I’m an egoist, you learnt that early on. Your mother once screamed that I’m the kind of person who doesn’t have any equals, I only have people above me that I want something from and people beneath me who I trample on. She was right, so I kept going until there was no one left above me.
But just how big is my egoism? You know that I can buy and sell everything, but would I clamber over dead bodies? Would I kill someone?
I had a brother. I’ve never told you that. He was dead when we were born. Maybe there was only room for one of us on this earth, and I wanted it more. I clambered over my brother in the womb. I was a winner, even then.
The woman with the folder was there, at the hospital. I’ve seen the pictures. Sometimes, when my mother drank alone at night, she fell asleep too drunk to remember to hide them. The woman was everywhere in those photos, an out of focus figure outside windows, a blur in the corridors. In one from the day before our birth, she was standing in the queue behind my parents at a petrol station. Mum was heavily pregnant. Dad was laughing in that picture. I never saw him do that. Throughout my life, he only ever smiled.
When I was five, I saw the woman with the folder by some train tracks. I was about to cross when she leapt forward from the other side and shouted something. I stopped dead, astonished. The train appeared a second later, thundering by so close that I fell over. By the time it had passed, she was gone.
When I was fifteen, my best friend and I were playing on the rocks by the sea in Kullaberg and halfway up we passed a woman in a grey sweater. “Be careful, these rocks are treacherous when it rains,” she mumbled. I didn’t recognize her until she was already gone.
It started raining half an hour later, and my best friend fell headlong. The rain was still falling during his funeral, as though it never planned to stop. I saw the woman as I was leaving the church, she was standing beneath an umbrella in the square, but the rain was still flecking her cheeks, the way it only does in Helsingborg.
When my dad got sick, I saw her outside his room in the care home, on his last night. I came out of the toilet, she didn’t notice me. She was wearing the same grey sweater, writing something in her folder with a black pencil. Then she went into his room and never came out again. Dad was dead the next morning.
When my mum got sick, I was working abroad. We spoke on the phone, she was so weak when she whispered: “The doctor says everything looks normal.” So that I wouldn’t worry about her dying a dramatic death. My parents always wanted everything to be like normal. Ever since my brother died, they just wanted to be like everyone else. Maybe that’s why I became exceptional, out of sheer obstinacy. Mum passed away during the night, I hired an appraiser to go through her flat and her possessions; he sent me photos. In one of them, from the bedroom, there was a black pencil on the floor. By the time I got home, it was gone. Mum’s slippers were in the hallway, and there were small clumps of grey wool on their soles.
I failed with you. Fathers are meant to teach their sons about life, but you were a disappointment.
You called me on my birthday last autumn, I was forty-five. You had just turned twenty. You told me that you’d got a job in the old Tivoli building. The city had moved the entire building right across the square to make room for new private flats. You said the word “private” with such disgust, because we’re so different. You see history, I see development, you see nostalgia, I see weakness. I could have given you a job, could have given you hundreds of jobs, but you wanted to be a bartender at Vinylbaren, in a building that had been ready to fall down even when it was a steamboat station four generations earlier. I bluntly asked you whether you were happy. Because I am who I am. And you replied: “It’s good enough, Dad. Good enough.” Because you knew I hated that phrase. You were always someone who could be happy. You don’t know how much of a blessing that is.
Maybe it was your mother who forced you to call; I think she suspected I was sick, but you invited me down to the bar. You said they served smørrebrød in the café; you remembered that I always used to eat it when you and I took the ferry to Denmark at Christmas when you were small. Your mother had nagged me to do something special with you, at least once a year, I think you know that. But I couldn’t sit still and talk, I needed to be on the way somewhere, and you got travel sick in the car. So we liked the ferry, both of us, me the way there and you the way back. I loved leaving everything behind, but you loved standing out on deck and watching Helsingborg appear on the horizon. The way home, the silhouette of something you recognized. You loved it.
I sat in my car in Hamntorget last autumn, saw you through the window of the bar. You were making cocktails and making people laugh. I didn’t go in, I was afraid I would end up telling you that I had cancer. I wouldn’t have been able to deal with your compassion. And I was drunk, of course, so I remembered the steps outside the house where you and your mother lived, and all the times you had sat there waiting for me when I didn’t turn up like I’d promised. All the occasions I’d wasted your time. I remembered the ferries at Christmas, always early in the morning so that we would get home in time for me to spend the rest of the day drinking. Our last trip was when you were fourteen, I taught you to play poker in a basement bar in Helsingør, showed you how to identify the losers at a table: weak men with strong schnapps. I taught you to capitalize on those who couldn’t understand the game. You won six hundred kronor. I wanted to keep playing, but you gave me a pleading look and said, “Six hundred’s good enough, Dad.”
You stopped at a jewelry shop on the way back to the ferry and bought some earrings with the money. It took me a whole year to realize that they weren’t for some girl you were trying to charm. They were for your mother.
You never played poker again.
I failed with you. I tried to make you tough. You ended up kind.
