28 tiny bagatelles from the edges of the unconscious

What do you think about when you go to bed? For those of us with busy minds, a strategy is sometimes required to make the thoughts stop spinning. You can breathe through body parts (good) or try sorting the players of football team IFK Norrköping into their different positions (bad).

Over the past week, I’ve been trying to construct stories instead, and it’s turned out to be effective. I’ve been falling asleep much faster than usual. Apparently, my brain has a knack for the bizarre, especially when I’m on the edge of the unconscious. In that in-between space, things like this can suddenly appear in the notes on my phone:

A woman asked me out after hearing my voice on the radio. Unfortunately, it was my deep ventriloquist’s voice she had heard, so I had to lip-sync to it for the entire date. But it wasn’t so bad, I thought. Most people went on like that their whole lives anyway.

In this dispatch, I thought I’d share a few shorter texts that I, in a previous life, posted on Instagram. I eventually grew tired of the (too) short form, but perhaps a renaissance is just around the corner. After all, I do need my sleep.

Welcome away ꩜

Jörgen Löwenfeldt

✦ 1 ✧

And so you sit in the armchair in your study and realise that in sixty years’ time the embryo will be walking along the pavement below, pointing towards the window and saying: That’s where I grew up.

✦ 2 ✧

Last year at the Nobel banquet I sat next to the woman who would later become my wife. She told me she had invented a new type of icing sugar. With great animation she described the chemical composition that guaranteed both powderiness and robustness. She arranged the cutlery into a tower to visualise the molecules. Only at dessert did she reveal she had been pulling my leg. Quite unabashed, she said it between two mouthfuls. In fact, she had taken her place at the table thanks to her ex-husband the neuroscientist. They were divorced, but he had dreaded going to Stockholm alone. And you don’t turn down an invitation, she said. No, you don’t, I said.

✦ 3 ✧

It was a summer when you wondered who you were. You used to know, but in recent years you had had to tear everything up and start again. Were you the sort of person who spent hours deliberating over which phone case to buy, or were you the voice of this generation? These two paths felt irreconcilable to you. Yet perhaps that was exactly how the voice of this generation sounded.

✦ 4 ✧

It might be a Thursday. Four men from The Literary Magazine break into the flat to remark on your cleaning. At first you are taken aback, but then you understand. You reply: You see, I don’t create the text, I merely remove what lies on top of it. The men make thoughtful notes, ask: So you scrape away a white film from pages that have already been printed?

✦ 5 ✧

Friday morning. The bus is quiet. One might ask why. If everyone lives this wrapped in their routines. But one doesn’t ask anyone on the bus.

✦ 6 ✧

As if someone had flipped a switch you had now become pleasant. Afterwards my friends spoke of how charming you had been, a first-class listener, with follow-up questions that dug deeper. You had stared at them with your wandering soft pupils and they imagined you were sober. The next day I waited for you at the kitchen table. “Was I good?” you asked.

✦ 7 ✧

I was told to forget the desperado in the balaclava, but it had the opposite effect. I contacted four or five motels, had sketched out a possible escape route. Suddenly he rang, I was surprised, said that everything was fine with me. He wanted to come over. I said I didn’t have much at home. He offered to buy something. No need, I said. But he insisted.

✦ 8 ✧

I could spend whole evenings simply absorbing the sounds of the house. Drawing them in to myself, for I had no television in those days. At times I felt like a secret agent. Then I became one.

✦ 9 ✧

The other girl appeared only in the way you treated me, as if you had rehearsed everything but not followed through with the action. To make you feel better I described your laugh as melodic: Almost like a soft refrain. I gave you a track to get on, whereupon you began laughing loudly and falteringly, more like a capricious guitar solo, though I never said that. I had almost forgotten that episode, but then you rang a few weeks ago. So, you’ve got the same number as in 1997? you began. I was waiting for you, I said. Is that true? you replied eagerly. Of course not, I said.

✦ 10 ✧

I was brushing my teeth in the shower when the doorbell rang. Normally I didn’t buy those Christmas magazines, but now I filled in almost every box. As planned the boy’s mother came by that same evening, she was as brisk and chatty as I had imagined her to be. She offered to look after my cat if I went on holiday. You can have it! I cried happily, but when I returned with the creature in my arms she was gone.

✦ 11 ✧

My box of assorted promotional pens. They puzzled me and I could not still my mind until I had reconstructed all the chains of events. I worked through the pens one by one and found myself one Tuesday at the Electrical Board in Haninge. They had an aquarium containing only butterfly cichlids. Take a seat, said the receptionist. On the table a ballpoint pen, though a different design to mine, later model. Is he here now? said a smiling voice behind me. Then a familiar face: What took you so long?

✦ 12 ✧

The cables may have been misconnected. Could blow the power amplifier. He says. Then a handshake, firm. It is memorable. A perfect handshake, caressing and embracing. He gets me. The stranger appears as someone else.

✦ 13 ✧

Robbing the church may not have been one of my better ideas, but in couples therapy we had agreed that my ideas were as good as yours, and yes, anything to reach consensus for once. At the font you asked if I was entirely sure it was made of pure silver, and I began looking for hallmarks. Afterwards we were offered the loan of the priest’s drying cabinet if we promised never to do it again, and it was not entirely unpleasant to eat communion wafers and drink wine into the small hours, so at the next therapy session we could tell the psychologist that the method had probably worked.

