Everything I Don't Remember

by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

  Sometimes when I walk into the bathroom in the morning and see his toothbrush beside mine I think that we have grown awfully close in an awfully short amount of time. That this closeness is— Delete that. Delete all of that. Just write that the rest of the year is like a stroboscopic slideshow of rumbling basslines, clinking glasses, nods at people we don’t know but recognize, sticky dance floors, rubber coat-check tags in my back pocket, steamy smoke-machine smell, cigarette butts in overflowing toilets, cigarette packs smushed into empty glasses, conversations in front of speakers where the only way to make yourself heard is to cup the listener’s ear. Then home in a taxi with ears ringing and waking up the next day with wrists full of stamps and pockets full of crumpled bills and forgotten beer tickets and sweaty gum and involuntarily stolen lighters and brown flakes of tobacco and receipts from places you hardly remember being at. But then you remember, of course, and smile at the memory. In short: it was a happy time. Maybe the happiest of my life.

  *

  Panther sighs and shakes her head. It hurts to think about this. The next day was a Friday. I was standing at the market in Kreuzberg, I was just about to buy two artichokes, I had them in a thin blue plastic bag, I had my change purse out, my phone rang, I answered. Vandad told me, he just said it and then he hung up. I know I collapsed, I remember that the guy selling vegetables seemed to think at first that I was trying to steal the artichokes, then he realized what was up and he ran out and stood near me so no one would accidentally step on me, it was crowded, the cobblestone street was full of vegetable bits and black water, there was a sound, it wasn’t crying, it was an animal, a mewling primeval animal, I squatted there, I don’t know how long, the vegetable seller stood there waiting for me to get up, he borrowed a bottle of water from a colleague, he handed it to me, I took it but couldn’t drink, shoes and unshaven shins walked by me, two German guys with guitars were talking loudly about pineapple tomatoes which were apparently like regular tomatoes but in the shape of a pineapple, they tasted the same as other tomatoes but the shape was totally different, and one guy said “then what’s the point of them” and the other answered something I didn’t hear because they had walked past me, they were already gone, after a while I could get up, the man with the artichokes wanted to give them to me but I paid, I didn’t want anything for free, I took the plastic bag and walked home, fifteen minutes later I realized I was going in the wrong direction, I turned around and walked home, I had bought artichokes, the sun was shining, German guys were talking about pineapple tomatoes, a truck was unloading lamps and dressers outside a furniture store, beer was glittering in plastic glasses at an outdoor restaurant, it was a nice day, people were happy, bikes wobbled by, taxis honked, cats meowed, the city was alive, but Samuel was dead.

  PART II

  LAIDE

  THE LIVING ROOM

  Did you come straight from the airport? Was it hard to find? You’ve lived in Paris, right? This neighborhood was probably pretty different back then. These days it’s super quiet. Or almost super quiet. But it’s lucky you didn’t come last Tuesday because the RER drivers and Air Traffic Control went on strike. I thought we could sit in here, will that work, sound-wise? Do you want tea or coffee? Milk? Hot or iced? Foam or no foam? Why don’t you tell me a little more about what you want to know while I get it ready?

  *

  Then came the autumn when Laide and Samuel met for real. And that’s probably what some people (like you, for example) would call the beginning of the story. And others (like me, for example) would call the beginning of the end.

  *

  Should I just start talking? Okay. But I’m going to trust that you’ll turn what I say into something that works as a text. I mean, like, take out when I say like “like” and “um,” because I know how spoken language looks when it’s written down word for word, it’s totally bizarre, you seem like an idiot and I don’t want to seem like an idiot, I want to seem like me.

  *

  In the spring of two thousand ten, I noticed that Samuel was changing. At first it was little things. Like when we did a toast together, more and more often he would say:

  “To love.”

  Even though both of us were single. He talked about Panther more and more often, he was annoyed that she wouldn’t answer his emails, he said we should go down to Berlin and visit her.

  “We were as close as you can be without being together, and now suddenly she’s gone.”

  But every time I wanted to book a trip, he put it off.

  *

  I moved home to Sweden in the spring of two thousand ten. I had gone back and forth like fifty times. Weekend visits, friends’ wedding, Dad’s sixtieth birthday. All the trips were the same. When I was little I loved to fly. Mom used to sit next to me and say that I was steering the plane, that it was up to me to take care of all the technology. When we backed out of the gate I was the one who did it by twisting the knob that held up the tray, and when we started the engines I was the one who gave them fuel by pushing on the recline button and to take off I had to push the recline button and turn the tray knob at exactly the same time. Then the plane would get up to cruising speed and then we could turn on the autopilot and retract the landing gear by turning the tray knob and pushing on the recline button.

