It’s cold, and I’ve left my jacket inside—I see it hanging next to her on the barstool. When I walk in again she looks at me quite openly, all the way from over by the bar.
* * *
Her apartment is dark, I sense that it has two rooms, that it’s completely symmetrical, one room on either side of the hall and maybe a kitchen between them. When she takes a step toward me I seize her wrists and put her hands around my neck.
“The bathroom,” I whisper in her ear, holding her wrists gently; she doesn’t try to free herself. I lower her arms and put them around my waist, concerned that she’ll place her hands on my shoulders if I let go of her and feel the holster straps through my jacket.
“There,” she nods toward a door behind my back.
I let go of her and walk into the small bathroom, closing the door carefully behind me. I hear her take off the jean jacket and hang it up, then she goes out to the room on the right. I remove my own jacket, the pressure in my chest, as if it belongs to someone else, a cry that isn’t mine. I unbuckle the holster and look around. It’s clean and impersonal, like a hotel bathroom, the only signs of her are the laundry basket in the tub and her clothes inside it, underpants, T-shirts; I want to open the medicine cabinet, but stop myself. Turn on the water instead, wash my face before I carefully bend down, protected by the running water, until kneeling on the floor, and I shove the holster with the pistol as far as I can under the bathtub. The feeling of pressure, as if I’m going to vomit. When I turn off the water I don’t recognize my face in the mirror, it is closed, locked, and I don’t know what’s going on behind it.
It’s still dark in the apartment, she hasn’t turned on any lights, I hesitate, enter the room on the right, and stop in the middle, not knowing where she is. Suddenly she’s close beside me, quiet and agile like an animal. We kiss softly and carefully, the sharp, cutting taste of alcohol and her thin, sinewy body turns beneath my hands. I pull up her T-shirt, she’s not wearing a bra, her breasts are so small they fit in my palms. Her nipples, big as raspberries, are hard between my fingers, she draws me closer, breathless I inhale her scent, feeling her angular hip bones against my own.
“Who are you?” She pushes me back at arm’s length, her eyes searching in the darkness. Black as coal against her pale face, her dyed hair reaches just below her shoulders and I know from the photo that her eyes are green, but it’s too dark to see their exact color.
She strokes my cheek gently. “Come,” she whispers, taking my hands and pulling me toward the bed. She removes my clothes, turns me over like a baby, strokes my back, touches me with firm, open hands, kisses the nape of my neck, takes one of my breasts in her hand, and with the other, presses an open palm against my cunt. It’s like being caressed by a pro, someone who knows my body by heart, someone trained in shooting it straight up. The serenity, the substance that brings everything to rest.
* * *
Afterward I try to make her out in the darkness, she’s lying on her side of the bed, naked, but I can barely see the outline of her body. She sits up, reaches across me, and gropes for something beside the night table, gets hold of her T-shirt and a pack of cigarettes, an ashtray and a lighter. She smokes slowly with her back against the wall and I recognize her from the photograph. There’s something self-sufficient in the way she smokes, in the discrete, defined movements distinguishing her body from its surroundings. I can understand why they leave her alone.
“I saw a performance,” she says slowly, exhaling the smoke. “A day or two ago. I never go to such things.”
She leans her head against the wall, waits and peers down at me in the bed. For a second I see Mia’s sleeping body, the nightmares that chase her, how sometimes when she wakes up she doesn’t understand that they’re over until several minutes later. The terror that shines in her eyes before the dreams flow away, until everything clears and grows still.
“A man ran from one corner of the stage, jumped high up, and fell straight to the floor. Then he got up and did it again. Again and again.” She slowly lowers one hand toward the blanket. “How can that be called a performance?”
Something warm shoots up behind my eyes and I smell her cunt through her crossed legs; she’s only wearing the red T-shirt. Plugged Recording. I wonder what it means, where she got it from. She exhales again, suddenly indifferent, before she stubs out the cigarette, gets up, climbs over me, and disappears into the bathroom.
