The Swede Read Online Free PDF Page A

palm-leaf roof and asked for the reception. The bartender instantly served up a tall glass of juice, indicating that it was on the house.
    “You found the place okay?” asked the man. Hoping to make up for the lie about the distance. N. shrugged and drank, his thirst intense.
    “Room?” asked the man.
    N. saw keys in a drawer. He nodded.
    “Your name?”
    N. didn’t even hesitate. He gave the name from the hospital, rooting in his bag until he found the passport to confirm it.
    The bartender, hardly looking, scribbled something on paper and held out a key. “Just follow the trail,” he said, pointing.
    T he hand-painted sign in the village, the tunnel through the rain forest, the lie about his name—all that had been more than a week ago. N. told himself that sleep had kept him there. He was surprised that he slept so well at Weejay’s. As if nothing disrupted his thoughts. The dark night hours slipped by, dreamless. He passed the days in a pleasant haze, like the few other guests, under the shelter of the palm roof. Just sat in the shade and watched, a stone’s throw away from the waves. Soon he stopped counting the days. The money in the canvas bag seemed never to run out. He could afford to wait.
    Weejay’s was built in a protected cove. “If the wave hits again, we’re safe here. We always come out okay at Weejay’s,” said the boy who served him breakfast on the second morning. “Not even the cat drowned.” A few days later the bartender suggested that he divein, but N. pointed to the dirty bandages on his arms and around his knees, and the man apologized. Another day, a couple tried to get their daughter to swim. She screamed and fought when, laughing, they carried her into the water. N., unable to watch, walked until he couldn’t hear the screams.
    Still, it wasn’t often that the dark thoughts came, that images of The Missing Ones washed over him. The two faces of his children. He tried to shut them out.
    What did he have left to look back on? Not much. His girls, of course . . . But the common thread was lost. A hell of a lot of years seemed to have simply slipped away. What really matters in life? Good deeds? Wasn’t there some act that made a difference? Anything?
    There were images, but they seemed diffuse, or as if they belonged to somebody else: a summer cabin, dinners for two, a boat on a trailer. Like scenes from a promotional video for suburban life. He never fit in there, and frankly, he hated it. When do you start to live? Can you decide? What if you actually took an idea and ran with it, all the way to the end—had he ever done such a thing? He knew too little about himself, and it felt like he really didn’t want to know. All he had was the memory of his girls. He longed only for them, and somehow he had to do them justice before his time was up. At Weejay’s in the evening, he learned to kill the hour before bed with whisky, to the rim of his toothbrush glass.
    T he only world he knew now was the one under the palm-leaf roof. Here, with the sand floor and the scattered plastic chairs. The oversize bar, which doubled as reception desk and office, stood in one corner, a South Seas cliché of bamboo and mirrors. Aftersunset every night, long strings of LED lights flashed white, red, and green, as if a Christmas tree had crashed into the bottles and mirrors. Two blue-green insect lamps hissed, hanging like stoplights at either end of the bar. Beyond the palm-covered bar, Weejay’s consisted of a dozen bungalows, a few sun-bleached wooden chairs, a palm grove with hammocks, and two pedal boats, chained. There was no other sign of civilization, anywhere.
    Early in his stay, N. made an acquaintance, a tall Czech wearing large glasses with heavy black frames. They spent the afternoons together, had a few beers. In the morning, as N. came out of his bungalow for breakfast, he often found the Czech coming back from his beach run, dragging odds and ends: the hook from a rusty anchor,