Tales From the Loop
Page 3
This was the rumor: a small boy lived in the house with his obese mother. The boy didn’t go to school and could neither read nor write. It was doubtful he could even speak. The father was in prison and that was probably just as well, because he was an infamous dirty old man. The mother was firmly rooted to the couch in front of the TV. She was so fat she couldn’t move, and she couldn’t be bothered to take care of the boy anymore. The poor thing had to fend for himself, and at dawn he prowled around, digging through the neighborhood’s garbage cans like a rat, looking for scraps of food. Now and then you could hear ecstatic whoops when he managed to bring down a boar or a deer. Supposedly he had speared visitors from social services on a few occasions, and had maybe looted a pizza delivery truck or two.
Anyway, the reason we sneaked around that godforsaken property was that we had heard he hid something amazing in the hen house. It was said he had a live dinosaur in there—a raptor he had raised since he found it in the fields behind the school, when it was still a nestling. Now it was grown and someone had seen it sneak around down by Sätuna, with the boy on its back!
One day, the lower parts of a body were discovered not far from that house, still dressed in a pair of jeans. It was found in a bank of snow, splattered with red. Nobody knew where the upper parts of the body were, but the assumption was that they were hidden in various fox dens across the area. How the victim had been killed was also unknown. Maybe it was a hit-and-run or a suicide. What was clear was that the body belonged to the boy’s father, evident from the wallet containing his ID, which was found in the back pocket of his jeans.
THE CYBERNETIC BISON BOAR
In the winter of 1990 there was a rumor that some animals had escaped from the laboratories at the FOA facility on Munsö. Some dark, big animals had been sighted in the woods around Sätuna on Färingsö, across from Munsö. They had probably crossed on the ice during the night. Everyone was excited and speculated wildly about escaped abominations. One day Little Tomas in 2B claimed he had seen the animals. He had encountered them in the stubble fields on the way to Kvarnbacken. We all stood in a circle around Tomas during our lunch break, asking questions: they had looked like boars, but were the size of bulls; they had glowing green eyes, and weird antenna things on their heads. Little Tomas had not been afraid, because he was good with animals. He had pitied them a little, because they had to walk around with those antennas on their heads.
There were no more sightings of the escaped animals, but all through that winter we found, much to our excitement, plenty of tracks we couldn’t explain, right up until the flowers bloomed in the meadows.
HOTEL ÅKERFELDT
Göholmen is a small island off the northern part of Svartsjölandet. Närke-Väst Energi AB had built an experimental power plant for wireless transmission of electricity on this small, forgotten piece of land in the ’60s, with grants from the government. They tried to create a stable and economically viable transmission of electricity from the Bona reactor to the station on Göholmen. The results were meager by the end of the ’80s, but the operational costs of the experiments were relatively low so the grant was continued. The caretaker and only permanent resident of the island was Axel Åkerfeldt, a malformed, ancient scarecrow of a man who lived in a 28-square-meter shed next to the station.
We used to make our way out there, across the ice, in the winters. On the island, you had to fight your way through deep snow and across the properties of summer houses. When you arrived at the station your toes ached from the cold and your wrists were chafed from the edges of your gloves, but Axel’s hot chocolate and biscuits were worth every hardship. “Hotel Åkerfeldt,” as Axel called it, was open until November 1994, when an exploding vacuum tube ended the caretaker’s life. Shortly thereafter the station was torn down.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF GÖRAN FRISKE
The Friske Wheel always looked funny, squeezed in between a Volvo and a Saab on the road into town. Göran started acting oddly after the tragedy with his daughter Connie. I remember the uncomfortable mood when he entered the stage at Folkets Park one late summer night in 1993, the year after Connie’s death. He was dead-drunk and bellowed old prog rock songs. When people tried to get him off the stage, he screamed, “I killed my own daughter! And Ragnar!”
That’s actually my first memory of someone being drunk.
A few months later he simply disappeared. Soon the Friske Wheel was found, crashed in a ditch down by Ilända. The door was open and an empty whiskey bottle was found in the cockpit. Betty Friske never heard from her husband again. Everybody assumed he had left the country or gone and drowned himself in Västerholmsviken. Betty soon married Lennart Ek, whom she had been having an affair with for a long time anyway.
A few years later I experienced something very strange. I dated Cindy Friske, Göran’s youngest daughter, for a while in high school. One day she showed me something very macabre. Under the bed, she kept a package that had been delivered to her a year after her father’s disappearance. She removed a large glass jar from the box:
PONTUS’S KATA
There was a hole in the fence behind the factories in Lunda that led to a place where reeds grew straight out of the asphalt and the air smelled of nettles. We used to sneak in there and look for old stuff, like furniture, a vacuum cleaner, or maybe even a computer. We would regularly find things of a more exotic nature; magnetrine discs, echo spheres, and hydraulic arms. The highlight was the pit filled with discarded androids. There seemed to be a remnant of electricity running through their circuits, because they focused their eyes on whatever you held up in front of their faces.
Once we took Pontus there and he went wild when we showed him the androids. With great effort, he managed to drag one of them out of the pit and propped it up against a wall. Then he began some sort of karate display. He landed a few kicks but it looked like he mostly hurt himself so instead he embraced the android, started thrusting his hips at it, and shouted:
“Onegaishimasu, baby!”
