The Invoice

by Jonas Karlsson

  —

  As soon as I’d pulled myself together I called Maud again. At first I couldn’t get through to her. They said she was busy, and had therefore redirected her calls to reception. Did I want to leave a message?

  I said I needed to talk to her, and that it was urgent, and I must have sounded persistent and difficult and aggressive enough, because in the end they put me through anyway.

  “So, are you done with me now, then?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Have you got anything else sensational to report?”

  I yelled that this was completely unreasonable, and how the hell did they actually work things out? But Maud managed to stay calm and said that I was the one who had withheld information. I begged and pleaded and shouted in turn. I wondered how the business with Sunita could increase my debt when it ought to have done the reverse. For the first time she sounded tense and rather nervous. I realized that she was under pressure. Perhaps because of all the miscalculations and mistakes. She said I shouldn’t think I could judge things like this better than some of the country’s most prominent experts and psychiatrists and psychologists, the people who had developed the system.

  After a while I calmed down and felt stupid. After all, it wasn’t her fault that things were the way they were.

  “How serious is it?” I asked after a brief pause.

  “Well,” she said, and even though she was making a real effort to sound calm, I could tell that she was upset. “You should have told me about Sunita…”

  “I assumed you already knew—”

  She interrupted me before I could finish, and sounded very apologetic.

  “Of course, that was our fault,” she said. “I don’t understand how we could have missed such a…”

  “So what happens now?”

  “I don’t know. You’re now registered as a so-called 6:3, and I can tell you that you’ve already gone through the debt ceiling…”

  I got up from the floor, waving the next-of-kin form in my hand. I was breathing hard into the phone.

  “But…we were going to sort this out…”

  She didn’t let me finish.

  “That was before Sunita,” she said. “And from what you told us, that only raises the credit side.”

  “How can it do that?” I said. “It was one of the worst experiences of my life…”

  “The way you described it, you had a fantastic time.”

  I noticed that I was shouting again. “Until she was snatched away from me! We were forced to…well, separate, under extremely…extremely painful circumstances. How can that be counted as something positive?”

  She snapped back at me.

  “Come off it!” she hissed. “It’s pure Hollywood! How many people do you think…?”

  Her voice was almost trembling. She fell silent for a moment, as if to compose herself, but soon carried on.

  “How many people do you think experience anything like that? Ever? Anywhere?”

  She tried to revert to cooler, more formal vocabulary, but her tone of voice gave her away. “And you still had your self-esteem intact at the end. According to your declaration, you could have drawn the experience out…so to speak…even after the conclusion of the relationship involving physical contact.”

  She flared up again. Sounded properly angry for the first time. Almost as if she were lecturing me.

  “And you tried to make out that your life was more or less a waste of time? Well? Isn’t that what you did? Wasn’t that the whole point of your last phone call? I almost fell for it. You’re actually a perversely happy person!”

  I didn’t say anything at first. Then I mumbled something about unfair calculations and other more successful people around me, but Maud dismissed all my objections.

  “It’s not as simple as that. You understand that, surely? It’s impossible to make generalizations…It’s all about the combination…and your specific combination of experiences in life has turned out to be extremely happy.”

  “Fine! What about everyone else, then?” I exclaimed.

  For a moment there was total silence. It was like she was thinking hard.

  “You really don’t get it, do you?” she eventually said.

  “What?” I said.

  Quiet now. Almost a whisper.

  “People are extremely unhappy. Most people feel really bad! They’re in pain. They’re poor, sick, on medication, depressed, scared, worried about all sorts of things. They’re stressed and panicked, they feel guilty, suffer performance anxiety, have trouble sleeping, can’t concentrate, or they’re just bored, or constantly under pressure, or feel that they’re being treated badly. Deceived, unsuccessful, guilty—anything and everything. At most, the majority of people experience a few years of relative happiness in their childhood. That’s often when they build up their score. After that it’s pretty bleak.”

  She sighed, making the line crackle, and I thought I could hear her shake her head.

  “If only you knew,” she said.

  I sat down against the wall again. She took a deep breath and went on: “You see, we look at life as if it were a classically constructed play. The one with the most whistles and bells isn’t necessarily the best. Things have to happen in the right order too, otherwise there’s no point…”

  I realized I’d never heard Maud talk like this before. And I recognized that there was a sort of trust, an honesty between us that it would be hard to manage without now that these conversations were drawing to a natural conclusion. Because even if I was upset about the way things were, I really didn’t want anything else but to sit and talk to her on the phone. Talking about stuff. Listening to her voice. But I said nothing. I realized that it would hardly work in my favor.

  —

  I could hear her rustle some paper again. For the first time I suspected that she was doing it to make it sound as if she had more important things to be getting on with. Maybe she just did it when she couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “So…” she said after a pause. “That film, what was it called? I watched it.”

  She fell silent, but I couldn’t hear any paper rustling this time.