* * *
When I wake up she’s sleeping beside me. I gather up my clothes, head to the bathroom, fish out my holster, and fasten it tightly under my arm. Quickly put on my jacket in the hall, then I stand for a while in the doorway to the bedroom and look at her before leaving; sleep smoothes out her face, as if she were dead or a newborn baby.
When I leave her, I choose the street down the hill toward the center of town, and before reaching the small square I sit awhile on a bench in front of a soccer field, beside a home for the elderly. I pull out my phone and call the task force. It doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes, they must have been nearby, I recognize them when they appear in the rotary where the slope ends, in unmarked vehicles. No sirens, just two big vans, one light, the other dark. I get up and go, hear them climbing the hill behind me, I push my hair out of my face, can smell her sex, she’s still there in my hands. Her jawline burned into my retina, just as lovely in reality as in the photo.
She’ll keep her beauty for a long time, long after our contemporaries have lost theirs to old age.
PART II
FEAR & DARKNESS
From the Remains
BY INGER EDELFELDT
Tantolunden
Translated by Laura A. Wideburg
Curled up in bed with my old-fashioned composition book, I’m finally feeling warm after the ice-cold night. And after such a strange encounter. She wants me to write down her tale. That’s all. A tale of winter and chill; an ice-cold saga. How fitting, that we are now in the middle of winter, with an unbelievable amount of snow covered by a shiny hard crust.
Everything was strange from the start—I mean yesterday, after I returned from my vacation and went out to see how my garden cottage had fared in the bitter weather. I wrapped myself in warm clothes and walked down to Bergsunds Beach, and then along the footpath by the edge of the expansive frozen water, toward Tanto.
The entire hillside seemed to be covered in a thick layer of white frosting. On the rock wall, at the first, lower wooden staircase, icicles hung like huge organ pipes. The second staircase, the one I usually take up to my cottage, had turned into an icy ramp, with barely visible steps. Still, I managed in spite of my slippery boots.
Once at the top of the hill, I could see out, over the encrusted surface of the water, the bridges, and the skyline with its glittering windows on the far side of the ice. The massive buildings on the horizon stood close to each other and seemed to exist in another time, a science-fiction future that appeared unreal and far removed from the garden colony—this special realm of small cottages painted in bright colors and their small yards with benches, tiny gazebos of glass, and other dreams embodied on their sloping plots. In the summertime, the whole effect is beyond idyllic, but now it seemed full of some fateful magic, as if a powerful winter sorcerer had bewitched it with frosting.
I’m describing all this because it all belongs. In the movies, characters never suspect that something unusual is afoot, but I felt it then. Everything was a premonition, a forewarning, but of something beautiful. As if something was calling to me. A crystal-clear, silent song vibrating in everything. Or am I reconstructing this after the fact? No, that I doubt.
The day had been sunny and clear, but the blue sky was beginning to darken as twilight approached; everything was breathtaking. The only thing that troubled me was the fear that the harsh weather might damage my cottage. This beloved small building, just one of the numerous playhouses for adults on the hillside, was my oasis during spring, summer, and fall. Mine was light blue like old-fashioned bab
y clothes for boys. The weather vane is less cute; it’s a rusty vulture. In addition, there’s a ceramic Poe raven nailed to the lowest branch of the apple tree.
I like to write in my little house, my refuge, now frozen solid. The snow lay heavy on its roof, the window panes were covered in strange, blossoming frost patterns. The ceramic raven watched me stolidly from the apple tree. I had to use a shovel to hack at the ice along the little door to open it.
An unpleasant smell struck my nostrils. Dead rat, I thought, but in this cold nothing dead should be able to give off such a stench.
With a bit of shock, I realized that someone had been in here. Nothing was damaged, but I was sure someone had been rummaging around.
No. That premonition I’d had on the way over had not been hinting at something beautiful. What I saw made me catch my breath. The instinct to vomit choked my throat. I saw a shape on the other side of the room—the thick plastic mat had been pulled up to cover something shoved right against the little bench, with its view over the spirea bushes, where I typically sat in the summer to drink my coffee.
