The Carrier
Page 44
The result is quite simply the perfect hiding place. When I push in the rolls of parchment, as I soon will, and then cover the hollow with ice which has fallen while I was digging away, nobody will be able to find it. Not before the walls melt, and the ceiling, this entire place is laid bare by the effects of climate change.
But before I complete my account for you in what I hope will still be some sort of posterity, I sink or perhaps fall on my knees here in the chapel. Clasp my hands and for the first time in many years say a prayer. For our nuclear weapons future. For you, for us, for myself. Whoever I might be.
Then I pick up the pen again, scratch the last lines into the parchment. Close my eyes, listen to the silence, feel the mild air of the eternal ice against my eyelids.
In just a few minutes it will definitely be over: when I have walked the four hundred feet or so from here to the hot spring and disappeared for ever.
After that, it will all be up to you.
Epilogue: Overtime
The woman stared at him, with the most intense gray eyes he had ever seen.
“Do you remember who Tomoya Kawakita was?”
The doctor shook his head, turned his back to the woman and ripped the sealed package of the syringe open, checked the fluid level, started the ritual.
He glanced through the glass pane at the broad outline of the single figure on the other side, from the light to the dark. The intention was obviously that he should not see who was standing out there.
The silence became oppressive.
“A baseball player, ma’am?” he finally said.
“Baseball player?”
“Yes, ma’am. You’d be surprised how many like to talk baseball in this situation.”
It was casual chat, gallows small talk: the only strategy he found bearable. Some said that it helped the subject to cope.
“I see . . .” the woman said. “No, he was a Japanese American, the last one convicted by us of treason, 1948, just over half a century ago. Mistreated our prisoners in the camps during World War II.”
Her voice was hypnotic, as in a lecture hall, or maybe a therapist’s. The doctor had to master himself to continue his preparations. Turned without a word to the woman, rolled up the left sleeve of her tunic as she continued:
“But he was reprieved in 1953, by Eisenhower.”
Still silent he tapped the point on her arm, a few times more than necessary. The vein was clear to see under the skin.
“Do you have any clue what I’ve done?”
The doctor had been here before.
“Of course you’re totally innocent, ma’am, acted in good faith or self-defense. I expect you tried to save the world.”
He gave her a smile. Of respect and of humility for his task.
“Something like that,” the woman said.
She met his gaze, smiled back. The doctor felt the heat spreading through his body, as if he himself were being infused.
Then he looked away and raised the syringe.
MATTIAS BERG is a cultural journalist based in Stockholm. After working at major newspapers such as Dagens Nyheter and Expressen, he joined Swedish Radio in 2002, where he was the head of the culture department for a decade. He has written two works of non-fiction on technology and culture; one about the early Japanese information society, and one about the cloned sheep Dolly and biotechnology’s dreams of creating artificial life. The Carrier is his first novel.
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GEORGE GOULDING was born in Stockholm, educated in England, and spent his legal career working for a London-based law firm. He is now a translator of Swedish literature into English, including David Lagercrantz’s continuations of the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson.