'A Private Greatness' Chapter 20

-Chapter 20-

At a particular hour in the twilight of early summer, the lights of downtown Vancouver coalesce into some sort of neon lava flow, the damp fog keeping it all molten and surreal. As I walked up the somber gray façade of West Burrard Street on my way to work, I studied the distant snow-shrouded peaks of the coast range with unconscious respect. Regal and watchful past the north shore; they were to be my new Norway, my escape from the building weight of the city. It wasn’t that the city was unlikable; quite to the contrary, I thought. It was a place now partly my own, and I felt my work meld unconsciously into the creative and economic fabric of this rainy urbanscape, letting myself be both a number and a singularity.

I now seldom saw Angelina; she was transfixed with her new Czech girlfriend. I regarded her as someone flighty and transient in both our lives, though I knew this was only my own sophomoric reaction to their love. Peder was juggling several vaguely awful yet tolerable jobs, his connections to a more esteemed academic post hinging on the circuitous path to legal immigration he now faced. I sympathized with him, but also saw myself increasingly detached from their troubles. My own path had begun to diverge from theirs as soon as the wheels of the tired 747 threw up smoke across the damp runway tarmac some four months prior. My job now gave me purpose, though I never thought it would be so. While I tried in youthful vanity to resist letting it define me, the confines of schedule and paycheck were pleasant insulations most of the time. I increasingly admired my boss, the charming Mr. Beckham of strange maps and incongruous euphemisms. I felt he had begun to exert some arcane paternal influence over me; such was my desire to please. Pleasing someone else was easier than pleasing myself these days.

I kept waiting to stumble on someone wonderful, and the bland pretense of unrealistic expectations kept my mind away from the past. The gray curtain that floated omnisciently over the Coast Range’s lifted one late June morning, and I thought the resulting landscape to be the most sublime coincidence of mountains, ocean and forest there could be. Landscapes aside, Peder was still a close confidant. When I saw him though, our stories of mutual past horrors where increasingly replaced by the mundane details of daily life- the bus schedule, the weather, the bargain of integrity for paycheck. Often we would meet for tea and cheap Russian cigarettes, sitting like the tired raven’s atop the little rooftop pool veranda on my building, the city spread out like a pixilated x-ray. Peder would bring up Max occasionally, but I always averted the discussion. It was more out of apathy than discomfort; I’d be the last to admit.

To have to compromise the finality of physical separation seemed unfair. I saw Max in a snowstorm, on one of the rare and sublime clear powder day’s at Whistler the previous March- his face had appeared in the trees, wonderful yet tinged with it’s own fragility, it’s steady shift to mushy, fog-shrouded slopes. Once I took a backcountry ski trip up to the silent, menacing peaks past Terrace with a few coworkers. The steep pillows spilled down through the pine trees like snowy ghosts, reminding me of how unsuited humans were to nature of this scale. It scared me, the fear coursed through my veins, warm and viscous, drowning the awful doubt that plagued me in times of solitude. We’d rented a little log cabin up against the sudden imposition of mountains that crested like a tsunami over the smooth river valley, the dull silver clouds giving way to fantastic alpine visions as we skinned above treeline. The soggy slush soon turned to waxy, buttery powder, the sort of snow that clings to skis like fine winds in a sail. Descending alone through tight thickets of birch and alder, scruffy spruce and noble Douglas Fir, I’d felt nothing could hurt me, everything was shrouded in frozen crystalline safety, mine forever. Max was like a ski turn through the silent glowing flakes, something loved and gone so quickly one scarcely knew its weight.

A few weeks later, my wanderlust temporarily tamed by the brutish insistence of the workday, so I’d thought, temptation again appeared. I had gone to sleep the night before exhausted, so weary from the lifeless repetition of steel weights in the gym that I felt my body sink through the thick mattresses and concrete slabs of underlying floor and into the warm, moist earth itself. My mind felt bright and whitewashed, filled with pleasant static and the refusal to recognize tomorrow as valid. Slowly, rising from the sea like Atlantis, I saw the little isle of Jacques de Marquee, its ragged green palms and shell beach framed by burnt limestone cliffs. I had just arrived, that was clear, and I carried nothing on me. Clad only in bleached, torn corduroy shorts, my pockets empty, I was barefoot and unusually weathered by the sun.

