Everything I Don't Remember (5 page)

For a second we weren’t sure how to greet each other. Handshake? Fist bump? I went with the nod and Samuel reciprocated the nod and I said:

“What are you drinking?”

“I waited to order.”

“Beer?”

“Great.”

I motioned two beers to the bartender and seasoned the bar with my hand to show him we wanted some nuts. We started by talking about how things were going (fine). Then we talked about our
weekend plans (maybe going out, or staying home). Then Samuel started talking about fish parasites.

“Sorry?” I said.

“Fish parasites. There are some really disgusting fish parasites. Have you ever heard of isopods, for example?”

*

Panther says of course she remembers how they met. It was through basketball. We played in the same league; he was on the boys’ B team, which was totally worthless, and I
was on the girls’ team, which won the national championship twice and got silver once. Once we got to know each other, the joke was that I should move over to their team so they could finally
win a game, because at the time I looked pretty much like a boy. Probably no one would have noticed, and my real name works for boys and girls. But I’ve never liked it, which is why I started
telling my teammates that people at school called me Panther and at school I said that people from basketball called me Panther, and soon people started calling me that, the name spread, and now
even my sister calls me that. She played basketball too, and even she was better than Samuel, people called Samuel “Chickadee” because he was so scared of the ball and he was way too
small to get rebounds. The first few times we saw each other outside of basketball we went to the Water Festival or hung around for hours at the twenty-four-hour McDonald’s on Hamngatan. And
I remember thinking that Samuel was different from other guys because it was like he talked because he liked talking and not because he wanted to fuck. He felt non-sexual somehow. We became brother
and sister; when things were rough at home I could crash at his place, his mom became my second mom, she understood without needing to know too much, she never asked why I needed to run away, I was
welcomed into his family and I will always be grateful for that. They saved me when I needed it the most and I— I’m sorry. Sorry. I’ll pull myself together.

*

I signaled to the bartender again and soon we had two new beers in front of us. Samuel hardly seemed to notice. He was in the midst of his description of the isopod parasite. He
described how it likes to live in certain kinds of water and when a particular type of fish approaches it gets inside the fish’s mouth and eats up its tongue.

“Okay,” I said, checking over my shoulder to make sure no one was listening to our conversation.

“Neat, huh?”

“I don’t know.”

“It eats up the fish’s whole tongue.”

“Oh.”

“And then—do you know what the best part is?”

“Even better than eating up the tongue?”

“Mmhmm. When the tongue is gone the parasite turns around and its body takes the place of the tongue. The fish starts using the parasite as a tongue, for crushing up food and stuff. Pretty
cool, huh?”

“I hardly even knew that fish have tongues,” I said.

“Me neither.”

We took a few sips of the beer, the glasses were foggy, the drunks mechanically hit the buttons that made the symbols on the screen spin round and round. The biker gang pointed at the darts game
on the TV and seemed upset.

“Do you come here often?” Samuel asked.

“Pretty often. I live nearby.”

“Big place?”

“A one-bedroom.”

“Rent or own?”

“Rent stabilized.”

“Wow. Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

*

Panther blows her nose and says that after upper secondary school she started the art school foundation course and Samuel studied political science at the university. We
didn’t have as much contact for a few years. I hung out with people in art circles and Samuel was surrounded by a bunch of people who wanted to study international relations and get jobs at
the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and work for the UN and save the world and that had definitely been Samuel’s thing at school. I thought he would feel one hundred percent at home. Instead he
pulled away from it. He took his exams and went to the required seminars, but in his free time he kept going on about how life is short and you have to fill up with new experiences so you
won’t die unhappy. He sounded like a fifteen-year-old version of me. One night he called to ask if I wanted to go to Tumba with him to watch an innebandy game.

“Innebandy?” I said.

“Yes! It’s the final of a tournament called Capri-Sonne.”

“Do you know anyone who’s playing?”

“No.”

“So why would we—”

“Aw, come on. It’ll be fun. Something to remember!”

