The Believer

by Joakim Zander

  “So how long will it take, Räv?”

  He shrugs.

  “Ten seconds for the cap, a couple of minutes for the doors. No more.”

  “And then?”

  “Oh, easy, just a few minutes. Chill, bre. I got this.”

  So we look at each other, unable to hide our smiles or how much we’ve been waiting for this, for the spring, for the gangster life. So we glide through the yellow light of the parking lot, floating soundlessly toward the Audi, our eyes on nothing but revenge and chaos.

  And Räven is a genius, he just braces his feet and pries off the gas cap, which pops off with a bang, then we suck the gasoline into a couple of Coke bottles. One liter should do it. We nod at each other, and Räven swings the crowbar against the glass. One time. Boom. Nothing. His eyes narrow, but Mehdi takes the crowbar from him without a word.

  He puts all of his two hundred pounds behind a swing that is destined to become legendary, which will live with us all summer, and the windshield explodes into thousands of tiny crystals that cover the asphalt, and before they’ve all even landed, Räven is inside the car emptying bottles onto the backseat and opening the doors to increase the draft. Then he crawls out again and looks at us. Holds a matchbox toward me.

  “It was your idea, brother. It’s only right that you’d get to light this shit on fire.”

  I take the matches, look him in the eye, look into Mehdi’s eyes, into Jorge’s eyes. They nod, red in the face, excited. And I do it. I light three matches at once and hold them in front of me for a second. Then I drop them inside the car door, watch fumes turn to blue and red flames above the seat, and we all turn around, and fly away over the parking lot with the fire still building behind us. We’re already at the square when the gas tank explodes.

  6. MANHATTAN, NEW YORK—SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 2015

  YOU LOOK TIRED,” Brett says as Yasmine sinks into the soft, blond leather seat beside him.

  He’d just woken up when Yasmine called a half hour ago, but you’d never know it now as he sits there in his tailored suit, white shirt unbuttoned an extra button, Italian shoes, his dark hair wavy and sculpted.

  Yasmine folds down the sun visor in front of her and throws a quick glance at its small mirror. Her left temple is swollen and has turned a pale reddish-purple. She runs her fingers over the swelling and feels it throbbing slightly.

  “I’ve had a few long days,” she says.

  She flips the leather sun visor shut, leans back, and closes her eyes.

  Until she ran across Brett at one of David’s friends’ openings in Williamsburg a year ago, she’d never met anyone like him. Sure, she’d seen pictures of people like him, seen them in Sweden too, bent over plates of seafood and rosé basking in the sun at open-air cafés in Stockholm. They were there when she used to go by Stureplan on her way to McDonald’s with her teenage friends. There they sat in their expensive suits, with their elegant nineteenth-century apartments, a race who lived isolated lives in the expensive neighborhoods of Stockholm’s inner city. They had their housing prices and their educations to keep them safe, walled off from the kind of chaos she experienced in her daily life.

  Brett is all that and more. He’s the American dream, more than the American dream. He’s Harvard and sockless feet in boat shoes and a house in the Hamptons. He is eighty-hour weeks at the office and Christmases in the Caribbean. But at the same time, there is a dissonance about him, something rebellious and ironic that cuts against his perfectly polished surface. It slips out in an unexpected joke or a dejected expression in a meeting with some hopeless client.

  Now he struggles to back the SUV out between the gas pumps and throws a quick glance sideways at Yasmine.

  “Looks like more than long days,” he says.

  Yasmine pretends not to hear him, just keeps her eyes closed. Brett is an agent in the advertising industry. He finds what he calls talent—creative young people with some special skill—which he sells to various advertising agencies and other clients who need those skills for their projects. Before she met Brett, Yasmine never knew there was such a job. She didn’t know anything about the advertising industry. It had amused her when, after a few glasses of Chardonnay at that little gallery on Roebling Street last spring, Brett started bragging about his job and his contacts. She’d assumed that he was hitting on her, and she had to work hard to keep his clumsy performance under the radar as David stared at them from the other side of the gallery.

