That morning, he’d woken to an odd fluttering sensation in his stomach, one that seemed related to or suggested by his heart. Both his grandfathers had died of heart attacks, and he drank too much, that was for certain. Heart trouble wasn’t out of the question, probably even likely, and his fear of this was almost always present, if only just as a whisper. But by breakfast the feeling had passed and he’d gone to work and was able to lose himself in the report he was filing for accounting, and by the afternoon he’d nearly forgotten about it. Jenny had been gone for a little over an hour and would be gone, it was likely, for at least another.
He knew the way to the hospital but still he followed the GPS. The voice said, “In 900 meters turn left at the traffic circle.” He did this. Within thirty minutes he was parked in the hospital’s small garage, watching a maintenance worker throw salt on the pathway to the main entrance. He watched the man finish this work before he got out of the car. On the concrete pillar beside him someone had painted a small black swastika and the words Keep Sweden Swedish. He read this sentence several times. He didn’t worry that Sweden was becoming less Swedish, but clearly some people feared that, and he knew fear caused people to act strangely. Jenny’s car was in the lot, about a dozen spots up from where he’d parked. He considered saying something about the swastika to the maintenance worker as he passed on his way into the hospital, but decided against it at the last moment and instead simply nodded to the man. “Watch your step,” the man said. His accent was thick and his voice was very deep. “I’ve only just shoveled here. It’s probably still icy.”
Jacob stepped carefully from one patch of melted ice to another. Because he hoped to make it clear that he heard and understood what the man had said in spite of the man’s accent, Jacob smiled broadly and nodded quickly. That he felt somehow guilty about the graffiti in the parking garage was an emotion he sensed distinctly but didn’t care to explore.
Inside, he sat in the only available chair in the cramped waiting area nearest the door. He knew his wife was upstairs. He checked his watch. She’d be down in a half hour. He had that long to figure out if he was going to go up and see her or if he was going to wait for her here. Cold air rushed in every time the doors slid open. He didn’t take his jacket off. There was a television mounted to the wall opposite the door. It was showing a news program at very low volume. A panel of guests was discussing the algae they already predicted would be a problem in the lakes that summer. It was only December, Jacob thought, and already everyone was anxious about what summer might bring. On the floor directly across from him sat a dog carrier. There was a sleeping dog inside, a small dog, its still head lit by a square of light streaming in from above. He decided to go to Jenny, and walked toward the elevators. When he passed the dog, it woke up suddenly and stuck its wet muzzle out through the cage. He heard the claws clicking on the hard plastic. The woman who owned the dog smiled at Jacob and said, “He must like the way you smell.”
He stood in front of the tall orange letter n on the wall beside the row of elevator doors. The doors were polished to a sterile glimmer. Jacob almost wanted to reach out and touch one of them. There was a sandy beach in Grimsta where he and Jenny liked to take the girls to swim when it was warm. A long floating dock had been built out into the water and at its end there was a slide. The beach was sometimes closed if large amounts of algae had been detected in the water, and on those days the slide and dock looked solemn and tragic bobbing up and down in the wind. Every year the algae made people sick, usually children who drank the water. No one had ever died as far as Jacob knew, and the beach closings always struck him as overly cautious and unnecessary. An elevator arrived with a ding. The doors opened to three people. Jacob moved to get on the elevator and then stopped. One of the people, a nurse in green scrubs, put her hand out to hold the door. “I’ll take the next one,” Jacob said. He stared at the three people and they stared back, smiling, until the doors closed.
Another elevator came and again he didn’t get on it, though this one was empty. He thought about algae and lakes and the way his daughters used to fight over which of them would get to dress as Lucia in the St. Lucy’s Day processions at their school. The girls were still young but they’d grown out of such arguments and into others, and he couldn’t remember when or how that had happened. He thought about Henrik Brandt, upstairs with the television and with Jenny, and he thought about the immigrant worker outside in the cold, fighting endlessly against the snow and ice. He felt the fluttering make itself known in his stomach again and put a finger to his pulse to see if he could determine some connection. He stood this way in front of the elevator for a few minutes until a nurse, evidently finishing her day’s work, stopped and, standing too close to him, asked if he felt unwell. He thanked her and went back outside and got in his car. Jenny’s car was still up the row from his. The worker was gone but a fresh layer of sand had been laid over the path and he could still see a hint of yellow peeking through the wet snow. He started the car and turned on the heater. While the car warmed up, he rubbed his hands together and watched the snow. A woman left the hospital, holding a newspaper above her head — a hopeful but pointless gesture in such heavy snow — and he watched her cross to the parking garage. As she passed his car, he followed her with his gaze and his eye caught the swastika again. Over the summer, graffiti like this had started to appear on the glass walls of the bus stop Jacob used every morning. There were swastikas and the double letter s that looked like lightning bolts. The images appeared fresh every Monday when Jacob went to wait for his morning bus. For six weeks straight they were there. Once or twice the symbols had been etched into the glass, but normally they were written in thick black marker or spray paint. The graffiti was usually cleaned up by the middle of the week, but by the following Monday it was always back. Then a neighborhood boy was arrested for riding his motor scooter on a school playground and as suddenly as the graffiti had started appearing on the bus stop, it stopped. For a few days afterward, Jacob and Jenny and their neighbors seemed invigorated with the proof that they lived in a nice neighborhood, a welcoming and safe place, in which this kind of hatred was only ever a prank. He told himself he was going to go back into the hospital and tell the receptionist about the graffiti so that she would tell whoever was in charge of such things that the vandalism needed to be removed. He was so convinced that this was a thoughtful and generous act, and he thought it out in such detail that by the time he was pulling out of the parking garage and easing out into traffic he’d already forgotten what he’d planned to do.
VII
Sometime between using the toilet and getting up from it, his pants had arranged themselves in such a way that the zipper’s pull tab had worked itself into the crease at the bottom of his fly. These were his favorite pants. First, he tugged at the pants, hoping the movement might cause the pull tab to dislodge itself. It didn’t. He dug his finger into his fly, hoping to force it loose. Nothing. Then he pinched the slider, tried to zip it upward. It was difficult to get a good grip and it didn’t budge. On the other side of the bathroom door, Jenny was packing for Copenhagen. Normally, Jenny would have fixed this sort of problem. She was capable and patient, but he didn’t think he could ask for her help without starting another fight. It all made him sad. Lately, that was the only emotion he could feel. Never frustrated, rarely angry, but always sad. He reached down to his fly, determined to free the pull tab by pulling the flap of the fly outward with his left hand as he positioned his right index finger as far behind the pull tab as possible. Still it would not budge. The tip of his finger stung and was tender from the effort. A feeling that reminded him of claustrophobia began to settle in his shoulders and back. He felt warm, and turned on the faucet for a drink. He placed his mouth to the stream of water. The water tasted earthier than normal, as if it might be coming from deep underground.