The Details, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
1: Johanna
2: Niki
3: Alejandro
4: Birgitte
A Note from the Translator
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
Johanna
After a few days of the virus in my body I come down with a fever, which is followed by an urge to return to a particular novel. It’s only once I sit down in bed and open the book that I understand why. There’s an inscription on the title page, made in blue ballpoint and inimitable handwriting:
May 29, 1996
Get well soon.
There are crêpes and cider at Fyra Knop.
I’m waiting until we can go there again.
Kisses (they would prefer to be on your lips),
Johanna
It was malaria back then; I’d been infected a couple of weeks prior by an East African mosquito in a tent outside of the Serengeti and fell sick once we were home again. I was admitted to Hudiksvall Hospital and nobody could understand why all my results were off the charts; when at last they gave me the diagnosis, the doctors lined up to get a look at the woman with the exotic affliction. A fire blazed behind my brow, and I woke at dawn every morning at the hospital from the sound of my own breathing and a headache unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. Following our trip to Tanzania, I’d gone straight to Hälsingland to visit my grandfather on his deathbed. Instead I fell ill and nearly died myself. I spent more than a week at the hospital, but by the time Johanna gave me this novel, I was curled up in our bedroom in Hägersten, where they had taken me by ambulance via a liver biopsy in Uppsala. I don’t remember the results—there’s not much I can recall from that summer—but I’ll never forget our apartment, the book, or her. The novel disappeared inside the fever and headache, fused with them, and somewhere in that mix is the line that runs all the way to today, a vein of emotion electrified by illness and fear, which is what propels me to the bookcase on this afternoon to find that specific novel. Ruthless fever and headache, fretful thoughts crowding behind the eyes, the whooshing of impending distress: I recognize it all because I’ve experienced it before—the boxes of useless painkillers on the floor by the bed, the bottles of sparkling water I guzzle without any reprieve to my thirst. The images start rolling the instant I shut my eyes: horses’ hooves in a dry desert, dank basements full of mute ghosts, big vowels screaming at me—it’s the full standard menu of nightmares I’ve had since I was a small child, only with the added sprinkling of death and annihilation that is the territory of illness.
Literature was our favorite game. Johanna and I introduced each other to authors and themes, to eras and regions and singular works, to older books and contemporary books and books of different genres. We had similar tastes but opinions divergent enough to make our discussions interesting. There were certain things we didn’t agree on (Oates, Bukowski), others that left us both unmoved (Gordimer, fantasy), and some we both loved (Klas Östergren, Eyvind Johnson’s Krilon trilogy, Lessing). I could tell how she felt about a book based on how fast she worked her way through it. If she was reading fast (Kundera, all crime fiction), I knew she was bored and rushing to be done, and if she was going too slow (The Tin Drum, all sci-fi), she was equally bored but had to struggle to reach the last page.
She thought it was her duty to finish a book she’d started—just as she finished all her courses, papers, and projects. There was a deep-rooted sense of obedience in her, a kind of deference to the task at hand no matter how hopeless it might seem. She must have gotten that from her parents, from their creativity and unflappable dedication. In her view this commitment to completion allowed her to enter the future unencumbered, a way of maintaining what she called “a clean slate.” Life, in Johanna’s world, was lived in one direction, and that direction was forward, only forward. It’s how we differed from each other: I rarely completed anything big. After a year of temping in various Pressbyrån convenience stores, I enrolled in multiple university courses, all of which I would end up either dropping or deferring to the future, until I started to write more seriously. And not even at that point, when I’d resolved to dedicate myself full-time to becoming an author, did I manage to follow the path I’d laid out for myself. Instead I spent my days strolling around Aspudden, Mälarhöjden, Midsommarkransen, Axelsberg. In this era the neighborhoods on the city’s outskirts still had a certain seediness to them, with motorcycle clubs and tattoo studios and dim video rental stores with tanning beds. The subway stations were dank and dirty. All manner of people lived side by side, white-collar workers who went to work with briefcases in hand, artists who rented cheap studios in the industrial areas, junkies whose drug dens were regularly raided by the cops, old men with leathery skin who spent all day drinking in the town squares; these people all lived alongside one another in the three-story buildings that lined the winding main streets. These buildings housed cramped storefronts that sold foreign spices and simple restaurants with brown interiors where I’d sit in a corner, an empty plate on a plastic tray in front of me as I finished the dregs of my light beer while watching the other early afternoon patrons. There’d be a notebook in front of me, paired with a carefully selected pen, but I rarely made use of these implements. I might have given the impression of being dedicated but I was not, and the book stack on my nightstand always included one or two titles I’d abandoned midway through. I preferred books with a pull so strong I couldn’t get out. It was the same way with most things in life and as a result my responsibilities were few, perhaps too few. In fact I’d rarely encountered a responsibility I didn’t reject. This general principle didn’t make for any “clean slates,” and I assume that Johanna could only view my inherent inertia as a challenge. There was something about her speed and enthusiasm that gave me a bit of velocity, made things happen. Maybe this characteristic was what made me feel so safe in our relationship: she had started on me and wouldn’t give up. She wasn’t going anywhere; she’d never yield to an impulse to leave. I relaxed and surrendered. She was so thorough, so affectionate and loyal. Would breaking up ever occur to someone like her? No, I thought. No, never.
