Trying on Different Voices

If you had another life, running parallel to the one you already have, how would you spend it?

I ask this question regularly because the answers have turned out to be interesting. Quite often, people tell me about opposite lives. In the forest, on the beach, doing nothing, or pursuing the career that never happened. Most people think that if they already have one perfectly decent life, it would be a shame to do the same thing in the other.

But if two are not enough, what do you do then?

You can always turn to fiction, as a reader or as a writer. That way I can, among other things, send greetings from the future, speak from the far side of a stroke, or through a mildly racist man who lives with his mother. All in the same dispatch. None of them is me. All of them are.

A lot of people liked the essay about underlining, but quite a few also seemed to feel slightly cheated by the concept. After all, I have promised escapism, and the essay form is built on almost the opposite. So this time I have seasoned the dish with two extra bagatelles, and in all humility I hope you’ll remember that the next time I break the rules1.

Just one more thing: The Bagatelles has just been named a finalist for Best Creative Newsletter in Sweden, chosen from 200 nominees. Thank you to all 4,661 kindred spirits for your support, and keep your fingers crossed for me (and The Nordic Museum) at the awards ceremony on 15 October.

Welcome away ꩜
Jörgen Löwenfeldt

✦ The Voice ✧

So, how did these symptoms begin?

You mean from the beginning, as in the beginning beginning?

Answer however you like. There is no right or wrong here.

Maybe we can start there. With here, I mean. Sorry, where exactly is here again?

Here is where you are not. There is where you are.

Right. It started on Ingarö, up by the rock where I kept my pinecone collection. Not the other place, where my brother hid his. They’re easy to mix up, because we often stole from each other’s stashes. Once I got there and it was completely empty, I thought I could blame the squirrels, but it was him. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t notice? No, I’m getting off the subject now.

You don’t need to think about me. Just keep talking.

I just have to ask. Who were you again? Have we met before, or how did this happen, you being connected to me for a conversation? Have you somehow got access to my neck chip? I’ve read about things like that, people starting to dream other people’s dreams. Just a technical problem, something that could of course be fixed, but frightening all the same. Not that you have any control over your own dreams either, but somehow they’re more familiar.

Everything is as it should be.

So you weren’t going to answer that? Right, okay. You mean I’m just supposed to accept that you’ve forced your way into my head like this? I mean, I’m a fairly open-minded person, but I don’t know if there’s much point carrying on.

Yes, you do.

You’re still here.

What are you thinking?

Now I remember. It didn’t start there with the pinecones at all, but weeks later. We went to a film premiere together and he sat rustling a bag of sweets through the entire film, not just a little during the adverts, but all the way through, as if he was rattling the plastic to see how long he could keep making noise before someone told him off. That was when the so-called symptoms began, if “symptoms” is what you want to call them.

What would you like to call what has happened to you?

Wounds would be better. You’re probably wondering why. It’s because I think they’ll heal with time. It’s just that a considerable amount of time has already passed, so I’m getting tired of waiting for the healing.

That is why you need me.

Why do you say that?

Because that’s what you believe, isn’t it? That’s why you keep talking to me, even though you can switch me over to the other channel whenever you like. Just the way you usually do with all the men. One badly judged joke and they end up on the static channel. Convenient for you, being able to do that. Another way of solving problems.

Who were you again?

Shall we go back to the symptoms, the ones you call wounds?

Okay, it feels a bit like having fly larvae writhing through my bloodstream. As if they’re forcing their way out into the capillaries. Sometimes it hurts so much I wake up screaming in my sleep. Do you think they could be living inside me now? Could there be more of them? Can the eggs hatch inside a human body?

Don’t get off the subject.

Aren’t you supposed to do what I ask? Weren’t you programmed to serve humanity?

Ah, so it’s a test. It isn’t strange that you think I’m a robot, given how this has turned out, but I’m someone else, something else.

Am I dead?

What makes you think that?

I can’t see my hands.

If we go back to the original question, I think everything will become clear, and you’ll be able to see your hands.

Is this some kind of detective puzzle, where we have to work out who the murderer is?

Something like that.

The butler, obviously.

We don’t really have time for this. Do you see the light over there?

Yes, I do.

We’re going to try to avoid it, okay?

Then I’m not completely dead yet, that’s good. But I’ve been poisoned, haven’t I? It’s the larvae? I need to remember how it started so you can give me the right antidote. Have I understood how this works?

It certainly seems so.

There by the pinecone collection, I got so many tick bites. Twenty of them in a cluster across one calf. Almost as if it felt like having a leech there. Mum spent the whole evening digging at them with tweezers before they were all gone, but ever since then, ever since then the larvae.

Reasonable.

How old am I, then? Maybe this was last week?

From this state, you are every age and none of them. It’s a little difficult to explain. But at least you’ve given us something to go on now. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be in touch.

