Naïveté Travels: Act Two
As a child, I was proud that my birth month, August, had more days than my sister’s, February. That’s where it began. The hunt for status later manifested in adulthood as a kind of anxiety, because in every encounter I had to emphasise my few strengths while simultaneously distracting the other person from glimpsing the much greater area that harboured my weaknesses. My bar-side encounter with Jan Berger, via the coaster and the palace queue, could have lifted me a few rungs closer to the right step (a tolerably dignified level), but the outcome instead called to mind a cruel practical joke, designed to make me accept my place in society. The one looking in. To even touch on the event, even to myself, meant repeating a disappointment, hammering home a message I had placed such weight on avoiding.
I never told anyone about it, of course.
A few seasons passed. We spent Easter at my girlfriend’s parents’ house (as well as Midsummer later on), before she broke up with me just as term was starting, shortly after we got back from Gotland, because, as she put it, she’d never really gotten close to me. She said it was like a film lay between us. Otherwise, everything was fine with me: I was kind, generous and fairly clever, and there was nothing wrong with our intimacy.
From our first date by the archipelago boats, I had simpered and adapted myself to her needs and interests, kept most things secret (such as the fact that I easily get seasick), because it didn’t fit her idea of how life should be. We shared a flat, because that’s what you’re supposed to do after five months if you’re the couple who’ll eventually get married, and even five months had been a bit too long. Ideally, we’d have told people that it clicked right away and that we’d been living in perfect harmony from the very beginning, casually dropping phrases like “I can barely remember what life was like before we met.”
At weekends we went on spontaneous romantic trips (I had a list of potential destinations in my notebook: Södertuna Castle, Åre, Barcelona, Split), because she believed planning was the opposite of passion. I also had to assert myself when we met her friends, because those were the laws of biology, not up for debate (and I was to be Alpha). Back home, I racked up points if I casually mentioned having played rugby in my youth (preferably without saying it was only three training sessions), or the fact that the famous radio host everyone listened to was my uncle (which was to be expressed in a subordinate clause, with the self-evidence of something people already knew).
After the dinner that ended us, I considered contacting a therapist and spent the evening aimlessly searching online, but by morning I’d forgotten all about it, because it was a workday and there were loads of emails my colleagues had left unanswered for me to deal with, since I was so good at that sort of thing. What they meant was that I could respond to hostile messages in a convincingly friendly tone, and that was absolutely true.
Nearly a year had passed by the time I next came into contact with Jan Berger. Or rather: with someone who had been in contact with him. This someone, Petter Abrahamsson, had become a new member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s advisory board, and during Friday’s drinks by the kitchenette I recognised him — vaguely, at first. If Jan Berger had been Clockwork’s answer to John Lennon, Petter was more like Ringo Starr: always there, but hard to say what difference he’d made, more like someone who’d just been lucky and gone along for the ride. He hadn’t been talked about much at the time, but more so now, after founding a series of multinational cloud storage companies. Only then was his ’90s background dragged into the spotlight, and the title of CMO at Clockwork suddenly shifted to founder on his Wikipedia page. It was as if everyone had forgotten the others, as if Ringo had retrospectively become the band’s frontman, and John, Paul and George were relegated to the outskirts of memory.
He was the one who started talking to me, probably because he was new to the board and saw me and everyone else in the room as part of the furniture. He stood by the fridge with a beer in his hand that he clearly didn’t intend to taste, presumably to keep control while still giving the impression of being one of the gang. I was like that myself, a bit calculating, awkward or just young, depending on who was judging me. In his place, I would have taken a few cautious sips, just to avoid suspicion.
“Haven’t we met before?” he asked suddenly.
“No, I don’t think so,” I replied, surprised. “Maybe at a press conference, but it’s been a long time since I worked in that area, and I was just an intern. You wouldn’t remember me.”
“No, not back then. I mean recently. I’m sure I’ve seen your face. Are you some sort of expert? Have you been on the news, perhaps?”
“You’re mistaken, I’m afraid,” I said, feeling my face flush, and since I couldn’t think of another way to change the subject, I said:
“I actually bumped into a former colleague of yours.”
Then I told the beginning of the story, about Serbia and how I’d unexpectedly caught sight of the former guru from the street, but left out the rest, the part I’d tried to erase.
Petter didn’t seem surprised, still holding the unopened bottle in a firm grip, but then something happened. He gave me a look that recalled the religious, as if he’d been converted in the moment, and then he began a few sentences, each of which had to be abandoned, until he came up with something he could express in full:
“I actually met Janne … the other week, but here, at home. He was trying to find investors for a new idea of his. It wouldn’t work here, that’s for sure. If it would work at all.”
“What’s he selling?”
He now shook his head in sympathy.
