The Blinded Man aka Misterioso

5

He is sitting motionless in the darkness, which isn’t truly dark. Through the balcony door light is seeping in from the streetlights below the luxury apartment. If he turned his head, he would see both of the big museum buildings resting quietly in the faint light issuing from inside. But he doesn’t turn his head. The silence is absolute. His gaze is directed unwaveringly across the floor of the large living room toward the half-open double doors leading to the hallway. He has already surveyed the space. A tiled stove and a fireplace in the same room. Next to the fireplace a dull-black big-screen TV and the stacked units of a VCR and stereo. On the floor are three artistically hand-woven rya rugs, a dining table with two place settings, and a five-piece oxblood leather sofa group. On the walls hang genuine examples of modern Swedish art, three paintings by Peter Dahl, two by Bengt Lindström, two by Ola Billgren. Enthroned on the mantelpiece above the fireplace is one of Ernst Billgren’s big mosaic ducks. A total of seven tile stoves on both floors of the apartment. If the previous living room was ostentatious, this one is thoroughly stylish.

He sits in the same position for over an hour.

Then he hears the front door open. There is a fumbling with keys. He knows that the man is alone. The man swears softly out in the hallway, a noticeable but not extreme intoxication. More like the inebriation of a man who knows exactly where to find the point of greatest possible enjoyment and how to keep himself there all evening. He hears the man take off his shoes and methodically put on his slippers; he even thinks he can hear how the man unknots his tie so that it hangs loose, draped down the front of his silk shirt. The man unbuttons his jacket.

The man pulls open one side of the double doors, already ajar and almost ten feet tall. He enters the living room, stumbles out of one slipper, swears, bends down, and manages to put it back on, then straightens up again and catches sight of him through the pleasurable haze. He tries to get a fix on him.

“What in holy purple perdition!” says the man pompously.

Famous last words.

He raises the gun from his lap and fires two rapid, silent shots.

The man stands still for a moment, stock still.

Then he sinks to his knees and leans forward.

He stays there for ten seconds, then topples over sideways.

He places the gun on the glass table and takes a deep breath.

In his mind he sees a list. Mentally he checks off a name.

Then he goes over to the stereo and turns it on. He lets the cassette door open and the tape slide down and the door close again, and the first piano notes glide through the room. The fingers wander up and down, the hands move up and down. Then the saxophone comes in and wanders alongside the piano. The same steps, the same little promenade. When the sax cuts loose and dances and leaps, and the piano starts to spread out the gentle chords in the background, the tweezers pull the first bullet out of the wall. He drops it into his pocket, then lifts the tweezers to the second hole-and waits. A couple of small drum rolls, and then that strange little Arabian-sounding twitter from the sax, a couple of seconds of Oriental digression. The piano vanishes. Sax and bass and drums now. He can see the pianist swaying as he waits. Yeah, u-hoo. He’s waiting too. The tweezers are raised.

The saxophone keeps climbing toward the heights, faster and faster. Ai. Is the sax player himself producing those little cries that punctuate the crescendo?

And at that moment, with the applause, the audience murmuring, the transition from sax to piano-at that moment he yanks out the second bullet. At that very moment. Splinters fall out of the wall. The flattened lump drops into his pocket to join the first one.

The piano replaces the sax, starting off with a few meandering intervals, apparently fumbling. Then it cuts loose from the established structures. The flights are freer and freer, more and more beautiful. Now he can hear the beauty. Inside himself. Not just as… a memory.

The bass disappears. The piano is meandering again, just like at the beginning. He should really be able to teach himself to understand this. The sax is now following.

The last repetition.

The applause, whistling.

He takes a small bow.

He will never grow tired of listening to it.