“I’m taking the day off. Going fishing.”
“You never take a day off work, Harold. You never go fishing.”
“I’m not really going fishing.”
She munched her cake and looked at him. “Would you mind telling me what’s going on? In your head, I mean?”
“Linda, I don’t know quite how to put this, but… I’ve found a hole in the pavement and it’s really bothering me. I think someone could fall into it.”
“I didn’t know you were so interested in road works.”
“It’s nothing to joke about, Linda. It’s a deep hole, incredibly deep. It could be lethal.”
“For God’s sake! Don’t you have more important things to worry about?”
He stood up. “I’m going to find out how deep it is, then report it to the City Council. I have to be responsible. If I don’t do this, someone could get hurt.”
“I’m the one who’s hurt, Harold. I’m very hurt.”
“At least you haven’t fallen down a hole,” said Harold, standing up and giving her a quick peck on the cheek before slipping out.
In the hall, he took his telescopic fishing rod, the fishing reel and the small box of tackle. He stood staring at his coats for a good long while, trying to decide whether to put on his usual cashmere overcoat or opt for his leather pilot jacket. Linda came out into the hall and walked into the bathroom. The door slammed behind her.
Harold took a deep breath, snatched the pilot jacket off its hanger and walked out. Just to reciprocate, he also slammed the door.
IV
Harold had not seen Stockholm mid-morning on a weekday since his undergraduate days more than five years ago. Everywhere there were people with time on their hands. Some also had money, which struck him as anomalous. Women shopping. Young men browsing in music shops. Why weren’t they at work?
Strolling down the familiar streets, he felt ashamed of himself. Here he was, a man in the middle of his career, with a fishing rod in his hand. If anyone from the office should see him now, it would certainly not look good. He pulled up the collar of his leather jacket and sneaked along the back streets.
When he reached the hole, he saw it had enlarged enough for him to peer down and see its rocky sides widening as they descended into pitch black. He took his fishing rod out of its case and extended it to its full length.
The reel sang. At 150 meters his line ran out, but he had still not touched bottom.
Troubled, he looked up. Linda was standing on the street corner, looking at him. Quite a few other people had stopped and were giving him the once over. Quickly he started reeling in his line. When he looked up again, Linda was standing right next to him.
“Harold. What’s going on?” she said.
He almost broke into a sweat getting the last of the line in, then packed his rod away and straightened up. “You know what I’m doing. I told you this morning. I’m trying to measure the depth of this bloody hole. Okay?”
“Okay.” Her eyes grew moist as they always did when she got emotional about something. She reached out and caressed his cheek, then left without another word.
Harold spent the rest of the morning pacing round streets in the locality, examining the tarmac for that same spongy feeling as on the corner of Nytorgsgatan. It was all solid except in one spot, where extensive cracking seemed to indicate the formation of a large hole under the pavement. This cavity might conceivably be part of the same structure, although, of course, a hole does not have any structure except the gaseous molecules inside it.
In an infinity of space, would there still be a claustrophobia in one’s body, a claustrophobia of suspension? He pondered this while he ate a shish kebab, sitting on a low wall with his fishing rod case leaning up next to him.
Then, when heading homewards, he saw a truly shocking thing.
As he came round the corner of Nytorgsgatan, an old lady fell through the pavement by the lamp-post. She fell like a stone, without a sound. Even her wheeled shopping trolley went in after her, like an articulated lorry tumbling over the edge of a precipice.
Harold ran up to the hole, which was now the width of a toilet-lid, just about enough for a skinny lady to go through. He put his head down the hole and stared down.
“Hello!” he shouted.
No one made any reply from the depths. He shouted again, even though he knew instinctively it was useless. She was already dead or dying.
Immediately he called up the City Council to report the hole and explain that he’d seen someone falling into it.
Within an hour they had sent a van, and set up a cordon preventing pedestrians from walking along the pavement. A small sign politely requested they cross the street and walk on the other side.
Harold was in deep shock. He approached one of the burly road-workers who had spilled out of the van to let him know about the old lady.
