Jonas Khemiri - Everything I Don’t Remember

*

The guests had gone home, the music had been turned off, the girl whose party it was had come out of her bathroom with her toothbrush and said:

“Listen, you can stay if you want but you have to stop fucking smoking indoors.”

We promised. Panther put out her cigarette. But we stayed there, we didn’t want the night to end, not yet. Laide had taken off. Samuel checked his phone every five minutes, mumbling:

“I don’t get why she took off.”

“Maybe she’s a psychopath who gets off on making people fall in love with her and then enjoys disappearing?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“It’s just one theory out of many.”

“You don’t know anything about her.”

“I know her type.”

Panther nodded but I don’t know if it was because she agreed with me or with Samuel or because she was dancing to the music in her head.

*

We walked along Scheelegatan in silence. We passed Rådhuset, the shoemaker, the bus stop, the pizzeria. We walked arm in arm like an elderly couple and I didn’t understand what was happening, how this could feel so right, despite my attempts to come up with reasons why it ought to feel wrong.

Some bellowing soccer fans were outside O’Leary’s, cheering at a match that was showing on the TV screens inside. A bus stopped by the hotel and dropped off a group of pensioners who were carrying programs from a musical. We arrived at the escalators at the entrance to Rådhuset Metro stop.

“Did you guys do what you did at that party because you wanted to be remembered?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you remember? In the kitchen?”

“Oh, that. No. We just thought it was a good idea in the moment. Something to fill our Experience Banks with. Something that made us remember the night.”

We smiled at each other.

“It was nice to see you,” he said.

“It sure was.”

“I’m going to remember this.”

“Me too.”

“When will we see each other again?”

“Soon?”

“Soon.”

The sun was going down. We went our separate ways. We kissed, we said goodbye, we kissed, we said goodbye, we kissed, we said goodbye, we said that it really was time to say goodbye, we kissed, we thanked each other for the date, it was awesome to see each other, now we have to say goodbye. I have to go home, me too, I have work tomorrow, me too, we said goodbye, we kissed. Forty-five minutes went by before, with a tired tongue and shaky legs, I finally started going down the stairs, into the chilly evening air of the Metro system. Samuel was still standing in the slanting sunlight, with his several-meter-long and thirty-centimeter-wide shadow. He waved when I turned around.

*

There we sat, the kitchen was total carnage. A battlefield of wine-box corpses, piles of plates, mountains of cigarettes, shards of glass, massacred beer bottles, empty liquor bottles, wine bottles full of cigarette butts. Panther had yellow chip crumbs in her downy mustache. It was almost five o’clock in the morning and it was still dark out. Everyone had left but the boyfriend of the girl whose party it was, he was out cold, snoring on the hall floor.

We should have gone home, it was time to go home, we had no choice but to go home. Then Panther looked up from the cigarette she’d just lit and said:

“We should do something insane.”

And my first thought was, of course. We should eat up the last of what’s in your breast pocket, so I nodded and smiled even before I heard what she said next.

“We should clean the shit out of this kitchen.”

We didn’t need a reason. We just did it. Samuel found the Ajax and soap and window cleaner from the cleaning closet, I took out a dustpan, and we had at it. We fixed the clog in the sink, loaded glasses and plates into the dishwasher, emptied the leftover pasta salad into plastic bags. We wiped off tables and swept and mopped and aired things out and I didn’t try to stop Panther until we were finished and I noticed that she was sneaking looks at the kitchen fan filter.

“That’s plenty,” I said.

“We can’t make it any better than this,” said Samuel.

The kitchen looked like an IKEA catalog, the counters were as sparkling white and bare as the inside of an elbow, the garbage bags were lined up in the hall like an army, next to the sleeping boyfriend.

*

I was sitting on the train on the way home when I got a message from Samuel. “A picture of a water glass.” Written out in words. I saw my smile in the reflection in the train window. It was almost as big as his.

*

We were just about to leave, we were finished, we felt proud and satisfied. Panther gave us a thumbs up, took two steps to the side, and puked her guts up into the shiny clean sink. Tiny red specks splashed onto the white tile walls and she threw up one more time and then stood up and said:

“Shit.”

Then she puked again and then we just stood there in this weird kitchen that still could have been in a catalog, as long as the photographer chose the correct angle and ignored the specks and the smell. We looked at each other and headed for the stairwell, left the garbage bags in the hall, stepped over the boyfriend, and ran for the Metro. We just managed to catch a morning train into the city, we sat in an empty group of four seats, as the train approached Gullmarsplan we started laughing, the laughter started way down in our knees and we laughed all the way across the bridge into the city. Some Spanish-speaking ladies turned around and smiled at us and when we said goodbye to Panther at Skanstull I thought that there was no reason to worry. Some friendships can survive anything.

*

I think I loved him. Take out think. I loved him. I loved him in a way I’ve never loved anyone else. I loved him even though we hadn’t slept together yet. I loved him because he whooped like a little boy when he laughed and shed a tear like an old lady when it was windy, because his pointy canine teeth made him look like a cat and because his big head balanced so regally on his thin shoulders and because his shabby clothes made him look like a person who had more important things to think about than laundry or sewing on buttons and because he smelled like a human and not a cologne factory. I loved him because he transformed all my earlier relationships into random asides and sometimes I felt a strong urge to call up my old boyfriends and say that I had to take back a few things: when I said I was in love I wasn’t in love and when I said I enjoyed our conversations I was exaggerating and when I said you were funny I was lying and when I said I loved you I didn’t know any better and when I ended it and said it wasn’t you it was me that wasn’t true either, because it wasn’t my fault, I wasn’t the broken one, there was something wrong with you . I just hadn’t met the right person and once I did it didn’t start with a storm of emotions that slowly weakened into a calm breeze that later turned into a stiflingly calm everyday life with nail-clipping in front of the TV and arguments about missing phone chargers. My relationship with Samuel was the exact opposite. We started with daily life, with long conversations between friends, which later, several months later, turned into kisses and closeness and an intimacy that. I don’t know how to describe it. But yes. I loved him. I truly did. What’s wrong? Are you okay? Yeah, sorry, I just got the sense that you disappeared for a minute there. Should we take a break? Are you hungry?

*

Then it was January. Panther went back to Berlin. During the next few weeks, or months, really, I hardly saw Samuel. We still lived together and our toothbrushes were still next to each other in the mug in the bathroom and Samuel’s spring coats and summer sneakers were still in the closet and his notebooks were stacked on his white bookcase. But he himself had vanished.