Фредрик Бакман - Anxious People

So the teenage boy ran out onto the bridge and shouted to the man, and the man stopped. The teenage boy didn’t know what he should do, so he just started… talking. Tried to win the man’s trust. Get him to take two steps back rather than forward. The wind was tugging gently at their jackets, there was rain in the air and you could feel the start of winter on your skin, and the boy tried to find the words to say how much there must be to live for, even if it maybe didn’t feel that way right now.

The man on the bridge had two children, he told the teenage boy that. Possibly because the boy reminded him of them. The boy pleaded with him, with panic weighing down each word: “Please, don’t jump!”

The man looked at him calmly, almost sympathetically, and replied, “Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don’t take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it’s as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.”

The teenage boy probably didn’t really understand what he meant. His hands were shaking as he glanced over the side of the bridge and saw death all the way down. The man smiled weakly at him and took half a step back. Just then, that felt like the whole world.

Then the man explained that he’d had a pretty good job, he’d set up his own relatively successful business, bought a fairly nice apartment. That he’d invested all his savings in shares in a real estate development company, so that his children could get even better jobs and even nicer apartments, so that they could have the freedom not to have to worry, not have to fall asleep exhausted every night with a pocket calculator in their hands. Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure. They trust us, which is a crushing responsibility, because they haven’t yet realized that we don’t actually know what we’re doing. So the man did what we all do: he pretended he knew. When his children started to ask why poo was brown, and what happens after you die, and why polar bears don’t eat penguins. Then they got older. Sometimes he managed to forget that for a moment and found himself reaching to hold their hands. They were so embarrassed. Him too. It’s hard to explain to a twelve-year-old that when you were little and I walked too fast, you would run to catch up with me and take hold of my hand, and that those were the best moments of my life. Your fingertips in the palm of my hand. Before you knew how many things I’d failed at.

The man pretended—about everything. All the financial experts promised him that shares in the real estate development company were a safe investment, because everyone knows that property values never go down. And then they did just that.

There was a financial crisis somewhere in the world and a bank in New York went bankrupt, and far away in a small town in a completely different country lived a man who lost everything. He saw the bridge from his study window when he hung up after the phone call with his lawyer. It was early in the morning, still unusually mild for the time of year, but there was rain in the air. The man drove his children to school as if nothing had happened. Pretending. He whispered in their ears that he loved them, and his heart broke when he saw them roll their eyes and sigh. Then he drove toward the water. Stopped the car where you weren’t allowed to stop. Left the keys in it. Walked out onto the bridge and climbed up onto the railing.

He told the teenage boy all this, and then of course the teenage boy knew that everything was going to be all right. Because if a man standing on a railing takes the time to tell a stranger how much he loves his children, you know he doesn’t really want to jump.

And then he jumped.

11

Ten years later the young police officer is standing in the corridor outside the interview room. His dad is still in there with the real estate agent. Of course his mom was right: they should never have worked together, he and his dad, there was bound to be trouble. He didn’t listen, because of course he never does. Occasionally when she was tired or she’d had a couple of glasses of wine, enough to make her forget to hide her emotions, his mom looked at her son and said: “There are days when I can’t help thinking you never really came back from that bridge, love. That you’re still trying to save that man on the railing, even though it’s as impossible now as it was back then.” Perhaps that’s true, he doesn’t feel like checking. He still has the same nightmares, ten years on. After Police College, exams, shift after shift, late nights, all his work at the station that’s garnered so much praise from everyone but his dad, even more late nights, so much work that he’s come to hate not working, unsteady walks home at dawn to the piles of bills in the hall and an empty bed, sleeping pills, alcohol. On nights when everything has been completely unbearable he’s gone out running, mile after mile through darkness and cold and silence, his feet drumming against the pavement faster and faster, but never with the intention of getting anywhere, of accomplishing anything. Some men run like hunters, but he ran like their prey. Drained with exhaustion he would finally stagger home, then head off to work and start all over again. Sometimes a few whiskies were enough to get him to sleep, and on good mornings ice-cold showers were enough to wake him up, and in between he did whatever he could to take the edge off the hypersensitivity of his skin, stifle the tears when he felt them in his chest, long before they reached his throat and eyes. But all the while: still those same nightmares. The wind tugging at his jacket, the dull scraping sound as the man’s shoes slid off the railing, the boy’s scream across the water that neither sounded nor felt like it came from him. He barely heard it anyway, the shock was too great, too overwhelming. It still is.

Today he was the first police officer through the door after the hostages were released and the pistol shot rang out inside the apartment. He was the one who rushed through the living room, over the bloodstained carpet, tore the balcony door open, and stood there staring disconsolately over the railing, because no matter how illogical it might seem to everyone else, his first instinct and greatest fear was: “He’s jumped!” But there was nothing down there, just the reporters and curious locals who were all peering up at him from behind their mobile phones. The bank robber had vanished without a trace, and the policeman was alone up there on the balcony. He could see all the way to the bridge from there. Now he was standing in the corridor of the police station, unable even to make himself wipe the blood from his shoes.

12

The air passes through the older policeman’s throat as roughly as a piece of heavy furniture being dragged across an uneven wooden floor. When he’d reached a certain age and weight, he’d noticed himself starting to sound like that, as if older breaths were heavier. He smiles awkwardly at the real estate agent.

“My colleague, he… He’s my son.”

“Ah!” the Realtor nods, as if to say that she’s got children, too, or perhaps that she hasn’t got children but that she’d read about them in a manual during her real estate agent’s training. Her favorites are the ones with toys in neutral colors, because they match everything.