Everything I Don't Remember (7 page)

“I don’t know,” I said.

Because I didn’t know. We went from room to room, looking at art that was sometimes art and sometimes turned out to be an ashtray that someone had left behind from an after-party. The
girls looked rich, or they must have been rich, because only rich girls can go to a party with so little make-up and such unshaved armpits and such dirty canvas bags without being ashamed. The only
room we stopped for a little bit extra in was at the far end of the building. Someone had made a work of art with a glowing warm furnace.

“I like this,” I said.

“Me too,” said Samuel.

We stayed in the room, the warmth warmed us, the fire crackled. Suddenly Samuel put out his hand and rested it on the furnace. He held it there until I swatted it away.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

“Just wanted to check how hot it was.”

I looked at him and wondered if there was something seriously wrong with him. Then I looked at the fire and thought that if good art was
this
good I could definitely learn to like
art.

*

Panther sighs and throws up her hands. But at the same time it’s really hard to know what you could have done differently. I don’t think it’s possible to save
someone who doesn’t want to be saved. There’s something self-centered about the whole idea that it’s up to you to take care of everyone around you. People live their own lives and
when they don’t want to do that anymore there’s not much you can do. I’m convinced that this would have happened even if I hadn’t moved to Berlin. Even if I had been a
little better at keeping in touch. What about you—do you feel guilty? Do you wish you had done something different?

*

We were interrupted by two students from the school. Samuel nodded their way and asked who had made this awesome piece of art. The students laughed.

“This furnace belongs to the glassmaking workshop.”

I swallowed and braced myself. But there was no attack. No scornful smiles. No sense of standing there naked. Samuel didn’t deflect the blame, he didn’t say that I was the one
who’d come up with such an idiotic thought. He just blew on his hand, laughed, and asked if there was an after-party. When the students moved on, Samuel and I stayed in the room, the fire
crackled, it smelled faintly of something I thought might be burned hair or sulfur.

“This is still the best thing here,” Samuel said, and I nodded.

He had my back. He didn’t let me fall. I thought, I will always do the same for him.

*

Panther looks surprised and maybe a little disgusted. Are you joking? What do you mean, “relieved”? I was totally crushed. Part of me died along with Samuel. There
is nothing, not the tiniest atom in my body, that felt “relieved” when I heard what had happened. No offense, but anyone who comes up with an idea like that must be pretty
disturbed.

*

After the art party we went into town. There was a line to get into East, but Ibbe from the gym was manning the door and I mimicked Hamza, I tried putting two fingers up in the
air, and Ibbe waved us in.

“Wow,” Samuel said after we found a table in the corner. “Did I just see two blackheads get into East at one thirty in the morning on the Saturday after payday?”

“Should we call the Guinness Book of World Records?”

We had a toast, we drank, we ordered more, we moved toward the dance floor.

“Baller culo.”

“Check out her booty.”

“Look at that sweet ass.”

“Damn, baby’s got back!”

“Nice humps.”

But we said it more to ourselves than to the girls. When a song Samuel liked came on, he vanished onto the dance floor. He was dancing in that way that made people point and shake their heads.
He transformed his arms into a sunset and roared along with the chorus. He crouched down and whispered secrets to the broken glass on the floor. He shook his ribcage side to side like maracas. When
he came back to have a drink I could smell his hardworking deodorant.

*

Panther shook her head. I don’t know. I don’t have a good answer for that. Maybe he forgot to take it off? It’s not impossible. Or he could have been driving
so fast that he knew the speed would be enough and that no seatbelt in the world could save him.

*

We had drunk more than usual. The sink in the bathroom was rocking like a rowboat. I had to max out my concentration in order to grab the door handle. When I came back I found
Samuel leaning into a corner, his legs planted wide as a tripod. The music stopped and the bouncers drove people out with arms like side-boom trucks.

“Home?” I said.

“Soon,” said Samuel.

It was chaos at McDonald’s. Two drunk Stureplan brats were lying on the floor and pointing at the spitballs on the ceiling as if they were comets. A teenage girl had thrown up on the
window. A homeless guy with a raincoat and plastic bags on his feet was sitting at a table and reading a newspaper and looking like the most normal person there. An old lady in a gray coat was in
front of us in line. She was swaying, she was taking a long time, there was some problem with her card. Samuel looked at his wrist (even though he didn’t have a watch) and said:

“How about this weather?”

