Jonas Khemiri - Everything I Don’t Remember

Are you ready? Shall we continue? I don’t remember much from January to the middle of March. We entered some sort of fog where it suddenly became inconceivable that we wouldn’t sleep together every night. When we weren’t working, we shared every waking moment. But what did we talk about? Why did we giggle incessantly? How could a regular old visit to the laundry room turn into a laugh-fest? How come everything we touched became so magical? I don’t know. I really don’t know. It’s all kind of a blur. We explored each other’s bodies with tongues and fingers, we slowly and methodically inventoried scars and birthmarks, ticklish spots and pleasure zones. We talked for so long that there was no time left over for sleeping, which didn’t matter because sleeping was for normal people and we weren’t normal, we didn’t need sleep or food, we only needed each other. Sometimes we went to work with unruly hairstyles and cheek colors that made our colleagues or clients smile and sometimes we stood at lunch restaurants waiting to pay and discreetly scratched our cheeks just to smell the scent on our fingers and remember the previous night. Sometimes we went to movies and plays and dance recitals and poetry readings and no matter what we saw it was too long because the time we had to spend sitting there in the dark, unable to talk to each other, went too slowly, but when we finally walked out into the night air whatever we had just seen turned out to be pretty good after all because we had the ability to elevate it, no matter how we had felt at the time, whatever we had experienced became really good, a work of fucking genius whether it was a TV show or a hockey match, because it wasn’t thanks to the actors or directors or poets or hockey players, it was thanks to us, we were the ones who imbued everything with meaning, we were the ones who breathed life into corpses. We were the ones who could transform all that was mediocre and ordinary into something else, something greater. We became so dependent upon each other that the very thought of not being together was unthinkable.

*

Things seemed a little empty. I have to admit that. I saw him when he came home to pick up some underwear or drop off dirty laundry, and each time I suggested that we hang out, have a few drinks, go out and take the pulse of the city. But Samuel didn’t have time, he always had to take off, he packed plastic bags full of shirts and underwear, shouted bye, and then he was gone again.

*

What do you mean “try being a little more concrete”? What is it you want to know, exactly? How often we fucked? Which positions we used? Whether I had single or multiple orgasms? Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I wouldn’t be able to give you many more details. We hung out in bed ninety percent of the time, but we slept like three hours per night because there were endless amounts we had to say. The threads of thought of all those conversations formed a finely meshed net that tied us together and every time we started talking about a new subject there were ten links back to something we’d talked about before breakfast and twenty links to something we would talk about later that evening and even though we shared all these words it feels totally bizarre to realize how little I actually remember of our conversations. One evening we couldn’t agree on whether Japp bars and Mars bars were the exact same kind of candy with different names, or different kinds of candy with similar ingredients, so we ran down to the kiosk and bought one of each and arranged a blind taste-test. Why do I remember that in particular? Out of all those first intense conversations about parental conflicts and generational anxiety and childhood fears and sibling envy and hopes for the future, I remember that taste-test, how we sat there naked in my bed with the pieces of chocolate in front of us, immediately unsure which kind was which.

*

No, I didn’t feel lonely. I didn’t feel deserted. I was glad for Samuel. He seemed happy, and his happiness made me happy. It was just sometimes, if we happened to run into each other at home and I asked how it was going and he replied that it was absolutely fantastic and he had never experienced anything like it in his life and he really hoped I would one day get the chance to feel the power of being really, really in love, of loving someone in a way that made you go completely limp at the thought that something might happen to the other person, sometimes, for a brief moment, I would feel a little bit like an outsider.

*

Yes. There was a difference. One is a little fluffier, the other tastes more of caramel. But I don’t remember which is which.

*

Around the time Samuel vanished, I started having trouble getting hours at work. Blomberg said that it had to do with a lack of customers, that there was an economic crisis and fewer people could afford to hire a moving company. But at the same time we figured something was up because the moving trucks were just as busy as usual. There were new last names in the schedule binders, non-Swedish names that weren’t listed in the salary binders. The owners of these names came in early and worked late and the only difference between us and them was they didn’t have T-shirts with the company logo, they didn’t have lifting belts, and they had to bring their own work gloves. At the end of the day, they received their pay in cash, just like we did.

*

One weekend we were sitting in my courtyard. It was five in the morning, we had flipped day and night, we were wrapped in blankets, everything had that special gray dawn light with haze in the air and frost on the grass and we were whispering so we wouldn’t wake the neighbors. We had been talking about our family backgrounds, I told him how my mom fled here, how she and my sister had been given a spot at the camp outside Borås, how they had waited there hoping that my dad would arrive before I was born but everything took a long time, there were papers and political issues that had to be dealt with and when Mom had me my sister stayed with a Nigerian family they had gotten to know at the camp and some kid in that family thought I should be called Adelaide, but I’ve always used Laide when I’m in Sweden. The only place that nickname doesn’t work is in Francophone countries. I was three when Dad finally came to Sweden and he had changed, he wasn’t the man Mom had left behind, he had grown thin and hard and they stayed together for several years anyway, they divorced when I was twelve, Dad moved to Malmö and Mom still lives here, she’s with a Swedish man now, they live in a terrace house in Tullinge.

Samuel sat quietly and listened. When it was his turn he told me about his parents, his Swedish mom and his North African dad who had met at a bar in Andalusia, his mom was there as an exchange student and his dad worked as an undercover security guard at a mall, they had started talking, they exchanged addresses, a few years later his dad came to Sweden for a visit, they became a couple, they got married, Samuel’s sister was born, then came Samuel, his parents were happy at first and then less happy, Sweden changed, Samuel’s dad started to worry that he would be fired from his job (Samuel never said what sort of work he did), he got sick (Samuel never said with what, and I didn’t want to dig for details), his mom decided she wanted a divorce and Samuel took his mom’s side, there was some sort of conflict and even though Samuel didn’t specify what it was about I got the feeling it had to do with money, it was something about an insurance policy his mom had through her job that his dad got a lot of money from and then his dad broke off contact with his children and moved back and they hadn’t heard from him since, that was many years ago. As we sat there a newspaper delivery guy ran in and out of doors, he had a reflective vest on, a large blue two-wheeled cart full of rolled-up papers. We sat there on the ice-cold outdoor furniture and Samuel nodded toward an apartment on the ground floor where the living room was lit by a string of lights. Out of nowhere he said: