The Survivors Read online

  Late night becomes early morning.

  He turns on the lamp again, sits up in Mom’s bed, reads her letter again. A single page, covered front and back in her unmistakable handwriting, indistinct here and there but still crystal clear, without a doubt, a text that spins a web between decades, binding together everything from here to the cottage, a simple little letter full of everything they all had on the tips of their tongues but never spoke aloud.

  The room shrinks.

  He shuts his eyes and maybe he sleeps, he thinks so, because when he opens his eyes again the room is brighter. He looks at the window, he can see a scrap of sunlight on the very top of the building across the street. A tiny yellow corner of the gray concrete.

  | 23 |

  The Current

  “I don’t know how I got out of the water. I guess I was unconscious. My next memory is lying on the deck of a motorboat, I heard frantic voices around me, felt hands on my back. And I remember throwing up the water that had been in my lungs, all over my hands, and the water was warm and I thought it felt nice.”

  He had been staring at the floor as he told his story, but now he looked up at last, met her gaze. The therapist was jotting down notes in her journal, she hid them from him while they talked, but once in a while he saw the wild ink strokes she had made, little curlicues, half-finished sentences, an illegible keyword here and there.

  “And I guess that’s that,” said Benjamin. “Then I ended up here, with you.”

  This was his third time seeing her. Two hours per session, according to a carefully delineated schedule. She had been very clear. In the past, people who had attempted suicide were almost exclusively given medication, she said. It was all about diagnoses and treatment. But now it was known that the patient’s story was central—she had called Benjamin an expert, the one who knew the most about his own history, and hearing this had made him almost ridiculously elated, almost touched, maybe because she wasn’t saying he was sick but, rather, the opposite: his own insights were crucial. She mostly just listened when he spoke, and sometimes she asked follow-up questions, some of them suggesting that she had spoken with his brothers, and he had nothing against that—he had given consent. Hour after hour of his account. That was all. The first time he came to the office, he had been surprised to find that there were two separate doors. One was for arriving and the other was for leaving. It was brilliant, like a system of gates that minimized the risk of encountering others. Still, Benjamin felt from the start that he learned more about the other patients than he would have liked. During his first visit he had to pee, and through the thin walls of the visitors’ bathroom he could hear the conversations; just before he flushed he heard another person burst into tears. The office was large, one long corridor, and sorrows played out in a row behind its doors. Benjamin had knocked tentatively on the door the receptionist directed him to, and a voice came from within: “Yes?” The tone was one of surprise, as if she hadn’t expected any visitors. And then he walked in. The therapist was a large woman in a small room with two deep easy chairs and a desk. And they sat across from each other, and he, the expert in himself, told his story and she listened, and the hours added up, painting a portrait of his childhood and adolescence, and now he was finished.

  “Okay,” she said, smiling at Benjamin.

  “Okay,” Benjamin said.

  She bent over her journal, making yet another note. It had been fourteen days since Mom died. Twelve days since he decided to swim into the sea until he could swim no more. He spent the first twenty-four hours after his rescue in the hospital. The next day, they asked him if he planned to harm himself again, and when he said no he was telling the truth. They asked if he was prepared to undergo specialized psychiatry, and he said yes. He was allowed to return home. Then came days from which he remembers very little. He was at home and didn’t go out. He remembers both of his brothers visiting him at the apartment. He remembers that Pierre brought a Swiss roll; he hadn’t seen a Swiss roll since he was a child. He doesn’t remember much about what they talked about, but he remembers that cake. It wasn’t until a few days later, when he began therapy, that he slowly returned to himself. Three sessions spread out over a week. Their conversations anchored him in reality, grounded him.

  “This is the third and final time we’ll see each other,” said the therapist. She glanced discreetly at the wall clock above his head. “I want us to devote the rest of our time to returning to a specific incident in your story—I hope that’s okay with you.”

  “Of course,” Benjamin replied.

  “I’d like us to talk a little more about what happened at the substation.”