  When Brett really did get in contact with her a few days later and offered to set her up with what he called the “street intelligence unit” at a huge energy drink company, it surprised her. And she was even more surprised when they wanted to meet her that same week in something they called their “clubhouse” in a neighborhood of the Bronx balanced on the edge of gentrification. No wine bars or organic stores yet, but a few of the early markers—the logo for Stumptown Coffee in the window of a café and bearded men in faux working-class clothes sitting on the other side of the dusty window. She’d asked Brett if he was coming to the meeting, but he’d had an uncomfortable look in his eyes and had nervously run a hand through his hair.

  “It’s in the Bronx,” was his only explanation, before offering to drive her to the closest subway station.

  The “clubhouse” was housed in an old commercial space with large windows that faced a gritty sidewalk right next to an old diner that was ironically called Energy. The intelligence unit consisted of five kids in their twenties who seemed to represent an array of ethnic groups and subcultures.

  After they talked about Banksy and Shepard Fairey and their “street capital,” Yasmine briefly presented a few street artists she thought were interesting at the time. She got the job after ten minutes. The next week she was on a plane to Tokyo for the first time. She had a paid hotel room, various brand-new digital cameras that she had no idea how to use, and just one mission: find “the next Banksy.”

  So she’d walked like a shadow over the streets she didn’t know, in a country that felt like another planet, with its impenetrable language and alphabet. All she had were her cameras and a couple of phone numbers for advertising people the energy drink gang were apparently friends with. The Japanese ad guys had been kind, took her out to bars and parties, shown her the best noodle shops and malls that were like luminous, autonomous worlds. But it seemed like the ad guys were as clueless about how she should fulfill her mission as she was. They showed her the graffiti and manga murals in neighborhoods like Shimokitazawa and Koenji, which looked like glittering, densely populated versions of Hornstull or Williamsburg. And she photographed everything dutifully, but it all seemed flat and empty, expressionless and mass-produced global art for bearded art directors, nothing you couldn’t find in any city. Nothing that was worth going halfway around the world to discover.

  She’d given up, determined to say the hell with her assignment, figured at least she got a trip to Tokyo out of it, could get away from everything for a while, that was something.

  But on the last night at a party in what seemed to be a student dormitory, she ended up next to a tiny girl named Misaki who looked about twenty years old. Yasmine was actually on her way to the airport but had a few hours to kill, and the ad guys, in their desire to show her everything, had insisted.

  Misaki was quiet and serious and there was something about her that spoke to Yasmine. It was nice to just stand quietly next to each other, to hide from the rest of the night. But after a while Misaki turned toward Yasmine and in apologetic, tentative English said she had heard that Yasmine was a curator and asked if she could show Yasmine her architectural art. Yasmine had laughed, she hardly knew what the word curator meant, but she happily agreed to look at her art. Misaki produced a computer as if from thin air, and soon they were sitting side by side on a brown couch in what seemed to be an enclosed balcony looking out over a dark alley.

  On the computer Misaki showed her scans of hand-drawn, architectural sketches of identical cuboids attached to one anoth
er to create various angular robotic figures, figures that seemed to be doing different kinds of exercises. Some crouched with arms outstretched, like a kind of gymnastics or yoga; others sat on their knees with arms thrown wide in a kind of plea or prayer. A few more stood on one leg. Probably a dozen characters in total.

  Yasmine didn’t know what to say. They were extremely well made, well thought out, and good-looking. But at the same time simple, like the drawings of a talented, mildly autistic child. She smiled, hopefully encouragingly, and nodded. Misaki pointed and leaned toward her.

  “Architect,” she said. “They are durable. Containers.”

  And through Misaki’s faltering English the image of what she had created slowly emerged: drawings and strength calculations of how the figures could be put together from freight containers. Monumental sculptures hundreds of feet high. It was the first time during the trip that Yasmine felt like she had found something really interesting, and before hurrying to the airport she asked Misaki to email her the sketches.

