Patrik comes out through the warm-air corridor with his cheeks red and his mouth whistling and you race away toward Kungsträdgården to split up your loot.
• • •
Your father continued his nightly walks all autumn. He wandered in a standardized circle. Night after night. Mostly he interpellated himself the same repeated questions. What am I doing here? How can this country note me as immigrated after so many years of taxable lodging? And why does my idiotic son take this insultation and exalt it as ideal? The sleeplessness forced him to thoughts of the character: And why are they attacking my studio when there are so many other immigrants who don’t behave properly? Perhaps it is other immigrants who are attacking me, with jalousie or location temptation as a motive!
Then it’s November and Heberson Vieira da Costa is shot in the face and the stomach and it’s the fourth blatte in one autumn and once again it’s the red laser sight and this time the news becomes internationally big and there’s a description of someone in a beige trench coat and suddenly every Swediot in the whole city has a beige trench coat and everyone leers menacingly and everyone’s shoulders stick out in that suspicious way at the armpit like with a holster.
Then the fifth blatte is shot and this is the first one who dies, the student Jimmy Ranjbar, who’s shot in the head outside the same student housing where Mansour lived when he first arrived and there’s a moment of silence and demonstrations and torchlight processions and you remember how you start to see red laser light wherever you turn, it blinks red in the corner of your eye and what started as a funny game is suddenly super serious and you feel so threatened that Imran starts to carry a butterfly knife in his inside pocket and you and Melinda each get a CO2 pistol and you never leave home without being strapped and you remember that night at McDonald’s when Melinda accidentally drops her pistol on the floor by the register and how you run away laughing and you remember how you start to blink and startle when the green walk light turns red and you remember how the city’s traffic lights take on a whole new meaning and one night when you’re walking on Norrlandsgatan a car brakes beside you and the red glare from the brake lights makes you startle and almost duck and a second later you are so ashamed it hurts.
The EXACT same emotion was felt by your father! But why didn’t you ever talk about your common fear? Why did you never meet in discussion? Your father began to have his studio door constantly locked, he sat hidden inside among his props, he canceled appointments, he found himself paralyzed like in a dream. He stopped functioning but could not explain why. Still, on certain nights he left his home and took his walks. Despite his terror of nocturnal shadows with beige trench coats and aimed red lights. Everything was better than passing more sleepless hours in solitary battle with invading thoughts. And perhaps there was some bizarre part of him which he will never be able to explain that almost longed for a confrontation. He does not remember much more of that fall.
And you remember January 1992, and it’s teenage emotion with sore forehead pimples and chafe-inducing jack-off habits. It’s the time when Dads start to get fuzzy contours, Dads are practicing ballet, Dads jump through burning rings in a leotard, Dads photograph pets and smile gratefully at the audience’s thunderous applause.
Dads refuse to choose a side.
Dads are cowardly betrayers.
Dads come, Dads go, and only Moms endure.
Because it’s only then, when Dads start to fade away, that you rediscover Moms. It’s as though Moms suddenly materialize themselves out of anonymity. Moms who have taken on the real responsibility, Moms’ invisible battles that have made everything possible. It’s Moms who hold down the fort, it’s Moms who never give up and who never betray. But now Moms are starting to get tired and sometimes you hear how she cries in the bedroom and sometimes she looks through Dads’ jacket pockets and one time she asks if you think Dads have a mistress. But it’s also Moms who still have everything under control and who only let her weakness show when Dads are in the studio or out on one of his ever longer “walks.”
Why “walks” instead of walks? What are you suggesting? Detail like this instead:
“That my father might have had parallel mistresses is of course an unthinkable thought, like that the sun might wake in the west or that Benny Hill might be uncomical.”
Hmm … this formulation would have piled me with pride in the beginning of our book. Now it just piles me with sorrow. Abduct it if you wish.
