On the first night in the apartment, after Bengt helped me move in, I walked to the grocery store, bought my food, and returned to find that my electronic key wouldn’t unlock the front door to the building. The keypad would turn green when you held the key in place and the door would click, but the lock wouldn’t give. I lit a cigarette and waited for someone to come out. My street was just off a main artery, so I saw streams of traffic and city buses pouring by, but not a single car or person turned onto my street. I checked my phone, tried the key again, and smoked my cigarette. I waited. I’d only been standing there for ten minutes, but waiting when you didn’t know how long the wait would be was almost unbearable.
Then three men turned down the street toward me. Two of them were wearing beanies and peacoats, and the one in the middle had on a big puffer jacket with his shaved head exposed. They were yelling to each other in what sounded like Arabic and gesticulating with their hands. Earlier in the day, lugging a box of my books from the bus, Bengt had told me to not stop for anyone who asked for directions at night. He’d been mugged at knifepoint in Folkets Park by two Middle Eastern guys who had pretended to be lost. I tried the key again. Again, it did not work.
The men approached. I lit another cigarette, not knowing what to do with my hands. I pulled out my phone and started pretending to check my messages, before realizing that pulling out an expensive phone was not a smart way to deter potential muggers.
“Hey! What are you doing?” the man with the puffer jacket called out in accented Swedish.
I drew hard on my cigarette. I put the grocery bags down in case I needed to use my hands. I was taller than them, but a fight would not go well.
“Are you locked out or something?” he said.
“The lock is broken,” I said in Swedish.
“Hold on.” The man in the puffer jacket pulled out his phone and made a call. Then he started yelling in Arabic. I heard a door open overhead. A man poked his head off the third-story balcony and yelled back in Arabic.
“My friend is coming,” the man with the puffer jacket said.
The man from the balcony—short, with a shaved head, sharp beard lines, and an expensive-looking white-collared shirt tucked into designer jeans—emerged from the elevator and opened the front door.
“Thank you,” I said to him. I held the door open for the three men.
“We’re not going in,” the man with the puffer jacket said.
“You just called to allow me in?” I continued in my unaccented but kind of weird Swedish.
“What were you going to do? Stand here all night?”
“How pleasant. Thank you.”
“It was nothing.” The man waved to his friend who had let me in, then walked away with the other two.
“Well? Come in,” the man said with a slight accent and a little impatience in his voice.
“Thank you.” I walked through the door he held open. “I just moved in, and the light turns green with the key, but I can’t open the door.”
I followed my new neighbor into the elevator, which was tiny in the way all Swedish apartment elevators are tiny, made to accommodate two or three people. The elevator itself had no door, but there were doors at every level that you could open once the elevator had come to a complete stop. When the elevator ascended, the empty fourth wall was exposed against the wall of the elevator shaft.
“I don’t know how long I would have waited if not for your help.” I wanted to say something small-talky instead of something overwrought, but while I could now carry on conversations in Swedish about literature and soccer, this we-just-met-and-we’re-not-really-going-to-say-anything talk was still difficult.
“It was so little.” The man looked at his phone.
A sign hanging on the elevator wall warned riders against bringing large garbage cans into the elevator, since, in such a tiny space, the garbage cans could catch on an edge of the exposed wall and force the elevator rider’s neck up against the back wall. The sign showed a stick figure with its neck broken by a trash can.
“I guess you better not bring trash cans in here.”
“No.” The neighbor was quiet.
“Have you lived here long?”
“Ten years.” He looked to be in his late twenties.
“Where are you from?” I asked, meaning where had he lived before this apartment.
The elevator stopped at the man’s floor. “Sweden,” he said, and walked off.
* * *
It was during those first six months in Malmö that I got my life together. I decided to not drink more than once a week, and for the most part I stuck to it, even if that one day a week still held more drinks than it should have. I didn’t take drugs. I thought about them, but I thought about them less than I had in Lund. I went for a run every weekday evening after school, ate healthier, and lost ten pounds. I got a little better at Swedish small talk. I learned how to say “Where did you live before?” In one of my emails to Anja, I asked if she would like to come visit. She explained that she had an exam coming up and couldn’t make it; she didn’t say that we should try another time. After that, the length between our messages grew even greater.
