People ask me all the time now whether I was afraid of dying. They say that your life is meant to flash before your eyes when it happens. And maybe it did for me too. But all I really remember is that the robbers had forced every one of us onto the floor, and then they took our cell phones and watches. And your mother had given me that watch for Christmas just a few weeks before.
We’d only been a couple for a few months, back then. And when the gun went off, I know that my first thought was that I might never see her again. And then I thought about what my father always said when I caused trouble as a child:
“What the hell, Fredrik, why does EVERYTHING always happen to YOU?!”
And then there were probably a few seconds there where I thought that if I did see your mother again, she would probably be all annoyed by the fact that I can’t even be given a nice watch without going off and getting myself shot.
I’m hard to live with like that.
And people keep asking me if I was afraid of dying. But… no. And that’s not because I’m especially macho or excessively brave or have an incredibly high pain threshold, but just because I kind of instinctively decided that this was probably one of those situations where it might be a good time to act like an adult. For once. “Survival instinct,” biologists probably call it. “Good upbringing,” if you ask your grandmother.
But me, I just thought that if I didn’t lie completely still and keep quiet, the next bullet would probably end up in my neck. So I just lay there and kept my mouth shut. And when the robber raised the gun again, and fired it down into the floor, I thought that bullet had hit me too.
That’s when I thought I would die.
My memories are a bit of a mess after that. But I heard sneakers running off. A door slamming shut. A car outside, tearing off. Worried voices shouting for me to lie still. I tried to get up anyway, of course, since I, well, you know. I’m kind of an idiot.
I remember my feet moving in thin air, and it was a bit like how I imagine cartoon characters feel in that second when they realize they’ve run over the edge of a cliff.
And then: the pain.
A pulsing merciless pain in my leg so massive that it consumed every ounce of my comprehension for what felt like a lifetime. As though someone were shooting me over and over and over again and again, only the bullets were coming from inside my body, out through my flesh, rather than the other way around.
I don’t know how long I was lying on that floor. That pain is all I remember.
The next thing I recall is the police. Then the paramedics. I know that I started shouting at one of them because he said, “The helicopter’s landed.” Because I don’t like flying. So I shouted something about how he could just bloody forget about getting me on that goddamn thing! And, well, as it turned out, he hadn’t said anything about a helicopter at all. No one really knows where I got that from. Funny how the mind works.
And then they gave me enough drugs to make a racehorse sit down and drink a Dr Pepper and download Wordfeud on its phone.
* * *
From then on, all this really was much harder for your mother than it was for me. Being shot is actually the closest I’ve ever come to being a rock star. Everyone takes really good care of you.
Your mother, on the other hand, just got a phone call while she was at work, from someone saying I was on the way to the hospital. They weren’t allowed to give her any details. Nothing about where I’d been shot, just that I had been, and that she needed to come in immediately. She had to jump into a taxi not knowing whether I would be alive or dead when she arrived. She had to contact my friends. She had to call my mom.
But me? I got morphine.
Not that I’m in any way encouraging you to take drugs, that is. I honestly only have very limited experience of them myself. There was that one incident when I was twenty, and I went to Thailand for a few months. I went to a party and fell asleep on a beach and woke up on a whole other island wearing a T-shirt someone had written wasabi on with a permanent marker. For the next two weeks, I had an insatiable craving for onion-flavor chips and tomato juice. And after that, I decided that this whole drug thing probably wasn’t for me.
But morphine. Holy smoke, dude.
All I remember is that the nurses lifted me onto a stretcher and that I was singing. It’s not altogether clear exactly what song, but I think it was “Afraid to Shoot Strangers” by Iron Maiden. And then I remember a nurse taking my hand and whispering gently that they needed to roll me onto one side and that I shouldn’t be scared. I know I had time to wonder what the hell I had to be scared of now that I was in the hospital, unless she was planning on pulling a gun of her own. I think I even joked about it. She smiled the way salesclerks tend to smile when I tell a great story and they don’t want to be rude. And then the nurses rolled me onto my side, and I felt four pairs of hands frantically searching my back. It wasn’t until then that I realized there was so much blood on my clothes that they didn’t know if there was more than one bullet wound.
And yes. At that point I got pretty goddamn scared.
But then they just gave me more morphine. And that fixed everything.
I know that while I was being wheeled into surgery, I told a nurse that she had to find my girlfriend and let her know I was fine and that everything would be okay. The nurse patted me on the head and told me not to worry about it. I immediately grabbed her wrist, fixed my eyes on her, and shouted, “You haven’t met my girlfriend! I’m not saying this for my safety but for the safety of the staff at this hospital!” And then they gave me more morphine.
But I guess someone must have heard me and taken me seriously after all, because not long after, another nurse opened a door down in the waiting room, put a finger to her mouth for your mother to be quiet, and then nodded for her to follow. I think your mother must have been incredibly scared. I know she was crying. I guess I was safe in the eye of the storm while she was the one caught in the wind.
And I suppose there are very few people blessed enough to be able to tell you the exact second, down to the very moment, when they realized they wanted to wake up next to a particular person for the rest of their life.
Your mother always says that everything broke inside of her when the nurse, after leading her up and down stairs and along corridors, suddenly opened a door. And there I was, all covered in blood on a stretcher. I know that I turned my head and saw her and that I felt my heart in my fingertips. I’ll remember that until I die. It was right there and then that I knew I would follow her to the ends of the Earth.
And… sure. Obviously I wish I could say that your mother felt all the same things at that exact moment. But, well, you know.
I was pretty stoned.
So what your mother saw, after running up and down stairs and along corridors with her heart in her throat and the tears streaming down her cheeks, was me lying on a stretcher, as far gone as a heavily sedated rhino, telling the nurses the joke about two Irishmen in a boat.
