“So?”
“I was just a little surprised.”
The taxi driver turned up the volume on the radio.
“They’re my friends. They just think it’s really awesome that we—”
“I get it. But didn’t we agree not to tell anyone outside of us about it? Because that’s not why we’re doing it, is it? So we can tell people about it?”
The taxi drove on. We didn’t say much more before it pulled up outside my door. I had my card out, out of old habit.
“I’ll get it,” Samuel said, handing over his card.
We snuck up the stairs and fell asleep on opposite sides of the bed.
*
It was Samuel’s idea for me to take over running the house. He was worried that more and more people would show up, and he asked me to stop by once a day and keep an eye on things so it wouldn’t get out of control.
“Maybe you can make up a list of everyone who sleeps there. Like, write down their names and where they’re from and how long they’re planning to stay.”
He repeated several times that the most important thing was that everyone understood that it was a temporary place to stay, and it could end any day.
“We can’t give them false hope. If my relatives want to get into the house, they all have to be out with a few hours’ notice.”
“It’s going to be a little hard for me to keep an eye on the house and still get in all my hours with the moving company,” I said.
“Don’t worry about that. We’ll figure it out. We’ll keep splitting what I make.”
And sure, it was generous of Samuel. But it wasn’t enough for me to start paying off my debt to Hamza. He was contacting me more and more often to inform me of how the interest had grown. Sometimes he texted pictures that showed what would happen if I didn’t pay up soon. It might be a hand without fingernails. A hockey pro who’d taken a puck to the eye. A cartoon character, tarred and feathered. A cute lamb that had been gutted on a strip of gray asphalt.
*
Then it started. And it was impossible to stop. First it was his voice. I started thinking that Samuel sounded fake. I noticed that he always adjusted his manner of speaking. If we were at a flea market and he wanted to buy a cigarette case from an old woman, he talked like an old woman.
“My, what miserable luck!” he might say when the old lady said that she didn’t take cards.
When we walked by the square to buy fruit, he would start speaking in an Arabic accent. He haggled over oranges by calling the seller alternately “brushan” and “habibi.”
“Baraka’Allah Oufik,” he said, winking, when he received his change, totally unaware that the guy was a Kurd.
When we went to the library he would walk among the shelves and talk about how much he longed to read a “present-day political novel with a contextual framework that problematizes the formats of its contemporary peers but simultaneously takes a critical stance on modernistic history.” And the sick thing was that it worked. Not always, but pretty often. The librarians and the old lady at the flea market loved him. But I noticed that the guy on the square looked at him with squinting eyes, as if he could tell that something was wrong. As if he knew: this guy has an accent because I have an accent. I started wondering who Samuel really was. Did he talk like me when he was with me? Who was he when I wasn’t there? Did I even know his true self?
One day we said goodbye in the hall, he had to run to the Metro to make it to work on time, I kissed him goodbye and locked the door behind him. Then I watched him through the peephole, as he entered the stairwell and started going down the steps. I wanted to see what he looked like when I wasn’t there. I wondered if he would speak Finland-Swedish with the one neighbor and southern Swedish with the other. Because I noticed how quickly he switched from one personality to the next, and the more I noticed it the more obvious it became that the version I knew was just one of many.
*
Every morning I biked over to the house and made the rounds. I checked off the residents against my list, I explained to new arrivals that the house was primarily for women and children but that in exceptional cases and on a short-term basis there might be a chance that men could sleep there too. Often there were practical items that had to be purchased, toilet paper and soap and dish detergent wouldn’t last forever, and I started collecting an administrative fee from people who wanted to stay in the house so that Samuel or I wouldn’t have to pay for those things. It was a small, symbolic fee that really didn’t cover very much more than those practical items. I knew that Samuel wouldn’t have anything against it, so I didn’t tell him about it.
*
Later on it was his impatience. It started to bother me that Samuel could never relax in the present, he was always looking ahead to his next experience. There was something self-absorbed about him, because he was always focused on his own experiences and his own memories. Never anyone else’s.
And then it was his blackheads. At first I thought they were cute. But then they started to grow. I couldn’t sit on the couch next to Samuel without noticing them, thinking about them, wanting to squeeze them or just get rid of them. On two evenings I suggested that he wash his face with my soap, and he just looked at me and shook his head.
And then it was his body odor. Samuel might wear the exact same clothes five days in a row. Sure, it’s super that you’re not walking around smelling like a perfume counter, but there’s something to be said for being able to sit down on the subway next to someone and they don’t start to look at you sideways and then switch seats as soon as they get the chance.
And then it was that I felt all this stuff and he didn’t seem to notice a thing. He just kept living his life as if he had no idea what was about to happen.
*
At first it seemed weird for Samuel to pay me for taking care of the house. But then I realized how much time it took up. Something happened almost every day. A woman claimed that two men had stolen her gold watch. I came in as an arbitrator, I convinced the men to open their luggage and there were quite a few things that weren’t typically masculine, several gold rings and some jewelry, but the watch the woman had described wasn’t among them. Two nights later, the men had disappeared and the small, broken TV that had been on the second floor was missing too. One woman was pregnant and feverish and terrified of going to the hospital, I called the medical advice hotline to make sure she could seek care risk-free, then drove her to Huddinge in a borrowed car. I left her at the emergency room and drove back, I didn’t want to take any chances. Her suitcase was still in the attic, and it was one of the things that was destroyed in the fire.
