Jonas Khemiri - Everything I Don’t Remember

*

Everyone did the countdown at midnight. TEN-NINE-EIGHT-SEVEN and I felt that obligatory emptiness that everyone feels when the year is about to end, SIX-FIVE-FOUR-THREE, panic about the passage of time, about the seconds ticking away, about how life will soon be over, TWO, I looked around, trying to find Samuel, ONE, he was suddenly standing beside me, HAPPY-NEW-YEAR, shouting and party poppers and horns. Everyone hugged everyone else and in the tumult that followed we kissed.

*

The occasional rocket flew through the air, it smelled like gunpowder. Samuel took out his phone and called Laide on the way, maybe he wanted to check if we were supposed to bring anything, or check to see if she was there already. He didn’t get an answer, but he walked the rest of the way with his phone in his hand like a compass. We met two guys who were going to the same party, I heard Samuel talking to them and I noticed that something changed about his voice. He was walking along that path and talking with an accent. He was rolling his “r”s. He asked the guys if they thought there would be any “sexy chicas” at the party.

The guys replied, “Definitely could be.”

They didn’t have any accent at all, they just looked at Samuel as if they were wondering why he talked so weird. And why his friend was wearing a dress that sounded like a music box.

*

The kiss convinced me. We were together. Our tongues nudged each other, first softly and gently, then more intensely. We fell into each other, we danced a slow jam although it was a fast song, we held each other although everyone was looking, we wanted more, I moved against him, he rasped, I rubbed myself against him, he whimpered. It was ten past midnight, it was a new year, we had met each other, we had found someone who made us feel less halved, a person who wasn’t perfect but we didn’t want perfection, we were tired of perfection, my relationship had been a five-year hunt for perfection and not once had I felt as alive as when I stood there damply at a house party in Bagarmossen.

“Bro.”

Vandad’s voice.

“Ey, Samuel. Panther wants to talk to you.”

Samuel’s hand tried to wave Vandad off.

“She says it’s important.”

We let go of each other, our chests loosened, we awoke from our slumber.

“What is it?” Samuel said.

“Just come on.”

Samuel looked at me.

“I’ll be right back.”

He disappeared into the kitchen. I stayed put. Santiago limped up to me with a glass and whispered: “What an idiot.”

To this day I don’t know if he meant Vandad, Samuel, or me.

*

It was nine thirty when we got to the New Year’s party. We said hi to people, Samuel introduced us to Laide and I said:

“Hey, it’s you.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah, we saw each other at McDonald’s. Summer before last.”

Laide gave me a suspicious look.

“I moved home this spring. And I don’t eat at McDonald’s.”

“No, I swear, I never forget a face. We had gone out and then we went to McDonald’s and you were standing in front of us in line.”

“I’m a vegetarian.”

“You had two veggie burgers.”

“I think you’re confusing me with someone else.”

“I think you’re wrong.”

Laide shook her head and walked to the living room. Samuel stayed where he was and didn’t seem to know whether or not to follow her.

“Let’s turn this around,” he said, walking into the party.

*

A few days into the new year, Samuel texted to apologize for what had happened at the New Year’s party. Since there were several things to apologize for, I held off on answering.

*

Several times during the evening I tried to remind Laide about our encounter at McDonald’s. I mentioned, for example, that she had been wearing a gold owl brooch and she looked at me and said:

“But I don’t have an owl brooch. Can we drop this now?”

She shook her head. Samuel gave me a look and flipped his palm to the sky.

“What?” I whispered. “It’s not my fault there’s something wrong with her memory.”

*

In the next text he asked if I was angry. I didn’t answer. Then he asked if he could see me, he wanted to explain what had happened. We decided to meet at a cafe on Kungsholmen. I walked there with a clear plan in mind. I had heard what he and his shady friends did at the New Year’s party, and now I was going to explain to him that we had no future together. I’m not ready for a relationship, I like you but not like that, it’s not you it’s me, and so on, insert cliché of choice and repeat until your vocal cords break.

*

Some people have a magical gift. They transform everyone else into idiots. They look at people with eyes that make whatever anyone else says fall dead to the ground. Every joke you utter loses lift and crash-lands. Laide is one of those people. Say someone was standing there at a New Year’s party and he wanted to tell a story, people like Laide appear out of nowhere and find fault, they say: “What do you mean Asians are ‘super good at studying’? How can you say that women are weaker than men — there are plenty of really strong women. And why do you use ‘he’ as a general term? It so happens that it’s the third person for ‘person’ but at the same time it only symbolizes people who have penises, so I prefer to use gender-neutral singular ‘they.’” Do you know how popular someone like that is at parties? Not popular at all. People were talking about New Year’s resolutions and how much time was left before midnight. Laide was talking about how in Sweden there are thirty-six thousand rapes each year. Samuel was listening and trying to appear interested.

“It’s a low-level war that no one talks about,” Laide said. “It’s so sick that mankind doesn’t do more to combat it when we totally could.”

I leaned toward her and said, “‘Mankind’ as in ‘humans’ or ‘mankind’ as in ‘people with penises’?”

It was a joke, I was trying to break the ice. Laide looked at me with eyes full of murder and Samuel tried to defuse the tension by going back to talking about fireworks.

*

Samuel was already at the cafe when I got there. Even though I was ten minutes early. I was surprised, I had pictured myself arriving first, having time to prepare, but he was already at a corner table and he looked up and smiled when he saw me.

“I didn’t want to chance not getting a table,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Fine. You?”

“I’m a little nervous. But otherwise fine. What do you want?”

And I thought: Why doesn’t he protect himself? Doesn’t he know what’s about to happen? It’s one thing to be nervous, or to want to come early to get a good table, but who would admit to that? Who says something like that as if it’s perfectly normal? He went up to order and I sat down and when he came back we avoided the New Year’s party. Instead we talked about how there were old French newspapers on the walls in the hallway and he said his dad had saved the paper from the day he was born and he had found it not long ago. It was in a box where his parents had kept mementos, there were locks of hair from his first haircut, the plastic bracelet he had worn in the hospital when he was born, and ten baby fingernail clippings.

“Ew,” I said. “I hate nostalgia.”

“Why?”

“It’s sappy. It tries to go backwards. It’s fake and inauthentic and. . cowardly.”

“You know where it comes from etmy. . ethno. .”

“Etamo. . What the fuck is the word?”

“Ety. .”

“Etymologically.”

“Right.”

“Nostalgia. Something about pain, right?”

“Mmhmm. Like, the pain of never being able to go back.”