The book in my hand is The New York Trilogy. Auster: hermetic but nimble, both simple and twisted, at once paranoid and crystalline, and with an open sky between every word. On that point we agreed, Johanna and I, and a couple of weeks later, when the fever subsided, I read it again, now looking for flaws. I wanted to find out if the series was in fact obvious or boring but not a single thing was off about it, and soon thereafter I read Moon Palace and was again spellbound. Auster turned into a true north of mine when it came to both reading and writing, even after I forgot about him and stopped reading his new books as they came out. His discerning simplicity became an ideal, initially associated with his name though it endured on its own. Some books stay in your bones long after their titles and details have slipped from memory. When I finally went to Brooklyn for the first time, I looked up his address as if it was the most natural thing to do. It was a couple of years into the new millennium, and Johanna had long since left me for someone else, a sudden and brutal departure, stone-cold. By the time I was staring at the stoop of the brownstone where Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt lived their lives and wrote their books, I was in a serious relationship with a man who in that moment was eating pancakes with my daughter at a nearby café. The multiple folded properties of time made it so that I could hear Johanna say something about chance, something I wouldn’t understand until much later, made it so that we both could think that we saw something moving behind the curtains on the top floor.
Like my current fever, that malaria infection installed a sense of eternity in my body; the illness felt like a permanent state. We had traveled to visit two friends of hers who were working in “the humanitarian aid world,” a world that seemed highly capacious. After two weeks of hanging out with them, I still didn’t understand what their jobs were. One of them was making a movie for some organization, and this movie was potentially going to screen at a conference, if the conference did indeed happen and if the movie did end up being made; whereas the other friend didn’t seem to do much more than tag along while carrying camera tripods. They were going to spend three months there before heading down south, and that night in the tent outside the Serengeti was our last night in the country. Nobody noticed the mosquito that bit me even though we shared a mosquito net, but on the plane home I found three itchy bumps on my elbow. Johanna had nothing. Technically the fever didn’t last more than two or three weeks, four at most, but it felt like I was bedridden for months. Johanna dabbed my forehead and brought me pastries from the bakery on the square, bite-size to fit my tiny appetite. She said she worried about my jutting hipbones though I could tell she was secretly fascinated by them. She made soups with cream and fed me bread she toasted in the oven with big pats of butter that sank into the crumb. I was grateful for all of it, for the food and the gifts, the paperbacks she inscribed with poetic flair. She hailed from an affectionate upper-middle-class family in Täby and this was how they gave presents: at random occasions and in elegant wrapping with beautiful cards slipped under the bows. There was a festive aspect to receiving one of these gifts, even when it was a simple offering slid across the table at lunch. In her world it wasn’t just about content and packaging, but also about the degree of surprise, about timing and allusions to the past and a potential future. Every gift was part of a web of references, winks, and tacit informat ion. With time the accrual of these presents became a burden; I would never be able to catch up. Her gifts were too many, too expensive, and too full of promises. Moreover, she had an eye for beauty that I lacked; she could find the perfect watch in a museum store; she bought a tray with a print of a film poster, Summer with Monika, at a movie theater threatened with closure. I still have both. My kids have asked me about this Monika, who she was and with whom she had that black-and-white summer, and the now-defunct watch is stuffed into a toiletry bag without its wristband, but I’ve never come across one as nice. Because of her brutal departure I tossed some of her presents and stowed others in an attic workshop, with the intention of bringing them back out again as my feelings cooled. It was never about financial value; money wasn’t something we talked about. She didn’t take out a student loan like the rest of us (we initially met in a journalism class at the university); instead she had a Visa card linked to a bank account that was regularly replenished by her parents. For me, who moved out and started supporting myself at age sixteen, and who’d dropped out of college several times, every expense required a sacrifice elsewhere in the budget. Aside from the books I doubt she held on to anything I gave her during our time together: the pocket camera, the dressing gown in imitation silk, the framed drawings by some comics artist who was popular back then but is now long forgotten. My gifts to her, the act of giving, left me feeling inadequate. I couldn’t help but register their cost and how relatively few of them there were. I was clumsy in comparison, suddenly conscious of money and what my lack of inherited taste could mean. Such things usually only existed in the undergrowth of the life we had together; they were things we didn’t discuss. There might have been a certain violence to the way she gifted, a triumphant supremacy that was affirmed each time she slid a rectangular box across the table (a necklace with an asymmetrical silver pendant), left a big surprise in the center of the living room (long-distance ice skates, including boots and ice claws), or placed a wrapped, newly published book on my pillow (Tranströmer’s The Sorrow Gondola), or came home with a box from Gunnarson’s Bakery that she dangled before my face before setting it down on the table between our teacups. It was a kind of generosity that cost her nothing, but which she knew I’d never be able to match, and which therefore gave her a secret upper hand. When I ran out of money, she was the one to replenish the fridge and the pantry, and she did it with cheese from the market hall cheese monger, fresh-squeezed juice, and newly ground coffee in brown bags from the specialty shop on Linnégatan. At some point, probably right after it ended, I asked myself if this was what structural violence looked like: to unconsciously teach someone about gifts, where to buy them, how to deliver them. To teach someone that you’re not supposed to buy the cheapest pair of pants, ready-made pesto, computer, or frying pan like I’d always done, but that you had to pick the best version? A couple of years later I saw that any notion of latent violence in this exchange was a figment of my own imagination, sparked by the experience of being abandoned and posthumously construed by a mind burning with indignation. Johanna gave me The New York Trilogy out of no other impulse than kindness, and the inscription’s kisses (which would prefer to be on my lips) were as real as kisses in blue ballpoint on a title page could ever be.
