One of these new friends was Niki, someone I ended up having to search for later on. It was long before I met Johanna, in a first-year English class where Niki and I were in the same seminar. She came up to me and started talking during the first break, and I came to understand that this was how she made friends, simply by hitching her wagon to people she thought seemed nice or who had something about them that appealed to her, in my case a pair of Stan Smiths that were as scruffy as hers. She had chosen her own name, Niki, since she hated the name her parents had given her, and she hated that name because she hated her parents. Whenever she said that word, “hate,” she scrunched up her nose and opened her eyes wide as if to underscore that she was on the offensive in her stance. It wasn’t some absent-minded, casual type of revulsion she was engaging in, not some kind of residue from punk teenage years, but a fire that burned bright day and night. Despite our many and long conversations, few concrete facts emerged to explain this hatred other than the assertion that these two people were “horrible,” so much so that she’d been compelled to move three hundred miles away, change her name, and get a protected phone number. Her claims were shrouded in mystery. I thought the facts would become clearer with time, but Niki’s statements about her parents were instead established as truths in their extant and obscure state.

  Suddenly I’d joined her circle of many who “knew” that Niki’s childhood had been terrible and that her parents deserved to burn in hell, and since I quickly counted as one of her closest friends, I was expected to be loyal and allied with this unverified truth and its want of details. I suppose it made for a certain bond between us, and generally I didn’t care what was true or not when it came to her parents; it wasn’t the kind of truth that mattered to me. When Niki learned I was sleeping on my grandmother’s couch in Jakobsberg, she invited me to share her one-bedroom in the Atlas neighborhood. It was hers through the housing agency, via the quota they had back then for the neediest cases. The category had its own lane, separate from the standard waitlist where I and hundreds of thousands of others languished for decades, and it was intended for battered women with children, people who were severely ill, and others who for various reasons needed an apartment of their own immediately. Niki explained to me that she’d lied and told them that her father had committed incest throughout her childhood and that it was harmful for her to be constantly uprooted. All it took was a certificate from a psychologist and an interview with a social worker, paired with a type of cunning I did not have in me. It was a lie of great precision; incest was a major topic of interest in the late eighties and early nineties. It was debated in the media and discussed at work lunches, and a new crop of experts emerged to testify that incest was a social problem of far vaster scale than anyone had previously realized. Therapists’ couches got busy with people whose repressed memories had to be coaxed to the surface. “I’m convinced my dad did it,” Niki said when she saw my skeptical face, “even if I don’t remember it yet.” Niki had been to many therapists of different kinds, but she always seemed to end up at odds with them. All they had to do was question her in the wrong way, or cancel a session, or go on vacation, or talk about tapering off the sessions, and Niki would end the relationship in a rage. A therapist might be amazing one week and absolutely incompetent the next. I realized from the very beginning that this was how she related to other people, that everything was black or white, love or hate, heaven or hell, nothing in between. She picked up two additional friends from our class, they were “brilliant super women,” “the world’s loveliest people,” had “the kindness of bodhisattvas,” until one of them reminded Niki to return the records she’d borrowed a couple of weeks earlier. The fact that she said this at a café, in front of other friends, made Niki furious; she’d been “dishonored with the world as witness” by this little rat who she never wished to see again, so when Niki got home that day she tossed the records into a plastic bag, bare vinyl and sleeves all in one jumble, took the subway to the home of their owner, and hung the bag on the door to the building; ciao. The other friend was discarded as part of the same process. But I stayed on, somewhat baffled though mostly fascinated by the intensity of her love and hate, the way she churned through people as if every feeling immediately had to be realized in action. The reasons varied but the method was the same. I must have known I couldn’t be an exception to the rule, but at that age (I was twenty-three) friendships were different from the way they are now. They could last forever for two months, two years, two hours; what mattered wasn’t time but magnitude, or speed, or the concentrated mass of meaning. Niki touched my heart. Not like the men I sometimes slept with and more rarely fell in love with, but for real, like a soul mate—even though that’s not a word I would’ve used back then—and I wasn’t bothered by knowing it would have to come to an end. Niki was an adventure, an endless all-genre drama where nothing was static and nothing could be predicted. She’d tried to kill herself in her teens but said that was all over now, “more or less,” and I came to realize that this “more or less” was a way of slashing open a little vein of fear in the people around her, a way of guaranteeing the care of her friends. I never saw her cut herself but I did glimpse a couple of scars and marks. “Anxiety management” was apparently how one of her therapists put it, a vent for the soul in the skin. She made frequent reference to her shrinks, and at some point I thought to ask how she could afford all these therapists in the city, with private practices and different specialties. “They pay,” was all she said. “I mean, it’s the least they can do.” It took me a while to realize that “they” referred to her parents. Today Niki would likely have been given some type of diagnosis for her mental instability, but in the era when I knew her, diagnoses weren’t on anyone’s mind. Nobody talked about symptoms, criteria, or drugs. People who struggled weren’t lumped together in medical communities; it was up to each and every one to do their best to understand themselves and others.

