The Invoice (13 page)

I really wanted to say something, but couldn't get the words out.

“No,” she said, and this time I'm sure I could hear her shake her head. “You filled in all those details for yourself.”

“But all great art…” I began.

“It's brilliant that you can extract so much emotion from that scene, but I have to look at it practically,” she said. “To me it was just unbearably dull.”

The two of us said nothing for a long time. The only sound was the noise of her colleagues in the background. The next-of-kin form in my hand was damp and crumpled now.

“If I could just watch that scene with you…” I said.

“You won't have time to watch anything,” she said. “They're probably already on their way to you now.”

“What? Who…?” I said. “What's going on now?”

She took a deep breath and began speaking in a low, confidential voice so that no one else in the office would hear her, as if she were telling me something I really shouldn't know.

“You're about to be picked up by one of our teams—”

“Picked up?” I exclaimed.

“Shhh! Yes, what did you expect? You can't possibly have further access under the circumstances.”

I could definitely hear emotion in her voice now. Even though she was really trying to sound businesslike.

“There's nothing I can do as things stand…”

I let the phone slip slowly down my cheek, until it hit my shoulder and fell to the floor. I heard her call my name from down there several times.

Clouds were gathering outside. Big, lead-gray billows were rolling in over the rooftops. The sun passed behind them and soon there was a flash of lightning, like a momentary camera-flash lighting up the whole city. There was a thunderous rumble and the first heavy drops were in the air. Soon the rain was pattering on the windowsill and bouncing in onto the floor. I should have shut the windows, but I just sat there paralyzed, staring at the cloud of dancing droplets.

What did she mean by “picked up”? What did no “further access” mean? In my mind's eye I saw myself being segregated, with one of those cones you put on dogs, to stop me from absorbing any more experiences. Light, sound, birds, wind, all the things I liked, even rain and stormy weather. I tried to think of really dull days, but suddenly everything seemed so wonderful. I really did try to imagine a properly gray day, but without meaning to I found myself thinking of water gushing out of the bottom of a drainpipe. So wet. The water in general. The whole principle of water. What the air is like when it rains. Drops against my skin. Girls I'd seen out in the rain. The way their clothes stuck to their skin, and that film,
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
, which Sunita had made me watch, and which I honestly hadn't appreciated at all until afterward, in hindsight, when she was gone. When all I had left were the things she opened my eyes to. A whole load of things that I now loved. The measured pace of Rachmaninoff's sonata for cello and piano, for instance. Bloody hell—there was no escape!

I shook my head and tried to conjure up images of terrible monsters and horrible demons. I tried to make them as vicious and dangerous as possible, but no matter how hard I thought of tails and tongues and teeth, they never ended up as anything but colorful characters in a computer game. I looked round the room in an attempt to find something really grim, tragic, or at least depressing, but everything I could see felt secure and beautiful and held only happy associations. My beloved old sofa, my lovely cushions, the wonderful poster of M. C. Escher's perfectly mathematical illusion. The damp, and the tiny drops of the liberating, oxygen-rich rain that occasionally reached the tops of my arms…I was still hopelessly happy.

For the first time I was struck by the unsettling thought that the true value of my Experienced Happiness might have actually been seriously undervalued.

Ten minutes later, when the men from W.R.D. knocked on the door, I was still sitting there, leaning against the wall in the same position. I had just thought of a summer some years ago when I'd borrowed Lena and Fredrik's cottage. At first I felt a bit lonely, but as the days passed I felt more and more liberated. And weightless. In the end I stopped noticing the passage of time, and even forgot how old I was. I would cycle slowly down to the lake through warm, gentle summer rain, and I was all ages at the same time. I got to my feet and went to open the door.

They said hello politely and waited for me to go to the toilet and get changed before we headed off to the vast granite complex, where we drove down into a large garage. We got out and went up in the lift to the same reception area where I had been twice before. Rain was lashing the big windows, sounding like hundreds of little drums.

Georg met us at the desk. He nodded to the guards and indicated that they could go now. This time he had with him two very well-dressed foreign gentlemen who didn't speak Swedish. He introduced them in English, and I was told that they were from the head office in Toronto and the Calgary subsidiary. They smiled at me and seemed pleasant enough. Neither of them said much. They mostly fiddled with their phones while we waited. I couldn't help wondering what was going to happen.

