Georg stood up as well. He adjusted his glasses and took the chance to brush an invisible hair from his eyebrow. The woman smelled faintly of some fresh, cool perfume, and she had a small brooch on the lapel of her jacket, a flower or wreath of some sort. I wondered if it meant anything or was simply supposed to be attractive. She sat down on the chair next to Georg without leaning back in it, put a file on her lap, and glanced at the papers Georg was leafing through. Now and then the corner of her mouth twitched in an extremely professional smile.
“Yes…” Georg said. “It’s a good life.”
“Yes, it is.”
The pair of them looked up at me, rather surprised, as if they hadn’t been expecting an answer. Georg quickly went back to looking through his papers, and the woman with the bank name looked at hers.
“It’s going to be an awful lot of money,” he said.
“Yes, I suppose you…” I began again, before I realized that he was addressing her the whole time. This was a conversation between the two of them. Clearly they were going to discuss the material before I was given the opportunity to comment on anything.
The woman with the bank name nodded and smiled again. Slightly indulgently this time. Then she turned back to Georg.
“Who compiled the summary?”
“Someone called Maud,” Georg said.
“Maud?”
“Yes, it says Maud Andersson here, must be someone down on the second floor…”
The woman with the bank name ran her pen along the lines of Maud’s report and worked her way through column after column, reading quickly in a fairly low voice.
“Okay, a clean sweep of H.C.s across the board, high E.H. points since the age of twelve, no empathy inhibitors. Parents both deceased, no family of his own, but regular experience quotient from comparable relationships. No setbacks noted since last December. Zero poverty rating. Top score on the emotional quotient…A number of good friendships over the years, all high engagement. Also an uncle—full marks as a role model. The child’s response regarding the subject is fully emotional. Reliable, but with no great responsibilities…Strong emotional attachments without any pressure to achieve.”
She moved on through the file, still pointing with her pen.
“Besides the welfare premium, whiteness premium, male premium, there’s also…let’s see…No problems sleeping. Workplace compatibility one hundred percent. One old friend—Roger—who visits regularly, but no social obligations. In other words, nothing but positive attributes…”
I realized that none of this was really meant for my ears, but somehow it was rather wonderful to hear my life described that way. Almost impressive. I thought it sounded as if Maud had summarized my life in an extremely elegant way, and I couldn’t help noticing that Georg raised his eyebrows a few times.
The woman with the bank name sat there straight-backed throughout in a way that I thought must be uncomfortable, but presumably she was used to it because she didn’t look at all troubled.
She had quite a small face, which made her eyes look disproportionately large behind a pair of glasses with heavy black frames. She might not have been conventionally beautiful, but there was something about her that commanded respect, which itself could probably be regarded as attractive, I reasoned. And if her lips had been filled, there was no denying that it was a very good job.
“Art? Culture?” Georg muttered.
“High musical receptiveness,” she went on, reading out loud from Maud’s report. “Responds positively. Affected by stimuli of the simplest harmonic variety.”
“Payment capacity?” Georg said, and the woman leafed through her papers and pulled out another sheet.
“According to the report, extremely low, no private wealth, although no home inventory has been carried out…yet…even if the respondent declares that he has…let’s see…‘instruments.’ ”
She put a hand to her mouth as she cleared her throat. Or suppressed a giggle.
“And a small collection of science-fiction literature. Value unknown.”
Georg turned to me at last.
“Well, then…And you haven’t made any payments?”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see the woman with the bank name glancing at the report, evidently unable to resist shaking her head. That could have annoyed me, but I was still too astonished that Maud knew so much about me and had summarized it so nicely in that document.
“Er, no…” I said.
He frowned and hummed to himself as he carried on looking through his papers.
“It’s fairly unusual for people with similar scores to you not to have any money,” he finally said. “Your category mostly consists of people with relatively large assets. Some, of course, were born with a silver spoon in their mouths, which is also one reason why their scores are so high—it all forms part of the same picture, so to speak. But even if they weren’t born rich, their Experienced Happiness often gives them a certain excess of energy, if I can put it like that. This is usually reflected in financial gain. But with you…the situation seems rather different…”
“Yes,” I said, and laughed, holding out my hands.
Georg fixed his eyes on me.
“You do understand how much money we’re talking about here?” he said.
I slowly shook my head and blew some air out of my mouth.
“Not really…” I said, and laughed again.
Georg didn’t look remotely amused. The woman with the bank name pulled out one of the documents and inspected it more closely.
“You owe 5,700,150 kronor,” Georg went on. “The interest alone will swallow up everything you could ever earn. Where do you work?”
I stretched and tried to adopt a confidence-inspiring expression, but the situation was somehow too absurd to really take in.
“At the moment I’m working part time at…Jugge’s Flicks.”
“Jugge’s?” Georg said, and both I and the woman nodded. He looked at me skeptically, then turned toward her again.
“We’ll have to arrange a home inventory as soon as possible,” he said.