  “The Bridge?” I said. “You watched The Bridge?”

  She sighed. And once again that strange warm feeling spread through me. She had taken the time to get hold of a Bosnian film from the turn of the millennium for the simple reason that I had recommended it.

  “I rented it,” she said. “And that scene you talked about. The one in the café. It was, well, I don’t know how to put it…”

  “You rented The Bridge? How did you manage to get hold of it?”

  “I got hold of it, okay?!” she said irritably. “So I sat down and watched it. I waited for that scene, and it eventually came. But, well, there was none of that stuff you were going on about. It was just two people sitting there. In a café. So what? It was pretty boring. Terrible lighting.”

  “Oh, come on,” I began. “No, I don’t think that’s—”

  “Don’t you get it?” she said. “You’re the one who read all those looks and touches and everything into it,” she said. “They’re all in your head.”

  I stood up and went over to the window.

  “No, I don’t think…”

  She went on: “But I ought to have realized that by now. It’s typical of you. You think you’re discovering a whole load of things, but they aren’t really there. No wonder you got such a high E.H. score.”

  “But they touched each other,” I said. “You must have seen them touch each other!”

  “It’s all one single scene, no editing. The camera’s a long way away. The whole time. It was all done in one take. You can hardly see anything.”

  “Okay, but that’s what’s so…”

  “Sure, they put their arms next to each other, but that’s all there was to it.”

  I tried to find the right words.

  “Yeah, but you still understand…”

  “What is it you unde
rstand?” she said. “What?”

  “Their little fingers touch…”

  “Yes, but what is it you understand?”

  “You see how—”

  “What do you see? You could hardly even see their hands. What’s so special about it? Grainy and black-and-white and all in long shot. To me it was just an endlessly drawn-out scene where practically nothing happened.”

  “How can you say that?” I said. “It’s completely magical…”

  “It’s impossible to tell from that distance. If they’d filmed a bit closer, maybe, but it was just one single, drawn-out shot.”

  I really wanted to say something, but couldn’t get the words out.

  “No,” she said, and this time I’m sure I could hear her shake her head. “You filled in all those details for yourself.”

  “But all great art…” I began.

  “It’s brilliant that you can extract so much emotion from that scene, but I have to look at it practically,” she said. “To me it was just unbearably dull.”

  The two of us said nothing for a long time. The only sound was the noise of her colleagues in the background. The next-of-kin form in my hand was damp and crumpled now.

  “If I could just watch that scene with you…” I said.

  “You won’t have time to watch anything,” she said. “They’re probably already on their way to you now.”

  “What? Who…?” I said. “What’s going on now?”

  She took a deep breath and began speaking in a low, confidential voice so that no one else in the office would hear her, as if she were telling me something I really shouldn’t know.

  “You’re about to be picked up by one of our teams—”

  “Picked up?” I exclaimed.

  “Shhh! Yes, what did you expect? You can’t possibly have further access under the circumstances.”

  I could definitely hear emotion in her voice now. Even though she was really trying to sound businesslike.

  “There’s nothing I can do as things stand…”

  I let the phone slip slowly down my cheek, until it hit my shoulder and fell to the floor. I heard her call my name from down there several times.

  Clouds were gathering outside. Big, lead-gray billows were rolling in over the rooftops. The sun passed behind them and soon there was a flash of lightning, like a momentary camera-flash lighting up the whole city. There was a thunderous rumble and the first heavy drops were in the air. Soon the rain was pattering on the windowsill and bouncing in onto the floor. I should have shut the windows, but I just sat there paralyzed, staring at the cloud of dancing droplets.

  What did she mean by “picked up”? What did no “further access” mean? In my mind’s eye I saw myself being segregated, with one of those cones you put on dogs, to stop me from absorbing any more experiences. Light, sound, birds, wind, all the things I liked, even rain and stormy weather. I tried to think of really dull days, but suddenly everything seemed so wonderful. I really did try to imagine a properly gray day, but without meaning to I found myself thinking of water gushing out of the bottom of a drainpipe. So wet. The water in general. The whole principle of water. What the air is like when it rains. Drops against my skin. Girls I’d seen out in the rain. The way their clothes stuck to their skin, and that film, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which Sunita had made me watch, and which I honestly hadn’t appreciated at all until afterward, in hindsight, when she was gone. When all I had left were the things she opened my eyes to. A whole load of things that I now loved. The measured pace of Rachmaninoff’s sonata for cello and piano, for instance. Bloody hell—there was no escape!

  I shook my head and tried to conjure up images of terrible monsters and horrible demons. I tried to make them as vicious and dangerous as possible, but no matter how hard I thought of tails and tongues and teeth, they never ended up as anything but colorful characters in a computer game. I looked round the room in an attempt to find something really grim, tragic, or at least depressing, but everything I could see felt secure and beautiful and held only happy associations. My beloved old sofa, my lovely cushions, the wonderful poster of M. C. Escher’s perfectly mathematical illusion. The damp, and the tiny drops of the liberating, oxygen-rich rain that occasionally reached the tops of my arms…I was still hopelessly happy.

