The Best Book in the World

by Peter Stjernstrom

  ‘Does it really work?’

  ‘Oh yes, indeed it does! Look at this!’

  Doctor Rolf stretches across the desk and digs out a little bell from among his papers.

  ‘Somnambulist, indeed! Now I want to sleep!’

  He goes ding-a-ling with the bell. Then he flops down with a crash in a heap over his desk. He isn’t a doctor any longer. How he just looks like a big heavy sack of flour. He is, however, still breathing, deeply and slowly. Doctor Rolf sleeps like a newly felled fir tree in the forest. A tiny sliver of saliva-like resin runs out of the corner of his mouth and down onto the sticky computer keyboard.

  Titus leans over Doctor Rolf and gives him a little careful shake. He tries a ‘Hello?’ and a ‘Doctor Rolf?’ but the only answer is a deep wheeze.

  Jesus, that was one hell of a chemistry set, Titus thinks, and sneaks out of Doctor Rolf’s consulting room, never to return.

  Research can be a pain. The more you dig, the bigger the hole. And how should you judge your discoveries?

  What is stupid today can be gospel tomorrow.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Calm of Stockholm

  When Titus leaves Doctor Rolf’s building, the air is still. He realises that there is no longer a promising early summer feeling that meets him. It is the middle of July and the very height of the summer. He feels a bit out of sorts and needs to clear his head after the strange visit to Doctor Rolf. He decides to walk all the way from this northern edge of the city down to Söder.

  He walks via the Observatory Park up behind the City Library so that he can follow Drottninggatan from its beginning right down to the Old Town. The trees in the lower reaches of Observatory Park groan under the merciless rays of the sun and fight with the grassy banks for the last drops of water in ground. You can almost hear the sucking and slurping. The green of the grass is sometimes broken by brownish patches. The leaves in the park droop humbly in a prayer for a little rain.

  He loves the Strindberg quotes that have been inserted into the centre line of Drottninggatan after the bottom of the hill. The street is still picturesque with cosy cafés and middling restaurants. The buildings are low enough to allow the sun to reach the pavement tables. This part of the street crawls with hip teenagers trying to break a record in drinking lattes as slowly as possible. Then, closer to the Old Town, the street is transformed into a bustling shopping Mecca for all the usual high street brands: H&M, Intersport, Stadium, Zara, Clas Ohlson, McDonalds and so on. Families with children dominate here. They rush between the escalators and swing doors with dripping ice creams at the ready and enormous plastic carrier bags under their arms. Woe betide you if you don’t look happy. Damn you if you don’t look rich. After Sergels Torg and the House of Culture, Drottninggatan dissolves into an icy cold corridor in the shadow of government departments in tall and ugly buildings. The only people to be seen are the odd middle-aged civil servant and occasional flocks of tourists that have probably gone astray. Weird shops sell elk motifs on T-shirts and Dala horses of every possible size. Who buys Dala horses? wonders Titus. What can you do with them? Perhaps there are bus trips directly to the souvenir shops, because they seem to be crammed with short and happy Japanese tourists. They compete to grab at the Dala horses. They obviously know something that others don’t know. Dala horses are good for potency. You crush them and mix the result with saké. A clunk of that and you get a magnificent swaying mid-summer pole from the Swedish Dalecarlia.

  Stockholm in summer is like nowhere else, Titus thinks. If you ignore the completely re-built area around Klara and the southern part of Drottninggatan, Stockholm is objectively the most beautiful summer city in the world, of any kind. No doubt about that; it must be considered as proven.

  The sound of the city is different in the summer, too. Birdsong that is almost painful in May and early June sounds like normal and pleasant interval music now. The cars are not in such a hurry between end-of-term celebrations, overtime work and suburban shopping. Instead, they roll slowly along the streets in a sort of proud parade to manifest what every genuine Stockholmer feels: Stockholm is best in the summer. That’s when the hundreds of thousands of ‘newer’ Stockholmers travel home to their provincial roots and are seen as rich and successful ‘homecomers’ for a few weeks. While there, they can subject their old cottages to an extreme makeover, they can push up the prices at local knick-knack auctions, grill Flintstone pork steaks and piss in the water at public bathing beaches to their hearts’ content. And the permanent local residents can moan and grumble about the people from the capital. Indeed, country folk need their images of the ‘Stockholmers’. That they are in actual fact mirror images of each other is of lesser importance.

  When Titus reaches the Old Town, he decides that he deserves a cup of coffee. He needs to think. He walks up to Stortorget and goes into the café in the Grillska building. With a cup of coffee and a cinnamon bun on his tray, Titus sits at a window table and looks out onto the square and the old Stock Exchange.

  The last few weeks have been eventful. For starters, he has written a copious amount. Most of it has been top-notch stuff. He knows that when he reads through the material in a week or two, it will be easy to decide what is up to standard. He has absolute pitch. When it comes to text, he can trust himself 100 per cent.

