The Circus

by Jonas Karlsson

  “Mr. Magic Bobbiiii!” the ringmaster cried, and Bobbi ran back in to take the applause. There was no sign of Magnus.

  After Bobbi, some acrobats came in on a little motorized cart. Because it was so small, they had to take turns riding on it. Hansen, or Larsen, came in and drove around on it as well.

  The curtain closed and the rest of the lights went up. We had reached the intermission.

  I sat for a while waiting for Magnus to come back as a succession of rustling anoraks brushed past me to leave. When he didn’t appear I headed to the little lobby to buy a drink from the vending machine.

  There was quite a long line, and my fingers grew cold as I stood there waiting, even though it was almost June. I kept looking around to see if I could see Magnus. I thought I caught a glimpse of him behind a woman with curly hair and two children pulling in opposite directions. By the time they’d got out of the way he was gone again. Oh well, I thought. I’ll see him when we go back to our seats again. I got my drink just as the band started to play. I hurried back to our seats along the uneven blue carpet with the strip of lights running alongside it.

  The second half began with acrobats crawling in and out of various tunnels and holes, disappearing in one place only to reappear a moment later somewhere else entirely.

  The audience was even more enthusiastic now, roaring with laughter at everything in the ring.

  At one point one of the acrobats came very close to me. He was wearing a false mustache and glasses, but I could still see that it was Mr. Magic Bobbi behind the disguise. In fact, all the acrobats looked a lot like Mr. Magic Bobbi. I tried to work out how many of them there were and concluded that—purely theoretically—it would be possible for him to be playing all of them, if he moved fast enough between the holes and switched hats and mustaches when no one could see. When the act was over the ringmaster came back in, and it struck me that he looked a lot like Mr. Magic Bobbi as well. On reflection, all the performers bore a striking resemblance to one another. Even the rather butch trapeze artist at the start.

  * * *

  —

  I sat through the whole of the second act, waiting for Magnus. I had trouble concentrating on the circus. The finale was a sailor—definitely Mr. Magic Bobbi—singing “New York, New York” through the tinny red microphone. It was unbearable. But I still thought it was odd that Magnus hadn’t come back. Didn’t he want to see the other acts?

  When the show was over and everyone left, I lingered to see if Magnus would appear among the benches. Perhaps he’d found something interesting at the back or had got talking to a member of the staff. Unless he’d got fed up and gone home? I stood around for a while, but eventually I started to feel silly so I left. On my way out I saw some security guards laughing. I couldn’t help thinking they were laughing at me.

  * * *

  —

  When I got home I kicked my shoes off so hard that they hit the wall. I screwed up the circus program and stuffed it in the bin, swore to myself, and went and lay on my bed with my clothes on.

  I wasn’t going to call Magnus Gabrielsson to ask where he’d got to. I thought it was very rude of him to disappear like that, especially when we’d arranged to go somewhere together. And it annoyed me that whenever we met I was always the one who ended up having to take care of him. Because that’s exactly how it was. I always ended up helping Magnus Gabrielsson. The very first time we ever met I had to help him up, brush the leaves off him, and carry his ugly old rucksack all the way home.

  I woke up early the next morning to the sound of rain pattering against the windows and the feeling that something wasn’t right. I lay in bed for a while trying to remember if I’d had any strange dreams. Then I got up and phoned Magnus Gabrielsson. The line was busy. Which meant that at least he was home, I thought. But the same thing happened when I tried again an hour later, and an hour after that, so I started to wonder if it wasn’t a bit odd after all. He couldn’t still be on the phone, surely? Unless he’d left it off the hook?

  I ate a bowl of muesli and thought about the previous day’s visit to the circus. It was like trying to remember an unpleasant nightmare. Everything seemed just as peculiar today as it had the day before.

  When I finished eating I put the bowl in the sink and went back into the bedroom to call Magnus again. I got the busy signal again, but when I tried once more the call didn’t even connect. I stood in front of my records for a while, feeling stupid. I swapped Antony and the Johnsons and Joan As Police Woman around, then called Magnus’s number again.

  When there was still no answer I went out into the hall and put my shoes and coat on. I thought I might as well drop by Magnus’s flat. It must have been ten years since I was last there.

  I stepped out into the street and realized I should have taken an umbrella with me but couldn’t be bothered to go back up and get one, so I pulled my hood up and kept close to the buildings in an attempt to stay out of the rain as best I could.

  * * *

  —

  By the time I reached the door to Magnus’s building I was soaked through, and realized that even if I had been able to remember the code to get in, they would have changed it by now. I stood beneath the porch, which barely sheltered me from the rain, peered through the glass, and saw the list of residents a little way inside the hall. I thought I could make out the name Gabrielsson shown as living on the first floor. I stepped back out into the rain and looked up. There was no sign of life on the first floor.

  I stood there squinting through the rain until I felt the water slowly but surely soak through my jacket and sweater. I spotted a 7-Eleven a little way down the street and set off toward it at a run. There were a few plastic tables inside, as well as a counter and a couple of barstools from which you could get a good view of Magnus’s building. I bought a cup of scalding hot tea and sat down. I shrugged off my jacket and hung it over the radiator beneath the table. I was the only person there apart from the cashier, and I considered taking my sweater off as well and sitting in my shirtsleeves but decided against it. I wiped myself down with some paper napkins. It didn’t make much of a difference.

  “They’ve turned the taps on full today,” the cashier said, nodding toward my jacket.

  I smiled. The cashier clattered about behind the counter. There was a badly tuned radio playing one of those Bryan Adams ballads whose titles I took a certain pride in not being able to identify. I tried to concentrate on Magnus’s doorway, but the heavy rain was like a wall outside the window, which was getting more and more steamed up. After a while a figure appeared out of the rain. He rushed toward the shop door and shook himself like a wet dog when he came in. He looked at me, seeking an exchange of knowing glances about the terrible weather. I looked back toward Magnus’s door again.

  The cashier repeated the line about taps, and I wondered if he had only the one stock phrase.

  A woman holding a newspaper over her head was heading straight toward the window, presumably to get as close to the building as possible. It struck me it was probably the first time I’d ever seen anyone do that with a newspaper in real life. It felt like a thing they’d do in—I don’t know—France, say. Suddenly she was standing in front of me and we looked at each other. It felt a bit uncomfortable, realizing that we were so close to each other, with just the pane of glass between us. I thought about turning away, then remembered I was supposed to be keeping an eye on Magnus’s door. I wasn’t the one behaving oddly. She was.

  We stayed like that for a moment, staring at each other, then I turned my attention back to Magnus’s building again. The heavy door was swinging shut on the other side of the street and I realized what I had just caught a glimpse of: someone had gone in through the door.

  I could have sworn it was Magnus.

  I considered running over, but couldn’t see any point. The door would still be closed. Whoever had gone inside would have van
ished into the stairwell by the time I got there. I needed to keep a closer eye on people heading toward the building if I was to catch someone who could let me in. I stirred the hot tea with a plastic spoon.

  The new customer came over to my table with his mug of coffee. He stopped so close that I realized he was going to say something to me. The moment he put his cup down on the table a light went on in one of the rooms on the first floor.

  “Did it catch you by surprise?” the man beside me asked, nodding out at the rain.

  I looked up at him, wondering what he meant. He gestured toward my wet clothes. I nodded and pointed at my jacket on the radiator under the table as I pondered asking if I could borrow the man’s mobile to try Magnus again.

  “Smart,” the man with the coffee said.

  “Yes,” I said, and leaned over to feel my jacket. It had dried a little, and had a damp warmth, like clothes in a dryer before they’re quite done. It felt nice now, but I knew it would be cold again the moment I put it on. When I sat back up the light in the flat had gone out.

  “Dry?”

  “No,” I said, pulling the jacket on anyway before running out of the shop and over to the door.

  I’d catch him on the way out.

  It was still impossible to shelter under the porch of the building, and gusts of wind kept blowing fresh sheets of rain into my face. I huddled against the door as hard as I could.

  No one came out, but after half an hour or so a woman appeared and let me in without any questions. She probably felt sorry for me when she saw how cold and wet I was, so I didn’t need any of the excuses I’d been making up to help pass the time.

  I squelched up the stairs and rang the doorbell. It sounded like someone was moving about inside the flat, but it was hard to tell because of the noise my wet clothes were making. A big puddle started to form around me. I tried to stand completely still and hold my breath so I could hear better, but there was no sound at all now. Maybe I’d imagined it. I nudged the letter box open.

  “Magnus?” I called. “Is that you?”

  It sounded stupid. The sort of thing someone would say in a film. So I didn’t bother shouting again, and knocked instead. No answer.

  After five minutes I walked slowly back down the stairs and stopped in the entrance hall. It was still raining just as hard, and I decided to wait until the weather eased.

  * * *

  —

  While I was standing there, leaning against the wall and looking out at the downpour through the glass, I caught sight of Jallo. He was walking along the other side of the street without a coat, and made a sudden dash across the road. Just before he reached the pavement it occurred to me that he might get a fright if he saw me standing perfectly still in the gloomy hall.

  Sure enough he came to an abrupt halt when he caught sight of me. He screwed up his eyes and squinted as if he couldn’t quite see if it really was me. He tapped on the glass and pointed at the door. I opened it for him.

  “Bloody hell,” he said, shaking off the worst of the water.

