The Invoice by Jonas Karlsson

out of my mouth.
    “Not really…” I said, and laughed again.
    Georg didn’t look remotely amused. The woman with the bank name pulled out one of the documents and inspected it more closely.
    “You owe 5,700,150 kronor,” Georg went on. “The interest alone will swallow up everything you could ever earn. Where do you work?”
    I stretched and tried to adopt a confidence-inspiring expression, but the situation was somehow too absurd to really take in.
    “At the moment I’m working part time at…Jugge’s Flicks.”
    “
Jugge’s
?” Georg said, and both I and the woman nodded. He looked at me skeptically, then turned toward her again.
    “We’ll have to arrange a home inventory as soon as possible,” he said.
    But she didn’t respond. She was fully absorbed in something in the file. She leafed back and forth, comparing different sheets. She made a note of something. In the absence of any response he turned back to me. He put down his pen, sighed, and rubbed his eyes.
    “How on earth could you have failed to notice you had to pay?” he said. “You don’t live in the middle of a forest, do you?”
    “No,” I chuckled.
    “It can be extremely hard to reach people living in isolated shacks,” he went on seriously. “People in the desert or up in the mountains who don’t have any direct contact with the outside world. Obviously that doesn’t happen too often in our department, but you can imagine…”
    I nodded.
    “The information has to be gathered somehow.”
    “Of course,” I said.
    He ran a hand through his hair, squinted, and looked at me carefully as if he thought I was some sort of interesting aberration.
    “Do you have a television?” he asked.
    I nodded.
    “So how could you…?”
    He held up a hand and counted on his fingers.
    “Our information campaign, all the discussions…the whole debate.”
    “I really don’t watch much television,” I said.
    “Really?” he said.
    “I mean, it’s not as if I’ve got anything against television,” I said. “Quite the opposite.”
    I thought about how easily I got distracted by practically any program. No matter what it was about. I got drawn in and fascinated by pretty much any moving pictures. The most obscure little broadcast, the most niche interest, could capture my attention and carry me off to other worlds—the more out of the ordinary, the more interesting I found it.
    “Still, I think I ought to clarify…” I went on. “I mean, I really do think, if you make a proper comparison…I think I should point out…”
    Even though I was trying, I couldn’t really come up with a good way to finish the sentence.
    “Hmm,” Georg said wearily, looking at me. “You’re questioning our calculations?”
    “Well, I just think…er, I don’t know.”
    He waited to see if I had anything else to add. When nothing appeared he leaned back in his chair, crossed one leg over the other, and said in an authoritative voice, “Our calculations have been developed and refined over many, many years. This is an incredibly complex science, as I hope you can appreciate. This isn’t just any old
felicific calculus
, you know.”
    He smiled faintly.
    “Obviously it has its roots in Bentham’s early theories, or, if you prefer, Pietro Verri…”
    He laughed again. This was obviously highly amusing.
    “But in recent years we have developed a much more finely calibrated set of tools. Of course, we have access to a vast amount of information. Obviously this is all more than a mere mortal can hope to gain an overview of, but the program deals with the constituent parts in an extremely sensitive way, and, when taken in context, each aspect can be calculated with a good degree of accuracy. For instance, we use both cardinal and ordinal measures.”
    He brought his fingertips together.
    “Instruments of this complexity give us the possibility to evaluate each individual’s results. So when the main decision about international redistribution was