  My collected belongings could fit in two bags—mostly books and clothes, as I remember—and I settled down on a mattress in a corner of the apartment’s single and unbelievably cluttered room. My bags went at the foot end of the mattress, and I put my toothbrush in the bathroom cabinet and a bottle of Bell’s in the pantry. That’s all there was to it. My arrival barely made a difference in the apartment’s general mess, and what little order I tried to maintain around my bed, the same neatness I’d kept at my grandma’s, felt strange and I soon gave it up. My grandmother had worked her entire life cleaning rich people’s homes, and she adopted those standards in her own house, too; dusting and vacuuming every week, gleaming stovetops and clean sheets. It was conceivable that Niki’s childhood home would have been one of her work places if she’d lived three hundred miles south. Niki’s family was wealthy, her parents academics with well-paying jobs, and their house a villa outside of Malmö with a parklike yard. I’d obviously never seen this house with my own eyes, but it had been described to me in great detail, the ground floor which housed her grandfather’s medical practice in the middle of the century, its large pocket doors made of oak so thick the people in the waiting room couldn’t overhear any doctor-patient conversations. This waiting room had been turned into a kitchen, one of two; there was an even bigger one on the top floor. Niki described the home as eerie and cold, but my imagination was all spacious rooms and large Persian rugs, wall-to-wall bookshelves, lots of bathrooms, and a staircase to yet another floor. I pictured it as impeccably clean and imagined that the contrast to the dirty clutter in the apartment where Niki currently made her home had to be enormous. She claimed that the tidiness of my grandmother’s apartment (which she’d seen when we picked up my belongings) was the same as her parents’ tidiness; that there was only one type of tidiness, one single way to clean, whereas I argued the opposite: that there were many different types of tidiness, an infinite number of reasons to polish a floor, an infinite number of ways to move across a newly polished floor. “Cleaning is cleaning,” Niki said. I couldn’t disagree more. Granted, Niki made a point of not cleaning just like many young people who have recently left their childhood homes, but the dirt seemed to touch her on a deeper plane. She loved things most people found gross, and the grosser it was the more she loved it. She was fascinated by the leftovers that sat abandoned for weeks on end in our fridge and liked to take the jars out to examine the contents as they were consumed by biological processes of mold and rot. One morning in July we came across a dead rat in Vasaparken and she crouched over it for a long time, observing the struggle of the maggots in the swollen flesh. It was as if something was perpetually tugging her downward, toward the underworld, the mess, the dirt, and the filth, as if she was unable to feel disgust when others did and was overwhelmed by fascination instead. As if something down there drove her to manifest this dull and sticky filth in her own life, and so she never changed the sheets, never vacuumed, left the dishes in a state most people would find intolerable. I wasn’t too bothered by it, though I sometimes missed the blinding whiteness that greeted me whenever I opened the fridge at my grandmother’s. There were many ways to clean, and for my grandmother it was about dignity, about getting some of the luster from the homes in which she worked for herself; to me it was a question of adapting, of being able to slide in and slip past without notice. At Grandma’s I cleaned as often as she did; at Niki’s I never thought to make my bed. A neat little zone in the corner would have looked odd in the tangle of clothes and books and old coffee mugs and glasses and plates encrusted with food and newspapers and records and stuff. I frequently came home to an unlocked door since Niki rarely found her keys when she had to leave; then again it was hard to imagine any burglar bothering to enter the place and look for something of value in the bedlam.

