Love Doesn't Work

by Henning Koch

  “I’m sorry, we prosecute when members of the general public call us out maliciously and waste valuable time better spent helping genuine victims.”

  “Do I look like a madman?”

  “Who knows? Madmen come in all shapes and sizes.”

  “I saw what I saw.”

  “You have nothing to back you up. And there are no old ladies missing anywhere. That thing you saw falling into this supposed hole of yours was not an old lady at all…”

  “Fine. If it wasn’t an old lady, what was it then?”

  “It could have been anything. A black bin liner blown along by the wind?”

  “This was no bin liner.”

  The policeman smiled. His teeth and gums looked like small pieces of yellow cheese stuck into regurgitated bacon rind. Harold tried to keep his composure. He hated poor hygiene more than anything.

  “Anyone can make a mistake,” said the constable. “It happens. We’ll let you off this time, but we’ve got your name and address. If you call us out again you’ll be prosecuted without fail.”

  That evening, Harold was in a somber mood as he ate his beef stroganoff.

  First there was the matter of Linda. Her absence was making him uneasy. The flat was never silent like this. Even when he strained his ears, all he could hear was a high-pitched whine of air. Or maybe it was just his ears malfunctioning?

  Occasionally a car went past or a plane flew over. It occurred to him that people everywhere were equating movement with some sort of meaning. The whole thing had kicked off with Magellan, Marco Polo, Columbus. Whenever people traveled somewhere, they felt their lives were significant. Even if they just drove somewhere, they had done something. In fact all they had done was to shift their carcasses somewhere else. Who cared if some fool sat at a café table in Venice looking at a pizza, or at a café table in Dresden looking at a Bratwurst?

  As for Linda, did it matter that she had gone? If he were up there in space looking down at the planet, would he be able to say, “Ah, there’s the place where a woman named Linda cohabits with Harold, although she seems to have temporarily moved out” Or would that be an irrelevance when juxtaposed with interesting enormities like the Great Wall of China?

  Yes, this was the real question.

  Suddenly it occurred to Harold that he needed someone to say, “Harold, you are a very confused man.” The trouble was, he had no one to enunciate those words. Instead he was left with a problem.

  He had discovered a huge and growing hole under his city. Soon they would all fall into this hole. They would fall for an eternity. They would not die when they hit the bottom, or by dashing themselves against the rock walls. They would fall forever. They would die of starvation, of boredom.

  Even though he was exhausted, Harold put on his leather jacket and went out again for another peek at the hole. It was refreshing to walk under the open, arching sky, now liberally speckled with stars.

  The pavement had been patched up, and when he walked across it, it seemed more solid. Even when he put all of his weight on it, he didn’t feel it moving.

  He panicked. What if it had all been a terrible mistake? What if the world were not coming to an end?

  As he walked home, there was something bothering him.

  Only when he slotted the front door key into the lock and opened the door did he realize what it was. Today was the second day he had not gone to work. He had not informed the Personnel Director. Tomorrow he would have to call in and explain that he was having a problem, a very real problem.

  He could already read the mind of his Personnel Director: “Can’t say I’m surprised he’s had a collapse. He’s so damned normal it’s abnormal; no one will even sit next to him in the canteen, just talking to him drives people round the bend.”

  And what would he say?

  Would he say, “There are some issues in my current life that are incompatible with normal work routines”?

  Yes, that is what he’d say when he called in.

  The bank would pay for therapy, he’d spend a few months on sick leave and then he’d go back to the office. His colleagues would all whisper about him but he’d be forgiven.

  A nervous breakdown must be exactly like this. One saw reality for a moment. Then it became unmanageable. Like a huge balloon rising up before one, it ripped and collapsed. With a shock one realized it had nothing inside except for air. It was an illusion of solidity, nothing else.

  V

  Before he went to bed, he remembered the note on the kitchen table. All it said was that he must get some help. Then a telephone number of a therapist, and the time of his first appointment, which Linda had already set up for him.

