Acts of Vanishing

by Fredrik T. Olsson

  The room fell silent. On the far side of the table she saw CW clicking his way up through the frequencies, and the digits on the display increased in half-megahertz increments up through the FM band.

  Static. Static. Static.

  Interminable waiting.

  Static.

  Eventually he stopped. Opened his mouth to say something but couldn’t remember what. He had been through the whole dial, without passing anything that even resembled a transmission.

  ‘Anyone know where P1 is?’ he said. ‘Or Radio Stockholm?’

  Embarrassed smiles showed through the gloom. Who memorised that sort of thing nowadays? Technology took care of all the necessary information–codes, addresses, even phone numbers of our nearest and dearest–and now, when there was suddenly no search engine to find them, no one had any answers.

  But then again, it didn’t make any difference. Once CW had finished the third cycle through the whole of the FM band, step by step and with a little pause after each click of the button, the facts of the matter were obvious to everyone.

  No one was broadcasting. The radio was dead.

  Christina felt the dam break inside her. If all the signals were down, if there really was nothing at all out there in the ether, what did that mean? How far did an FM signal reach? How big was the area affected by the power cut? What had happened?

  Her catastrophic thoughts took on a momentum of their own, and she could feel them spinning out of control. What if Stockholm had actually got off lightly, and was in fact at the periphery of a much bigger catastrophe…?

  ‘Wait!’

  CW again. Proud eyes once more.

  ‘The AM-band,’ he said. ‘I searched the AM-band. I think this is Dutch.’

  The relief was like everyone in the room breathing out. The voice from the speaker was incomprehensible and intermittent, but at least it was a voice. An over-energetic presenter talking to a caller who was even less audible, with both of them laughing for no reason, the way people do on the radio. Judging by their tone it was probably a quiz, but honestly, who gave a shit what it was: it meant the world was still there. Somewhere not all that far away there were people untroubled enough to spend time competing on a phone-in, which meant that whatever else had happened, life was not surrendering today.

  Christina gulped hard, cursed herself for allowing those teenage feelings to get to her.

  ‘Third,’ she resumed. The final point. ‘The consequences.’

  The questions spilled out of her. How long will society survive? What happens to Sweden? First hour, second hour, after a day?

  ‘As of now, we don’t know how long the power is going to be out, and let’s hope for the best, but suppose this continues, how long can we survive? What sort of reserves do we have? Water? Food? Healthcare?’

  One by one her colleagues got up from their places, some in teams of two, others on their own, before trickling out through the open-plan office, pulling on their coats as they went.

  They weren’t, of course, about to get any answers. Everyone would be blaming someone else, but that would be news too, and every step would lead to new people to question. Handled right, this was a press opportunity, and they couldn’t ignore it just because they didn’t have electricity.

  No one knew how long that would last.

  But, when it was all over, you wanted to have a story to tell.

  Christina stood at the window long after the last of her colleagues had gone, staring out into cold and darkness.

  ‘Are you thinking about her?’ the voice behind her asked.

  ‘Amongst other things,’ she answered. ‘A whole lot of other things.’

  The woman standing in the doorway was a photographer, even though the paper officially didn’t have any.

  She was older than Christina, older and heavier and still panting from climbing the stairs, probably for the first time in years. She was wearing a big print dress with loose, multicoloured fabrics over the shoulders, thin material that fluttered at the slightest movement giving her the appearance of an old-fashioned screensaver. All of which did nothing to make her look smaller, which was probably the idea.

  Above all, though, she was a friend. A prized colleague. Follow­ing a couple of vivid arguments when someone else had booked her before Christina, she had become Christina’s unofficial companion, and that was the way it had stayed.

  Beatrice Lind. Saviour in her hour of need. Literally.

  ‘How are you finding the flat?’ she asked, as though tuning in to Christina’s thoughts.

  Christina turned to face her before answering.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ she said. ‘If you like vintage, that is.’ A pause, then she couldn’t help adding: ‘And if by vintage you mean old stuff that just tends to smell a bit off.’

  Beatrice nodded. ‘In that case my boss at my old job was vintage.’

  They exchanged invisible smiles through the darkness, an island of normal in the middle of all the terrifying weirdness. Eventually Beatrice took a deep breath and asked the question on everyone’s lips.

  ‘What’s going on out there?’

  Christina took an age before she spoke, then she nodded to Beatrice to follow her down to the car park.

  ‘Work,’ she said.

  6

  As the woman with the long dark hair opened the door to the apartment on Ulica Brzeska, she knew that she was never going to see him again. She let the creaking of the door and floor subside, and stood there waiting with a pounding heart until she could be sure that no one had heard her, that no one else was lurking in the damp stairwell or had seen her take the short cut across the back yard and possibly followed her in. All she could hear was the odd sound from the trams down on Targowa or Kijowska, the singing rails as a train passed through Warsaw Wschodnia, the slamming of a door in a nearby building.

