Some Kind of Peace: A Novel

by Camilla Grebe

  It was dark, of course, a loathsome, dense, impenetrable darkness, massive as a concrete wall. The black water’s chill penetrated through the seams of my wet suit. I remember an almost transparent shrimp swimming nonchalantly past my mask and vanishing into the darkness, like a space probe on its way into Nothing. Its small legs moved jerkily and made it look like a mobile on a string, the kind you hang over a baby’s crib. Against my will, I felt my body getting stiffer, my heart beating faster, and the familiar cramp spreading in my body. I turned around to give Stefan the sign for ascent. I still had control over my body, but as I looked around I saw only more darkness. No Stefan. Instinctively, I groped around in the dark water, seeking the cold, hard steel surface of the tank or the rough neoprene.

  The realization struck me in stages: Stefan wasn’t here. I would have to get up to the surface by myself. I was alone in the darkness. The cramp in my chest was almost unbearable and I felt that I had to, really had to take off the mask because I was going to suffocate. I had to get out of this horrible darkness. I tried to think about sunlight. I closed my eyes and saw it before me, but it was too late. The damage was already done. My thoughts could no longer affect my panic-stricken, uncontrolled body.

  I brought my hand toward my forehead and took hold of the upper edge of the mask and coaxed it carefully off as I spit out the regulator. The cold water that washed over my face felt liberating, and with surprise I heard a gurgling sound coming out of my throat as I rose uncontrollably toward the surface.

  I was inconsolable that evening. I had violated the most fundamental safety rules of diving. Stefan sat on the edge of the bed and stroked my hair. He was worried and confused: How could I simply lose control like that? I know he never understood how I could lose control over my body so easily.

  After all, his body always obeyed.

  It took several years for me to get over this incident, to get past the panic-stricken feeling of total loss of control, surrounded by all the darkness, the cold. A prisoner in my own body.

  It is yet another stunningly beautiful but oppressively stifling late-summer evening. The tall pines shade the house and it is pleasantly cool inside when I come home. I open all the windows and French windows anyway, call for Ziggy, and take the cat food out of the cupboard. He ought to be hungry, because he didn’t eat anything yesterday and was out all last night and all day.

  With a certain reluctance I go through the mail, but there is no gray envelope waiting for me this time. I pull on an old bleached-out bikini and take a quick swim. The sea has warmed up in the hot summer and it is a pleasure to swim, but today I keep it short. Instead, I spend the evening listening to David Bowie, drinking sour wine out of a box, skimming through research articles, and writing treatment plans. It is almost half past midnight when I set the articles aside, curl up on my side in bed, and almost immediately fall asleep.

  I wake up in the middle of the night and it immediately strikes me that something is wrong. Before I’ve even opened my eyes, I know something has happened. It’s as if the air is different somehow. It feels suffocating, pressed against my face and my body—it seems far too heavy and tactile to be air.

  I look up. Close my eyes. Look.

  There is no difference in what I see with my eyes open and closed: compact darkness. A velvety, hollow, black hell. My heart beats faster as I lean over the side of the bed and fumble for the flashlight on the floor. It’s a solid one, made of sturdy black plastic and really big. Waterproof, it is presumably also suitable for white-water rafting, hiking, and bar fights. I always keep it by the side of the bed.

  But not now.

  All I can feel on the spruce floorboards are dust bunnies. The room is completely dark, which is unusual this time of year, when a little light will find its way in from outside. I can hear rain drumming against the Eternit roof and at a distance an ominous rumble. The stifling summer evening will now have its inevitable sequel in the form of a real summer storm. This is not unusual here where I live.

  There is something special about thunder by the sea—I don’t think it happens more often, but the sound seems amplified. There are no forests or buildings around it that can serve as a muffler. Instead, the rumbling of thunder rolls back and forth over the surface of the water like a bowling ball on a stone bench.