On Saturday nights, I’d go dancing at Grand or Moriskan with Bengt and the guys from class. Once every month or two, we’d go to one of the underground raves that you had to sign up for on private social media pages. You would prepay the cover charge and then receive a text at midnight with the address of the rave—usually an empty community center or warehouse in Sorgenfri. Sometimes on Fridays I’d meet internet dates for a drink that would either end in a polite hug or the kind of cautious sex you have when you’re tipsy enough to initiate it but sober enough to be conscious of all the things that can go wrong. On Sunday afternoons, I went on long walks around the city, west through the old city and the harbor, out east to the blue-collar blocks of Kirseberg, south through the Middle Eastern enclave of Möllevången (which was being gentrified) and down into Rosengård (which was not), back up past the Louvre-looking glass train station building at Triangeln, and up through the warehouses of Sorgenfri back to my apartment.
After that first night of stupid fear, I never felt that I was in danger. Despite its reputation, I knew from internet research that Malmö had fewer murders per capita than Portland or Seattle and similar crime rates to Stockholm. But, as I saw it, three factors led to the Swedish fear of Malmö. The first was that, in Stockholm, the immigrant housing projects were located miles outside the city, in satellite towns that could be forgotten or used for punch lines. In Malmö, the housing projects were just south of the city center; from my apartment, you could walk to Rosengård in thirty minutes. The second was that over one-third of Malmö residents were foreign-born, and crimes committed in Malmö by men with dark skin were more frightening than those committed in Stockholm by men with white skin. Walking around Malmö at night, I felt safer than I had walking around Lund at night, as dark-skinned men smoking cigarettes and arguing outside kiosks were less scary than bands of white college boys, drunkenly eager to perform for their friends. It had also not escaped my attention that the only crime I had witnessed in either city was my own assault of the Swedish boy outside the nation.
The third, and the most well-founded, reason that Swedes were afraid of Malmö was that it had a high rate of explosions. Along with the culture, literature, and rave scene, Malmö had an organized-crime scene. Every now and again, somebody from one syndicate would try to kill somebody from another syndicate, and it would be big news in all the papers. But these syndicates were pretty good about only killing one another. More frequently, grenades or small bombs would go off in unoccupied buildings in the middle of the night, damaging property but not people. The fitness store down the street from my apartment had been bombed in the early spring, damaging windows and mannequins, apparently as a message from someone wanting money. The next day, the owner and his brothers had hung a giant banner that read EASTER SALE, OUR PRICES ARE EXPLOSIVE!
Even wit
h all the sensational coverage in the news—every paper in the country would write about a Malmö crime, whereas the same incident in Gothenburg or Uppsala would only get regional coverage—the only crime that I’d heard of firsthand was Bengt’s mugging in the park. But Bengt, I later learned, had also been mugged in London, Berlin, and Stockholm.
“People like to mug me,” he explained at Moriskan one night. “I guess I just have that kind of face.”
* * *
My classes in Lund met just three times a week, and I spent my off days at the Malmö University Library. The library was on the top floor of a five-story wavy-glass building in the middle of downtown. It had high windows with a panoramic view of the city, from which you could see the bridge, the old city, the Central Station, the Turning Torso, and, just across the canal, the boat from the Noah’s Ark party.
At first I thought that it was the inspiring view that got me writing again, but I later realized that my inspiration might just have come from a lack of hangovers. Regardless, I started writing again in thirty-minute bursts that were short enough to keep me from hating my work but long enough to get coherent chunks of words onto the page. I soon completed the story I had long failed to write, about the immortal jellyfish and a teacher in his first semester sober, trying to balance sobriety with the affection he had for students who would soon leave. When it was done, I sent the story off to an editor at the Sun who had written me some encouraging rejection letters in the past. A few weeks later, she offered me $500 for it.