  Apart from that though, nothing. No music greeted her, the way it always did when he was home before her. No jazz trumpet floating over the top of elegant standards, no whirring from the giant industrial fan, the one that would usually be humming away above the stove, trying in vain to remove the scent of garlic and oils and vegetable stock from the air. Aromas that would normally hit her here.

  But it was his voice she missed most of all, his articulate, gentle, intelligent… she bit her lip. Memories are memories. This was now. Michal Piotrowski was gone, and he wasn’t coming back.

  She found tufts of his hair in the bathtub, great tufts as though he’d grabbed fistfuls of his shaggy hairstyle and shorn himself like a sheep. He had altered his appearance, just as he’d said he would, over the wine and the candles and the rough, worn dining table, right through clasped hands and a love that grew stronger and tougher for each day they were forced to keep it secret. If it happens, he had said, if he had to disappear, then it would go just like this.

  She had laughed at him, a little too loud and too shrill, because he’d made her feel afraid and uneasy and the only way to shed all that was to pretend that he was joking. But he wasn’t.

  When she’d rinsed him out of the bath and watched the final hairs disappear down the plughole, when no traces remained of his transformation, she went out into the big living room. Running along one of the interior walls was a long plank of coarse dark timber, fitted like an outsize desk from one corner to the other, and above that hung rows of shelving, and that’s where she eventually found them.

  The photo albums. The memories. The days they had got to spend together, the trips they took–always far away, always in secret, waiting for a permission that was never going to come.

  One by one, she took photos out of the albums, looked herself in the eyes as she eased the corners from their mounts: smiling, happy eyes that gazed back at her from glossy paper. She put them in a pile on the table, each new memory slightly fresher than the one before.

  She’d got past halfway when she opened a brown envelope and saw the photos change character. These were photos that she didn’t recognise. They were tak
en from a distance, clearly in secret and with a telephoto lens, of a man and a woman and a teenage girl in a city she didn’t recognise. Sometimes they were together, sometimes on their own, here getting out of a car and into an apartment, there just doing their own thing. The young girl on a café terrace. Coffee and cigarettes. The man climbing into a taxi, outside a boxy redbrick complex. She stared at them for ages without understanding.

  Who were these people? What were they doing in his shelves?

  But there was no one to ask, and the next pictures were of her, and they brought back the memories of the travel and of missing him so much it hurt all over again, and she carried on purging album after album until nothing remained on the shelf.

  The realisation hit her like a slap. Suddenly, there were no more pictures. Their relationship had deepened and lasted so long that the world had changed around them–analogue had become digital, and the last photo of them was seven years old. After that there were no physical prints.

  How many years was that, lying on the table? Five?

  Altogether it had been twelve years. Twelve years of her life. One technology had replaced another, borders had been redrawn, entire countries established and abolished. Their relationship had stayed in the same place.

  Until now.

  She carried the photos into the kitchen. Placed them at the bottom of the big sink. Next to the gas stove were the same piles of matchboxes as always, and she placed them all on top of the pictures, took a clutch of unused matches and struck them in a single sweep.

  Saw her own face crumple in the heat. Saw the pieces of photographic paper curl up as if to repel the flames for a few more seconds, before they went black and hovered up over the worktop like thin weightless veils of soot.

  It was for her own sake, so he had said. But the worst part remained, and even if she didn’t know why, she had promised. One more task, and after that, memories would be all she had.

  Because memories don’t burn.

  7

  William Sandberg leaned over the table in the darkness. Just a movement, a change of position, yet it expressed an underplayed sarcasm; a tired protest, mute and invisible, but that no watcher would have missed.

  ‘I,’ he said. Then: ‘Don’t. Know.’

  They had let him wait in silent solitude for another twenty minutes before at last they opened the door. Then they had almost hovered into the room, their features blue in the emergency lighting, and in the darkness the smallest sounds had become near-tangible events: clothes rustling as they moved, chair legs scraping against the floor as they sat down, papers being laid on the table.

  The one on the left had introduced herself as Cathryn Forester, as though that was something very special and worth boasting about. And as Major, as if that was too. And then, in perfect Swedish, only with a slight English accent, she had introduced the face next to her.

  William had long since recognised him. The height, the heavy gait, the presence. The bastard. Not that he’d had any reason to make assumptions, he knew that too, but as his former colleague had floated into his seat across the table, William had realised that deep down, he’d been assuming that Palmgren wasn’t part of this. Lassie, he’d thought, would be on his side. Regardless of why William had been brought in, whatever all this was about, Palmgren would intervene like the older cousin in the playground, protesting and rushing to help as soon as he heard he was there.

  Instead he’d sat down and set out his papers, every bit as formal and reserved as the English Major to his right. Clicked nervously with an invisible pen, hidden in the darkness without saying a word.

  She, on the other hand, had managed more. She had asked methodically and at length about things they already knew, name, age and kiss my arse, he’d thought to himself but made sure not to say out loud.

  Then there was that question that kept coming up, again and again, the one William would have been only too glad to answer if he could. Except that he did. Not. Know.