Call someone. The words flew through my mind. Get out of here. Don’t check this out all by yourself.
But yet, a moment later, I still stood there, looking at the figure under the mat. The girl, this word came to me, as if she were all the girls in the world, as if there were no living girls, happy girls, girls eating ice cream in the sunshine.
She was curled in a fetal position. Her skin was bluish white, her limbs oddly thin. The body, frozen almost solid, wore nothing but a thin, dirty summer dress which had, perhaps, once been white. That the dress was trimmed in romantic, innocent lace made the sight especially creepy.
I couldn’t see her face. Her long dark hair curled over her features as if she herself wanted to hide them as a last gesture to spare any future gawkers. Or perhaps the killer had done this, covered her face, her stare. Trafficking, I thought. Crime scene, police. I felt so faint I had to sit down, powerless, but still unable to look away from the little naked foot. Repugnance and horror ran through me as well as wild tenderness, sorrow, and anger—as if I should be able to hug her and comfort her! Yes, that’s what it was like, what it was actually like.
The light in the cottage shifted into a darker blue, as if it emanated from her, oozed out of her. I was entirely alone in this cottage on the frosted hillside during twilight with the frozen body of a girl. A nightmare, said the voice in my head. And then I noticed a dead rat beside her body. A number of dead rats, actually. Had they chewed off her face? Don’t even think about that. A dark, trapped cry throbbed in my head, my throat, my chest. It carried no coherent thoughts with it; both the ability to think and the ability to act had fled.
Then a quick movement. Unexpected, incomprehensible. A rustle, an exhalation, and she sat up. I was so shocked I didn’t have time to be afraid, but I felt I had been thrown into another dimension, a kind of dream state, where this could happen.
I saw a tiny heart-shaped face. Her eyes were totally black, like bullet holes, with no whites. Her features shone gray-white, haloed by her black hair. Her lips were moving slightly, an almost silent sound reached my ears, but I could not make out what she was saying—was she speaking a foreign language?
Then came something resembling a laugh behind a closed mouth, and she said, “Welcome!”
Perhaps she’d already hypnotized me. At any rate, she seemed to be, in some inexplicable way, already familiar.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “My name’s Alma. I’m just sleeping here. It’s good that it’s winter. The days are short. And I never freeze.”
I had nothing to say to that.
“You realize what I am, don’t you?”
When I silently shook my head, she smiled briefly and I could see her sharp teeth, white as pearls and glistening. Yes, I must have been hypnotized. I didn’t even shudder.
“I’ve been finding places to sleep here and there,” she said. “Ever since it happened.” Her black, eternal gaze bored into me as she cocked her head. “You’re a kind person, aren’t you?”
Well, what was I supposed to reply to that? I shrugged and forced a smile.
She said, “I don’t kill people.” She fluffed her hair the way girls do. “I’ve been sleeping in different cottages until I came to yours. Yours was the right one. You’re a writer. I love books. Rather, I love to disappear into them. Brontë. Oates. Atwood. And, of course, Poe. I love your raven, by the way! I thought I would just wait here until you showed up. And now here you are.”
“Can I help you in some way?” I managed to say. I really hoped I would not have to help her die. I didn’t want to deal with a cross and a stake or old black blood. I didn’t want to hear her pleas for eternal rest.
“Sure, you can help me,” she replied. “I’ve been praying for you to come! You want to use words to scare people, so let me inspire you. You’ll hear my story, you’ll give me a few nights of your time, and I’ll be your Scheherazade. Yes, you will be the one to write my winter tale. You will make it beautiful. You will write it so that whoever reads it will want to weep. Their tears will become diamonds in the cold; they will be stars and shine forever in my memory. And what you will do for me, you will do out of love.”
Alma’s Winter Tale
I was sixteen years old then. You think I might have been younger, but I had just turned sixteen, I am sixteen, I will be sixteen. How long has it been? I think it’s been three years now, but five hundred years from now, I will still be sixteen.
