Jonas Khemiri - Everything I Don’t Remember

“Where did you grow up?”

Again: the question just came out. I don’t know how or from where, but I sat there at the bar asking questions like I was some hot-shot TV journalist. Samuel told me about his childhood, that he and Panther were from the same neighborhood, an inner-city housing project.

“It was a nice place. Pretty mixed. There were homies and Swediots, alcoholics and pensioners. We liked it there. What about you?”

I told him briefly about my background, moving around Sweden, my childhood in Halmstad, my teen years in Gothenburg.

“Oh, I get it,” said Samuel.

“What?”

“Your dialect. I was having trouble placing it.”

He didn’t ask anything about my brother. He didn’t try to get to know me by digging for anything historical. And that was why we got to know each other. We gave each other time. Even though we didn’t talk the whole time, we knew on that first night at Spicy House that we belonged together. Erase that. Just put that we didn’t have to talk the whole time to know we were going to be best friends.

*

Panther collects herself, nods, and says that if anything came up repeatedly, it was Samuel’s concerns about his memory. He would jot down little notes in notebooks to remember his experiences. He was paranoid about never remembering faces. Sometimes I wondered if his memory was getting worse because he was working so hard to improve it. In the spring of 2007 he initiated Project Memory Phase. Has anyone mentioned it? It was a totally bizarre idea. His plan was to divide up the year in memory sections. When January started he put on a particular pair of jeans, a certain cologne, and a special cap. Then he wore those things every day for a whole month. Then came February and he switched to a different pair of pants, dabbed on a new kind of cologne, and wore a beret. And he also realized he could use sound, so he listened to nothing but Tupac, all February. Then came March and he put on a pair of chinos and a new kind of cologne and went with no hat and only listened to Bob Marley. Then came April and he did the same thing again, new pants, new cologne, new music, and an old-man hat on his head. He hoped that all this would make connections in his brain and life would feel longer somehow. But as so often happened with him, it was a better plan in theory than in reality. He had given up the whole project by summer. When I asked why, he said it wasn’t having the right effect. Instead of remembering his experiences, he remembered the music and the pants and the cologne. But his actual daily life as it went by, he was remembering even less of that. And when he told me this, it was a Sunday afternoon, we were waiting for the Metro at Mariatorget, we had just played basketball, our fingers were sore after all the dunking on the kid-high baskets, our fingertips were rough and smudged gray, and he shook his head and looked toward the train that was about to roll in, the rails crackling like a bonfire.

“I don’t know how you all do it.”

I assumed he was talking about memory and I told him that I had a shitty memory too.

“I hardly remember what I did last week,” I said.

Samuel looked at me, his face lighting up with a grateful smile.

“Really?”

Maybe it wasn’t completely true, but I said it to make him feel better, I felt sorry for him, he worked so hard to try to understand and control something that came perfectly naturally to so many people.

*

After three rounds it was last call and then last last call and we got the bill. I paid. Samuel hardly seemed to notice. But as we were standing on the square, about to say goodbye, he said:

“Thanks for the beer. Next time, it’s on me.”

“No problem,” I said, putting out my hand to say goodbye.

He took my hand, pulled it up toward his chest, and leaned in for a hug. I let him do it, I didn’t hug him back, but I didn’t shove him away either, I didn’t head-butt him, I hardly thought about how it would look to the people on the Stairmasters inside the twenty-four-hour gym. It would have been an unnecessary thought anyway, because the gym was empty, I noticed once we’d said goodbye and I was walking home.

*

Panther says that she would be happy to share her memories from the last day. Samuel and I talked to each other at quarter to eleven. I was the one who called. He picked up and said he was in the car but he would call back soon. We hung up and I thought: “in the car?” Whose car? And where is he going? And why did it sound like there was freaking elevator music in the background?

*

Nothing in particular happened on the second night, and not the third or fourth either. We met at different places (twice at Spicy House, once at a bar in Gamla Stan). We ordered drinks, we drank, we talked. About normal stuff. About the kind of things people talk about to seem not totally bizarre. But in the midst of all the regular stuff, unusual things would pop up. Like when Samuel suddenly asked if I had tried putting saffron on pears.

“It’s wicked good.”

Or when he told me about the kayak stand by Norrtull where you could borrow boats without being a member.

“Want to try it sometime?”

Or when he asked if I’d been north of the polar circle.

“No,” I replied. “Have you?”

“I went up to Jukkasjärvi a few years ago to check out the northern lights.”

“By yourself?”

“Mmhmm. But I was only there for one night. I stayed at a hostel and trudged through snow up to my thighs for several hours, on the hunt for the northern lights. But the sky was totally pitch black. Then I got it in my head that I had to do something to make them show up. I started making snowballs and I thought, if I hit the same tree with three snowballs in a row I’ll get to see the northern lights. It was harder than I thought. It took me like fifteen minutes to do it.”

“Did you see them?”

“No. The sky was just as black as it had been before. But on the way back to the hostel I got lost in the woods. Then I looked up at the sky and saw the light. It was a yellowish round circle in the middle of all that black. It looked incredibly alien, a lot more amazing than in pictures.”

“Nice.”

“But the next day the girl at the desk in the hostel said I had probably just seen the lights from the sports arena nearby.”

*

Panther says that when Samuel called back, it was a bit past eleven. I answered on my German phone, we agreed to call each other on Skype, we logged in and called. Samuel apologized for sounding so irritated when I first called, he thought it was his mom calling to talk money.

“The house?” I said.

“Mmhmm. That fucking house.”

“What’s going on?”

“Not much. Sitting in the waiting room at Huddinge hospital.”

“Everything all right?”

“Yeah. I’m here with Grandma. She’s trying to get her driver’s license back. She’s getting her vision checked right now. Then she’s going to drive in a simulator.”

“What are the chances she’ll succeed?”

“On what scale?”

“One to ten.”

“Minus twelve.”

*

One night we were talking names and Samuel said that his dad wanted him to be named Samuel because he had started to figure out the reaction a foreign name would get you from employers and landlords. His dad didn’t want his son to run into the same problems.

“What would your name have been otherwise?” I asked.

Samuel smiled and gave examples of names that required two throat-clearings, names that started with h-sounds deep down in his stomach, names that sounded like a sneeze or rhymed with two insults, and as we sat there at the bar talking names and drinking beer I heard myself saying that my brother had hated his name.