Jagannath

by Karin Tidbeck

  “You had me worried,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “I’ve realized what I have to do.” She put a steaming cup in front of me and sat down in the opposite chair. A smoky Lapsang smell wafted up from the cup. Rebecka rested her elbows on the table and leaned toward me.

  “I’m serious about not coping anymore,” she said. Her tone was matter-of-fact. “I want to die, Sara.”

  “I don’t want you to,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I really don’t want you to.”

  “Well, it’s not for you to decide, anyway.” She took a sip from her cup. I didn’t know what to say, so I drank my tea. It was sweetened with too much honey.

  “I suppose you’re going to tell me,” I said eventually.

  “The Lord isn’t going to do anything,” Rebecka said. “I know that now.”

  There were white dregs at the bottom of my cup.

  “Rebecka, what did you put in my tea?” I said.

  Her face was set, almost serene. “I’m going to make Him listen,” she replied. “I’m going to do something he can’t ignore.”

  —

  I was naked when I woke up in her bed. My wrists and ankles were tied to the bedposts. Rebecka was sitting on a chair beside me, a toolbox at her feet.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  Herr Cederberg

  HERR CEDERBERG preferred leaving the office to have lunch outside. He would sit on a bench next to the fountain on Mariatorget, reading the newspaper with a sandwich or two, especially now that the weather was nice. It was June, and the flower beds were full of giddy insects that every now and then buzzed over to Herr Cederberg to make sure he wasn’t a flower. Other office workers populated the adjacent benches with their lunch boxes, and some even stretched out on the lawns, drinking the first summer sun like pale lizards.

  Herr Cederberg was vaguely reading an article on the national economy when feet crunched by on the gravel, and a girl’s voice mumbled, “…like a bumblebee.”

  Another voice tittered. He didn’t have to look up to know they were talking about him. He was already very aware of his swelling thighs and bulging stomach and that his feet were not quite touching the ground. The most common simile was pig, followed by panda, koala, and bumblebee, in no particular order. Herr Cederberg looked up from his newspaper. Two rosy and adolescent faces quickly looked away and leaned toward each other. The one who had giggled continued:

  “Oh, I love bumblebees, they’re so neat. You know how the laws of nature say they shouldn’t be able to fly, right, but they fly anyway?”

  “Yeah, but how?” asked the first girl.

  “Because they don’t know they’re not supposed to!”

  The girls burst into shrill laughter. Herr Cederberg couldn’t summon the energy to say anything. They had no idea of their own idiocy and wouldn’t for years to come, if ever. He looked at the fat little insects bumping around in the tulips, their wings, if one could see them in slow motion, oscillating in a beautiful figure-eight pattern. He imagined himself fluttering his arms in the same fashion, slowly ascending into the sky.

  —

  Herr Cederberg had long ago converted his garage into a workshop. His first passion had been for model planes, but the last few years he had been experimenting with different types of kites. His finest work to date, a Balinese dragon, covered the ceiling in bright red and gold.

  He surveyed the little space. There was plenty of material to work with. He rolled up his shirtsleeves, took off his jacket, and started sketching a framework.

  —

  Herr Cederberg finished the machine on an early morning in the second week of August. At first glance, it resembled a stubby-winged canoe on wheels. The cockpit had a corduroy seat with a safety belt. A pair of bicycle pedals stuck out of the floor. It had felt a little banal to use pedals to power the wings, but they turned out to be the perfect method for creating the oscillating pattern he wanted. The chassis was covered with a layer of oilcloth, painted with black and yellow stripes. Herr Cederberg realized he hadn’t given the craft a name.

  After a long blank moment, he patted the chassis and said, “Bumblebee.” He blushed at his own lack of imagination.

  It was time to go. He folded the wings along the sides and pushed Bumblebee out of the garage, toward the forest.

  —

  Herr Cederberg stood sweaty and winded on the edge of a cliff in the forest outside the suburb. Far below lay the lake and the dark green sea of the pine forest. Next to him, the craft sat with its wings extended and a couple of wedges under its wheels to keep it from running off the edge. Herr Cederberg put his goggles on and crawled into the cockpit. He fastened his seat belt and waited.