I saw the little red cabin on stilts beyond the point, and walked toward it instinctively, though it held no special significance to me, no memory. Entering through an open door, I found the interior sterile and empty, devoid of furniture or any of the warm accoutrements of the living. Against one wall lay a skeleton of a man, bleached in the sun, ancient and apathetic-looking. I regarded it with the indifference one might reserve for a particularly belligerent vagrant, a compassion so strong it regresses into disaffection. Just then the sun began to descend from its steely apex such that the room was lit with blinding light. The walls fell away silently, melting into the sharp limestone. My body stood upright and silent through this strange procession; my skin soft and smooth despite the solar oven the little isle cooked in. Feeling a sudden call to action, I knelt amidst the former shadow of the cabin and touched the hand of the skeleton, which had remained fixed and lifeless, just another token of the bizarre.

It pulled me towards the ground with unexpected intensity, morphing quickly into warm flesh, the creases between his fingers absorbed in some translucent material, neither man nor bone. The skeleton, now a ghoulish apparition of various faces that had visited me yet failed to transcend my ego, fell away into a rifting chasm. The chasm grew until it parted the solid gray stone and the sea beyond it like Moses in the new apocalypse, and I fell into it instinctively. Gradually though, falling became a sort of apprehensive lift. I felt my trip played at high speed in reverse; rising though the concrete slabs and tawdry carpets of my building until I reappeared in bed, the alarm signaling morning’s return. My face was tight and knotted with the suppression of tears, but just when I figured I’d call in sick to work and languish for no particular reason, a note of austerity forced me into stiff office clothes and the East-bound 7 bus.

That September, I resigned. I’d never seen Mr. Beckham go into a rage like that before. ‘You know, I used to be naïve and restless like you… before I realized life isn’t all fucking around’ he said, rapidly pacing the parquet floor of the boardroom. I wanted to cry. I wasn’t sure of anything, wasn’t completely committed to the idea of buying another boat, cancelling my lease, and setting off for the south. I knew it was imperative though, like the Arctic tern who barely touches down on the grassy hummocks of Labrador or Ellesmere Island before alighting again to the South Pole, I had to keep moving. It was the only way to stave off that feeling, the hopelessness. ‘Clark, you’re good’, Mr. Beckham pleaded. ‘We need guys like you. You might not be the most brilliant or charismatic guy on our team, but you get your work done more efficiently than almost any of them, and I can’t afford to lose you. It’s been eight months. Hang on for your one-year review and we’ll see about a raise.’

‘Mr. Beckham… I can’t. I’ll be back, that I’m sure of, and I don’t expect to be offered a job again. I know what I’m doing seems rash, foolhardy, crazy even…’, I trailed off. ‘Well, you’re telling me. I’m sad things have to end this way, Clark. You can still say no and I’ll take you back, no questions asked.’ ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Beckham. Actually, I’m not sorry. I need to do this. But, I regret that you can’t understand why, and that I’m hurting others in the process. Guess I never really did care about anyone but myself.’ I turned before Mr. Beckham could reply, and the tall oak doors of Imperial Resources closed behind me, their inward sweep a sort of deathly exhalation.

The secretary, Marissa, pretended to blow her nose while wiping a few tears aside. Her new floral silk blouse was specifically for my eyes, for my hands, I knew. We’d been to lunch several times in the past few weeks, after the initial months of smoldering glances and feigned officiousness. I’d told her about Max in the first few minutes of our lunch date, but she didn’t believe me. ‘Clark, all young men have thoughts like that. Plus, you had the physical connection, right? And you went on some pretty unbelievable adventures together… you never really loved him though.’ It was only when she mentioned her own upbringing in an evangelical Christian household on the ragged, windswept Manitoba prairies that I forgave her.