  Back in New York the energy drink gang loved Misaki’s sketches.

  “That is exactly what we’re looking for!” a bearded guy, maybe Rainbow, exclaimed and hugged Yasmine. “So fresh!”

  Brett had called her a Rebel Curator—even printed it on business cards that Yasmine, embarrassed by the corniness of the title, consistently refused to hand out. And after Tokyo Yasmine became part of Brett’s stable of trend-conscious young people from all over the world who came to New York for a thousand different reasons. Brett paired her with other companies, other kids in camouflage who wanted something fresh, or men in suits in Midtown who wanted to understand the street. And thanks to Brett, she’d be sent all over the world. Ljubljana, Detroit, back to Tokyo. Always for different companies, always the same obscure mission.

  Sometimes she found something really interesting, like Misaki, and sometimes nothing at all. But over the past six months it started to dawn on her that she had a nose for scouting new, unexpected projects. And the missions just kept showing up, and the money continued to roll in—which David always went through quickly. But the missions gave her the opportunity to stay in New York, in exile, and then disappear when David’s partying escalated. They gave her the opportunity to both be in exile and escape from exile.

  And now, here in this grotesque car with Brett, she’s hoping her reputation is enough to give her one more chance. One more opportunity to escape. Or maybe the opportunity to run from who she’s become back to who she was.

  When she opens her eyes she sees Brett glancing at the swelling near her eye again.

  “It’s nothing,” she says, anticipating him. “Nothing I want to talk about.”

  She pulls out her phone, scrolls through nonexistent messages. From the corner of her eye, she sees him nod, maybe relieved not to have to ask anything else about her eye. He keeps his focus on the traffic on Lafayette.

  “Is your pitch ready then?” he says at last. “No offense, but you’re looking a bit rough?”

  “Pitch?” she says. “I don’t even know who we’re going to meet?”

  “You’re the one who wanted a paid trip home?” he says, lifting an eyebrow. “We’re meeting Shrewd and Daughter, one of the world’s most prestigious PR agencies. I mean, this was your idea, right? You called me and asked me to find a customer for a project you have? What do you think? Agencies want to throw money at you because you found some Japanese container artist six months ago?”

  He glances sideways at Yasmine, clearly annoyed.

  “You’re not the only one in this business, and seriously, your reputation isn’t that solid. Sure, everybody’s heard about the container lady, and that’ll get you in the room, that’s the only reason they’ll meet with you. But when you’re there you better fucking deliver. Please tell me you’ve prepared something? I didn’t just throw my Saturday morning away on nothing?”

  She feels the pressure welling up inside, the pain in her injured eye, the throbbing in her foot. That was what she’d thought. That it would suffice for her to say that she had something going on in Stockholm, pictures of something interesting, and Brett would find somebody to pay for her trip. She hadn’t thought she’d have to show anything at all, just those three pictures from her mom’s email. All she can think about is Fadi. All she can think about is that he was dead, and he might not be anymore. All she can think about is a chance to make things right.

  Now a kind of desperation takes hold of her, and she has to fight the impulse to open the car door and throw herself out onto Lafayette Street, fight the urge to run as fast as she can, as far as she can. Because she knows that won’t help, nothing helps, what you can escape from is always crushed by the weight of what you can’t.

  Instead she closes her eyes again, breathes calmly, looks at the buildings of SoHo and wipes away something that might be a tear as discreetly as she can.

  “You saw the pictures I sent?” she says, doing everything she can to sound neutral and confident. “There’s something there. Why do this if you don’t think so yourself?”

  Brett sinks into his seat with a sigh.

  “That’s a good question.”

  7. BERGORT—WINTER 2011

  EVENTUALLY I WAKE up, so I must have slept. The room is grayer now, whiter, no darkness or yellow from the streetlights outside, so it must be morning. The sheets are all tangled up, and for a moment I think that yesterday might not have happened yet, maybe it’s still just a plan, unrealized and far away. But when I lift up my thin mattress the metal box of petty cash from the studio is lying in the hollow space under the box spring. On the other side of the room, the closet door where you grabbed your sketches is still ajar. Everything happened. Everything.