My mother and I had argued. We often argued. She’d throw me out of the house, and then she’d call me on my cell phone and apologize: Come back, Alma, I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean to say that, I didn’t really think that, just come back and everything will be good. I’ll stop drinking and bringing home stupid men. I’ll become an angel, the moon is made of cheese, there’s peace on earth, the climate issue is resolved, the world is all candy fluff, just come home.
This time it was also winter, and she threw me out without warning. Just because. I was locked out in the falling snow and wind, late at night, no coat, just a long sweater, no phone, no keys. You whore, stealing Lasse from me.
You see, we lived in this neighborhood, in one of those huge tower blocks on Flintbacken, the ones shaped in a half-circle. In the same building, next to our entrance, were a school and a preschool for English-speaking children and I often wished I could live there instead. A sign said: Welcome to the Suns. If you took the stairs on the left side of the building, through the groves, you went down to the beach. The path along the beach always had joggers on it in all kinds of weather, but halfway up there was a bench not far from the stairs and I sat down on it in spite of the cold and the snow. I hoped I would get pneumonia or a urinary tract infection or something. Maybe even die. And it would be all her fault.
I sat there for a while, the falling snow muffling all sounds, although I could still hear the frenetic pace of the runners training for some marathon and a dog barking in the distance. I could hear the sound of a train crossing the Årsta Bridge—a train going away, I’ve always loved that sound.
Die, die, die! I kept thinking, and I don’t know who I wanted to die, me or her. Perhaps I wanted everything to die, sucked into a black hole and gone, like in Donnie Darko.
I hadn’t heard any footsteps, but a guy suddenly appeared in the snow in front of me. My first thought was he must have come from a costume party. He wore a tall black hat, sunglasses, and a tuxedo. A little like the Sandman. I remember thinking that he was trying for the creepy look and he’d succeeded, but in my state of mind, I was not afraid. I felt he was very attractive, extremely attractive, even sexy. Unfortunately.
“May I sit down?” he asked, and I said, “Sure.”
He sat down and we were silent for a while. Then he said, “Look, you’re freezing. You don’t need to freeze.” He was all over me in an instant and I remember his sickly black eyes as he whipped off the sunglasses and then everyt
hing faded.
I woke up with snow on me everywhere, in my mouth and eyes and nose; I was lying stretched out on the bench, completely covered in snow; he must have left me in this odd position. I sat up. Everything felt strange, shifted, changed, as if I’d had some kind of memory loss or had fainted. But the strangest thing of all was I wasn’t freezing. I had no idea what time it was. I didn’t have my cell phone. The air was so still, however, that I thought it must be very late at night. No sounds of running from the walkway, no day sounds at all. Had anyone seen me as they walked by? Do people bother to look around at all?
Then I heard a dog barking shrilly from the top of the stairs. It sounded like a tiny, terrified dog, and the voice of the owner trying to calm it was female.
I got up, reassured that someone was out and about, and a woman too, and I walked up the stairs to ask her what time it was.
I will never forget the expression on her face. She was as terrified as the dog. She told me the time—one thirty in the morning—and then she pulled the Chihuahua, still barking at the top of its tiny lungs, as far away from me as she could, while striding down the path in a different direction. Her reaction terrified me too. I knew nothing but had the urge to go home. Mama would ask me for forgiveness, I thought, and she’d make me a cup of hot chocolate. She is nice to me as soon as she regrets what she’s done, which usually happens after a few hours.
I couldn’t get the door code to work. I pressed the call button for our apartment, again and again, until she answered over the intercom. The connection was bad. She said hello a number of times and couldn’t seem to hear what I was saying, but she must have realized it was me, because she let me in. Once inside, I pressed the elevator button, but it didn’t work that night either, so I ended up taking the stairs three flights up. The elevator was waiting right by our door, so why hadn’t it come down? I rang the bell at the door to my home.
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