flow.”
Well. That was a little odd. Aberdeen. A remarkable sign, and he knew better than to look at it as something that just happened, that didn’t mean anything. There were coincidences everywhere, and the important thing was to accept them. To sometimes let yourself be guided by the coincidences.
Everything has a purpose. Yes.
There is a higher power.
Dylan mumbled, on the way to his destruction in a city that was made of ruins and empty of life.
“Music to make you happy,” said Winter.
She laughed, actually laughed.
“When did
“Do you still have a phone?” he asked. “Or have the authorities disconnected it?”
“Why?”
“If we’re having a party, Angela and Elsa can come.”
“I’m glad you came, Erik,” said Lotta.
He nodded. He had called. Angela and Elsa weren’t going to come. Elsa was sleeping. Angela was wondering. I’m not a bitch, she had said. But one begins to wonder. Is it strange if I’m wondering?
He was going to go home in a few minutes.
“I don’t know what it is,” said his sister. “I have to pull myself together. It’s suddenly as though nothing means anything anymore.”
She looked tired in the ugly hall lighting, tired and sad.
“You know that it does,” said Winter. “You have a lot of things that mean something.” He could hear how empty that sounded.
“But that’s not what it feels like. Not now.”
“Come to my house.”
“Now? What, I don’t know…”
“Come to my house tonight. Kristina is already in custody, right?”
She smiled.
“She’s out in the islands, actually, at a friend’s house. On Branno.”
“Aha.”
“Well…”
“Come along. You don’t even need to finish your drink. I have lots of bottles at home, wine and enough rum for fifteen men.”
17
Lotta made Winter call home first. A nice surprise, Angela had said. Of course she should come. Absolutely.
“If only we had something special to offer you,” she said when they came.
“Erik promised me fifteen barrels of rum,” said Lotta.
She went home when it was almost dawn.
“What we can’t do during the day we do at night,” said Angela, who was standing at the window watching the taxi disappear into Allen.
“There is no day, there is no night,” said Winter.
“No?”
“That’s how it is.”
“I don’t know if what you’re saying is positive or negative,” said Angela.
“It’s a state of being. At sea.”
“I don’t think I want to hear more about the sea right now, Erik.”
“Soon you’ll be living a stone’s throw from it.”
She didn’t say anything; she kept standing at the window. There was a faint glow in the east. The sun was coming up but it wasn’t above the sea.
“I don’t know,” she said.
He waited, but she didn’t say anything more.
“I really don’t know,” she said after that.
“What don’t you know?”
“About the sea. The land. The house.” She turned around suddenly. “I might just end up alone. Elsa and me. It might be isolated. Far from everything.”
“The idea isn’t that you and Elsa are going to live there on your own,” he said.
She didn’t answer.
“Did you hear what I said?”
She walked over to the sofa where he was sitting.
“We should probably think it over one more time,” she said.
“It’s still a good piece of land,” he said. “We should probably still buy the land, right?”
On Sunday afternoon they took a walk in the Garden Society. Elsa ate an ice cream and then fell asleep. Winter felt a bit tired. It must have been that last barrel of rum at dawn.
They sat on the grass. A couple paddled by on the canal in a kayak. They heard a laugh from them; it floated on the water.
Angela had a dark circle under one eye.
She was on at five in the afternoon. It would be a long night, but there was no night, she thought now, there is no day in health care, and no night. Everything is governed by the frailty of the body, by the regular rhythm of the nurses handing out medicine. And suddenly the rhythm could be broken by an alarm, by the nasty sound of ambulances outside the emergency entrance.
Everyone to his station.
“You have become very interested in fish all of a sudden,” she said.
“Angela…”
“Yes, I know that we weren’t going to talk about it, but I’m doing it anyway.”
“I thought I owed it to her.”
“You carry a lot of debts, Erik. Constantly.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How many calls do you get every day when people’s loved ones are missing or they want to report a stolen bike or they’ve fallen down the stairs or been punched in the face?”
He didn’t answer.
“All those people you’re all duty-bound to meet personally, to listen more thoroughly to their problems. God, it has to be hundreds a week. And none of you have time. That must make you feel so guilty.”
Winter saw Elsa move on the blanket. Angela had raised her voice, but only slightly.
“Can we talk about this later, Angela?”
“Later? Later when? I go to work at four thirty, darn it.”
“She’s been trying to reach me for a long time, and it does concern a missing person, after all.”
“Really? How long has this person been missing? A grown man. Is there a bulletin out? Have you contacted Interpol?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, you have now, but not when you went out to Donso.”
“It was when I went there that I understood that it was time to go farther.”
“And none of that could happen over the phone?”
He heard the sound of paddling again, a laugh again, water. He looked at her.
“I think it was good that I went there and talked to them. Unfortunately.”
“Unfortunately? What do you mean?”
