Then the feeling of paralysis vanishes as quickly as it arrived. She can breathe again and starts moving her fingers, then her arms and legs. She realises that she’s wide awake when she hears the sound of deep breathing beside her, and calms down. She knows she’s going to need Jeanette’s help if she’s to stand any chance of becoming whole.
When did everything really begin? When did she invent her first alternative personality? When she was very young, of course, since dissociation is the defence of a child.
She glances at the time. Just after four thirty. She won’t be able to sleep now.
She can take Gao, Solace, the Worker, the Analyst and the Moaning Minnie off the list, because she understands them. They’ve all played out their roles.
That leaves the Reptile, the Sleepwalker and Crow Girl. They’re more difficult, because they’re closer to her, and weren’t created from people around her. They are her.
The Reptile is probably the next in line to disappear. That personality’s behaviour follows a simple logic with its roots in the primitive, she’s worked that much out, and it’s that idea she needs to bear in mind when she isolates, deconstructs and analyses that particular personality.
Simultaneously destroying it and incorporating it.
Sofia Zetterlund, she thinks. I have to meet her. She’ll be able to help me remember how I used these personalities as a child and teenager. But can I really go and see her?
If I do, will it be as Sofia or as Victoria?
Or like today, both of us, simultaneously?
She lies there for a bit longer before carefully getting up and starting to put her clothes on.
She needs to move ahead, needs to heal, and she can’t do that here, alone in the darkness.
She needs to go home.
She leaves a note for Jeanette on the bedside table, shuts the bedroom door and calls for a taxi.
Libido, she thinks as she sits at the kitchen table waiting for the taxi. The life instinct. When does it stop? What does her own libido consist of?
She watches a fly crawling up the kitchen window. If she was starving and there was nothing to eat except that fly, would she eat it?
Barn?ngen
THE FIRST THING the woman sees is the corner of a black plastic bag. Then she realises that she ought to call the police. She’s on her way home from a bar and it’s after four o’clock. Late, sure, but nothing for her to worry about, seeing as she got fired from her job as a housekeeper two years ago and no longer has to worry about such banal concerns as regular sleep and normal responsibilities.
The evening hadn’t ended the way she had hoped, and she’s standing half drunk and disappointed on the quayside at Norra Hammarbyhamnen, not far from Skanstull and a stone’s throw from the ferry to Sickla, watching the black bag bob in the water.
At first she’s inclined not to care, but then she remembers all the detective shows she’s seen on television, where a member of the public finds the body. So she gets down on her knees at the edge of the quayside and pulls at the bag. And for the same trite reason she carefully opens the bag, and to her surprise realises that her suspicions were correct.
In the bag is a withered arm. A leg and a hand.
But what she hasn’t counted on is how her own body would react when she saw a dead body for the first time.
The woman’s first thought is that it must be a doll that’s rotted in the water. When she sees that it isn’t a doll, and that the small child’s eyes are missing, its tongue appears to have been bitten off and its face is covered with bite marks, she throws up.
Then she calls the police.
At first no one believes her, and it takes her more than seven minutes to persuade the male officer in charge of the emergency call centre that she’s actually telling the truth.
When she hangs up she notices that her phone is shiny with vomit.
She sits down on the quayside, with a firm grip on the plastic bag to make sure it doesn’t disappear, and then she waits.
She knows what she’s holding, but pretends it’s something else. Tries to forget what she just saw. A child’s face shredded by another person’s teeth.
Human teeth really aren’t meant to cause damage.
Vita Bergen – Sofia Zetterlund’s Apartment
IT’S EARLY MORNING, and she’s sitting at the computer in her study and staring at the screen.
Lasse’s alive, she thinks.
The address is the same, P?ln?sv?gen in Saltsj?baden, and she’s also managed to find out that he travels a lot for his work. She’s found his name on a list of participants at a conference in Düsseldorf that took place just three weeks ago.
She finds herself laughing. Admittedly, he had betrayed her, but she hadn’t killed him as a result.
Now that she’s got confirmation of that everything feels so trivial. She hasn’t just invented alternative lives for herself, but for other people, too, dragging them down with her in her own internal collapse. Lasse is alive, and maybe he is living a double life as well, just like before, but with some other woman. His life has moved on outside her own enclosed world. And she’s actually pleased about that.
The process has escalated.
She still has a lot to do before she can allow herself a few hours of sleep. She’s on something of a roll, and she has to make the most of it. She feels focused, and the buzzing in her head is soothing.
She gets up and goes into the kitchen.
Behind the kitchen door there are two bin bags full of paper. She’s started clearing out the concealed room, and will soon be able to get rid of everything. But she isn’t quite finished yet.
During the night she had one question ringing in her head: What is the serial killer’s libido, and might she be able to find her own by studying that of others? The most extreme, deviant examples?
There are piles of paper on the kitchen table along with the biography of Andrei Chikatilo, and she tears out the pages she marked earlier with folded corners.
She reads that it takes time for the enzymes in the brain to break down experiences and create a second ego. That the second ego isn’t scared of gutting a stomach of its contents, or cooking and eating a womb, while the first ego trembles with horror at the very thought.
Andrei Chikatilo was as divided as one cell from another.
Eggs and cells, she thinks. Dividing.
Primitive life. The life of a Reptile.
Sticky chocolate cake. Two eggs, two hundred and fifty grams of sugar, four tablespoons of cocoa, two teaspoons of vanilla sugar, one hundred grams of butter, one hundred and fifty grams of flour and half a teaspoon of salt.
There’s another article on the kitchen table. About Ed Gein, born 1906 in La Crosse, Wisconsin, died 1984 at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison.
The article is about what the police found in Gein’s home, and she’s stapled it to a picture of a snake swallowing an ostrich egg, the largest single cell in the world.