Handling the Undead (3 page)

David looked up at the mixing booth, where Leo was pushing every button in sight, to no effect. David was about to shout at him to cut the power when he felt a shove and fell on the low stage. He lay there, hands still clapped over his ears, and watched as the woman swung the microphone over her head and dashed it into the concrete floor.

There was silence. The audience stopped, looked around. A collective sigh of relief went through the room. David clawed himself up to standing and saw Leo waving his hands, pulling his index finger across his throat. David nodded, cleared his throat and said loudly, 'Hello!'

Faces turned toward him .

'Unfortunately we have to interrupt tonight's show due to ... technical difficulties.'

A few laughs in the audience. Jeering.

'We would like to thank our major sponsor, the Vattenfall Power Company, and ... welcome you back another time.'

Boos from around the room. David held out his hands in a gesture that was supposed to mean, So fucking sorry for something that's not remotely my fault, but people had already lost interest in him. Everyone was moving toward the exit. The place was empty in a matter of minutes.

When David reached the kitchen, Leo looked grumpy. 'What was that thing about Vattenfall?'

'A joke.'

'I see. Funny.'

David was about to say something about captains and sinking ships since Leo was the boss of the place-and OK, next time he would make sure he had a routine prepared for a reverse power cut-but he held back. In part because he couldn't afford to get Leo's back up, and in part because he had other things to think about.

He went into the office and dialled Eva's cell phone number from the landline. This time he got through, but only to her voicemail. He left a message asking her to call him at the club as soon as possible.

Someone brought some beers in and the comedians drank them in the kitchen, amid the roar of the kitchen fans. The chefs had turned them on to mitigate the heat from the cooking ranges that couldn't be turned off, and now they had the same problem with the fans. They could barely talk but at least it was cooler.

Most of them left, but David decided to stay put in case Eva called. On the ten o'clock radio news they heard that the electrical phenomenon appeared to be confined to the Stockholm region, that the current in some areas could be compared to an incipient lightning strike. David felt the hairs on his arms stand up. Maybe a shiver, maybe static electricity.

When he felt a vibration against his hip he thought at first it was to do with the electrical charge in the air as well, but then realised it was coming from his cell phone. He didn't recognise the number that came up.

'Hello, this is David.'

'Am I speaking with David Zetterberg?'

'Yes?'

Something in the man's voice generated a clump of anxiety in David's stomach and set it wobbling. He stood up from the table and took a couple of steps into the hall toward the dressing room in order to hear better.

'My name is Goran Dahlman and I am a physician at Danderyd Hospital. . .'

As the man said what he had to say, David's body was swept into a cold fog and his legs disappeared. He slithered down the wall to the concrete floor. He stared at the phone in his hand; threw it away from him like a venomous snake. It slid along the floor and struck Leo's foot. Leo looked up.

'David! What's wrong?'

Afterwards David would have no real memory of the half hour that followed. The world had congealed, all sense and meaning sucked out of it. Leo made his way with difficulty through the traffic; it was following the most rudimentary road rules now that all the electronics had been knocked out. David sat curled up in the passenger seat and looked with unseeing eyes at the yellow-flashing traffic lights.

It was only in the entrance of Danderyd Hospital that he was .ihlc to pull himself together and refuse Leo's offer to come up with  him. He couldn't remember what Leo said, or how he found the right ward. Suddenly he was just there, and time started making its slow rounds again.

Actually, there was one thing he remembered. As he walked through the corridors to Eva's room, all the lamps above the doors were blinking and an alarm sounded continuously. This felt entirely appropriate: catastrophe eclipses everything.

She had collided with an elk and died during the time it took David to reach the hospital. The doctor on the phone had said that there was no hope for her, but that her heart was still beating. Not anymore. It had stopped at 22.36. At twenty-four minutes to eleven her heart had stopped pumping the blood around her body.

One single muscle in a single person's body. A speck of dust in time. And the world was dead. David stood next to her bed with his arms by his sides, the headache burning behind his forehead.

