My house in Argentina had been occupied. I went there to shoo out the intruders. The flight alone took eighteen hours, with changes in Miami and Brasilia, but at last I arrived. My new lodgers were a group of orphaned teenagers who called themselves Escapistas. They asked me to recite a poem in my language, my other language, that is, Swedish. I read aloud from Tomas Tranströmer's Baltics, which I always kept in my hand luggage in case my thoughts grew too clamorous. They asked how I lived back home in Sweden. I described my studio flat with its kitchenette, strewn with stucco and vinyl records. They asked for pictures. I showed them a few, and they swiped through picture after picture on the screen. The leader, a freckled boy with a bass voice, asked whether I wanted to have the house styled, because it really was in a sorry state, even for bohemians. I mean, we're embarrassed when we bring people here, he said. I explained that I would think about it, but first they needed to leave, because it is hard to bring rooms to order when they contain a quintet of drunken poets with questionable hygiene. A small girl with a squint, who had sat quietly throughout the conversation, then asked the question that sent a cold shiver down my spine. She smiled slyly as she delivered the words: But if you're here, who's in your flat?
It was my birthday tomorrow, the calendar warned. My name and my new age slid across the screen, and I had two choices: dismiss or snooze. Accept the way death was drawing closer or forget. I left the box open. A few days passed and the box was still there. Seven years later, the same box. Twenty, forty years. People began to die. I had great grandchildren. My skin was smooth, I could easily jog up a hill. Scientists wanted to study me, any number of gay couples wanted my genes, but I declined their approaches. My memoirs needed updating every twenty years. By the time the earth perished, I had already moved to the Andromeda Galaxy, from which I am writing this. The box is still here, up in the corner. I turn 36 tomorrow.
Already in the stairwell I had an inkling, a vague sense that there was something unwanted in the building, and that the unwanted thing was me, but I knocked hard on the door as instructed and was ushered into the Easter celebrations. I was introduced as Linn's boyfriend and she winked slyly and whispered as I approached, “I'll Swish you later, just keep going, you're a natural.” You might say I went the whole way, having both climbed K2 and written a doctoral thesis on indigenous peoples who worshipped the Norse gods, but then they asked how we had met. “You'll have to ask Linn about that,” I said. Her uncle singled me out with his eyes and gave a little laugh, as though I had been found out. “No, no, nothing like that,” I said. “I'm an honourable man.” He grinned. “Oh yes, we've heard all about your exotic films.” That was when I felt I needed to get out of here, away from this sick, twisted family who thought I could be bought, but it was too late. They had arranged a surprise wedding officiated by Ebba Busch Thor, and I was, after all, the accommodating type.
I am listening to a summer radio talk that I would gladly have recorded myself, because then it would have been true that I had been Jonas Hassen Khemiri, but does he want that? Do we get along? Take something as simple as coffee: how do we like it? Freshly ground, I think, and black, or is that just me; what do we think? He is quiet and lets me finish before he asks the Question: Who am I, and what do I want with him? About the coffee, I try. But I don't know any of those things he is asking about, that is precisely why I have become Jonas Hassen Khemiri together with him. Is this really your voice? he asks. Do I really have to have one? I try, and lower our gaze.
The brain likes to write itself out in long sentences, so it has a little time left over for other things, simply being, carpe diem und so weiter, which it practises so little but would really love to master, and the brain would certainly book itself onto a suitable course, but then it thinks of something else, which may have happened fifteen years ago, or might possibly happen in another fifteen years, and are we really remembering everything now, perhaps there is something we don't remember we ought to do, and what do we actually want, actually, the brain thinks, because it knows no other way. We can feel sorry for the brain for being like this, so we write it out for it, and comb it neatly.
I had spent too much time on what wasn't me. What wasn't me had had almost all my time, to be honest, I had given my time to the other thing, what wasn't me. I couldn't say why I had spent too much time on it, or I could, because it was a bit of fun, and everything that is a bit of fun always gets a little too much time.
I had had inklings before, but now things became serious in earnest. The roots were pulled out by the roots. The end came to an end in the end. Here was now here and now. It was the eternal return returning and returning. And returning. It wasn't funny any more, what was funny was no longer funny, any longer. This is how it can feel when it's like this, you said, just like that, as though we were to have it like this. I needed to start again and start again and start again and start. Just start.
The flies and the stink of mocha. You pretended to make small talk. Then you stretched out your upper body and leaned across the table. Well, the thing is. The darkness branched out inside me. A few years later I changed cities and seas and names. The lizards drank milk here. I drove at random for weeks simply because I could. On the phone you repeated Well, the thing is, in other words. I need to be surrounded by your breathing, I replied too late.
I had become stuck in a style, a style that had become stuck in me, because I had become stuck in it, or whether it had become stuck in me, it didn't really matter, because now the style had, after all, grown attached to me and I to it and we were going to start a family and never separate.
On the balcony as a child, when I pointed towards the school playground swaying behind the lime trees, when I asked about that playground, whether one day I would be one of the children who owned it, but you shook your head, because everything was going to be uprooted and I was the only one who knew nothing. Soon I would be 35 and recount the episode in a piece written in a café in Hammarby Sjöstad. It was a short life, really, for one so long.