Love Doesn't Work Read Online Free PDF Page A

already set up for him.
    That night, Harold had disturbing dreams.
    He dreamt that he woke up in the middle of the night, then got dressed and went outside. Linda was standing in the sodium glare of a streetlight. Her lips were encrusted with small, sharp diamonds. When he kissed her mouth it was like kissing a brooch with a soft tongue lurking in its hard crack. Her hair was gilded and hung stiffly down like a glittering helmet, the decorated head of an Egyptian mummy.
    “Why did you come back?” Harold asked.
    “I couldn’t leave. We’re prisoners,” she said. “Look!”
    He turned his head and registered the fact that they were in a cell, the sort of cell one used to see in American Westerns. There was even a sheriff on the other side of the bars, tipping his chair and watching Harold and Linda with dull interest as he chewed his toothpick.
    Linda sank down into the snow, and Harold positioned himself behind her, spreading his legs so she could lean back against his chest. The flimsy gauze of her dress rubbed against him, and he grew powerfully tumescent. Linda seemed pleased. She looked back at him and smiled; then started dealing some cards, which weren’t cards at all, but large moths gently flexing their patterned wings. Occasionally one of the moths tired of the proceedings and fluttered away, leaving them short-handed.
    Next, Harold and Linda were teleported to the corner of Nytorgsgatan. Two police officers in a parked Volvo were keeping an eye on the hole. One of them opened a thermos and poured himself a cup of thick pea soup.
    After a while they turned on their flashing lights and drove off.
    Harold and Linda moved closer to the gaping hole.
    “Why are we here again?” she said. “What can we do, Harold?”
    “Don’t you understand, Linda? This whole city is going to disappear. All our friends, every person living here is blissfully unaware of the fact that there’s a yawning gulf just below their feet. We have to call someone.”
    “All right. Tell me who, then?”
    “I don’t know.”
    They stood in silence. The icy wind assaulted them, like a blast from infinity.
    Next, Harold was watching a televised image of a landing strip at an airport, with a monstrous jet plane looming just above it, its wheels touching the tarmac with a little puff of smoke. Without an explosion, acrid smoke or flames, even without a sound, the runway ripped like a huge piece of paper and the plane disappeared. The police were quickly on the scene. A tarpaulin the size of a football pitch was stretched across the runway. Witnesses were rounded up and taken away in coaches.
    The evening news bulletin reported that a group of anarchists had tried to dupe the general public with a cowardly trick. The airline had sent its spokesman to the news studio.
    “There’s been no loss of planes, so it seems rather redundant to speak of an air disaster, wouldn’t you agree?” said the spokesman. “We are living in a world that is being taken over by terrorists and other elements actively working against democracy, equality, and other civilized values.”
    A few moments later the Prime Minister appeared to make a statement. It ran from his mouth like gravy: “We are talking of a plane that does not exist, hundreds of witnesses that do not exist, a hundred and fifty passengers that no one has managed to name. In other words, we are talking of a staged, simulated event, a trick organized by a group of a highly motivated and dangerous individuals, all of whom will be hunted down, arrested and punished vigorously through our legal system.”
    That same night, Harold and Linda packed clothes and food in a rucksack and took the back door out of the apartment block, exiting via the stinking refuse room in the basement.
    Two hours later a group of plain-clothes police officers arrived, kicked in the door and submitted the whole flat to a careful search, even ripped the sofa apart and took up the floorboards and looked in suitcases for