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can throw the fish back. Come on. It will be fun. Live a little!”
    And maybe in retrospect it sounds spontaneous and exciting. But it wasn’t. There was something desperate about the whole thing. Samuel actively tried to seek out new experiences, but he
was completely incapable of enjoying anything. The more he talked about depositing things in his Experience Bank, the emptier he seemed. I remember feeling sorry for him. He seemed lonely.
Especially when he texted me on the way home from the innebandy tournament in Tumba to say that two of the three matches had been “hella exciting.” Out of some sort of desperation and
fear of . . . I don’t know what. Sorry, here I go again, I really don’t mean to. Can you grab me some toilet paper?
    *
    Then we sat there in silence. But it wasn’t uncomfortable silence, the kind that makes you want to overturn the bar and run for the door. We sat there, me thinking about
the fish parasite, Samuel answering a text from Panther—the girl who had been with him at the party in Liljeholmen.
    “Have you been friends for a long time?” I asked.
    The question came perfectly naturally. It wasn’t like I had to think to come up with it. I was curious and I asked it, and Samuel replied that they had known each other since the end of
compulsory school. They were in the same basketball league and later her family kicked her out because she didn’t want to live the same way they lived and then she stayed at his mom’s
place for about six months.
    “Where did you grow up?”
    Again: the question just came out. I don’t know how or from where, but I sat there at the bar asking questions like I was some hot-shot TV journalist. Samuel told me about his childhood,
that he and Panther were from the same neighborhood, an inner-city housing project.
    “It was a nice place. Pretty mixed. There were homies and Swediots, alcoholics and pensioners. We liked it there. What about you?”
    I told him briefly about my background, moving around Sweden, my childhood in Halmstad, my teen years in Gothenburg.
    “Oh, I get it,” said Samuel.
    “What?”
    “Your dialect. I was having trouble placing it.”
    He didn’t ask anything about my brother. He didn’t try to get to know me by digging for anything historical. And that was why we got to know each other. We gave each other time. Even
though we didn’t talk the whole time, we knew on that first night at Spicy House that we belonged together. Erase that. Just put that we didn’t have to talk the whole time to know we
were going to be best friends.
    *
    Panther collects herself, nods, and says that if anything came up repeatedly, it was Samuel’s concerns about his memory. He would jot down little notes in notebooks to
remember his experiences. He was paranoid about never remembering faces. Sometimes I wondered if his memory was getting worse
because
he was working so hard to improve it. In the spring of
2007 he initiated Project Memory Phase. Has anyone mentioned it? It was a totally bizarre idea. His plan was to divide up the year in memory sections. When January started he put on a particular
pair of jeans, a certain cologne, and a special cap. Then he wore those things every day for a whole month. Then came February and he switched to a different pair of pants, dabbed on a new kind of
cologne, and wore a beret. And he also realized he could use sound, so he listened to nothing but Tupac, all February. Then came March and he put on a pair of chinos and a new kind of cologne and
went with no hat and only listened to Bob Marley. Then came April and he did the same thing again, new pants, new cologne, new music, and an old-man hat on his head. He hoped that all this would
make connections in his brain and life would feel longer somehow. But as so often happened with him, it was a better plan in theory than in reality. He had given up the whole project by summer.
When I asked why, he said it wasn’t having the right effect. Instead