To read with a fever is a lottery; the contents of the text will either dissolve or penetrate deep into the cracks accidentally opened by an out-of-control temperature. This is why The New York Trilogy moved me in a way I’ve never understood, and it is also why I’ve sought it out today, almost twenty-five years later and with an altogether different fever blazing behind my eyes. An altogether different fever, I write, even though every fever is the same fever, with the same nightmares and the same distress. Time folds in on itself, as it often seems to do under the influence of fever, and I suddenly find myself standing side by side with the me from twenty-four years ago. The brink of insanity lies at 102 degrees, but not far below, at 100.4, there’s a clearly discernible valley where I wouldn’t mind spending my days. In that band your guard drops, and figures from the past are given access, though not as ghosts. 100.4: a temperature where the body’s ability to stay alive is intact even as your interest in being an alert and informed social being cools, so as long as you can bear to have the past slinking about your legs like a pack of dogs, this valley offers a pleasant lassitude. I remember the fevers of childhood, all those fevers before the introduction of rapid-read thermometers when taking the temperature required Vaseline and persistence, my mother observing the blue pillar of the quicksilver to confirm what my body already knew: 100.4, a day of soporific dissolution, the walls thin between the world and me. At 100.4 degrees there’s nothing in me that whispers “forward” anymore. And isn’t that command the truest essence of this world, that which makes everything tick? Forward, forward.
I dropped out of the class that had brought us together before the semester was over. Encouraged and enthused by Johanna, I decided to give my writing a chance and got started on the short story project I’d been thinking about for some time. It was a collection of stories tied together by theme, which might have been successful had I completed more of them. I did make some headway, got at least halfway through or a little longer on all of them, before my courage faltered. Forward is only a direction for people with speed and I spent whole days polishing sentences that were ultimately scrapped altogether. Johanna, naturally, got her degree and landed a job at the local radio station through her dad’s connections. Getting home from work around six or seven in the evening, she’d come stand behind me at the big desk and look down at the screen as long as I let her, which I usually did, and then she’d nod and smile. She encouraged me even when the screen showed approximately the same sentences as the day before. I’d never previously let anyone read my writing but with her it was easy—probably because she considered everything I squeezed out with rapt attention. Even though I understood that she was mixing up the kisses on my lips with the appraisal of my work, her kindness still motivated me to keep going. It turned into a game where her advice could be as concrete as the finger she placed on my screen: “let them get each other in the end instead” she might say, or “make her crazier.” By the time she came home the next day her will had been done. It turned out that every story required her touch for completion, as if she not only understood my intentions better than I did but as if she alone could see where they might go. I found myself with something akin to enthusiasm for work and managed to establish a routine for my writing, which included reaching a daily word count. There was joy in getting through the rough patches that were part of the effort, and I found that the toil I expended one day would usually be replicable the next day, and the next, and the next. In a few weeks this habit of writing replaced the occasional bursts of inspiration that used to be my main driver but which never yielded more than a few pages at a time, and out of which no more than a paragraph or two would be serviceable at a closer look. I pulled myself together, overcame my fear, became systematic and diligent; I listened to Johanna’s praise and suggestions, I wrote again, I wrote better, I kept writing. The despondency that usually plagued me was miraculously gone. I was in Johanna’s room now, in a warm and productive embrace. She piled superlatives on top of one another, it was like a campaign, and her words were confirmation that I’d chosen the right path. Afterward, when she’d taken her books and clothes and left me behind in a dusty apartment I couldn’t afford and with a collection of furniture I didn’t want, I understood that her adoration had tied me to her. Or, rather: it had tied my ability to her. With her, my only reader and my best reader, my closest and most encouraging reader disappeared, and the hurdle to sitting down and finishing anything became insurmountable. For years I tried, consciously and unconsciously and more times than I care to count, to re-create that situation with other people. After Johanna I dated men and women who liked literature but didn’t want to read my writing, or who wanted to read my writing but didn’t get it, or who got it but had nothing intelligent to say, or who didn’t get why I was trying to write in the first place; men and women who enjoyed the wrong kind of literature (crime fiction only) or the right kind of literature for the wrong reasons (Ellroy, because he’s hard-boiled), or who liked the things I did for the same reasons I did but saw no reason to talk about it, or who simply thought that printed matter had become irrelevant as an art form. None of them could mix the kisses on my lips with anything else. The kisses always landed where they did (on my lips) and never elsewhere in my life or on my attempts to create something.
