by Mattias Berg
So I asked if I could instead pay by giving him a quotation, which I had come to think of while all this was happening. He looked at me, skeptical, with his childish mathematician’s face, not understanding. Then he slowly nodded.
The words are from The Bhagavad Gita, I told him, the Hindu scripture that as a spiritual seeker I always had close to my heart. They describe how the god Vishnu tried to frighten the Prince into doing his duty. I intoned them for the mathematician: Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
He looked bewildered, as if he had expected more, but then seemed satisfied. Started to say that the quotation could well be worth ten dollars, as strange as that was!
But then he got no further—before I started to tear off his head, taking great pains in doing so, the same way one twists and pulls at a root to extract it from the soil. And only when I had got this close to him did I discover that the mathematician bore a striking resemblance to my youngest child.
Who, furthermore, had the same name as the prototype of the bomb. The one which an unfathomable chain of events had just detonated, without igniting the universe after all.
Trinity. The light of my life.
2.03
I could not stop fiddling with the bandages, despite the excruciating pain, trying to work out what she had done.
The whole area between the upper part of my cheeks and my hairline burned like the fires of hell. The Nurse had made what seemed to be her biggest intervention around the eyes, had no doubt changed both their size and shape. That tends to have the greatest impact. Changing the look, the expression, the whole personality with the help of the “mirror of the soul”. Then continued up over the forehead. Made it bigger or maybe smaller, lifted, smoothed, put in wrinkles. Taken away or added a number of years.
For hours I had lain and waited for the woman in the bunk next to me to wake up, Ingrid Bergman, Alpha, so that she could tell me who I was. What I had become. I had the cannula in the back of my left hand, and over the same wrist the security strap of the briefcase which, thanks to the Nurse’s first bravura performance, was without its tracking mechanism. Now, for sure, we were “lost to the world”, as Ingrid Bergman had told us.
My watch indicated 19.52, September 9, 2013, depth negative 307.7 feet. I stuffed the notebook back into the very bottom of my combat pack. Put aside my chronicle for you in posterity, my account of everything that had happened since we left the fallout shelter three days ago. The night lights in the roof of the enormous rock chamber, sixty-five feet up, had been just enough for me to keep working on my chronicle as I peered through the minimal slits between the bandages covering my eyes.
I lay on my back in the stone-hard bunk. Tried to find a position in which I was comfortable. And, at that moment, Ingrid Bergman woke up.
Sat upright, cast her eyes around, ran her hands over her face. Then looked straight at me. Even she was covered in bandages, all the way down over her throat. But her voice was intact—although her lips too must have been modified. The melody floated out through the narrow opening where the mouth was, seemed to fill the whole rock hall, all the way up to the roof.
“You don’t make a very convincing mummy.”
I waited for her to continue.
“Quite a few people are better dead than alive. But you’re not one of them, Erasmus.”
In the silence that followed I saw another dwarf spider move over the back of my hand. I pinched my arm hard in an attempt to work out if this too was a hallucination—but the only result was an uneven red patch on the skin, while the little creature clambered over my wrist-watch.
“Who are you?”
It was only with difficulty that I was able to form the question, moved my lips as little as I could. The stitches cut like barbed wire into the corners of my mouth and around my eyelids. My whole face flared, as if covered with hot wax under the bandages.
“As I said, my treasure: your Alpha.”
“And before that?”
“The Carrier of the briefcase immediately before you. While I was your supervisor, working on your dissertation, before NUCLEUS was created.”
I tried to keep my mouth steady, but it seemed to have a life of its own. My voice sounded slurred and frightening—even to me.
“And before then?”
“Your lecturer. She who taught you everything.”
“And before then?”
Ingrid Bergman did not answer, brought the quiz to an end and turned to face into the rock chamber. I followed her look: the movements of the bandaged head. In addition to our two metal bunks and the moveable surgical lamps, I could make out a number of undefined bits of apparatus further away in the dark, like gigantic bugs now extinct. It seemed to be some kind of technical equipment which time had left behind. Manual microscopes, gauges with big displays, computers with mounted, open-reel tapes and light bulbs, all made of metal and covered with a thin, red-gray coating.
Turning my head, first to scan the shorter side of the rock chamber and then the longer one, I was able to get an idea of its size, despite my limited vision through the eyeholes in my bandages. I decided that it must be at least two hundred feet by two hundred, like two running tracks next to each other, with a total surface area of almost one and a half square miles. In other words, the size of a modest hangar. At most a quarter of it was illuminated by the emergency night lighting in the roof, a further quarter lay in semi-darkness—while at least half of the rock hall was plunged in darkness.
Nowhere was there a sign of the Nurse. I let my eyes search further around the visible quarter: past shelves fixed onto the rough bed-rock wall, fume cupboards with rows of flasks which looked as if they had never been touched, crystallization bowls and graduated glasses. Empty, aged climatic chambers. A man-sized X-ray spectrometer, which might have seemed miraculous in the mid-1960s. An M.S.E. centrifuge which was at least as bulky.
“Where the hell are we?”
Ingrid Bergman gave no answer to that either, still facing away from me, staring into the room.
