The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

first years of the 1920s built up a considerable circle of customers in the county. On Saturday evenings, when his contemporaries were attending barn dances, Allan sat at home and developed new formulae to improve the quality of his dynamite. And when Sunday came, he went to the gravel pit and tested the new explosives. But not between eleven and one, he had finally had to promise the local pastor, in exchange for him not complaining too much about Allan’s absence from church.
    Allan liked his own company and that was good, because he lived a solitary life. Since he didn’t join the ranks of the labour movement he was despised by socialists, while he was far too working class (not to mention being his father’s son) to be allowed a place at any bourgeois gathering. Gustavsson, for one, would rather die than end up in the company of that Karlsson brat. Just think, what would happen if the boy discovered what Gustavsson had been paid for the enamel egg which he had once bought from Allan’s mother for next to nothing and now sold to a diplomat in Stockholm. Thanks to that bit of business, Gustavsson had become the district’s third proud owner of an automobile.
    That time he had been lucky. But one Sunday in August 1925, after the church service, Gustavsson’s luck ran out. He went out for a drive, mainly to show off his expensive car. Unluckily for him, he happened to choose the road that passed Allan Karlsson’s house. At the bend, Gustavsson had got nervous (or perhaps God or fate had a hand in the events), and the gears got stuck and one thing led to another and Gustavsson and hisautomobile went straight into the gravel pit behind the house, instead of following the gentle curve of the road to the right. It would have been bad enough for Gustavsson to set foot on Allan’s land and have to explain himself, but things turned out much worse than that, because just as Gustavsson managed to bring his runaway automobile to a halt, Allan set off the first of that Sunday’s trial explosions.
    Allan, himself, was curled up for protection behind the outhouse and could neither see nor hear anything. Not until he returned to the gravel, did he realise that something had gone wrong. Bits of Gustavsson’s automobile were spread out over half the pit, and here and there lay bits of Gustavsson himself.
    Gustavsson’s head had landed softly on a patch of grass. It stared vacantly out over the destruction.
    ‘What business did you have in my gravel pit?’ Allan asked.
    Gustavsson did not reply.
     
    Over the next four years, Allan had plenty of time to read and improve his knowledge of how society was developing. After the explosion in the quarry, he found himself incarcerated in an asylum, though it was hard to say exactly what for. Eventually, the topic of his father came up when a young and enthusiastic disciple of Professor Bernhard Lundborg, an expert on Racial Biology at the University of Uppsala, decided to build his career on Allan’s case. When Allan fell into the clutches of Professor Lundborg, he was immediately sterilised for ‘eugenic and social reasons’ on the basis that Allan was probably a bit slow and there was probably too much of his father in him for the state to allow further reproduction of the Karlsson genes.
    The sterilization did not bother Allan. On the contrary, he felt he was well-treated at Professor Lundborg’s clinic. Now and then, he had to answer all sorts of questions such as why he needed to blow people and things into bits and whether he hadany Negro blood. Allan answered that he saw a certain difference between things and people when it came to the pleasure of lighting the fuse of a load of dynamite. Splitting a rock down the middle, that could make you feel good. But if instead of a rock, it was a person, well, Allan couldn’t see why a person wouldn’t move out of the way under the circumstances. Didn’t Professor Lundborg feel the same way?
    But Bernhard Lundborg was not the sort of man to involve himself in philosophical discussion with his patients; he repeated the question about Negro blood. Allan answered that you never really know, but both his parents had had skin that was as pale as his, perhaps the professor would take that as an answer? And then Allan added that he was dying to see a black man for real if the professor had one on hand.
    Professor Lundborg and his assistants did not answer Allan’s questions, but they made notes and hummed and then left him in