  That night, Harold had disturbing dreams.

  He dreamt that he woke up in the middle of the night, then got dressed and went outside. Linda was standing in the sodium glare of a streetlight. Her lips were encrusted with small, sharp diamonds. When he kissed her mouth it was like kissing a brooch with a soft tongue lurking in its hard crack. Her hair was gilded and hung stiffly down like a glittering helmet, the decorated head of an Egyptian mummy.

  “Why did you come back?” Harold asked.

  “I couldn’t leave. We’re prisoners,” she said. “Look!”

  He turned his head and registered the fact that they were in a cell, the sort of cell one used to see in American Westerns. There was even a sheriff on the other side of the bars, tipping his chair and watching Harold and Linda with dull interest as he chewed his toothpick.

  Linda sank down into the snow, and Harold positioned himself behind her, spreading his legs so she could lean back against his chest. The flimsy gauze of her dress rubbed against him, and he grew powerfully tumescent. Linda seemed pleased. She looked back at him and smiled; then started dealing some cards, which weren’t cards at all, but large moths gently flexing their patterned wings. Occasionally one of the moths tired of the proceedings and fluttered away, leaving them short-handed.

  Next, Harold and Linda were teleported to the corner of Nytorgsgatan. Two police officers in a parked Volvo were keeping an eye on the hole. One of them opened a thermos and poured himself a cup of thick pea soup.

  After a while they turned on their flashing lights and drove off.

  Harold and Linda moved closer to the gaping hole.

  “Why are we here again?” she said. “What can we do, Harold?”

  “Don’t you understand, Linda? This whole city is going to disappear. All our friends, every person living here is blissfully unaware of the fact that there’s a yawning gulf just below their feet. We have to call someone.”

  “All right. Tell me who, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They stood in silence. The icy wind assaulted them, like a blast from infinity.

  Next, Harold was watching a televised image of a landing strip at an airport, with a monstrous jet plane looming just above it, its wheels touching the tarmac with a little puff of smoke. Without an explosion, acrid smoke or flames, even without a sound, the runway ripped like a huge piece of paper and the plane disappeared. The police were quickly on the scene. A tarpaulin the size of a football pitch was stretched across the runway. Witnesses were rounded up and taken away in coaches.

  The evening news bulletin reported that a group of anarchists had tried to dupe the general public with a cowardly trick. The airline had sent its spokesman to the news studio.

  “There’s been no loss of planes, so it seems rather redundant to speak of an air disaster, wouldn’t you agree?” said the spokesman. “We are living in a world that is being taken over by terrorists and other elements actively working against democracy, equality, and other civilized values.”

  A few moments later the Prime Minister appeared to make a statement. It ran from his mouth like gravy: “We are talking of a plane that does not exist, hundreds of witnesses that do not exist, a hundred and fifty passengers that no one has managed to name. In other words, we are talking of a staged, simulated event, a trick organized
by a group of a highly motivated and dangerous individuals, all of whom will be hunted down, arrested and punished vigorously through our legal system.”

  That same night, Harold and Linda packed clothes and food in a rucksack and took the back door out of the apartment block, exiting via the stinking refuse room in the basement.

  Two hours later a group of plain-clothes police officers arrived, kicked in the door and submitted the whole flat to a careful search, even ripped the sofa apart and took up the floorboards and looked in suitcases for secret compartments.

  When they found nothing, they concluded that Harold and Linda were part of a terrorist cell.

  Having spent his whole life longing for more space, Harold now found himself living under the open sky among a group of people who’d taken refuge in the Greenstone Mountains of Västerbotten, close to the Arctic Circle.

  A geologist from Uppsala University had advised them that the earth’s crust was older and deeper here. Here, if anywhere, they would have firm ground under their feet until the end of time.

  Behind them, Stockholm had already collapsed into the abyss.

  Linda was a changed woman. She was tougher and more resourceful, always sewing or making ingenious devices for cooking over open fires, with a train of children behind her, always one at her breast and several more hanging at her skirts.