  For the first time I was struck by the unsettling thought that the true value of my Experienced Happiness might have actually been seriously undervalued.

  Ten minutes later, when the men from W.R.D. knocked on the door, I was still sitting there, leaning against the wall in the same position. I had just thought of a summer some years ago when I’d borrowed Lena and Fredrik’s cottage. At first I felt a bit lonely, but as the days passed I felt more and more liberated. And weightless. In the end I stopped noticing the passage of time, and even forgot how old I was. I would cycle slowly down to the lake through warm, gentle summer rain, and I was all ages at the same time. I got to my feet and went to open the door.

  They said hello politely and waited for me to go to the toilet and get changed before we headed off to the vast granite complex, where we drove down into a large garage. We got out and went up in the lift to the same reception area where I had been twice before. Rain was lashing the big windows, sounding like hundreds of little drums.

  Georg met us at the desk. He nodded to the guards and indicated that they could go now. This time he had with him two very well-dressed foreign gentlemen who didn’t speak Swedish. He introduced them in English, and I was told that they were from the head office in Toronto and the Calgary subsidiary. They smiled at me and seemed pleasant enough. Neither of them said much. They mostly fiddled with their phones while we waited. I couldn’t help wondering what was going to happen.

  I held the next-of-kin form out to Georg, who looked at it with surprise and hesitantly took it.

  “Of course, yes, this…” he said slowly. “I don’t really know who…This is really just a trial, so far…”

  After a while another man came and got the two foreign men. Georg remained standing over by the desk and I sat down in an armchair while the others disappeared into the conference room with the noisy ventilation. He looked at my form for a while, then put it down on the desk beside him.

  “Well, then.” He sighed, and shook his head.

  He sat down in the chair next to me and gave me a sympathetic look. I realized I was sweating. I looked round to see if I could see any handcuffs, or a cage, or anything like that.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked in as relaxed a voice as possible.

  He shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not going to preempt anything, but it doesn’t look good. Not good at all…”

  Everyone who walked past looked completely normal and seemed preoccupied with their own concerns. No one looked at me oddly, so I assumed that only a small group there at W.R.D. knew about my situation and what was likely to happen to me.

  I was having trouble sitting still. I turned round and tried to look into the glass office where meetings were usually held, and where a large number of people were now leaning over something on the table. Some of them were gesticulating with their arms. It was like they were waiting for a particular signal, or perhaps another participant. I took a deep breath and tried to stop my hands from shaking on my lap.

  “Why me?” I asked Georg, almost in a whisper.

  He shrugged his shoulders. As if it was a question that couldn’t possibly be answered easily.

  “What about all the millionaires?”

  He smiled and ran his hand through the hair that may or may not have been dyed.

  “Believe me, we’re taking care of them as well. Most wealthy people will obviously receive a fairly hefty invoice. But it isn’t always so simple. To take just one example, let me tell you about…hmm, let’s call him Kjell.”

  He sat up in his chair and leaned toward me.

  “Kjell worked at a factory in Stegsta and lived a quiet life in all respects. He mostly kept to
himself. He did his job, saved some money, and was eventually offered the chance to buy some shares in Stegsta Ltd., which shot up in value shortly afterward. Two or three years later they were worth five times what Kjell had paid, and he sold the shares at an impressive profit. He ended up with a small fortune, which he looked after carefully, while still going to work as usual. Each year his capital grew in various funds and investment accounts. When I asked if he wasn’t thinking of doing something fun with the money, he always said he was planning to take early retirement and have his fun then. I couldn’t help thinking that if anyone had the strength of character to do that, it was Kjell. Sure enough, he retired at the age of fifty-five. The day after he left work he called and said triumphantly: ‘At last, I’m free!’

  “I didn’t hear from him for six months. There was nothing unusual about that. He wasn’t the sociable type and I assumed he was in the Bahamas or on some luxury cruise or whatever someone with plenty of time and money might come up with. But the next time he called he was in an acute psychiatric treatment center.

  “He had ended up having severe anxiety attacks. He was depressed, but not just feeling a bit low and thinking that life was a bit miserable. He was depressed in a way that didn’t mean finding new ways to think about things or to get going with his life again, or eating better and enjoying the little things, nothing like that. For him it was about whether he could be bothered to get out of bed in the morning. And not give up and put an end to it all. It was about deciding at each moment to go on living. Resisting the easy option for one more day, one more hour, one more minute. He said when it was at its worst, he just sat there breathing and looking at the time. Waiting for the relapse into darkness to pass.”

  Georg leaned back again.

  “The E.H. score he had gained because of his financial success fell away, like a cherry blossom in May, when there was no longer anything to push against.”