The Survivors Read online

  Benjamin looked down at Molly, who was still in his arms, and gently placed a hand on her head. He turned back to his brothers, contorted his face, and held the dog out to them.

  “At least take Molly,” he moaned. “Let her go free, she doesn’t deserve this!”

  Pierre giggled.

  “Let’s head back,” said Nils.

  “Hold on,” said Benjamin. “I just have to see what it looks like in there.”

  He took a few steps toward the building and stood in the doorway. He peered in but could see only vague shapes. Running his hand along the inside wall, he found a switch and flipped it, and suddenly the whole room was lit up by a fixture on the ceiling. The room was smaller than he’d expected. A little area to stand in, and, on the back wall, a dense row of thick black cables that ran from floor to ceiling. It was like the room was vibrating with the current that ran along the walls, intense and constant, a sound that reminded him of the three big clothes dryers in the basement back home in the city.

  “Do you think there’s a current in them?” Benjamin called to his brothers.

  “Yes!” Nils answered. “Don’t touch anything in there.”

  Benjamin picked up a rock and cautiously tossed it at the cables.

  The rock fell to the floor, and nothing happened. He picked up a bigger rock and threw that.

  “It doesn’t seem like there’s any current,” he called. “Nothing happens when I throw rocks at it.”

  “Rocks don’t conduct electricity!” Nils called. “That doesn’t mean those cables don’t!”

  Benjamin slowly moved closer to the lines, was now only a foot and a half away from them. He raised his hand toward the black wall.

  “Don’t touch those!” Nils cried. “I’m serious. You could die!”

  “No, no,” Benjamin called back. “I’m not going touch anything.”

  He brought his hand closer and heard a crackling sound from the cable, like static, but it went away as soon as he lowered his hand.

  He raised his hand again. Teeny, tiny sparks, almost invisible, appeared between the cable and his hand. The closer he moved, the more it crackled. He’d never heard a sound like it in his life. It reminded him of the sound you heard in movies when they were measuring radioactivity after a big accident. He could control the sound with his hand, making it come closer or move away, and now that he understood the power here, he realized Nils was probably right. If he were to touch the cables he would be gravely injured, and a thought flew through his mind: This is the closest I’ve ever been to death. He turned around to look at his brothers.

  “Do you see this?” he called. He looked up and watched the little flecks of fire zoom out into the room.

  “It’s sparks! It’s like magic!”

  “Stop!” Nils shouted. “Stop that right this instant!”

  Benjamin raised and lowered his hand, listening to the sound that came and went, the sparks rising around him, and he smiled and looked his brothers in the eye and then the whole room went blue.

  He awoke pure. For the first few seconds he was weightless and free. He sat up, trying to orient himself. Then came the pain—fire in his back and down his arms, and reality crashed down on top of him. He looked out at the fence.

  He thought: Where are my brothers?

  He looked up at the sky, saw that the sun was lower. How long had he been lying there? He tried to get up but his legs wouldn’t hold him, so he gave up and sat down again, and then it dawned on him, beginning with a faint shiver that ran through his body.

  Molly.

  She was lying just a few yards away from him. There was no mistaking it. Her scorched skin and unnatural position. He crawled over to her, lifted her ruined body, and placed it in his lap. He looked at Molly’s lifeless face, her half-open mouth, as if she were deeply asleep and would wake up if you shook her a little bit. But he didn’t dare do it because he didn’t want to touch her wounds, afraid it would hurt her. He pressed her to his chest, to the spot where she had been resting when she died. His breathing came faster and heavier and he heard unfamiliar sounds, realized they were coming from him. And bit by bit, the world vanished. All his life he had battled this feeling, of losing his grip on reality. He had always sought out real places or things to hold tight to, but for the first time he wanted the opposite: to let go of everything that kept him here. He sat in the dark and looked out at the green rectangle of reality outside, and he squeezed his eyes shut and looked at the doorway again and hoped it would soon make itself inaccessible, just go dark, and he would be gone, untethered from reality, caught in darkness forever.

  He must have lost consciousness, because when he looked up again the sun was even lower in the sky. He got up and staggered toward the door. His first steps into the light. He passed the fence. The thought: Where are my brothers?

  He walked through the forest with the dog in his arms. He couldn’t remember how he did it, how he made it home. But he remembered seeing the lake, which was dark; he remembered that it was smooth, no wind. He remembered walking on legs that could hardly bear him and he remembered seeing Mom on the stone steps, standing in her robe. He remembered that Mom’s contours were diffuse, that the foliage around the house was fogged over by his tears. He remembered that Mom took a few steps onto the lawn, that she was looking at him with some sort of astonishment. And he remembered that she collapsed on the grass and that she cried out in despair, and that the lake responded.

  | 13 |

  12:00 NOON

  The moose fencing ends here; the county highway narrows and its condition worsens, patched asphalt and unexpected dips and dead animals in the road, bloody fur and meat flattened on the pavement. No cars from the opposite direction, only the occasional silver semi hauling timber. Station after station fades out on the car radio. They’re on the other side of Sweden, heading deeper and deeper into the forest, and they speak less and less, and by the time they finally turn off the county highway they’re not talking at all. They’re back on the gravel road; three more miles through the forest and they’ll arrive. The rearview mirror vibrates, and he can see the dust rising behind them like smoke from a Bengal flare, billowing out on either side of the car, up over the trees, the spruces getting taller and taller the closer they get to the cottage.

