Anders looked at the box in Simon's hand; his eyes moved up over the green towelling of the dressing gown and stopped at Simon's face, which suddenly looked immensely old and tired. The hand holding the box was almost touching the floor, as if the insect weighed a hundred times more than its appearance suggested.
'What shall I do?' asked Anders.
Simon drew the hand holding the box towards him and shook his head. 'Do you know what you're getting into?'
'No,' said Anders. 'But it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. At all.'
Now Simon had got what he wanted, he seemed to be struck by remorse. Perhaps he didn't want to expose Anders to the risks involved after all. Perhaps he didn't want to be parted from his magical Spiritus. He ran his thumb distractedly over the boy on the box.
'You have to spit,' he said eventually. 'Into the box. You have to give it saliva. And you have to keep on doing that every single day for as long as you live. Or until you…pass it on.'
Anders gathered saliva in his mouth. After a while he nodded to Simon and took the box from him, pushed it open. Anders allowed the gob of saliva to emerge from his lips, to drip down…
'No, wait!' said Simon. 'Let's not-'
But it was too late. The tear-shaped, bubbling gob had already left Anders' mouth and fell straight on to the insect's leathery skin just as Simon's hand reached out.
Anders had thought nothing could taste more disgusting than the wormwood concentrate. He was wrong. Whatever penetrated his mouth now and spread throughout his body had a non-physical dimension that a taste could never match. As if he had bitten into a piece of rotten meat and at the same moment become the meat.
He opened and closed his mouth in a series of dry retches and his body shook in small convulsions, causing the box to fall from his grasp. Simon sat on the bed with his hands covering his face as Anders slumped sideways, clutching his stomach. He vomited and vomited without anything coming out of him.
The box was lying roughly twenty centimetres in front of him. A round black shape appeared over the edge, and the next moment the whole insect was out of the box. It had grown. Its skin was shiny and its body was moving smoothly across the floor, heading for Anders' lips. It wanted more of this manna, directly from the source.
Even though he felt so ill, Anders managed to sit up so that the insect couldn't find its way into his mouth. With trembling hands he placed the box over it and slid it shut without harming the insect.
There was a great deal of activity inside the box, and it moved across the floor in jerks and thrusts. Anders swallowed a bubble of vileness and asked, 'Is it angry?'
'No,' said Simon. 'Just the opposite, I should think.'
He looked into Anders' eyes. For a long time. Something happened between them, and Anders nodded.
Before Simon left the room he said, 'Take care of yourself.' He pointed at Anders, at the matchbox. 'That only happens the first time. The taste.'
Anders sat on the floor watching Spiritus bounce around in his little prison like some kind of morbid toy.
He still didn't know what he was going to do or how he was going to do it, but one thing he did know: during that long look, Simon had given his approval. Do what you have to do.
Anders conquered his revulsion and cupped his hand over the box. The insect calmed down as it felt the warmth of his body, his presence, and he became aware of everything that flowed.
His body was an immense system of larger and smaller channels, where water ran in the form of plasma. He had learned about this in schooclass="underline" the plasma carried corpuscles, thrombocytes, but he could neither see nor feel those, he could see only cloudy water being pumped around by the heart, out into his arteries, and he saw and knew that he was a tree, all the way out to the most fragile twigs. A tree made of water.
He was also able to feel very clearly all the water flowing or standing still in the house, although this feeling did not have the same intensity of revelation. The network of water pipes was visible through the walls, just like an X-ray, and the bottles of water he had brought with him…
Now… now…
He curled his hand around one of the bottles on the floor as he held his other hand over the matchbox. Yes, he could feel the water in the bottle. But nothing else. It was just the same as with his blood: he could feel only the water, but he felt that all the more strongly.
He looked at the hand cupped over the box and a couple of lines by the poet Tomas Tranströmer came into his mind. He didn't really read much poetry, but he had made a start on Tranströmer's collected poems so many times that he knew the first one by heart.
In day's first hours consciousness can grasp the world
As the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.
That was exactly how it was, with the reservation that the world his consciousness grasped was the part that consisted of water. He could follow it through the cold-water pipes, feel the drips from the leaking kitchen tap where he lost contact with it for half a second until it joined the thin film of water finding its way into the waste pipe and continuing downwards, out and eventually into a larger body of water that lay outside his range.
He let go of the box and the perception faded as he moved his hand away, centimetre by centimetre. When the hand reached his face and moved across it, the feeling was gone. He was a person, not a tree.
It would take less than this to make you lose your mind.
Once when he was about twenty he had been at a party and had ended up next to a guy who had just swallowed a blue pill. They were sitting at a glass table, and the guy had stared at that table. After a couple of minutes he had started to cry. Anders had asked him why he was crying.
'Because it's so beautiful,' he had replied, his voice thick with emotion. 'The glass. I can see it, do you understand? What it's made of, what it really is. All the crystals, the strands, the tiny, tiny bubbles of air. Glass, you know? Do you understand how beautiful it is?'
Anders had looked at the table and had been unable to discover anything special about it, apart from the fact that it was an unusually ugly and clumsy glass table, but he had decided not to mention this. The guy might well have taken something else, because he was found later in a snowdrift into which he had dug his way. The reason he gave was that his blood had begun to boil.
You could lose your mind.
Perhaps a human being has the ability to see through glass, as it were, to experience water if we have a tool to help us use our brains and sensory perceptions to the full. But we don't do it, because of the toll it takes. We refrain, so that we may live.
Anders took a couple of swigs of water and got back into bed. The powerful experience of becoming aware of the water's secret life had made him feel exhausted but not sleepy, and for several hours he lay curled up, staring at the wall opposite where the pattern on the wallpaper formed itself into the molecular structures of unknown elements.
Only when the first light of dawn began to seep in through the window, painting the wallpaper grey, did he begin to drop off. As if from far away he heard the alarm clock ring in Simon and Anna-
Greta's room, and he could see them in his mind's eye, getting up and dressing for their short honeymoon. Enjoy yourselves, my darlings. There was a faint smile on his lips as he fell asleep.
Those Who Have Turned Away
Staircases that go upwards although in fact they’re going downwards…
Kalle Sandare
Maja
'Let go of me! Let go of me!'
I don't like him. He looks horrible. I scream. The other one comes and puts his hand over my mouth. I bite him. It tastes of water. Why don't Mummy and Daddy come?