  The morning wind was too gentle, but after midday it finally picked up speed. A low-pressure front was heading in, and the chubby cumuli fused and inflated as they wandered the horizon. When the draft finally arrived, Herr Cederberg tore the wedges off and cheered quietly as the craft rolled forward, lifted its nose, and slid out over the edge. He pedaled as fast as his legs could manage. The wings were sluggish at first but picked up speed, and when an updraft shot up along the cliff, Bumblebee really took off. The air rushing by made Herr Cederberg’s cheeks flutter. He rose higher and higher at a steep and determined angle.

  The low-pressure front came in straight ahead. The cumuli had gained height and metamorphosed into an enormous cumulonimbus, an anvil-shaped mass that stretched up into the higher layers of the atmosphere. Herr Cederberg looked down at the ground. He looked up at the cloud. Then he smiled and pedaled faster.

  At first, the suction of the cumulonimbus felt like a faint increase in wind. Then suddenly, it was as if someone had grabbed the craft, as the cloud greedily started sucking in all air in its vicinity. Herr Cederberg saw the dark belly of the cloud stretch out like a bruised ceiling. The wind howled in his ears. The cloud ceiling soon filled his entire field of vision.

  The forward motion turned into a violent updraft, and the air darkened around him. Bumblebee began to shudder and shake. A wing abruptly tore away and pulled half of the oilcloth with it. Herr Cederberg clung to the edges of the cockpit with whitening knuckles as the cold and dark closed in around him. Ice crystals flocked to his eyelashes and mustache. The other wing fell away into the fog. Herr Cederberg unfastened his safety belt and kicked away from the cockpit. The craft’s remains disappeared under him. The fog brightened slightly. He closed his eyes.

  Sometime later, the light became almost unbearably bright, and the wind quieted down. Herr Cederberg opened his eyes again. He was floating just above the top of the cumulonimbus cloud. Above him, a hard little sun shone in a sky colored dark violet. Little cirrus clouds powdered the stratosphere. White hills billowed away in all directions. The cold was deep and quiet. Herr Cederberg oscillated his arms, like a bumblebee.

  Who Is Arvid Pekon?

  DESPITE THE WELL-KNOWN FACT that it’s the worst time possible, everyone who needs to speak to a governmental agency calls on Monday morning. This Monday was no exception. The tiny office was buzzing with activity, the three operators on the day shift bent over their consoles in front of the ancient switchboard.

  On Arvid Pekon’s console, Subject 1297’s light was blinking. He adjusted his headset, plugged the end of the cord into the jack by the lamp, and said in a mild voice:

  “Operator.”

  “Eva Idegård, please,” said Subject 1297 at the other end.

  “One moment.” Arvid flicked the mute switch and fed the name into the little computer terminal under the wall of lamps and jacks. Subject 1297 was named Samuelsson, Per. Idegård, Eva was Samuelsson’s caseworker at the unemployment insurance office. He read the basic information (1297 unemployed for seven months), listened to the voice sample, and flicked the mute switch again.

  “Gothenburg unemployment insurance office, Eva Idegård,” Arvid said in a slightly hoarse alto voice.

  “H
i, this is Per Samuelsson,” said Per. “I wanted to check what’s happening with my fee.” He rattled off his personal registration number.

  “Of course,” said Arvid in Eva Idegård’s voice.

  He glanced at the information in the registry: last conversation at 1:43 p.m., February 26: Subject’s unemployment benefits were lowered and insurance fee raised because of reported illness but no doctor’s certificate. (Subject did send a doctor’s certificate—processed according to randomized destruction routine §2.4.a.)

  “You’ll have to pay the maximum insurance fee, since we haven’t received a doctor’s certificate,” said Arvid.

  “I sent two of them in the original,” said Per. “This isn’t right.”

  “I suppose one could think that,” said Arvid, “but the fact remains that we haven’t received them.”

  “What the hell do you people do all day?” Per’s voice was noticeably raised.

  “You have a responsibility to keep us informed and send the right information to the unemployment benefit fund, Per,” Arvid said in a soft voice.

