Let the Old Dreams Die (40 page)

The Beetle was illegally parked by the entrance to the carpark, but Majken was sitting in it. I brushed the snow off my coat and got in.

‘How did it go?’ she asked.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘They’ve closed the store, so there’s no one inside.’

‘And they know why?’

‘Yes. If they understood. I told them everything.’

‘Bravo,’ said Majken as she put the car in first gear and drove out of the carpark.

We drove slowly down towards Hamngatan. I had plenty of time to go through my life. Go through. What was there to go through?
So much emptiness, years compressed into seconds and the same actions repeated over and over again. I was done with all that.

Majken reversed up to Kungsträdgården and stopped. The entrance to NK glowed like an orange in front of us. I couldn’t see any people. If it hadn’t been for my expedition earlier in the day, it would have been packed.

The car was across the carriageway. A bus stopped, angrily sounding its horn.

‘Any last words?’ asked Majken.

‘No,’ I said. ‘What is there to say?’

She accelerated gently, headed for the entrance and aimed for the double doors in the centre. When she was sure of her target she floored the accelerator. The doors resisted for a moment before they gave way, splintered.

We were on the ground floor, inside a car. It was a weird feeling.

Majken picked up the detonator, hesitated, then gave it to me. I sat there with the little lump of metal in my hand, looking at the blue button. If years can seem like moments, there are moments that can seem like years.

Somewhere far away, someone screamed. I pressed the button.

Once again I had managed to forget that the boot is at the front on a Beetle. Therefore I just managed to be surprised, for a fraction of a second, that the annihilating blow came from the
front
. The windscreen shattered into a white blur that covered my eyes, made everything disappear. We are not invisible.

Let’s move on.

The summer when I was nine years old, my dad came home with a cardboard box on the back of his truck. A big cardboard box. The biggest I’d ever seen. Two by two by two metres. Dad said it would hold eight thousand cartons of milk. I don’t know what had been in the box. In those days my dad was working at the sawmill, so it was probably some kind of building material. Rockwool, maybe. I didn’t speculate at the time. It was just a wonderful box, for me.

As soon as Dad had thrown it off the truck, I dragged the box over to the lawn and got inside. It smelled wonderful, like brand-new toys on your birthday. The double doors formed by the lid stood open, facing the garden; they framed the image and made the daylight brighter. The everyday trees and bushes became new and strange, as if I were watching a film.

I sat down on the floor and saw Dad come into the picture, on his way to the front door. He stopped, turned to face me and waved. I waved back, even though it felt wrong. You don’t wave to people in
a film. But I was really pleased about the box, after all.

Dad went into the house and I closed the doors of my box as best I could. However I fiddled, there was a gap about one centimetre wide that I just couldn’t get rid of, and through the gap a strip of sunlight fell across the floor. It was impossible to achieve total darkness so I closed my eyes instead. Listened.

Through the thin walls I could hear birds singing, the sea lapping on the shoreline, faint voices, outboard motors. It was as if everything had been moved far away from me, out of reach. I was able to distinguish each individual sound, but the whole picture, the world, was gone and couldn’t reach me.

I lay down and pretended I was in a different time. The strip of sunlight lay across my hips like a narrow belt. All around me were castles, tournaments. The voices I could hear were knights quarrelling. Soon the swords came out. If I opened the doors, my horse would be outside waiting for me. Through the roof I could see pterodactyls crossing the sky. They were circling around the box, but they couldn’t get in. Perhaps they couldn’t even see it, perhaps I was invisible.

There was a knock at the door, and I opened my eyes. The strip of sunlight lay across my thighs.

‘Anyone home?’ called my father’s voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Dinner will be served in the main house shortly.’

I got to my knees and crawled out of the box. The afternoon sun dazzled me. The faint, electrical hum of the summer brought me back to the real world. The smell of sawdust from Dad’s Fristads trousers. I wasn’t aware of any smells inside the box.

‘How’s it going?’ he asked.

