Everything I Don't Remember (14 page)

“Would you like a napkin?”

“Please.”

I went to grab a bunch of napkins, he dried himself off, he shook his head side to side to get the water out of his ear.

“So what do you think?”

“About what?”

“Did it work? Will you think of me the next time you take a sip of water?”

“I suppose we’ll find out.”

I reached for the other glass of water, closed my eyes, and took a sip. I thought of him, I tried associating the non-taste of water with the person sitting next to me at this cafe. I opened my
eyes and was met by his wide smile.

“What do you think?”

“There’s a chance I’ll remember you tomorrow.”

*

Midnight had passed, the party was lame, Laide’s friends were boring. A mix of perfumed Iranians, short South Americanos, ugly dykes, tattooed university chicks. Only
Panther, Samuel, and I were there to fill up our Experience Banks. I was sitting on a barstool in the kitchen when Panther said:

“This party sucks. But maybe we can do something about it.”

She patted her breast pocket.

“I’ll get Samuel,” I said, heading for the dance floor.

*

We sat at the cafe until the insides of our cups were covered in brown tree-rings of dried coffee. Mostly we talked about memory, how you remember, why you remember, when you
remember. He told me he had a friend with a photographic memory.

“It’s totally sick. He remembers everything. In perfect chronological order. No wait, you’ve met him, he came to the New Year’s party.”

“That big guy?”

“Right. Vandad.”

“He does
not
have a photographic memory, I can promise you that.”

“What about you—what kind of memory do you have?”

“I don’t know. A pretty good memory, I think. I remember what I need to remember. I don’t panic when I forget something.”

“I do. I don’t know why. It’s always been that way. That’s why I make lists.”

Samuel reached into the inner pocket of his jacket, hesitated for a second, and then pulled out a notebook.

“What do you write in that?”

“Everything I need to remember.”

“Like today: ‘Meet Laide at Petite France’? And then: ‘Pour water on myself’?”

“Exactly. For real, I used to do that when I was little. The first time I was going to call someone I had a crush on I had a long list of suggested topics of conversation. I was terrified
that we wouldn’t have anything to say.”

“Do you still have the lists?”

“I save everything. That’s why I don’t write them in my phone. I still have the lists and the funny thing when you read them is that I had this terrible lack of imagination.
Question one: ‘Do you have any plans this summer?’ Question two: ‘What did you do last summer?’ Question three: ‘Do you like summer?’ Question four: ‘Any
plans for Christmas?’”

“Didn’t you ask me that?”

“Sure did. Thank God for the list!”

*

We sneaked into a bedroom, scattered fireworks unfurled in the sky like flowers, occasional volleys of bang-snaps rang out. Panther took out a putty-like lump wrapped in tinfoil
paper, she heated it up with a lighter, she divided it into four pieces, stuck the biggest one back in her pocket, gave us each a little ball, and swallowed hers.

“What is it?” Samuel asked.

“A postcard from Berlin,” said Panther.

We swallowed them and when we came out the party was one hundred percent more fun. The music was better, the people more beautiful, even Laide seemed pleasant. Panther threw on a bathrobe from
the bathroom and let it liven up the dance floor, I put on three songs in a row, Panther instructed the party people to imitate the bathrobe’s movements as if the bathrobe were a personal
trainer, and no one questioned it, Panther shouted that this was what they should do and people caught on, the Iranians grinded on the university chicks, the university chicks hit on the South
Americanos, the South Americanos raised their glasses for
viva la revolución
, the bass vibrated, the floor swayed, Samuel threw himself into the rhythm with that style of dancing that
made it difficult to imagine that he worked at the Migration Board by day. He turned his hands into little birdies and pretended to be surprised when their beaks bit him on the nose. He stood
perfectly still and tried to wiggle his ears. He waved his hands in the air as if he were directing an airplane to park. Sometimes I saw Laide beside him, she was trying to talk, twice I saw her
pull his arm to try to make him stop dancing, but both times a new song he couldn’t stand still to came on and ten minutes later Laide was gone. “Did you see where she went?”
Samuel asked when the buzz started to wear off and the party was almost over.

“I think she went home,” I said, without sounding happy about it.