“It’s confidential, unfortunately, so I can’t say much. But I have to admit I’m a bit worried about Janne. I won’t say he’s lost it, he’s always been a bit of a wild one, but this was a bit far out, honestly.”
“Is the name Naïveté Travels familiar to you?”
His eyes said yes, but his mouth said:
“Confidential, as I said. I’m sorry, I do want to talk, you can tell, but the clauses are strict, you know, it could mean a fine or worse. You’ll have to call him yourself and ask, you said you had his number.”
Then he started drinking the beer, pulling a face like someone expecting an orange but getting a grapefruit. We didn’t talk again, he claimed he had to “take a quick turn about the place.” Fifteen minutes later I saw him standing alone by the reception desk, no bottle in hand. I wasn’t in any social distress, there were plenty of colleagues to choose from, and the evening unfolded like a slightly more tipsy afternoon coffee break, time sped along by intoxication, before I made my way home by commuter train and bus and finally a half-hour walk to my block of flats on the hill in Ösmo. It wasn’t until I was brushing my teeth that I reflected on the way Petter Abrahamsson had stared, with a silent eureka. Maybe there was a slightly more successful lookalike out there, pretending to be brilliant in my place, I thought with a pang of bitterness, since I was hardly my own best friend at the time. My inner self was more like a malicious voice hissing why I was doomed to wretchedness, loneliness and insignificance.
Where the hell was that bloody coaster, anyway?
The flat was in a sorry state after she’d taken her stuff and half the furniture, unfortunately, all the pieces that gave the place any sort of personality. That much I understood. Even the houseplants were apparently hers, as were the art posters, and now I even missed that porcelain Santa she’d insisted on placing in the bookshelf. I couldn’t bring myself to buy anything new, because I didn’t think I deserved more. One upside to the barrenness was that I more easily found lost items, and sure enough, the coaster was in one of the Ikea boxes with loose things, tangled up with chargers, earphones and a Legoland keyring. The number was still there, ready to be dialled. And I would call, tomorrow.
But on Saturday I woke up in a very different, far more vulnerable mood. Around this time we used to do the crosswords together, and I looked at the silent radio, and I had a dull headache, and I felt lonely.
I rang her instead, didn’t know where she was in life, but thought she might be sitting at home with her mum and dad in the townhouse, listening to their endless bickering and lip-smacking and thinking maybe I wasn’t so bad after all. I didn’t really want to be the sort of guy who pined after girls, but everything just felt so bleak and she would surely understand. After all, she’d been my only close friend (and my mates were planning weddings and I’d rather perish than show weakness in front of them).
“Yes, hello?” she answered, and just before it was my turn to speak I heard a stern male voice in the background asking:
Is it him?
Then there was silence and she said:
“Did you want something in particular? We’re having breakfast here, you know.”
“No, I just wanted to talk to you. I miss you.”
“I can’t right now.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Right, then.”
For the first time since the break-up, I cried. I was the only one left, and I couldn’t very well ring home to Skärblacka with news like this. They all thought things were going brilliantly for me up here, that’s what I let everyone believe every time we met, even though it had been a while, since she’d claimed all the holidays (unless you count that day trip my parents made to see Chess at the Oscars theatre). Now I could at least go home for Christmas Eve, but at the same time I obviously couldn’t, because by the time I returned, I had to be someone. Otherwise, what was the point of running away? I might as well have become a salesman at the factory and owned a house and had a family and spent the weekends raking leaves and driving the kids to matches like everyone else.
Saturdays were hard, but Sundays were worse, because then there was nothing left to rest from, and even though I usually preferred quiet weekend activities, I was overtaken by a messy feeling. I couldn’t settle. It had been different when she was in the flat. Then she only had to be breathing somewhere in the rooms. A dog would surely help, maybe I could borrow one? Or just find a new girlfriend, somehow, although I had no idea how that worked these days. It probably wouldn’t be as easy again as someone just coming up to me at Åhléns beauty counter and asking for my number. But even if it happened, she’d surely, a year down the line, explain why we couldn’t carry on by saying there was nothing really wrong with me, she just hated my personality.
For the rest of the day I saw myself from the outside, judgmental: here’s the bachelor wandering aimlessly around Ösmo centre trying to kill the weekend, and not even brave enough to sit at the pizzeria and drink beers with the other lost souls. If only I could opt out of how I appeared in other people’s eyes. If only I could function a bit more like Jan Berger. But I couldn’t even choose the road to ruin. I just stood there, awkward and still, watching like any old nobody: a bit too average, a bit too plain, a bit too quiet. A bit too wrong.
No one would write a novel about me, I thought, while watching the alcoholics at the slot machines. But I wanted more than that, I wanted more than to be the side character to the protagonist, more than the subplot before the real story began. I wanted at least something, I thought, unexpectedly optimistic, and that was what set me apart from the others. Sooner or later, everything I’d dreamed of would come true. It was meant to.