  He drives cautiously down the old gravel road, and he sees Nils in the back seat, suddenly leaning forward in concentration, his eyes fixed ahead. It’s as though the place has been under the protection of some secret benefactor who has put all their effort into making sure that everything remains untouched in case the family should ever return. The road is grooved and the car gives a shudder in the same spot as always. The pull-out signs on the shoulder still lean at the same angles as they did before. Have days and years even passed here? Or has everything stood still? Maybe something happens to time in the woods, and it doesn’t act as it should. Time is a gravel road; if you keep to the right you can watch yourself pass on the other side. He suddenly sees the old Volvo 245 coming at him, Mom and Dad in front, dressed up for Midsummer. And there, in the middle of the back seat, he sees himself, his attentive gaze as he tries to make sure everything goes smoothly.

  And now Benjamin can hear the sound of an engine through his open window and suddenly Nils comes over the rise on his moped, its gas tank gleaming in the sun, and he passes quickly, sad and alone, driving fast down the narrow strip of gravel that links their cottage with reality, on his way back from his shift at the grocery store. And look, there among the trees, Benjamin and Pierre running close on each other’s heels, lost in the woods; scared and intent, they follow the sound of the moped to find their way home.

  The car is approaching the hill where the sunlight always makes it hard to see in the evening, and once he’s crested its top he can see himself again. He’s standing right at the side of the road, a little boy with skinny legs, in shorts and no shirt. Mo
m has been off in the city to work for a few days, and Benjamin has gone up to the gravel road on his own to greet her. The boy’s clear-eyed gaze meets Benjamin’s own as he passes, staring into a stranger’s face, uninterested, and then he turns back toward the hill, watching for his mother.

  There they go, one by one, all the boys that were him.

  Benjamin and his brothers are close now; they turn onto the little tractor path. He remembers the last morning they spent here, a week after the accident. The boys were informed of the decision suddenly, at breakfast: We’re going home. Everything became urgent. Big suitcases split open on the living room floor. Dad walked around turning off lights and radiators. As he packed the last few things into the car and checked the doors to make sure they were locked, Mom lit a cigarette and leaned against the hood of the car. She smoked absentmindedly, her eyes on the lake. Benjamin approached her, made an attempt to pick up the purse she had set at her feet, but she waved him off and Benjamin lingered by her side, right next to her. Mom glanced down at Benjamin and back to the lake.

  “The day it happened,” Mom said, tapping her cigarette with her index finger. “I woke up in the afternoon and couldn’t get back to sleep. I was lying in bed, doing a crossword…”

  She made a gesture, pointed at the sky.

  “Suddenly the light went out. I looked up, surprised. What was going on? And then, after just a few seconds, it came back on again.”

  Mom shook her head slowly.

  “I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but now I understand.”

  She smiled.

  “We can choose to see it as a beautiful thing. It was like a little greeting, a farewell. The lights went out, and then she was gone.”

  Mom walked to the barn and stubbed her cigarette out against the wall and stuck the half-smoked butt back in the pack. Then she got in the car.

  It’s obvious that no one has driven here for a very long time. The grass has grown tall between the tire tracks; bushes strike the undercarriage and smack the car on both sides. Another car approaches on the narrow slope, the old Volvo 245 again, packed to the gills, just like when the family left the cottage on that last day. He sees Dad at the wheel, Mom, beside him, gazing vacantly at the road ahead. In the back are the three brothers, squished close, shoulder to shoulder. Benjamin keeps to the right to leave room for the vehicle to pass. He sees himself for an instant, just a glimpse of the boy in the middle. His sad, alert eyes keeping close watch over everything that happens inside the car and out. The Volvo passes Benjamin and drives up the hill and he watches it in the rearview mirror until it’s out of sight. He rounds the last curve and soon the red wooden house emerges from among the trees. He sees the overgrown lot, glances up over the impressive firs, which make the place seem so small. The tall grass rustles under the car. He drives all the way up to the root cellar and turns off the engine. The brothers sit in the car for a moment and look out.

  They’re back.

  2

  Beyond the Gravel Road

  | 14 |

  10:00 A.M.

  He looks up at the massive electrical poles along the European highway. Their black cables swoop slowly into the summer outside the car windows, then curve up again, reaching their highest point at the tops of the enormous steel structures that line the road, one hundred yards, then they dip again, curtsying at the meadows below.

  One time Benjamin’s circuit-breaker box caught fire. He managed to put the flames out, but an electrician had to come fix the short circuit. The man stood in the hall and unscrewed the panel to get access. He was skilled, had the first housing off in just a few seconds, gathered the screws in his beefy fist. He was about to move on, starting on the next housing, when all of a sudden a cross breeze caught the kitchen door and slammed it right behind him, and the electrician’s immediate reaction: he dropped everything he was holding and raised his hands as if this were a stick-up. Benjamin was confused. As the electrician gathered up the screws and tools that were scattered across the hall floor, Benjamin asked what had happened. “Occupational hazard,” he said. “The instant an electrician hears a bang, he drops everything.”