But she didn’t respond. She was fully absorbed in something in the file. She leafed back and forth, comparing different sheets. She made a note of something. In the absence of any response he turned back to me. He put down his pen, sighed, and rubbed his eyes.
“How on earth could you have failed to notice you had to pay?” he said. “You don’t live in the middle of a forest, do you?”
“No,” I chuckled.
“It can be extremely hard to reach people living in isolated shacks,” he went on seriously. “People in the desert or up in the mountains who don’t have any direct contact with the outside world. Obviously that doesn’t happen too often in our department, but you can imagine…”
I nodded.
“The information has to be gathered somehow.”
“Of course,” I said.
He ran a hand through his hair, squinted, and looked at me carefully as if he thought I was some sort of interesting aberration.
“Do you have a television?” he asked.
I nodded.
“So how could you…?”
He held up a hand and counted on his fingers.
“Our information campaign, all the discussions…the whole debate.”
“I really don’t watch much television,” I said.
“Really?” he said.
“I mean, it’s not as if I’ve got anything against television,” I said. “Quite the opposite.”
I thought about how easily I got distracted by practically any program. No matter what it was about. I got drawn in and fascinated by pretty much any moving pictures. The most obscure little broadcast, the most niche interest, could capture my attention and carry me off to other worlds—the more out of the ordinary, the more interesting I found it.
“Still, I think I ought to clarify…” I went on. “I mean, I really do think, if you make a proper comparison…I think I should point out�
��”
Even though I was trying, I couldn’t really come up with a good way to finish the sentence.
“Hmm,” Georg said wearily, looking at me. “You’re questioning our calculations?”
“Well, I just think…er, I don’t know.”
He waited to see if I had anything else to add. When nothing appeared he leaned back in his chair, crossed one leg over the other, and said in an authoritative voice, “Our calculations have been developed and refined over many, many years. This is an incredibly complex science, as I hope you can appreciate. This isn’t just any old felicific calculus, you know.”
He smiled faintly.
“Obviously it has its roots in Bentham’s early theories, or, if you prefer, Pietro Verri…”
He laughed again. This was obviously highly amusing.
“But in recent years we have developed a much more finely calibrated set of tools. Of course, we have access to a vast amount of information. Obviously this is all more than a mere mortal can hope to gain an overview of, but the program deals with the constituent parts in an extremely sensitive way, and, when taken in context, each aspect can be calculated with a good degree of accuracy. For instance, we use both cardinal and ordinal measures.”
He brought his fingertips together.
“Instruments of this complexity give us the possibility to evaluate each individual’s results. So when the main decision about international redistribution was taken…”
He held out one hand.
“…well, we were all ready to get going.”
I nodded as if I understood. As if I had even the slightest idea of who these men were and what their theories meant. Verri? Sounded like a footballer. Georg gathered his papers together and looked at the time.
“You’ll have to stick around for the next few days and wait for the investigators,” he said, and made to stand up.
“Hold on a moment,” the woman with the bank name said. She pushed one file toward Georg.
“Take a look at this,” she went on, holding out another sheet of paper and placing it on top of the first. “It doesn’t match.”
She and Georg both inspected the figures one more time. Looking from file to file and comparing amounts. The tips of her fingers slid silently across the paper.
“Who did these calculations?” she asked.
“Well, it came from Twelve, so it must have been the economists in…”
Georg started to look for a signature on the sheet of calculations as the woman talked, half to herself, half to Georg.
“Look at this, here…”
She pointed at one column, then moved her hand to another sheet of paper.
“And then compare it with this…”
They both hunched over the documents. I felt like taking a look as well, but thought it probably best to stay where I was. I had a feeling I wouldn’t understand much of those numbers and diagrams anyway.
Georg ran a hand through his thin, tinted hair. The woman suddenly got to her feet and hurried out to the reception desk. She came back with a calculator and apologized.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, “but there seems to have been some mistake here.”
“No problem,” I said. “I’m not in any hurry.”
Georg took the calculator and tapped in some numbers.
“This isn’t right at all,” he muttered. They stared at each other.
I felt some of the pressure in my chest ease and my shoulders slowly began to relax. On some level I had always suspected that things couldn’t really be as bad as all that. The amount was obviously far too high for it to have anything to do with me. With a bit of luck everything was going to get sorted out now.
“See here,” she whispered. “They’ve added those two numbers to that one. That’s why…”
She looked up at me and smiled again. Her face looked tenser now, making her smile look stiffer, more like a grimace.
“We really are terribly sorry,” she said.
She put the pen down and tapped at the calculator.
“There’s been a mistake…a miscalculation. The amount you need to pay isn’t 5,700,000 kronor. It’s…”
They both stared at the calculator.
“…10,480,000 kronor.”
