The Demon of Dakar aka The Demon from Dakar

Three

“On my way,” Johnny Kvarnheden mumbled, and turned up the volume on the car stereo. The late-evening sun was bathing in Lake Vättern. Visingö looked like a towering warship, steering south, and the ferry to Gränna resembled a beetle on a floor of gold.

There was something cinematic about his flight, as if someone had directed his melancholia, set the lights, and added the music. He was conscious of this cinematic effect and was steered, allowed himself to be steered, caught in the classic scene: a lone man leaving his old life behind, on his way to something unknown.

A telephone call was all it had taken, a split second of deliberation in order for him to make up his mind, pack his few possessions-too few, and in too much of a hurry-and set out on the road.

He wished that his road trip could last forever, that the contents of the gas tank, his hunger, and his bladder were his only constraints. That the trip could be the focus, that he could fly down the highway unconnected to everything except the friction between his tires and the asphalt.

If there had been a camera, he would have turned it on the road, toward the black of the asphalt, the traces of traffic, and the grooves from the teeth of the snow-clearing trucks, not at his face or the landscape that flickered past. The sound track would not be Madeleine Peyroux’s voice from the CD player, but the rhythmic thumping from the roadway. The stiffness of his shoulders and the cramplike grip of his hands on the steering wheel would be the voice that spoke to the viewer.

He kept his disappointment and grief at bay, but also his hopes and dreams. He thought about descriptions of food, plates of one prepared dish after another. The fact that he was a chef saved him for the moment.

He was worthless as a lover, couldn’t even get it up anymore, and was just as worthless as a partner. This had slowly but surely become clear to him, and this insight had struck him with full force yesterday evening when Sofie described his attempts as “pathetic.”

“You aren’t living,” she said, in a sudden burst of volubility, “and your so-called attentions toward our relationship are ridiculous. It is nauseating. You don’t know how to love.”

He reached out and touched her, pressed his body against her, and felt desire for the first time in months. Repulsed, she shook him off.

“Nauseating,” he said out loud. “What kind of a word is that?”

He passed Linköping and Norrköping. Then he thundered on into Sörmland with an accelerating desperation that made him drive much too fast. The direction no longer worked. He turned the volume up higher, playing the same album over and over again.

As he approached Stockholm he tried to think of his new job. Dakar sounded good, like a solid B. He didn’t know more about the restaurant than what he had learned on the Internet the night before. The menu looked all right on paper, but there was something about the presentation that was jarring, as if it was aspiring to be high class but couldn’t quite manage to live up to its own superlatives. There was no lack of self-confidence. The writer had simply put in too much.

It was his sister in Uppsala who had told him about the job and he had called the owner. The latter had quickly jotted down his references and called back half an hour later to say he had gotten the job. It was as if he sensed Johnny’s situation.

He didn’t know more about the city than that it had a university. His sister hadn’t told him very much, but that had not been necessary. He was going to… yes, what? Cook, of course, but what else?