“You’ll have to have a word with the emergency services about that,” said the road-worker. “We’re checking the pavement, but there’s nothing here worth getting stewed up about. Just a little crack in the tarmac.” He had an amused look on his face. His lips bulged, his mouth was so stuffed with snuff he could scarcely talk and his furry brown arms were covered in tattoos. Harold sighed. Clearly, he would have to speak to someone more senior.
As soon as he walked into the flat he knew that Linda was not there. Admittedly this was not so difficult to gauge, given that she had removed her coats from the coat-rack. Other things she had taken included CDs, DVDs, toiletries, books, a laptop and all of her clothes from the wardrobe. The place looked bigger, somehow.
In the bed, right in the middle, she had very pointedly left her doll.
On the kitchen table was a note, which he distractedly looked at, deciding to read it later once he had made his phone call to the City Council.
On the fridge was another note, held in place by a fridge magnet. It said: “Check the freezer. I have frozen ten portions of beef stroganoff.” He wondered if this meant she would be back in ten days.
He went into the living room and, after consulting the telephone directory, put a call through to the Manager of Roads, Footpaths, and Cycle Lanes at the City Council. Unfortunately, the manager was not at his desk. According to his secretary, he was at an urban regeneration conference in Kuala Lumpur. Still, the secretary, who seemed fairly capable and senior, was willing to discuss Harold’s urgent matter.
Harold quickly and efficiently summarized what he had seen, that is, the old lady falling down a hole in the pavement.
The secretary was quiet, and then she said: “Was an ambulance called?”
“No. The council workers showed up and they said there wasn’t a hole.”
“If there wasn’t a hole then how do you suppose a woman fell into it?” she said. Harold could almost visualize her glancing at her watch.
“Can I be frank? This is a very deep hole, I suspect what we’re dealing with here is a displacement of the earth’s crust.”
There was a loud sigh. “Oh Christ.”
“I know. It’s serious. Look, I’m not a deluded person. I’m a banker. I’ve taken the day off just to examine this hole. It’s at least 150 meters deep, and my own personal feeling is it’s a hell of a lot deeper than that.”
The telephone made a click.
Harold stared at the phone for a while, then called the emergency services. A curt, anonymous voice answered.
“Your name?”
“Yes, I’d like to report a person falling into a hole in the pavement,” said Harold.
“Your name, sir.”
“Harold Blomkvist.”
“Can you give me a location?”
“Absolutely. It’s on the corner of Nytorgsgatan, Södermalm.”
“Any idea of the victim’s injuries?”
“I would have thought she’s dead but I’m not sure.”
After a few more routine questions, the operator hung up. Harold quickly put on his coat again and ran down to the corner of Nytorgsgatan. The ambulance and police car were already there with their blue lights flashing. Some ambulance personnel were searching the scene, presumably puzzled to find neither a hole nor anyone lying injured at the bottom of it.
Harold stepped forward to explain. A few minutes later he was sitting in the police car with a frowning constable.
“You’re not listening to me,” said Harold. “A woman died here today when she fell through.”
“I’m sorry, we prosecute when members of the general public call us out maliciously and waste valuable time better spent helping genuine victims.”
“Do I look like a madman?”
“Who knows? Madmen come in all shapes and sizes.”
“I saw what I saw.”
“You have nothing to back you up. And there are no old ladies missing anywhere. That thing you saw falling into this supposed hole of yours was not an old lady at all…”
“Fine. If it wasn’t an old lady, what was it then?”
“It could have been anything. A black bin liner blown along by the wind?”
“This was no bin liner.”
The policeman smiled. His teeth and gums looked like small pieces of yellow cheese stuck into regurgitated bacon rind. Harold tried to keep his composure. He hated poor hygiene more than anything.
“Anyone can make a mistake,” said the constable. “It happens. We’ll let you off this time, but we’ve got your name and address. If you call us out again you’ll be prosecuted without fail.”
That evening, Harold was in a somber mood as he ate his beef stroganoff.
