The Invoice (12 page)

Eventually the woman with the bank name appeared.

“Hello! We've met before, of course,” she said, and it occurred to me that it wouldn't be a good idea to ask for her name again, so I was none the wiser this time. She was dressed in a mauve jacket and skirt, the same severe cut as before, but now she had a large artificial violet-colored flower attached to her lapel. She was holding a folder to her chest, and led me into the big conference room. She asked me to take a seat. The woman in the scarf stayed outside.

Shortly afterward Georg arrived, bringing with him an older man with bushy eyebrows and a dimpled chin. The three of them stood in a little group on the other side of the table, and the woman with the bank name gave the new arrival a brief summary of my case. Every so often Georg interrupted with a clarification. Sometimes they very nearly talked at once. I recognized some of the terminology this time.

“Maximal E.H. score…”

“High values for euphoria, harmony, sorrow and pain, melancholy…”

“Sensitivity?”

“Maximal, as far as we can tell. But without lasting trauma…and, well, you know what that means. The resulting experiential charge shoots up…”

The woman held up a graph that the other two studied very carefully.

“Bloody hell, that's the highest quotient,” the man with the eyebrows said.

“Definitely. I've got nothing but fives here…”

They bent over another document.

“And the curve for shortcomings?”

“Latent,” she said.

“To take one example, he's only declared life-enhancing humiliation,” Georg said. “Nothing but character-forming setbacks. All according to the progression framework. There's no deviation from the development model. He's almost a textbook example of the
Live for today
template.”

“The only infections he's suffered occurred at exactly the right time to cause the least possible problems and the mildest symptoms, yet with optimal results for his immune system. Just look at this graph…”

They lowered their voices and I could only hear fragments of what they were saying, because they were trying not to be overheard. Occasionally they covered their mouths with their hands.

“…Almost absurd levels of pleasure…and full access to his feelings. According to our contact, on certain occasions the subject has the ability to forget basic simplifying acts in daily life which on sudden recollection give a twofold increase to his E.H.”

“And now…” the woman with the bank name said, picking up a new folder. “Now a hitherto unknown relationship has come to light. With a woman named Sunita.”

“Look here,” Georg said, pointing with his pen at the new folder. “Post-Sunita, life-affirming results all the way.” He leafed forward a few pages and pointed again. “Here again…life-affirming.”

The others nodded.

“Excuse me,” I said.

All three of them looked at me, aghast. As if they'd forgotten I was sitting there, or didn't know I could talk.

“I thought I was going to be seeing Maud,” I went on.

The man with the eyebrows looked quizzically at the woman with the bank name.

“Maud?” he said. “Who's this Maud?”

“Maud Andersson,” she replied. “Apparently she works down on the second floor. He has indicated…”

She turned to a different page.

“…here that he thinks ‘she is doing a very good job.' ”

The eyebrows were suddenly fixed on me.

“I see,” he said, shaking his head at me. “No,” he said. “No, no, it will just be the three of us.”

He put one hand to his mouth as he leafed through the file with the other.

“Intellect?” he muttered to the woman.

“Intact,” she replied.

“Here again,” Georg said, still looking down at the file. “Look, same as before…”

As I sat there watching these three people, my attention was taken by the new man's build. His body looked out of proportion. At first I couldn't work out what it was, then I realized that his legs were far too short. Which meant that he had an extremely low waist. The end result was about right. He was more or less of normal height, but now that I came to think about it he was almost entirely torso. It looked a bit odd when you saw the three of them standing next to each other.

The woman with the bank name took out another diagram. Georg interjected from the other side: “We can't possibly allow continued access as things stand,” he said.

“No,” the man with the torso whispered. “He's past the debt ceiling, so we'll have to impose a 6:3 on him.”

The others reacted sharply.

“
A 6:3?
”

One of them took out another document. The meeting moved farther along the table as the paperwork spread out. They slowly sat down as they carried on talking.

“He can't request any deductions either,” the woman said. “He hasn't really had any grounds on each of the…” She fell silent for a moment. Almost as if she had lost her train of thought.

As if on a given signal, all three stopped and looked over at me. Astonished.

I realized that I was something special. Georg broke the silence.

“But,” he began slowly, “as I understand it, his repayment capacity is practically zero?”

The woman and Georg took turns tapping new numbers into a calculator.

The man with the bushy eyebrows and short legs was still staring at me. He very slowly leaned across the table and held out his hand, as if it had only just occurred to him that he ought to shake my hand. I took hold of it, and he pressed my hand, at the same time as continuing his conversation with the other two.

“Have we carried out a home inventory?” he said, still not taking his eyes off me. As if the handshake were taking place in a parallel world.

Georg and the woman both shook their heads. The man with the eyebrows replied with a low rumble of disapproval.

“See that it gets done as soon as possible.”

