The Invisible Man from Salem (32 page)

In the period leading up to my disappearance I go to a psychologist. She becomes increasingly flippant and I can't understand why. I remember one afternoon in her office, she asks me what's wrong. I say that I don't know, that it may or may not have something to do with my family, or my friends, I don't know. Anja's dead, maybe it's that. Maybe it's the junk. She asks how my family are these days. I say fine, everything's fine. There's only Dad left and he's fine.

‘What about me?' I ask.

‘What do you mean?'

I don't know what to say, I feel so disorientated.

‘Yes, what about me?' I repeat, feeling helpless.

‘It will be okay,' she says, ‘when you get a bit older everything will be fine. You grow out of things.'

‘I don't know,' I say, ‘I don't think so.'

She tilts her head slightly. She looks down on me, she doesn't say so but I know it's true. I've met so many people like her now, and they are all the same.

I manage to disappear. It takes time. Giving someone an ID card and a pat on the back is one thing, but really disappearing is another. Especially if, as I have, you've ended up in all sorts of unusual registers. I don't manage to fix all of them. Certain entries are too old to be altered, buried deep in the machinery of Swedish bureaucracy. I bribe whoever I can, threaten civil servants via decoys, and report false changes of address and bank details. I try and get myself certified dead but for that you need a corpse and I'm not prepared to go that far. 2003 and everything else is in place. I choose the name with great care and at twenty-four John Grimberg is a man who vanishes into thin air.

I switch to a lighter drug because I need a clear head right now. It doesn't work out and in the end I'm back on the horse. To keep functioning I start taking black market medication. No clinic would prescribe Subutex for the likes of me. I'm still taking them, but no one knows about that — well, apart from you. Twice a day I take methadone, sometimes more often than that. Recently it's been more.

After a while, once I've managed to become someone else, things start ticking over on their own. Through Abel I start helping people get new identity documents, start investigating whether it's possible to completely erase any trace of someone. It's one thing getting rid of yourself. Someone else is a much bigger ask.

Before long I'm all over the place, helping people left and right and earning insane amounts of money. If I told you how much you would laugh, it's ridiculous. But during all that time, all those years, even when things were at their worst, not even then did I think of you. I hadn't forgiven you, but I'd moved on. Besides, I had no idea who you were, where you were, or even if you were alive. That uncertainty felt good.

And then, just three weeks ago, everything fell apart. Imagine it taking that long! Since then I've been writing this to you, Leo.

Are you listening? Can you hear me? I'm going to make sure that you listen.

Dad got sick and after a while he died. I'd tried to see him as much as possible before he had to go into hospital.

I think we both knew we'd had it, but neither of us said anything. I think he knew what I was up to, but he didn't mention that either. We played cards, watched films, went and played darts every now and then in some bar, that sort of thing.

I don't know if he felt the same, but it seemed to me that we had an unspoken agreement. We just made sure we had each other, that's all. We both needed that.

Then he had to be admitted and I visited him in hospital. I used a false name and Dad heard it, I think, because he called me it once, and smiled. The last time we saw each other he was very weak and it took a while before he recognised me. That's when something grabbed me, when I saw his face.

I'd put so much distance between myself and everything else that had anything to do with Salem. I had to, to survive. So when I saw him there it was a shock, as though everything came back to me. Suddenly, no time had passed, despite the fact it's been nearly sixteen years. He was all I had left. And then he died. I didn't know what to do with myself. I started dreaming and the dream was just one thing: the colour red, how I was ensnared by it, and couldn't get free. I floated through the funeral in a daze.