Then the old lady turned around and gave him a surly look. We discovered that she wasn’t an old lady at all; she was a girl about our age or a little older. She had a strangely bell-shaped
coat and some gray streaks in her hair. She muttered something and walked toward the street. I saw that she was wearing a gold brooch shaped like an owl on her coat. The girl was Laide. And as I
walked up and ordered for myself and Samuel, we can establish that this was the first time Laide and Samuel saw each other. There were no strings playing from the loudspeakers. No choirs of angels.
No random car went by on the street with its windows down, blasting D’Angelo’s “Lady.” The sky outside did not fill with nighttime fireworks. Samuel and Laide were at the
same McDonald’s. He saw her. She saw him. It was late at night or early morning, and life just went on. As if nothing had happened. This was their first meeting. Even if I seem to be the only
one who remembers it.

*

Panther says that after the phone call she got a text from Samuel. He wrote that the streets of Sweden were safe because his grandma hadn’t passed the test and now they
were going to eat lunch and go back to the home. Then he wrote:
Thanks for calling. It meant everything to hear your voice. Fuck everyone else.
I don’t know exactly what he meant by
“everyone else.” I had a hectic afternoon, I had a working lunch and then a studio visit and to be completely honest I forgot about his text. I never responded. I didn’t really
know how to answer so I just didn’t and then it was too late.

*

We stood on Kungsgatan. Empty cabs zoomed by us, one, two, four, six, ten of them. We just laughed.

“Hi, Guinness Book of World Records,” Samuel said. “It’s us again.”

“Don’t bother sending anyone over.”

“Stockholm is the same as ever.”

We walked up toward Sveavägen to test our luck there. There were two beggars lying under the bridge. Samuel stopped and read their signs. Then he placed two gold tenkrona coins in
one’s mug and put a fifty-krona bill in the other’s. He just did it, without checking whether anyone was looking, without seeming proud. I looked at him and thought that he was a very
unusual person. Not because he gave money to beggars, but because he did it there and then, in the middle of the night, when no one was looking. Except for me.

*

Panther is quiet, thinking back. Just so you know, that last text sounds more dramatic now that I’m telling you about it. But I definitely should have responded. I could
have written, like,
Take it easy bro, I’m here for you, you’re not alone, everyone has felt the way you’re feeling at one point and you’ll make it, don’t worry,
don’t let go, hold on.
But of course I didn’t [pausing, looking out the window]. Okay, damn it, that’s enough, would you stop looking at me like I’m so guilty? [Standing
up, walking to the bathroom.] What the hell is with you, what the hell do you want, I didn’t have time [slamming the bathroom door].

*

Twenty minutes later. Still no taxi. Or—an awful lot of taxis zoomed past us with their signs lit and picked up other customers further on. In the end we decided to go for
a solo wave. I went to stand near a shop window with my phone to my ear, Samuel stood alone on the sidewalk. A taxi stopped, Samuel opened the door and said where we were going and when the taxi
driver accepted, I pretended to end my call and jumped into the backseat. The driver saw me and swallowed and moved the passenger seat forward so I would have room for my legs. We drove south in
silence. Samuel was low on cash and I said it was fine.

“I’ll get it.”

“Thanks, I’ll get the next one,” he said, as usual, and clapped his hand to his wallet-slash-heart.

I shook my head to say it didn’t matter and I would never let money come between us. The taxi drove on. We dropped Samuel off in Hornstull and continued toward Örnsberg. When we
turned off Hägerstensvägen I leaned forward and showed my cash to the driver.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I have money. I’m not going to rob you.”

The driver gave a nervous smile, he tried to hold the wheel a bit more loosely but I noticed how relieved he was when I unfolded my body from his backseat and the car recovered its usual center
of gravity.

*

Panther calms down and comes back. She says that later that same day, at four or five in the afternoon, a stranger called from Samuel’s phone. He said that there had been
an accident, he said that it probably wasn’t that serious, he had worked in Cambodia and had seen things that were considerably worse. But I called Vandad anyway, I told him what had happened
and I thought that if it was serious someone would contact me. When I didn’t hear anything I assumed that everything was fine. I went out that night, a few drinks at Möbel-Olfe and then
a party in a courtyard near Görlitzer Bahnhof.