  I stretch out my hand and pick up the phone, try to call you, but don’t have enough money left on my prepaid phone. I text: WHERE ARE YOU? and push “send” but it doesn’t go through. Not even enough money for that. I drop the phone on the floor and lean back against the wall, remorse and anxiety tearing me apart. I beat my fists against my forehead, halfheartedly at first, then harder and harder until I’m afraid I’ll split my eyebrows, so I stop, collapse into a ball on the bed, whisper: “No, no, no!”

  I sneak out of the apartment sometime after ten. It’s quiet and empty, they’re at one of their jobs, earning money we’ll never see, sent home to family, or squirrelled away, always for the past or the future and never for the here and now. I open the old laptop and try again:

  Where are you? I can fix this.

  I see that my brothers are online, and send them a quick message, without explanation:

  Camp Nou. Now. Need to talk.

  Ten minutes later I’m breathing in frost and ice on the corner of the plastic field. It must have snowed again last night, because there’s a fragile, fluffy layer on every chain-link of the fence around the field. A field of snow, surrounded by a net of snow. It takes them a half hour to show up, red-cheeked, laughing.

  “Shoo, Fadi, what’s happening, brother?”

  “Damn len, you should have gone to school. The plan, bro, the plan!”

  They thump each other’s backs, happy and unconcerned. I look over their shoulders. I stomp, jump, spin, and worry.

  “Listen,” I say. “Everything’s gone to shit, OK? Wallah, really fucked up.”

  I light a crooked cigarette and tell them about the code, how they’ll see that it was Yazz’s code we used in the burglary. But the brothers just laugh, just look at each other like I’m an idiot.

  “So she gets blamed?” Bounty says. “What’s the big deal, brother? She wants to go away, yao? So let her take the rap for this then?”

  The others nod. They don’t get it. I just keep smoking—exhale a jagged, gray cloud that rises above the jagged, gray concrete, up toward the jagged, gray sky.

  “Fuck,” I say. “It’s not about her, OK?”

  I’m looking at Jorge, trying to catch his eye, don’t give a shit about the others now, don’t give a shit about Bo
unty because he’s a fucking retard. Don’t care about Räven because he’s already a criminal, always has been, he doesn’t care about this, he’s already turned around and started messing with his phone. I don’t care about Mehdi because he’s fat. I’m only looking at Jorge, because he’s always the last one to join in with our bullshit, always skeptical, always half a step behind, always one thought ahead. But he only shrugs.

  “What can I say, brother? What’s done is done. And your sister is gonna do it, right? Just chill, yao. Lie low.”

  The cigarette’s done, but I take one more drag so it burns down to the filter, before I throw it onto the snow. I look at Jorge again, but he’s already laughing at something Mehdi said.

  “Well, fuck it then,” I say.

  I don’t care anyway. I don’t give a shit about their stupid fucking risk analysis. That’s not the point anyway. I don’t give a shit if it works. All I care about is that you left for good. You’ve floated above me for so long, and now you’ve left the atmosphere. Your shadow will fall somewhere else. But that’s not something you share with your brothers. That’s not the kind of thing you share with anybody.

  It’s started snowing by the time I leave Camp Nou and head home, pass by the playground, which is empty and pointless without swings or children, its benches hidden in snowdrifts. The brothers’ voices are still audible though muffled by the snow as they head in the opposite direction, past low-rises and the park and down toward the school. I can’t do an afternoon there today. Can’t just pass the day doing nothing. It’s completely empty between the buildings, there aren’t even any bums sitting on the benches outside the liquor store, and the ads—always for the same damn seventy-nine-kronor chicken—sway and creak in the wind. It’s as if I’m the only one here, as if everyone else has left, like there was an evacuation that nobody told me about.