*

As we left the cafe I felt confused. I had gone there with a clear goal in mind. I was going to be honest and straightforward: I’m sorry, but this isn’t working.
It’s not even an option. You’re too young. Your friends are too druggy. Your cohabitant is too creepy. Your job is political, but in exactly the wrong ways. Your clothes are too
disheveled. Your cheeks are too smooth. You’re too short. You’re too skinny. Your head is too big. Your beard is too nonexistent. Your eyes are too naïve. Your hair is too
well-trimmed. So thanks but no thanks, I know where this is going so we might as well break it off now, it was short and perfectly fine while it lasted, let’s shake hands and say goodbye,
goodbye, goodbye. I stopped walking. We kissed. A taxi honked.

*

The guests had gone home, the music had been turned off, the girl whose party it was had come out of her bathroom with her toothbrush and said:

“Listen, you can stay if you want but you have to stop fucking smoking indoors.”

We promised. Panther put out her cigarette. But we stayed there, we didn’t want the night to end, not yet. Laide had taken off. Samuel checked his phone every five minutes, mumbling:

“I don’t get why she took off.”

“Maybe she’s a psychopath who gets off on making people fall in love with her and then enjoys disappearing?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“It’s just one theory out of many.”

“You don’t know anything about her.”

“I know her type.”

Panther nodded but I don’t know if it was because she agreed with me or with Samuel or because she was dancing to the music in her head.

*

We walked along Scheelegatan in silence. We passed Rådhuset, the shoemaker, the bus stop, the pizzeria. We walked arm in arm like an elderly couple and I didn’t
understand what was happening, how this could feel so right, despite my attempts to come up with reasons why it ought to feel wrong.

Some bellowing soccer fans were outside O’Leary’s, cheering at a match that was showing on the TV screens inside. A bus stopped by the hotel and dropped off a group of pensioners who
were carrying programs from a musical. We arrived at the escalators at the entrance to Rådhuset Metro stop.

“Did you guys do what you did at that party because you wanted to be remembered?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you remember? In the kitchen?”

“Oh, that. No. We just thought it was a good idea in the moment. Something to fill our Experience Banks with. Something that made us remember the night.”

We smiled at each other.

“It was nice to see you,” he said.

“It sure was.”

“I’m going to remember this.”

“Me too.”

“When will we see each other again?”

“Soon?”

“Soon.”

The sun was going down. We went our separate ways. We kissed, we said goodbye, we kissed, we said goodbye, we kissed, we said goodbye, we said that it really was time to say goodbye, we kissed,
we thanked each other for the date, it was awesome to see each other, now we have to say goodbye. I have to go home, me too, I have work tomorrow, me too, we said goodbye, we kissed. Forty-five
minutes went by before, with a tired tongue and shaky legs, I finally started going down the stairs, into the chilly evening air of the Metro system. Samuel was still standing in the slanting
sunlight, with his several-meter-long and thirty-centimeter-wide shadow. He waved when I turned around.

*

There we sat, the kitchen was total carnage. A battlefield of wine-box corpses, piles of plates, mountains of cigarettes, shards of glass, massacred beer bottles, empty liquor
bottles, wine bottles full of cigarette butts. Panther had yellow chip crumbs in her downy mustache. It was almost five o’clock in the morning and it was still dark out. Everyone had left but
the boyfriend of the girl whose party it was, he was out cold, snoring on the hall floor.

We should have gone home, it was time to go home, we had no choice but to go home. Then Panther looked up from the cigarette she’d just lit and said:

“We should do something insane.”

And my first thought was, of course. We should eat up the last of what’s in your breast pocket, so I nodded and smiled even before I heard what she said next.

“We should clean the shit out of this kitchen.”

We didn’t need a reason. We just did it. Samuel found the Ajax and soap and window cleaner from the cleaning closet, I took out a dustpan, and we had at it. We fixed the clog in the sink,
loaded glasses and plates into the dishwasher, emptied the leftover pasta salad into plastic bags. We wiped off tables and swept and mopped and aired things out and I didn’t try to stop
Panther until we were finished and I noticed that she was sneaking looks at the kitchen fan filter.

“That’s plenty,” I said.

“We can’t make it any better than this,” said Samuel.

The kitchen looked like an IKEA catalog, the counters were as sparkling white and bare as the inside of an elbow, the garbage bags were lined up in the hall like an army, next to the sleeping
boyfriend.

*

I was sitting on the train on the way home when I got a message from Samuel. “A picture of a water glass.” Written out in words. I saw my smile in the reflection in
the train window. It was almost as big as his.