  Harold had to admit that their children were very lovable. As for Linda, now that she had her children she seemed less concerned about Harold. He was a spent force, a cracked amphora whose value had been proved, although lately eclipsed by these small growing entities whose significance was infinite and almost cosmic.

  Sometimes Harold reflected that he would never again walk along city streets, browsing for CDs or renewing his insurance policy at the broker’s. Such things were now obsolete. Along with everything else, they had gone down the hole.

  One day a fleet of military helicopters arrived, landing on a piece of level ground and disgorging a number of Ministers and high public officials with their assorted wives, husbands and families. The politicians did not speak to the settlers, merely threw embarrassed glances in their direction. In no time at all they had built a palisade and, within it, a village of strong, timbered houses with proper stone chimneys. Guards were placed at the gates.

  The government announced a public meeting, at which the Prime Minister set about justifying his policies. As soon as the Cabinet had found out about the hole, he explained, it was thought more merciful to keep the truth from the people. This was partly to avoid panic. After all, the entire population could not have emigrated to the mountaintops of Västerbotten.

  The Prime Minister also reported that all the major cities of the world had fallen into the bottomless void. Who knew where the Eiffel Tower was now, or Big Ben?

  Maybe one day the planet would spew forth lava and build new continents. When this happened, the human race would come down from the mountains and build a new Jerusalem based on the same Grecian ideals.

  The years passed. Disease and starvation were widespread among the settlers. The bureaucrats, with their solid houses and well-stocked warehouses behind the palisade, had an abundance of food and medicine. Occasionally they would make a grand gesture and donate some medicine to a dying settler outside the walls.

  Sometimes at night Harold could hear the politicians standing on prominent rocks, practicing the speeches they would make on the day the first foundation stone was laid for the reconstruction of Stockholm.

  VI

  He woke from the dream at three in the morning. Outside, a storm was hammering the building. The gods were angry.

  Harold looked for Linda but she was not in the bed and not in the bathroom either. Then he remembered that she had gone. Probably she was staying with her sister in Solna, but he knew he mustn’t telephone her there, or ask her to come home. Linda was not like that. Leaving, for her, had been a final gesture. Harold closed his eyes and tried not to cry. Things snapped sharply into focus, like new-broken glass.

  At first he had an absurd vision: he saw the lady with the shopping trolley, falling through the air and occasionally making a slow revolution. In her hand she held an umbrella, like a sort of Mary Poppins figure in a neatly buttoned blue overcoat, her hair held in place by a hat and hat-pins. She still had not reached the bottom of the hole! Her eyes were wide-open, more in amazement than terror.

  Then, as he moved in closer, he recognized Linda’s features, so familiar yet out of reach.

  Even as she fell, she grew aware of him and looked over with a hurt, disappointed expression. There was a finality there, a realization that nothing could be changed.

  Harold understood that he had created the bottomless hole, and now his Linda would be falling forever.

  Love Doesn’t Work

  * * *

  MY WORLD IS LIMITATION, HAS BEEN LIMITATION FROM BEGINNING TO END. I’ve gotten used to it. The first time I saw a woman naked I looked at her and thought, “My God, it’s not what I thought!” And when I went to the obligatory places for the first time—Venice, Paris, Barcelona—they struck me as self-conscious arenas designed for the tourist to come and buy a postcard. Consumed, empty theatres.

  At any rate, when I woke in the morning in my friend’s house, I wasn’t prepared for the utter brilliance of it all. He had bought acres of derelict houses in a tumbledown medieval town in Sardinia, then somehow managed to persuade the authorities to let him knock them all together and build a big white pod that dwarfed everything else in the town.

  All his architectural ideas were invested in that building.