  I try to turn on the bedside lamp. Nothing happens. Maybe a fuse has blown? After much hesitation, I force myself to sit up and tentatively set my feet on the worn wood floor.

  I can’t help but smile a little at myself. This is absurd, the situation is pathetic. A fuse blows and I become… incapacitated, irrational. I desperately search my memory for something to hang my thoughts on, a mental line to hold on to as I slowly lift myself off the bed. But the only thing that fills my awareness is the music I was listening to before I fell asleep.

  Ground control to Major Tom

  I shiver. An animal cries out in the distance and I feel a cold draft along my legs. Is a window open?

  Take your protein pills and put your helmet on

  The house is quiet. Too quiet. Slowly, I slip across the cold floorboards out of the bedroom. The only thing I hear is the rain and the waves regularly crashing against the rocks below the house, like a gigantic animal’s heavy breathing.

  Then.

  A sharp pain flashes through my shinbone, spreads along my thigh all the way up to my groin. I double up. Another crash and something lands on my big toe with a dull thud. What is going on? There is a chair in the middle of the floor. Why is it here? I can’t remember pulling it out. The chairs are always around the table in the kitchen. And now—my toe—what the hell is that? I bend over and investigate the object that fell on my toe.

  It’s the flashlight.

  Ground control to Major Tom

  I turn on the flashlight while I massage my shin, but nothing happens. Is it broken? Once again I feel the cold night air streaming toward me. Something is terribly wrong. And the whole time: the music in my head that won’t go away.

  Why is the chair in the middle of the floor? Why is the flashlight on the chair and not by my bed? I remind myself to stop drinking so much. Obviously, I must have moved the chair and for some strange reason put the flashlight on it. I just don’t remember when and why. But this sort of thing happens to me sometimes. Once I fell asleep on the rocks and woke up in the middle of the night, ice-cold, covered with mosquito bites, my back unbelievably stiff. In the dark.

  If I wasn’t so afraid of the dark, it could have been a funny story, or possibly embarrassing. Another time, I left the freezer wide open after a late-night ice cream raid. All the food was ruined. That wasn’t a funny story either, just expensive. No more wine this week, I tell myself, as I let go of my shin and get up unsteadily.

  A slight queasiness forces me to stand still a moment. I don’t know if it’s due to the wine or the fear, but I can feel my heart pounding in my chest, inexhaustible and twitchy like a Duracell rabbit. Carefully, I start moving toward the hall, one foot tentatively in front of the other—I don’t want to risk running into something again. Where is the fuse box? Distance and proportions become distorted in the dark, and although I have been in the cramped space that is my hall innumerable times, I can’t find the familiar little metal box.

  Sweat breaks out on my forehead, runs into my eyes making them burn, and I feel tears welling up. I grope with my hands along the bead board paneling that covers the walls. Why in the world did I stay in this dark house? Why didn’t I move to the city? Like a normal person. No, I simply had to stay. Alone out in Stockholm’s archipelago wasteland. I should have done as they said.

  Like Aina said.

  I can hear my own halting breath. Damn house. Damn dark shit hole. How am I going to find it? Suddenly, the reassuringly cool metal of the fuse box is under my sweaty fingers. As a reminder that the only thing that is misplaced in this room is my own exaggerated reaction. I take a deep breath and concentrate on the fuses. They’re the old-fashioned kind: gray with a lo
op that falls off when the fuse has blown. But it’s totally dark, so it’s impossible to determine if one of them is broken.

  Suddenly, a flash of lightning illuminates the house with a ghostlike, blue-white glow. For a moment I can see the fuse box as clearly as day—the heavy metal frame, the rounded porcelain fuses, and the black Bakelite main breaker: It’s switched to Off.

  A thought starts to form in my mind, an insight that is growing gradually, like a diver in turbid water slowly rising toward the surface who perceives the light increasing in stages. Has someone been here? But before I have time to seriously think that through, I hear a creaking noise. The hall door is caught by the wind and blows wide open, filling the house with cold, damp night air just as the boom of thunder echoes over the sea.