  The class in which we met ended, and I skipped the last exam; I took a job at a warehouse, followed by one at Pressbyrån where I worked as a temp and alternated between the different convenience stores across the city whenever someone was out sick. This meant that I sometimes had work and sometimes did not, and on the days when I didn’t have work, I stayed at home reading or writing or hanging out with someone, or with Niki. She led a similar existence but wrote more intently and with the explicit ambition of becoming an author. Or rather, to publish a book; she was an author already, she said, since she was writing. Rent was cheap, our expenses were few, and neither of us saw any point in working more than necessary. If we came home late at night, we’d unplug the phone to avoid early calls from potential employers. Now and then I had to spend a long time looking for the phone before I found it shoved into a drawer, the oven, or the hamper. It was common for the device to end up somewhere unexpected when Niki had a call that went wrong, like when someone called who wasn’t welcome to call, or the other way around, when someone who was supposed to call didn’t. Sometimes she would unplug the phone and sometimes not, which meant it might ring from underneath the couch or inside a pile of newspapers. These things quickly stopped surprising me, just like a knock on the door in the middle of the night followed by Niki (having lost her keys) stumbling in drunk with a gaggle of new acquaintances and putting on the kettle or getting a bottle and digging up the record player and starting a dance party, or being woken up by her a couple of hours later so we could watch the sun rise from the roof. The roof was an old balcony meant for beating rugs that could only be reached from a ladder in the attic; the hatch was technically sealed but it was easy to open, and once you were through, you had the sunset across the railway tracks and Lake Klara, or the sunrise over the buildings on the other side. We’d drink cloudy homemade wine and scream loud enough to get through to the core of life, believing that there was less in between us and heaven since we were on a roof. Today, several decades later, separated from that time by a new millennium and a new kind of world, I can still understand that scream, perhaps more so than ever, that yearning for closeness and getting to the heart of it all. But I no longer see why we felt the need to climb onto the roof.

  The demijohns with the cloudy wine were a project of mine, I kept the slowly hissing vessels in the kitchen and tapped the wine—to the extent that it even deserved that name—in screw top bottles that had been passably rinsed and which I subsequently stored in the fridge. “Urine wine” was the name we had for this concoction, and some batches were so foul that we determined they could only be drunk on the roof, since the view from there compensated for most of the world’s ills, including undrinkable wine. Urine wine on the roof tonight?, a message waiting for me on a scrap of paper on the table in the morning. Sure thing, I’d scribble in response before leaving the apartment, and then we’d meet up in the evening, either just the two of us or with others joining in, to climb onto the roof and let our screams echo between the old buildings. A couple of months after we met, Niki started dating Jonas, a skinny metalsmith and moonshiner who dressed in all black and had done a stint in prison for draft dodging. He let us keep his still in our kitchen, and mash replaced the sugary batches of apple wine in the demijohns. I can still identify the distinctive scent the instant I enter a building, though it’s become increasingly rare. The still was a closed, cone-shaped tin vessel with a tube that guided the steamed alcohol to cool above a container where it regained its liquid form, dripped into a catch bucket, and was ultimately purified through a long tube filled with charcoal. This moonshine reached a proof of 40 percent, and its aftertaste brought to mind oily little incinerated animals. Our joint ownership of the still increased the flow of people through our apartment, turning our kitchen into a natural launch pad for all kinds of nights out. People showed up with boxes of pizza that were left behind in piles on the floor, they filled ashtray upon ashtray with cigarette butts before they left, or else they stayed put, lounging on the couch or stretched out on Niki’s bed where they’d chat and blow smoke at the ceiling. I met the people who would turn into my closest friends this way, when they turned up in my home out of nowhere, lured by Niki or Jonas and the promise of new people and free alcohol. But as opposed to my previous scene, the drinking wasn’t important here. Niki and I were just as happy to spend an entire Friday night with tea, or water, or nothing at all, since what drew us together—and which would from that point on constitute the core of all my relationships—was conversation: a multiyear-long dialogue that began during a break outside a university seminar room when Niki came up to me and commented on my shoes, and which ended a few years later in the echoing stairway of a building in Galway. We could spend weeks apart and still pick right back up where we’d left as soon as we saw each other again, as if only a breath had passed. What I loved the most was that there was never an instant when I knew ahead of time where a conversation with Niki might take me. In contrast to most people I’ve known in my life she rarely told anecdotes with herself as the main character, or anecdotes she’d already told before, or anecdotes in general, since the nature of an anecdote—beginning, middle, and