“Where did the rain come from?” Sebastian yells in the troll’s ear, or at least where he thinks trolls might have ears.
“It’s tears!” the troll roars back, where the troll thinks Sebastian has ears.
“Whose?”
“Yours! All the ones you’ve held back inside you! I told you, I TOLD YOU!!!”
“WHAT!?”
“THAT EITHER THE BUBBLE WILL CRACK! OR YOU WILL!”
Sebastian disappears under the surface, just for a few moments or maybe an entire life, before he struggles his way back up again. A flock of huge grey birds hover over them. Now and then they dive towards the water and snap at Sebastian’s shirt collar. He shields himself with his arm, their sharp beaks leaving long, deep, bleeding cuts in him.
“Are they trying to . . . take me?” Sebastian screams with the rain and the wind raging and roaring across his cheeks.
“No, they’re trying to . . . scare you!” the troll cries back while one of the birds takes off with a beakful of fur.
“Why?”
“Because they want you to stop swimming.”
Sebastian grips tightly on to the troll’s fur, closes his eyes even tighter. He doesn’t know who is keeping whom afloat in the end. They’re hurled through the waters, down into the darkness, into a wall. They land in a petrifying silence, impossible to trust. But at last Sebastian opens his eyes again and realizes that the two of them are lying coughing and snorting in the sand on a beach. The sun slowly dries fur and skin.
“Where are we?” Sebastian asks.
“At the bottom,” the troll whispers.
“The bottom of what?”
“The bottom of you.”
Sebastian sits up. He’s got sand inside his clothes, in every place you don’t want sand to be, and some places where Sebastian imagines that the sand wants to be just as little as Sebastian wants it there. It’s warm when he lifts it up in his palms, runs around his fingers until it finds its way between them. Sebastian looks at his knuckles, full of cracks that don’t hurt, and it’s not raining anymore. Maybe it never rains at the bottom, maybe the sun always rests on you here, never too much and never too little. Surrounding the beach are high, smooth cliffs, impossible to climb. This is a paradise, at the bottom of a hole. Along one of the cliff faces there is a rope, and at its very end there’s a campfire burning. Sebastian carefully opens his palms towards the small, bouncing flames to feel the heat. The wind tickles his ear.
“Do it,” the wind shouts. “Do it!”
Sebastian scratches his ear, looks at the troll in surprise. The troll points sadly to the fire.
“Everyone is waiting for you to do it, Sebastian.”
“What?”
“Decide that it’s easier to stay down here. And set fire to the rope.”
Sebastian blinks like his eyelashes have gotten stuck to his heart and have to be ripped from it every time his eyes open.
“I can’t live on the outside of the bubble,” he stammers at last.
“You can’t live in here either,” the troll replies.
The words shiver when the answer falls from Sebastian’s lips and the tears bring him to his knees:
“I don’t want it to hurt anymore. Does everybody else hurt like this?”
“I don’t know,” the troll admits.
“Why do I hurt when nothing has happened? I never laugh! Everybody normal laughs!”
The troll’s paws rub the spot where the troll probably has temples.
“Maybe it’s your laugh that’s broken. Not you. Maybe someone broke it. One time someone broke my favorite breakfast plate. I’m still a bit upset about it, actually.”
“How do you fix a laugh?” Sebastian whispers.
“I don’t know,” the troll admits.
“What if there’s something wrong with me after all?”
The troll looks to be taking this under serious consideration.
“Maybe something’s wrong with the wrong?”
“Huh?”
“Maybe the balloon isn’t even a balloon. Maybe you don’t have to be happy. Maybe you just have to be.”
“Be what?”
The troll writes something in the sand. Slowly and carefully, with its most beautiful letters. Then it promises:
“Just that.”
The troll dries the boy’s eyes. The boy asks:
“What do we do now?”
“Sleep,” the troll suggests.
“Why?” the boy asks.
“Because sometimes when you wake up there’s breakfast.”
The troll puts its paw under Sebastian’s cheek. Sebastian crawls up in it and falls asleep. From tiredness, not exhaustion. The troll sleeps around him, the boy’s tears rest like crystals in its fur. When they wake up, the fire has gone out. Sebastian blinks at the sky.
“What are you thinking about?” the troll asks.
“I’m thinking that maybe the balloon was neither dropped nor ran away. Maybe someone just let it go,” the boy whispers.
“Why would anyone let go of a balloon?” the troll asks.
“Because somebody wanted it to be happy.”
The troll nods gratefully, as if this new thought is a little gift. Sebastian stretches forward carefully and touches the rope.
“What’s up there?” he asks and points to the top of the cliffs where the rope is attached.
“A life. A hundred thousand years of all the best and all the worst,” the troll whispers.
“And in-between that?”
The troll smiles, almost happily.
“Oh, yes! THAT! All the in-between. You get to choose that. The best and the worst in life just happens to us, but the in-between . . . that’s what keeps us going.”
Sebastian’s breath bounces around in his throat.
“Will you come with me?”
“Yes. We’ll all come with you.”
Sebastian’s face crumples up like confused laundry.
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“We,” the troll repeats.
When Sebastian looks out over the beach he sees a hundred thousand trolls.
“Who are they?”
The troll hugs Sebastian until Sebastian is only hugging air. The other trolls walk toward him and disappear, one by one, all through the same crack. But they call out from the inside:
“We’re the voices in your head that tell you not to do it, Sebastian. When the others say ‘jump,’ ‘stop swimming,’ and ‘set fire to the rope.’ We’re the ones that tell you not to.”
