The Colony

by Annika Norlin

They thought about this when they fell asleep and when they woke up, but then Aagny sat there eating a sandwich as usual and talking about this and that, and gradually they forgot about the Other Aagny, that she had ever existed. And maybe they had looked the same, where they stood by the burning car, adrenaline in their bodies and the heat of the flames on their faces.

They were all strange. They were all flawed. Together, they managed to survive. They each had something that benefited the others.

“You know when you used to go to church,” she said. “Why did you?” “Well,” he replied. “There were several reasons, I suppose. But one is that it brings together people who truly want to believe that the world is fundamentally good, and that everyone has a chance. Even if I’m not sure that I believe it myself, I wanted to be around others who do.” Sagne thought for a while. “It’s exactly the same, really,” she said. “The garden makes me believe that the world is good.

And even if we don’t discover something entirely new, just the fact that you can take a seed, put it in the ground, and it becomes a plant—I can’t understand how people don’t think about that all the time.”

During their upbringing, most people see their parents perform actions, which they don’t understand or can’t relate to at all. Like József—his mother’s scratching and screaming. But there should be a word for how, one day, you find yourself doing the same thing. You understand.

“But that’s how it is with most things,” Sagne said. “We are all part of a perfect system. Everyone is needed.” She pondered. “Except maybe humans. We are the only ones who take more than we give.” The group felt ashamed.

What she missed from her brief forays into religious experiences was a sense of awareness, that if one assumes there is a God, one also assumes there is someone who gives us something. The Big Bang, Sara thought, was like believing that a buffet had appeared out of nowhere and all you had to do was grab yourself a fork and eat before someone else gobbled it up. This led to a greedy way of thinking. If, instead, one assumed that nature itself is God hosting a feast, or that all species—including humans—are a kind of study group or housing cooperative hosting the party together, it inspires a humbler attitude. Thank you to nature/the housing cooperative/all existence.

But she didn’t say anything more, for she enjoyed sitting there with them, and she had learned early on that most other people have a need to discuss obvious matters, and you should simply indulge them—you didn’t have to listen.

It was as if, without anyone saying it out loud, they turned into more and more of a flock. Anyone who has spent an extended period of time in a group knows that, eventually, language becomes simplified. You go from long, intricate sentences to single vowels and sighs—ah! when you sit down on the wooden steps, mm! when the potatoes are fresh.

There was an advantage to speaking less and coexisting more. The advantage was that it led to less bickering. Before they stopped making small talk, their days had been full of squabbles—who had forgotten to bring in water, who hadn’t cleaned up after themselves—and József was busy trying to prevent every conflict. But now they made a point of being accommodating, not thinking too much. The chores took care of themselves. The one best suited for something did it.

Perhaps it was around this time they started calling themselves the “Colony”. It started as a joke; Sagne was talking about ants as usual, about the way they coexisted, when Zakaria said: “Like us. An ant colony!” And he sounded so cheerful that no one could help but laugh. A colony of individuals, where everyone worked, where everyone had a different skill set. It felt good to say. Like there was a reason. Like it was natural. They tried to stop thinking of themselves as individuals. Instead, each was a part. A part of the colony.

There was also something more. József was rootless. His parents were dead. If you really thought about it, he had no one else. Sometimes, when Sara or Sagne talked about their childhood—about their stable families that were still alive, about the houses they grew up in that still stood boasting of all the things that showed they had lived—he felt such a profound jealousy that he had to walk away and kick a root.

If you are wondering what they did with their days, they lived. And if you have lived a certain way for long enough, it’s hard to go back to anything else. They didn’t want to be held accountable. If they re-entered regular society again, they would have to pay for the time they had spent here.

The same way all people in all societies do. You look at one another and see others doing the same things in the same way and you think ah, this seems to be a way of existing.

There was something so fragile about the Colony; they knew that at any moment it could crumble. That’s why they cherished it so tenderly.

The goal was this: to live to the highest degree possible on what’s out there. Like the other species did. Anything caught was shared. They were a collective organism, not individual beings. At their least, they were the people in the group; at their most, they were the whole Colony and maybe, just maybe, all of existence.

And time went by. After a while, they no longer asked questions. The questions had fallen silent, become neutral. This was life, neither more nor less.

There are some people who have the ability to act so naturally according to their own will that people around them lose their bearings—well, I guess this is how it is from now on?—and

She smiled. “Look at the ants over there. Sagne taught me the queen’s role is to lay as many eggs as possible, with all the males in the colony.” She smiled her usual smile, but József noticed she was suddenly saying it out loud. That she was the queen. Everyone already knew it. But this was the first time she had said it.

And the others went along with it, in words: “We shouldn’t build there; when the pig comes, it’ll need somewhere to live.” In this way, Sara’s idea was cemented as a good one. Only, everyone knew it would never materialize in physical form.

The non-existent pig would come to hover like an invisible spirit over the farm. Everyone knew that at some point, there would be a change. When the pig comes.

The Swedish authorities were so tediously meticulous that a statement of someone’s death would certainly require an actual dead body!