  He looked at me as if he was expecting me to say something.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  * * *

  —

  I first met Jallo at a camp we attended each summer between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. He was a little older than me and went to Berg School: a hyperactive hippie kid who had moved from Finland with his mother a few years earlier. We spent a few summers together at that place—there were horses and a garden and you could paint, all that sort of thing. For a long time I thought we were in love with the same girl, but I don’t remember us ever falling out about it. “People like us need to stick together,” he had said. By that he was probably referring to the fact that we both liked synthesizer music, and it was important we stuck together because things weren’t easy if you were into synth music back then. But I can’t say I ever heard him play any music, and he knew surprisingly little about the subject when we talked about it. Then again, it was always difficult to get much of a handle on him. Admittedly he was older than me, but he seemed even older than his years. He got on well with grown-ups and was occasionally allowed to help the staff, and he was able to talk in that grown-up way that sometimes made it hard to say if he was one of us or one of them.

  We only really started to spend more time together when we got to high school. After Dansson, he was the person I socialized with most—not that there was much competition. But I did genuinely enjoy his company.

  “I thought I’d look in on Magnus,” I said.

  “Magnus?” Jallo said and sighed.

  “Yes. What about you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “Do you want to do something?”

  * * *

  —

  Despite having been friends for so long, Jallo often annoyed me. He spoke in a drawl that made me feel restless and irritated at the same time. His clothes looked as if he’d made them himself and he used to go on personal development courses in Holland, coming home with rosy cheeks talking about the more important things in life. It often felt like he lived in a different reality and that rules and regulations didn’t apply to him the way they did to the rest of us. Everything seemed to be relative, conditional, as if it all could just as easily have been the other way around.

  He never bore grudges. He was bound to have forgotten our row about “real friends” already. Nothing ever seemed to bother him. He just brushed himself off and carried on. He regarded every setback as an exciting challenge, and was only interested in how to move on from any given situation. He could turn on a sixpence and go off in completely the opposite direction without slowing down at all, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Success didn’t seem to affect him either. Everything was just “exciting” or “cool,” and nothing was too insignificant not to warrant in-depth exploration. He could spend ages staring at you in silence, as if he was expecting something more. As if nothing was ever quite enough for him. As if there was always something he wanted to change.

  Magnus didn’t like Jallo. He said there was something weird about him. And of course there was. He always popped up just when you least expected it. He stood way too close. Didn’t have any of the usual inhibitions. Always asked question after question, trying to get under your skin. It was as if no answer was ever good enough for him. It didn’t matter what you said, he always followed up with another question.

  “Why are you in such a hurry?”

  “I don’t want to be late.”

  “What for?”

  “A class.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to miss the start.”

  “What difference would that make?”

  “I’d get a black mark.”

  “Why would that matter?”

  “It’s not a good idea to get black marks.”

  “Why not?”

  “Leave off!”

  Whenever you said something, he would nod, and you’d assume you’d reached some sort of agreement. Then he’d make a completely different decision instead. Maybe he was just shy or being polite, but it always made me feel a bit stupid. As if he always knew more than me in any given situation.

  Before he even graduated from high school he had developed an entrepreneurial spirit. He registered as self-employed and set up a phone line for people who “wanted to get things off their chest.”

  “This is the future,” he told me. “The service sector! The soft economy, human issues. Contact, interaction, interpersonal values. Industry,” he said with a snort. “Industry is so over, you know. There’s no future in stuff. No one wants more stuff. What society needs now is someone to take care of all the lost souls industry has left behind. You need to take care of your brand, construct your own style, your own way of dealing with other people, understanding and appreciati
ng them. That’s the future. Communication. You’re home and dry if you know how to communicate. But if you don’t, then…”

  Over the next few years self-employment became a private company, and the private company became a public limited company. These days he was renting office space to run some sort of clinic, as well as various other questionable activities. He had customers he called clients, but not so many that you couldn’t show up there pretty much whenever you felt like to drink coffee and talk rubbish while Jallo proudly showed off his latest purchases, notwithstanding his proclamations against “stuff.”

  “Take a look at this! Velvet!” he said, patting a couch he’d placed in the middle of the room.

  He had furnished the room with heavy red curtains, handwoven rugs, and big, annoying, garish pictures that didn’t seem to be of anything much, but which he was still very proud of. He always said the way things looked was vital.

  “It’s more important than you’d think,” he said. “People often pass judgment at first sight.”

  I don’t know what he did to the poor fools who went to see him, but they must have been happy since they kept going back.

  * * *

  —

  He had long hair, sometimes loose, sometimes in a ponytail. If you saw him out in the street you could easily think he was a dropout, a “resting” rock musician or some other unemployed hedonist who had been taking a few too many drugs, whereas he actually ran that clinic as well as a number of other businesses. He’d just applied to register a new form of therapy and was, if you believed what he said, “on his way to becoming a real player.” If he was on his way to an important meeting you might see him with a suit hanging off his lanky frame. But it was as if he didn’t care what other people thought when it came down to it. He did exactly what he liked, when he liked.