  *

  Mostly, of course, we hung out together. But sometimes Samuel got the idea that he should go on a date. He met girls with names like Malin-slash-Esmeralda-slash-Zakia. They exchanged numbers, they went for coffee, they went out to eat. They were heading in a certain direction. Then a few weeks later I would ask how it was going with Malin-slash-Esmeralda-slash-Zakia.

  “Oh, nothing came of that,” Samuel would say.

  “What happened?”

  “Malin and I went to the movies and the way she breathed was totally disgusting, it was like the air whistled when it went through her nose. At first I didn’t notice, but once I heard it, it was impossible to stop thinking about it.”

  Or:

  “Esmeralda was nice but her parents are conservatives, I mean like they’re on the city council, and that’s not going to work. Plus she lives in Gärdet.”

  “So?”

  “It’s kind of far to go all the time.”

  Or:

  “I don’t know, Zakia and I never clicked. Yeah, we hung out a little but I was never quite there. Something wasn’t quite right, I don’t know what. Maybe it was the age difference.”

  “Wasn’t she just two years younger than you?”

  “Mmhmm. But it felt like more. Plus she had an ugly purse.”

  *

  By now traveling was a boring routine, a tiresome waiting game. I hardly remember my trip home. But I remember that it felt weird to bring less luggage home with me than I had had when I moved down. I had left most of my books behind, and a lot of clothes too. My belongings felt sullied somehow, they were part of a relationship that was over, they were a shell I had worn for five years and now I was free.

  *

  At the same time, Samuel started sliding up to strangers at bars to ask about their definitions of love. People would be sitting there talking about the kinds of things people talk about in Stockholm (how hard it is to find good skilled labor, good realtors, bad realtors, who earned what on a rental turned co-op-slash-sale-slash-bid) and without any sort of lead-in Samuel would approach them and force whatever he wanted to talk about into the conversation. Like this:

  “A good tradesman can make you fall in love a little, and by the way, how would you define love?”

  Or:

  “I assume you end up with an intimate relationship with your realtor, almost as intimate as with a romantic partner. And how would you define . . .”

  I saw him do the same thing time and again. And the strange thing was that people answered him, everyone had their own definition. One taxi driver said that for him, love was a relationship that always yields increased returns.

  “Like a bank account?” said Samuel.

&nbs
p; “Yes, but a damn good bank account. With amazing interest. And guarantee of deposits. Not one of these fucking huge banks, you know. A small, specialized niche bank.”

  “But there aren’t any guarantees with love,” I said.

  “No, you might be right about that,” the taxi driver said with a sigh. “So I guess it’s probably a pretty crappy bank account.”

  Another time we were at an after-party and some girl claimed that love is when someone else is the main character in the movie of your life and you yourself become a supporting role and everyone else is an extra. After a trip to the movies Samuel and I were sitting at a cafe and when I came back from the bathroom I heard the lady next to us say to Samuel and her husband:

  “No, no, no. You two just don’t get it. Love isn’t about ‘being happy and content.’ Love is suffering and pain and feeling sick and still being prepared to give up everything for the other person—everything!”

  Her husband shook his head. Samuel nodded and looked like he understood. But even then I thought that he didn’t get it and never would.

  *

  The only piece of clothing I missed was an orange scarf I wore on my second date with my ex-husband. I thought that would ruin the scarf forever, but in fact I sometimes yearned for it. And every time, that yearning made me happy. It felt, like, nice that a scarf could win out over that long-as-intestines, painful mess of a relationship.

  *

  When Samuel brought up the definition of love for the hundredth time, I was a little irritated.

  “Love is love,” I said. “What more do you want to know?”

  “But there has to be a better definition than that.”

  “Okay, here’s the definition of love. The definitive one. Love is when things that are chill get extra chill because the person you’re with is so chill.”

  Samuel laughed and told me I sounded poetic.

  “That’s right, I’m a poet. Now let’s call a taxi.”

  *

  Sometimes I actually toyed with the thought of calling my ex-husband, just calling him and asking him to send the scarf. As if we were distant colleagues who had never lived together, been married, gone at each other so hard that I sometimes doubted we would come out of it alive. But we did, and of course I will never call him. It’s over, it’s finished, I hardly think about him anymore. But that scarf, on the other hand.