  The storm is near.

  With shaking fingers, I force the small black Bakelite switch back up. The house is instantly filled with light. From the kitchen comes a sigh and a gurgling sound as the refrigerator starts up again. I sink down on the wood floor among old sneakers and rubber boots, and wipe my sweaty brow with the back of my hand. The floor feels cold and damp, and it takes a while before I realize that it is not my own sweat I am feeling on the shiny worn floorboards. That is when I see it, right inside the threshold, a wet puddle, bearing witness to someone’s presence.

  It’s a footprint.

  Date: August 28

  Time: 3:00 p.m.

  Place: Green Room, the practice

  Patient: Sara Matteus

  “I have to ask you something that maybe doesn’t belong here,” says Sara, looking hesitant.

  It is fifty minutes into our session, and I am getting ready to wrap it up. Sara is dressed in a minimal tank top that makes her skinny body look even thinner. She is leaning forward in a way that makes her look like a sad, starving dog. She is holding a pair of sunglasses in her left hand and slowly strikes them against her bony thigh, lost in thought.

  “Sure,” I say, perhaps a little absentmindedly.

  I’m finding it hard to concentrate and be attentive after the events of last night. I didn’t get much sleep. After I fixed the power outage, I lay in bed in a sweaty, sleepless daze, twisting and turning until morning came. Not even a couple glasses of wine helped with the anxiety. When the alarm clock rang, I forced myself out of bed and had a painkiller for breakfast.

  “It’s about this guy… or man. Same difference…”

  Sara pauses, gathers up her courage.

  “He seems to like me, we talk about everything, we have fun, but… he doesn’t want to have sex with me.”

  Sara switches to drumming her sunglasses against the Kleenex box on my little coffee table, as if to underscore the significance of her words. She looks distressed, and I guess that this is probably the first time she has run into this particular problem. In psychology-speak, Sara is what we call “sexually acting out.” Others might call her loose, but for Sara this is not about sexual satisfaction. In reality, it’s the insecure little girl inside her that is struggling to be acknowledged and appreciated.

  “Has it been like that all along?” I ask in a friendly but neutral tone.

  “At first I thought he wanted to wait until we knew each other better or something. I mean… I was almost, like… flattered. As if I were a fine wine or something, that should be saved.”

  Sara laughs for a moment and looks at me with an expression of feigned surprise.

  “Then I slowly started to wonder if maybe he’s impotent or something. It’s not really all that unusual at his age,” Sara says, as if she knows everything about the sexual problems of middle-aged men.

  “But I think he wants to, though something is holding him back. I mean, I can tell he wants to, but he pulls back when it’s about to happen. He gets almost… he gets almost angry. How can that make him angry?” she asks quietly, looking closely at me.

  “I don’t know,” I reply tentatively. “There are so many reasons and I don’t know your friend, of course. It could be anything from fear of not measuring up sexually—I mean, you’re attractive and young and so on—to physical ailments or emotional blocks. What do you think? After all, you’re the one who knows him best.”

  “I don’t think anything.” Sara shrugs, but I can tell from her facial expression, from her entire posture, in fact, that she is tormented by something. She shrugs again and looks me intently in the eyes.

  “Okay, it’s like this… it’s like he’s carrying a lot of… anger. As if he’s really angry… inside, and it comes out when we start getting close, physically close, that is.”

  Sara’s voice fades and she lets her head hang down toward her chest. She suddenly appears indescribably fragile. She curls up in the leather armchair like a little bird and wraps her arms around her knees.

  She sits like that, silently, for a long time, and I let her be.

  “Sara,” I begin hesitantly, “have you thought about why it is so important to you that the two of you have sex?”

  “Oh, my God!”

  She lifts her head and looks at me as if I’m crazy. “My God,” she repeats. “We’ve been seeing each other almost every day for at least a month. He sleeps at my place and he says he wants to live with me. Hello! Don’t you think it’s strange that he doesn’t want to sleep with me?”