When I got back to the apartment everything seemed to have taken on a different tone. The whole place had changed. Everything suddenly looked colorless. It was as if I could see how cheap and simple it was for the first time. Shabby. I saw the empty pizza boxes sticking out of a paper bag, waiting to be taken out to the bin. The dirty dishes in the sink, the sun-bleached curtains, the sagging sofa.
The worn old thresholds I walked over day after day. The dust on the floor, table, and windowsills. The old, washed-out clothes scattered all over the place. But also the things I liked best of all: my flat-screen computer, the shelves of films, the games, the rug with the Heinz logo. The Beatles mug. My Asimov collection. The M. C. Escher poster, of that waterfall that seems to be flowing upward, and which I had been saying was my favorite picture for several years. Now it just looked banal. Clichéd and ordinary. The old mirrored picture with the Coca-Cola logo, which, admittedly, had felt old and ridiculous for years, but nonetheless held so many memories. Sketchpads and pens. Some paintbrushes. My guitars. The Indian statues Sunita had given me. The big bookcase full of vinyl records and magazines. The CD collection. The boxes of neatly arranged cassette tapes. The things that had been my most cherished possessions. Now the whole lot felt dead. Lifeless. Why had I kept all this stuff?
A menu for the Thai restaurant was stuck to the fridge door, with one from the pizzeria on the freezer. There were circles round the Calzone Special and Pompeii. My favorites. The two I could never choose between, before I always ended up ordering the Calzone. The same calendar I always bought, the one I felt comfortable with, was hanging from the inside of the open kitchen cupboard, completely blank. I felt like bursting into tears.
The next day it was my turn to be back in the shop. It was fairly quiet. The tape in the kitchen had come loose and the door of the cupboard under the sink was hanging half-open as usual. I fiddled with it for a while until I got it to stick again, even though I knew it wouldn’t last long. I made some coffee in the scorched jug as the peculiar events of the past few days buzzed round my head. It was difficult to make any sense of things. The astronomical amount of money, the strange way they talked at W.R.D., I wasn’t used to that sort of thing. I couldn’t help thinking that I really didn’t want anything to change at all. Then I found myself thinking about the Internet and changed my mind. Obviously there were some changes that were good and some bad. But I realized it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. Dynamite, for instance: Was that good or bad? I stood by the shelf of documentaries and reflected upon good and bad changes through the ages. As I thought about which ones had to be counted as the biggest changes over the years, I realized that I had a tendency to rank more recent changes above older ones. For instance, industrialization above the invention of the wheel, or the telegraph above the shift to fixed human settlements. I ranked my personal three favorite changes in the Western world during the past three centuries, and suddenly I was standing there with the BBC’s documentary about the suffragettes’ struggle for women’s votes in my hand. Then I came across a film called Iron Jawed Angels. It looked good. I must remember to watch it. And Tom Baker would soon be releasing a new film called The Voice, which had to be about Frank Sinatra, I thought. Unless it was about Ella Fitzgerald? Perhaps it was about that talent show? Then I came up with a new way of puffing out my cheeks and amused myself with that for a while.
After that I found the remains of an old sticker that someone had stuck to the side of the counter, now just fragments that it was quite fun to pick off with my thumb and forefinger. Twenty minutes or so later, I’d almost managed to get rid of it all.
I called and ordered Thai takeout, and just after lunch a red-haired girl came in with a whole bundle of films she was returning la
te. She was in a bad mood, and thought we should have sent a reminder. I said we usually did just that, but she shook her head and said she hadn’t received one.
“Well, that sort of thing happens sometimes,” I said. “There might be something wrong with the computer…”
We agreed to drop the fine for late return, seeing as there had obviously been a problem with the reminder, and she looked a bit happier when she left.
I wondered if she’d received a huge bill from W.R.D. as well. I reasoned that we should probably try to keep each other’s mood up as best we could. Set a good example to each other. Eventually things would slip back into some sort of everyday routine again. Somehow it felt slightly reassuring to know that we were all in the same boat. She was pretty when she smiled, I thought. Freckles can be very attractive.
A bit later that afternoon I stuck an old video into the little television with a built-in VHS player behind the counter, and had time to watch the first half of Blade Runner before finishing for the day. As I shut and locked the shop I remembered that I had been planning to change the background on my phone again, but hadn’t got round to it. Oh well, I thought. That’s something else I can still do.
On the way home I walked past one of those big advertising hoardings. “Give or take,” it said in big blue letters. For the first time I noticed the name of the advertiser, their logo printed in the right-hand corner. Letters that were so wide and stylized that they didn’t really look like text. Three cubes with just tiny differences to indicate the separate letters. The first was a very solid crown, and the other two like boxes with lines and dots on them. Only if you looked closely and, like me, had spent a lot of time over the past few days in the company of that acronym could you make out the letters W, R, and D.
I got home just before seven, and had started leafing through the latest catalogue from an IT company when my phone buzzed in my pocket. For some reason I thought it was Maud, but when I answered I heard Roger’s breathless voice at the other end.
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