*
I signaled to the bartender again and soon we had two new beers in front of us. Samuel hardly seemed to notice. He was in the midst of his description of the isopod parasite. He described how it likes to live in certain kinds of water and when a particular type of fish approaches it gets inside the fish’s mouth and eats up its tongue.
“Okay,” I said, checking over my shoulder to make sure no one was listening to our conversation.
“Neat, huh?”
“I don’t know.”
“It eats up the fish’s whole tongue.”
“Oh.”
“And then—do you know what the best part is?”
“Even better than eating up the tongue?”
“Mmhmm. When the tongue is gone the parasite turns around and its body takes the place of the tongue. The fish starts using the parasite as a tongue, for crushing up food and stuff. Pretty cool, huh?”
“I hardly even knew that fish have tongues,” I said.
“Me neither.”
We took a few sips of the beer, the glasses were foggy, the drunks mechanically hit the buttons that made the symbols on the screen spin round and round. The biker gang pointed at the darts game on the TV and seemed upset.
“Do you come here often?” Samuel asked.
“Pretty often. I live nearby.”
“Big place?”
“A one-bedroom.”
“Rent or own?”
“Rent stabilized.”
“Wow. Congratulations.”
“Thanks.”
*
Panther blows her nose and says that after upper secondary school she started the art school foundation course and Samuel studied political science at the university. We didn’t have as much contact for a few years. I hung out with people in art circles and Samuel was surrounded by a bunch of people who wanted to study international relations and get jobs at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and work for the UN and save the world and that had definitely been Samuel’s thing at school. I thought he would feel one hundred percent at home. Instead he pulled away from it. He took his exams and went to the required seminars, but in his free time he kept going on about how life is short and you have to fill up with new experiences so you won’t die unhappy. He sounded like a fifteen-year-old version of me. One night he called to ask if I wanted to go to Tumba with him to watch an innebandy game.
“Innebandy?” I said.
“Yes! It’s the final of a tournament called Capri-Sonne.”
“Do you know anyone who’s playing?”
“No.”
“So why would we—”
“Aw, come on. It’ll be fun. Something to remember!”
I said no. The same way I said no when he suggested we go to the Police Museum, take part in a medical study on insomnia at Karolinska, watch the horse races at Solvalla, or go to Hellasgården to try ice fishing.
“I’m a vegetarian,” I reminded him.
“So? We can throw the fish back. Come on. It will be fun. Live a little!”
And maybe in retrospect it sounds spontaneous and exciting. But it wasn’t. There was something desperate about the whole thing. Samuel actively tried to seek out new experiences, but he was completely incapable of enjoying anything. The more he talked about depositing things in his Experience Bank, the emptier he seemed. I remember feeling sorry for him. He seemed lonely. Especially when he texted me on the way home from the innebandy tournament in Tumba to say that two of the three matches had been “hella exciting.” Out of some sort of desperation and fear of . . . I don’t know what. Sorry, here I go again, I really don’t mean to. Can you grab me some toilet paper?
*
Then we sat there in silence. But it wasn’t uncomfortable silence, the kind that makes you want to overturn the bar and run for the door. We sat there, me thinking about the fish parasite, Samuel answering a text from Panther—the girl who had been with him at the party in Liljeholmen.
“Have you been friends for a long time?” I asked.
The question came perfectly naturally. It wasn’t like I had to think to come up with it. I was curious and I asked it, and Samuel replied that they had known each other since the end of compulsory school. They were in the same basketball league and later her family kicked her out because she didn’t want to live the same way they lived and then she stayed at his mom’s place for about six months.
“Where did you grow up?”
Again: the question just came out. I don’t know how or from where, but I sat there at the bar asking questions like I was some hot-shot TV journalist. Samuel told me about his childhood, that he and Panther were from the same neighborhood, an inner-city housing project.
“It was a nice place. Pretty mixed. There were homies and Swediots, alcoholics and pensioners. We liked it there. What about you?”
I told him briefly about my background, moving around Sweden, my childhood in Halmstad, my teen years in Gothenburg.
“Oh, I get it,” said Samuel.
“What?”
“Your dialect. I was having trouble placing it.”
He didn’t ask anything about my brother. He didn’t try to get to know me by digging for anything historical. And that was why we got to know each other. We gave each other time. Even though we didn’t talk the whole time, we knew on that first night at Spicy House that we belonged together. Erase that. Just put that we didn’t have to talk the whole time to know we were going to be best friends.