Sitting there in the Malmö Library, I read her email over and over, trying to record every little edge of the ecstasy so I could come back to it later. With every breath, I felt like a writer. I wanted someone to share my joy with—someone who would understand what it meant to be able to pay a month’s rent with fiction—but whom could I call? My mother was teaching at a meditation retreat all month, off the grid. I hadn’t been keeping up with my writer friends from grad school, and it seemed like kind of a dick move to write for the first time in a year to brag about being published. I could tell Stella, but with the time difference and her work schedule, it was usually hard to get her on the phone, and I didn’t want to email her the news. I could tell my Swedish friends, but they would never have heard of the magazine.
But at least I knew. That was something.
* * *
Without the longing for drugs—which, aside from short, unexpected pangs, had settled down—and the near-constant hangovers, which had been relegated to two days a week following my drinking night, I found that I could get through most days without feeling trapped by the confines of my room, the vastness of time before I went to sleep, or the loneliness that couldn’t be cured by other people. I was too busy for all that. I often woke up feeling kind of happy. Not jump-out-of-bed happy, but like I could open my eyes without groaning at the realization that my life was right where I had left it the night before. I would wake up and think, Today you have to shower, go to the store, make breakfast, pack a lunch, take the bus to Lund, go to class, take the bus back to Malmö, write in the library, study, go home, make dinner, go for a run, and then be back here in bed by midnight. Right back where I started but having accomplished one more day of life. There was no great excitement, but there was contentment. I rarely felt the need to escape my life or myself. It was the first time I could remember feeling this way.
* * *
One Sunday in late summer, I was headed down to the basement of my apartment building with a blue IKEA bag full of laundry in each hand. You saw these IKEA bags everywhere in Malmö: in the hands of Rom migrants gathering bottles and cans, Kurdish Swedish shop owners carrying tubs of garlic sauce to their kebab joints, and middle-class white Swedes riding the elevators down to their shared laundry rooms, avoiding eye contact with the neighbors they never talked to. It occurred to me, as I looked in the mirror of the tiny elevator, that I was starting to resemble one of those middle-class Swedes. I was twenty-nine years old. I had on leather boots and a red-and-black-checkered shirt tucked into jeans. And I was carrying laundry.
Back home, I’d always hated laundry, but in Malmö I came to love it. Swedish communal laundry rooms had sign-up sheets, which meant you had to schedule your time in advance and then stick to your schedule, as you might not secure another slot for a week or two. Going over your time was unforgivable. The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård had detailed this feature of Swedish life in My Struggle, which he had written while living in Malmö. Knausgård would forget his laundry in the machine, pissing off his neighbors to no end, and then rant against the tyrannical Swedish system of rules.
“Set an alarm!” I would yell at the book.
In the US, the communal laundry room offered freedom. You didn’t have to sign up. You could trot down whenever you wanted, laundry basket tucked under your arm, and always have the possibility of open machines. But there was no guarantee that you’d get a machine. Or that the previous user would empty his machine on time. You could spend a whole afternoon marching back and forth between apartment and laundry room without ever finding an open machine. In Sweden, there was less freedom. You did laundry on the day you signed up for it. But there was security. During your time slot, the machines would be yours. Everyone had an equal chance to wash their clothes, so long as they planned ahead.
My building was especially strict in enforcing the laundry schedule. Ever since some vagrants had been found squatting in the basement, the garbage rooms and laundry room could only be opened by electronic key. You scanned your key to sign up for laundry slots on an electronic board in the subterranean hallway, and your key would only open the laundry room during your slot. If you had the 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. slot, and you didn’t make it back to the laundry room until 5:10, you’d be locked out, left to hope the next washer could let you in to get your clothes.
I walked down the foul-smelling concrete hallway, which was lined with the garbage rooms of Sweden’s polynomial recycling system. When I reached the laundry room, a little winded from the weight of my IKEA bags, I found a distraught woman in a beige head scarf leaning against the door.
