Roger’s jowls were shaking with despair and confusion, his lips were moving but all his emotions remained trapped inside. The man with the rabbit’s head appeared to see an opportunity to explain what was really going on, which he did in a tone that only a middle-aged man with a Stockholm accent as broad as a motorway could do: “Listen, Rog—you don’t mind me calling you Rog? Don’t feel bad about this! Women often turn to me, you know, because I’m happy to do the things they might not be able to persuade their husbands to do.”

Roger’s face was contorted into one large wrinkle.

“What sort of things? What sort of relationship are the two of you actually having?”

“A business arrangement, I’m a professional!” the rabbit corrected.

“Professional? Have you been paying to sleep with him, Anna-Lena?” Roger exclaimed.

Anna-Lena’s eyes doubled in size.

“Are you mad?” she hissed.

The rabbit stepped closer to Roger to sort out the misunderstanding.

“No, no, not that sort of professional. I don’t sleep with people. Well, not professionally, anyway. I disrupt viewings, I’m a professional disrupter, here’s my card.” The rabbit fished a business card out of one of his socks. No Boundaries Lennart Ltd., it said, the Ltd. indicating the seriousness of the business.

Anna-Lena bit the inside of her lip and said: “Yes, Lennart’s been helping me. Us!”

“What the hell…?” Roger exclaimed.

The rabbit nodded proudly.

“Oh, yes, Rog. Sometimes I’m an alcoholic neighbor, sometimes I just rent the apartment above the one where the viewing is taking place and watch an erotic film with the volume turned up really loud. But this is my most expensive package.” He gestured toward himself, from his white socks to his underpants, then his bare chest, until he reached the rabbit’s head, which he still hadn’t managed to remove. Then he announced proudly: “This is ‘the crapping rabbit,’ you see. The premium package. If you order this, I sneak into the apartment before everyone else and hide in the bathroom. Then when the other prospective buyers open the door, they catch sight of a naked, adult man with a rabbit’s head sitting on the toilet doing his business. People never really get over it. You can always get rid of scratched floors and ugly wallpaper when you move in, can’t you? But a crapping rabbit?” The rabbit tapped the temples of the rabbit’s head demonstratively: “It gets stuck in here! You wouldn’t want to live anywhere you saw that, would you?!” A thought that all of those present, as they looked at the rabbit, had nothing but sympathy for.

Anna-Lena reached her hand out to Roger’s arm, but he pulled it away as if she’d burned him. She sniffed: “Please, Roger, don’t you remember that viewing in the recently renovated turn-of-the-century building last year, when a drunk neighbor suddenly appeared and started throwing spaghetti Bolognese at all the prospective buyers?”

Roger was so insulted that he let out a loud snort.

“Of course I do! We bought that apartment for three hundred and twenty-five thousand below its market value!”

The rabbit nodded happily.

“I don’t like to boast, but the alcoholic spaghetti-throwing neighbor is one of my most popular characters.”

Roger stared at Anna-Lena.

“Do you mean to say that… but… what about all my negotiations with the Realtor? All my tactics?”

Anna-Lena couldn’t meet his gaze.

“You get so upset when you lose a bid. I just wanted you to… win.”

She wasn’t telling the whole truth. That she had become the sort of person who just wanted a home. That she wanted to stop now. That she’d like to go to the movies occasionally and see something made-up instead of yet another documentary on television. That she didn’t want to be a shark. She was worried that the betrayal would be too much for Roger.

“How many times?” Roger whispered in a broken voice.

“Three,” Anna-Lena lied.

“Six, actually! I know all the addresses by heart…,” the rabbit corrected.

“Shut up, Lennart!” Anna-Lena sobbed.

Lennart nodded obediently, and started to tug and pull at the rabbit’s head again. He spent a long time fully absorbed in that, before declaring: “I think something loosened a bit just then!”

Roger just stared down at the floor with his toes tightly clenched in his shoes, because Roger was the sort of man who felt emotion in his feet. He started to walk around in a wide semicircle, over to the balcony door, accidentally stubbed his toes against one of the baseboards, and swore quietly, quietly, quietly, both at the damnable baseboard and the damnable rabbit.

“You stupid… stupid… you stupid…,” he muttered, as if he were searching for the very worst insult he could think of. Eventually he found it: “You stupid Stockholmer!” His toes hurt as much as his heart, so he clenched his fists and looked up, then ran back through the apartment so quickly that no one had time to stop him, and knocked the rabbit to the floor. With all his love, at full force, one single blow.

The rabbit fell through the door back onto the bathroom floor. Fortunately the padded rabbit’s head absorbed most of the impact from Roger’s punch, and the softness of the rest of Lennart’s physique (he had roughly the same density as a dumpling) absorbed the rest. When he opened his eyes and looked up at the ceiling, Julia was leaning over him.

“Are you still alive?” she asked.

“The head’s stuck again,” he replied.

“Are you hurt?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Good. Move, then. I need to pee.”

The rabbit whimpered some sort of apology and crawled out of the bathroom. On the way, he handed Julia a business card, nodded so hard toward her stomach that his rabbit’s ears fell over his eyes, and managed to say: “I do children’s parties as well. If you don’t like your children.”

Julia closed the door behind him. But she kept the business card. Any normal parent would have done the same.

* * *

Anna-Lena was looking at Roger, but he was refusing to look back. Blood was dripping from his nose. Their doctor had told Anna-Lena that it was a reaction to stress after Roger was diagnosed as being burnt-out at work.

“You’re bleeding, I’ll get some tissue,” she whispered, but Roger wiped his nose on the sleeve of his shirt.

“Dammit, I’m just a bit tired!”

He strode out into the hall, mostly because he wanted to be in a different room, which made him curse the open plan layout. Anna-Lena wanted to follow him but realized he needed some space, so she turned and walked into the closet, because that was as far from him as she could get. There she sat down on a small stool and went to pieces. She didn’t notice the cold air blowing in, as if a window were open. As if there could be an open window in a closet.

* * *

The bank robber was standing in the center of the apartment, surrounded by Stockholmers, both figurative and literal. “Stockholm” is, after all, an expression more than it is a place, both for men like Roger and for most of the rest of us, just a symbolic word to denote all the irritating people who get in the way of our happiness. People who think they’re better than us. Bankers who say no when we apply for a loan, psychologists who ask questions when we only want sleeping pills, old men who steal the apartments we want to renovate, rabbits who steal our wives. Everyone who doesn’t see us, doesn’t understand us, doesn’t care about us. Everyone has Stockholmers in their life, even people from Stockholm have their own Stockholmers, only to them it’s “people who live in New York” or “politicians in Brussels,” or other people from some other place where people seem to think that they’re better than the Stockholmers think they are.