  “Bitch. Hag,” Per said, and hung up.

  Arvid removed his headset, massaged the sore spot it left above his right ear. He wrote in the log: 2:07 p.m., March 15: Have explained the raised fee.

  “Coffee break?” said Cornelia from the terminal to his right.

  —

  The light by Subject 3426 was blinking when Arvid sat down again.

  “Operator,” said Arvid, calling the details up on his screen. There was no information except for a surname: Sycorax, Miss. He hadn’t seen this subject before.

  “Hello?” said a voice. It was thin and flat.

  “Yes, hello.”

  “I would like to be put through to my dead mother,” said Miss Sycorax.

  “Just a moment.” Arvid muted the call. “Dead mother? How am I supposed to imitate her dead mother?” he said to his terminal. He peeked for the guidelines that should be popping up next to Miss Sycorax’s name. There was nothing. Then he saw his hand rise up and flick the mute switch, and a sonorous voice burst out of his mouth. “Hello?”

  “Mother, is that you?” said Miss Sycorax.

  “Darling! Hello there. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

  “Finding a good connection to Hell isn’t easy, Mother.”

  Arvid fought to press his lips together. Instead they parted, and his mouth said: “It’s lonely down here.”

  “Not much I can do about that, Mother,” Miss Sycorax replied.

  “Can’t you come visit, just for once?” said Arvid, his voice dolorous. He desperately wanted to rip his headset off, but his hands lay like limp flippers in his lap.

  “Well, if you’re only going to be whiny about it, I think we can end this conversation,” Miss Sycorax said tartly.

  Arvid called her just that—tart—in her dead mother’s voice. His ear clicked. Miss Sycorax had hung up. Arvid’s hands were his own again. He took his headset off with shaky hands and looked around. At the next terminal, Cornelia was talking to Subject 2536 (Persson, Mr., talking to an old friend from school in Vilhelmina), twirling a lock of dark hair around her pencil as she spoke to the subject in an old man’s voice. When she ended her call, Arvid stood up from his chair.

  “I’ll be leaving early,” he said.

  “Oh. Are you all right?” Cornelia asked, reverting to her melodic Finno-Swedish.

  Arvid looked for any sign that she had overheard him talking in a dead person’s voice, but thought he saw nothing but concern in her liquid brown eyes.

  “Migraine, I think.” Arvid took his coat from the back of the chair. “Migraine, I have a migraine.”

  “Go home and rest,” said Cornelia. “It happened to me a lot when I was new. It’ll get better, I promise.” She turned back to her terminal to take a new call.

  Arvid punched out and left the office. Outside, yellow afternoon light slanted through the street. As Arvid unlocked his bicycle, a woman in a phone booth next to the bicycle stand was arguing with someone. Arvid caught the words “unemployment” and “fee.” He wondered briefly if that was Cornelia’s call; she was unyielding in her caseworker personas.

  —

  Arvid did feel better the next day. By nine o’clock coffee, he felt more or less normal. As he entered the break room, he saw that Konrad, the senior operator, was carefully laying out pale cakes on a plate. Cornelia was stirring an enormous mug of coffee.

  “Kubbar!” said Konrad. “I made them last night.”

  Arvid picked a cake from the plate and bit into it. It was dry and tasted of ammonia and bitter almonds. Cornelia was sniffing at hers.

  “How are they?” Konrad asked. He was watching Arvid eagerly. “I haven’t made these for years. I was wondering if I got the proportions right.”

  “It’s different,” Arvid managed. He washed the cake down with some coffee.

  “It tastes like cyanide shortbread,” stated Cornelia. “Very Agatha Christie.”

  “Heh,” said Konrad. He took a cake for himself and tasted it. “Your generation isn’t used to ammonia cakes, I suppose.”

  Arvid had another one. The ammonia taste was strangely addictive.

  “I have a question for you,” Arvid said after a moment. “You’ve been here the longest. How are the subjects picked, really?”

  Konrad shrugged and bit into his third kubbe. “No idea,” he said. “I signed an NQ-NDA, just like you.”