*
Panther collects herself, nods, and says that if anything came up repeatedly, it was Samuel’s concerns about his memory. He would jot down little notes in notebooks to remember his experiences. He was paranoid about never remembering faces. Sometimes I wondered if his memory was getting worse because he was working so hard to improve it. In the spring of 2007 he initiated Project Memory Phase. Has anyone mentioned it? It was a totally bizarre idea. His plan was to divide up the year in memory sections. When January started he put on a particular pair of jeans, a certain cologne, and a special cap. Then he wore those things every day for a whole month. Then came February and he switched to a different pair of pants, dabbed on a new kind of cologne, and wore a beret. And he also realized he could use sound, so he listened to nothing but Tupac, all February. Then came March and he put on a pair of chinos and a new kind of cologne and went with no hat and only listened to Bob Marley. Then came April and he did the same thing again, new pants, new cologne, new music, and an old-man hat on his head. He hoped that all this would make connections in his brain and life would feel longer somehow. But as so often happened with him, it was a better plan in theory than in reality. He had given up the whole project by summer. When I asked why, he said it wasn’t having the right effect. Instead of remembering his experiences, he remembered the music and the pants and the cologne. But his actual daily life as it went by, he was remembering even less of that. And when he told me this, it was a Sunday afternoon, we were waiting for the Metro at Mariatorget, we had just played basketball, our fingers were sore after all the dunking on the kid-high baskets, our fingertips were rough and smudged gray, and he shook his head and looked toward the train that was about to roll in, the rails crackling like a bonfire.
“I don’t know how you all do it.”
I assumed he was talking about memory and I told him that I had a shitty memory too.
“I hardly remember what I did last week,” I said.
Samuel looked at me, his face lighting up with a grateful smile.
“Really?”
Maybe it wasn’t completely true, but I said it to make him feel better, I felt sorry for him, he worked so hard to try to understand and control something that came perfectly naturally to so many people.
*
After three rounds it was last call and then last last call and we got the bill. I paid. Samuel hardly seemed to notice. But as we were standing on the square, about to say goodbye, he said:
“Thanks for the beer. Next time, it’s on me.”
“No problem,” I said, putting out my hand to say goodbye.
He took my hand, pulled it up toward his chest, and leaned in for a hug. I let him do it, I didn’t hug him back, but I didn’t shove him away either, I didn’t head-butt him, I hardly thought about how it would look to the people on the Stairmasters inside the twenty-four-hour gym. It would have been an unnecessary thought anyway, because the gym was empty, I noticed once we’d said goodbye and I was walking home.
*
Panther says that she would be happy to share her memories from the last day. Samuel and I talked to each other at quarter to eleven. I was the one who called. He picked up and said he was in the car but he would call back soon. We hung up and I thought: “in the car?” Whose car? And where is he going? And why did it sound like there was freaking elevator music in the background?
*
Nothing in particular happened on the second night, and not the third or fourth either. We met at different places (twice at Spicy House, once at a bar in Gamla Stan). We ordered drinks, we drank, we talked. About normal stuff. About the kind of things people talk about to seem not totally bizarre. But in the midst of all the regular stuff, unusual things would pop up. Like when Samuel suddenly asked if I had tried putting saffron on pears.
“It’s wicked good.”
Or when he told me about the kayak stand by Norrtull where you could borrow boats without being a member.
“Want to try it sometime?”
Or when he asked if I’d been north of the polar circle.
“No,” I replied. “Have you?”
“I went up to Jukkasjärvi a few years ago to check out the northern lights.”
“By yourself?”
“Mmhmm. But I was only there for one night. I stayed at a hostel and trudged through snow up to my thighs for several hours, on the hunt for the northern lights. But the sky was totally pitch black. Then I got it in my head that I had to do something to make them show up. I started making snowballs and I thought, if I hit the same tree with three snowballs in a row I’ll get to see the northern lights. It was harder than I thought. It took me like fifteen minutes to do it.”
“Did you see them?”
“No. The sky was just as black as it had been before. But on the way back to the hostel I got lost in the woods. Then I looked up at the sky and saw the light. It was a yellowish round circle in the middle of all that black. It looked incredibly alien, a lot more amazing than in pictures.”
“Nice.”
“But the next day the girl at the desk in the hostel said I had probably just seen the lights from the sports arena nearby.”
*
Panther says that when Samuel called back, it was a bit past eleven. I answered on my German phone, we agreed to call each other on Skype, we logged in and called. Samuel apologized for sounding so irritated when I first called, he thought it was his mom calling to talk money.
“The house?” I said.
“Mmhmm. That fucking house.”
“What’s going on?”
“Not much. Sitting in the waiting room at Huddinge hospital.”
“Everything all right?”
“Yeah. I’m here with Grandma. She’s trying to get her driver’s license back. She’s getting her vision checked right now. Then she’s going to drive in a simulator.”
“What are the chances she’ll succeed?”
“On what scale?”
“One to ten.”
“Minus twelve.”
*
One night we were talking names and Samuel said that his dad wanted him to be named Samuel because he had started to figure out the reaction a foreign name would get you from employers and landlords. His dad didn’t want his son to run into the same problems.
“What would your name have been otherwise?” I asked.
Samuel smiled and gave examples of names that required two throat-clearings, names that started with h-sounds deep down in his stomach, names that sounded like a sneeze or rhymed with two insults, and as we sat there at the bar talking names and drinking beer I heard myself saying that my brother had hated his name.
“Once he said that his greatest wish was for his name to be Patrik, and I teased him because I thought Patrik sounded so fucking lame.”