He leaned back and sat down on his chair again.

“Well…,” he said, looking through the file until he found my name. Then, when he evidently realized it was too late to get personal, he didn't bother to say it. He simply nodded, as if he were content merely to know what my name was.

“Your debt has just been increased to 149,500,000 kronor.”

The inspectors came early the next day. I opened the door and let them into the apartment just after half past seven in the morning. They were large and taciturn. Careful and thorough. They worked efficiently and almost without speaking to each other. They went through my belongings quickly and methodically, rather like customs officers. A woman in the same sort of uniform looked through my clothes and registered the things in the bathroom. I tried to help them as much as I could, but soon realized that they were best left to their own devices.

For each item they made a small mark in a pad. They pulled out my kitchen drawers, opened my cupboards. Checked my pictures and photographs. They dealt with some things in bulk. One of the men looked at only a couple of my vinyl records, for instance. And not even the two most valuable. None of them noticed my copy of Jimmy Smith's
Softly as a Summer Breeze
, for example, no scratches, original pressing. The one checking the records merely shook his head and made a note.

An hour later they were finished. One of them handed me a “next-of-kin form” that he said I should fill in. They thanked me and left.

I sat on the floor looking at my things. Now that the men had gone, they felt even more worthless.

It was oppressively hot inside the apartment. The kind of sticky heat that clung to your body. Like having a tight helmet round your brain. It was as bad as trying to breathe in a sauna, and it didn't get any better when I opened the windows even wider. The sultry air outside was completely still. Swallows were flying low. I looked at the piece of paper in my hand and wondered who I should give as my next of kin. Jörgen? Roger? In the end I wrote my sister's name and address.

I paced up and down in my boiling-hot living room and tried to make sense of my thoughts. Had I presented everything wrong? Was there something I'd missed? Was it really possible to claim, as W.R.D. were, that I had taken the best from my relationship with Sunita? Okay, so our relationship was already starting to feel a bit tired when we separated. We didn't really share any interests beyond film, and we didn't agree on most things. She had a rather spoiled way of looking at the world, but at the same time she could seem pretty helpless. She was provocatively uninterested in other cultures, and declared on one occasion when we were having a row that I was more or less insignificant. That what we had together was only a parenthesis, something that didn't count, and, quite regardless of what she might feel now, would have absolutely no impact on her future. It was as if she didn't really value her own feelings. As if everything she had with me, all the films and her education, our entire culture, was just one long dream. Soon enough she would be going back to reality. She was Daddy's little princess, and when I once pointed out that he didn't seem to have been in touch for several years it was enough to make her expression freeze and break the spell between us.

It wasn't that great standing outside in different places in the winter and shivering, waiting for a sign that might or might not come. Toward the end she had almost seemed a bit bored, as if she had had enough. I daresay we both realized that it wouldn't have lasted much longer, but the fact that we were forced to split up suddenly made the whole thing feel incredibly sad. And the pain. The pain! I could still feel it as I walked back and forth, sweating, between the window and the living-room table.

As soon as I'd pulled myself together I called Maud again. At first I couldn't get through to her. They said she was busy, and had therefore redirected her calls to reception. Did I want to leave a message?

I said I needed to talk to her, and that it was urgent, and I must have sounded persistent and difficult and aggressive enough, because in the end they put me through anyway.

“So, are you done with me now, then?” I said.

“I don't know,” she said. “Have you got anything else sensational to report?”

I yelled that this was completely unreasonable, and how the hell did they actually work things out? But Maud managed to stay calm and said that I was the one who had withheld information. I begged and pleaded and shouted in turn. I wondered how the business with Sunita could
increase
my debt when it ought to have done the reverse. For the first time she sounded tense and rather nervous. I realized that she was under pressure. Perhaps because of all the miscalculations and mistakes. She said I shouldn't think I could judge things like this better than some of the country's most prominent experts and psychiatrists and psychologists, the people who had developed the system.

After a while I calmed down and felt stupid. After all, it wasn't her fault that things were the way they were.

“How serious is it?” I asked after a brief pause.

“Well,” she said, and even though she was making a real effort to sound calm, I could tell that she was upset. “You should have told me about Sunita…”

“I assumed you already knew—”

She interrupted me before I could finish, and sounded very apologetic.

“Of course, that was our fault,” she said. “I don't understand how we could have missed such a…”

“So what happens now?”

“I don't know. You're now registered as a so-called 6:3, and I can tell you that you've already gone through the debt ceiling…”

I got up from the floor, waving the next-of-kin form in my hand. I was breathing hard into the phone.

“But…we were going to sort this out…”

She didn't let me finish.

“That was before Sunita,” she said. “And from what you told us, that only raises the credit side.”

“How can it do that?” I said. “It was one of the worst experiences of my life…”

“The way you described it, you had a fantastic time.”