  There was a buzz from Benjamin’s pants pocket; he took out his phone. A message from the group text Nils had created the afternoon Mom died. He had named the group “Mom” and Pierre had quickly renamed it “Mommy,” Benjamin didn’t quite understand why. As a joke? They never would have called her that when she was alive. He quickly read the text and put the phone down on the table next to his chair.

  “You look a little confused,” said the therapist.

  “No, it’s nothing,” said Benjamin. He drank some of the water that was on the table. “Nils says he wants ‘Piano Man’ to be played at the funeral.”

  “ ‘Piano Man’?” she asked.

  “Yes, that song.”

  It was less than twenty-four hours until the funeral. Nils, as if obsessed, was making plans up to the last minute. He’d written in his text that it was Mom’s favorite song, so it would be fitting, and Benjamin did have a memory of her playing it for the kids when they were little; she had shushed them all and asked them to listen carefully to the lyrics, and when it was over she said “Mwah!” and made a gesture with her hands to her lips, as if she were plucking a kiss from her mouth and tossing it into the room. Benjamin didn’t care one way or the other if it was played at the funeral. But worry suddenly crept into him, because he knew what that text was the beginning of, he knew Pierre wouldn’t let Nils off the hook now. Another buzz. Benjamin bent over to look.

  “Haha,” Pierre wrote.

  And preparations for battle were underway, the three dots hopping in the texting app, eager points of Pierre’s malice and Nils’s umbrage dancing on the screen.

  “What do you mean?” Nils wrote.

  “Sorry. I thought you were joking. A song about a drunken artist playing the piano at a sleazy hotel bar? At Mom’s funeral? Are you serious?”

  “Mom loved it. How can that be wrong?”

  “My favorite song is ‘Thunderstruck’ by AC/DC. Do you think I want it at my funeral?”

  And then silence. Another minor injury to add to all the rest, another few delicate strands breaking between the brothers. He stuck his phone in his pocket.

  “The funeral is tomorrow, already?” the therapist asked.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  The therapist gave a gentle smile. “Anyway,” she said, leaning forward in her chair. “I’d like to spend some more time at the substation.”

  “Okay,” said Benjamin.

  He didn’t understand the reasoning behind this. He had told her everything he recalled about that day. He had told her everything he recalled from his childhood, sharing things that he’d experienced with his brothers but had never talked about with anyone, not even them. He had told her about birch whisks and buttercups, and he’d even shared his most difficult memories, things that changed him. The root cellar. Midsummer. His father’s death. The idea was that this would help him understand himself, that he would see himself as the sum of his narrative. But now those stories were spread out before him and the therapist like Lego bricks, and Benjamin had no idea how to put them together. He knew that what he had done to himself two days after Mom’s death was a result of all the rest of it. He just couldn’t figure out how.

  “And I think we have to take a big step
now,” said the therapist. “A step that might be difficult. Are you with me?”

  “Okay.”

  “I want you to picture yourself at the substation.”

  He remembers the sight of the little building in the clearing. A path led up to it, faintly trampled, maybe not even trampled at all, maybe there was no path. The sound of mosquitoes and a bird very close by, and farther off, a hissing sound from the building, the quiet murmur of the electricity as it skimmed through the cables inside, tumbling around and dividing itself over to the cottages in the forest. From a distance, the building looked almost idyllic. Just a little cabin in the woods, and outside it a garden of power, poles in neat lines with their black hats gleaming in the afternoon sun. There was hardly any breeze. He remembers walking over roots that looked like ancient fingers.

  “You’re walking with your brothers and you approach the substation and you open the broken gate,” says the therapist. “You’re on the other side of the fence now. You go into the little building. Can you picture that?”

  “Yes.”

