The Carrier

by Mattias Berg

  Fold here. Pull the zipper up along edge “A” and bring it to opposing edge “C”, then fold into “F”. The briefcase goes in the pouch which this creates—and the combat pack in the compartment on the underside. If you do this right, the decals will appear on the outside of the upper pocket. And just be aware that I’m bored to death, Erasmo. You’re taking forever!

  But in spite of all my efforts, I could not bring together what Jesús María had called THE HYBRID. In enormous capital letters all the way across the long side “E”. So when Ingrid finally woke up I was forced to ask her for help. It was immediately apparent that she was familiar with the way Jesús María thought, her twisted creativity, clearly on a level with her own. After an hour or so we had managed to assemble the strange construction. A sort of combination of case and backpack—with the capacity not only to hold but also to be both.

  “This is how Jesús María passes the time. The art of folding, like origami, or a traditional Japanese kimono. Clothes which can take a day to put on and which at the same time become some sort of ceremonial armament. Equipment which is indistinguishable from its structure, where surface and what lies beneath constantly change places.”

  She put the empty contraption on my back, tightened the straps, found the exact balance. It was both incredibly light and surprisingly heavy. Like silk with steel or lead woven into it, a mythical hero’s armor. In some way the weight gradually spread across my back until I no longer noticed it.

  Ingrid lifted in first the briefcase and then the combat pack, each in its designated compartment. Both of these bulky objects disappeared almost without trace, swallowed up by the shapeless and more or less organic hybrid. The difference between having zero and 110 pounds in there was bewilderingly small. Then she also took my weapon and put it in its dedicated place: a long narrow compartment at the side, hidden yet easily accessible.

  I put the hybrid on the ground, walked around it with Ingrid to examine how it was constructed. The combat pack and my nuclear football had not exactly become one—but rather something new, a third something. There were compartments everywhere, zips, possibilities, alternatives. There was also a clever little hole for the security strap of the briefcase, so that I could still keep it over my wrist, even with the hybrid on my back.

  But the decals were the cherry on top, Jesús María’s ironic nod toward this whole business. Using satire to disarm history’s heaviest weapon.

  Because her experimental carrying equipment, which now held the “most important object in the world”, was covered on top with bits of fabric from foreign cities in typical ’60s and ’70s style. The name of each place plus a kitschy little textile design image—of just the kind one had on backpacks and padded jackets in my childhood.

  Rich kids could buy “St Moritz” or “Chamonix” on their ski trips with their parents. Soon they added “London”, “Rome” and “Paris”, perhaps, from their solo educational trips in Europe. I was given “Aspen” and “Niagara Falls” by some distant relatives.

  Now Jesús María had recreated these very decals, together with some other less usual ones, and sewn them onto the hybrid. The camouflage was perfect. Even a trained eye would not see more than a gigantic travel backpack of the old sort, plucked out of the cellar after many years.

  It was still hard to talk, my whole face was too tight. My lips felt grotesque. Only if I formed my words at the very front of my mouth could I manage a sentence—but that was enough to express my unconditional surrender.

  “She’s good.”

  “Isn’t she just, Erasmus? The world lost out on a major artist.”

  “How did she get hold of the material?”

  With a sweeping gesture, Ingrid indicated the rock chamber’s south-east corner. Only when I let my headlamp light up the darkness could I see the broken office chairs which had been stacked there, higgledy-piggledy. As well as the mess next to them: tattered yellow rubber gloves for sun, torn blue hospital blankets for sea. The white stuffing from the chairs must have been the snow in the decals.

  “Composite materials, you might say. Wrecked goods, like the woman herself.”

  “You mean that Jesús María made the decals with her own hands?”

  “Mmm . . . Jesús María has the memory of an elephant. Way too much so for her own good.”

  I bent down and lifted the hybrid onto my back again.

  “But it was I who asked her to make that for you, Erasmus, so you can disguise the briefcase and have both hands free from now on. I can guarantee you’ll need them.”

  “She does what you tell her?”

  “On odd days. On even ones she does different things.”

  “So which was it yesterday, when she shut me in with the apes?”

  “Oh, don’t take that too personally, my treasure. Jesús María gets confused between different men. She lives in her past.”

  2.08

  Those who have not lived through it think that sabotage, military offensive, counter-attack, not to mention war, are explosive occurrences. That everything unfolds in rapid sequences of endlessly dramatic movement. In fact, there is mostly immobility.

  Edelweiss used to preach that we had to anticipate nothing just as watchfully as absolutely anything. The nuclear weapons system is based on this. The mere fact that it is there creates a sort of existential half-way house, where one is constantly as close to war as one can be, even during times of peace: however low the alert level is. The wet-behind-the-ears recruits who are sitting there furthest down in the bed-rock—in the indescribable solitude of the missile silos—have to guard the Dragon with the same vigilance at the lowest level of military preparedness as at the highest, because the system itself is by far the greatest potential danger. All day long. The whole year. Decade after decade.

  And it was in just such an existential no-man’s-land, a gap in both time and space, where we now found ourselves. Ingrid said that we should take the chance to rehabilitate ourselves while we could. Before she was ready with her planning; before she gave us our marching orders.