  ‘So you keep saying,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, you did hear then,’ he answered. ‘I thought that, since you had to ask so many times, maybe your hearing went with the lighting.’

  He found himself playing for time without even knowing why, resorting to sarcasm to slow the conversation down, no matter how unviable a strategy. What was she doing here, a foreign officer, in an interrogation room inside the Swedish Armed Forces HQ? It was all deeply alarming. In more ways than one.

  ‘Is it a person?’ she said. ‘An organisation? Is it an acronym?’

  This time he didn’t answer at all, and when he didn’t she steeled herself before repeating the original question, for the umpteenth time. Word for word, the same deliberate, over-articulated delivery.

  ‘Who. Is. Rosetta?’

  ‘It is a sender,’ he told her. ‘What more do you want me to say?’

  ‘We know that. But who?’

  William shook his head. His energy was draining. The darkness sapped him, as did the lack of time perception, and there were moments when he thought he saw a movement in the blackness, as if one of them had raised a hand, or there was some fourth person in here that he hadn’t seen until now. Each time, though, he realised that it was just his brain filling in the gaps of its own accord.

  ‘I realise that you have to ask me that,’ he said, straining to maintain his focus. ‘But I’ve run out of synonyms now. I don’t know.’

  ‘Which brings us on to question number two,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it rather odd that you ended up going there?’

  Here we go again.

  ‘Isn’t it odd that you show up at just the right spot, at just the right time, with no idea who asked you to?’

  He could feel his pulse rate rising. They’d just begun to scratch the surface, yet already they had questions he couldn’t answer. Waiting in line were others, ones that he didn’t want to answer.

  Please, he said to himself. Please don’t go there.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said instead, a last attempt to seize the initiative. ‘Tell me why I’m here.’

  From the other side of the table, silence.

  ‘I understand that this has to do with the power cut. I just don’t see how.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  He saw Forester’s teeth twinkle opposite. Was she smiling? Her voice certainly wasn’t.

  ‘Because I struggle to believe it’s pure coincidence. You jump me at Central Station. At that very moment, this happens.’

  He made an invisible gesture out into the darkness, towards the walls, the ceiling, all the things that should be bathed in the sterile, bright white light of fluorescent tubes, but were not. ‘So instead of asking me questions I can’t answer, please: tell me what has happened.’

  For a second, Forester breathed in as though she was negotiating with herself. As though, for an instant, she might consider answering. Instead, she reached for the stack of papers on the table in front of her.

  On top of the stack was some sort of plastic document wallet, possibly white or yellow, but under the emergency lighting it was as ice blue as anything else. She laid both hands on top of it. Two rubber bands signalled that the folder was closed and would remain so for the time being.

  ‘Can you tell me what happened three months ago?’ she asked.

  Not there. Not there.

  ‘I can,’ he said. ‘But you already know.’

  ‘You were sacked.’

  ‘I was encouraged to resign.’

  ‘How did that feel?’

  Feel?

  ‘Is that why you’re here? You’re a shrink?’

  ‘Did you feel hurt? Hard done by? Did you feel you’d been treated unfairly?’

  William felt the sweat just starting to find its way down his back. Here we go. Whatever she suspected him of doing, it was utterly clear why she suspected it, which meant that the interrogation room was a corner he’d painted himself into, all on his own. Chances were she’d already heard colleagues telling her how he’d change
d.

  ‘Did you feel you wanted to demonstrate your skills? Show what you can do? Show your employers what they’re missing?’

  William shook his head. Across the table sat a woman making accusations without saying what they were, and the one person who should be speaking on his behalf was sitting right beside her not speaking at all.

  ‘Say something,’ he said eventually. ‘For fuck’s sake, Lassie.’

  The words found their way out of him, tired, almost silent, and he looked Palmgren straight in the eyes that he could not see. Come on. Show us which side you’re on, now.

  For the first time, he heard Palmgren breathe in.

  ‘Why did you go to ground, William?’

  Of all the things to say.

  ‘Did I? Did I really?’

  ‘We tried to get hold of you.’

  ‘That’s one of the drawbacks of sacking someone. They don’t tend to be on call so much after that.’

  Palmgren didn’t respond. ‘We needed your help,’ he said instead.

  William could hear the sarcastic retorts lining up inside his head, knew what he ought to say: ‘I don’t think I’m the right person to help you with anything, unless what you’re looking for is someone to come in here and be obstructive. Unless you’re suffering an acute shortage of people wallowing in self-pity and creating conflicts and–what else was it you said?–becoming a risk for the whole operation.’

  That’s what he should have said. And on another day, in another life, that’s just what he would have done, and afterwards he’d have smiled with dark eyes and added, ‘If I’m wrong, if that is what you’re looking for, then I think the team investigating the Olof Palme case still have a couple to spare.’

  His weapon of choice was sarcasm, and after thirty years in the Forces it was the only one he had full command of. Now he was sitting there, and it was loaded and ready for use, but the anger had gone and all he felt was regret. Regret and resignation and please, let me go.