The backpackers nod in confusion, and finally by their collective efforts manage to drag the suit-wearing body onto the platform. The county council women are still screaming, as if they sincerely believe this is a constructive approach under the circumstances. The man appears to be breathing, but Ove stays down there on the track. He hears the train coming. It’s not quite the way he planned it, but it’ll have to do.

Then he calmly goes into the middle of the track, puts his hands in his pockets, and stares into the headlights. He hears the warning whistle like a foghorn. Feels the track shaking powerfully under his feet, as if a testosterone-fueled bull were trying to charge him. He breathes out. In the midst of that inferno of shaking and yelling and the chilling scream of the train’s brakes he feels a deep relief.

At last.

To Ove, the moments that follow are elongated as if time itself has applied its brakes and made everything around him travel in slow motion. The explosion of sounds is muted into a low hiss in his ears, the train approaching so slowly that it’s as if it’s being pulled along by two decrepit oxen. The headlights flash despairingly at him. And in the interval between two of the flashes, while he isn’t blinded, he finds himself establishing eye contact with the train driver. He can’t be more than twenty years old. One of those who still gets called “the puppy” by his older colleagues.

Ove stares into the puppy’s face. Clenches his fists in his pockets as if he’s cursing himself for what he’s about to do. But it can’t be helped, he thinks. There’s a right way of doing things. And a wrong way.

So the train is perhaps fifteen yards away when Ove swears with irritation and, as calmly as if he were getting up to fetch himself a cup of coffee, steps out of the way and jumps up on the platform again.

The train has drawn level with him by the time the driver has managed to stop it. The puppy’s terror has sucked all the blood out of his face. He is clearly holding back his tears. The two men look at each other through the locomotive window as if they had just emerged from some apocalyptic desert and now realized that neither of them was the last human being on earth. One is relieved by this insight. And the other disappointed.

The boy in the locomotive nods carefully. Ove nods back with resignation.

Fair enough that Ove no longer wants his life. But the sort of man who ruins someone else’s by making eye contact with him seconds before his body is turned into blood paste against said person’s windshield; damn it, Ove is not that sort of man. Neither his dad nor Sonja would ever have forgiven him for that.