Here lay his whole future, everything good that he could even imagine would come from life. Here lay the last twelve years of his past. Everything gone; and time shrank to a single unbearable now.

He fell to his knees by her side, took her hand.

'Eva,' he whispered, 'this won't work. It can't be like this. I love you. Don't you understand? I can't live without you. Come on, you have to wake up now. It doesn't make sense without you, none of it. I love you so much and it just can't be like this.'

He talked and talked, a monologue of repeated sentences which, the more times he repeated them, felt more and more true and right until a conviction took root in him that they would start to take effect. Yes. The more times he said it was impossible, the more absurd it all seemed. He had just managed to convince himself of the feeling that if he simply kept babbling the miracle would happen, when the door opened.

A woman's voice said, 'How's it going?'

'Fine. Fine,' David said. 'Please go away.'

He pressed Eva's cooling hand against his brow, heard the rustling of cloth as the nurse crouched down. He felt a hand at his back.

'Can I do anything?'

David slowly turned his head to the nurse and drew back, Eva's hand still held in his own. The nurse looked like Death in human form. Prominent cheekbones, protruding eyes, pained expression. 'Who are you?' he whispered.

'I'm Marianne,' she said, almost without moving her lips.

They stared at each other wide-eyed. David took a firmer hold of Eva's hand; he had to protect her from this person who was coming to get her. But the nurse made no move towards him. Instead she sobbed, said, 'Forgive me ... ' and shut her eyes, pressing her hands against her head.

David understood. The pain in his head, the ragged pulsating heartbeat was not only his. The nurse slowly straightened up, momentarily lost her balance, then walked out of the room. For a moment, the outside world penetrated his consciousness and David heard a cacophony of signals, alarms and sirens both inside and outside the hospital. Everything was in turmoil.

'Come back,' he whispered. 'Magnus. How am I supposed to tell Magnus? He's turning nine next week, you know. He wants pancake cake. How do you make pancake cake, Eva? You were the one who was going to make it, you bought the raspberries and everything. They're already at home in the freezer, how am I supposed to go home and open the freezer and there are the raspberries that you bought to make pancake cake and how am I supposed to ... '

David screamed. One long sound until all the air was gone from his lungs. He pressed his lips against her knuckles, mumbled, 'Everything's over. You don't exist any more. I don't exist. Nothing exists.'

The pain in his head reached an intensity that he was forced to  acknowledge. A bolt of hope shot through him: he was dying. Yes. He was going to die too. There was crackling, something breaking in his brain as the pain swelled and swelled and he had just managed to think, with complete certainty-I'm dying. I am dying now. Thank you-when it stopped. Everything stopped. Alarms and sirens stopped. The lighting in the room dimmed. He could hear his own rapid breathing. Eva's hand was moist with his own sweat, it slid across his forehead. The headache was gone. Absently, he rubbed her hand up and down across his skin, drawing her wedding band across it, wanting the pain back. Now that it was gone, the ache in his chest welled up in its place.

He stared down at the floor. He did not see the white caterpillar that came in through the ceiling, fell, and landed on the yellow institutional blanket draped over Eva, digging its way in.

'My darling,' he whispered and squeezed her hand. 'Nothing was going to come between us, don't you remember?'

Her hand jerked, squeezed back.

David did not scream, did not make a move. He simply stared at her hand, pressed it. Her hand pressed back. His chin fell, his tongue moved to lick his lips. Joy was not the word for what he felt, it was more like the disorientation in the seconds after you wake from a nightmare, and at first his legs did not want to obey him when he pulled himself up so he could look at her.

They had cleaned and prepped her as best they could, but half of her face was a gaping wound. The elk, he supposed. It must have had time to turn its head, or make a final desperate attempt to attack the car. Its head, its antlers had been the first thing through the windshield and one of the points had struck her face before she was crushed under the weight of the beast.

'Eva! Can you hear me?'

No reaction. David pulled his hands across his face, his heart was beating wildly.

It was a spasm ... She can't be alive. Look at her.