  Arvid looked at Cornelia, who was chewing. She jerked a thumb at Konrad and nodded.

  “So nobody knows?” said Arvid.

  “The manager does, I expect,” Konrad replied.

  “But don’t you ever wonder?”

  “No Questions, No Disclosure, son. I’m not about to bite the hand that feeds me. Besides, all you need to know is in the work description. We take calls to governmental agencies…”

  “…and calls to persons the subjects don’t know very well,” Arvid filled in. “But—”

  “And follow instructions. That’s all there is to it. That’s all you need to know. The manager relies on our discretion, Arvid. NQ-NDA.”

  Arvid sighed. “All right. What did you do before you got this job, anyway?”

  “Stage actor,” said Konrad. He picked a fourth kubbe from the plate. “Mhm?” he said, pointing at Arvid with the cake.

  “Ventriloquist.” Arvid nodded at Cornelia. “You?”

  “Book audiotapes,” said Cornelia.

  Konrad swallowed. “See there, three crap jobs you can’t make a living off of. Isn’t it nice to be able to pay rent and eat good food?”

  “I guess,” said Arvid.

  “You’re new here. When you get over that starving artist thing, when you’re my age, you’ll agree that it’s nice to be able to eat roast beef.” Konrad pushed the plate toward Arvid. “Here, have another kubbe.”

  —

  It was one week later, just after lunch, that Miss Sycorax’s lamp started blinking again. Arvid hesitantly took the call.

  “Hello,” said the flat voice of Miss Sycorax.

  “Where would you like to be connected?” said Arvid.

  “I want to be connected to the Beetle King.”

  “I see,” said Arvid, and muted Miss Sycorax. He cast a frantic glance at Cornelia, who was deeply involved in yet another call with Subject 9970, Anderberg. Mrs. Cornelia frowned and waved him off. He returned to Miss Sycorax.

  “Miss, I’m afraid I really can’t connect you to anyone by the name of…hello, my little pupa.” A rustling voice forced its way out of his mouth midsentence.

  “There you are,” Miss Sycorax said. “I have a request.”

  “Anything for my little sugar lump,” hummed Arvid.

  “Aww, shucks,” said Miss Sycorax.

  “Your wish?”

  “There are bugs crawling all over me.”

  “I know! Isn’t it wonderful?” crowed Arvid.

  “Hm. Yes, perhaps. In any case,” she went on, “I’d like th
em to take some time off. I’m developing a rash.”

  “A rash, yes? An eczema.”

  “Yes. It’s flaking a bit.”

  “And that isn’t very pleasant.”

  “No. It itches.”

  “Well,” said Arvid, “where should I send them off to, then?”

  “Anywhere you like,” said Miss Sycorax. “For example, I don’t like the old woman in the corner store. Or the man who sells sticky window-pane-climbing dolls in Old Town.”

  “Aha.”

  “I don’t like the switchboard operator, either.”

  “Let’s say, then,” said Arvid, “that we dismiss the little critters until you feel better.”

  “Good.”

  “And you let me know when you start feeling lonely again.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good-bye, honeycomb.”

  “Good-bye, Your Majesty.”

  When the Beetle King’s voice had left him, Arvid sagged back in his chair.

  “I might have gone mad,” he told the terminal. He put his coat on and left the office.

  —

  When he came into the office the next day, Arvid found a stag beetle sitting on his terminal. It hissed angrily when he shooed it off, and crawled in under the desk where it refused to move. Shortly after morning coffee, a cockroach settled on his rules-and-regulations binder. Arvid left it alone.

  Cornelia was more drastic about it. She had sat down in her chair to find the stuffing colonized by flour beetles. She was currently in the backyard, setting fire to the seat. The whole office smelled like insulin. Konrad sat at his terminal at the other end of the office, observing with great interest a dung beetle struggling with some cookie crumbs. No one was taking the incoming calls.

  “Shouldn’t we call pest control?” said Arvid.

  “Can’t get through,” said Konrad, eyes on the beetle. “I heard something on the radio about a bug invasion in Old Town.”

  “Maybe it’s the season for it,” said Arvid.