Page 99 of The Living and the Dead

That was the kind of thing love could do. As powerful as death, it is. Wasn’t that true of love? And if it wasn’t, what was love for?

“You don’t want to?” she asked one night.

“No, I do. I don’t know what’s going on,” he said.

“Do you want to try again?”

He was afraid of failing again, because he wouldn’t be able to cope. “Not tonight. Is that okay?”

“Of course. Hey. It’s no big deal.”

His shortcomings. He didn’t know why they tormented him so, but they did. She would beg him to go deeper inside her, to the point where her eyes lost focus and her body began to quake seconds before she opened her mouth to scream. But he could only get that deep with his hand. It sounded vulgar when he put it into words, in his mind, but it was like he knew he couldn’t go as deep as Killian had. He pictured a hollow space inside Felicia that would forever remain untouched, longing for something she couldn’t have.

Sander had tried to accept the responsibility imposed upon him; he wanted to be the man he needed to be, but he no longer knew how. He had no language for it, and without language you become paralyzed. Everything becomes either/or, no conclusion, you come to a standstill.

Silence piled up between Sander and Felicia, sometimes temporarily dissolved by sharp words, bitter fights. He feared they would begin to hate each other, and eventually it felt like they did. Hatred, that was a strong word, but if that wasn’t what he was feeling, why was he thinkingit?

It came out in the little things: Sander couldn’t stand her bad sense of humor and Felicia couldn’t stand the way he never wanted to listen to music at home. Sander was tired of how she could never make up her mind about what to wear anytime they left the house, and Felicia was sick of his refusal to wear anything but comfortableeveryday clothes. He was annoyed at her new habit of gabbing to her classmates on the phone until late at night, a never-ending chatter, and she was irritated that he wouldn’t leave the bedroom lamp on until she had come to bed, too, and that he never wanted to talk when they were lying in bed, only read or have sex. Sander hated that Felicia went out some nights, without telling him where she was going or when she planned to be back; Felicia hated that Sander never talked about his real feelings, would only say everything was fine, as usual, it’s fine.

“Some words don’t mean a damn thing,” she snapped one night.

“Believe me,” Sander said. “I know.”

She couldn’t stand how self-absorbed he was, stuck so deep inside himself; he couldn’t stand how quick she was to burst into tears. He couldn’t abide by how impossible it was to satisfy her, and she found it unbearable that he tried so hard. He hated that she was such a terrible liar, and she hated that he forced her to lie. Sander was uncomfortable with how much Felicia talked to her mother, and Felicia despised Sander for being unable to stop talking about the past.

All of this—where did it come from? He suspected she knew the answer as well as he did. Killian remained a silent and invisible presence, as the dead tend to do, and at the same time he swelled like a boil between them. Sander wanted to be free, going so far as to wait at the bus stop in town, on the verge of taking the bus to Oskarström to visit the cemetery and the gravestone that waited in the lush green foliage there. But he couldn’t doit.

Or did he, perhaps, not want to be free at all? Was freedom in fact what he feared most of all?

He often saw the chapel in Skavböke in his mind’s eye at night, just as he’d seen it on the night of the landslide. Unnaturally large and white, it towered against a clear sky.

“Do you wish you hadn’t stayed?” she asked him once.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because of…like, this. You seem so…you’re the one whochose to stay with me, I know that you’ve said so. But do you regret it?”

“No.”

He no longer knew if he was lying. But he felt that familiar feeling in his body, the urge to flee rising like a fever in the summer night.

73

In the summer of 2002, the search for a missing young man resumed after the police raided an encampment. Sander read about it in the paper and saw a picture of Siri Bengtsson’s grim face.

This was also the summer he spent many days at Billiards & Bowling. It was in the basement of a parking garage in town, a building with thick brick walls, countless nooks and crannies. On weekend nights, the line to get in was all the way down the street, but it was a decently comfortable place during the day. Sander would sit down there by himself, with a cup of coffee and his textbooks. When it got late enough, he might have a beer or two.

But tonight he was alone with a book when he heard a voice he recognized.

“Don’t get up, I just need to take a leak.”

Sander turned around in time to see the back of someone vanishing into the culvert that led to the restrooms. He was sharing a table with four other young men, empty glasses and packs of cigarettes on the table.

“He’s a cagey one, that guy,” one said.

“Yeah. What an odd duck. Can’t fucking hold his liquor, either. He pukes every time.”

“He brought a flask, did you see?”