A man comes to the bank to install a new control system and finds the building destroyed, as after an explosion. At an adjacent cafe, he meets a younger man who lives on investing in financial derivatives, that is, speculating in the future. Together they travel to Romania and spend the evenings in the same bed with a computer on their stomach. They buy and sell and when they are tired they fall asleep close to each other, in spoon position. So it is all over, the man returns to the bank and finds that the work there has been going on all the time, during the masses of mass, in now narrow spaces.
So, the first of five short stories in Jonas Eikas After the Sun can be described: it takes place in a familiar world, but inexplicable events occur, mysterious encounters take place, as in science fiction but here and now. The work is digitized, decoupled from place, traditional family patterns are dissolved, but tenderness exists, and the longing. The portrayal of the two men and how they move towards each other, take on each other without consent to violence, is self-evident, intimate, and draws the reader into a desire that is more emotional and erotic than sexual.
The other stories are similarly about people living outside of a normal labor market, or rather of the work that is the new normal: long drugs, selling dreams, watching out for tourists on a beach in Mexico. There we meet a beach boy who lubricates white backs with sun oil, fetches drinks and is utilized in various ways in the tourism industry. About the nights, he and the other boys meet in bodily rituals that are ultimately aimed at living in a different form of life than the human, that as the shrimp get a protective shell.
Another short story depicts an old couple who lost their two daughters in cancer and now live motorhome life. She searches for religion, he tries to find a technical solution for his inability to cry out his grief and operates a valve in the trachea. It connects him to a transmitter he found in Nevada's desert; a sad tone attracts all kinds of animals that are stroking his body.
After the sun contains a frightening picture of a future that is already here, where people have become things and distanced from meaning-creating contexts. However, the darkness does not rule alone, the indestructible search for closeness of people is constantly illuminated and caught up in Eika's sharp as poetic prose. He is a writer who writes with his eyes and records every detail and smallest movement. It is a pleasure to read him, a challenge to thought and feeling: I do not always know what I am about, but I do not want to miss a line of it.