I held the next-of-kin form out to Georg, who looked at it with surprise and hesitantly took it.

“Of course, yes, this…” he said slowly. “I don't really know who…This is really just a trial, so far…”

After a while another man came and got the two foreign men. Georg remained standing over by the desk and I sat down in an armchair while the others disappeared into the conference room with the noisy ventilation. He looked at my form for a while, then put it down on the desk beside him.

“Well, then.” He sighed, and shook his head.

He sat down in the chair next to me and gave me a sympathetic look. I realized I was sweating. I looked round to see if I could see any handcuffs, or a cage, or anything like that.

“What are you going to do?” I asked in as relaxed a voice as possible.

He shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I'm not going to preempt anything, but it doesn't look good. Not good at all…”

Everyone who walked past looked completely normal and seemed preoccupied with their own concerns. No one looked at me oddly, so I assumed that only a small group there at W.R.D. knew about my situation and what was likely to happen to me.

I was having trouble sitting still. I turned round and tried to look into the glass office where meetings were usually held, and where a large number of people were now leaning over something on the table. Some of them were gesticulating with their arms. It was like they were waiting for a particular signal, or perhaps another participant. I took a deep breath and tried to stop my hands from shaking on my lap.

“Why me?” I asked Georg, almost in a whisper.

He shrugged his shoulders. As if it was a question that couldn't possibly be answered easily.

“What about all the millionaires?”

He smiled and ran his hand through the hair that may or may not have been dyed.

“Believe me, we're taking care of them as well. Most wealthy people will obviously receive a fairly hefty invoice. But it isn't always so simple. To take just one example, let me tell you about…hmm, let's call him Kjell.”

He sat up in his chair and leaned toward me.

“Kjell worked at a factory in Stegsta and lived a quiet life in all respects. He mostly kept to himself. He did his job, saved some money, and was eventually offered the chance to buy some shares in Stegsta Ltd., which shot up in value shortly afterward. Two or three years later they were worth five times what Kjell had paid, and he sold the shares at an impressive profit. He ended up with a small fortune, which he looked after carefully, while still going to work as usual. Each year his capital grew in various funds and investment accounts. When I asked if he wasn't thinking of doing something fun with the money, he always said he was planning to take early retirement and have his fun then. I couldn't help thinking that if anyone had the strength of character to do that, it was Kjell. Sure enough, he retired at the age of fifty-five. The day after he left work he called and said triumphantly: ‘At last, I'm free!'

“I didn't hear from him for six months. There was nothing unusual about that. He wasn't the sociable type and I assumed he was in the Bahamas or on some luxury cruise or whatever someone with plenty of time and money might come up with. But the next time he called he was in an acute psychiatric treatment center.

“He had ended up having severe anxiety attacks. He was depressed, but not just feeling a bit low and thinking that life was a bit miserable. He was depressed in a way that didn't mean finding new ways to think about things or to get going with his life again, or eating better and enjoying the little things, nothing like that. For him it was about whether he could be bothered to get out of bed in the morning. And not give up and put an end to it all. It was about deciding at each moment to go on living. Resisting the easy option for one more day, one more hour, one more minute. He said when it was at its worst, he just sat there breathing and looking at the time. Waiting for the relapse into darkness to pass.”

Georg leaned back again.

“The E.H. score he had gained because of his financial success fell away, like a cherry blossom in May, when there was no longer anything to push against.”

He looked at me to see if I'd understood.

“Naturally there are special cases,” I said. “But what about all the others? The ones whose lives are a never-ending party. The ones with loads of friends and acquaintances. Fast cars. Lovers. I haven't got anything like that.”

“A large social circle can be a good thing, of course,” he went on. “And lots of parties. But it's the quality that's important. Too many contacts can lead to stress—it actually reduces E.H. scores. Increased financial assets also raise expectations. And some things that at first glance can look like negatives actually end up raising the score dramatically. Take your own case, for instance, and everything connected to pain and pleasure. How do you think we deal with the BDSM community?”

He raised his eyebrows. I couldn't think of anything to say.

“Children, then?” I said after a while. “I haven't got children. And that must be the meaning of everything to some extent…”

He sighed and rubbed one eye with a finger.