First there was the matter of Linda. Her absence was making him uneasy. The flat was never silent like this. Even when he strained his ears, all he could hear was a high-pitched whine of air. Or maybe it was just his ears malfunctioning?
Occasionally a car went past or a plane flew over. It occurred to him that people everywhere were equating movement with some sort of meaning. The whole thing had kicked off with Magellan, Marco Polo, Columbus. Whenever people traveled somewhere, they felt their lives were significant. Even if they just drove somewhere, they had done something. In fact all they had done was to shift their carcasses somewhere else. Who cared if some fool sat at a café table in Venice looking at a pizza, or at a café table in Dresden looking at a Bratwurst?
As for Linda, did it matter that she had gone? If he were up there in space looking down at the planet, would he be able to say, “Ah, there’s the place where a woman named Linda cohabits with Harold, although she seems to have temporarily moved out” Or would that be an irrelevance when juxtaposed with interesting enormities like the Great Wall of China?
Yes, this was the real question.
Suddenly it occurred to Harold that he needed someone to say, “Harold, you are a very confused man.” The trouble was, he had no one to enunciate those words. Instead he was left with a problem.
He had discovered a huge and growing hole under his city. Soon they would all fall into this hole. They would fall for an eternity. They would not die when they hit the bottom, or by dashing themselves against the rock walls. They would fall forever. They would die of starvation, of boredom.
Even though he was exhausted, Harold put on his leather jacket and went out again for another peek at the hole. It was refreshing to walk under the open, arching sky, now liberally speckled with stars.
The pavement had been patched up, and when he walked across it, it seemed more solid. Even when he put all of his weight on it, he didn’t feel it moving.
He panicked. What if it had all been a terrible mistake? What if the world were not coming to an end?
As he walked home, there was something bothering him.
Only when he slotted the front door key into the lock and opened the door did he realize what it was. Today was the second day he had not gone to work. He had not informed the Personnel Director. Tomorrow he would have to call in and explain that he was having a problem, a very real problem.
He could already read the mind of his Personnel Director: “Can’t say I’m surprised he’s had a collapse. He’s so damned normal it’s abnormal; no one will even sit next to him in the canteen, just talking to him drives people round the bend.”
And what would he say?
Would he say, “There are some issues in my current life that are incompatible with normal work routines”?
Yes, that is what he’d say when he called in.
The bank would pay for therapy, he’d spend a few months on sick leave and then he’d go back to the office. His colleagues would all whisper about him but he’d be forgiven.
A nervous breakdown must be exactly like this. One saw reality for a moment. Then it became unmanageable. Like a huge balloon rising up before one, it ripped and collapsed. With a shock one realized it had nothing inside except for air. It was an illusion of solidity, nothing else.
V
Before he went to bed, he remembered the note on the kitchen table. All it said was that he must get some help. Then a telephone number of a therapist, and the time of his first appointment, which Linda had already set up for him.
That night, Harold had disturbing dreams.
He dreamt that he woke up in the middle of the night, then got dressed and went outside. Linda was standing in the sodium glare of a streetlight. Her lips were encrusted with small, sharp diamonds. When he kissed her mouth it was like kissing a brooch with a soft tongue lurking in its hard crack. Her hair was gilded and hung stiffly down like a glittering helmet, the decorated head of an Egyptian mummy.
“Why did you come back?” Harold asked.
“I couldn’t leave. We’re prisoners,” she said. “Look!”
He turned his head and registered the fact that they were in a cell, the sort of cell one used to see in American Westerns. There was even a sheriff on the other side of the bars, tipping his chair and watching Harold and Linda with dull interest as he chewed his toothpick.
Linda sank down into the snow, and Harold positioned himself behind her, spreading his legs so she could lean back against his chest. The flimsy gauze of her dress rubbed against him, and he grew powerfully tumescent. Linda seemed pleased. She looked back at him and smiled; then started dealing some cards, which weren’t cards at all, but large moths gently flexing their patterned wings. Occasionally one of the moths tired of the proceedings and fluttered away, leaving them short-handed.