What?

…

Hello?

…

The voice, can you hear me? The light is getting closer, I wasn’t supposed to look over there, was I? You said I should avoid staring at it, but there’s nothing else here.

I think we have a solution.

That really was at the last second.

All you need to do now is close your eyes. And when you open them again, don’t mention any of this. You have to promise. You just say you had a nice little sleep. That’s all.

Yes.

Promise.

I promise.

✦ The Complete Recording ✧

Here, in the future, we do not use that term. Being filmed, as you call it, is no more than one of life’s givens. Like breathing, the heartbeat, blinking and telepathy. From our first second on the planet, everything we do is recorded, because it can be, and because the alternative borders on barbarism. Think about it: what would the alternative be, to be denied our own history? No one would vote for that party, believe us. It would be like shutting down the possibility of forming couples.

Of course, we never think about any of this, just as you never thought about how many times a day you swallowed your own saliva (and neither do we). Several litres, surely, if you had counted (though who would count). So we are offered complete archives of every individual life, because: why not?

Surveillance, you call it. We call it Knowledge.

Neutral. Better.

For would you not, like us, want access to your grandparents’ first meeting, to join them at the very moment, at that crayfish party, when they realised they had fallen in love? Or find the cause of your father’s violent temper in his great-great-grandfather, who suffered the exact same nervous twitch that time by the candyfloss machine at the fairground, only a hundred years earlier? The sort of thing that explains us. Psychoanalysts are simply delighted to be able to follow childhood through observable facts rather than retrospective constructions. No more repressed memories and other mumbo jumbo.

Everyone is much happier now. You may not believe that. You are thinking, “Well, I suppose you have invented soma”, but you should know that we do not need to take any supplements or dopamine maximisers, because we eat what we need, when we need it, unlike you who, forgive the expression, shovelled down milkshakes, hamburgers and cheese puffs like barbarians, without counting the minutes of life each unit cost you. You had no implants, after all, so you could not see those figures before your eyes, which may be a mitigating circumstance, and perhaps you were happy in the moment, but in the long run one does want to live, does one not? Live for a long time, does one not? Avoid dying, does one not? Look into the eyes of those you love for ever.

We can also read the tales of antiquity. We understand Marcus Aurelius. We can recite the Epic of Gilgamesh. All of this is ours, just as it was yours. Then there are other things about us that we can understand you might find strange. Such as these popular channels where people watch people, through Knowledge. Even we, the more sensible among us, consider it a waste of time to watch, on a loop, someone else watching you watching yourself, and to put this spectacle on display before the public. The viewing figures make us ashamed, so I suppose you could say that we are cut from the same cloth, deep down, considering the way you carried on with your “doom scrolling”. You will no doubt be disappointed to learn that we have not moved beyond the concept of “reaction videos”.

Most of us, really, would rather watch without being watched ourselves, but one can no longer know that with any certainty, since the notification from the system does not arrive until the following day, because the government has decided that this is how it should be. Organised crime needs to be fought, and it would hardly make sense for the police to have to tell them so while organised crime was being fought. It is pure logic, and surely it is a relief that all the abductions have stopped lately. No more babies discovered in the favelas of Mars, so it is hardly surprising that the government received increased support from voters last time around, because things cannot possibly be that bad for us. You understand that too.

We are not so different from you as you may think, though perhaps we were being prejudiced there, in which case forgive us. We are simply doing the best we can, within our limited possibilities, to live our one and only lives, on this planet, in the universe, just as you did. Perhaps, then, one has to accept the occasional aberration. You understand that very well, of course, because we know what you were like. But we do not judge.

✦ No Stops ✧

On a train. The conductor asks for my ticket. I realise I haven’t bought one. I ask:

“All right, where is this train heading?”

She replies:

“How should I know? Do I look like I work here?”

The train doesn’t stop anywhere. It just keeps going and going. I close my eyes for a bit.

When I open them, I’m lying in someone’s arms. I’m a baby.

“Damn. Something’s gone wrong with the switching,” I try to say, but I’m a baby.

✦ Elementary Things ✧

One of those damn undocumented people further down in the building had thrown an entire Christmas tree down the rubbish chute. Then people had kept chucking their Christmas and New Year rubbish in after it, cocktail sausages and prawn shells and all, and of course the whole lot got stuck halfway down, like a blockage. And good luck getting hold of an emergency caretaker over the holidays, so we had to live with the stench, which after a while started to smell like a decomposing corpse, and God knows, maybe that was what it was. So I could hardly stay at Mum’s any longer, even though she was ill with brain fog and needed my company just to remember her own name, but come on, I’m a sixty-year-old man, I need a bit of freedom, don’t I. And you can’t be on call twenty-four hours a day just because she’s forgotten where she put the remote, or which channel is which. If she’d understood, she’d have understood.

