Half an hour later, someone called the emergency number to report a car fire out in Esmared.
The technical investigation determined that Killian must have been driving at high speeds. He had likely gone into a skid on the ice and tried to brake, and, when that didn’t work, pulled the hand brake to correct. But that only made it worse. The car overturned, flipped onto its roof, and slid across the road and into the rock wall near the shoulder. The gas tank burst and in an instant the car was engulfed in flames. Traces of the accident would still be visible years later, dark spots on the scorched asphalt.
It burned for quite some time before anyone happened by. Killian,or what was left of him, was still behind the wheel. The damage to the car had been so severe he couldn’t escape.
As Siri stood out in Esmared, observing the remains of the car and its driver, she thought: We didn’t do this, did we? Or was it us? Did he take off because ofus?
45
The news of Killian’s death reached Sander a few hours later. When the phone rang in his house in Skavböke, he was the only one available to pick up. His parents were out on the property chopping wood; Dad with the ax and Mom stacking, as always, while they chatted. A pleasant moment for them both; they often found themselves chuckling together. This was something he would miss when he was gone—seeing his parents interact this way.
A cop whose voice he recognized was waiting on the other end of the line.
“This is Siri Bengtsson. We met last week. I’m calling about your friend,” she said. “Killian.”
“Okay?” Sander managed to say, when she didn’t continue right away. “What is it, what about him?”
A protracted silence. “I have some really bad news, Sander.”
—
Right and wrong. They don’t fall from the sky; the concepts are created on Earth to stave off catastrophe. It’s as simple as that. Inevitably, and just as simply, those very same catastrophes are only to be expected when someone breaks the rules.
Later on, Sander’s memories of the time just after he learned of Killian’s death were awfully fuzzy. It was as if his head were gone too.He couldn’t make any decisions, could hardly register where he was. At the height of this blur, he put one foot in front of the other, stepped into the bathtub, showered. Stuck first one arm into a shirt someone (his mother?) was dressing him in, then the other.
But there was one thing he knew for sure: somewhere in this void that surrounded him for those first few days was the crematorium in Halmstad. Lundström had taken them there, the whole class, for a religious studies field trip early last fall.
The sun still beamed with the warmth of summer up in the sky as they gathered outside, Sander and Killian, Alice and Isabelle, Mikael, Pierre, and all the others; a softspoken man with glasses, wearing jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, came out to greet them. His head was shaved bald.
“Maybe he accidentally stuck his head in the oven for too long,” Killian whispered, making Sander giggle.
Felicia was behind them. Sander turned to her and smiled. She smiled back, but she was looking at Killian.
The operator spoke as though he were addressing someone right next to him rather than a group spread in a semicircle around him; it was very difficult to make out his words.
When the cremation begins, he told them, the body is in a casket that is conveyed into a large oven.
“We’ll visit that room at the very end.”
Disposal of a body by cremation had once been called “committing to fire.” The body is simply burned into ash. The crematory oven reaches temperatures of between eight hundred to one thousand degrees Celsius, and the process takes about eighty minutes. It’s a very environmentally friendly method, almost perfectly clean, because the temperature is so high. Under optimal conditions the oven is even exothermic. The operator asked if anyone knew what that meant.
When no one said anything, Sander raised his hand.
“It means that the process creates more energy than it uses, or something like that.”
“That’s basically it. Although we sayreleaseandabsorbenergy. Theexhaust gases that arise during the cremation can contain particles, which must then be filtered out. The energy from those gases goes to the district heating plant to heat buildings, and metal from titanium implants and so forth is gathered and sent for recycling.” Here, the operator paused. “You may have heard,” he added, as if this was a matter of great sorrow and distress, “the myth that gold teeth go to the staff who work at the crematorium. This is not true, and in fact it is chemically impossible. At a thousand degrees, everything melts. There are other myths, such as the rumor that the person screams or even moves during the cremation process. That is not true either. In death, everything is peaceful and quiet.”
They had all moved into the building by now. Sander had imagined the crematorium as a factory, vast and industrial, all brick or stone, heavy machinery, men in sooty work clothes. As if the dead were blocks of coal being shoveled into a boiler.
Instead, it looked a lot like their school, the area by the main office: big windows and pine furniture, brochures with titles like “All About Cremation” and “For the Bereaved.”
“We are the last stop,” the operator said. “Life has reached its endpoint, but the person still has value; the body still has rights. Even in death, we are very careful to protect these rights.”
The last stop. He spoke so oddly, as though he were both a priest and a bureaucrat. He described what happened before a body arrived, which forms were filled out and by whom, how the next of kin chose an urn for the ashes and how the urn arrived at the crematorium; how each casket was given a fireproof identification tile. He showed them the room where they stored the caskets before they were taken to the oven.
“When it’s all over,” he said, “we keep the urns in this room, which is always locked and alarmed. We take them out on the day the ashes will be spread or buried.”
Sander leaned toward Killian. “Do you want to be cremated?”