*
Everything just kept escalating. We were at a restaurant and I noticed that Samuel smacked his food. I saw his gums, the bits of food, his big, yellow teeth slowly grinding the food into a grotesquely chunky sludge which he then swallowed in large, greedy gulps. I said I had to cruise on home. He thought he would be coming along. I said I needed to do some prep for work.
“Laide,” he said. “You have to remember to live a little. You. Only. Have. One. Life.”
And he really said it like that. Slowly. With. Philosophical. Pauses. I had the urge to lean over and bite him on the nose. Who the hell was he, to sit there talking like some fucking life coach? What did he know about my story, my life, my choices? I shook my head. He smiled. There was green stuff stuck between his teeth.
On the way to the Metro he ran into someone he knew and I noticed him stiffen, he backed away when the girl wanted to hug him and he rapidly brought the conversation to an end. We kept walking. I thought he was trying to be the person he thought I wanted him to be, but instead he was transformed into a shell of what he was.
“Who was that?” I asked once we had gone through the turnstiles.
“No idea.”
He turned toward me for a kiss, I twisted my head away and pretended to check my phone. I knew what I had to do, but I was putting it off, I didn’t want to do it, I knew
how bad I would feel afterwards. But I had no choice. Neither of us was happy that way. If I just did it quickly, at least we would still have the memories of what we had once been.
*
One time I answered when Hamza called and he was so surprised he didn’t know what to say. I had ignored so many of his calls, and now we could suddenly hear each other’s voices. Instead of hissing all those things I’d heard him say in the voicemails, that he would do this and that to my earlobes and shatter my kneecaps and fuck my mom and kill my pets, he told me how big the loan was and that I would regret it if I didn’t pay up soon.
“Is that all?” I said.
“I don’t want to have to do this,” Hamza said, sounding sad.
“Then don’t,” I said.
“I have to do it.”
“Give me a month.”
“One month?”
“Two months.”
He hung up.
*
The autumn grew colder, the days shorter, the darkness more intense, and I couldn’t look at Samuel without thinking of how stingy he was. How he automatically let me pay when we went to the movies, or ate at a restaurant, or had coffee or bought flowers. When he paid, I thanked him. When I paid, he merrily picked up the goods and walked out of the store. He didn’t seem to think about money at all. And the less he focused on money, the more I was forced to do so. In the end, it wasn’t his stinginess that bothered me, but my own—his casual attitude to money made me seem uptight, his mantra that everything would work out in the end transformed me into the stingiest person I’d ever met. I started to hate myself when we hung out, and I despised myself for noticing that he frequently chose cheap filter coffee when he was paying and expensive flavored lattes when it was my turn to pay. Everything seemed like a countdown.
*
Right after that, Samuel called and I could tell from his voice that something had happened.
“Spicy House in twenty,” I said.
I was sitting at a window table, I saw him walking up. He had a plastic bag full of swimming gear. But his hair was dry. His body was moving like he had dumbbells in his hands. He hugged me.
“It’s over,” he said.
His body seemed to be pulsing with strange twitches.
*
In September, Samuel talked about how incredibly happy he was with me and how he couldn’t manage without me. In October he wanted us to start planning a trip abroad for the next summer. In November he asked if I wanted to have kids, and if so when. I thought: The only reason that you’re saying and feeling all these things right now is because you can tell I’m about to leave.
*
I went up to the bar, bought two drinks, and came back.
“I love her,” Samuel murmured.
“No, you don’t love her.”
“It hurts so bad.”
“Soon it won’t hurt as much, here, chug this.”
“I don’t get it.”
“There’s nothing to get, she was a betraying cunt, you just have to realize that.”
“What did you call her?”
“Sorry, I mean . . . It’s like this. You can’t trust girls. That’s just the way it is. Hamza has a saying. He likes to say, ‘Girls are fat, smell like strawberries, and can’t be trusted.’”
“Who the hell is Hamza?”
“Never mind.”
“And what experience do you even have with girls?”
The question hung blankly in the air. Instead of responding, I raised my glass and we toasted and downed our drinks.
*
In late November, I did it. I hadn’t even been planning to do it. Not there. Not then. We met at the Eriksdal bathhouse, we were going to go swimming but before we changed we grabbed coffee in the cafeteria and right there, just after we ordered and found a seat in a secluded corner with our respective trays, I said it. I told him how I felt. I said that I loved him and I wanted to be with him but I couldn’t because I didn’t trust him and I said that if we didn’t do something about it now we wouldn’t remember the good times we really have had and I said I’ve tried to ignore these feelings, tried to work through them, tried to remind myself that I’m the broken one, not you. But it doesn’t work. It doesn’t help. I turn into a person I hate when I’m like this and it’s not cool, the way I’ve treated you, and every time I’m not with you I feel so awful that the times when we’re together can never balance it out and I know you get what I mean because I can tell that you’ve started to close off, you’re not yourself anymore, you’ve started to act the way you think I want you to act when we go out, I’m saying this with love, you can’t take it as criticism, I just have such a hell of a hard time trusting people and I wish I were different, I wish I didn’t feel so guilty for not feeling enough, I wish I could be a hundred percent honest when I say that I love you, but I don’t know if I am and knowing that makes me crazy and I hope you can forgive me because I wish I were different, that everything was different, that we were different, and that and that . . .