I said no. The same way I said no when he suggested we go to the Police Museum, take part in a medical study on insomnia at Karolinska, watch the horse races at Solvalla, or go to
Hellasgården to try ice fishing.

“I’m a vegetarian,” I reminded him.

“So? We can throw the fish back. Come on. It will be fun. Live a little!”

And maybe in retrospect it sounds spontaneous and exciting. But it wasn’t. There was something desperate about the whole thing. Samuel actively tried to seek out new experiences, but he
was completely incapable of enjoying anything. The more he talked about depositing things in his Experience Bank, the emptier he seemed. I remember feeling sorry for him. He seemed lonely.
Especially when he texted me on the way home from the innebandy tournament in Tumba to say that two of the three matches had been “hella exciting.” Out of some sort of desperation and
fear of . . . I don’t know what. Sorry, here I go again, I really don’t mean to. Can you grab me some toilet paper?

*

Then we sat there in silence. But it wasn’t uncomfortable silence, the kind that makes you want to overturn the bar and run for the door. We sat there, me thinking about
the fish parasite, Samuel answering a text from Panther—the girl who had been with him at the party in Liljeholmen.

“Have you been friends for a long time?” I asked.

The question came perfectly naturally. It wasn’t like I had to think to come up with it. I was curious and I asked it, and Samuel replied that they had known each other since the end of
compulsory school. They were in the same basketball league and later her family kicked her out because she didn’t want to live the same way they lived and then she stayed at his mom’s
place for about six months.

“Where did you grow up?”

Again: the question just came out. I don’t know how or from where, but I sat there at the bar asking questions like I was some hot-shot TV journalist. Samuel told me about his childhood,
that he and Panther were from the same neighborhood, an inner-city housing project.

“It was a nice place. Pretty mixed. There were homies and Swediots, alcoholics and pensioners. We liked it there. What about you?”

I told him briefly about my background, moving around Sweden, my childhood in Halmstad, my teen years in Gothenburg.

“Oh, I get it,” said Samuel.

“What?”

“Your dialect. I was having trouble placing it.”

He didn’t ask anything about my brother. He didn’t try to get to know me by digging for anything historical. And that was why we got to know each other. We gave each other time. Even
though we didn’t talk the whole time, we knew on that first night at Spicy House that we belonged together. Erase that. Just put that we didn’t have to talk the whole time to know we
were going to be best friends.

*

Panther collects herself, nods, and says that if anything came up repeatedly, it was Samuel’s concerns about his memory. He would jot down little notes in notebooks to
remember his experiences. He was paranoid about never remembering faces. Sometimes I wondered if his memory was getting worse
because
he was working so hard to improve it. In the spring of
2007 he initiated Project Memory Phase. Has anyone mentioned it? It was a totally bizarre idea. His plan was to divide up the year in memory sections. When January started he put on a particular
pair of jeans, a certain cologne, and a special cap. Then he wore those things every day for a whole month. Then came February and he switched to a different pair of pants, dabbed on a new kind of
cologne, and wore a beret. And he also realized he could use sound, so he listened to nothing but Tupac, all February. Then came March and he put on a pair of chinos and a new kind of cologne and
went with no hat and only listened to Bob Marley. Then came April and he did the same thing again, new pants, new cologne, new music, and an old-man hat on his head. He hoped that all this would
make connections in his brain and life would feel longer somehow. But as so often happened with him, it was a better plan in theory than in reality. He had given up the whole project by summer.
When I asked why, he said it wasn’t having the right effect. Instead of remembering his experiences, he remembered the music and the pants and the cologne. But his actual daily life as it
went by, he was remembering even less of that. And when he told me this, it was a Sunday afternoon, we were waiting for the Metro at Mariatorget, we had just played basketball, our fingers were
sore after all the dunking on the kid-high baskets, our fingertips were rough and smudged gray, and he shook his head and looked toward the train that was about to roll in, the rails crackling like
a bonfire.

“I don’t know how you all do it.”

