A Darker Shade of Sweden (5 page)

It was very strange.

People ought to be more careful. Once he had stretched out a hand to a young boy walking past. He had wanted the boy to feel the pain in time. The boy had run away.

Since then he had never tried contacting anyone.

Now he was on the verge of slipping away. His eyes let go of the picture on the wall; he hoped he was slipping in the right direction, not towards the interface. He hoped to be here still when he woke up.

He is dreaming.

In his dream he is walking as if he really existed, walks across low, warm heather, through a sparse fir wood, towards dunes of sand; he wants to reach the sea. He has heard that it's supposed to be calm today. He is just a young boy and has never seen total calm, never seen the sea all shiny and smooth. He never gets there. A large, dark bus pulls up in front of him, blocking his way. The door to the bus opens and the shape behind the wheel waves to him. He doesn't want to enter the bus, but there is nobody close he could call out to. He opens his hand. Only moments ago he caught a ladybug; he blows at the red-and-black insect until the ladybug flies away. He doesn't want it to come along into the bus. When the door closes behind him he runs to the seat at the very back of the bus, hoping that he'll be able to hide. The bus lifts from the ground and soars above the fir wood; he glances out and sees a small house far below. In a hammock behind the house a woman is lying; she waves to him. He presses a hand against the window. When the bus stops it is dark outside, green neon light pulses in through the windows. He sees darkened houses on both sides, houses of stone. It has taken him to a city. The figure behind the wheel turns around towards the back seat and brings out a microphone. He can hear the figure start singing.

He knows the song.

He was still there when he woke up.

He lay in bed for a very long time, trying to decide how he felt. Sometimes he didn't know if he was still inside his dreams; sometimes that's what he believed, that he was still in another world. That he was someone else.

But not this time.

He raised his hands and pushed them through his brown, curly hair. Even his hair was still there.

That made him feel calm.

Two nights in a row he stayed in his room. He didn't open the window, didn't touch any of the pills on his table, fell asleep without pacing his surface. He didn't know what this meant. Perhaps he wouldn't have to go out any more? In that way? That would be a relief. He didn't like the fact that it had dragged on the way it had.

That wasn't how he had first meant it to be.

At first it had just been a woman. Anyone of the right age.

And just one.

But it wasn't enough. He had thought that one would be enough, a single one, to lower him into darkness once and for all.

It wasn't that simple.

The light caught up with him again.

Now he didn't know when it would stop. That worried him; he already felt a tinge of weariness. The first time there had been a streak of excitement. Not because of what he would do, or did, but because of the chance of reaching the darkness. The second time the excitement had gone, it was more like a preliminary to what he really wanted; to what enveloped him when he saw the white cotton thread grow still in the corners of their mouths and it was done with.

Then he wished for the darkness never to end.

But it did.

He went over and opened the window. It was still night outside and the window ledge was empty, no charred hands, no singing blackbird.

There was no reason to go outside.

He sat down by his wooden model and thought about people in other places. I'll never meet them, he thought. Sometimes he gave them names, taken from plants or animals. On his wall he drew kings with saucer heads and completely ordinary people with long, extended noses, noses like slim roots, three feet long. You could see that they were prying into things they shouldn't. It was dangerous. Already in the sandbox there were children prying, small, round children with noses already long. He learned to recognize their kind.

He went up to his long coat and pulled out a slim brown leather glove from one of its pockets. It had probably belonged to a woman. He had found it on his way to Ester. It happened fairly often that he found lost gloves on his nightly walks. If they were made of leather he brought them back with him and boiled them in a steel pot, for a long time, until they had shrunk. He hung them on a clothesline stretched across the kitchen. Almost a hundred shrunken gloves hung there now, fastened by small wooden clips. He viewed it as a row of pennants.

He let the glove fall into an empty pot.

In good time he would boil it.

He glanced at the door to his apartment. Sooner or later there would be a knock on it, he knew that, if he still remained in who he was. It was a wooden door and there was no doorbell; someone would knock on the timber. He tried to imagine the sound and the hand that made it. Whose hand was it? At best it would be himself knocking, at worst someone who wished him ill. Someone whose long nose had discovered him.

He wouldn't open at once. First he would remove the picture of the funnel from the wall and hide it under his pillow; then he would hold his hands under the freezing faucet water until they were numb.

There would be another knock.

Then he would say something through the door, explain that he couldn't open it since he had no hands. What would happen after that he didn't quite know; perhaps they would fetch someone who could pick the lock or perhaps they would just break down the door.

He would have to be prepared for the worst.

He went over and took his long coat from the hanger. Soon it would become light and he wasn't tired; soon the light would come. He felt that it came too fast. He had paced his room for many hours and still wasn't tired. He ought to be.

He ought to sleep.

He ought to be more careful.

He went out.

Gunvor Larsson was seventy-eight years old and lived alone. Her husband had died from an intracranial hemorrhage four years ago. She missed him, on one level, as a life partner should, but at the same time she was relieved. Their last years had been marked by the immense bitterness her husband felt about his life, a life he viewed as ruined by many different things. Those few times Gunvor had carefully tried to suggest that, after all, they had loved each other and stayed together for all of their lives, he had started to weep.

That was almost the worst of it.

But now he was gone and Gunvor was in good health, given her age. Her only problem appeared at night; she always woke up after only a couple of hours and found it difficult to relax again. She had tried almost everything, from medications with strange names to books on tape with just as strange tales. One of her grandchildren had tried to get her to start meditating and made her make up a mantra, a special word which after being repeated interminably would make her relax and be able to go back to sleep. She had chosen the word “ocean.” On the first few nights she had mumbled “ocean” for ten or twenty minutes and then brewed a cup of tea to pass the time.