So right there and then, she was probably more tired of me than anything else. If we’re being completely honest.
But she stayed. And aside from being half your gene pool, I’ll always view the fact that I managed to make her do that as my top life achievement.
The doctors pulled the bullet out of my leg. Which really wasn’t anywhere near as dramatic as it sounds. The real drama actually didn’t happen until the next day, once all the drugs wore off and a nurse came in to take the catheter out of my… well, you’ll learn as you get a bit older exactly where a catheter goes. And, seriously, if she’d given me the option of pulling it out or shooting me in the other leg right there and then, I probably would have needed a moment to ponder it.
And I was the lucky one in all this, it should be noted. The man in the bed next to me also had his catheter taken out that morning. But he had morning wood.
Anyway.
After that, they gave me a bottle of pills and told me I could go home. All in all, I wasn’t even in the
hospital for a day and a night. Bullet in, bullet out, and back in my own bed again before Jack Bauer had time to sort out a single episode of 24.
Life is all about small margins. A few inches here and there.
The police showed me afterward which type of gun I’d been shot with. Showed me where I was lying on the floor and talked about how slightly different the angle of the weapon could have been. The shooter could have pointed it a little to the right, and maybe I would never have become a father. Slightly upward, and maybe I would never have walked again. A little farther upward, and, well, you know. I wouldn’t be writing this.
I was on painkillers for a month. On crutches for two. Saw a psychologist for three. It took a spring for me to be able to walk properly again, a summer to learn to stop waking up in the middle of the night crying and screaming. And if you ever wonder why I always say that your mother is too good for me, there are ten thousand reasons.
But those nights are one of them.
She’s a lion, your mother. Never forget that. Everyone took care of me, gave me pills and free taxi rides and beers in the local pub in exchange for me telling the story of how it felt to take a bullet. But it was your mother who held our lives together when I came tumbling down and crashed. She was the one who worked more than full-time and paid our bills and every morning and every night changed the bandage on a messy wound, which went as deep as a ballpoint pen into my thigh. She was the one who cheered like I’d scored the winning goal in a World Cup final when I called her at work just to say that I’d managed to climb into the bathtub all by myself for the first time. She was the one who held my hand and promised everything would be okay when I had to teach myself all over again to stand in line at the supermarket without having a panic attack.
She was the one who really took that bullet. Don’t ever forget that.
That autumn, we went to Barcelona, and, in a small square by a small church, I got down on one knee and asked her never to get as annoyed at any other man for leaving wet towels on the floor as she does at me. The very next summer, we got married. And three weeks later, she woke me at dawn by hitting my forehead insanely hard with a plastic stick and shouting, “One line or two? DOYOUSEEONELINEORTWO???”
And the very next spring, you were born. Life’s a game of inches.
So if we’re ever standing by the gate at your school and I hold on to your hand just a little too tight. Or for a little too long. Then that’s why. Most people never get to find out that they aren’t immortal.
And I know I’ll show the scar to you and your friends at some point in time, and when you walk away your friends will turn to you with wide eyes and say, “Seriously? Did he really get shot?” And then you’ll allow a few dramatic seconds to pass. Stand up straight. Nod slowly and matter-of-factly. Look each of them straight in the eye. And then you’ll shrug and say, “Nah, you know, my dad, he talks a lot. It’s probably just a birthmark!”
I hope you won’t be angry at me for still trying to impress you. I hope you won’t hold this book against me.
You and your mother are my greatest, most wonderful, scariest adventure. I’m amazed every day that you’re still letting me follow along.
So always remember: Whenever I’m difficult. Whenever I’m embarrassing. Unreasonable. Unfair. Just think back to that day when you refused to tell me where the hell you’d hidden my car keys.
* * *
And never forget that you started this.
More from the Author
Us Against You
The Fredrik Backman…
The Deal of a Lifetime
Beartown
And Every Morning the…
Britt-Marie Was Here
About the Author
Fredrik Backman is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller A Man Called Ove (soon to be a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks), My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, Britt-Marie Was Here, Beartown, and Us Against You, as well as two novellas, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer and The Deal of a Lifetime. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden, with his wife and two children.
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ALSO BY FREDRIK BACKMAN
A Man Called Ove
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry
Britt-Marie Was Here
And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer
Beartown
The Deal of a Lifetime & Other Stories
Us Against You
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Fredrik Backman
English language translation copyright © 2018 by Alice Menzies
Published by arrangement with Salomonsson Agency
Originally published in Sweden in 2012 as Saker min son behöver veta om världen
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Interior illustrations copyright © 2019 by Anna Woodbine
Jacket design by Alan Dingman
Photographs by Shutterstock/Africa Studio
Author photograph © Linnéa Jonasson Bernholm/Appendix Fotografi
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Backman, Fredrik, 1981–author. | Menzies, Alice, translator.
Title: Things my son needs to know about the world / Fredrik Backman; translated by Alice Menzies.
Other titles: Saker min son behöver veta om världen. English
Description: First Atria Books hardcover edition. | New York : Atria Books, 2019. | “Atria reprint fiction hardcover.” | “Originally published in Sweden in 2012 as Saker min son behöver veta om världen.” | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018054900 (print) | LCCN 2018059312 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501194764 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501196867 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Backman, Fredrik, 1981– | Backman, Fredrik, 1981—Anecdotes.| Fatherhood—Sweden—Anecdotes. | Authors, Swedish—21st century—Biography.
Classification: LCC PT9877.12.A32 (ebook) | LCC PT9877.12.A32 S2513 2019 (print) | DDC 839.73/8 [B]—dc23
ISBN 978-1-5011-9686-7
ISBN 978-1-5011-9476-4 (ebook)
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