Jonas Khemiri - Everything I Don’t Remember

*

I suggested the place, Samuel said it sounded perfect, it was only a few stops from the apartment he was subletting in Hornstull. On the way to Spicy House I thought of all the nights I had sat there. It was the perfect place. No one ever bothered you. No one asked any questions. Everyone came in, ordered, was left alone. I still didn’t know the names of some of the bartenders. I opened the door, walked past the drunks by the gambling machines, ignored the biker gang in the corner and slid onto a barstool next to Samuel.

*

Panther says she knows the feeling. I still have Samuel in my phone. I know, it’s a little weird, but I can’t bear to delete it. There wouldn’t be any trace left of him if I did. The name after his would just jump up a spot. Now I see his name every time I look at my favorites [scrolling on an invisible cell phone]. And I still think about how sick it is that he no longer exists. Did you know he only came to visit me once? He was always coming up with new reasons why it wouldn’t work out for him to come down here. First he had no cash because it was expensive to sublet, and then he moved in with Vandad and all his money went to going out with him, and then he met Laide and there were all kinds of things to fix up around the house. And when he did come, I had the feeling that Vandad had, like, forced him to leave Stockholm. I don’t know what he was afraid of.

*

For a second we weren’t sure how to greet each other. Handshake? Fist bump? I went with the nod and Samuel reciprocated the nod and I said:

“What are you drinking?”

“I waited to order.”

“Beer?”

“Great.”

I motioned two beers to the bartender and seasoned the bar with my hand to show him we wanted some nuts. We started by talking about how things were going (fine). Then we talked about our weekend plans (maybe going out, or staying home). Then Samuel started talking about fish parasites.

“Sorry?” I said.

“Fish parasites. There are some really disgusting fish parasites. Have you ever heard of isopods, for example?”

*

Panther says of course she remembers how they met. It was through basketball. We played in the same league; he was on the boys’ B team, which was totally worthless, and I was on the girls’ team, which won the national championship twice and got silver once. Once we got to know each other, the joke was that I should move over to their team so they could finally win a game, because at the time I looked pretty much like a boy. Probably no one would have noticed, and my real name works for boys and girls. But I’ve never liked it, which is why I started telling my teammates that people at school called me Panther and at school I said that people from basketball called me Panther, and soon people started calling me that, the name spread, and now even my sister calls me that. She played basketball too, and even she was better than Samuel, people called Samuel “Chickadee” because he was so scared of the ball and he was way too small to get rebounds. The first few times we saw each other outside of basketball we went to the Water Festival or hung around for hours at the twenty-four-hour McDonald’s on Hamngatan. And I remember thinking that Samuel was different from other guys because it was like he talked because he liked talking and not because he wanted to fuck. He felt non-sexual somehow. We became brother and sister; when things were rough at home I could crash at his place, his mom became my second mom, she understood without needing to know too much, she never asked why I needed to run away, I was welcomed into his family and I will always be grateful for that. They saved me when I needed it the most and I–I’m sorry. Sorry. I’ll pull myself together.

*

I signaled to the bartender again and soon we had two new beers in front of us. Samuel hardly seemed to notice. He was in the midst of his description of the isopod parasite. He described how it likes to live in certain kinds of water and when a particular type of fish approaches it gets inside the fish’s mouth and eats up its tongue.

“Okay,” I said, checking over my shoulder to make sure no one was listening to our conversation.

“Neat, huh?”

“I don’t know.”

“It eats up the fish’s whole tongue.”

“Oh.”

“And then — do you know what the best part is?”

“Even better than eating up the tongue?”

“Mmhmm. When the tongue is gone the parasite turns around and its body takes the place of the tongue. The fish starts using the parasite as a tongue, for crushing up food and stuff. Pretty cool, huh?”

“I hardly even knew that fish have tongues,” I said.

“Me neither.”

We took a few sips of the beer, the glasses were foggy, the drunks mechanically hit the buttons that made the symbols on the screen spin round and round. The biker gang pointed at the darts game on the TV and seemed upset.

“Do you come here often?” Samuel asked.

“Pretty often. I live nearby.”

“Big place?”

“A one-bedroom.”

“Rent or own?”

“Rent stabilized.”

“Wow. Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

*

Panther blows her nose and says that after upper secondary school she started the art school foundation course and Samuel studied political science at the university. We didn’t have as much contact for a few years. I hung out with people in art circles and Samuel was surrounded by a bunch of people who wanted to study international relations and get jobs at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and work for the UN and save the world and that had definitely been Samuel’s thing at school. I thought he would feel one hundred percent at home. Instead he pulled away from it. He took his exams and went to the required seminars, but in his free time he kept going on about how life is short and you have to fill up with new experiences so you won’t die unhappy. He sounded like a fifteen-year-old version of me. One night he called to ask if I wanted to go to Tumba with him to watch an innebandy game.

“Innebandy?” I said.

“Yes! It’s the final of a tournament called Capri-Sonne.”

“Do you know anyone who’s playing?”

“No.”

“So why would we—”

“Aw, come on. It’ll be fun. Something to remember!”

I said no. The same way I said no when he suggested we go to the Police Museum, take part in a medical study on insomnia at Karolinska, watch the horse races at Solvalla, or go to Hellasgården to try ice fishing.

“I’m a vegetarian,” I reminded him.

“So? We can throw the fish back. Come on. It will be fun. Live a little!”

And maybe in retrospect it sounds spontaneous and exciting. But it wasn’t. There was something desperate about the whole thing. Samuel actively tried to seek out new experiences, but he was completely incapable of enjoying anything. The more he talked about depositing things in his Experience Bank, the emptier he seemed. I remember feeling sorry for him. He seemed lonely. Especially when he texted me on the way home from the innebandy tournament in Tumba to say that two of the three matches had been “hella exciting.” Out of some sort of desperation and fear of. . I don’t know what. Sorry, here I go again, I really don’t mean to. Can you grab me some toilet paper?

*

Then we sat there in silence. But it wasn’t uncomfortable silence, the kind that makes you want to overturn the bar and run for the door. We sat there, me thinking about the fish parasite, Samuel answering a text from Panther — the girl who had been with him at the party in Liljeholmen.

“Have you been friends for a long time?” I asked.

The question came perfectly naturally. It wasn’t like I had to think to come up with it. I was curious and I asked it, and Samuel replied that they had known each other since the end of compulsory school. They were in the same basketball league and later her family kicked her out because she didn’t want to live the same way they lived and then she stayed at his mom’s place for about six months.