Jonas Khemiri - Everything I Don’t Remember

*

I wanted to see him. It didn’t feel like our words on the phone were enough. My body wanted its share. But every time I suggested we get together, something got in the way for Samuel. Often he had a lot going on at work, or else he needed to help Vandad with some unspecified matter, or else his sister needed a babysitter. The weeks went by and all we did was talk on the phone. I didn’t understand what was going on. Sometimes I suspected he was dating someone else at the same time. There was no neat category PI could place my feelings in. Were we friends, siblings, colleagues, soulmates, acquaintances, or moving toward being a couple? It was all so fuzzy. Sometimes I talked to my sister to get advice. She was as blunt as ever.

“Get in a taxi. Go there. Fuck him. See if it was worth the wait. Then we can talk.”

“He doesn’t live alone.”

“Send a taxi to pick him up. Fuck him. Make an assessment.”

“It just always feels like he’s finding excuses to avoid seeing me.”

“Then he’s gay.”

“He says he’s had girlfriends. But I don’t know when.”

“Then he’s not interested.”

“He calls like every three days and we have conversations that never end.”

“Then who the fuck knows what he’s up to. Stop answering and see what happens.”

I tried to stop answering. I heard my phone buzz. I saw his name on the screen. I put my phone aside. Ten seconds later I saw my fingers answering. I needed to hear his voice to make it through the day. Not because we talked about anything all that deep. If I were to tell you what we said you would zone out within a few seconds. But at the time those conversations brought some sort of lightness to my body. With him, I became the person I knew I was deep inside but hadn’t been in many years. I was quick, funny, smart, imaginative, and above all: curious. His enthusiasm infected me and when he told me about how he had written a list of twenty-three things he wanted to do before he turned twenty-three and then resolutely tackled them one by one (everything from trying cocaine to petting a mountain gorilla to finally reading The Neverending Story all the way through), I found myself wanting to do the same thing. Maybe not a list, exactly, and it had been a long time since I was twenty-three, but just that attitude, going out in the world and seeing it as chock-full of possibilities. He took his experiences very seriously, and I was drawn to him, I wanted to be a part of him, I wanted to know him skin to skin, cover his body with my lips, investigate what would happen if we were close. But time passed and we didn’t see each other. November turned into December. When I heard that some friends in the neighborhood were going to have a New Year’s party, I texted Samuel to see if he wanted to stop by. I was sure he would say no. But his response, just a few minutes later: “Sounds fun. Can I bring two friends?”

*

We had arranged to meet Panther at Skanstull. She was wearing a white jacket and a long turquoise dress with gold patterns and little bells at the hem that made her sound like a miniature cow as she came walking along the platform, waving at us. Around her neck she had a purple scarf worn at an angle like a flight attendant, and we hugged her holding our clinking oblong liquor-store bags and welcomed her home and ten minutes later we were on the train to Bagarmossen.

The closer we got, the more nervous Samuel was. He ripped up the bag handle and dropped small bits of plastic on the floor of the train. He bit his lip. He hmmed and drummed his hand against the windowpane. At first I thought it was because we were heading out of the city, because sometimes when we wound up at the far end of one Metro line or another, where he didn’t feel at home, I noticed that Samuel, like other inner-city people, acted strange. They looked at the surroundings and commented on them in an impressed tone.

“Wow, awesome buildings” (about ordinary high-rises).

“Sweet moped” (if someone whizzed by on a moped).

“Mmm, it smells amazing” (about the apple smoke drifting out of a regular old hookah bar).

“Nice, a library!” (as if it were strange that people round here would read books).

“Wow, it really didn’t take all that long to get out here” (although we had just taken a 250-krona taxi ride).

But this time there was something else making Samuel nervous. I tried to calm him down by pretending to box him in the stomach, to remind him that no matter what happened, his friends were by his side.

“Girlz up hoez down, right?”

Panther nodded.

“Broz before hoez?”

The bells on Panther’s dress agreed.

“But what if it’s her ?” Samuel said.

“What do you mean, ‘her’?”

“What if it’s her who’s the her who’s the one?”

Panther looked at me and I shrugged to indicate that he had gone temporarily insane.

*

The New Year’s party was in full swing when Samuel walked into the front hall. My body gave a start when it caught sight of him. Within three seconds it decided to become a sweaty dishrag with no spine. I slithered my way out to the hall and hugged him. I felt his hand against my damp back. We smiled at each other, unsure of how well we truly knew each other.

Samuel introduced me to his two friends.

“Panther,” said Panther, extending her hand.

Panther? I thought. Did she say Panther? Behind her was Vandad. Tall as a Christmas tree, broad as a wall, round as a sumo wrestler. Wriggling out of his leather coat made him short of breath. His body kept going, beyond the padded shoulders of his jacket. I put out my hand. We shook. He had a clammy, limp handshake. It was like he was dipping his hand into mine. Then he handed his leather coat to me as if I were in charge of the coat check this evening. I looked him in the eye. Then I dropped the coat on the hall floor and went back to the party. It landed as heavily as a clubbed animal.

For the rest of the night, I hung out with my friends and Samuel hung out with his. Ylva was celebrating the fact that she was finally single, Tamara was almost finished with her dissertation, Santiago was on crutches after an encounter with ice and Shahin was Shahin. It was crowded, the dance floor got going, people were drinking, people were smoking up. Samuel made a few attempts to talk to me, but it felt wrong, I didn’t recognize him from our phone calls, he was having a hard time focusing, his eyes kept drifting over toward the dance floor.

“Hello?” I said. “Are you listening?”

“Yeah, sorry. I’m just. . trying to keep track of my friends. Sorry.”

I don’t know what he was afraid of. His friends were fine on their own. Panther was holding court in the kitchen, she was telling everyone who would listen about the art scene in Berlin, and when no one was listening she kept talking anyway. Vandad was sitting on a barstool in the corner. His glass was constantly in motion, from the bar counter to his mouth, to the box of wine, back to the bar counter, back to his mouth. He was so tall that I didn’t realize he was balding until he sat down.

*

The train kept rolling south. When we stood up and got off, Panther said:

“Wow, great vibe — a little like Neukölln.”

Samuel agreed and I walked beside them without saying anything. The vibe wasn’t great, or different, it was a perfectly normal area, just like everywhere else, and even though I’d never been there before I knew my way around. There was the grocery, there was the pizzeria, there was the alky bar, there was the hot-dog stand, the square, the park benches where the kids sat sneaking cigarettes and scouting everything out, and the path we would take to get to the party. The only thing that was different was that there was an organic cafe on one corner of the square, there was a party going on in there, a bunch of forty-year-olds all dressed up in their going-out clothes were standing out in the snow and smoking and casting nervous glances at the kids on the square.