Though to be perfectly honest I’m not sure how much of this I actually got out, because I started crying after a minute or so. Samuel held me and comforted me.
“There, there,” he said, getting up to find some more napkins.
*
Because these were special circumstances, I went straight to the bar and bought two more.
“It hurts so bad. I can hardly breathe.”
“It will feel better soon.”
“Should I call her?”
“No.”
“I shouldn’t just call her up? Just real quick?”
“Give me the phone.”
“For real?”
“Yes, hand over your phone and drink up. You can have it back when we get home.”
“I love her so goddamn much.”
“You’ve known each other for like a year.”
“Exactly. And now it’s over—I can’t believe it.”
“You just have to accept it and move on.”
I turned away as Samuel started to cry. It wasn’t that I was ashamed, but I knew how he would feel the next day. It was for his own sake. I slid on over to the gambling machines. Once he had calmed down I came back to my seat. We took a few sips. Toasted.
“Sorry. Aw, shit. I feel better now.”
He wiped his nose and tossed back his drink.
“I’ll get the next round, what do you want?”
I smiled and thought: He’s back.
*
When I looked at him sitting there with his big mouth and his kind eyes, I knew that I would regret it. But I had no other choice.
“We can’t keep going like this, can we?”
“I thought we were happy,” said Samuel.
In one instant my irritation was back. It bugged me that he sounded so naïve when he said that, and at the same time it bothered me that he didn’t look sad enough. We left the bathhouse and walked to the Metro. It bugged me that he walked too slowly. I was annoyed when he checked the time on his phone on our way through the tunnel under Ringvägen. As we stood and waited for the train and I was shuddering from all the crying, a beggar came up with a picture of his two kids and even though he must have seen I was fragile he didn’t give up, he rattled his coffee cup, he pointed at his mouth, he said “please please” and at first I was irritated that Samuel was too stingy to give him money. But then he dug out a gold ten-krona coin and gave it to the beggar and then I was irritated that he was so gullible.
When my train finally rolled in, we hugged goodbye. It was the last time I touched him. The doors closed. He was still standing on the platform. The train moved through the tunnel, out onto the bridge. I tried to focus on the view. Årstaviken. The treetops. The roads. The badminton hall. And the bathhouse where we could have been swimming that moment if I weren’t broken. As we departed Gullmarsplan I started crying again, I saw my contorted face in the reflection in the window and realized that Samuel hadn’t shed a single tear.
*<
br />
A few hours later. Last call. We were fine sitting down, but had a harder time standing up.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“My phone,” Samuel said.
“Fuck your phone. Fuck Laide, fuck Sting.” (I only said that because a Sting song happened to be playing on the bar speakers—I don’t have anything in particular against Sting.)
I returned to the table with two to four drinks. Four Samuels looked up and smiled, I sat on one of five chairs and thought, the battle to help him find his way back to being himself starts now.
“Shouldn’t I call her?”
“No, you shouldn’t call her.”
“Just to see how things are?”
“Give me your phone.”
“You already took it.”
“Oh right. I have your phone and you are not going to call her.”
Even though last call had come and gone they let us stay there and soon it was last last call and it was Samuel’s turn to buy. He walked a crooked line to the bar, he grabbed it like a lifebuoy, the bartender smiled as he placed his order. Then he came back with just one beer.
“I felt like I had enough,” said Samuel.
I sat there with my single beer. I asked if Samuel wanted a taste.
“No, I’m good.”
I tossed back half the beer, put down the glass, and went to the bathroom. When I came back, Samuel was by the door with his coat on. We walked out onto the square, the night wind was icy cold, a very fit couple was working out side by side on the Stairmasters in the gym, they were staring at their reflections and looking pleased. On the way out I noticed that the half-full beer I’d left on the table had been drunk. And I don’t know why I noticed that or what it changed, but I remember thinking that Laide was still there inside Samuel, even though they had broken up and would never be together again, she would be a part of him forever. I hoped I was wrong.
*
I was convinced he would call. I waited for the phone to ring. If only he had called I would have taken it all back. But he never called.
*
Samuel was back. He was himself, and yet not. One night I heard him talking to someone in his room. The same song had been playing on repeat for several hours, I recognized it but couldn’t place it, when the song ended I could hear a few seconds of the next song and then a few seconds’ pause and then the song started over again. Every time it happened I thought that he should either turn on the repeat function so the same song would play over and over again automatically, or else he should let the disc or the playlist play. But instead, the same song and two seconds of the next one, for one hour, two hours, three hours. At last I knocked on his door and asked how he was feeling. He didn’t respond, but I heard him mumbling.
Everything I Don't Remember Page 18