I was the only one left, and had to take care of the estate. Dad had taken care of Julia's and Mum's deaths. He claimed to have thrown everything away and I hadn't been down in the basement, so when I did go down there I got a shock. Everything was there. He hadn't even thrown my old clothes away. As I'm writing this I just don't understand why he didn't say anything, why he claimed to have thrown it all away. But as I stood there all I could think about was how he'd fitted it all in. Even the furniture from Julia's room was down there. Her bed, desk, shelves, everything. The bed was still made. Can you imagine? The bed was still made! The bedclothes were full of mould but you could still see the pattern, the little colourful dots. For some reason I took the boxes off the bed and pulled the cover back. There were some of her clothes lying in there. They were half-rotten, just like the bedclothes, but I still recognised them.

You've no idea how the little everyday things can bring the past crashing back, like a black hole inside of you that sucks you in. That was the first time I had a relapse with the heroin, in there. I went out and scored and sat down among the stuff and just shot up.

When I started going through the boxes I found clothes I hadn't seen for ages. They belonged to you. That blue hoodie with the Champion logo on, do you remember that? I don't suppose you do. I even found Julia's notepad, where you had written each other's names. I found Mum's old photo album, which she'd put together during those moments when she felt a bit happier. I remember she was very particular about the order, which photo should come after what. It started when it was just her and Dad, then I popped up here and there and then Julia. She was wearing her necklace in several of the photos.

That storage room was like stepping into another time. Everything swirled around me. Memories of Mum, Dad, and everyone else. It was just like I told you, do you remember I said several times that if anything happened to Julia we wouldn't be able to stick together? And that's what happened, slowly but surely. I don't think I cried. I lived down there for several days (don't bother looking, I'm not there anymore), going through all that stuff, not doing anything else. I watched those old films we made, the ones we recorded ourselves. First up was one called ‘
LOVE KILLER
'. Do you remember that one?

I burnt the lot in a steel drum in the yard. Everything, apart from the stuff that was too big to fit. I took that to the dump. But everything else, every last fucking memory, I torched the lot. I am no one. Have nothing. On the outside, everything's fine after Dad's death, but inside it's like I'm disintegrating. I feel so incredibly lonely. Invisible. For the first time.

Maybe it's because I'm getting older. When I was twenty I could live like this, didn't think about missing anything. That I was just gliding through life. These thoughts keep me awake at night. The isolation is complete. I feel anonymous, it's like everything's suddenly caught up with me. I've started hallucinating. Sometimes I manage to sleep but sometimes I can go days without.

The methadone doesn't help anymore, I feel constantly drawn back to the smack. What is this life of mine anyway? I'm not in touch with anyone, I've got no ties to anyone.

How did I find you after all this time? That's the fantastic part, how the pieces all fall into place even though everything is in bits after Dad's death. It starts a couple of weeks before his death, when I finish a job for someone I don't trust, but I need the money. He's got an acquaintance, a girl, who I trust even less. Rebecca. Somehow she finds out my identity, the one that I normally live under. You have to have them on you — ID documents — and one evening, when I'm meeting someone, I haven't had time to switch to the identity I use the rest of the time. She must have snooped in my jacket or something, although I'm almost certain that I never let it out of my sight. I don't know because I'm so shaky and I've taken a big dose of methadone. The world is a little bit murky and I don't feel safe. Maybe one of them, Rebecca or her friend, gets to see my name.

She starts blackmailing me, saying she'll go to the police if I don't pay her to keep quiet. To begin with I do as she says but it escalates, just gets worse and worse. She demands more and more money, she even follows me to Dad's funeral, and causes a scene at the reception. I'm scared all the time, always looking over my shoulder. Everything that I've built up is at risk of falling down around me. I start planning for a new identity but I can't cope with it, the state I'm in. I need to get rid of her somehow. I start following her. One night she ducks through that entrance on Chapmansgatan. I wait outside, in the car. A man comes out a few minutes later, and that man is you.

My world stands still. And it's that, my reaction when I see you, which makes me understand what I have to do.

I know what you're thinking: I've lost my mind. Maybe I have. But everyone has something that will push them to the edge, and maybe over it. Most people don't know what that is, but I do. I know where it started to go wrong.

I kept you under surveillance after I'd found you. Now it's your turn to spiral down, down, down.