Allt Detta Kan Vara Vårt

IKEA was terrifying. Striking and bright, people juking and bumping. Sharp, hard edges. Intersecting geometric shapes. Endless rooms of feng shui’d minimalist low-set furniture, color-blocked retro yellows and oranges. I wished I had a shell. Fucking Kevlar shell—vest, helmet. Rifle. Goddamnit, I wanted a rifle.

Can you imagine clearing this? I didn’t say it out loud—I’m not fucking crazy—I said it in my head to Ruiz. He was tango uniform. Tits up. Wasted. Dead. He lived in the ringing at the base of my skull. Popped out every now and then, and we’d shoot the shit like when we were back in country at our patrol base talking about what our lives would be like after we left the Marines. I took a wide-set stance, held an imaginary rifle at the high ready, and combat-glided a few steps along the path marked with light-projected arrows hanging from the exposed guts of the ceiling. Heel, toe, heel, toe, heel, toe.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, dog, said Ruiz.

A couple stared.

“Dean,” said Hope. “Don’t be weird.”

Fatal funnels everywhere, güey, said Ruiz. Watch your six.

I pretended to be tail-end Charlie, turned one-eighty, cleared the rear, turned forward, continued my patrol. I dared whatever bad guys to show themselves. Fuck around and find out. It was gung-ho, lifer nonsense; Ruiz flexed his shoulders like Macho Man Randy Savage, pretended to be all King Shit or whatever, and laughed at me.

Get some, said Ruiz.

“We definitely need this,” said Hope, snapping a picture of a high chair’s price tag—ANTILOP printed across the top—with her phone.

“Put it in the cart,” I said. I’d never been to IKEA before, but I knew the jokes: cheap shit, hard to put together, couples fighting, blah blah blah blah blah.

“The tag tells the warehouse location.”

“Like a grid coordinate.”

“This isn’t Iraq, okay?”

“Grid coordinates are on all maps,” I said, but Hope was already in the next room, six months pregnant and on a mission to prepare for the baby. The fetus. She didn’t like me calling it that, but I didn’t know what else to call it. Bugged me to think of it as a baby. Like, the thing was basically a parasite at that point, sucking the life out of her.

I turned the corner and walked into a guy’s ass while he was bent over taking a picture of a tag that read SÅNGLÄRKA. I didn’t say I was sorry and hurried to catch Hope.

Lost in the sauce, boot motherfucker, said Ruiz. Complacency kills, you fucking new guy.

What he meant was that I was a fucking fetus too—out of the Corps seven months, working a part-time job loading semitrucks at UPS, pregnant twentysomething girlfriend teaching me how to be a human, diddy-bopping around IKEA like I knew what the fuck a SÅNGLÄRKA was. So maybe I felt closer to the thing in Hope’s belly than I wanted to admit. Neither of us had asked for any of this.

Hope waddled room to room, measured furniture with an IKEA paper measuring tape, took pictures of tags; I followed, pushed the cart full of whatever bullshit she tossed in: KRAMA, LENAST, KLÅMMIG. I whispered the Swedish nonsense words; their thick weight held me down, anchored me to the soft fabrics and plush pillows and throws, and Ruiz faded back into the constant drone inside my grape.

In a living room I sat on a POÄNG and then the fetus was in my arms. Not a fetus anymore: a baby. The baby’s eyelids drooped. I bounced in the chair while the television projected an old muted sitcom blue and white over the LIDHULT and the LACK and the walls covered in KNOPPÄNGs and SKATTEBYs and HOVSTAs. At a GERTON piled with textbooks and papers I wore glasses and typed on a computer under buttery light from a VIDJA while the baby played on a STADSDEL with a LILLABO. I made egg scramble in an OUMBÄRLIG while the baby—a toddler now—stood on a BEKVÄM watching. Hope played music from an ENEBY and danced with our dog through the kitchen, making the toddler laugh. I stood at the threshold of a room. There was a MYDDAL against the far wall. Two tiny chests rose and fell under the LATTJOs. Two. I walked into another bedroom and there I was. Sleeping in a king HASSELVIKA next to Hope. Ten years, fifteen years later.

Overhead, dog, said Ruiz. Check your goddamned overhead.

When I looked up, pointed my imaginary GEVÄR into the wiring and girders, the TRÅDFRI blinded me like an explosive flash, and then I was upside down in the driver seat of a LASTBIL. It was February and the kind of cold that gets caught high up in your nose and makes you sneeze. My ÖRON rang and my ANSIKTE hurt and Ruiz was dead and I always figured after an IED there would be something—RPGs, SKJUTNING, HELIKOPTRAR, SKRIKER. Like, the world would freeze and make space for something. RÄTTFÄRDIGHET. HÄMND. But there was nothing. We had been patrolling a bumfuck alternate supply route thirty klicks from any major STAD—even now I couldn’t tell you why. Not even a shitty HYDDA in sight. There was nothing but TYSTNAD and MREs and REDSKAP from our LASTBIL spilled across the broken asphalt and icy winter rain from a lead sky and calm chatter over the radio while our LT called in Ruiz’s kill number after Doc pronounced him and there was that goddamned ringing that wouldn’t go away.

BESTÅs and rifles and STRANDMONs and Humvees and GRUNDSJÖs and desert and GURLIs and bodies piled everywhere and there was Hope in the middle of it all: resting on a gray KIVIK that reminded me of that Iraq winter sky. On Hope’s left sat Ruiz. Deader than dogshit.

I wasn’t nervous or anything like that. I wondered what the Swedish word for happy was, and then I thought that was a pretty fucking cheesy thing to think, and my entire head felt like it might split open at the seams from the ringing, but it didn’t change anything. I was happy.

Look alive, motherfucker, I said to Ruiz.

That’s cold, dog, he said.

“Comfortable?” I said.

“My feet are killing me,” said Hope.

“I’m happy.”

I was going to ask her to marry me right then, in the goddamned bedroom section of IKEA. Sweet, greasy Swedish meatball stink hanging in the air, brain pulsing against the inside of my skull, Ruiz’s body tangled and twisted and bloody, strewn over the cushions.

“Are you?” I said.

“I’m tired.”

I might’ve mumbled something about how we could stay here awhile. That it was nice. That we could pretend it was all ours. Maybe not—I don’t know if I said it out loud to Hope or in my head to Ruiz or the fetus or not at all.

What I said for sure to Hope was “Marry me,” but at the same time a shopper appeared and called to another, “Here’s a KIVIK!” The shopper collapsed onto the lounger attachment for the KIVIK on Hope’s right.

“What?” said Hope.

“No,” said the sitting shopper, raising and waving a hand. “In here.”

“I don’t think this will fit in our living room,” said the second shopper, standing, hands on hips.

“Measure it,” said the sitter.

“I thought you brought the measuring tape from home,” said the stander.

“Wait, what?” said Hope.

“It’s comfortable,” said the sitter, looking from Hope to the stander.

“A thousand bucks?” said the stander to the sitter. Then, to Hope, “The colors on these things. Can you believe?”

The sitter and the stander laughed and Hope laughed and I laughed and Ruiz laughed and I imagined the fetus laughing too, Hope’s belly jumping. All of us pretending like we got the joke, while at the same time, thousands of miles away on a road with no name, standing in the cold rain, surrounded by Humvee wreckage, I waited for something to happen. Then Hope leaned over Ruiz, the swell of her belly pressed onto him; she snapped a picture of the price tag.

“I’m ready,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

Read more from Issue 19.2.