“What do you know about the others. . . the Team, Edelweiss, the President himself?”
She started, turned her bandaged head with caution to me: as if I had woken her. Had to clear her throat before she could answer.
“So far as Kurt and John are concerned, I know where they are. And I would guess that all the others are in about the same place, back at the starting point. Sitting there on the other side of the Atlantic, trying to determine where we have vanished. How the bed-rock can have gobbled us up.”
“How can you be so sure: how do you know they’re not on our trail?”
“Because you can’t search for something which doesn’t exist. Which never has existed.”
“And yet here we are.”
“True, my treasure. Here we are.”
Just as I had begun to get to my feet and to go off to investigate where we might be, Ingrid Bergman broke the silence. Started to tell the story. Feeling her way at first, then picking up pace.
It was a strange scene, a filmic moment. Two mummy-like figures in metal bunks in a vast rock hall, illuminated by a weak, bluish glow seeping from the night-light of the neon tubes. Some sort of melody flowing out of the hole cut into the bandages around the mouth of one of the mummies.
And it took an hour before she was done. Afterward I had no idea if any of it was true, even so much as a single word of it.
* * *
Her real name, she said, was Ingrid Oskarsson. I had continued to stare unblinking at the white of the bandaged head until a register in the voice—“so, call me Ingrid”—drew me back. She had been a promising science student, with peculiar side interests in cultural history, hand-picked fresh out of high school to work in the top secret Swedish nuclear weapons program, managed by the mighty Swedish National Defense Research Institute, the F.O.A. At the end of the 1950s, the project was divided into an “S.” program and an “L.” program, the names characterized by the genius for security policy euphemis
ms which were preferred by the young social democratic government of the time. “S.” stood for “shelter”—and its primary function was to conceal what was being carried out by “L.”, as in “loading”.
The process was concealed under a similar, ponderous use of bureaucratic terminology. Aided by the expression “Extended security research”, one could at a measured pace take all the steps necessary for making a finished atom bomb, while the general public was none the wiser.
According to Ingrid, “Freedom Of Action” was another of those coded expressions. The official meaning was that, in case of war, the country could change course and begin production of a Swedish atom bomb. But in fact a number of those weapons should have been finished by then, the work completed behind a veil of secrecy. Ingrid referred to it as dupery of the public and the politicians on a grand scale over a number of decades. Awareness of the Swedish atom bomb project was kept within a tight group of people.
“It was also during the first half of the ’60s, that we began to build this sprawling tunnel system. It just kept growing—and soon we started to refer to the whole construction as the Inner Circle. I wasn’t the person managing the project, not in practice, we had so many engineers, after all. People who loved dead ends, chutes, gizmos, hidden lighting systems, technological finesses. You know, Erasmus, boys. Like all the technicians behind the scenes of NUCLEUS.”
I looked into the holes that were her eyes: could see that her eyelids were shut. As if she could picture it all whilst telling her story.
“And even before that, the whole of central Stockholm was riddled with holes, like a mature cheese. We could fit eight thousand civilians plus the entire government into the Klara air-raid shelter alone, and the atom bomb-proof one at Katarinaberget was the world’s biggest when it was completed in 1957. Besides that, there were the years of what was referred to as “city transformation” and renovation of the center of town. The demolition of the old heart of Stockholm, the newspaper district, the destruction of cultural historical sites, the expansion of the district heating system after the war. Vast modernistic projects above and below ground—which at the same time served as a cover for all the construction which was going on deeper in the bed-rock. So we linked the existing facilities, creating nodes within our own navigation system: the new geography, in which we blasted out the most secret installations further below the district heating construction, so that nobody who was not authorized would have any business being down at that level. And spread out this underground landscape as far as we could. Wider than the city itself, in fact.”
She opened her eyes again, behind the slits. I felt her looking straight at me.
“We took our inspiration from the building of the underground train system in Moscow, all that monumental energy. Even this took its time, of course, years, half a decade of day-to-day work for many secret bus-loads of explosives experts and mining engineers from Kiruna: the most skilled of workers. And the basis for it was already there. A number of world-class facilities deep in the Scandinavian bed-rock, perfect for secrets and protection, not even the angels could reach there. All that was missing was a person with the right kind of spirited imagination. Or rather, two.”
Beyond her, I could make out parts of the apparatus, the out-of-date laboratory equipment. Everything seemed to be there as before, abandoned in a controlled flight, left neat and tidy. Or as if somebody had been there not long ago to clean up.
“But even all of this—years of tunnel construction, detonations every night, as far below the surface as a human being can bear to spend time without losing their senses—was just a means and not an end. The Inner Circle nothing more than a transportation system with a number of connected laboratories. As well as a way of making everything disappear, if that should prove necessary. Including ourselves and all our discoveries, the whole topography of secrets, the halls of mirrors. Into the same invisibility in which it had first been created.”
She shivered in the chill of the rock chamber. I handed her my blanket, which she at once wrapped around her own one. A cloud of breath rose toward the roof, like smoke from a dragon, as she continued.