Late last night, at the hospital, the woman with the folder came walking down the corridor. She stopped when she saw me. I didn’t run. I remembered all the times I had seen her before. When she took my brother away. When she took my best friend. When she took my parents. I wasn’t going to be scared anymore, I’d keep that power at least, down to the last moment.
“I know who you are,” I said, without a single tremor in my voice. “You’re death.”
The woman frowned and looked deeply, deeply offended. “I’m not death,” she muttered. “I’m not my job.”
That knocked the air out of me. I’ll admit it. It’s not what you expect to hear at a moment like that.
The woman’s eyebrows lowered as she repeated: “I’m not death. I just do the picking up and dropping off.”
“I—” I began, but she interrupted me.
“You’re so self-obsessed that you think I’ve been chasing you all your life. But I’ve been looking out for you. Of all the idiots I could have picked as my favorite . . .” She massaged her temples.
“Fa . . . favorite?” I stuttered.
She reached out and touched my shoulder. Her fingers were cold, they moved down towards my breast pocket and took a cigarette. She lit it, clutched her folder tight. Maybe it was just the smoke, but a lonely tear ran down her cheek as she whispered: “It’s against the rules for us to have favorites. It makes us dangerous, if we do. But sometimes . . . sometimes we have bad days at work too. You screamed so loudly when I came to get your brother, and I turned around and happened to look you in the eye. We’re not meant to do that.”
My voice broke when I asked: “Did you know . . . everything I’ve become, everything I’ve achieved . . . did you know? Was that why you took my brother instead of me?” She shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. We don’t know the future, we just do our job. But I made a mistake with you. I looked you in the eye and it . . . hurt. We’re not meant to hurt.”
“Did I kill my brother?” I sniffed.
“No,” she said.
I sobbed despairingly. “Then why did you take him? Why do you take everyone I love?”
She gently placed her hand in my h
air. Whispered: “It’s not down to us who goes and who stays. That’s why it’s against the rules for us to hurt.”
When the doctor gave me the diagnosis, I didn’t have an awakening, I just did my accounts. Everything I’d built, the footprints I’ve left behind. Weak people always look at people like me and say, “He’s rich, but is he happy?” As though that was a relevant measure of anything. Happiness is for children and animals, it doesn’t have any biological function. Happy people don’t create anything, their world is one without art and music and skyscrapers, without discoveries and innovations. All leaders, all of your heroes, they’ve been obsessed. Happy people don’t get obsessed, they don’t devote their lives to curing illnesses or making planes take off. The happy leave nothing behind. They live for the sake of living, they’re only on earth as consumers. Not me.
But something happened. I walked along the beach out by Råå, the morning after the diagnosis, and I saw two dogs running into the sea, playing in the waves. And I wondered: Have you ever been like that, as happy as they are? Could you be that happy? Would it be worth it?
The woman lifted her hand from my hair. She seemed almost ashamed.
“We’re not meant to feel things. But I’m not . . . just my job. I have . . . interests too. I knit.”
She gestured to her grey sweater. I tried to nod appreciatively, because it felt like she expected it. She nodded back with smoke in her eyes. I took the deepest breath of my life.
“I know you’re here to collect me now. And I’m ready to die,” I managed. As though it were a prayer. And then she said the one thing I feared even more: “I’m not here for you. Not yet. You’ll find out tomorrow that you’re healthy. You’ll live for a long while yet, you’ll have time to achieve whatever you want.”
I trembled. Hugged myself like a child and sobbed. “Then what are you doing here?”
“My job.”
She patted me gently on the cheek. Then she walked off down the corridor, stopped outside a door and opened her folder. Slowly pulled out a black pencil and crossed out a name. Then she opened the door to the girl’s room.
The day before yesterday, I heard the girl and her mother arguing. The girl wanted to make a milk-carton dinosaur, but there wasn’t time. The girl got angry, the mother cried. The girl stopped then, the corners of her mouth jumping over the despair leaving her eyes as though it was a skipping rope, and she held her mother’s hand and said: “Okay, then. But what about a game?”
They had one where they pretended to talk on the phone. The mother said she had been taken captive by pirates, that she was on her way to their secret island to help the pirates build a flying pirate ship, and in exchange they would sail her home again. The girl laughed and forced her mother to promise that they would build a milk-carton dinosaur then! After that, the girl explained that she was on a space ship with “alianies.” “Aliens,” her mother corrected her. “Alianies,” the girl corrected. “They’ve got mysterious machines with huge buttons and they stick wires into my arms and they have masks over their faces and uniforms that rustle and you can only see their heads. And they whisper, ‘There there, there there, there there,’ and then they count down from ten. And when they get to one you go to sleep. Even though you try not to!”
The girl fell silent, because the mother was crying then, even though it was just a game. So the girl whispered: “The alianies will save me, Mummy. They’re the best.”
