The Room (8 page)

I hadn't cried since primary school, and I didn't like it. It was wet and messy. Crying is for weak people. Crying is a sign of not wanting to pull yourself together, and a way for people of low intelligence to get attention. Crying belongs to small children and onions.

But there was something different about this bout of crying. It was calm, factual crying. Good crying. Water cleansing the tubes, rather like clearing a gutter of leaves and pine needles. A way to get rid of negative energy and make room for something better. It was as if I could feel all the improper thoughts flying away, and new ones taking their place. Better ones. A fresh start.

A new me.

For the first time I realized how oddly I had been behaving. My behavior belonged in the madhouse. And that was where I would end up if I didn't pull myself together.

Thinking about all the stupid things I had done and what they had led to gave me a headache. Going through the various events of the past weeks made me feel distinctly uncomfortable, as I realized how mistaken my behavior had been in a whole series of different situations. I was forced to recognize my limitations, and it pained me.

Still, it was nice being able to think clearly for the first time in ages. And I realized that you have to live and learn.

Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Afterward it felt good to have cried. As if I had once again gotten the better of myself and climbed another rung higher on the ladder of my personal development. How high can I get? If I carry on like this, who could possibly stop me?

I could easily have cried a while longer. Obviously I didn't. I sat down at the kitchen table and thought through how to enact my return.

Karl looked up at me as if he'd seen a ghost in fake leather shoes when I went into his office and stood in front of his desk with the new indoor shoes on.

“Why are you late?” he asked.

“I overslept,” I said.

Karl raised an eyebrow.

“I'm very sorry,” I went on. “I had trouble getting to sleep last night. I lay there thinking. Thinking about recent events. The things I've said and done, and so on. I suddenly seem to get ideas in my head, you see. So I'm lying there thinking about all that. As long as I get enough sleep, I can see it's all nonsense. These past few weeks…Then this morning…Well, I just had to sort my head out a bit. I've had a lot of new things to try to take in recently.”

Karl nodded warily. I took a deep breath and went on.

“I can see that I've been behaving oddly, and I'd like to do what I can to put right any problems I may have caused.”

Karl put his pen down on his desk and leaned back in his comfortable office chair.

“Björn, Björn, Björn,” he said, as if he were talking to a small child.

“And I understand that my actions have caused problems, not just for me but for you too, and I'd like to ask for your forgiveness. It was never my intention to cause trouble and bad feelings. I promise that from now on there won't be any more of that nonsense.”

“Sit down, Björn,” Karl said, rolling round to the front of his desk.

I sat down on the uncomfortable little chair. Karl looked at me and I thought I could detect a crooked smile.

“You're an unusual person, Björn. I'm glad you've taken the time to think this through. Maybe it was worth a late start?”

“Obviously, I'll make up the time I've lost…” I began, but Karl gestured dismissively with his hand.

“Don't worry about that, Björn. If we can get you sorted out, then this little break will have been entirely justified.”

He looked at my new indoor shoes and lit up. It was obvious that he liked what he saw.

“They're really nice,” I said.

“Aren't they?” Karl said with a smile.

“Yes, that's what I just said,” I said.

He cleared his throat and turned serious again.

“So are we agreed on the rules now, Björn?”

“Yes,” I said.

He leaned toward me.

“And can we forget all about that room now?”

“Of course,” I said.

He looked at me and I realized that I ought to nod. I nodded.

“Good,” he said, and rolled back to the other side of the desk. “Good, Björn. No one will be happier than me if we can find a solution to this.”

“I'm pleased,” I said.

“Yes,” Karl said, and smiled again.

On my way to my workstation I tried to find someone to say hello to, but no one looked at me. HÃ¥kan was leafing through some papers and humming to himself. I sat down at my desk and switched the computer on.

Half an hour later I handed in a printout of the updated list of phone numbers. Karl raised his head and brightened up.

“Excellent,” he said.

He scratched his head and looked around, as if he were thinking. I stood in the doorway and waited. Most of the staff in the department had gone home for the day. I thought I might as well stay a bit longer.

“Do you know what?” he said after a few moments. “Tomorrow, could you put together a list of which projects have been quality assured and which ones haven't? It would be good to have it on paper.”

I nodded.

“You'll be able to tell from where they've come from if they've been checked or not.”

“Of course,” I said.

I returned to my place and sat down just as HÃ¥kan got up, put some documents in his bag, slung it over his corduroy jacket, and disappeared without a word to me.

I logged in and got to work at once.

An hour or so later I decided to call it a day and go home too. I was almost on my own in the office. I turned the lamp off, gathered my coat and briefcase, went out to the lift, and went straight down to reception. Without passing the room.

I slept relatively well that night. I slept the sleep that only someone who has been down at the bottom but is now on his way back up can sleep. The sleep of someone who recognizes that an inferior position is a good position to attack from. The sleep of someone with a plan.

You don't turn a river by abruptly trying to get it to change direction. You don't have that much power. No matter how strong you are. The river will just overwhelm you and obstinately carry on pretty much as before. You can't make it change direction overnight. No one can. On the contrary, you have to start by flowing with it.

You have to capture its own force and then slowly but surely lead it in the desired direction. The river won't notice it's being led if the curve is gentle enough. On the contrary, it will think it's flowing just the same as usual, seeing as nothing seems to have changed.