  I don’t answer, but I know she’s right.

  In the city, people don’t look at each other when they walk by. You look down at the ground. That’s just how it is. Maybe that was why she never saw me? But still, it was really strange. During the early summer, several times I came so close to her in line in Söderhallarna market that I could have easily put my hands around her little bird neck and squeezed. It would have been over in no time.

  Once I touched her bony arm in line at the ATM. It was downy and warm from the sun. I pulled back my hand as if I had been burned and shivered with disgust. But she didn’t see me, she only scratched her arm a little absentmindedly with her short, unpolished nails.

  I started to feel invisible, like those pitiful down-and-out bastards who make their home in Medborgarplatsen. The ones no one looks at.

  Drunks, crazies, young guys with swollen muscles and big tattoos are invisible. The whores, too, with their tormented, demanding stares, stick-thin thighs, worn-out veins, and hungry sex. I saw them looking and heard their voices inside me: “Wanna FUCK? I can help you: I see your pain. I see YOU.”

  When the invisible people show up in the subway or on the streets, ordinary people discreetly look away. The invisible people populate the parks of Stockholm, the underground labyrinths where the subway trains rush forth through the night, and the homeless shelters. They are the ones who ride the night bus from one end station to the other in an endless loop, never getting anywhere. They are the ones who beg for a meal at lunchtime among the customers at McDonald’s.

  And to her I was invisible, just like them. I was on the same level as any old alcoholic. Me, of all people!

  One day, right before Midsummer, I nonchalantly stood in front of her on Götgatan, my stance wide, blocking her path.

  But she only stared down at the street and made a determined half circle around me without even lifting her gaze.

  It was then that I decided. She’d had her chance, her chance for atonement, and she blew it.

  For that reason, I had to punish her.

  It is late afternoon and I feel tired and listless. I know I was more distracted during my hour with Sara than is appropriate, by my standards, anyway, but the alternative would have been to cancel today’s session, and I think that would have been worse for her.

  Her boyfriend worries me. Who is he, and what does he really want with Sara? I know that her love life should not be at the center of our therapy, but still, I can’t help being worried. At the same time, I’m starting to doubt my own intuition. How can I really assess anything rationally right now? I’m so shaken up and afraid that I see danger everywhere.

  Threats.

  I sigh heavily and try to
think about other things. I can’t let fear win.

  I open the window in my office. Voices drift up from the market below. I toy with the idea of talking to Aina. Maybe I should accompany her to the art opening she’s going to and stay the night in her little studio on Blekingegatan. We both have the day off tomorrow.

  The thought of waking up in her tiny apartment is appealing. A little hungover, wake Aina up, and then go down to the 7-Eleven to get breakfast. An old routine. We’ve done it many times before. I get up and cross the small hallway, into Aina’s office.

  I find Aina sitting in the lotus position on the floor, talking on her cell phone. She sparkles and laughs loudly, which means there is a man on the other end. Although it’s unclear which one. She looks up and sees me. As I start to back out of her office, she signals that I should stay put. With a couple short sentences she concludes the call and looks at me.

  “Siri! Tell me about it!”

  I am confused. I don’t know what she wants to hear. “Tell you what?”

  Aina simply smiles.

  “You looked like you… well, like you wanted to share something,” she says, and perhaps she is right. Sure, I would like to tell her what happened last night, but I can’t. I can’t bear to.

  “I wanted to talk about the exhibition,” I say instead.

  “You’re coming!”

  Aina’s smile is almost more radiant than the one she had on her lips during the phone conversation with the unknown man.

  “Hot damn, that’s great! Do you know how long it’s been since we went out together? You have to stay over too, and then we can have breakfast in Helgalunden if the sun is out.”

  Aina’s enthusiasm knows no bounds and it just sweeps me away. Wonderful Aina, with her ability to make other people feel chosen and special.

  “By the way, that was Robert on the phone.”

  “Which Robert?”