The Details by Ia Genberg

Author:Ia Genberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

3

Alejandro

Right when I wanted a hurricane there was a hurricane. I had longed to be swept off my feet, to get entangled in something, and I had the good luck of getting exactly what I’d asked for, the bad luck of getting everything I thought I wanted, the good luck and the bad luck of having my prayers about passionate love heard. It was not even four months before the turn of the millennium, and I was on my belly in bed next to Kristian in our apartment in Årsta, listening to the little baby campaign that was the culmination of our lovemaking. He worked as a party secretary in the parliament, where he wrote op-eds, speeches, letters from “disgruntled citizens,” material for motions, press releases, blog posts for members of parliament, meaning he was a man of campaigns and opinions, his own and other people’s shifting opinions, opinions of the future, opinions people weren’t yet aware they would soon hold. Opinions were the raw material of his craft, the soil from which the words grew. Today he is the chief information officer at an environmental organization. I sometimes run into him at events (we have mutual acquaintances), but whenever he sees me he just nods and looks the other way, as if he wants me to know: the wound is still there. He was pushing the campaign for a baby (“or two, or three, or five”) with one hand on my lower back and his nose in my hair, abetted by the fantasies stirred in basically anyone who hears the names of imaginary future children: Dante, Max, Wilmer, Maya, Nelson, Lova, Miranda, Berit, Margareta, Julia, Bassian, Bella, and though it might have looked like a game (Johnny, Conny, Sonny, Ronny) it was in fact a version of the lobbyists’ smarmy little bowl of candies in the business fair booth where it’s so easy to pause for a moment, let yourself be flattered, start chitchatting and joking around, let it slip that I love the name Frank above any other, and Billy, which made him laugh out loud, and now the topic was established and all of a sudden we had a deal. From then on I felt replaceable, kind of like his opinions, coworkers, and employers, like a cog or an accessory to the big system he served so eagerly in his jeans and brand-name blazers and which was comprehensively analyzed in the thick volumes that lined his bookshelves, but by the time he tattooed my name around his biceps to prove the opposite, I was already on my way out, at that point I’d already had sex with Alejandro in the backseat of a cab from Vaxholm, so in hindsight it’s hard to say which one of us was replaceable in the end.

Alejandro hadn’t been invited to join Zomby Woof since he didn’t have the requisite competence in any instrument, but legend had it that the night when he impulsively got up on stage and started moving to their music was the first time the band felt complete.

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