✦ 14 ✧

Apart from coffee and its origins I have a multitude of interests. Such as travel, interior design, food and wine. I have a rich social life, I say. The sharp morning light makes me stare at her hands. She has a dozen small tribal tattoos across the back of her left hand. Just like my grandmother. We might work, despite her initial blunders.

✦ 15 ✧

Someone is shooting live rounds from a tower. Pigeons, says the waitress. But then — like an empty sack she collapses.

✦ 16 ✧

I called, apologised for the delay, said that violent crime had increased, it was the season. The person called insisted on their innocence. The voice slightly hoarse, almost childlike. The person expressed concern (empathetically) and wanted to know more about the victim. I said the scratches were nasty, that my stomach had been upset by the photographic evidence. The wife was certainly guilty. Whatever she said. But all this was confidential, I stressed. The person understood, apparently knew all about confidentiality.

✦ 17 ✧

Could I retell myself in the same way as in a novel, toss out a few red threads through the generations and weave my movements into a story? An attempt was made: and you called me improbable? You said: no babies smoke! But what did you actually know about me.

✦ 18 ✧

Y stands in front of her house. Warm night air gathers here, blood pumping to her cheeks. I brought something, I say. She dips her fingers into the bag. Do you ever miss it all sometimes? I ask. It happens, she says. We move towards the petrol station, almost dawn, walking in the middle of the road. I don’t know how you stand it, I say. You’re better when you don’t talk, she says.

✦ 19 ✧

It was July and the snow was falling softly. My eyes had stuck shut again. She had to lead me to the ferry, fixed the ticket into my hand and murmured her you’ll be all right, won’t you? Oh yes, oh yes, I said as I lowered my rucksack to the asphalt.

✦ 20 ✧

It was blowing a gale and we stayed indoors. For lack of anything better to do she handed me a sheet of paper and a pen. Draw something funny, she said, and I began to scribble. The sky was manuring snow against the window. Large flakes stuck fast. A siren came towards us, faded and came towards us again. All that I remember with certainty. Someone knocked at the door, pounded hard, shouted: Come out! The harbour floats towards the sea!

✦ 21 ✧

I was newly divorced, knocked down the walls and had the grand piano lifted in. That’s how I got to know my neighbours, and I was no longer alone.

✦ 22 ✧

They had stopped calling, those bloody telesales people. So I rang a missed number, ended up speaking to an Olov. He was tired of the job, didn’t even subscribe to any newspaper himself. I rang him every evening. Olov’s supervisor was pleased. Until the figures were presented. I had to sign up for six months, fifty kronor a month wasn’t much to quibble over. Olov told me he had seen the film The Ghost Writer and since then had been searching for remotely located houses. Could we meet there? Or perhaps this was as good as it would ever get between us. The thought was both frightening and comforting. In fact we had it quite good.

✦ 23 ✧

I hadn’t heard from you in many years when you made yourself known with a letter. It lay on the desk one Tuesday. You cleaned my office, you wrote. You really ought to have said something from the start, but you enjoyed “having me to yourself”. You washed my coffee cups, often four or five of them every night, as if you weren’t being paid. When the shift was over you would sit back in my ergonomic chair, look at the holiday photos of our children in a canoe, read through my recycling thoroughly as if the sheets revealed something. The whole floor, with its archipelago of seating areas, was dazzling in the dawn. You wanted to take me along sometime, but my presence would spoil the arrangement.

✦ 24 ✧

It must have been January because I was smoking. Read about the long slog of winter, and yes, we had our own version. At this time of year we were alone out here, could cordon off any road we liked, made the summer’s daring overtakes feel like an unruly dream. This was our backdrop. Like peace to you. But in me the thoughts could not be brought together, they slipped teasingly away at every attempt.

✦ 25 ✧

I was lying on the floor. Now I had the chance to do that thing I had dreamed of. I was lying on the floor.

✦ 26 ✧

Awake. Here I am, on a sofa, seeing nothing, eyes adjusting, clear. Someone is pointing a revolver at me. “Well, welcome home,” she says. I am not afraid, but where am I? The last thing I remember from yesterday is: nothing. I have no yesterdays. “You’re wondering what’s happened, aren’t you?” she says. “Yes, please, enlighten me.” She keeps talking, the revolver steady in her hand: “They warned me that people like you get aggressive when told.” I am now wide awake, sitting upright, adjusting my hair. “Then tell me, you owe me an answer.” She laughs. “No, I don’t owe you anything. I’ve already paid.” I stand up and she aims. “Sit down, robot.”

✦ 27 ✧

You walk towards the library and still none of what has happened has happened. While she turns towards the crossing you watch her whites of the eyes expand, and you think: She knows she’s doing it, and if she doesn’t know it she feels it, because it alters your breathing. She tucks a lock of hair behind her ear and turns to you and you think: Yes, she knows it, of course, she’s teasing me, playing the game, to reach where we are not. When all that has happened has happened you will write several essays about the women who on 21 July 1996 never murdered the Deputy Prime Minister outside party headquarters on Sveavägen. About the individuals who could just as well have done it, but never could, like you.

✦ 28 ✧

You begin to drop crumbs in your sleep. Each night you are led further in. Waiting for someone and turning around. Sensing familiar colours scents textures fabrics. You do this because you are inquisitive. It is a method, that alone. Yet you notice how that layer thickens when you are about to wake, starts to become difficult to pass through, as if the crumbs had been blown away?

Sleep well.

– Jörgen Löwenfeldt ✦ jorgenlowenfeldt.se ✧ bagatellerna.se ✦

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