The Laser Man is still sitting with his laser sight ready in movie theater balconies, huddling in front car seats, hidden behind light poles. There he is, you see? … No, there! Always behind you and to the side and sometimes it actually feels like you’re going crazy. On January 22, the student Erik Bongcam is shot in the cheek and the day after the bus driver Charles Dhlakama is shot in the stomach and right after that the economist Abdisalam Farah is shot in the back of the head and the civil engineer Ali Ali and SHNEYA LASERMAN?! EVERYONE knows it’s a conspiracy, it’s going around the city that it isn’t one laser man but a gang of laser men, a group of racist combat soldiers who have banded together with the Security Service and the Norrmalm riot squad and the fucking Silvia whore in order to make all blattar super paranoid and make them leave Sweden. Dads sits quietly and it’s you, Melinda, Imran, and Patrik against the world, you against them, or fuck YOU, it’s WE, WE who wander through life and together are exceptions, WE who together refuse their rules and eat their pigeonholes, WE explode their categorizations because we aren’t Swediots or immigrants, we are the perpetually unplaceable. Our dads come from Chile and our moms are Swedish Moderate politicians and we are born and raised in villas in Täby. Our parents are chemistry experts from Nigeria and we have four sisters who are the world’s most immense bodyguards and our dads send fancy silk blouses from Singapore. We are born in Pakistan, we have steel-rimmed glasses and red-checked bandannas and dream of being the first in the world to rap in Balochi. We have Tunisian dads and Swedish-Danish moms and we are neither totally suédis nor totally arabis but some other thing, some third thing, and the insight about not having a simple collective grows us into creating our own pigeonhole, a new collective without borders, without history, a creolized circle where everything is blended and mixed and hybridized. We are the reminder that their days are numbered. We are the ones who take your disgusting language and turn it around. We are the ones who will never accept a language that’s designed to screen us out (and which moreover calls the most beautiful part of the breast a wart yard). We are the ones who jet instead of leaving, we own instead of triumphing, we bang instead of making love, we say five-o when you say police, we shine while you rust, we soar while you land in the marsh, we sit on the back of benches and spit seas onto squares of sidewalk while you sit where you’re supposed to and sigh, we’re the ones who get that it’s actually called an assist in basketball and that mecca has nothing to do with bingo and that a fine cat has nice boudies and definitely no fur or pedigree. We are the future! and it’s Melinda who says this last bit and she smiles her glittering gummy smile and you remember her silhouette there in the dusk on the basketball court with her tangled Afro and her worn comb and it’s so cold that you’re playing with cutoff mittens and it’s right after her sister Fayola has died of cancer, she was twenty-two and Melinda rarely talks about her but even cancer is Sweden’s fault and more and more often Melinda says things that Fayola said to her and mostly it’s quotes by Frantz Fanon and it doesn’t matter that you don’t know who that is, it doesn’t matter that Melinda just repeats Fayola’s words, it doesn’t matter that you pronounce Frantz Fanon as though he were a Norrlander and Aimé Césaire as though he were an antique Caesar.
Nothing matters more than that you’re building symbiosis and instead of dads who are willing to fight you have each other.
January 28, 1992: The hot dog stand owner Isa Aybar. Five bullets, one to the head, two in the right, and one in the left arm. The Laser Man continues to shoot blattar while Sjöbo politicians s
mile and the Norrmalm police take it easy and the politicians enjoy silence and skinheads celebrate through the night with cheers and heils at the helicopter platform.
January 30: Hasan Zatara. One bullet to the head at Hägersten and you’ve all bought candy at his kiosk and Zatara loses the ability to speak and is paralyzed and the spring wanders on in constant terror and constant suspense.
Finally there are certain parents who choose the Fight. Some take a stand and roar their rage when Friggebo and Bildt want to join hands and sing “We Shall Overcome” in Rinkeby. Some arrange demonstrations and lead torchlight processions and organize national immigrant strikes. Some make their last names invisible in the phone book and say to their children: Study whatever you want as long as you can do it abroad because this whore country isn’t going to want to have us here in ten years, study medicine, study economics, then we’ll get out of here, start a big business in Great Britain, and laugh at our memories of this uncultured land of barbarians.
