Russian Roulette

I hadn’t been in touch with my feelings for a long time. A film had settled over everything I experienced, as uniformly grey as depressed patients describe their pill-dulled days: a shrinking spectrum of possible life experience. In my desperation to expand, I pushed my comfort zone, sweating through salsa clubs, giving speeches in schoolroom German, grinding down my fingertips on climbing walls, but all that striving led only to a weary so what.

When I saw the note outside the boxing club, a sliver of life cut into the desolate room within me. Russian roulette. I’d heard the term anecdotally and of course I understood the rules, everyone understands the rules, but does everyone understand the desire? To spin the cylinder, press a cold revolver to your temple, squeeze the trigger, and wait. Perhaps a life beyond this one, or a life within this one. To place everything in the hands of a maybe. Maybe fate.

Maybe not. The venue for these potential executions was a basement beneath a massage parlour on Närkesgatan. No one spoke to anyone. It seemed to be an event for loners. I tapped on a hunched-over guy leaning against the ventilation pipe and asked, “How does it work?” His eyes looked wild, bloodshot and disturbingly alive. “It’s one thing to make it once”, he rasped, “another to make it six times”. “Holy shit”, I said. “The record is fifteen”, he said, nodding toward a woman in a pearl necklace and high heels.

Unlike my conversation partner, there was nothing unusual about her demeanour. She looked more like a dutiful accountant summoned to keep minutes so the shareholders’ meeting would have reliable documentation of every intermezzo.

The revolver was placed on a folding table in the center of the room. Around it, three plastic chairs. I followed the contestants with my gaze, how these muscle mountains and gangsters slowly took their seats and gradually lost their strength, took their turn and click. Not once did the bullet fire. It didn’t stop the players from collapsing afterward. The stench of urine became unbearable. Some, still living, bodies had to be pushed aside to make room for the next. It became clear we weren’t playing with life but for it.

When the final round took place, the woman stepped forward. She let the cylinder spin a few times, placed the barrel against her forehead, and pulled the trigger. Another click. Casually, she put the weapon back on the table and returned to her seat, as if she had just tested the mechanism. The whole scene had set my heart pounding. I was breathing hard, elated. Surely my range had widened from the vision I’d just been blessed with, as if I’d experienced her death anxiety in her place. How could I thank her for my pulse? How could she ever understand?

Out on the sidewalk, I followed her to exchange a few words. She seemed to have slipped quickly back into a civilised persona, and needed a moment to recall where she’d seen my face. She asked: “Why don’t you try it yourself?” I said I was planning to join in next time, though it was a lie. “There is never a next time, and always”, she said. “What’s your secret?” I asked. Her face stayed motionless. “I live off reactions like yours”, she said.