  The Best Book in the World is beginning to acquire a structure that he really likes. The variation of a thriller with elements of fact works better than he could have imagined. The bits with Håkan Rink’s hunt for Serial Salvador are snappy and hard-boiled. They always end with an exciting cliffhanger. The sections with facts occupy at most one or two pages each time, and serve as comfortable resting places in the midst of the action. He has already managed to incorporate the most common subjects that the bestselling non-fiction and reference works usually deal with: from crash slimming to self-help. The language is almost impertinent in its accessibility. Sometimes he wonders if it really can be so lucid and easy to read when the theme is so intellectual. You can’t help but go on reading and reading, to keep finding out what happens next. Titus is pleased with himself: this is exactly what he wants to achieve. Language is communication, not an art form in itself. The work of art is that which remains inside the reader’s head. A unique picture that only exists in a single copy.

  But best of all is nevertheless that Astra forced him to sober up. He feels bright and energetic. The poison has left his body. In a purely chemical sense, I have conquered the abuse, he thinks. His body no longer screams for poisons. What remains are figments of his imagination: he can still find himself looking in the fridge for a beer or feeling in his pocket for a fag. The force of habit is powerful, but these remnants are no worse than he can brush aside with the help of another figment of his imagination: the reward image where he is lying there enjoying life on a warm young female body. Better to be obsessed than dependent.

  He feels the calm returning to his body. It has been quite a while since he has been away from his computer for such a long time. It doesn’t feel totally wrong to be out on the city streets again. Cafés. People-watching. Relaxing.

  That unpleasant Doctor-Rolf feeling is losing its grip. What an idiot. What a pathetic life. What a repulsive attitude towards people. At the same time, it was quite interesting to hear what he had said about Tourette’s syndrome being just an imaginary illness.

  What if he was right? What would that mean in Lenny’s case?

  CHAPTER 21

  Dark Clouds Appear

  When he steps out of the lift and in through the door to his flat, Titus immediately gets an unpleasant sensation of somebody having been there. Hard to say why. Does it smell funny? Or is it simply that a neighbour is making weird food and the smell is spreading through the ventilation system?

  No, somebody has definitely been here. Titus looks around. Since it is a one-room flat with a kitchen alcove he doesn’t even have to leave the hall to see everything. Besides, nowadays it is well cleaned. He bends down to look under the
sofa-bed. No uninvited guest there, anyway.

  He opens the flat door again to check the stairs, and hears someone running down them. The entrance door slams shut with a smothered heavy sound and silence falls again. Who the hell was that? Titus rushes to the window to try to see. Not a soul outside the front door. A long and shambling figure is just going round the corner. Black jeans. A studded belt glistens. Lenny? Gone. Titus could have sworn it was Lenny.

  He jerks the window open and shouts out:

  ‘Lenny! Lenny! Come back, damn it! What the hell are you playing at?’

  A white-haired lady on a balcony shakes her head and takes a slurp from a dainty coffee cup. Oh, it’s him again. That drunken writer. All he can do is booze and take drugs. But keep the laundry room in the cellar clean? Not a chance! Yes, that’s him.

  Titus charges down the stairs to try to catch up with Lenny. When he gets round the corner where Lenny disappeared, he sees a completely empty street before him. He has disappeared into thin air.

  Although he has started to feel that he is in fairly good condition from all the spinning at the gym, Titus is seriously out of breath after that short sprint. He leans against the wall and pants heavily.

  What the hell…? Was it Lenny? Or was he seeing things? But surely it had been Lenny? Fuck! What was he after?

  Titus runs up to the flat again to check if anything has been stolen. He can’t find anything amiss. There isn’t much to steal. Who wants a pile of pizza cartons? At the same time, that unpleasant sensation is still evident. Somebody has been there.

  Then he sees it.

  Oh, shit! He was right after all!

  The desk by the window. The computer. The lid has been opened. He never leaves the lid up when he has a rest. That is something that has been imprinted since he was a little boy. A lid should always be put down again after use, and that’s that. He might have been something of a careless fellow for the greater part of his life. But lids? No, he has put them down as far back as he can remember.

  So Lenny has been there sneaking around. Has he got inside the computer? Has he managed to get past the breathalyser lock?

  Titus blows into the tube and waits for the computer to start up. A message appears on the screen:

  Hello Titus! A little while ago, you or someone else started me incorrectly. This means hibernation for a further one hour, twenty-two minutes and forty-three seconds. Please come back a little later!

  The figures flick past on the counter. After a few moments, the screen goes blank.

  What the fucking hell, thinks Titus. Lenny has tried to force his way into my computer! That can only mean one thing: he is after my manuscript!

  But how has Lenny found out about The Best Book in the World? There are only four people in the whole world who know about the idea: Titus himself, Astra, Evita Winchester and Eddie X. Who talked? It could hardly be Astra or Evita – they have everything to lose from revealing something. They would never jeopardise good sales. He himself has hardly met a soul for weeks. Besides, he has been stone cold sober.

  So it must be Eddie. But why would Eddie tell Lenny about the idea? Wouldn’t it be better in that case to do what Titus has done: just shut himself in his room and write the book without talking to a soul about it? Besides, Eddie X is too kind-hearted to sell out Titus. No, it doesn’t seem likely. Not Eddie.