Samuel nodded, he didn’t ask any further questions, and in his silence I started telling him things about my brother. There was no logic to what I said, I just told him that my brother had always wanted a video-game console, but he had to settle for a Gameboy, and his favorite turtle had been Leonardo at first and Raphael later, and his turquoise pajama bottoms had a bad waistband and they were constantly crooked because he always hiked them up on one side, and once when we were eating chicken he said that it was good but it was too bad about all the cute little chickens who had to die so we could eat them up, and the whole family paused their forks and looked down at their plates but my brother kept happily eating and his hair wasn’t as kinky as mine and when he was little he teased me about my hair but when he was older he asked me if there was some way to make his hair kinkier and as revenge for his teasing I made up that bananas are good for kinking hair and he ate bananas nonstop until Mom noticed that the weekly fruit bill had sky-rocketed and I revealed my joke and once when it was New Year’s Eve and the city was rumbling with firecrackers my brother woke up and came rushing out of his room in his crooked pajama bottoms with two toy pistols, shouting that he had to shoot back. I sat there for an hour saying things I remembered but had never told anyone. Samuel listened and nodded and ordered more beer. He didn’t say: Is your brother the one who died? Or: How did it happen? He just sat there looking at me. And when he didn’t ask any probing questions it somehow made it easier to keep talking.
*
I said he had been twelve years old when it happened. And that we were relatively new to Stockholm.
“Mom had gotten a job in sales at a company that manufactured kitchen fans, my brother was with two friends and the big sister of one of the friends, they were going to go bowling, they were crossing a parking lot by Kungens Kurva, there was a lot of snow, they got run over side-on by a tanker truck, the friends survived, the sister too, but my brother died.”
Samuel looked at me. He didn’t tilt his head to the side. He didn’t look sorry for me.
“Did they catch him?”
“The driver? Mmhmm. There were witnesses and everything. But they let him go. He said he didn’t notice that he had run them over. He said he thought he had hit a shopping cart.”
I thought, here come the questions, he’s going to ask me how it felt and what happened to our family, if the divorce was because of my brother, if that was why Mom decided to quit her job and move back. But no. Instead he said:
“You’re lucky you have such an awesome memory.”
“Why?”
“Because it means you still have him. He’s not dead. He lives on. Thanks to you.”
We sat there in silence. When the bill came, we never split it. One of us covered it all. Sometimes it was him. Pretty often it was me.
*
Panther says that Samuel insisted on calling his grandma’s dementia “confusion.” He told her about all the things his family had done so she wouldn’t have to move out of her home. They printed out pieces of paper with clear instructions for how to turn the burglar alarm on and off. They put colorful sticky notes on the remote so she could remember how to change the channel. They bought a landline phone with buttons the size of sugar cubes because she always forgot to hang up the cordless phones and it made everyone worry when the busy signal beeped for over two hours, and someone had to hop in a taxi and go out to the house only to find her sound asleep in front of the TV. One time Samuel told me that he had called her home phone and when she answered the TV was so loud that she said “wait a second.” Then the TV went off and his grandma tried to continue her conversation with Samuel via the remote. I laughed when he told me that, and Samuel laughed too, but then he added:
<
br /> “It would be funny if it weren’t so fucking tragic.”
I never understood why he was so upset by his grandma’s illness. For me, aging was a natural part of life, you get old, you forget, you need other people to help you. But Samuel seemed to have a hard time accepting it.
*
One evening Panther stopped by. Or. First came Panther. And then her hair. And last, her perfume-slash-cigarette smell.
“Christ, what a lively bunch,” she said when she saw us sitting there in silence.
She was wearing a pair of army pants and a jacket with a purple peacock pattern that made her look like a drowned pom-pom (it was raining out—her jacket was dripping dark thready patterns on the floor). This time we said hi to each other. I thought, Panther? Why Panther? If there was any animal this person did not resemble, it was a panther. Drowned Turkish hamster, maybe. Kurdish marmot, definitely. Oversized Syrian meerkat, possibly. Stoned Persian peacock, yes, but only because of the jacket. Instead of asking why she was called Panther I asked what she wanted to drink and went to the bar to order.
*
Panther said that Samuel sat there in the waiting room at the hospital and told her that he had taken a bunch of nostalgic things from his grandma’s house. Photo albums and CDs, perfumes and Christmas cards and old clothes his grandfather had worn. All to try to bring back his grandma’s memories.
“Is it working?” I asked.
“Don’t know. It comes in waves. Sometimes she’s perfectly lucid. She sat there in the car humming along with the music and asked how Vandad was. Then three minutes later she thought I had kidnapped her. It’s so fucking bizarre.”
He said it in a gravelly voice. Then he cleared his throat.
“When she doesn’t recognize me I usually put on my grandpa’s old fur cap. That makes her cooperative. But you have to keep your distance because sometimes she wants to lean in for a kiss.”
As we spoke he stood up and walked around in the hallways, twice I heard him ask about a coffee machine, and then a nurse said he could find one “over there” and then he walked over and poured a cup. When I asked how Vandad was he was quiet for a few seconds before he responded.
Everything I Don't Remember Page 4