“You keep picking out individual things. None of them need necessarily mean anything by itself. There's no such thing as an unambiguously positive event. Or an isolated state of happiness. Besides, I seem to recall that your sister has children…?”

I shook my head and sighed.

“You're very smart,” I said.

He laughed and looked at me. And held up his hands in a way that said,
I rest my case
.

“You see,” Georg said, “that way you have of being impressed by everything you experience. In our formulas…well, what can I say? It quickly mounts up.”

“I've always been so cautious,” I muttered, slowly shaking my head. “I've never really pushed for anything…”

He looked at me as if he wondered what I was getting at. As if he couldn't really work out if I was actually heading somewhere with my argument, or just drifting about aimlessly in an attempt to gain time.

“Yes,” he said, “there are advantages and disadvantages to everything. But in your case…well, it certainly looks as if the advantages have the upper hand.”

He looked me in the eye again.

“You must realize that very few people even come close to a score like yours?”

I nodded and looked over at the window, where the rain was forming thick lines on the glass. Like little rivers. He narrowed his eyes slightly.

“You've maintained a very constant level,” he said. “And with so little personal effort. It's very odd. Fascinating, actually.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “It's just that I probably expected…”

“What?” he said. “What did you expect?”

He fixed his eyes on me.

“More?” he suggested.

I squirmed.

“There must be people who have lived—how can I put it?—far more passionately. People who've followed their desires. I don't know. Fucking around. Taking drugs.”

“Most narcotics also have drawbacks,” he said bluntly. “I presume you know that.”

I nodded.

“That's also a typical masculine trait,” he said. “Men always assume that more money means more happiness.”

“Really?” I said. “Still…a friend of mine…”

He shook his head dismissively.

“Let's not start making comparisons.”

“I know. But we did,” I said. “And the woman who…Well, I happened to find out how much she was being charged, and it seems quite unreasonable that she should have such a lower amount than me.”

“Like I said…”

“I just don't get it,” I said.

He folded his arms.

“What does your friend do?”

“She works h…I mean…She…she has a similar job to yours…”

Just as I was thinking that I mustn't give anything away with my body language, I realized that I'd already glanced over at the conference room. He looked at me. He suddenly became very serious. He was silent for several long moments, studying me without blinking.

“I don't mean what job she has,” he said slowly, also glancing over at the glass-walled room containing the others. “I mean, what does she
do
? How does she act? How does she pass her time, and how is that connected to her well-being?”

“Oh,” I said hesitantly. “Well, I don't really know her like that…”

“No,” he said quickly, and leaned closer to me again. “You've got no idea, have you? You don't know what psycho-social effect her work could have on her, for instance. Or how many negative interactions she may have in her life.”

I shook my head and tried to find the right words.

“She…well, she doesn't seem depressed,” I said. “We get on pretty well, actually…”

He wasn't listening to me, and went on: “And you don't know anything about her daily life, about the depersonalizing impact of her work. And do you know what?”

He moved closer to me and lowered his voice to a whisper.

“If I were you,” he said, “I'd keep very quiet about this ‘friend.' ”

He looked over at the meeting room, where the others were preparing for my arrival.

“If only for her sake…”

The man who had shown the foreign gentlemen in some time ago was suddenly standing next to me.

“We're ready,” he said. “You can come in now.”

I turned round and felt my pulse speed up. Georg was already on his feet, and I was about to stand up when I realized that I had to take my chance. Who knew if there would be any more chances at all? I leaned back.

“I want Maud to be here,” I said.

They both stopped and looked at me.

“Maud?” the man said. “Who's Maud?”

“Maud Andersson,” I said.

He looked round.

“There's no Maud here,” he said.

“Yes, there is,” I said. “Maud Andersson. I want her here.”

Georg turned to the new man.

“She works on the second floor, apparently,” he said. “She's been his contact here.”

“Oh?” the man said uninterestedly, as if he were wondering how this could change anything.

“You could get them to call down and see if she's there,” Georg said.

“Yes, do that,” I said. “I'll wait here.”

The new man stood there for a moment looking at me, then he went over to the desk and spoke to the receptionist.

Georg sat down again and looked at me. After a while he leaned over.