  He remembers the black moisture on the walls. The roar of electricity flowing through the lines. A flickering light on the ceiling, giving a faint glow, he remembers thinking that was odd, that there was so much electricity and yet the light on the ceiling couldn’t be any brighter? His brothers overexposed in the sunlight outside, they paled, he heard their voices, distant cries captured by the breeze, Nils told him to come back out. He said it was dangerous. As Benjamin approached the wall of electricity, their voices grew sharper, but nothing could reach him, their cries were only woolly calls in the distance, like echoes from across the lake on calm evenings when he and Pierre skipped rocks at the shore.

  “You’re standing inside the building,” says the therapist. “You’ve got the dog in your arms and you’re standing very close to the cables. What are you thinking?”

  “That I’m invincible.”

  He remembers standing in the center of a raging current of power—and it didn’t touch him! The feeling that he could do whatever he wanted, because nothing could get him. He was in the eye of a hurricane, everything around him was destroyed, but not a hair on his head was harmed. It was as if the current surging on the walls belonged to him now, he had broken into the core, he was victorious, all the power in here was now his own.

  “You turn toward the door,” says the therapist. “You look at your brothers. You’re too close to the lines. You don’t touch anything, and yet the current hits you.”

  He remembers the explosion. He remembers the seconds preceding it. He could guide the noise by moving his arms. He raised his hand to the current and the current answered him. Each time he reached toward the cables, his brothers’ shouts were louder. He liked seeing them scared. He teased them, watched them as they stood with their fingers through the fencing. Then the room turned blue, the heat on his back, and the white explosion, he faded and disappeared.

  “You wake up on the floor of the building,” says the therapist. “You don’t know how long you were unconscious. But eventually you wake up. Can you picture that?”

  “Yes.”

  He remembers his cheek against the gritty floor. His back was missing—what else was gone? He didn’t dare to look, because he didn’t want to know what other parts of him were lost. He looked out the door, at the fence. Where are my brothers? They saw the explosion, they were witnesses to his being torn apart, they saw his body burning. And yet they left him. He remembers waking up and passing out again. He looked out, the sun had moved in the opposite direction, it became earlier in the afternoon.

  “You’ve regained consciousness. You wake up. And now you discover the dog. She’s not far away, on the floor. You crawl over to her, sit on the floor, and pick her up and hold her. Do you remember that?”

  “Yes.”

  He remembers the shame.

  The pain was nothing, he couldn’t feel it anymore, his back was gone but he had lost the ability to feel anything but shame. He held her as the sun went up and down at superspeed outside, starry skies in various shapes signaling down at the little building. Clanging from the forest, loud and scraping, like the racket when a large structure sags and splinters, gentle, wild winds coming and going, fir trees swaying and stilling, animals stopping outside the building, peering in and moving on, and here he had always felt halfway outside reality, as if he were observing himself from some other place. Now he was not only in the center of himself, but in the center of the universe. He held her close, pressed her to his chest, she was cold.

  “You’re holding the dog,” says the therapist. “You’re holding her and looking down at her. Do you see her?”

  “Yes,” Benjamin replied.

  “What do you see?”

  He remembers hushing her gently, gingerly, as if she were asleep. He remembers crying over her face and how it looked like they were her tears. “It’s not a dog you see, is it?” says the therapist. “When you picture her before you now, isn’t it a little girl?”

  Worlds rolled by outside the little building, he looked out at the gap where millennia passed by, and down at her, the little one, the one who had been bound to him from the start, who was under his protection, not only that day but every other day, and he sat there on the floor, held her lifeless body, weighed it in his arms, and he cried because he had failed at the only thing he had been put on earth to do.

  “Isn’t it your little sister in your arms?”

  | 24 |

  12:00 MIDNIGHT

  A police car slowly plowed its way through the blue foliage, down the narrow tractor path that led to the property. Benjamin remembers it clearly, because he was on his knees on the lawn and none of what had happened had sunk in and that police car, those flashing lights, were like reality demanding to be let in, something from the outside world that wanted to know what he had done.