“You understand, Erasmus, we had come a long way. Much further than the rest of the world realized. Sweden as a territory had, after all, been asleep: it had kept itself off the battlefield for more than 150 years. But during and after the Second World War, we had acquired hidden strengths. Real superheroes. Prominent nuclear physicists. Not just Lise Meitner and Manne Siegbahn, our own Nobel Prize winner, but also Glenn Seaborg—who was of Swedish descent and who retained a deep love of this country. All civilized countries have had scientific golden ages. That inexplicable accumulation of knowledge and talent in some lucrative field during a specific historical period, whether it be navigation or the petroleum industry. And this field was very much ours. But you know all that, my treasure. At least in theory.”
I thought I saw her playful eyes behind the bandages. It was the first hint since our unexpected reunion: that she and I had worked so closely, for so long, on my elusive dissertation. She acknowledged that I knew about the broader Swedish context. Nevertheless I did not react, let her lead on.
“I myself never really made the grade on the scientific side. But I had one god-sent gift: I could pull the wool over people’s eyes, society as a whole and the politicians, public opinion, whoever. My specialty was in that mental side of things. So I suppose my biggest contribution lay in keeping the secret secret.”
A sound came from the unlit part of the rock chamber, someone was moving in the darkness. My body tensed—but Ingrid kept going, regardless.
“For safety’s sake, we kept the management of the project not just within the Inner Circle, but to its very core. So there weren’t many who themselves knew the tunnels by heart. Had the entrance codes to the different sections, could follow the light-emitting diodes through the mass of the bed-rock, were aware of the structure of the whole labyrinth. Who didn’t just have instructions to follow—but knew the full scope of the project, both the tunnel system and the secrets within.”
Although a shape was emerging from the gloom, she wanted to finish what she was saying. And that needed just one more sentence.
“I should say there were two of us.”
When the Nurse joined us in our dimly lit part of the hall, she too was heavily bandaged. Not in one series of dressings over the whole of her head, like us, but in three separate bits. On the forehead, where the glass splinters from the lamp had penetrated. Under the eyes and around the mouth. The three sections were distinct from each other—I assumed because she still needed to be able to work without having her head draped in bandages, to make a series of incisions on herself, always maintaining some freedom of movement. Or perhaps because this particular Nurse seemed to do everything her very own way.
“I know, you should have got more rest. But Ingrid says that we don’t have the time. So this sure as hell isn’t going to be much fun, unless of course you’re funny that way.”
She ran a quick check on pulse, temperature, oxygen supply. Then the Nurse asked us to hold up our drips ourselves while she wheeled our bunks across the rock chamber, toward an almost invisible door. When one came right up to it, a small line could be discerned in the rough rock wall. I didn’t see the door handle at all until the Nurse pressed it down and I heard a muffled click. I gripped the briefcase harder, the cannula tight over the back of my hand. I felt my pulse quicken from that minimal exertion.
The chamber that we now came into was approximately fifteen feet by fifteen, and at least as high. I made out another metal bunk, X-ray equipment, an unwieldy defibrillator, needle destroyers, four portable spotlights, a hydraulic operating table, a full-length mirror and something that looked like an autopsy table made of tiles. Everything covered in the same red-gray coating as the equipment in the larger chamber. The atmosphere was heavy with the 1960s, the Cold War, the passage of time.
“What do you think, my treasure?”
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br /> I did not answer, didn’t even turn toward Ingrid. Tried with my limited field of vision to observe the Nurse on my other side: what she was going to do with us this time. Saw her start to dig around in her gigantic medical pack, while Ingrid picked up her story again.
“In these two laboratories, at the deepest point in the bed-rock, negative 308 feet, we studied the effects. On the dead and the living, humans and animals, short-term and long. The instant and eternity. Everything was so new for us, you see—and for the rest of the world. That’s the sole mitigating factor in our defense. We called them ‘Test Rooms’. What we thought of as military humor, Erasmus. You know: keeping things at arm’s length. Keeping them relative.”
Our psychologists always stressed how important it was, after our operations, to be as few as possible when the bandages were removed. Not to do the rounds, not to have unauthorized people about. In an ideal scenario only the doctor and the patient. To get over the shock of being confronted with someone different staring back at you from the mirror. And the whole monstrous side of it. The stitches like rails across your face, the seeping wounds, large bluish areas.
But now I was lying here in the bunk in front of the mirror, together with someone I knew nothing about, even what she was doing here, and wondering what she had made of my face. And with another person who could just as easily have been telling me fairy tales as telling me the truth.
She—Ingrid Bergman, or maybe Oskarsson, Ingrid—was the first one out. The Nurse maneuvered her higher against the bedhead, so she could see herself in the mirror. Undid the bandages, like a Christmas present, from the bottom up: chin, mouth, nose, eyes, forehead. I was already gaping far too much when the lower part of her face was uncovered. Felt the tear in the corners of my mouth as my stitches came undone under the dressings, one by one.
At least twenty years had been lifted from her. Under the grotesque bruising, there was little left of the mature Ingrid Bergman. No round face, no full mouth, nothing soft or spirited left at all. Instead she had acquired heavy eyelids and even higher cheekbones, thin lips, the mouth a straight line. The whole face had become younger, but also more severe.