Packing up the apartment, noting all the little household items of stability that I’d acquired; cheap art pieces, fancy kitchen appliances, a space unequivocally my own amidst all the rushed uncertainty of the city, I wondered why I’d wanted all this to begin with. It was such a compromise- security and adventure always must be mutually exclusive, I knew. I’d played their game, supported myself; basked in the modest immortality a 9-5 and a good lease afforded. Yet in the end I knew it was my primal fault- my inability, or perhaps just refusal to play by someone else’s rules. The rain had returned, and truthfully I dreaded the idea of solitude in poor winds and dull gray curtains of fog on a little boat, bound for somewhere sunny and half-real to the South. I’d had some modest luck in finding a good boat. In actuality, the search had been an incessant distraction from both work and play the whole of the previous summer. My morning runs down Point Gray Road past Kits Beach to Jericho Park were really just an evaluation of the shiny nautical real estate laid out in little slips and marinas for my eyes only, the luxury yachts of the executives and little fishing skiff’s belonging to Chinese immigrants alike.

It was the islands that did it, that pushed me over the edge. They visited me almost every night now. When I woke from the dreams, often with cold, glassy beads across my forehead and the mattress damp and expansive across the black cube of my bedroom, I saw their shapes across the ceiling. Some I had visited; some I knew only in his mind. One in particular had fascinated me, its private horrors so compelling because I knew they were real. It was pedantically called Clipperton Atoll, and lay some thousand kilometers off Baja Mexico. It was the creation of untold numbers of humble sea creatures whose skeletons massed on a sunken volcano, forming a ring of brilliant white phosphate. Briefly annexed by the French in another show of misguided 19^th century imperialism, it was now uninhabited save the tens of thousands of bright orange land crabs, or so the little ‘Atlas of Remote Places’ I kept on my bed stand said. Their eyes were comical and omniscient atop little black stalks, their forms coloring the isle’s perimeter sinisterly.

It had been victim of the sort of desert island mutiny story that makes one cringe at the violent disposition of man, the soulless reversion to basest instincts or perhaps just our nature. I chose not to think of it, the cruel irony of a place christened ‘Ile de la Passion’ by the French where a gentle woman would be raped and killed by a maniacal lighthouse keeper who crowned himself king of the isle. Later he would have his face smashed in with a hammer by the handful of other woman whom he kept in quiet terror on this little piece of burnt coral and ragged palms in the endless, flat Pacific. ‘Mare Pacifico’… the placid sea. So had the Spanish in their limitless exploitation dubbed this expanse, this cosmic bathtub where the scrum of man floated to the surface like shipwreck’s wash ashore.

The atoll had a history that seemed both predictable and irreverent, the endless imperialistic scheme’s never quite conquering the orange crabs and fluorescent reef. Discovered relatively late in European man’s awful Pacific manifest destiny by two wayward Frenchmen in 1711, it had become a lonely outpost of the Parisian empire. It was a colony only in name, where a handful of semi-enslaved natives and irreverent Frenchmen wrought phosphate from the pale earth. Shortly after the turn of the 20^th century a tragedy of almost comic horror unfolded on the atoll. The result of this penultimate folly was a cessation of human presence that had continued until the present, save my plans. There were no lush stands of fruit trees, no bubbling springs or teal streams, only the blinding white sand and drip castles of toxic bird shit, piled so high that they breached the unruly sea around the crater rim of a sunken peak. There were few photos of the island and after I spent the better part of a morning in the musty cabinets of the University of British Columbia map collection, I was convinced I’d seen all recorded evidence of the place.

The appeal of a place half-realized, existing on a map like some cartographic typo in the middle of the Pacific was undeniable. I tried to imagine why the atoll had visited me in the dreams, why it had appeared first as a shadow and then given an identity, a name such that I felt certain it was in fact this place. I imagined myself overrun by nature, its presence loud and demanding, raucous gulls and scuttling crabs. I realized I could fathom the staleness of such a place, provided he had food, clothing and shelter. I knew though from my own oceanic travels that these things seldom staved off the madness of isolation. They only brought lusting for past excess, and I envied the distant natives of the shadowy tropics, content in their own ignorance or perhaps denial of modern man. I wanted to be king of the atoll with no subjects, to be subject myself only to the watchful eye of the sun, the stirring green palm fronds and the untold little black eyes of the crabs. Few had reached this isle unassisted, and few had tried, but I felt that the process would unfold and explain itself without prompting. Just as the endless green swells of the North Atlantic had pushed The Stranger to her destiny, so would this next trip build.

