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At the bottom of Ruben’s property was a dock. It appeared to be wedged between two rocks and reached far into the water, and you could see it from the kitchen window. On one of our first nights, Ruben had talked about it, said how lovely it was in summer when you could walk right through the terrace doors and down the slope and onto the dock and fling yourself into the sea. One evening when I was cooking I wondered if Mildred had done that when she lived here. If she’d walked down to the dock as confidently as she had inside the house, wearing her bikini. I imagined her in a silvery, sort of slutty bikini with a Brazilian cut.

Ruben came over and stood behind me. Out on the sea, a large ferry was idling by. After a while Ruben said:

“Ellinor, did you know a people can be read in their local water?”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“As is the water, so are the people. That’s always true.”

He talked about the water in Stockholm’s archipelago. Rocky islands, islets. Saltwater bays, Lake Malar and its outflow into Saltsjön. Sweetness and salinity, fresh air and freedom.

“Stockholm is one of the most beautiful places on earth,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“What’s the water like down where you are? Do you have a pond somewhere? A puddle for the farmers to splash around in when it’s hot?”

I set the knife on the cutting board and remembered the lake outside our village. People used to call it the pearl of Skåne, but it lost that name over the years because too much fertilizer seeped into it from the surrounding fields. For several summers it was a pale green, foul-smelling soup. Once Johnny asked: Ellinor, wanna tag along and go fishing? I replied that the lake smelled of old shit. And Johnny replied that maybe it did, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any fish in it. Even as he was speaking, it felt like that sentence was crucial and would stay with me for a long time, even though the sentence didn’t really say anything. It might smell of shit, but that doesn’t mean there are no fish in it. We went down. Johnny pushed the boat out and jumped in. He floated a few meters away from the shore. I stayed there, watching him. The oars hung from the boat and down into the water. He sat in the middle and moved them like two spoons in nettle soup. Are you really going to go out in that? I asked from the beach. We didn’t need to speak loudly at all. It was dead silent and the water carried our voices. Insects buzzed above the surface and I could see he was concentrating on hooking a worm. I repeated my question as the boat glided further out into the green water. Across the lake the sky was turning red in the evening sun. And it was like the silence had crawled into my head, like I might be losing some sort of interface with the world, or like there might be something seriously wrong with my ears. It was like everything was going straight in. The splashing against the boat. Johnny’s face as he handled the worm. The green algae bloom and the heat. I put my hands over my ears and looked at the ground. I stood like that for a long time, until the sounds started to feel more normal. I felt relieved, almost happy in a way that I couldn’t remember feeling in forever.

“Johnny?” I said.

Even though he was a way from the beach he heard me perfectly.

“Yes?” he said and raised his head.

“I love you.”

As soon as I saw his expression I regretted saying it. He kept his mouth shut, like a child pressing its lips together so that nobody can shove in food. Taking hold of the oars, he rowed out to the middle of the lake. All I could see was the sky and his back there in the rowboat. He sat with his bait sunk in that soup for hours, not saying a word until nightfall, when he came gliding in again and needed help pulling the boat ashore.

“No,” I said to Ruben. “No ponds. Just inland lakes where the water is soft, warm, and dark.”

“Soft, warm, and dark, Ellinor… Do we have time before we eat?”

If we had sex now it would end with a heavy, cold, and irrevocable orgasm. An orgasm that, so to speak, would be impossible to get out of alive. Like a fork in the road. If you go in one direction you’ll never get anywhere. If you go in the other you won’t get anywhere either, but you’ll get nowhere in a completely different way.

“Is it true that you’ve only loved one woman in your whole life?” I asked.

For a moment he looked puzzled. Then he took my hand and dragged me out of the kitchen.

“Who said that? That’s not the sort of thing you go around here thinking about, is it? Poor Ellinor. Tell me about someone who liked you instead. Someone you’ve been with. Someone who used you. I want to hear, tell me everything, and don’t leave anything out. Make me hot because I don’t have it in me to do it all by myself.”

My first impulse was to tell him about Johnny. But I felt like I couldn’t tell him about the fights, the cellar, the pickup or the cabin with the bead and butt paneling. Nor did I want to talk about the lake or the thing with the interface. I couldn’t really figure out what it was about Johnny that I couldn’t offer up, I just couldn’t. That’s why I told him about Klaus Bjerre in Copenhagen.

“What a sorry fucker,” said Ruben when I finished the story. “You really cooled me off. It’s impossible to fuck after hearing a story like that, Ellinor.”

“Not everything is about sex,” I said.

“No,” said Ruben.

“There are other things. In life.”

“Yes. I know some people can be satisfied with only having sex twice a year. Or maybe that doesn’t satisfy them, but they also understand that their lives don’t hinge on sex.”

“With Klaus Bjerre it was something else,” I said.

“Yes,” said Ruben, “with Klaus Bjerre it was definitely something else. You weren’t able to hide the monster inside you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You should’ve helped him. But you left, fled the field. And now you have a guilty conscience, because you don’t want to acknowledge that part of yourself.”

“I don’t think that I—” I began.

“My favorite author,” he continued, “the French author who’s what one might call un enfant terrible, he tries to articulate exactly that. That you can evade the monster. You can be evasive your entire life, without anyone noticing, not even you. But it’s there, and it wants to eat. He knows that most things in humans are monstrous, but somewhere in the midst of all that shit there’s something.”

He took a deep breath and said:

“Now and then you can catch a glimpse of the heart of the monster. Do you get me, Ellinor?”

I looked at my feet.

“I’ve read all your Michel Houellebecq books,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I found the row on the bookshelf. The one behind all the other books. And I read them, one by one, while you were working.”

Ruben stared at me.

“Are you joking?”

“No.”

“Hold on, Ellinor. Hold on.”

He stood in front of me. Raised his hand and let it drop again.

I looked out the window behind him.

“There’s an animal outside,” I said.

I kept staring at the window, and meanwhile Ruben stared at me. For a long moment all I saw was Ruben’s reflection and my own. I brought my hands to my nose and smelled the cream.

“There’s something out there,” I repeated.

“Ellinor,” he said and came closer. “I don’t think you’re feeling well. I’m going to pick up a takeout so we don’t have to cook. Both of us are tired. I’ll be right back, and then we’ll talk about what you read.”

He took his jacket and walked out the door. I heard the gate shut behind him. I went closer to the windowpane, saw my face get bigger. I knew what I would see if I put my face to the pane, blocked out the light with my hands, and looked out. I would see the path with the snow, the pines, and the gate. The air would be high and still, as it is in winter up north. At his age, to begin the long and arduous journey into another person: he’ll never have the energy for that. I took a breath, and felt fortified somehow, as if my nails had gotten stronger or my nasal passages had cleared. I would go into the bedroom, take my things out of the drawer and then get my bag. Open the door. Open the gate. See a bus stop. Walk to the bus stop and wait. Then I would take the train home, and find Johnny in his trailer. I wondered if you could get to Johnny’s trailer without passing the ditz’s house. If there was a back road of some kind, or if you had to pass her house, where she might be sitting on the porch with the child and the dog and the whole circus, her man in a trailer in the forest. If that was the case, I’d walk right by without a word. If she shouted anything, like hello who are you and what are you going to do in that trailer, then I’d say: I’m Ellinor and I’m going to see if Johnny wants to come to Copenhagen with me. Then I’d say to Johnny: I have 50,000 kronor. You coming to Copenhagen?

I thought I caught the scent of the sea. I’ll soon be on a train, I thought. I’ll soon be looking at the forest and the long, deep lakes along the tracks.

Then I put my hands to my temples, pressed my face to the glass, and stared out into the darkness.