  The fear of getting a shock. He never knew it as a child. Before the accident, he was drawn to electricity. Behind the pool complex was a horse farm, and after his swimming lesson one day, as the other children were walking back to school, Benjamin wandered over to the electrical fence that penned the horses into their pasture. He stood there for a long time, looking down at the thin wire and the laminated yellow warning sign that showed a hand touching the line and red lightning bolts flying in all directions. He held both hands close to the wire, as if to dare himself; he cupped his hands without touching it, and then he grabbed on. A quick pulse of current flowed through his hand and reached his armpits before it died out. He recalls feeling strangely exhilarated afterward. It was as if the current had done something about his peculiar lack of energy for a moment; he got a jolt, and as it flowed through him it was as if he heard a voice whispering: “Get moving!”

  Pierre is speeding down the highway, always in the left-hand lane. Whenever he has to slow down for someone up ahead—highway tourists passing each other at their own pace—he cruises up right behind them and flashes his brights, immediately scaring them out of the far lane, and Pierre speeds up again and the engine revs as it accelerates, sounding hale and hearty.

  “Food!” Pierre suddenly shouts, pointing at a road sign that’s approaching from the horizon.

  “Finally,” Nils mumbles from the back.

  The fast-food restaurant looks like any other. The employees wear gold stars on their chests; some have several, others none at all, so everyone can tell who is good and who is bad. Each one wears a name tag, except the oddly young manager, who wanders between registers alert, chicken-like, ashamed of his lazy employees. He walks around, tense, taking over tasks, making things right, sometimes just stopping to gaze at all the guests with a hollow smile.

  They order hamburgers and French fries and sit down at one of the tables nearest the exit. Nils takes out his phone.

  “I have to deal with the shitstorm you two created,” he says. “My guess is that we’re wanted by the police.”

  “Oops,” Pierre says with a laugh.

  “No, not oops,” says Nils. “This is fucking serious.”

  Nils goes outside and Benjamin watches him walk through the stiff breeze in the parking lot, pressing the phone to one ear and his palm to the other to keep out the racket from the highway. Pierre shakes the French fries onto his hamburger bun, places the little white ketchup packets in a neat line; if one runs out, it’s not far to the next.

  “I honestly never thought we’d go back,” Pierre says.

  “No,” says Benjamin. A new thought suddenly pops into his mind, and he looks up from his food: “Why not?”

  “Because of the accident, I mean,” Pierre says. “It was so hard on you.” Benjamin watches Pierre make quick work of his food. He dips three fries into the ketchup; they’re heavy and droop like tulips as he puts them in his mouth.

  “I still don’t get it,” Pierre says. “Why did you get a shock? Don’t you have to touch a line to get shocked? You didn’t touch anything.”

  “I didn’t get it either,” Benjamin replies. “For ten years I walked around with no idea what had happened. But then I found out.”

  “So, what happened?” Pierre asks.

  And Benjamin tells Pierre about arcing. There are places where an electrical current is so strong that even the air is charged. It heats up to several thousand degrees, until it’s so hot that there’s a discharge, which acts like a bolt of lightning.

  “That’s what happened to you?” Pierre asks.

  “Yes. I’m lucky to be alive, according to the electricians I told about it.”

  “You’ve talked to electricians?”

  “Yea
h. Lots of them.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to understand what had happened to me.”

  Pierre shakes his head, gazes out at Nils, who has moved and is now standing, with his phone, on a grassy berm that faces the eight-lane highway.

  “Do you know how many electrical shocks are reported to the Electrical Safety Board each year?” Benjamin asks. “Fifty. But do you know how many people they think actually get shocked? Over twenty thousand. But no one reports them. Know why?”

  “Shame?”

  “Exactly. They’re ashamed. Because they’re electricians. They’re supposed to know what they’re doing.”

  “Incredible,” Pierre says, putting down his hamburger, which is nibbled at the edges as if by a rat. He picks up a fry, gnawing at it like it’s a pretzel stick, and deposits the end he’d been holding onto a napkin on the table. Benjamin notices that he’s left a number of little stumps next to each other.

  “Why aren’t you eating the ends?” Benjamin asks.

  “They’re disgusting,” he says. “My fingers are dirty—they’ve been everywhere.”

  Benjamin watches Pierre as he discards one fry end after the next, and suddenly he feels a wave of tenderness for his brother, because as the little pile grows on the table he thinks he sees a sign that Pierre, too, has got some baggage; that kind of quirk carries a story as well. Benjamin has always been astounded that Pierre seems to have come totally unscathed through childhood. He appears unaffected, as if he simply shook off everything that happened—or maybe it even made him stronger? But as Benjamin watches his brother stack his fries, it’s the first time he feels like there might be a trace of something else, because in some way a man who doesn’t want to put something in his mouth after touching it wants nothing to do with himself.