So I started taking longer and longer walks. The mere thought of the smell gave me acid reflux. First it was the stairwell, then the building itself, then the whole neighbourhood. One enormous rubbish dump full of rotting prawn shells. Out, just get out. Suddenly, obviously against my will but perhaps in accordance with fate, I found myself in the part of town with the shacks, where immigrants from near and far had put up tents, sheets of metal and whatever the hell else they could find to keep the weather out, and now I was going to get robbed. I could feel it. Just shove a gun in my face, now that I’d taken a wrong turn. I’d already started wondering how much an iPhone 20 was going to set me back when an old woman, actually a little like my mother, but sort of Romani, crossed the road in front of me. I’m not a racist, I should point out, just a realist. Someone has to say it like it is. Don’t throw the Christmas tree down the rubbish chute. Don’t light a fire on the parquet floor indoors. Don’t put rat meat on pizza. Elementary things.

The woman who was not my mother grabbed my hand, and better that than my phone, and began examining the lines. She ran her index finger across my palm, studied what she found there with a grim expression, shook her head and let go. Then she said nothing. It was as though she had weighed my soul on a set of scales, been disappointed and decided not to buy it. So damn deflating, typical immigrant. I’d at least been hoping she would tell me I was going to meet a tall, dark stranger. But I was never that lucky.

✦ Relate to This ✧

There was just so much going on at the time. Arranging the funeral and all the Christmas fuss, marking exams and answering emails, planning the next term and being an inspiring manager. And on top of everything else, the Nobel Banquet, which she was invited to at the last minute when the head of department was unable to attend. She said yes because that was easiest, but it was that very afternoon, as she was about to powder on some rouge and get into her party frock, that something gave way in her brain.

It felt like a twig snapping, and sounded like it too, before a dull, warm fire surged through her head and knocked her out. The stroke paralysed the left side of her body. For the first few weeks she could not speak. After a while she managed to get hold of language again, but returning to herself was a laborious process. While everyone else carried on doing what they always did, she sat at the piano in the drawing room and picked her way through the mere fifty pieces written for the right hand. But not once did she wonder what would have happened if the haemorrhage had gone the other way, because there were more than five hundred pieces for the left hand. At least she had one hand.

A year or so after all this, she ran into an old classmate from Lund. They had spent quite a lot of time together for a while, because they lived in such close quarters and had similar temperaments. Alike, but never quite friends. Back then, there had always been a quiet rivalry embedded in every one of her acquaintanceships. Everyone was heading in the same direction, but not everyone could make it all the way.

The classmate was standing by a doorway trying to manoeuvre a stroller up the steps, spotted her and said: My dear, it’s you, come in and we’ll have a chat.

The apartment was furnished in a simple yet eclectic style, probably because it had become a fusion of two disparate families: rustic antiques interspersed with IKEA, the vinyl collection and the glass dolphins. The classmate’s husband came ambling in from the kitchen. He was handsome and polite, asked whether she would like some rooibos, and she did. There were freshly baked coconut macaroons. And it must have taken them a good two or three minutes before they noticed the arm hanging there by her side like a stowaway.

So she explained everything. How at first everything had gone very quickly upwards, life and career alike. How it had all been abruptly cut short by the brain bleed. How the wedding plans had fallen apart, how she had been cut off from sickness benefit. How she picked her way through the days at the piano like a Paul Wittgenstein. How she had come to see the life within life, that there was no point in becoming regretful or bitter. This was simply how things were now.

The classmate and her husband listened reverently to what she told them, while the baby slept. Sweet little sighs drifted into the room every now and then. Then they looked at her, then at each other, then back at her again, and the classmate said, her face arranged in perplexity:

You have to understand, I can’t relate to this at all.

She turned to her husband and asked:

Can you?

He replied sympathetically:

No, I’m afraid not. This is very difficult for us to relate to.

Yes, said the classmate, it really is.

A silence fell, not because it wanted to, but because there was not much more to say. Even the little one made no sound.

Her arm felt heavier than usual. Her thoughts formed so slowly that she could almost follow the process, the synapses exchanging information and settling into different patterns, which then became conclusions. She did not know what to say now, or whether she should eat another coconut macaroon, but then she would have to put down her teacup, and it was filled so close to the brim that it was probably better to take a few sips first.

The classmate said, in an attempt to combat the strange atmosphere:

Such a shame you never made it to the party.

Yes, indeed, said her husband.

We’re actually keeping an eye out for the Nobel dinner service at Bukowskis. It’s so elegant, though a little too expensive. So ugly it’s beautiful with those gold rims, and don’t you think the nineties have somehow started coming back? That enough distance has opened up for the outlines to become visible. Haha. Yes, we’re old now.

Very elegant, said her husband.

Thank you for reading.

– Jörgen Löwenfeldt ✦ jorgenlowenfeldt.se

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