Anxious People

Jack is angry at the way the former hostage interviews are going and throws his coffee cup. Jim feels sympathy for his son but feels powerless to help. The narrator describes the two men as being very different from each other due to being from very different generations, but they are similar in their shared love for Jack’s late mother. Jack and Jim also both love Jack’s sister, who has an addiction to heroin.

Jim tries to encourage his son by saying that they’re all just doing the best they can, with the hostages and in life more generally, but Jack can’t stop thinking about the man on the bridge.

This chapter is a transcript of Jack interviewing a 20-year-old girl named London who works as a bank teller in the bank that the bank robber tried to rob. London won’t directly answer his questions and is sarcastic instead. When he comments on her unusual name, she says, “Have you been smoking something?” and then starts mocking him (36).

The narrator says that it wasn’t the bank robber’s fault that they weren’t able to rob the bank. Instead, it’s society’s fault “because in recent years society has turned into a place where nothing is named according to what it is anymore” (38). The bank robber didn’t realize until it was too late that the bank was cashless. When the bank robber entered the bank, they asked for “6,500 kronor” (39), which London thought was a strange amount since most bank robbers ask for much more.

This chapter is a transcript of Jack questioning London. Jack asks London if she remembers anything about the bank robber’s appearance. Jack references the robber as a male, and London says that Jack has a “sick binary view of gender” (41).

The narrator makes true claims regarding the bank robber and, by extension, humanity. Of the latter, they say that “we weren’t ready to become adults” (43).

After the bank robber left the bank, they panicked and ran into an apartment complex to avoid the cops. This is what started the inadvertent hostage situation.

The narrator claims that the man who died by suicide on the bridge and the bank robber have “moral hazard” in common. The man on the bridge lost his wealth in a bank crash. At the bank, the banker explained that his loss of wealth was his fault because he should never have trusted the bank. The banker explained this as a moral hazard. When the bank robber was seven years old, she experienced moral hazard when she earned extra money for Christmas that her mother spent on her alcohol addiction.

The bank robber grew up and promised herself never to become like her mother. The man on the bridge sent a letter to the banker and then jumped off the bridge.

The story flashes back to the hostage situation. Jim and Jack are the first ones to appear on the scene. Jim has never been involved in a hostage drama because the town is too sleepy and small for that, but Jack once took a course on the subject. However, the information he can recall doesn’t help him.

The narrator poses some general truths that they believe most people would agree with, such as the fact that lies, stealing, and killing are wrong. However, then they complicate these truths by wondering if it’s acceptable to kill an animal that’s attacking a person. They also question whether it would have been moral to kill Hitler and whether it is acceptable to steal something small “because you really have to” (53), provided no one gets hurt. The narrator connects this to the bank robber, a person motivated by the fear of losing her children. The narrator hypothesizes that most people can’t imagine robbing a bank but can empathize with the factors that led the bank robber into the bank.

The bank robber went through a nasty divorce after her husband cheated on her and left her with nothing. Her ex-husband threatened to take her daughters away unless she could sustain herself, and she was afraid of losing them or making them feel put in the middle of the situation. She thought she could quietly rob a bank, use the funds to pay her rent, and then eventually repay the bank somehow.

The story flashes back to the hostage drama. There is a box of Christmas lights in the hallway outside the apartment where the hostages are being held, but Jack and Jim initially think the box is a bomb. Jim calls the experts in Stockholm despite Jack’s protest. Jack wants to solve this case on his own without the tough guys from Stockholm taking it over.

Jim calls the neighbors who live across the hall from the apartment with the hostages. He finds out that they’re a young couple and are in the process of breaking up.

The story flashes back to the hostage situation. The bank robber didn’t mean to start a hostage drama; she ran into the open apartment to hide. While looking at her reflection, the bank robber realizes, “They’re not the captives here, I am” (71).

This chapter is a transcript between Jim and Zara, one of the former hostages. Zara constantly belittles Jim and refuses to directly answer his questions. When he asks if she would like some coffee, she says that she wouldn’t drink it if “[he] and [she] were the last people on the planet and [he] promised [her] it was poison” (72). Zara is wealthy and looks down on people who aren’t.

Zara starts seeing a psychologist named Nadia shortly before being held hostage. She wants to receive sleeping pills because she has been contemplating suicide and thinks that sleeping pills are the only viable option. Zara is confrontational with Nadia and constantly picks apart her thoughts. This is her way of keeping Nadia at a distance and remaining in control.

Nadia can immediately see that Zara “[is] suffering from loneliness” (80). This, however, is her opinion; professionally, she tells Zara that she is experiencing “nervous exhaustion.” Nadia begins to realize just how ill Zara is when she exclaims that she has cancer during one of their sessions. When Nadia says she’s sorry, Zara admits she was lying to make a point, but Nadia thinks it was an inappropriate thing to joke about.

Nadia slowly develops empathy toward Zara despite Zara’s cold exterior. One day Nadia asks Zara to interpret the painting hanging on her wall. It’s of a woman looking off in the distance. Zara says the woman might be thinking of dying by suicide, and Nadia starts to feel truly concerned for Zara for the first time. None of her other patients have ever interpreted the painting in terms of suicide (the narrative will later reveal that Nadia once contemplated suicide while standing on the edge of a bridge).

This chapter is a transcript of an exchange between Jim and Zara. Jim keeps trying to get Zara to give him straight answers about what happened in the apartment, but she keeps dodging his questions with sarcasm. She does answer one question honestly, though. When Jim asks why she wasn’t scared of the bank robber’s pistol, she says it’s because she had “been contemplating killing [her]self for quite a long time” (91). However, she was surprised to realize that when confronted with death, she didn’t want to die.