Evening came, the long, light summer evening, and the sidewalk restaurants filled up with tourists drinking beer and wine and gorging themselves while they believed they were experiencing Stockholm, the Venice of the North. Bitterly I thought that they knew nothing. They saw nothing of ordinary city life, but only this Skansen, this outdoor museum-city redesigned for tourists, which slowly grew out of Old Town and little by little conquered the neighborhoods close by, the area around the King’s Garden, known as Kungsträdgården, northern Södermalm, places which once had been shabby, dark, with nothing of interest but isolated ice-cream kiosks and dank cafés, now resplendent with green magnificence, well-raked footpaths, special paths with views along the cliff side of Södermalm, Italian-style cafés, and everyone pretending that this was the natural, the normal, the real Stockholm which, in some peculiar way, I’d been reminded of by Kim’s conversation. I knew that beneath this smiling city lay a scornful, hateful city deformed by drink, like a cirrhosis of the liver, with its outcasts, prostitutes, drug addicts, all that which must be swept aside at any price so that the illusion of the shiny-clean city could be maintained for all the tourists and, for that matter, all the hicks who’d moved in, who wanted Stockholm only as backdrop for their lifestyle choices.
Who could it be? Had I ever met Kim or the man? Had they called me at random? Fear and anxiety coexisted in my breast with a feeling, not entirely unpleasant, of being chosen. And as the hours passed, the evening became as dark as it could; sometime around midnight, without having received another call, I reluctantly decided to set off homeward and retire for the night. On the one hand, of course I was worried about Kim, whom I thought was my responsibility to save, to take care of. But on the other, I worried that my chance to be somewhat important wouldn’t come.
I settled myself in bed. Unfortunately I no longer lived in Old Town, it had become too expensive. Years before I had sublet an apartment, a little studio, on Norra Dryckesgränd, but now I lived way off in western Kungsholmen — a part of town that wasn’t exactly thought of as the city but was on its way up to luxury. Gentrification, I suppose. But the process was not so far advanced, and there was still the occasional drunken bum found sleeping in the nearby parks.
Although my body lay in bed, my consciousness was still in Old Town. My disappointment slowly increased, so much so that I played with the idea of saying to hell with all these odd conversations — pretending that I’d never heard of Kim, turning my face to the peach-colored wallpaper from the eighties, and falling asleep — when the plink of a text message sounded from my phone. Instantly I was wide awake and completely present, in the now again, and I read the message hoping to find a new clue. But it was only a text from Krister, who wondered where I’d been. We’d planned to meet up and have a beer with his colleagues in their office which was also in Old Town. Funnily, as long as I’d wandered around there I’d never once walked by their office on Baggensgatan.
Now I was awake and far too uneasy, my body far too restless to return to sleep. So I sat up in bed with my laptop over the covers on my lap and surfed the Internet, just to pass the time until I got tired enough to drop off to sleep again. Everyone knows that you can’t sleep if you’re sitting with a computer in bed at night, and it was already close to two o’clock in the morning, the sun rising again, so in every way it was a stupid choice. But truly, I had no desire to sleep.
I’d received ten e-mails from an address I didn’t recognize. But I instantly understood where they came from. The address was yourslavekim@xxx.com, so there wasn’t any doubt as to what they were about. All the e-mails had large attachments. I was cold throughout my body, alone in the universe, full of remorse for having felt so important earlier, and again I thought of going to the police with all of it.
None of the attachments had names, just long combinations of numbers and letters. I opened the first one, which was a zipped file with twenty photos. No, I didn’t want to see them, my forearms were heavy as lead and I really didn’t want to look. And yet I looked. A naked body lay on its stomach on something I couldn’t identify. Its arms and legs were stretched out and tied up. My telephone number was written on its back. Seeing this image was like having a dagger plunged into my chest. As if I were guilty. Although I didn’t yet know of what. Nobody seemed to be harmed, and in any case games like this aren’t illegal.
The body looked extremely young. A girlish boy or a boyish girl. I tried to find something by which I could recognize it. Medium-length blond hair. No body hair. Maybe I’d get to see more in the next picture if I looked. I opened the file. Same body position. A rather large man, between forty and fifty, wearing a dark suit and shoes polished to a high shine, dragging Kim — for I assumed that the naked body could belong to nobody else — by the hair so that its head was bent backward. I sensed resistance in the body, which my own reacted to with the uncontrollable tensing of my muscles. The pictures continued with little variation. The body was tied up, the man in the suit drew it taut, pulled it by the hair, pressed his polished shoes against it. And on the body was my telephone number. It was as if I were there. I felt the body’s pains in my own, like a weak reverberation. But uglier than that, despite the fact that I pushed the thought away, I also felt, yes, I actually identified with the corporal grip of the man in the suit, the feeling of the cloth against the naked body, my own hand striking the body while I wore leather gloves.
The next e-mail contained a GIF. It depicted Kim’s completely hairless backside, with an anal plug stuck in its asshole. The genitals were carefully covered with something that made it impossible to identify the gender. The body writhed in discomfort and resistance and I quickly closed the file. I then opened the remaining e-mails to verify that they too contained attachments of various sizes, but I didn’t want to see them. I shut down the computer and lay down on my bed. First I pulled up the covers, then I kicked them off, now it was too cold, now too warm. It wasn’t that I was aroused. I don’t get aroused by BDSM or violent porn. But at this point I really had to get some sleep, so I jerked off mechanically in bed, while trying not to think of anything, even though the pictures floated before my mind’s eye the whole time. After coming, I turned to the wall and, eventually, drifted off.
After a few hours of uneasy sleep I was awakened by the telephone ringing. I didn’t reach it in time and the ringing stopped. Three missed calls. I’d barely slept at all; I’d floated feverishly within different dream scenarios, all of which circled around Kim in myriad ways, somehow not being woken up by the repeated phone calls.
Suddenly I found myself sitting on the edge of the bed. I felt sweaty, filthy, needed a shower before going out. But the restlessness in my body put me on autopilot; I pulled on my jeans and the same, no, a new T-shirt at least, and I went out into the cool Swedish summer-dawn light and began to walk toward Old Town again. The sense that I could be important and must be at hand was so strong that my legs automatically took me all the way back there, along Norr Mälarstrand, the tourist buses to city hall, past the hideous traffic interchange between city hall and the central train station, and over the Vasabron, past the old seats of power — Parliament, the Royal Palace, the House of the Nobility, and the Bonde Palace.
In need of caffeine, I entered Café Tabac, sat down at the bar, and downed a cup of ordinary brewed coffee while I leafed through Dagens Nyheter, the morning paper, seeing neither the pictures nor the headlines. The images of Kim being sexually abused somewhere near here, maybe in a cellar just under the café where I sat, had burned themselves permanently into my retina so that they lay like a film over everything I saw.