I set off from Vancouver on September 22^nd, the new vessel a 44-foot wooden sloop built in the old character of northwestern sailboats- strong, slow, and generally invincible. I named her ‘Terra Australis’, after the mythical southern land, a place that had captivated both learned and restless men for centuries. She was wild and strong-willed, restless after 2 years of wallowing ungracefully in a little patch of oily water in a rundown east end marina. Her owner was an ancient logger, a man beaten by the cold, damp elements of the B.C coast and rewarded with a modest house in the half-slums of east Vancouver and a nice sailboat to call his own.

He seemed pleased with me, with my uncertainties and romantic ambitions, and the modest price I paid, $25,000, seemed part of a secret pact of adventure between us, the whole of my savings poured into both of our futures. The old man said he’d seen all the world he wanted to see, and now needed a decade or so to think, read, and watch the somber green mountains past his neighborhood progress through the indistinct southwestern B.C seasons. The money I’d paid him would suffice, he winked good-naturedly, and we shook hands with somewhat sad finality. I brought the boat out to a marina my friend worked for on the west end under power. The rain and fog were a late-September blur under the watchful, rigid eaves of steel and green glass as I passed north of downtown. I’d placed most of my possessions in a cold, vaguely moldy storage container way out in some new subdivision west of Chilliwack, where the shadow of Mount Sleese loomed like a sentinel of the nearby U.S border.

My work visa expired in a few months anyways, I rationalized, but I knew Mr. Beckham would have helped me with the naturalization process if I’d stayed. My charts were old and inadequate, a yellowed set of 1:24,000 topo’s with scant nautical information. Just the occasional sounding, and as one approached Seattle, an increasing density of ominous little green asterisks denoting sunken ledges and submarine cables. I’d packed so incongruously; I thought irritably as I guided the boat on her first real tack in years out across the broad bay the separated Vancouver proper from the marshy subdivisions of Abbotsford and Richmond to the south. I’d brought sweaters but neglected long underwear, carefully arranged t-shirts but stored away half my jeans, labored over which books to bring, then forgotten my reading glasses. I felt I had to accept everything as I’d done before, to see things in the even light of the experience again. There was one place I had not seen in my dreams, a place perhaps too visceral and ominous to have infected my thoughts.

Paradox Island. To end Max’s tyranny over my thoughts, I needed to go. Not just because it was real or mysterious or convenient to my journey. I knew every disconnected segment of the past half-year was tied to this; was a step built upon the steep hill to this place. I imagined myself walking through the fog, the deafening silence of the mossy green woods that ringed the little isle closing the path behind me. I’d appear before the cabin, Max’s cabin. I would open the door, the hum of the damp, rainy delirium now as real as the fog, and I would strip naked, the covers of the little bed above rough wooden floorboards swallowing me up forever.

Three days later, I steered though the thin, foggy passage between Friday Harbor and Lopez Island. The ubiquitous foul-mouthed diesel fishing boats were absent, and the occasional hollow cry of an overhead gull was the only sound. The chart which lay dewy and thoughtful on the aft deckboard’s told me where the island lay- it was straight ahead, just to starboard of S40E, a mirage watched indifferently by orcas and sea otters. I lowered the sails mechanically and without thought. The winds were weak and inconsistent here, but I easily ridden my present momentum to the little cove where the cabin lay. I felt weak, vulnerable, aged. I coughed, shook a little, and then steadied myself on the wheel and thought only of the next day, the pleasant fluorescent lights of Seattle filling the awful void of Paradox Island.

