The Details

by Ia Genberg

Some books stay in your bones long after their titles and details have slipped from memory.

The multiple folded properties of time made it so that I could hear Johanna say something about chance, something I wouldn’t understand until much later, made it so that we both could think that we saw something moving behind the curtains on the top floor.

At some point, probably right after it ended, I asked myself if this was what structural violence looked like: to unconsciously teach someone about gifts, where to buy them, how to deliver them.

To read with a fever is a lottery; the contents of the text will either dissolve or penetrate deep into the cracks accidentally opened by an out-of-control temperature.

It was suddenly clear to me that this room inside of me had been shuttered a long time ago, at the end of the last century. A simple realization, like seeing the weather through the window: it’s raining.

there was something about her that made her well-suited for life in the public eye. She had the gaze, the smile, an entire well of viewpoints that never seemed to run dry. She was able to get her bearings and form an opinion on some topic in the span of one minute—or perhaps more accurately, what passed for “an opinion,” and which could easily transform into its opposite at the blink of an eye, like a game, as if the subject matter itself was an irrelevant appendix to the verbal flexing made visible by its light.

predicted. She’d tried to kill herself in her teens but said that was all over now, “more or less,” and I came to realize that this “more or less” was a way of slashing open a little vein of fear in the people around her, a way of guaranteeing the care of her friends. I never saw her cut herself but I did glimpse a couple of scars and marks.

In contrast to most people I’ve known in my life she rarely told anecdotes with herself as the main character, or anecdotes she’d already told before, or anecdotes in general, since the nature of an anecdote—beginning, middle, and finale—contradicted Niki’s demand for complete authenticity.

Anecdotists were intellectually dishonest, and anyone who made the mistake of telling the same story more than once—about someone being arrested for public inebriation at Hamburg’s central station and who subsequently, to their great surprise, woke up sharing a cell with a former classmate; about the grandmother who was more or less on her deathbed when she gave birth to the storyteller’s mother; or about the person who had jumped the fence to Visby’s botanical garden after it had closed for the night only to discover that the garden’s Cannabis sativa had no mind-altering properties whatsoever—would not be invited back.

Ever since my friendship with Niki I think of the anecdote as a form of chronic illness that attaches itself to some people; that compulsion to tell everything in the shape of a story, to turn life into a formula meant to captivate, impress, upset, or inspire laughter. An anecdote is a sealed box that cannot yield anything other than more sealed boxes until every party to the conversation—or the “so-called conversation” as Niki would put it—sits there with their own pile of sealed boxes, mentally obstructed, tied to the mast, and with the anecdote next in line tugging at their attention.

Swedish. TV means that somebody else is trying to control my gaze, whereas books leave me to my own devices.

A methodical approach to an irrational task offers a certain hope of success in a project that is in fact hopeless. And to some extent a methodical approach can provide a sense of meaning, even joy in some cases. This apparent structure might be what makes searching for something so much like writing: the stroll of the thought down to the paper that appears purposeful when it is not; a map with twenty equilateral rectangles superimposed on an unfamiliar town, a quest for someone who is here but has disappeared.

up, it was upholstered in a new red linen cloth patterned with purple flowers that had no referent in the real world, they were simply flowers, a human fantasy about flowers, the kind of freedom artists have when it comes to nature, to observe it and then choose to invent something else instead.

Lists were made, thousands of lists that chronicled the century, the millennium, perhaps as a way of tending to the memory of it all, but above all to get rid of it with the expectation that the past would disappear if only it was categorized comprehensively enough.

there, takes on other names. Johanna, Hägersten,

“Desire” seemed like “desire” until I disappeared inside of it and stayed in there. It made a different kind of desire appear, an agreement about temporary magic, when places in us that could not touch did touch. To be permitted authenticity in the midst of this act, with not a single thought in my head, without imitation, to be permitted to wreck my life in peace once more. I was so close to myself in situations like this, right at the edge, but to find him there, in my own flesh, the fact that I was an introvert and still found him there, as if we’d always waited for each other and the sweat and the flame that became ours so fast.

There was an inherent pleasure to her hands and movement, a tenderness for objects of all sorts, and objects, in turn, seemed to come alive through her. When she told me that the carbonator she’d been gifted by a customer was really ugly, she made her voice quiet so that the machine wouldn’t hear and be upset, and when she placed it in a cupboard that was already occupied by a plastic coffee maker and a microwave and some other ugly kitchen tools, she did it with the same type of care and methodical devotion that she displayed when repairing furniture or caring for her father’s grave, a constant respect for every detail of physical life.

We live so many lives within our lives—smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up—and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame.

But it turned out that I already had everything right here, in the details around me, that it’s simply a question of being attentive in looking at all of it, of letting myself go and directing my attention outward, and I mean truly outward. That’s where this sharper sense of being alive is found, in the alert gaze on another. It was how I came to understand Birgitte, by observing her attentively.

The things they had been subjected to lingered in me long past the end of my shifts, and their anxiety was like hers, an anxiety that doesn’t wax and wane but endures in the form of a tension inside everything.

“There’s the legacy of that time,” he says, “the true revolution.”

We never talk about Birgitte anymore, but he was the person she finally opened up to, and a few weeks after her funeral he told me about her, told me everything he knew about her, her catastrophes, gave me all she’d entrusted to him. They’d been divorced for fifteen years and he nevertheless cried for her life, a life lived but also spilled.

Articles about anxiety often note that it was historically useful, so evolution made it part of our nature. Anxiety motivated us to make sure the fire was out and the children still breathing; it protected us in teaching us to protect ourselves and others.

Going deeper requires a loss of control, requires the abandonment of that constant surveillance of time and space in exchange for a headlong fall inside oneself, or into somebody else, or down one of life’s many cracks and fissures.

As far as the dead are concerned, chronology has no import and all that matters are the details, the degree of density, this how and what and everything to do with who.

I’m writing again after the fever, as if an old, welcome wound has opened and started to bleed, and I guess it’s an incomplete puzzle, these pictures of others and whoever they end up portraying.