  So while she continued clicking away on the portable command terminal or practiced her yoga—the asanas which had names like “Warrior”, “Destroyer of the Universe” or “Corpse Pose”, defied description—I picked up my strength training again. Running was only a distant dream, really to be able to stretch out, lengthen my stride, push my body to the limit.

  According to Ingrid, Jesús María did nothing physical: needed no training, since her fuel consisted only of dark matter. Pure vengeance. Unclouded hatred. We did not see much of her either, apart from when—once a day at most—she opened the protective doors to her inner rock chamber and came out to help herself to some of the masses of food that Sixten had put in our refrigerator. Like the rest of the machine park it seemed to have been left behind from the ’60s.

  After I had done my light training session—increasing each day the number of reps, even though my body might not be ready for the intensity to be raised—I went into the shower room. The space must have had a different function in the good old days. I did not ask Ingrid about it because her answers rarely made me any the wiser. I turned the tap counter-clockwise as far as it would go. At first I had been amazed that the water started to run after all these years, and then at how icily cold it could become in the Scandinavian bed-rock. In due course I wobbled back to the metal worktop where I had left my training gear, half-paralyzed with cold.

  I decided every morning that I would ask Ingrid about the next phase, and every evening I fell asleep without having done so.

  On Friday the 13th a week had gone by since our flight. The day which more or less all of the western world had chosen as a symbol of ill luck. Ingrid had spoken about what she considered to be the most likely origin of this during one of her mesmerising lectures: how a number of Knights Templar had been imprisoned by Philip IV on Friday, October 13, 1307 and then tortured and executed.

  It was also the day on which the curse of inactivity and u
ncertainty—the creeping in my body, the slow increase in my pulse: phase two or perhaps even phase three already—was finally broken.

  First I heard the eight beeps from the control panel by the door. Then in came Sixten, fired off his warm smile.

  “Do you fancy doing a round, Erasmus? Giving your spirits a boost?”

  His running gear seemed at least as high-tech as mine, as was the clever backpack with two water bottles in pouches on the front of each of the shoulder straps. They not only demonstrated that Sixten was a committed runner, but also that he was at least as much of a perfectionist about it as about everything else.

  “Ingrid has told me that you like running. So I thought it would be nice to have some company—and at the same time show you something of the surroundings. It might interest you, Erasmus.”

  My watch showed 21.43. Late enough for us not to have to worry too much about bumping into anyone, early enough not to seem suspicious if we did so.

  I looked at Ingrid. She met my eye, nodded.

  “Have faith in your pretty new face, my treasure. You can hardly recognize yourself. So how would anyone else?”

  2.09

  Nevertheless, I pulled the thin, stretchy bobble hat down over my forehead further than was needed, just to deal with the temperature. The training clothes were a mandatory part of our combat pack. Edelweiss—who never himself walked more than a few feet—used to stress that keeping as mobile as possible counteracted the almost physical pain of inactivity.

  The watch showed 16.1 degrees in the Test Rooms and now 7.3 up here on the earth’s surface. The air was crisp and brittle as glass. Just to be outside was dizzying. Everything was familiar and yet so unfamiliar. The same sky and the same moon as when I was feverishly waiting for the signal, looking out from the suite at the Grand Hotel, waiting for first sunset and then sunrise, before I found out who Alpha actually was and anything at all about her insane plan. Before the world was turned upside down.

  Sixten noticed that I was catching my breath. Stopped and gave me a worried look.

  “How’s it going, Erasmus? Is the backpack too heavy for you after your surgery? I’ll take it if you want.”

  “Thank you, sir, but I can hardly feel it.”

  “Good. It’s a bit out of the ordinary from the point of view of running gear. But even if we bump into someone unexpectedly tonight, or some time in the future, it’ll be fine. I prepared the neighbors for the fact that relatives from America are coming to visit. I thought that you would have a lot of equipment, stuff to carry that might look odd—so I laid it on a bit thick. Said that you were semi-professional bird watchers, that you were going to study some unique Swedish biotopes.”

  Sixten took off his own voluminous backpack, large enough to conceal not just one but two telescopes. Without a word he handed over one of them, which I left protruding enough so that it could be seen clearly. The sign of a twitcher.

  Then he took the lead again, running at a comfortable long-distance pace, in the range of ten minutes per mile. At that speed I could follow him relatively easily. It felt so strange to have both hands free and yet not be in civilian mode. The apparatus swayed softly inside Jesús María’s hybrid, the world’s most important object, contained within her thin and yet tough fabric, the magic she had wrought.

  We left the houses and the glow of the streetlights. Steadily I lengthened my stride, felt the intoxication of freedom. As we passed the last windows before the wooded area I could not help having a quick look in. Small red lamps in the children’s bedrooms, blue moons with gold stars, cuddly toys. I let the memories come, wash over me, like blood, before I erased the images from my mind.

  Then the darkness took hold. Tall trees, roots and rocks on the ground. Sixten was obviously used to moving in unlit terrain. When we had got far enough in, he stopped and waited. Here we were surrounded by fir trees, as in a chamber in the forest, I could hardly see the sky through the dense branches.