The mother tried not to kiss her a million times. The nurses came and lifted the girl onto the rolling bed to take her to the operating theater. They passed mysterious machines with huge buttons. The girl had wires stuck to her arms and the alianies wore uniforms which rustled and masks over their faces and when they leaned over the edge of the bed all she could see was their heads. They whispered, “There there, there there, there there,” and then counted down from ten. And when they got to one, the girl fell asleep. Even though she tried not to.
It’s bloody awful to admit to yourself that you’re not the kind of person you’ve always thought you were. All you normal people would have tried to save the child if you could, wouldn’t you? Of course you would. So when the woman with the grey sweater opened the door to the girl’s room, part of me cracked, because it turns out that I’m more normal than I thought. I shoved the woman, grabbed the folder, and then I ran. As though I were one of you.
My car was parked outside the hospital; the brake lights never came on. The wheels grappled for something to cling onto in the snow. I drove down Bergaliden toward town, and then took Strandvägen north, toward the sea. The most beautiful stretch in the world. I thundered between the trees by Sofiero Castle, towards the terraced houses in Laröd, and didn’t slow down before I reached the 111. There, on the slip road to the bigger road, I stopped and turned off the headlights. As the lorry approached, I drove straight out. I don’t remember the crash, just the pain in my ears and the light which washed over me as the steel crumpled like foil. And the blood, everywhere.
The woman dragged both me and the folder out of the wreck. When I shouted, “I can give you someone else to kill!” she realized that I meant myself. But it made no difference. She couldn’t take a death for a death. Only a life for a life.
I lay there on the ground with all of Helsingborg’s winds beneath my clothes, and she patiently explained: “It’s not enough for you to die. To make room for the girl’s entire life, another life has to cease to exist. I have to delete its contents. So if you give your life, it’ll disappear. You won’t die, you’ll never have existed. No one will remember you. You were never here.”
A life for a life. That’s what it means.
That was why she brought me to you. She had to show me what I was giving up.
An hour ago, we were standing in Hamntorget watching you clean the bar through the window. “You never get your child’s attention back,” your mother once said. “The time when they don’t just listen to you to be nice, that time passes, it’s the first thing to go.”
The woman stood beside me and pointed at you. “If you give your life for the girl at the hospital, you’ll never have been his.”
I blinked, out of step.
“If I die . . .”
“You won’t die,” she corrected me. “You’ll be erased.”
“But . . . if I don’t . . . If I’ve never . . .”
She wearily shook her head at my lack of understanding. “Your son will still exist, but he’ll have a different father. Everything you’ll leave behind will still exist, but it’ll have been built by someone else. Your footprints will vanish, you’ll never have existed. You humans always think you’re ready to give your lives, but only until you understand what that really involves. You’re obsessed with your legacy, aren’t you? You can’t bear to die and be forgotten.”
I didn’t answer for quite some time. I thought about whether you would have done it, given your life for someone else. You probably would. Because you’re your mother’s son, and she’s already given a life. The one she could have lived if she hadn’t lived for you and for me.
I turned to the woman. “I’ve sat here watching him every evening since I got sick.”
She nodded. “I know.”
I knew that she knew. I’d understood that much by now. “Every night, I wondered whether it was possible to change a person.”
“What did you conclude?”
“That we are who we are.”
She started walking straight toward you then. I panicked. “Where are you going?” I shouted.
“I need to be sure that you’re sure,” she replied, crossing the car park and knocking on the door of Vinylbaren.
I ran after her and hissed: “Can he see us?”
I don’t know what I was expecting. The woman turned to me, mockingly raised one eyebrow and replied: “I’m not a bloody ghost. Of course he can see us!”
When you opened the door, she muttered, “I need a beer,” without paying any attention as you patiently—like your mother
would have done—tried to explain that unfortunately the bar was closed. Then you saw me. I think both of our worlds probably came to a standstill right then.
You didn’t say anything about my ripped suit, or the blood on my face, you’d seen me in a worse state before. The woman in the grey sweater ate smørrebrød and drank three beers in a row, but I asked for a coffee. I saw how happy that made you. We said very little, because there was too much I wanted to say. That’s always when we fall silent. You wiped the bar and sorted the glasses, and I thought about the love in your hands. You’ve always touched the things you like as though they had a pulse. You cared about that bar, adored this town. The people and the buildings and the night as it approached over the Sound. Even the wind and the useless soccer team. This has always been your town in a way it never was for me; you never tried to find a life, you were in the right place from the start.
I told the woman in the grey sweater what you had told me: that they had moved the entire Tivoli building right across the square. That’s what fathers do, they sit in front of their sons and tell their son’s stories to a third person rather than letting them speak for themselves. The woman looked at me for intervals which were far too short between blinks.
“You don’t care?” I asked.
“I really, really, really don’t,” she replied.
And you laughed then. Loudly. It made me sing inside.
I asked questions, you answered. You told me that you had designed everything in the bar with respect for the building’s history. It showed. I should have told you that. Not for your sake, because you won’t remember any of this, but for mine. I should have told you I was proud.