  There were stark concrete terraces with overhanging Tibetan eaves and carved dragon’s heads; arrangements of terracotta pots with flowering plants; teak decking; plunge pools of fragrant juniper wood imported from Finland; a library with built-in bookcases; a secret door to the music room; a snooker room where the green baize of the table was always brushed, the symmetrical polished balls pristine as a Derbyshire tea-set; overlooked by a donnish bar stocked with every conceivable malt whisky, behind it a vulgar touristic map in the background, framed in dark wood, displaying “The Great Whiskies of the Auld Country.”

  “How the heck did you get planning permission for this?” I asked him, and he laughed with that anything-can-be-done expression of the land of his birth, California.

  “Never ever ask an architect how he swung the fucking planning application,” he oozed, almost breaking into an oily sweat at the thought of his triumph. “If against your better judgment you do ask, don’t have any illusions about getting the truth, because you won’t get it.” Before I could respond, he added: “You know, sometimes decay works in your favor. I told them this street would fall down if nothing was done. My builders saved fifteen houses adjoining this building.”

  “So that’s the truth, then?”

  “Plus I offered an anonymous donation to the municipality.”

  “If you have money there are no problems, only solutions.”

  There was something petulant in my voice when I said that. I was a penniless Londoner, flown in to visit my big-shot friend. He had always approved of me, said I was a “genuine phoney,” a phrase he stole from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He’s not concerned with originality, he’s a straight-talking Jimmy from Sacramento and nothing ever went wrong in his life.

  “That’s not quite true. Money is simplistic, kind of like a lens. If you have money you’re looking through one lens, and if you don’t you’re looking through another. But neither is true.”

  “That’s profound, Jimmy. Profound. But I still don’t understand what the hell possessed you to live here. What do you do here? Don’t you get bored?”

  “Bored? Sure I get bored. I get bored anywhere, Chuck. Boredom …” he muttered, frowning as his sluggish brain-cells dug into the problem, “…is the human condition. That’s why I’m into form, and structure, and startling buildings. We need all that, we need beauty, Chuck. Or we’re fucking finished.”

  We
were sitting on a terrace outside his library, an incredible number of swifts and swallows darting over the tiled roofs below us, screaming as they tumbled with great daring through the air. To make things even more scenic, we were drinking green tea out of Chinese hand-bowls. People like Jimmy always employ interior decorators with an ill-disguised hostility towards handles, even door handles… in fact doors altogether are anathema to an architect worth his salt. In design-land, every room has to be open-plan, every little object has to scream out its identity and, above all, the identity of its owner.

  There was something bemused about the way Jimmy acceded to design. I genuinely believe he had no aesthetics of his own. He had simply decided to be successful, and after that he’d aped what he saw in magazines, or in his friends. As we stood there talking, I considered the absurdity of a large, fluorescently yellow pig placed daringly against the window. Its bulky balls suggested the message of the piece, something like, “Hey, I’m ugly but I’m full of spunk.” I thought of Jimmy getting up in the morning, calling out to his latest girlfriend before he gets into his station wagon to drive into Los Angeles: “There’s something I gotta do, honey. Gotta get myself that pig, remember the one we saw yesterday? I couldn’t sleep all night, it would just look great in Sardinia. You know my friend Dennis? He’s invested in a Perspex calf. I reckon plastic animals are kind of zeitgeist. Soon they’ll all be extinct and we’re gonna be like that old Indian chief said. Dying of loneliness.”

  Jimmy. Always talking about zeitgeist. That bullshit word. Zeitgeist, leitmotif, Forbes Magazine. These were the Holy Trinity.

  Everything had been fine for Jimmy until one day he decided a man of substance must have a wife. That was when his problems started.

  A wife presented some major disadvantages. A knock-out wife could not be bought or downloaded. Even Jimmy, with his clueless, status-obsessed mind and his concern for the outward appearances of everything, knew that wife acquisition, at its most fundamental, was about what you had to offer inside. You could buff up your inner spirit, pay for a hell of a lot of therapy and spend a substantial amount of time meditating in Himachal Pradesh, but if you were still the sort of person who loathed sharing a toothbrush with your lover, it was unlikely that you would ever make her happy.