  I glanced at the weakly illuminated numbers on my wrist-watch: 22.49, September 13, 2013. I was now in Sixten’s hands. This was a man it was easy to rely on. Yet I tried very hard to keep my focus—tensed all over when I heard through the darkness how he started to move in some way, the rustling of his windcheater, the situation changing. I readied myself to draw my weapon from the hybrid before he had time to get much further.

  But Sixten was quicker than me. In the next moment I felt the cold of his bottle against the back of my left hand, just above the security strap. I raised it to my mouth and took a little of the sports drink, even though neither of us really needed it after running for such a short time at a light long distance speed. But he was not attacking, he was reaching out to me. Making a gesture.

  “All the same it’s odd, you know,” he said.

  I waited, watched, listened to the heavy silence. Until the pulse had subsided in my still delicate frame. Until Sixten at last said:

  “How the lies just came. Almost by themselves, when I was going to talk to the neighbors about your arrival—and suddenly made up all that stuff about bird watching. That the machinery could start up again like that, with turbines and drive belts going full tilt, the whole business. After forty-five long years.”

  I had to fight to keep down the sticky sweet aftertaste of the drink. Could hardly have said anything, even if I’d wanted to.

  “Can you imagine it was Aina who wanted to move out here? That she, who hated everything to do with nuclear weapons from the first day, had seen a brochure about this nice new area in Ursvik and suggested we come and have a look. As soon as we stepped off the bus she began to sob like a little girl over her memories. Couldn’t stop telling me how fantastic the sense of solidarity had been during the so-called Ursvik March in 1961: the first large-scale protest against the Swedish nuclear weapons program. That it was this which got her into studying jurisprudence at Lund University, to choose a life in the law, this which was the starting pistol for the whole of her pretty formidable engagement.”

  Still no sound. Save for Sixten’s gentle past tense and the soft hum of night-time motorway traffic.

  “And you understand that I felt incredibly uncomfortable. Nya Ursvik was going to be built bang on top of our most secret installations from before. The Plutonium Laboratory, the Metallurgy Section, the Test Rooms. Even if they were impressively deep down I was worried that someone would stumble upon the network of the old system during the construction of the houses.”

  A shock, like a shivering fit, ran through me. Partly because the temperature had dropped to four below and I was dressed for movement. Partly because Sixten’s intimate old man’s voice got right to me.

  “I hadn’t been entirely honest with Aina either, saying only that I was involved in highly classified research out here. And as soon as the Swedish program was axed I was transferred to the disarmament section—which at first felt peculiar. But I was by no means alone. The fact is that Sweden’s delegations at the international conferences included many other unofficial advisors, who had earlier been active in our own nuclear weapons efforts. I could even say that we became a power in disarmament because we never became one in rearmament. Because of our history at the time, circumstances, you know how it is, Erasmus. The power of destiny.”

  Sixten fell silent, seemed to hesitate. His outline had started to become visible through the darkness.

  “So when Aina brought me along to some out-and-out activists’ meetings, in the early ’70s, I had not got around to telling her what I had been up to in the old days. And then after that the timing somehow never seemed right. A pathetic excuse, admittedly.”

  When a moped puttered along somewhere nearby, Sixten fell silent again. Even though it was far away, he did not go on with what he was saying until the rider had stopped and had ample time to get indoors.

  “So it was impossible for me to agree with what she wanted. We had a spacious house with a proper yard, and we weren’t in any need. Even though Aina pointed out the rather nice-looki
ng small lawns which had been drawn in the brochure at the back of the houses here, as well as the wooded area close by—she even went so far as to find out that there were places nearby with relatively rare species of birds for me to study—I should say that I never got into serious negotiations over it. And that’s how the situation remained for a quite a long time. A sort of ceasefire, so as not to let the battle over our future home crush our wonderful marriage, just when we had both retired. Until Ingrid called, forty years to the day after she and I had separated.”

  I recognized the sound now. The little swish when one sort of plastic brushes against another. I took the bottle from Sixten’s hand and emptied it in one go. I suddenly felt overwhelmingly thirsty. His story seemed to consume as much energy as a proper long run.

  “Ingrid said that she had discovered my wife’s name in the record of some minor action. That your people had registered her presence among all the others, in what must clearly have been an extremely systematic mapping of your ideological opponents, all the way down to and including little Aina Lundberg in neutral little Sweden. That Ingrid had seen the first name and the family name and simply put two and two together. Just as she herself was beginning to plan your flight in earnest, and needed a safe haven to start out from. A whole succession of circumstances, I should say. The rather strange ironies of history.”

  Sixten took a swig from the other bottle.

  “And after that the situation was the direct opposite. In other words impossible for me not to do what Aina wanted, to move out here to Ursvik. She would otherwise have interpreted my reservations as if I wanted to avoid memories of Ingrid—when she got in touch I had felt compelled, despite everything, to tell Aina—and of course this would be the most perfect hiding place on the globe. In my humble opinion the only underground tunnel system in the world which is so extensive and at the same time so unknown. Or what do you say, Erasmus? You who are much more up-to-date than me?”