A large bandage covered the right half of her face, but it was clear that it was ... too small. That bones, skin and flesh were missing underneath. They had said that she was in bad shape, but only now did he realise the extent of it.

'Eva? It's me.'

This time there was no spasm. Her arm jerked, hitting against his legs. She sat up without warning. David instinctively backed up. The blanket slid off her, there was a quiet clinking and ... no, he had not realised the full extent of it at all.

Her upper body was naked, the clothes had been cut away. The right side of her chest was a gaping hole bordered by ragged skin and clotted blood. From it came a metallic clanking. For a moment, David could not see Eva, he only saw a monster and wanted to run away. But his legs would not carry him and after several seconds he came to his senses. He stepped up next to the bed again.

Now he saw what was making the sound. Clamps. A number of metal clamps suspended from broken veins inside her chest cavity. They swayed and hit against each other as she moved. He swallowed dryly. 'Eva?'

She turned her head toward the sound of his voice and opened her one eye.

Then he screamed.

Vallirigby 17.32

Mahler made his way slowly across the square, his shirt sticky with sweat. He had a bag of groceries for his daughter in one hand. Soot-grey pigeons waddled under his feet with centimetres to spare.

He looked like a large, grey dove himself. He'd bought the worn suit jacket fifteen years earlier, when he became fat and could no longer use his old clothes. Same thing with the pants. Of his hair, only a wreath above the ears was left and the bald spot on top had become red and freckled from the sun. It was easy to imagine that Mahler was carrying empty bottles in the bag, that he was rooting around in garbage bins-a big pigeon plucking goodies from discarded takeaways.

This was not the case. But it was the impression he gave: a loser. In the shadow of Ahlens Emporium, on his way down to Angermannagatan, Mahler dug under his double chins with his free hand and took hold of the necklace. A present from Elias. Sixtyseven colourful plastic beads threaded on a fishing line, now tied around his neck for all eternity.

While he continued to walk he rubbed the beads one by one like a rosary, like prayers.

It was three flights up to his daughter's apartment; he had to stop and catch his breath for a while. Then he unlocked the door with his own key. Inside it was dark, stuffy and stale from unaired heat.

'Hi sweetheart. It's just me.'

No answer. As usual he feared the worst.

But Anna was there, and still alive. She lay curled up on Elias' bed, on the designer sheets that Mahler had bought, her face turned to the wall. Mahler put down the shopping bag, stepped over the dusty Lego pieces and perched himself gingerly on one corner of the bed.

'How's it going, little one?'

Anna drew in air through her nose. Her voice was weak. 'Daddy .. .I can feel his smell. It's still there in the sheets. His smell is still here.'

Mahler would have liked to lie down on the bed, against her back. Put his arms around her and been Daddy, and made everything hurtful go away. But he didn't dare to. The bed slats would crack under his weight. So he simply sat there, looking at the Lego pieces that no one had built anything with for two months.

When he had been looking for an apartment for Anna, there was one on the ground floor of this same building. He hadn't taken that one, out of fear of burglars.

'Come and have something to eat.'

Mahler put out two servings of roast beef and potato salad from plastic containers, cut up a tomato and placed the slices on the edge of the plates. Anna did not answer.

The blinds in the kitchen were drawn, but the sun pressed ill through the cracks, drawing glowing lines across the kitchen table and illuminating the whirling motes. He should clean. Lacked the energy.

Two months ago, the table had been full of things: fruit, mail, a toy, a flower picked during a walk, something Elias had made at daycare. The stuff of life.

Now there was just the two plates of supermarket food. The heat and the smell of dust. The bright red tomatoes; a pathetic attempt.

He went to Elias' room, stopped in the doorway. 'Anna ... you need to eat a little. Come on. It's ready.'

Anna shook her head, said into the wall, 'I'll eat it later. Thanks.'

'Can't you get up for a while?'

When she didn't answer, he went out into the kitchen again and sat down at the table.

Started loading the food into his mouth automatically. Thought the sound of his chewing echoed between the quiet walls. Finally he ate the tomato slices. One by one.