*

Okay. I realize we don’t have “all the time in the world.” And of course I can “fast-forward to Laide and Samuel’s next encounter.” As long
as you agree that everything I’ve told you up to now plays an important role in what happens later on. The rest of the year flies by. Panther moves to Berlin to concentrate on her career in
art. Samuel and I go from being acquaintances to being friends to moving in together. By day he works at the Migration Board and I stack moving boxes in fifteen-footers. On the weekends we do all
those things Samuel gets it into his head we have to do so as not to miss out on life. And I tag along; I never say no. Even if there are times when his ideas make me want to shake my head and ask
why. Why take an airport bus to Arlanda and back to watch planes landing and eat dinner at a buffet place that according to Samuel’s cousin is “every pilot’s best-kept
secret”? Why swing by the shooting range in Årsta to check out the recoil in a Glock? Why buy a used Sega Genesis online to see if NBA Jam is still as fun as it was when we were little?
I don’t know. Samuel doesn’t either. But we do it all anyway and we share everything equally and if one of us is low on cash the other one pays and when Samuel finds out that his sublet
won’t be renewed the obvious choice is for him to move in with me. I help him with the move, get him free boxes from work and borrow a cargo van. He takes the living room, I keep the bedroom.
Once Samuel says that he’s never had a friendship that was so “wonderfully undemanding” and I’m not a hundred percent sure what he means but I nod and agree.

Sometimes when I walk into the bathroom in the morning and see his toothbrush beside mine I think that we have grown awfully close in an awfully short amount of time. That this closeness
is— Delete that. Delete all of that. Just write that the rest of the year is like a stroboscopic slideshow of rumbling basslines, clinking glasses, nods at people we don’t know but
recognize, sticky dance floors, rubber coat-check tags in my back pocket, steamy smoke-machine smell, cigarette butts in overflowing toilets, cigarette packs smushed into empty glasses,
conversations in front of speakers where the only way to make yourself heard is to cup the listener’s ear. Then home in a taxi with ears ringing and waking up the next day with wrists full of
stamps and pockets full of crumpled bills and forgotten beer tickets and sweaty gum and involuntarily stolen lighters and brown flakes of tobacco and receipts from places you hardly remember being
at. But then you remember, of course, and smile at the memory. In short: it was a happy time. Maybe the happiest of my life.

*

Panther sighs and shakes her head. It hurts to think about this. The next day was a Friday. I was standing at the market in Kreuzberg, I was just about to buy two artichokes, I
had them in a thin blue plastic bag, I had my change purse out, my phone rang, I answered. Vandad told me, he just said it and then he hung up. I know I collapsed, I remember that the guy selling
vegetables seemed to think at first that I was trying to steal the artichokes, then he realized what was up and he ran out and stood near me so no one would accidentally step on me, it was crowded,
the cobblestone street was full of vegetable bits and black water, there was a sound, it wasn’t crying, it was an animal, a mewling primeval animal, I squatted there, I don’t know how
long, the vegetable seller stood there waiting for me to get up, he borrowed a bottle of water from a colleague, he handed it to me, I took it but couldn’t drink, shoes and unshaven shins
walked by me, two German guys with guitars were talking loudly about pineapple tomatoes which were apparently like regular tomatoes but in the shape of a pineapple, they tasted the same as other
tomatoes but the shape was totally different, and one guy said “then what’s the point of them” and the other answered something I didn’t hear because they had walked past
me, they were already gone, after a while I could get up, the man with the artichokes wanted to give them to me but I paid, I didn’t want anything for free, I took the plastic bag and walked
home, fifteen minutes later I realized I was going in the wrong direction, I turned around and walked home, I had bought artichokes, the sun was shining, German guys were talking about pineapple
tomatoes, a truck was unloading lamps and dressers outside a furniture store, beer was glittering in plastic glasses at an outdoor restaurant, it was a nice day, people were happy, bikes wobbled
by, taxis honked, cats meowed, the city was alive, but Samuel was dead.