finale—contradicted Niki’s demand for complete authenticity. She didn’t care for people who were all pretend, she said; people who altered themselves for others, who interrupted others to talk about themselves, who explained what it was all about, who bragged, who only piped up when they were 100 percent sure, who tried to sound smart, who adopted other people’s opinions, who smarmed, who said they agreed when they didn’t. Anecdotists were intellectually dishonest, and anyone who made the mistake of telling the same story more than once—about someone being arrested for public inebriation at Hamburg’s central station and who subsequently, to their great surprise, woke up sharing a cell with a former classmate; about the grandmother who was more or less on her deathbed when she gave birth to the storyteller’s mother; or about the person who had jumped the fence to Visby’s botanical garden after it had closed for the night only to discover that the garden’s Cannabis sativa had no mind-altering properties whatsoever—would not be invited back. Ever since my friendship with Niki I think of the anecdote as a form of chronic illness that attaches itself to some people; that compulsion to tell everything in the shape of a story, to turn life into a formula meant to captivate, impress, upset, or inspire laughter. An anecdote is a sealed box that cannot yield anything other than more sealed boxes until every party to the conversation—or the “so-called conversation” as Niki would put it—sits there with their own pile of sealed boxes, mentally obstructed, tied to the mast, and with the anecdote next in line tugging at their attention. These types of conversations were much like talk shows—Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before and whatever else the rest of them are called. We had no TV, at least not in any permanent way, though now and then it happened that someone had rescued a functional television from a dumpster or the garbage room and put it in some corner. None of them were particularly long-lived, but it was in this way I had my first exposure to MTV, an introduction to an entirely new type of frantic publicity, which was initially viewed as offensive but has become the new normal. I remember our amazement at the breathless hosts who were standing up while introducing song after song and the fragmented narrative of the music videos. “This is the future,” Niki said. I think she liked it. We didn’t watch TV by passively staring at the screen but methodically, critically, as part of a perpetually ongoing analysis of everything around us. To get absorbed by a show, to let yourself be swept up, would have been a sign of mental lassitude. Not even while enormously hungover would we ever have thought to go channel-surfing. TV shows were akin to magazines, political debates, and conversations at family gatherings (she came to a few of mine): incidences of current trends, available to interpret for a deeper understanding of the world. My relationship to television has barely changed since then; I rarely get absorbed by a show the way others seem to be, I tend to mix them up or forget to watch the next episode, or else I don’t catch the title or where it’s being shown, and whenever I do find myself in front of a screen my attention is drawn to things without relevance, as if I’m surveying a crowd. I note the ways actors have aged and who’s had a face-lift, that the subtitles render the English “billion” as “biljon,” a word that doesn’t exist in Swedish. TV means that somebody else is trying to control my gaze, whereas books leave me to my own devices. During the time I knew Niki we would spend whole days when we didn’t work in the bookshops on Drottninggatan and in the surrounding neighborhood. There were tons of them, each with a different focus, specializing in traditional bourgeois edification or poetry or drama or first editions and similar rarities, or cheap softcovers, or nonfiction. We went shopping with whatever money we had, though we didn’t think of these purchases as regular shopping; it was more like a type of towing. We’d say we were headed down to Drottninggatan to “get” some books, not “buy,” as if the books with all their contents somehow already belonged to us, as if all we did was provide the bail to set them free and bring them home. But even after they’d arrived in our home, where we read them or started to read them or merely put them somewhere for future reading, we still didn’t consider them as belonging fully to us. Just like buying books, the ownership of books was distinct from other types of ownership, more like a loan that might run out or be transferred onto someone else at the drop of a hat, for example as soon as anybody showed an interest in the title or author in question. For a short while I kept The Man Without Qualities in the low, blue-lacquered bookcase by my bed, four volumes I’d gotten after someone recommended the novel, but which I’d instantly come to realize I was nowhere near ready for. The first volume was dog-eared at page twenty and lay untouched where I’d put it, until one evening when one of Jonas’s work friends opened it. His name was Palle; he’d been traveling the world and was only briefly at home to make some money. He’d taken a welding class through the employment agency and got a job at the plant where Jonas worked, and here he was sitting on my mattress with a cup of tea, sinking into the first pages of this book. He’d skipped the introduction and the translator’s note and went straight to the novel itself, which I took as a good sign. The book was his, I knew it immediately, no discussion needed. It had just taken a detour through me.

 

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