Free Fall

Pretty often, entirely meaningless events get stuck in the memory, like irritating refrains. But sometimes it’s the meaningful ones that fail to grasp their own significance, he thinks after watching the program on near-death experiences, awakening an episode long since forgotten.

Three decades earlier, the family spends a week in Sälen in August, climbing the high mountains among the gnats, picking cloudberries, and fishing farmed Arctic char in the lake. On the way home they stop at a summer amusement park in Leksand, where the event will take place.

A crucial element for the memory is the embarrassing secret, which for the child carries the same weight of shame as it would for a grown man to admit he’s never been kissed. The ten-year-old has never ridden a roller coaster. A fact that exposes him as cowardly, nearly useless, and out of sync with the expectations he has of himself.

The topic of amusement rides comes up often, like in the woodwork or the locker room after hockey practice, and when others boast about upside-down rides, loops and vomit, he quietly slips away, barely able to imagine going on one even in thought. No one must ever know.

Nor will anything ever change, because he is not the kind of person who rides those things. That’s just how it is. That’s just who he is. Always will be, he believes — just like so many other things he believes and will come to believe.

That afternoon in the nineties, however, he finds himself in line for an attraction that doesn’t seem risky at all. Beside it is a raft. It’s cranked a few meters up a steep incline, before a latch is released and the passengers rush downward. The finale consists of a splash into a pool, before the process repeats. Even small children are riding. He can too.

But it is actually quite high, he realises a little too late, and when the latch gives way to gravity, his body is shocked into panic. The lurch in his stomach is the first of its kind. As he plunges toward disaster, his whole life flashes before him, just like in the movies. Moments streak past in reverse, like slide transparencies rapidly pushed in and out of the projector. An inner editor seems to have curated it all beforehand, like those prewritten obituaries waiting for their deaths. And just as the body falls, so do the moments, toward their zero point — the last of the kind he shouldn’t remember. “So this is what it’s like to die”, he has time to think before hitting the water, and everything goes still.

He never tells anyone about it. The reaction wouldn’t be appropriate, and it would reveal the tightly bound secret. Best to wait thirty years before thinking about it again.