Every evening, Aagny sat by Zakaria’s bed, reading to him, feeding him soup and bread. He didn’t particularly enjoy reading, though. So she would recount the plot of various films to him. “Pretty Woman. There’s a man, played by Richard Gere, who is incredibly rich. And he’s staying at this hotel. That’s when he finds a prostitute, with a heart of gold—”

Zakaria had three upsides, the neighbor thought. The first was that he was tall and big, and looked like he could hurt people. The second was that he practised martial arts, so he actually could hurt people. The third was his bright personality, that he was loyal by nature. If you needed him, he would be there. He cared for you. He also had two downsides, the neighbor thought. The first was that the last positive trait unfortunately applied to everyone: he cared for them. He didn’t want to hurt anyone. The second was that he had a very poor sense of direction. It was frankly a bit embarrassing.

Zakaria gave him the money he had in his pocket. The next time he heard anything about his father was the following day, when they called from the hospital. His father had gone into cardiac arrest from an overdose. It wasn’t hard to figure out where the money for the overdose had come from.

So Låke took the book with him into his bedroom. In another Jackie Collins book, he read: Your whole life is ahead of you. Don’t you ever forget that. He never did. My whole life is ahead of me.

Låke looked as if he had never thought about it. Now he gazed at me with amusement, and spoke the following sentence, which I will forever remember: “You can’t think that far ahead, you’ll go crazy!” He giggled loudly now. I barely understood the comment at the time, but I saved it in the back of my mind, and later, in the evening, I would take it out and realize its mind-boggling core: he lived only in the now.

A task I had been given by my therapist: to reflect on my own thinking. If I were to put it into a percentage, she asked. What percent of my thoughts were focused on a) the future, things that would happen or could happen b) the past, things that had already happened, and c) the here and now. I estimated my percentages as 90/10. Ninety percent on the future, and ten percent on the present. The part about the present mostly revolved around things like my back hurting, or if I was hungry, or drunk, or in love.

Everyone has three personalities, minimum. One in real life. One on the internet. And one when you are drunk.

There was a way of thinking in the cities that assumed all people wanted to be there—in the city—and live according to the city’s laws, and anyone who didn’t lacked a certain determination. Do you have what it takes to end up in a big city? To be someone? That’s how we think in the cities.

I had an aha moment about myself: who is truly the loneliest, someone who lives far out in the middle of nowhere but is lumped together with people, or someone who interacts with hundreds of people every day but refuses to let anyone under their skin.

It’s just a shame that as soon as my thoughts even touched on my place of work, or writing an article and receiving comments on it, my nervous system started firing on all cylinders again. I was genuinely afraid of the thought of working, as though a phobia had developed. That simply being there would be harmful to me.

Just like everyone else in the world, she seemed to view her life story as universal and relatable—something that didn’t require further explanation. It didn’t seem to occur to her that for someone like me, child abuse and prison time were things that raised eyebrows.

But back to the last question I had asked. The one that led to everything. Namely, how they had ended up here. It was Sara who spoke. She answered simply: “We’re all people who have struggled to feel that anywhere else is okay. Here, we’ve created a life according to our own rules.”

“As human beings, we make so many small choices every day that we forget we also have the ability to make big choices. We don’t have to live where everyone else lives. We don’t have to live like everyone else lives. We can sit down and ask ourselves: what do I truly believe in? And then you try to live that way, with people you actually want to live with.”

“Why don’t we dance in Sweden, except in certain places, at night, when we’ve been drinking? “Why do we speak when we could sing? “Why do we act as if our minds are completely separate from our bodies? “Why must we walk around pretending all the time—pretending to be normal, removing the parts of ourselves that stand out?” And finally, she said this so quietly that you had to strain to listen, which we all did: “Why do you work yourselves to death to earn money so you can become rich and have leisure time?”

Suddenly it crept into me. I realized that it wasn’t just me who felt naked. It was some kind of double emperor’s-new-clothes situation, where both I and the group felt that the pants had been pulled down on our respective societies. Both were naked, exposed in all their phoniness.

and it was all the other people, all the magazines, all the billboards, all the hairdressers and skin therapists and personal trainers standing there screaming be better be better, and I had never before been able to completely shut them out—no matter how amazing the sex was, they had always been there at the same time, a part of the event—it was as if the act actually consisted of thousands of people and all of capitalism. A small performance for an audience of one, where the result hadn’t been to build desire but doing it right, being enough.

I only partially agreed with what I was saying here, but I have learned that in successful apologies it’s best to exaggerate both the recipient’s virtues and one’s own idiocy.

Sometimes it made her gag reflex kick in again—her eyes and that creep’s mouth together, in the same face—but occasionally she would pause and realize that, since she was adopted, she had never before seen her own features in another person. The feeling was dizzying. He actually existed. He was actually her child.

József had an image of himself as a good person. He had this image of himself because others had often told him so. He never got angry; he always tried to make peace, always tried to understand the other side. He comforted and listened. Surely that made him a good person? Suddenly he realised that he wasn’t at all.