  He remembers the two policewomen who got out. He remembers that Mom refused to let go of Molly when they wanted to examine her. They talked to Dad, he remembers the sound of their murmurs in the dim twilight, and Dad pointed discreetly at Benjamin, and then they all came over to him, approaching from different directions. He remembers that both women were kind, they laid a blanket over him in the summer-evening chill, asked questions, and were patient with him when he couldn’t answer. He remembers that another police car arrived a while later. And after that came an ambulance. And then came a procession of other vehicles, a truck from the electric company, other cars, they parked crookedly along the sloping tractor path. People vanished up into the forest, toward the substation, and came back. Strangers stood in the kitchen, using the phone.

  Suddenly there were so many people. This place, which had always been deserted, where no one but the family ever set foot, was now crawling with people and everyone wanted to get inside him, wanted to make his crime real with their questions.

  He’s been taking walks again.

  From the therapy office along the old tollgates in the south end, across the bridges, through the deserted alleys of Gamla Stan and along the quays, all the way downtown. He walked until the summer night fell, and now he’s passing the subway entrance with the broken escalator once again, the sidewalk cafés where he used to sit and drink with Mom. When he arrives at Mom’s front door, his brothers are there waiting for him.

  “Have you been crying?” Nils asks.

  “No, no,” Benjamin replies.

  They walk into the stairwell, sensing each other’s bodies in the silence of the elevator. Mom’s nameplate has already been removed. It’s a callous detail that’s generally in keeping with all other contact Nils has had with the landlord. Two days after Nils reported Mom’s death and stated that they wanted to end the lease, he got a text from the landlord saying that they had inspected the apartment and found that it didn’t merely “smell of smoke,” as Nils had maintained when he’d described the c
ondition—it was to be considered “smoke damaged” and must be sanitized immediately. The apartment had to be emptied sooner than planned, and that’s why the brothers are here now, in the middle of the night, the day before Mom’s funeral, to rescue some last mementos of Mom before the apartment is cleaned out tomorrow and it all disappears.

  Nils unlocks the door and goes around turning on lights; the apartment begins to glow. Mom only bought lamps from the fifties and set them up on every conceivable surface; all these light sources in brown, yellow, and orange bathe the apartment in light reminiscent of the evening sun on a dock in June. The brothers slowly drift through the apartment to find things to remember Mom by, but Benjamin remains standing in the hall. He looks at his brothers, watches them search tentatively through bookcases and empty chests of drawers, and he finds that they remind him of their younger selves on Easter: little pajama boys on the hunt for chocolate eggs Dad hid in the furniture. Nils finds a small wooden sculpture and takes it down off the shelf. Pierre spots Mom’s photo albums and sits on the living room floor; immediately sucked in, he has soon forgotten why they’re here.

  “Look at this,” he says to Nils, holding out one of the photos. Nils laughs and sits down next to his brother. They sit there on the floor, in their stocking feet, like children in overgrown bodies, as if they have become adults despite themselves, and they look in wonder at photographs of themselves as children, trying to understand what happened. Benjamin goes to the kitchen. Something crunches underfoot, specks of marmalade gleaming softly in the light of the ceiling fixture. Little greetings from Mom everywhere, tooth marks on the pointy, knife-sharpened pencils on the kitchen table. The white-bottomed saucepans that have had milk burned onto them throughout the decades. Lipstick on the edge of the coffee cup in the sink. A single plate with an outline of tomato sauce. He opens the fridge, and yet another source of yellow light spreads its glow across the kitchen floor, the door racks full of medicine, small bottles with information leaflets stuck on like wings, white plastic blister packs, foil tabs and red triangles flashing signals into the room. Mom’s presence is total, and as he digs through the items he feels guilty for doing this without asking permission first. He opens the freezer. Every shelf is wedged full of single-serving packages of pierogi. It was an emergency measure undertaken by the brothers a month or so ago, to get Mom to eat more. They took Mom to the store, walked through the freezer section to spark her enthusiasm, showed her different meals. All she wanted was pierogi.