I don’t know if those kicks had hit a switch or something because mid-thrust the android suddenly locked its arms and legs around Pontus, and he howled in pain. Olof and I had to pull and kick at the thing for several minutes before it relented. All ended well; Pontus gave us his Golden Axe in exchange for us not talking about the thrusting incident at school.
THE METAL DETECTOR
The Gödel pulses. (That’s Gödel with a G as in Gladys, not George.) That’s what the disturbances that occurred as a side effect of the experiments in the Loop were called. Usually you only noticed the kitchen lamp or TV screen flickering for a brief moment, but occasionally the effects were more tangible. Fuses blew, cars refused to start, and light bulbs shattered. Sometimes you felt the ground vibrate and your ears pop. I remember a frightening episode when I was around six, when suddenly the voices of everyone around me sounded really deep. Probably just a Gödel pulse according to my father, who was walking around pulling at his nose. I suppose he was trying to equalize the pressure.
Every family in the area had been issued a small blue pamphlet from Riksenergi that contained information about how the neighbors of the Loop might be affected. The Gödel pulses had a separate chapter where the side effects were listed and described very pedagogically. The last page contained safety instructions that could be removed from the pamphlet. At our house, that was up on the refrigerator door.
One weekend we had a metal detector in the house. My father had borrowed it from work. I remember it well; I ran around with that device, all euphoric, trying to detect coins, nails, and old toys that were scattered throughout the garden. It started screeching horribly when my father was about to try it out, and I was terrified of having damaged it somehow. My father looked annoyed and tried to make the device stop howling, but soon he stopped. “Listen,” he said. The screeching rose and fell slowly. It sounded eerie. I remember that moment so clearly. My father stood perfectly still and listened intently to the noise, me right next to him—equally focuse
d, if not more—eagerly trying to discern my father’s mood and where it was all going.
Then the noise stopped. My father glanced at his wristwatch and said,
“Gödel pulse!”
My father claimed he had needed the metal detector to find a lost set of keys, but a few days earlier I had accidentally witnessed him as he angrily tore his wedding ring off his finger and threw it out in the rye field behind the house.
REGARDING THE EXTINCTION OF DINOSAURS
After an awkward weekend up in the mountains with my father, I returned to Svartsjölandet knowing that I would soon have the honor of being a child of divorce. If I look at my memories from the side, that weekend is a black line, like the dark boundary in the rock layers left by the disaster that killed all the dinosaurs.
I was drawn to other children of divorce after that weekend. We went for long walks, staring at the ground in front of our feet. A new and dark inner landscape had opened up, and we wanted nothing more than to talk about it. We abdicated from childhood, tried to learn how to talk as adults, and shamefully glanced back at our playgrounds.
FINAL WORDS
The Loop was finally decommissioned on November 5, 1994. By then we all had acne. Society was changing; it was obvious to everyone. The yellow cars from the Loop disappeared from the roads. Government-owned companies became privately owned and changed names. We did not grieve these changes when they occurred; we were fully occupied with our greasy skin and breaking voices.
Playtime was replaced, piece by piece, with computers. Soon we spent almost all our free time in the glow of a monitor. But at least once a day each of us was thrown outside by an agitated mother (nearly all our fathers were remarried and had moved away by this time), and then we returned to our old playgrounds like zombies around a mall. We sat wedged into the swings outside the school, or crouched in someone’s old treehouse, smoking stolen cigarettes.
We walked in long lines through winter nights, and you could see little points of light go on and off in the darkness—cigarettes smoked by teenagers who had gathered around their wrecked memories, like a requiem.
We made our nights our days, squinted at the horizon, and sighed. Way over there, the morning dawned.
In this English edition, I would like to take the opportunity to express my gratitude for the enormous show of support from people all over the world. Over the past few years, I have received enough warmth and well-wishes to last a lifetime.
A whole new chapter has begun with the fantastic support that Free League Publishing and I received for this Kickstarter campaign. This would not have been possible without all of you contributors to the project, and I would never have believed your response would be so overwhelmingly positive. There are no words that adequately describe my gratitude—because apart from the purely financial support, you give me enormous inspiration and energy to continue exploring the strange world of the Loop and to capture all those fleeting memories from a time that never was.
Apart from Free League Publishing and their fantastic efforts in bringing this book to life, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the following people: Josefin and Ola, my mother and father and my wonderful siblings, all my childhood friends from Mälaröarna (who helped create all those memories), everyone on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook who has supported me and shared my images (I won’t forget you @maettig for the idea about the Fire watchers), and all the creators of the photographs, poems, movies, books, paintings, sculptures, models, music pieces, tutorials, video games, role-playing games, Lego builds, buildings, songs and video clips, etc. that have inspired me and been invaluable during my process.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 Simon Stålenhag and Free League Publishing
Originally published in Sweden in 2016 by Fria Ligan AB
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Kickstarter Edition Credits
Illustration & Text—Simon Stålenhag
Editor—Nils Karlén
Graphic Design—Christian Granath
Project Manager—Tomas Härenstram
Color Adjustment & Prepress—Dan Algstrand
Translation—Martin Dunelind
Proofreading—Rebecca Judd, T.R. Knight
Initiator—Magnus Lekberg
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-9821-5069-3
ISBN 978-1-9821-5070-9 (ebook)