Tonight was the same again.

Shortly after two she woke and got out of bed, wrapped in her worn, pale blue dressing gown. She put some water for tea to boil and sat down by the kitchen table. During the last few nights she had taken out some of her old photo albums—she had quite a few—and looked through them, image by image, to pass the time. Pictures of children and grandchildren, of trips abroad and summer houses and pets and people whose names she had forgotten. Now she held the last of her albums on her knee, the one from last year. Another of her grandchildren had printed out a number of digital pictures on paper and gifted her the album.

She had reached a photo of her single great-grandchild when the doorbell rang.

“Tonight you will dance.”

The phrase from the lovely song floated to the surface of his mind. “Tonight you will dance.” People sang it on bright midsummer nights when he was tied inside the greenhouse. He heard them trying to sing in parts, heard their wobbly voices searching for each other. Everyone was in high spirits, many were children. Later they would come in to weep in front of him and feel bad. When they loosened the harness it was almost dawn; his mother had put sour milk out on the steps. He never knew if it was intended for him or for the hedgehog.

He had time to think all that before the door in front of him opened. An elderly woman peered at him through the crack.

“Yes?”

“Is it Gunvor?”

“Well? I don't want to buy anything.”

“Neither do I.”

He looked at the photo album on the kitchen table. It was spread open. He stretched his hands out and took it. The two open pages were crammed with pictures of children. He let his eyes move across the images until they stopped on a small boy down by the corner of the page. He looked at the boy for several minutes, his brown, curly hair, his tight mouth. Finally he held the album out to the woman bound opposite him and pointed at the little boy.

“Is that your grandchild?”

The woman's face was dark blue, her eyes wide, her head shaking violently. He couldn't make out if she said yes. He turned the album back towards him and opened the next spread. It too was full of pictures of children; children hugging adults and children holding flowers. All of them looked cheerful and happy; none of them were harnessed. His mouth narrowed to a bitter streak; he knew that in time those children would grow very long noses. He turned the pages back to the picture of the little boy down by the corner; that boy's eyes were searching for his, he thought, perhaps as if he wanted to appeal to him. He felt something wet rise under his eyelids.

Suddenly he shut the album and watched the woman in front of him. It seemed to take much too long. He was impatient. He wanted what he had come here to find. He was on the verge of rising before she had died but remained seated. Finally her body went limp. He watched her and waited for his reaction.

For the darkness.

It didn't come.

Nothing happened inside him.

He poked lightly at the white cotton thread at the corner of her mouth. It hung slack and immobile. Everything was as it should be, but even so it was all wrong.

He remained sitting in his chair for several minutes, close to despair.

He had a feeling.

Suddenly he rose and threw the photo album across the floor. His heart beat unnaturally hard.

He kicked his chair aside and rushed out from the kitchen.

In the stairwell he felt his throat constrict in a cramp.

He left the house without giving a thought to remaining unseen. It meant nothing any longer. He tore off his heavy coat and started to run. It was still dark and he chose the nearest way. He noticed that he met a few nightly walkers; a couple of cars had to swerve. He continued straight ahead. He knew what was happening and he wanted it to happen where there was no one else. He had to make it back to his crypt.

He began screaming long before he had reached the door to his building.

Now his heart had calmed down, the scream had gone silent, his body had slowed down. He stood leaning against one of the walls of his room. He knew it to be the calm before pain. He had experienced it before, how everything went still for a little while before it began in earnest.

As if there was compassion.

He looked around his room to remember it, the couch, the table, the wooden model; his eyes caught at the wooden door in the wall. Inside it was a wardrobe. He knew that there were clothes in the wardrobe that weren't his. He didn't know whose they were, but that didn't matter to him.

Particularly not now.

He started by taking the picture down from the wall, the one with the funnel and the melon. He folded it, carefully, and put it under his pillow.

If he returned he would know where to find it.

He went over and opened the window. The window ledge was empty. He brushed his hand over it. He would miss the charred hands, those that never touched him.

Suddenly he heard the singing, the blackbird, far away out in the darkness. He tried to see it without succeeding. He pursed his lips to whistle but refrained from doing it. He didn't want to disturb the past.

He stood at the window for a long time.

When he closed it he felt tiny, rolling movements across his cheeks. He went to the mirror, bent down and saw a face.

Is that how I look?

He regarded the face in the mirror. He recognized it. He recognized certain features, those particular cheekbones, those arched eyebrows, the mouth he had never seen before. He leaned against the mirror and let his mouth touch the mirror mouth. Then he brushed away the things trickling down his cheeks and felt that it was time.

He lay down on top of the bed.

His time had run out, for this turn, it was pointless to try to fight it.

The first few times he had done that, tried to remain in who he was.

It never worked. He screamed and cut his own body not to lose touch with it. In vain; whenever he began slipping in the wrong direction there was no return.

Nowadays he just slipped along.

He lay stretched out on his bed, his hands clutching the blanket tight; his whole body began shaking. He knew what would follow. He knew that there were a few seconds, sometimes ten or fifteen, when he was right in the middle of the interface, inside the zone, on his way from who he was to something he couldn't even imagine.

Or someone.

A few seconds that brought an unbearable physical pain.

The first time it happened he was unprepared. He slipped into the zone and didn't know what would come, not until he saw the executioner. A shadow with no face and with a long object in its hands. He stared at the shadow and never had time to react; the glowing scythe cut through the base of his skull, down through his body and through his groin.