Uneventful days. Days without any particular character. Days which at first glance didn't appear to have led to much. Days that no one pays any attention to. Every day there came more and more documents from the investigators on the sixth and seventh floors, all of them waiting to be turned into framework decisions.

HÃ¥kan was becoming more and more anxious about the workload. He started making excuses. Moaning about the quality of the investigations. Their layout, content, incoherent argumentation.

So you're the only one who's perfect? I thought. How ironic.

HÃ¥kan and Karl had endless heated discussions that always ended with talk about the possibility of the entire Authority being closed down.

The threat of closure hung like an evil spirit over the whole department. Probably the whole Authority. I assumed this was the government's way of keeping us on our toes and not letting anyone think they were safe. But HÃ¥kan was irritated at the investigators and the work they did most of the time. He waved documents at Karl when he walked past:

“How am I supposed to formulate a clear, easily understood text from this rubbish? Do they even know what decision they've come to themselves?”

I went in to see Karl with money for the indoor shoes. At first he didn't want to take it, but I insisted, and explained that I would have bought a pair exactly like them if I'd gotten them myself. After a while he relented. He took the money and put it in his own pocket. I didn't say anything.

Later that day Karl came over to see HÃ¥kan, and I heard them discussing the formulation of a new decision. I took care not to look up from my work as I listened to them talking.

HÃ¥kan was groaning and constantly scratching his sideburns, and said he couldn't produce a clearer text from that material, and that it was impossible to work any faster, particularly at the moment when there wasn't exactly a calm atmosphere conducive to work.

Without looking at them I could tell that this last remark was aimed at me, and I thought I could feel them both glancing in my direction. I pretended not to notice.

Soon I had finished my task. Sorting out the quality-assured projects was really just a matter of checking the signatures at the end of each file. One investigator meant no. Two or more control declarations with different save dates meant yes.

I was done just before lunch and another printout was delivered to Karl's office. Karl thanked me and smiled, but I could see how tired he was.

“What shall I do now?” I asked.

Karl looked at me as if he had no idea what I was talking about. He stared blindly through the window facing the office.

“Well…” he muttered, sighing through his nose.

“Perhaps there's some text that…?”

Karl looked at me.

“What are you thinking?”

“No, I was just wondering if I could help…”

“No thanks, Björn. I don't think so. It'll be fine. But you could…”

He looked round the room.

“…check all the printers…make sure they've all got enough paper and so on.”

We looked at one another, both of us aware of the menial task he was asking a civil servant to do, and I realized that my humiliation had to be dragged right down to the very bottom. I didn't mind. I was prepared. I nodded and went out to find some photocopy paper.

All the printers in the department ended up as full of paper as they possibly could be without the paper feed jamming, or the thin plastic holding it being so overburdened that it broke.

When I saw several of the others having a coffee break I went over to the little kitchen as well and got myself a cup.

A peculiar silence spread round the small room. They all drank their coffee, but the easy banter was missing. I tried to avoid making eye contact with Jörgen, who still looked likely to have an outburst at any moment. All you could hear was the sound of my spoon stirring the cup.

When I returned to my place I saw that the inevitable had now happened. HÃ¥kan's papers had finally overflowed onto my desk.

HÃ¥kan's chair was empty but his desk was covered with files and documents, all waiting to be formulated into new framework decisions. Several piles of printouts were positioned so that they were almost nudging the back of my computer screen.

I felt a pang of my old intolerance. A gust of my old self who had been far too excitable, too guileless in purely tactical terms.

I sat down at my desk and put my hands against all his things. Then I simply pushed them back until everything was just inside the edge of his desktop. I heard one or two things fall to the floor on the other side of the desk.

When HÃ¥kan came back with a large pile of papers in his arms he didn't even bother trying to make room among the mess on his desk, but impudently parked it all on my side. He leaned down and picked up the papers that had ended up on the floor. He didn't even seem to wonder how they had gotten there.

Soon he disappeared again.

My initial impulse was of course to repeat my earlier procedure and this time push everything a bit further to make him realize what he was doing. But then my eyes were caught by one of the printouts.
Investigation. Case 1,636,
it said. I realized that this was an opportunity. Without even asking for it, I had been given a helping hand. An almost meditative calm spread through me.

I looked around. I took hold of the pile of papers with both hands and put what had been left on my desk in my drawer.

HÃ¥kan spent a large part of the afternoon trying in vain to find the missing investigations. Even if he didn't say anything, I knew that was what he was doing. He picked up books and files, looked underneath things, muttering to himself and occasionally swearing quietly.

I watched him go in to see Karl, gesticulating with his arms. Karl looked sweatier than ever. At some point HÃ¥kan gestured in my direction, but Karl merely shook his head.

I took care to participate in all the group coffee breaks and idle conversations. No one spoke to me or even looked at me, but I was there. I was taking part. I was a physical presence among them.

To start with, I noticed that everything would stop as soon as I came along. I would stand beside the others and pretend I hadn't noticed. In the end, I came to assume the role of passive participant, the person no one bothers about, but whose presence is a precondition for the general character of social interaction.

By five o'clock most of the others had left, but I stayed behind as usual. I did an extra circuit of all the printers and checked that they were all full, mostly to make sure that the others had all gone home.

Then I went back to my desk. I opened the drawer and took out the top bundle of papers.

Investigation. Case 1,636

I put it in my briefcase, put my coat on to leave, checked once more that there was no one left, crept round to the corridor with the toilets, turned the light on, and slipped inside the room for the eleventh time.