‘Great,’ I said.

He ran his hand over the box.

‘There’s no room for it anywhere inside,’ he said. ‘If it rains, well…’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You can keep it for as long as it lasts. Or do you think we should chuck a tarpaulin over it?’

‘Dunno.’

Dad nodded. ‘I’ll check the weather forecast.’ He looked up at the sky. ‘It’s not going to rain for a while. Unfortunately for the potatoes.’

‘Fortunately for the box,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

We went into the house.

When Dad had gone to work the following day, I went out to the box. The dew hadn’t yet evaporated, and the cardboard surface was damp, buckled. The box looked odd standing there in the garden, like something that had been dropped from a spaceship. It made everything around it look different.

In the garden shed was an old pram that Dad had saved so that we could take the wheels off if I wanted to build a go-kart. It was difficult to get the box up onto the pram, even more difficult to get it to stay there. After several failed attempts where the box fell off after a couple of metres, I got the idea of putting a few stones in the bottom.

I had to pull the pram along behind me so that I could see where I was going. The box fell off several times. It must have taken me an hour to move it the three hundred metres to Sjöängsstigen, and when I got there things became even more tricky. The track was narrow, and the trees were so close that the branches scraped along the sides of the box, constantly threatening to knock it off.

Adults came along the track, joking with me: ‘Moving out, John?’ One person offered to help, but I declined. I didn’t want them to know. When I got to the last part, actually going into the forest, I left the pram, tipped out the stones and pulled the box along behind me. It was easier. I had only brought the pram to give the task a kind
of legitimacy. A child dragging a massive box behind him along the ground doesn’t look good. I knew that.

In the forest there was no one to get in my way. I held onto one of the flaps and the box slid smoothly across the grass and the moss. As soon as I felt the slightest resistance, I stopped and checked. Pushed aside a branch or shifted the box sideways to get around a rock. The box was still completely undamaged when I reached my goal.

My old den, made of sticks and bundles of fir branches, had withered. The needles that were still attached had turned grey, and the whole thing looked like a pile of brushwood. I spent a while clearing it away and spreading it around the forest. Then I put the box in its place.

I took a few steps backwards. It was fantastic.

The box created a world within the world. Its pale brown, geometric shape in the middle of the chaos of the forest was my work. My creation, my orderly lines. The box had made me the owner of this place. My house was here. The doors were wide open, all I had to do was step inside.

I ran home with the pram, made up a bottle of squash, grabbed some biscuits and a roll of tape and ran back. Then I spent the whole afternoon in and around the box. With the tape I could close the flaps so that no daylight found its way in.

‘What’s happened to the box?’

‘I moved it.’

‘Oh?’

‘Can I sleep there tonight?’

‘In…in the box?’

‘Yes.’

Dad peeled a boiled potato, put it on my plate. I could do it myself, but it took five times as long. He looked out of the window.
The sky was pale blue, with hardly a ripple to be seen on the water in the bay.

‘Yes, I should think so,’ he said. ‘But in that case I want to know exactly where you are. How did you manage to move it, anyway—it’s a real whopper!’

‘With the pram. It’s in the forest, by Sjöängen.’

‘Up towards Bogefors?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, I know.’ He looked at me. For a moment I thought he looked sad. Then the expression vanished. He smiled. ‘I think we’d better give the sleeping bag a bit of an airing first.’

The sleeping bag, which had been packed away for a long time, was hung on the clothesline to air. Dad put new batteries in the big torch and I made myself some sandwiches and a big bottle of squash, then packed the whole lot in my rucksack along with some Tintin annuals and a pillow.

Dad was sitting on the front porch in the evening sun, reading old magazines. I stood in front of him with my bag to show him.
Here I am. All packed and ready to go.
He squinted at me, nodded.

‘Right. So you’re off, then.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m off.’

There wasn’t much more to say. We always hugged each other when I came out to meet him, or when I was leaving. This wasn’t one of those occasions, so I was surprised when he got up from his chair and put his arms around me.

