Be prepared to have a lot of assumptions questioned if you read this short story. If the first few lines interest you, read the book rather than the highlights here.
This is a short story about what you would be prepared to sacrifice in order to save a life.
Your hometown is something you can never really escape, but can never really go home to, either. Because it’s not home anymore. We’re not trying to make peace with it. Not with the streets and bricks of it. Just with the person we were back then. And maybe forgive ourselves for everything we thought we would become and didn’t.
Most of us so desperately want to believe that every heart which stops beating is missed equally. If we’re asked, “Are all lives worth the same?” the majority of us will reply with a resounding “Yes!” But only until someone points to a person we love and asks: “What about that life?”
I was born here but I’ve never gotten used to it; Helsingborg and I will never find peace. Maybe everyone feels that way about their hometown: the place we’re from never apologizes, never admits that it was wrong about us. It just sits there, at the end of the motorway, whispering: “You might be all rich and powerful now. And maybe you do come home with expensive watches and fancy clothes. But you can’t fool me, because I know who you really are. You’re just a scared little boy.”
I’m a winner, a survivor. And all survivors are scared of death. That’s why we’re still here.
I was smoking on the fire escape so the nurses wouldn’t see me. They went on and on about smoking, as though it would have time to kill me.
I’m not an ordinary person, everyone will hear about it when I die. When five-year-old girls die, no one writes about that, there aren’t any memorials in the evening papers, their feet are still too small, they haven’t had time to make anyone care about their footsteps yet. But people care about me because of what I’ll leave behind, what I’ve built and achieved, businesses and properties and assets. Money isn’t money to me, not like it is to you. I save and calculate and don’t worry about it. It’s nothing but points for me, just a measure of my success.
I know what you’re thinking: what a bastard I am. And you’re right. But the vast majority of successful people don’t become bastards, we were bastards long before. That’s why we’ve been successful.
Every parent will take five minutes in the car outside the house from time to time, just sitting there. Just breathing and gathering the strength to head back inside to all of their responsibilities. The suffocating expectation of being good, coping.
The only thing of value on Earth is time. One second will always be a second, there’s no negotiating with that.”
The porch door was open, your mother was listening to Leonard Cohen, so I told you that we actually lived deep in a cozy grotto and that the sky was like a stone covering the opening. “Then what are the stars?” you asked, and I told you they were cracks, through which the light could trickle in. Then I said that your eyes were the same thing, to me. Tiny, tiny cracks, through which the light could trickle out.
I’m an egoist, you learnt that early on. Your mother once screamed that I’m the kind of person who doesn’t have any equals, I only have people above me that I want something from and people beneath me who I trample on. She was right, so I kept going until there was no one left above me.
I had a brother. I’ve never told you that. He was dead when we were born. Maybe there was only room for one of us on this earth, and I wanted it more. I clambered over my brother in the womb. I was a winner, even then.
I bluntly asked you whether you were happy. Because I am who I am. And you replied: “It’s good enough, Dad. Good enough.” Because you knew I hated that phrase. You were always someone who could be happy. You don’t know how much of a blessing that is.
I didn’t run. I remembered all the times I had seen her before. When she took my brother away. When she took my best friend. When she took my parents. I wasn’t going to be scared anymore, I’d keep that power at least, down to the last moment. “I know who you are,” I said, without a single tremor in my voice. “You’re death.” The woman frowned and looked deeply, deeply offended. “I’m not death,” she muttered. “I’m not my job.” That knocked the air out of me. I’ll admit it. It’s not what you expect to hear at a moment like that. The woman’s eyebrows lowered as she repeated: “I’m not death. I just do the picking up and dropping off.” “I—” I began, but she interrupted me. “You’re so self-obsessed that you think I’ve been chasing you all your life. But I’ve been looking out for you. Of all the idiots I could have picked as my favorite . . .” She massaged her temples. “Fa . . . favorite?” I stuttered.
I walked along the beach out by Råå, the morning after the diagnosis, and I saw two dogs running into the sea, playing in the waves. And I wondered: Have you ever been like that, as happy as they are? Could you be that happy? Would it be worth it?
It’s bloody awful to admit to yourself that you’re not the kind of person you’ve always thought you were.
The woman dragged both me and the folder out of the wreck. When I shouted, “I can give you someone else to kill!” she realized that I meant myself. But it made no difference. She couldn’t take a death for a death. Only a life for a life. I lay there on the ground with all of Helsingborg’s winds beneath my clothes, and she patiently explained: “It’s not enough for you to die. To make room for the girl’s entire life, another life has to cease to exist. I have to delete its contents. So if you give your life, it’ll disappear. You won’t die, you’ll never have existed. No one will remember you. You were never here.” A life for a life. That’s what it means.
“You never get your child’s attention back,” your mother once said. “The time when they don’t just listen to you to be nice, that time passes, it’s the first thing to go.”
You humans always think you’re ready to give your lives, but only until you understand what that really involves. You’re obsessed with your legacy, aren’t you? You can’t bear to die and be forgotten.”
“Every night, I wondered whether it was possible to change a person.” “What did you conclude?” “That we are who we are.”
This has always been your town in a way it never was for me; you never tried to find a life, you were in the right place from the start.
A second is always a second; that’s the one definitive value we have on earth. Everyone is always negotiating, all of the time. You’re doing the deal of your life, every day.
We went to the outdoor seating area; there’s fierce competition for the most beautiful view in Helsingborg, but that particular place is so calm and confident. It doesn’t need to show off, it knows its own beauty. The waves rolling in, the ferries anchored in the harbor, Denmark waiting on the other side of the water. “How does this work?” I asked. “We jump inwards,” the woman replied. “Does it hurt?” I asked. She nodded sadly. “I’m scared,” I admitted, but she shook her head. “You’re not scared. You’re just grieving. No one tells you humans that your sorrow feels like fear.” “What are we grieving?” “Time.”