  The only reasonable explanation that Titus can come up with is that Lenny must have eavesdropped on his and Eddie’s drunken ramblings at the festival, when they thought up the whole idea. Then, when Lenny and Titus happened to meet at Moderna Museet and sat in the café, well… Lenny must have put two and two together. He saw that I was sober and on the ball, thinks Titus. Must have thought that I seemed to be back in the real world again. Like hell he did – he must have realised that I’m busy with something big when he twigged that I wasn’t boozing any more. What could have got Titus back on the straight and narrow? And then he got curious. Why didn’t I think of this earlier? I can’t go around looking like a new person until all this is over. Everybody is going to wonder what’s got into me. And then the speculation will get going. A new book, a new woman, what the hell could it be? No, not until the book is finished can I let people see me sober, thinks Titus.

  He grabs the telephone and punches in Astra’s number. He lets it ring a while. Lots of rings. Finally, she answers.

  ‘Hi, Titus! How are things?’

  ‘Truth is, it’s all fucked up.’

  He tells her everything that has happened. About the message on the computer screen and who he suspects, about their meeting at Moderna Museet. He hadn’t uttered a word about the book to Lenny, who nevertheless clearly seemed to be on his case. This is much worse than industrial espionage. Cultural espionage – this threatens our entire democracy. Threatens our very existence. Titus is at full steam ahead now, blurting out all his worries.

  Astra is a model of calm. She wouldn’t be a star publisher if she couldn’t cope with panicky situations and panicky people.

  ‘Titus, this is what we’ll do. I’ll arrange a locksmith and see to it that you get a modern and secure lock, or a completely new door if it’s needed. And you need have no worries at all about the computer. Lenny – if it was indeed him – hasn’t managed to get into it. The breathalyser lock is restricted so that it will only react to your unique enzyme combination, it is only your breath that can start the computer. I didn’t want to tell you this earlier, because you would only have blown your top and shouted even more about Winchester’s undercover tricks. I took a saliva sample from a beer can when you were at my place after the festival and the technicians fixed the rest.’

  ‘What are you saying? So that breathalyser thing was your idea from the very start? You said it was Evita’s idea!’ mutters Titus.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Damn it, Astra. I thought you were on my side.’

  ‘But I am! You must admit that it has worked rather well!’

  ‘Yeah… I suppose.’

  ‘Well then you can relax. I can guarantee that he hasn’t seen any of your files. Sit down and try to work again. As soon as I’m back home we can meet and then I’ll start reading.

  ‘As soon as you’re back home? What do you mean? Where are you?’

  ‘In Antiparos, in Greece. Didn’t I tell you? I’m on holiday.’

  ‘Oh, right. Nice. Okay, ring me when you’re back. Have a nice time!’

  Titus feels calmer. Astra is good for him. She thinks about everything. A perfect woman. And if she was pretty before, then what is she going to look like after a few weeks of Greek sun? Oh my God, if only I had a bit of Zorba in me, thinks Titus.

  He blows in the tube and looks at the message: fifty-eight minutes and thirty-five seconds left.

  He is keen to see with his own eyes that the manuscript is still there. If anyone has stolen it, he might just as well top himself straight away. He would never be able to find the energy to re-write the whole thing.

  No, he must think through his routines better: check that the windows are shut when he goes out and lock the door properly, check it is locked by pushing the handle down and keep a discreet eye on the entrance door a couple of minutes after he goes out. Urgh, he is all nerves. Just take it easy, Titus, everything will be all right, he thinks.

  Another blow in the tube: fifty-six minutes and seventeen seconds.

  Time crawls along.

  Titus goes into the kitchen alcove and turns the coffee machine on. He makes a sandwich using a slice of Cheddar and slices up a green pepper to put in it. He fills a glass with orange juice. The fridge doesn’t look like an ice desert in the Arctic any more, now that he has his eating habits under control. A balanced diet. Regular mealtimes. Things will sort themselves out. Breathe slowly.

  He looks out through the window. The white-haired lady is still sitting on her balcony. Now she is pressing the buttons on the radio on the balcony table.

  Yeah, why not? Good idea, thinks Titus, and turns on his little k
itchen radio.

  The signature tune fills the room. It is Summer. Probably the most popular radio programme in Sweden of any category. Swedes known and unknown who have something exciting or interesting to talk about are given one and a half hours each at lunchtime during the summer to enthral the whole country. They intersperse their stories with their favourite music. The result is often extremely personal and occasionally rather provocative. Nobody is indifferent to what they hear. The evening tabloids usually get on the bandwagon and do a messy re-write or a sick distortion the next day to sell a few extra copies in the summer news drought.

  The signature tune fades away. Titus wonders who it will be today.

  Good afternoon, Sweden.

  Hello, Swedes!

  My name is Eddie X.

  I am an author and poet.

  I live on water, bread and love.

  And music.

  You can do that too.

  Today I’m going to show you my life.

  Because it is your life too.

  You and me.

  We are very similar, don’t you think?

  Just as fragile, just as strong.

  Just as repulsive, just as beautiful.

  Today I’m going to show you my memories.

  And I shall play music that has gilded my memories to something priceless.

  You will be there with me when I made out the first time.

  You will be there with me when I made love the first time.