And then there are Dads. Who continue to smile kindly at Swedish masters who want their Pekingeses photographed. Who refuse to be a part of the blatte fight. Who just look at you with sadly cowardly eyes when you do your best to rouse their engagement.
“Do your best to rouse their engagement?” Allow me a capital laugh for a whole line:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!
You did not attempt to rouse your father’s engagement. Your mission was to shatter his pride. Do you remember, for example, the February day when you came downmarching into the studio with your lousy loser friends? It was a tragic parade. First you: jeans adequate for five legs, a Mercedes star around your neck on a chain, and on your upper body an illegitimately obtained Champion shirt. Then Melinda with her microphonishly large hair and her billowing sweatpants suit, which reduced her body to the size of a blackhead. And Imran last, fat as a Japanese sumo, draped like a hip-hop tent with matching colors. All of you had the same caps with the gangster sign of the LA Raiders.
Without any respect for the customer who hired your father’s talent, you auctioned with a loud voice that your father immediately, from this second forward, should annul his work for “Swediot customers.” Your father excused himself toward the customer and sighed forth his response.
“And why would I do that?”
“Haven’t you heard? There is an immigrant strike! All immigrants are stopping work today.”
“I am NOT an immigrant! Why does everyone name me an immigrant? How long should I migrate? I am Swedish. I have passed half my life here …”
“It doesn’t matter. The strike is going to show Sweden.”
“Show what?”
“I mean like that there’s a whole lot of immigrants who like … work. I mean … Why should you work for the slave owners? Why should you let yourself be exploited by Swediotic racists?”
(Here your confused friends shouted out their support in the form of bellowing hip-hop sounds: “Yo, yeah, word up, cowabunga!”)
“I do not let myself be exploited!” shouted your father with screwed-up volume. “I only try to live my life in peace and kindness. Why does no one let me do this? Why do you persist in inflicting your behaviors on me? Just let me live!”
With force, your father conducted you and your sad friends out to the sidewalk. Then he locked the door and returned, sighing, to photographing the Chihuahua, whose master wanted it to be formed in an egg carton because the dog’s name was Eggy. The customer commented the incident with a single word:
“Teenagers,” he said, and smilingly sidewound his head in an attempt to shape sympathy. Your father responsed him in the same way and they smiled each other’s understanding.
Write me … Do you realize now as an adult that you dealt in the logic of racism? That you and the racists exposed the same terminology when you embraced everything blattish and they everything Swedish. But your father was … yes, your father? He was solitary in his solitude. He stood isolated both interiorly and exteriorly.
This turbulent day was not over. After your discussion in the studio, your father lacked all lust for a journey home. He did not have the strength to invade the sphere of the home to find himself trapped there between your grandmother’s accusations of fundamentalism and your accusations of betrayal.
Without inspiration, he spent the long night with his work. He sat parked at the studio table with a carefully locked door and weakly echoing night radio in the background. He sipped a whiskey while he polished up a project for the Swedish domestic ferret society. He inspected photographs of the society’s directors (wearing happy smiles with their beloved ferrets). He tried to focus his thoughts on the task. It went well. In thirty-second phases. Then hounding thoughts invaded his head.
Finally he raised his body from the stool, knocked out the lamps, and wandered his steps toward the commuter rail station. It was a wintry night with that special silence that encapsulates Sweden when the snow lies driven into masses. Your father wound his body into the leather jacket and squinted his eyes to steel his body against the cold. The air roused your father and he had almost regained a little of the former vitality of his steps when from the bush at his side he noticed an aimed red light. He froze his movements like a frightened animal. His head was turned slowly downward.
There on his shoulder … A vibrating red dot of light … Your father’s heart stopped.
