One man’s unhappy love affair with his own memories and the past keeps him from taking part in the present, which is flowing all around him. He prefers to move through border zones between dreams and reality as well as geographically. The highway exits of northeast Stockholm comprise a makeshift stage for his nostalgic fantasies and odd experiences. Slightly shamefaced the man observes that his mind is crammed with debris leading nowhere, and he perceives his attention to detail and people as pure voyeurism. A song cycle about autumnal yearning for the unchanging pier on the horizon.

Peter Lindroth

“I recall the cord to the alarm clock at my dad’s bedside, the broad shadow of the hour handle which appallingly slowly slid down the night-glowing clock-face’s right half, across its pink electric slumber down towards the wee hours of morn and six o’clock when the buzzer was set in motion. I recall the sweat on my dad’s cotton pajamas and the rank breath from his sleep in the dark. The spruces moved behind the blinds, a pheasant ran like a threat across the confines of the lots and the power line moved in arcs high up under the gray morning sky. It gradually got lighter under the clonck of the diminishing rain through the funnel of the downspout.” INSTRUMENTAL “If you take the heavily trafficked road out of the city, on its north-east side, through the roundabout and drive it some ways towards Frescati, Albano and The Bergian Gardens, you will pass a secluded zone in full amnesia shortly before the road makes a turn underneath a railway bridge. You discover it more easily if you bicycle or walk – it lies immediately to the right of the bike path, distinguished by a sign of the old, dark blue kind, which has become dented and lost all its original color. The sign is faint and says nothing about the area where it stands, only displaying the symbol of a gas station a few hundred yards up ahead. Another sign, “to the trains”, indicates a path which rises steeply from the traffic route, through the zone, to one of the Roslag route’s stations, which appears so completely deserted that it is hard to conceive of trains stopping there. But they do. Even though the station lacks signs displaying its name.” “My father was like a dark house, turned away in a slumbering smile. He could be like a brick wall, some early nights he was sensed down in the living room like a checkered atmosphere of chess. My father was like a rectangle, vertical, in phase with the stripes of the wall. The lingering echo of tense springs in the bent knee of the desk lamp. Frescati Inverness Stocksund I’m still awake A train arrives. Caught without an errand I tread along the wooden pier of the platform so that the engineer believes I want to board. I try to signal with my back and my gait that I don’t want to get on, and after some extended moments the train continues. Above the lethal cable lamps of the old kind, shaped like cups turned upside down on saucers, hang from tall, green-painted poles of iron. The hedges of spruces in the Bergian garden slowly turn brown from inside. A heap of stacked umbrella skeletons, of wood, clinking dryly in the draft from a sinking sun. The lanes of the highway have become wider. My field of vision has narrowed unto a focal point, which scans what’s left of the yellow lines of the road. On a patch where remains of the paint have stuck in craters from studded tires, blades of grass have emerged and a few spoonfuls of needles and sand have blown in. Disturbances in the magnetic fields of October space have occurred. Their electric glaciers, at a distance, seem rather immobile, but appear to be a-drift on the heavenly slope like a stack of plates, at any moment. Now the gate came down at the tracks of the Roslag route. A speedy wave of sound through the ground. Jays move mechanically through the chestnut with the diodes of their feathers oscillating between the leaves. My perception falls head over heels, crumples across withered flox, towards puddles and soil, moves downwards, ‘tween flickering shoals of bacteria, through the fern-patterns of the cells. Down, through dust, between the stains of afternoon, like clover ten. INSTRUMENTAL Right in the mighty roundabout, a lawn has been laid down where you hardly get a chance to be, where you look up against the heights with Car Eldh’s studio, and in the opposite direction, perpendicular to the steep hill, a sole high-rise climbs, filled with corridors and students I’ve never seen, and whom, probably have no relation whatsoever to the motion of heavy traffic in the depths below their window. In the middle of this lawn in the roundabout I sometimes sit in a kind of peculiar light, summer sky above, though lacking any real sun and at no special time of day. I rest in my bathing-trunks at the foot of an almost vertical staircase of aluminum to jump from, into the hallucinatory pool, and I turn my vanilla fudge in my hand to better grasp the flickering of stripes on the wrapping paper. A Scania Vabis with a trailer and double pairs of wheels