Copenhagen Noir - Bo Tao Michaelis [65]
This morning finds Nils Forsberg sleeping at his kitchen table. A string of saliva has run down his chin. Forsberg doesn’t dream. He’s sunk into a deep black hole—the dreams are happening somewhere else. The alcohol rushes throughout his body, shakes and shivers in all his body’s nooks and crannies, searching for cells, thirsty cells wanting to be saturated again. Time will burn off the alcohol. Time is our only friend. It moves on, rushing like an ocean. Everything tears and jerks inside of him and he can’t see it or understand it. He’s like the living dead, what’s left over at the end. Finally, that’s what it’s all about: time. It changes us, it teaches us, if only we’ll listen.
In the end, it all comes down to one question: who is it you belong to?
Who do you belong to? Your car? Your job? The alcohol? The drugs? You allow yourself to be defeated, vanquished, conquered, beaten. Eventually, that’s the only thing Nils Forsberg can subscribe to: that he’s owned. To live becomes like being on fire for one moment. To flare up like a star in a black room, imploding, then disappearing with a faint hissing sound, like when you drop a burning match into a glass of water. One quick fizzle, then all is quiet.
“Even time is political,” Mats Granberg once said. Forsberg’s answer had been blunt, not to say aggressive. “Ah ha? And what the hell do you want me to do about it?” How do you answer something like that? Which of course only meant that Forsberg tried to make sense of it because he missed his friend. He also knew that he couldn’t admit it to himself. He couldn’t allow himself to be human. All his mistakes, his failures, his problems lived their own life in Forsberg’s consciousness, soaring and surging through his body like a separate ecosystem.
In the course of his career, Nils Forsberg had seen more dead people than he cared to think about. He had seen them in every condition, at all ages.
Children and adults, men and women. The dead all carried a common burden. Their spirits floated weightlessly, while the memory of them nailed them to this world. It was as though a special kind of energy had been released around the dead. A human being who disappears in a crime leaves a string of loose ends behind. Connections that are not cleared up, explained, will haunt the rest of us, force out an answer. Nils Forsberg lived in a dark maze, groping about and finding nothing, not even a flicker of light. Only the voices from the dead looking for answers, crying out to him when he tried to sleep, hesitantly reaching for him when he let his thoughts float. He knew he was not alone in this, that most police officers were haunted this way, yet it was rare that anyone said anything about it. As long as one didn’t speak of it, it didn’t exist, that particular problem.
A police report is at best a slow journey, two steps forward and one step back. At worst it’s a march in place. Most often it’s a balancing act between madness and discipline. This was a phrase Forsberg liked to repeat to anyone who cared to listen: “Madness and discipline! And all we have here is the discipline! Where’s the creativity! Where’s curiosity?”
The dead.
Some of these deaths he had shared with Gisela Eriksson. They had attempted to recreate times, places, and events to such an extent that the dead had become like distant friends, or relatives you haven’t seen for a long time. The dead. He knew Gisela Eriksson also walked around surrounded by the shadows. She’d been his closest friend, the only one whom he could share his thoughts with. And then he’d gone and ruined it all, pushed everything to its ultimate conclusion so that finally there wasn’t anything to be done but shut the door behind him. He’d always thought she’d be the one to take over after him. And that’s what happened,