I assumed he was talking about memory and I told him that I had a shitty memory too.

“I hardly remember what I did last week,” I said.

Samuel looked at me, his face lighting up with a grateful smile.

“Really?”

Maybe it wasn’t completely true, but I said it to make him feel better, I felt sorry for him, he worked so hard to try to understand and control something that came perfectly naturally to
so many people.

*

After three rounds it was last call and then last last call and we got the bill. I paid. Samuel hardly seemed to notice. But as we were standing on the square, about to say
goodbye, he said:

“Thanks for the beer. Next time, it’s on me.”

“No problem,” I said, putting out my hand to say goodbye.

He took my hand, pulled it up toward his chest, and leaned in for a hug. I let him do it, I didn’t hug him back, but I didn’t shove him away either, I didn’t head-butt him, I
hardly thought about how it would look to the people on the Stairmasters inside the twenty-four-hour gym. It would have been an unnecessary thought anyway, because the gym was empty, I noticed once
we’d said goodbye and I was walking home.

*

Panther says that she would be happy to share her memories from the last day. Samuel and I talked to each other at quarter to eleven. I was the one who called. He picked up and
said he was in the car but he would call back soon. We hung up and I thought: “in the car?” Whose car? And where is he going? And why did it sound like there was freaking elevator music
in the background?

*

Nothing in particular happened on the second night, and not the third or fourth either. We met at different places (twice at Spicy House, once at a bar in Gamla Stan). We
ordered drinks, we drank, we talked. About normal stuff. About the kind of things people talk about to seem not totally bizarre. But in the midst of all the regular stuff, unusual things would pop
up. Like when Samuel suddenly asked if I had tried putting saffron on pears.

“It’s wicked good.”

Or when he told me about the kayak stand by Norrtull where you could borrow boats without being a member.

“Want to try it sometime?”

Or when he asked if I’d been north of the polar circle.

“No,” I replied. “Have you?”

“I went up to Jukkasjärvi a few years ago to check out the northern lights.”

“By yourself?”

“Mmhmm. But I was only there for one night. I stayed at a hostel and trudged through snow up to my thighs for several hours, on the hunt for the northern lights. But the sky was totally
pitch black. Then I got it in my head that I had to do something to make them show up. I started making snowballs and I thought, if I hit the same tree with three snowballs in a row I’ll get
to see the northern lights. It was harder than I thought. It took me like fifteen minutes to do it.”

“Did you see them?”

“No. The sky was just as black as it had been before. But on the way back to the hostel I got lost in the woods. Then I looked up at the sky and saw the light. It was a yellowish round
circle in the middle of all that black. It looked incredibly alien, a lot more amazing than in pictures.”

“Nice.”

“But the next day the girl at the desk in the hostel said I had probably just seen the lights from the sports arena nearby.”

*

Panther says that when Samuel called back, it was a bit past eleven. I answered on my German phone, we agreed to call each other on Skype, we logged in and called. Samuel
apologized for sounding so irritated when I first called, he thought it was his mom calling to talk money.

“The house?” I said.

“Mmhmm. That fucking house.”

“What’s going on?”

“Not much. Sitting in the waiting room at Huddinge hospital.”

“Everything all right?”

“Yeah. I’m here with Grandma. She’s trying to get her driver’s license back. She’s getting her vision checked right now. Then she’s going to drive in a
simulator.”

“What are the chances she’ll succeed?”

“On what scale?”

“One to ten.”

“Minus twelve.”

*

One night we were talking names and Samuel said that his dad wanted him to be named Samuel because he had started to figure out the reaction a foreign name would get you from
employers and landlords. His dad didn’t want his son to run into the same problems.

“What would your name have been otherwise?” I asked.

Samuel smiled and gave examples of names that required two throat-clearings, names that started with h-sounds deep down in his stomach, names that sounded like a sneeze or rhymed with two
insults, and as we sat there at the bar talking names and drinking beer I heard myself saying that my brother had hated his name.