  *

  The spring grew warmer, Stockholm’s outdoor cafes opened, and . . . Yes! Take it easy! Chill out . . . It seriously stresses me out when you do that . . . They meet soon, I promise. Laide moved home to Sweden and we were sitting at that cheap beer place by Fridhemsplan. People were talking soccer, horse-racing, or which rappers have the finest honeys in their videos (someone said the southern ones, someone said West Coast, no one said East Coast). Samuel and I were talking about who we were back in upper secondary school. I said I was about the same as I was now, a regular old invisible person who people knew they shouldn’t start something with. Samuel said he hadn’t been bullied, but there were people at his school who thought he was a little weird. He hadn’t had any problems in compulsory school because he went to one near his neighborhood and people knew who he was, but in upper secondary he ended up in a school that was farther away and the atmosphere was different there. The guys were supposed to be a certain way and the girls were supposed to be another way and at first he got respect because people could tell that at the least he wasn’t totally Swedish. But then a rumor went around that he was gay and Valentin who did Thai boxing and was the terror of the school grabbed Samuel’s headphones in the common room and even though Samuel mostly listened to hip-hop, Biggie and Tupac and Snoop, this particular time he happened to be listening to a classical piano piece, and Valentin laughed and started calling him Chopin, which turned into chicken, which turned into chickadee because of course Samuel was brown but white at the same time. They took his cap and spit gobs of snot into it, they graffitied his locker, in the shower after gym everyone left when he came in, and in the lunchroom Valentin liked to trip with his glass of milk and drop it in his food or onto his neck and if it got in his face he said sorry without holding back his laughter because the milk looked like cum. Samuel told me all of this in a voice that said it was nothing to worry about. But when I heard it I wanted to look up Valentin’s address and pay him a visit at home, ring his bell, stick my foot in the crack, and explain a thing or two. Samuel smiled and said that was nice of me, but it wasn’t as bad as it sounded.

  “It’s not like I was bullied.”

  When the bill came, one of us picked it up, it didn’t matter who, because we shared everything equally.

  *

  I landed at Arlanda. In the midst of feeling sort of free because I was alive. Freed from my ex-husband’s sticky web. The colors seemed bolder, my body lighter, and everything seemed possible as I stood there by the baggage carousel waiting for my bags. “Welcome to my hometown,” said all the famous faces, blown up huge on the walls. Then I jumped on the train into town. It was classic Swedish spring sun, cold and clear light that gave the illusion that it was warm out if you were sitting behind a pane of glass. I looked out at the ancient-forest landscape that still surrounds Stockholm and felt all my enthusiasm vanish. What the hell am I doing? I thought. How can I voluntarily be on my way back to this fucking backwater town? Am I really going to waste my life in this nowhereland when there is a whole world out there? And at that point I wasn’t thinking about Brussels, I was thinking bigger than that, I was thinking São Paulo, I was thinking New York, I was thinking Beirut. I was thinking about anything that wasn’t an adorable little city center with a few buildings from the Middle Ages and a castle that looks like a barracks and three measly little Metro lines and an inner city surrounded by industrial areas while everyone talks about how the city can’t grow any bigger and then and there, before I had even arrived, I felt like I had to get away, that this was a trial period. I promised myself I would stay for only six months, a year at the max.

  *

  Spring became summer. Time passed. Samuel continued to ask people about definitions of love and when he encountered people who seemed content in their relationships he would always ask how they met. I stood next to him, thinking that everyone had a tale and that tale grew taller and taller every year.

  “How did we meet? Oh, that’s actually an amazing story.”

  And even though no one but Samuel cared, they would start telling it. They were in the same class in elementary school and hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years when, by “huuuuge coincidence,” they ran into each other at a market. In Italy. At sunset. They were at a conference and ended up next to each other in line for the breakfast buffet. They sat there until lunch. Until dinner. They didn’t leave the dining room for several days. They stood next to each other at ICA in Bredäng in two cash register lines that were exactly the same length, and after the line had stood still for thirty seconds, five minutes, fifteen minutes, they started talking to each other. The conversation never ended and “that’s how it happened” they said, smiling their liar smiles. I suppose they wanted our eyes to light up, wanted us to share their joy. But in fact, both Samuel and I thought that they ought to keep their joy to themselves, because they didn’t get that there were people out there who hadn’t experienced that, who were still waiting.

  *

  I refused to become one of those people who gets stuck in a place just because it’s comfortable, who meets someone and takes out loans and buys an apartment and imagines that this shithole of a city with its nervous baristas and bartenders who drool over celebrities and racist bouncers and narrow-minded politicians and redneck police force is the norm; who forget that Stockholm is an anomaly, a tiny goddamn backwater populated by peasants, as far north as you can get, a city that completely lacks purpose and is so afraid of its own shadow that people don’t talk to each other even when the Metro stands still in a tunnel for fifteen minutes. It’s the only city in the world where ne
wborns learn how to avoid eye contact. You see it in children who grew up somewhere else, they come here and think that people will fawn over them on the Metro, they flutter their eyelashes, they offer pacifiers to dogs, but their fellow passengers quickly let them know the score, not a single glance up from the phone, not a single smile from anyone in return, like mummies, like pillars of salt they go back and forth, to work, home from work, each fellow human is treated like a beggar, and if there’s only one thing I must remember it is that this is not everything. There is a way out, there is always a way out, I thought as the train approached the city.