*

We were just about to leave, we were finished, we felt proud and satisfied. Panther gave us a thumbs up, took two steps to the side, and puked her guts up into the shiny clean
sink. Tiny red specks splashed onto the white tile walls and she threw up one more time and then stood up and said:

“Shit.”

Then she puked again and then we just stood there in this weird kitchen that still could have been in a catalog, as long as the photographer chose the correct angle and ignored the specks and
the smell. We looked at each other and headed for the stairwell, left the garbage bags in the hall, stepped over the boyfriend, and ran for the Metro. We just managed to catch a morning train into
the city, we sat in an empty group of four seats, as the train approached Gullmarsplan we started laughing, the laughter started way down in our knees and we laughed all the way across the bridge
into the city. Some Spanish-speaking ladies turned around and smiled at us and when we said goodbye to Panther at Skanstull I thought that there was no reason to worry. Some friendships can survive
anything.

*

I think I loved him. Take out think. I loved him. I loved him in a way I’ve never loved anyone else. I loved him even though we hadn’t slept together yet. I loved
him because he whooped like a little boy when he laughed and shed a tear like an old lady when it was windy, because his pointy canine teeth made him look like a cat and because his big head
balanced so regally on his thin shoulders and because his shabby clothes made him look like a person who had more important things to think about than laundry or sewing on buttons and because he
smelled like a human and not a cologne factory. I loved him because he transformed all my earlier relationships into random asides and sometimes I felt a strong urge to call up my old boyfriends
and say that I had to take back a few things: when I said I was in love I wasn’t in love and when I said I enjoyed our conversations I was exaggerating and when I said you were funny I was
lying and when I said I loved you I didn’t know any better and when I ended it and said it wasn’t you it was me that wasn’t true either, because it wasn’t my fault,
I
wasn’t the broken one, there was something wrong with
you
. I just hadn’t met the right person and once I did it didn’t start with a storm of emotions that slowly weakened
into a calm breeze that later turned into a stiflingly calm everyday life with nail-clipping in front of the TV and arguments about missing phone chargers. My relationship with Samuel was the exact
opposite. We started with daily life, with long conversations between friends, which later, several months later, turned into kisses and closeness and an intimacy that. I don’t know how to
describe it. But yes. I loved him. I truly did. What’s wrong? Are you okay? Yeah, sorry, I just got the sense that you disappeared for a minute there. Should we take a break? Are you
hungry?

*

Then it was January. Panther went back to Berlin. During the next few weeks, or months, really, I hardly saw Samuel. We still lived together and our toothbrushes were still
next to each other in the mug in the bathroom and Samuel’s spring coats and summer sneakers were still in the closet and his notebooks were stacked on his white bookcase. But he himself had
vanished.

Are you ready? Shall we continue? I don’t remember much from January to the middle of March. We entered some sort of fog where it suddenly became inconceivable that we
wouldn’t sleep together every night. When we weren’t working, we shared every waking moment. But what did we talk about? Why did we giggle incessantly? How could a regular old visit to
the laundry room turn into a laugh-fest? How come everything we touched became so magical? I don’t know. I really don’t know. It’s all kind of a blur. We explored each
other’s bodies with tongues and fingers, we slowly and methodically inventoried scars and birthmarks, ticklish spots and pleasure zones. We talked for so long that there was no time left over
for sleeping, which didn’t matter because sleeping was for normal people and we weren’t normal, we didn’t need sleep or food, we only needed each other. Sometimes we went to work
with unruly hairstyles and cheek colors that made our colleagues or clients smile and sometimes we stood at lunch restaurants waiting to pay and discreetly scratched our cheeks just to smell the
scent on our fingers and remember the previous night. Sometimes we went to movies and plays and dance recitals and poetry readings and no matter what we saw it was too long because the time we had
to spend sitting there in the dark, unable to talk to each other, went too slowly, but when we finally walked out into the night air whatever we had just seen turned out to be pretty good after all
because we had the ability to elevate it, no matter how we had felt at the time, whatever we had experienced became really good, a work of fucking genius whether it was a TV show or a hockey match,
because it wasn’t thanks to the actors or directors or poets or hockey players, it was thanks to us, we were the ones who imbued everything with meaning, we were the ones who breathed life
into corpses. We were the ones who could transform all that was mediocre and ordinary into something else, something greater. We became so dependent upon each other that the very thought of not
being together was unthinkable.