Sebastian looks at his hands. One of the cracks closes up. Then another one. He holds the invisible scars against his cheek and wonders how you live with them instead of living in them. Then he closes his eyes again, sleeps all night there in the sand.
He dreams. Not that he’s running, like he usually does. Not that he’s falling or drowning. He dreams that he’s climbing now, up a rope, to the top of a cliff. When he wakes up, he’s on his own next to the hole. He drops the rope and it falls to the bottom, lands with a soft thud. Far down there in the sand, the boy can still read what the troll wrote when it said, “Just be,” and the boy said, “Be what?”
It says Sebastian. Just that.
He sits with his feet dangling over the edge and awaits the sound of rain against the roof of the bubble. But nothing comes, and far away he sees something else, something he hasn’t seen in so long, he’s forgotten what it looks like. A line in the sky, from top to bottom. Sebastian has to turn his head to the side until his neck sounds like bubble wrap before he finally realizes what it is.
A crack in the glass. Just the one. He can barely fit his hand through it. His mother touches his fingertips on the other side. He hears her shout his name into the bubble, and he whispers:
“You don’t have to scream, Mom . . . I . . . can hear you.”
“Sebastian . . .” she whispers then, the way only the person who gave a child its name can whisper it.
“Yes, Mom,” he replies.
&n
bsp; “What can I do for you?” she sobs.
Sebastian thinks for a long time before he finally answers:
“Breakfast. I’d like . . . breakfast.”
When his mother whispers that she loves him, snow starts falling from the sky. But when it lands inside the bubble it’s not frozen flakes, it’s freshly shed fur, small bits of fluffy fuzz that settle softly on Sebastian’s skin. It’s still early, maybe he doesn’t have words for this yet, but in time he might be able to talk about it. One day when someone says something and maybe he laughs for the first time. Or when he laughs as if it were the first time, over and over again. Laughs as if someone a very, very long time ago found the laugh on the ground in a forest, broken to pieces after a storm, and brought it home and nursed it until the laugh was strong enough to be released into the wild again. And then it takes off from the rooftops, straight up towards the heavens, as though someone let go of a balloon to make it happy. Maybe, in a hundred thousand years.
He blinks at the light, as the sunrise gently tugs at the clouds until the night lets go. There’s a note in his pocket. He’ll find it soon.
Don’t jump, it says, written with someone’s most beautiful letters.
don’t jump
sebastian please
don’t jump
because we really really want to know
who you can become
if you don’t.
Just that.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank all the very nice people who have been patient enough to read everything I’ve written over the years. Even the weird stuff. It’s been a great and overwhelming ride.
These three stories in particular were never really meant to be a book, so I would like to thank my publisher for making it into one anyway. Especially Brendan May, Kevin Hanson, and Rita Silva, whose belief in me and my writing has really been quite unreasonable.
Furthermore, I would like to say thanks to my wife, as always. You’re my castle. Whenever I’m with you I’m safe.
Thanks also to Tor Jonasson and Marie Gyllenhammar at Salomonsson Agency, for keeping it all together, and for sticking by me. It’s not always been easy, I’m aware of that.
A final shoutout to my grandmother, who was always my toughest critic and biggest fan. I’m still trying to make you proud. And to the friends I lost along the way, some because of disease and some because of pain: I really miss you guys.
Fredrik Backman
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © LINNÉA JONASSON BERNHOLM/APPENDIX FOTOGRAFI
Fredrik Backman is the New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, Britt-Marie Was Here, Beartown, and Us Against You. His books have been published in more than thirty-five countries. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden, with his wife and two children.
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ALSO BY FREDRIK BACKMAN
A Man Called Ove
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry
Britt-Marie Was Here
Beartown
Us Against You
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright for The Deal of a Lifetime © 2016 by Fredrik Backman
English language translation copyright for The Deal of a Lifetime © 2017 by Alice Menzies
Originally published in Swedish in 2016 by Helsingborgs Dagblad
Published by arrangement with the Salomonsson Agency
Copyright for And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer © 2015 by Fredrik Backman
English language translation copyright for And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer © 2016 by Alice Menzies
Originally published in Swedish in 2015 as Och varje morgon blir vägen hem längre och längre
Published by arrangement with the Salomonsson Agency
Copyright for “Sebastian and the Troll” © 2018 by Fredrik Backman
English language translation for “Sebastian and the Troll” © 2018 by Vanja Vinter
Published by arrangement with Salomonsson Agency
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This Simon & Schuster Canada edition November 2018
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Jacket art and design by Alan Dingman
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Backman, Fredrik, 1981–
[Short stories. Selections. English]
The deal of a lifetime, and other stories / Fredrik Backman.
Translation of selected short stories by Fredrik Backman.
Issued also in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-982103-32-3 (hardcover).—ISBN 978-1-982103-33-0 (ebook)
1. Backman, Fredrik, 1981– —Translations into English.
2. Short stories, Swedish—Translations into English. I. Title.
PT9877.12.A32A2 2018 839.73'8 C2018-902295-7
C2018-902296-5
ISBN 978-1-9821-0332-3
ISBN 978-1-9821-0333-0 (ebook)
The Deal of a Lifetime and Other Stories Page 7