With the naïve reaction of a child he attempted to brush the dot away but the light only smiled at his attempt, wandered on from his shoulder to his center, down toward his stomach, hip, thigh, then a hop up to his chest; this blinding laser dot shone against your father’s heart, and your father’s body throbbed with the realization that his life was seconds away from termination.
He just stood there, let himself be searched by the laser beam, and awaited the sound of a shot.
But instead smothered laughter could be heard from the bush, which was suddenly shaken to life, the dot disappeared, and two jokers scampered their steps toward a door. Your father remained standing with the throbbing of his heart, the stickiness of his mouth, and an aching cramp in his head.
But no Laser Man crime, no exploded jaws, punctured stomachs, or paralyzed store owners affect your family more than that night in April ’92 when someone breaks into the studio from the courtyard, breaks the storeroom pane, and climbs in through the window. They wander around in Dads’ studio and break things at random, the copy machine crashes to the floor, binders of negatives are tossed from the bookshelves, posters are torn down. Someone discovers the dog biscuits and starts a dog biscuit war. Someone wants to be worse and poops in a photography magazine that Dads have contributed to, then wipes the poop in long streaks over the white studio walls. Someone wants to be worst of all, discovers the cans of used chemicals, developing fluids, and fixer, and someone unscrews the cork and says that this fucking smells like gas and someone else presents the idea and some third person says of course and they laugh and cheer and collect all the flammable material in the darkroom, crumpled posters, Kadir’s old mattress, the empty boxes, the negative binders, a dried houseplant, some unused wooden frames. Then on with the liquid and a little more, don’t be stingy, there too, more, finally everything is wet and they back toward the door and it’s smothered giggles, someone who has to pee, come on now, dammit, you’ll have to go later, shh, there’s someone out there, are you messing with me? no, shut up now, who’s going to light it, you, no, I will, okay do it then, who’s got the lighter, come on someone has to have a lighter, but hell SOMEONE has to have one, okay, thanks, are you with me, are you ready?
The flames that light up the room meet the poured-out trail of liquid, rush silently blue toward the waiting pile, giggling rush out to the courtyard, smothered laughter, someone who still has to pee, someone who’s looking for a key to their moped, someone who says no one lives upstairs, right?
The next day Moms answer the telephone and stand totally silently for way too long. Moms don’t even h
ave time to explain the details before you have gathered your troops. It’s you, Melinda, Imran, and Patrik who with tense fists and gnashing teeth jump the gates to the commuter train, force yourselves up the escalator, crash through the exit gate so it bursts, stamp your gravel-puffing steps in time through the shopping center, share silent rage when you see the police’s cordon tape from a distance and the black soot marks that have lapped out from the smashed store window.
It’s you who see Dads sitting alone on the edge of the sidewalk, Dads who are mumbling to himself and who have had a blanket placed over him by someone who doesn’t know him and who doesn’t know that Dads always have blankets over his legs and never over his shoulders.
Everything until now was practice but now it’s serious, now they have pushed us too far and your friends pretend not to hear Dads’ mumbling about that you can bet it was vandal blattar who did it, typical immigrants, they hate other immigrants who succeed and …
You say it kindly because not even you are ready to test Dads when they’re this fragile: Why would a gang of blattar write WAR on the wall with poop?
Dads answer: Precisely so that we will suspect the wrong people. They are smart, you know, smarter than you’d think when you see them … or perhaps they were going to write … Varón? Maybe it was South Americans?
You never find out who’s guilty, because the police have more important things to worry about, and when you ask the constable whose name is Nilsson when they are going to put out the nationwide alert and interview neighbors and dust for fingerprints and do composite sketches he laughs as if you were joking. And he must be a racist too, you can tell by looking at him, that he’s been bought off and bribed by WAR, because he’s totally blond and totally freckly and his pants are pulled up too high and he’s totally going high-water, and what else can you expect from someone who shares a name with Pippi’s monkey? Do you say this to him? No, true to form you speak inwardly instead of outwardly. But your friends agree with you, don’t they? They don’t contradict you, anyway.
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