I noticed that I was shouting again. “Until she was snatched away from me! We were forced to…well, separate, under extremely…extremely painful circumstances. How can that be counted as something positive?”

She snapped back at me.

“Come off it!” she hissed. “It's pure Hollywood! How many people do you think…?”

Her voice was almost trembling. She fell silent for a moment, as if to compose herself, but soon carried on.

“How many people do you think experience anything like that? Ever? Anywhere?”

She tried to revert to cooler, more formal vocabulary, but her tone of voice gave her away. “And you still had your self-esteem intact at the end. According to your declaration, you could have drawn the experience out…so to speak…even after the conclusion of the relationship involving physical contact.”

She flared up again. Sounded properly angry for the first time. Almost as if she were lecturing me.

“And you tried to make out that your life was more or less a waste of time? Well? Isn't that what you did? Wasn't that the whole point of your last phone call? I almost fell for it. You're actually a perversely happy person!”

I didn't say anything at first. Then I mumbled something about unfair calculations and other more successful people around me, but Maud dismissed all my objections.

“It's not as simple as that. You understand that, surely? It's impossible to make generalizations…It's all about the combination…and your specific combination of experiences in life has turned out to be extremely happy.”

“Fine! What about everyone else, then?” I exclaimed.

For a moment there was total silence. It was like she was thinking hard.

“You really don't get it, do you?” she eventually said.

“What?” I said.

Quiet now. Almost a whisper.

“People are extremely unhappy. Most people feel really bad! They're in pain. They're poor, sick, on medication, depressed, scared, worried about all sorts of things. They're stressed and panicked, they feel guilty, suffer performance anxiety, have trouble sleeping, can't concentrate, or they're just bored, or constantly under pressure, or feel that they're being treated badly. Deceived, unsuccessful, guilty—anything and everything. At most, the majority of people experience a few years of relative happiness in their childhood. That's often when they build up their score. After that it's pretty bleak.”

She sighed, making the line crackle, and I thought I could hear her shake her head.

“If only you knew,” she said.

I sat down against the wall again. She took a deep breath and went on: “You see, we look at life as if it were a classically constructed play. The one with the most whistles and bells isn't necessarily the best. Things have to happen in the right order too, otherwise there's no point…”

I realized I'd never heard Maud talk like this before. And I recognized that there was a sort of trust, an honesty between us that it would be hard to manage without now that these conversations were drawing to a natural conclusion. Because even if I was upset about the way things were, I really didn't want anything else but to sit and talk to her on the phone. Talking about stuff. Listening to her voice. But I said nothing. I realized that it would hardly work in my favor.

I could hear her rustle some paper again. For the first time I suspected that she was doing it to make it sound as if she had more important things to be getting on with. Maybe she just did it when she couldn't think of anything to say.

“So…” she said after a pause. “That film, what was it called? I watched it.”

She fell silent, but I couldn't hear any paper rustling this time.

“
The Bridge
?” I said. “You watched
The Bridge
?”

She sighed. And once again that strange warm feeling spread through me. She had taken the time to get hold of a Bosnian film from the turn of the millennium for the simple reason that I had recommended it.

“I rented it,” she said. “And that scene you talked about. The one in the café. It was, well, I don't know how to put it…”

“You rented
The Bridge
? How did you manage to get hold of it?”

“I got hold of it, okay?!” she said irritably. “So I sat down and watched it. I waited for that scene, and it eventually came. But, well, there was none of that stuff you were going on about. It was just two people sitting there. In a café. So what? It was pretty boring. Terrible lighting.”

“Oh, come on,” I began. “No, I don't think that's—”

“Don't you get it?” she said. “You're the one who read all those looks and touches and everything into it,” she said. “They're all in your head.”

I stood up and went over to the window.

“No, I don't think…”

She went on: “But I ought to have realized that by now. It's typical of you. You think you're discovering a whole load of things, but they aren't really there. No wonder you got such a high E.H. score.”

“But they touched each other,” I said. “You must have seen them touch each other!”

“It's all one single scene, no editing. The camera's a long way away. The whole time. It was all done in one take. You can hardly see anything.”

“Okay, but
that's
what's so…”

“Sure, they put their arms next to each other, but that's all there was to it.”

I tried to find the right words.

“Yeah, but you still understand…”

“What is it you understand?” she said. “
What
?”

“Their little fingers touch…”

“Yes, but what is it you understand?”

“You see how—”

“What do you see? You could hardly even see their hands. What's so special about it? Grainy and black-and-white and all in long shot. To me it was just an endlessly drawn-out scene where practically nothing happened.”

“How can you say that?” I said. “It's completely magical…”

“It's impossible to tell from that distance. If they'd filmed a bit closer, maybe, but it was just one single, drawn-out shot.”