‘You take care of yourself,’ he said.

‘I will,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow morning.’

‘Yes. I know.’

I set off and he sat down again; I could hear the creak of the springs behind me. I turned around one last time, waved. He waved back. His reading glasses had slipped down his nose and the sun set
them on fire; the shadows made the porch look soft and warm. I’ll always remember him that way.

The low sun didn’t reach down as far as the box, and the glade lay in shadow. I unrolled my sleeping bag, placed the pillow at the top and arranged my provisions in the corner. Then I lay in the sleeping bag for a long time, reading Tintin and gazing out across the forest where the twilight was making the tree trunks dark. I didn’t play any fantasy games; it was just the way it was.

When the light was too poor to read any longer, I closed the doors. I made a few air holes, taped the doors shut and switched on the torch.

The big difference between this and being in a tent was that nothing was moving. No canvas flapping, no hint of the shadows outside. No contact with the ground. Only the smooth walls, all exactly the same. I could have been absolutely anywhere.

I read about Tintin until my eyes started to feel gritty, then I switched off the torch and curled up in my sleeping bag. It was pitch dark. I opened and closed my eyes, couldn’t see any difference.

Perhaps I slept, perhaps I didn’t. If I did sleep, I was woken by a noise. Something was moving across dry twigs, through grass. It was getting closer. I felt my eyes with my fingers to check that they were open. Yes. It hurt when my nail touched the eyeball. I reached for the torch and found it, but didn’t switch it on.

I held my breath. Whatever was outside stopped, started moving again, towards the box. I could hear it breathing now: it was deep and slow, I pictured a big animal. My head was spinning from the lack of oxygen and I slowly exhaled, breathed in again and stuck my fist in my mouth.

This was no horse or cow. Something that size, though. Much bigger than a person. I could hear that from its footsteps. But the
thing that was moving towards my bed was walking
on two legs
. I can’t tell you exactly how I knew that, but there was something about the interval between the steps, how the feet landed on the dry grass, the dry leaves.

In vain I stared at the cardboard walls in the direction from which the creature was approaching. Nothing but darkness. I screwed up my eyes and red stars began to explode. The creature was just outside now, on the other side of the wall. My heart was pounding like mad and I wanted to hurl myself at the taped-up door and run, run.

The sound of the creature’s breathing was now so loud I thought I could feel the warmth of its breath on my face. The thing that was breathing was no more than half a metre away from me. Slowly, slowly I reached out my hand, until my fingers touched the cardboard wall. I kept them there, waiting.

I imagined a blow, a sudden jolt, the thin wall ripped open, and I would be sitting there face to face with the creature on two legs that was not a person. But nothing happened. Everything was quiet. I exhaled again, breathed in new air.

Then it happened. I felt it first as a faint vibration in my fingertips, then I heard the shuffling noise. The thing on the other side was running its hand over the wall. Slowly, like a caress. I felt the pressure of its hand, the wall bulged a fraction as it passed directly under my fingers. It stopped there for a moment, and then it was removed.

I sat with my fingers touching the wall, listening. Footsteps disappearing through the grass. The muscles in my legs were aching from sitting still in such a cramped position, but I didn’t move until the footsteps were indistinguishable from the soughing of the treetops. Then I moved my hand away from the wall and curled up on the floor.

It had left me.

From
Vi
magazine, August 2006

For those of you who might be interested in the phenomenon of the awakening of the dead that took place in Stockholm on August 13, 2002, there are a number of books available.

The most thorough account of the course of events is to be found in
Dead or Alive?
by Sten Hammer, which was published recently. In addition to a detailed minute-by-minute analysis, this 800-page work also includes interviews with a number of key figures.

A more critical view is prevalent in
The Compound
by ETC journalist Dag Eliasson. Here the main focus is on the actions of the authorities before and after the escape from the Heath on August 17, 2002. The interview with Health Secretary Lars Härstedt, who resigned in connection with this incident, is particularly interesting.