Jonas Khemiri - Everything I Don’t Remember

“Once he said that his greatest wish was for his name to be Patrik, and I teased him because I thought Patrik sounded so fucking lame.”

Samuel nodded, he didn’t ask any further questions, and in his silence I started telling him things about my brother. There was no logic to what I said, I just told him that my brother had always wanted a video-game console, but he had to settle for a Gameboy, and his favorite turtle had been Leonardo at first and Raphael later, and his turquoise pajama bottoms had a bad waistband and they were constantly crooked because he always hiked them up on one side, and once when we were eating chicken he said that it was good but it was too bad about all the cute little chickens who had to die so we could eat them up, and the whole family paused their forks and looked down at their plates but my brother kept happily eating and his hair wasn’t as kinky as mine and when he was little he teased me about my hair but when he was older he asked me if there was some way to make his hair kinkier and as revenge for his teasing I made up that bananas are good for kinking hair and he ate bananas nonstop until Mom noticed that the weekly fruit bill had sky-rocketed and I revealed my joke and once when it was New Year’s Eve and the city was rumbling with firecrackers my brother woke up and came rushing out of his room in his crooked pajama bottoms with two toy pistols, shouting that he had to shoot back. I sat there for an hour saying things I remembered but had never told anyone. Samuel listened and nodded and ordered more beer. He didn’t say: Is your brother the one who died? Or: How did it happen? He just sat there looking at me. And when he didn’t ask any probing questions it somehow made it easier to keep talking.

*

I said he had been twelve years old when it happened. And that we were relatively new to Stockholm.

“Mom had gotten a job in sales at a company that manufactured kitchen fans, my brother was with two friends and the big sister of one of the friends, they were going to go bowling, they were crossing a parking lot by Kungens Kurva, there was a lot of snow, they got run over side-on by a tanker truck, the friends survived, the sister too, but my brother died.”

Samuel looked at me. He didn’t tilt his head to the side. He didn’t look sorry for me.

“Did they catch him?”

“The driver? Mmhmm. There were witnesses and everything. But they let him go. He said he didn’t notice that he had run them over. He said he thought he had hit a shopping cart.”

I thought, here come the questions, he’s going to ask me how it felt and what happened to our family, if the divorce was because of my brother, if that was why Mom decided to quit her job and move back. But no. Instead he said:

“You’re lucky you have such an awesome memory.”

“Why?”

“Because it means you still have him. He’s not dead. He lives on. Thanks to you.”

We sat there in silence. When the bill came, we never split it. One of us covered it all. Sometimes it was him. Pretty often it was me.

*

Panther says that Samuel insisted on calling his grandma’s dementia “confusion.” He told her about all the things his family had done so she wouldn’t have to move out of her home. They printed out pieces of paper with clear instructions for how to turn the burglar alarm on and off. They put colorful sticky notes on the remote so she could remember how to change the channel. They bought a landline phone with buttons the size of sugar cubes because she always forgot to hang up the cordless phones and it made everyone worry when the busy signal beeped for over two hours, and someone had to hop in a taxi and go out to the house only to find her sound asleep in front of the TV. One time Samuel told me that he had called her home phone and when she answered the TV was so loud that she said “wait a second.” Then the TV went off and his grandma tried to continue her conversation with Samuel via the remote. I laughed when he told me that, and Samuel laughed too, but then he added:

“It would be funny if it weren’t so fucking tragic.”

I never understood why he was so upset by his grandma’s illness. For me, aging was a natural part of life, you get old, you forget, you need other people to help you. But Samuel seemed to have a hard time accepting it.

*

One evening Panther stopped by. Or. First came Panther. And then her hair. And last, her perfume-slash-cigarette smell.

“Christ, what a lively bunch,” she said when she saw us sitting there in silence.

She was wearing a pair of army pants and a jacket with a purple peacock pattern that made her look like a drowned pom-pom (it was raining out — her jacket was dripping dark thready patterns on the floor). This time we said hi to each other. I thought, Panther? Why Panther? If there was any animal this person did not resemble, it was a panther. Drowned Turkish hamster, maybe. Kurdish marmot, definitely. Oversized Syrian meerkat, possibly. Stoned Persian peacock, yes, but only because of the jacket. Instead of asking why she was called Panther I asked what she wanted to drink and went to the bar to order.

*

Panther said that Samuel sat there in the waiting room at the hospital and told her that he had taken a bunch of nostalgic things from his grandma’s house. Photo albums and CDs, perfumes and Christmas cards and old clothes his grandfather had worn. All to try to bring back his grandma’s memories.

“Is it working?” I asked.

“Don’t know. It comes in waves. Sometimes she’s perfectly lucid. She sat there in the car humming along with the music and asked how Vandad was. Then three minutes later she thought I had kidnapped her. It’s so fucking bizarre.”

He said it in a gravelly voice. Then he cleared his throat.

“When she doesn’t recognize me I usually put on my grandpa’s old fur cap. That makes her cooperative. But you have to keep your distance because sometimes she wants to lean in for a kiss.”

As we spoke he stood up and walked around in the hallways, twice I heard him ask about a coffee machine, and then a nurse said he could find one “over there” and then he walked over and poured a cup. When I asked how Vandad was he was quiet for a few seconds before he responded.

“Vandad’s fine,” he said. “I think.”

“What, did something happen?”

“No, not really. He’s fine. I’m fine. Everyone’s fine.”

“Okay.”

As usual, Samuel was very bad at lying. All I had to do to find out the truth was not say anything [making her hand into devil’s horns and listening to her index finger].

“No, I mean, we haven’t talked for a while.”

Short pause.

“And we don’t live together anymore.”

Pause.

“I’m subletting again. By Gullmarsplan.”

Long pause.

“But it’s good, it really is, I like it. I’m thinking of buying a place of my own soon.”

I’m not sure what happened between Samuel and Vandad. Do you know? Did it have something to do with Laide? Was it something about the house? You’ll have to ask Laide if you get hold of her because I have no idea.

*

From the moment Panther entered the room, it was like Samuel was transformed. I thought that Samuel with Panther meant Samuel became less Samuel, because he stopped talking and started nodding and looked at Panther like she was his idol and asked questions with the efficiency of a tennis machine spitting out balls. Panther was talking ninety miles a minute. She told us about some schoolfriends who had started up a project about “diversified recruiting” and I never figured out whether she thought it was a good idea or a bad one because she told us about the project and dissed everyone who was part of it and then she said:

“But it is a good thing that it’s being done because all the art schools — including ours — are so segregated it’s sick. It’s not exactly Berlin.”