deepen the tone of the traffic now and then, rippling the chlorine blue water in its rumble. I watch summer-blonde boys climbing in and out of the water, and now it occurs to me that one of them may be my son, but no, he wouldn’t be here in the middle of the roundabout, he’s occupied somewhere else with digital games He’s not aware that right here lays a checkpoint out towards fond memories of the hydrogen bomb. I have to finish all this before I can deal with him seriously. He’ll pull through. Why am I so nervous? It’s a bright day. Sky blue as a color sample. Air pierced by September chill. I stroll among fruit treas. I haven’t offended anyway. Haven’t made a fool of myself. Scared nobody. Not come too close. Haven’t been banal. Haven’t been mystic. Why am I so nervous? I’m afraid I will send emails to people, with stupid contents. I make gestures over the sending commando, which wishes to withdraw the finger, like the trigger mechanism of a death machine. I harbor a horrible fantasy. A picture that makes me gasp and walk way to fast along the sidewalk. It’s all about a man I don’t know. He married not long ago, to a woman I once visited. Their picture was in the paper and they thanked all who’d made that day memorable. I don’t know the man, but I know who he is and what is his name. Such things are appalling. Why do I remember it? I keep worrying that he some time will get on the same bus with me, because that’s happened some sporadic time before. I my dream I saw incredible bulls, huge as double-deckers, standing like high bridges across the gate. It was light, daytime, but sun was lacking, and the ground shook and quivered from dreadful acceleration. In the dream I saw double-decker-high bulls standing like bridges across the gate. It was daylight but no sun. Nature made a put-on impression, as if the landscape was on display for someone’s anger and began pushing me in the decided direction that the bicycle now carried me at such a speed. I held on to the handlebars as tight as I could not to be blown off the road by a cosmic blast. The TV was kindly occupied making colors. I roamed without worries in an animated children’s movie from the Warsaw Treaty, where apple-cheeked robbers with twisted moustaches liberated themselves in jolly, collar booted strides out of an ambush at right, to intercept farmers arriving in a hay-load. The foliages were round circles cut out of green silhouette paper. The spectral colors curved jerkily out of the horn of an old gramophone, blossomed into a cloud of thoughts and sailed in chinking noise from a streetcar clock diagonally across the screen. I stepped out into the kitchen to make unhealthy sandwiches from the sliced bread Diwong, which had to be toasted to taste anything, packed in a plastic bag with a picture of young people who came tumbling out of the setting sun, across the hills, in positive pop star leaps. Shivering from comfort and well-being I thought about 16-year-old Annika who sat in her room dense with placards in the basement, mourning the recently deceased Jimi Hendrix, enjoying my plans about how we could tease her about it. Birds in shining primary colors, with antennae-looking extensions on their heads sang mechanically out of the realms of the silhouette paper trees. In a black-and-white news program in a light grayscale with low contrast you saw scenes from Hanoi, with mortar, plaster and beams soaring about in roaring firestorms. Women on all four came creeping out of the fallen houses. I sat by myself at the TV, munching one tangerine after the other. The speaker voice established that more bombs had been distributed during this campaign than during all of World War II. It must have been something with the number, itself, of bombs that became uncomfortable. Because when it came up, I had to rush to the toilet for a good size shit attack. Otherwise, that happened seldom. That was, in a way, easier to stand, any way, than what had just happened, after I’d forwarded an email through a list, to about fifty people, at least. It contained things I may return to. I moved in tighter and tighter circles ‘round the sending commando, like a monkey, incredibly carefully, inching closer to a leopard hide, before I, driven by an enigmatic self-destruction, irrevocably clicked away my shamelessnesses. You can turn a bomb plane around. But an email flown off can never be pinched in the wing. With just one punch I’ve pulled destruction towards me and raised fucking hell. Perhaps worse, even, than any bomb pilot. I recall with regret how I used to sit in front of the TV. I sit most of the day in the silence of the dog days, strapped to the stripes of the lounge-chair, in a neutral look, watching the canopy of the sky moving around the bay. From the unchanging pier I have a view across the motions of the moon. I’ve been sitting here through later years, at the periphery of Earth. That’s all. I can’t recall what women I’ve had and which I have only wished for. We never meet anyway.”

John Erik Eleby, Peter Lindroth, Ludvig Josephson