“I am so sorry,” she said in heavily accented Swedish. “I didn’t make it in time. I know the rules, but I just did not make it in time.”
“It’s okay, no harm,” I said, which was the Swedish equivalent that I used whenever I meant “no problem”—though I wasn’t entirely sure it meant “no problem.” Everyday expressions were still tricky.
I let the woman in and she quickly emptied the washing machines of her wet clothes.
“There’s no hurry. You may use the dryer—I’m not in need of it for another forty-five minutes. I don’t mind sharing the room.”
“No, no, no.” She waved her hand. “Thank you.”
“It would be pleasant to share.”
But she apologized again and hurried out with her arms full of clothes, probably so distressed by her lateness that she had forgot to bring her IKEA bags. Her distress, I thought, must have come from past laundry room scoldings that she’d received from our neighbors. Almost the only circumstance in which I saw Swedes regularly talking to strangers was when someone failed to follow the rules: to take a number in line, to refrain from using cell phones in the quiet car of the train, or to abide by the laundry schedule. White Swedes, particularly older white Swedes, might grow irritated at the volume of the bus passenger speaking Arabic into his cell phone, yet would never say anything unless a specific rule was being broken. But when that number wasn’t taken, that cell phone wasn’t turned off in the quiet car of the train, or that washing machine was still spinning at 5:01, all their anger at the changing world—at living in a city where one out of every three people was from a foreign country, at having to listen to conversations in languages they couldn’t understand, at being told that the jokes of their childhood were no longer funny—exploded in righteousness.
“This is the quiet car!” the old Swede would say, leaning in two inches from the Arab’s face. He
would point to the NO PHONES sign with an angry wave of the finger. “You may not talk on your phone here!”
Much as I felt bad for the woman who had to ask for my help to get her clothes back, I liked that the room was locked. I liked that neither she, nor anyone else, could come inside without my permission while I was doing my washing. I liked that she had to ask me to let her in. That I could put on my headphones and listen to podcasts without worrying about the sudden presence of another person saying hello, watching me, judging me. I liked that, in the laundry room, even Sunday-hungover and useless from my weekly night out, I was getting something done. In a few hours, the previously dirty laundry would be clean and ready to wear—there was no anxiety about it.
This evening, as I sorted the whites from the darks, I listened to a podcast in which a sportswriter was proposing that men’s tennis matches be shortened from five sets to three, because the length of the matches was daunting for the viewer.
“Even when you’re enjoying something,” he said, “you can’t wait for it to end.”
The sportswriter said that he had never once avoided a book because it was too short—never once gotten to the end of a book and wished it were longer. I tried to think of a book that I had wished were longer but found that even my favorite short books had been precisely the right length. I had enjoyed them, in part, because I knew they would soon be ending. When I was reading a good book, I couldn’t wait to get to the end—to be done with it, so that I could think about it and maybe write about it. But when I started writing about it, I was so anxious to get the words out of my brain and onto the page before I lost anything that it wasn’t enjoyment I felt but panic.
The same was true of relationships. I had only had the one serious relationship, with Alexandra, which now existed mostly in my memory as a blur of screaming, fucking, and crying. But besides that, all my monogamous relationships had been based on finitude. Back in high school, the only relationship I’d had was the summer before I was leaving for college. In college, a casual hookup turned into a short relationship once I knew I would be leaving town to move in with Stella and Zach. Part of me thought I fell for Anja because I knew she’d be leaving. In Hamburg, I’d been excited to see her. But I also couldn’t wait to leave. Now I missed her terribly. But if she came to visit, the same thing would probably happen. There would be that perfect moment when I woke up next to her, or when she was trying to tell a story but laughing so hard that she couldn’t get the words out, and I’d want to live inside that moment forever. But then the moment would end and she’d need something from me that I didn’t want to give, and I’d either feel bad about withholding it or feel dread at having to give the thing I didn’t want to give, and then I would, once again, wish to be alone.
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