The fog lay like suspended thoughts in a surreal but typical inversion, the sun shining bright and unobstructed perhaps 50 meters overhead. I felt insulated by the muffled light- like the dull lights of my old office, it balanced the extremes of thought and encouraged a bland productivity in its place. I anchored the boat in several fathoms of murky green water, the bottom providing surprisingly good purchase. The fine, rounded gravel Max had spoken of longingly ran along the islands edge. Rowing into shore, I strained to see the geometric edges of the little cabin beyond the dark pines, but instead there were only lifeless shadows.

My shoes echoed with the stifled sound of round pebbles against each other as I walked up the beach. Glancing back at Terra Australis reflexively, like the child who looks once more through the closet door before entering Narnia, I was surprised to see a little motorboat tied up neatly some fifty meters distant along the shore. It looked old and tired, probably abandoned by some summer visitors, I though. I imagined the laughing college students, drunk and reckless, swimming back across the little passage to Lopez Island at 3 AM after the motor failed to start. On the edge of the chipped wooden seat of the motorboat, caught against a worn steering wheel, was a little fragment of patterned gold fabric. The wind gusted slightly, dispersing the last of the fog, and I looked back to find it gone. Just an apparition of the sun, I thought absently. Even if it had been real, it meant nothing more than a fragment of memory in the wind. The cabin now appeared out of the haze, just as I knew it had to, yet a few feet in front of the crooked, mossy door stood a man. A young man, framed in the building silver light of mid-morning, smiling and physical. For a minute I lost him, the shadows of the trees swallowed the image, but then it reappeared, stronger, running, yelling.

'A Private Greatness' Chapter 19

-Chapter 19-

Max was hot. If he turned over every 15 minutes or so, the dull, humid apathy of the cell was tolerable. He felt grateful for the slight solitude his father’s connections during the trial had afforded him. Thinking back to the day he’d left Clark Nilsson in Haugesund, the spectacle that had followed seemed distant and absurd. It was a sort of apparition that appeared like a small, sandy island on the horizon line of his mind, its profile barely breaking the awful, flat plane. He was kept in largely peaceful custody for a few initial hours, the authorities intrigued but more inclined to believe he was just some sad local youth, drunk or high and attempting to gain a little notoriety by impersonating a wanted man.

He’d almost reveled in the gruesome bureaucracy, his smile alarming the cops as he handed them a few forms of I.D. His stance had been neither defensive nor conceding, just a neutral body up against the stiff wall of authority. He deserved everything he got, and it deserved him likewise, he’d reasoned. ‘What a way to get back in touch with my father’, he thought, and his father did indeed swoop in and exert his clout somewhat. His sneer during the proceedings was seen as arrogant contempt, but was in fact merely an expression of the same insecurities Max had been dealt. Nonetheless, it became a favorite detail of the Oslo news broadcast of the trial.

When Max spoke at his defense, or rather his testimony as it was, it was oddly eloquent and forthright. He chose to involve the Soviet’s as little as possible, knowing only of Peder’s recent incarceration and the minor diplomatic crisis that might ensue if he chose to take that direction. Norwegians followed his story with an almost envious fervor. Their judgment was an odd mix of sympathy and condemnation, making it difficult to determine which side, if any, spoke in poor taste. His father seemed to approach the whole affair with a sort of resigned indifference. That his reunion with his estranged son should be such a trifling embarrassment was difficult for him to bear; yet Max felt them grow imperceptibly close during the 2-week trial.

The mutual exhaustion from the prying eyes of the state was a sort of perverse kinship. When they released Max into his father’s custody, Lars hired a dozen or so local vagrants to harass and beset the media paparazzi with pre-determined political manifestos against the direction of the state and the media. This of course intrigued and incensed them all the more, and soon the national tabloids were proclaiming Lars Lundgren as a sort of rogue nihilistic industrialist. Max and him could both laugh at this good-naturedly over glasses of wine at his beautiful house in the shadows of the aluminum plant in Karmøy, unsure who had done the wrong thing.

As they drove home from the station, the bums joyously shouted expletives at the media vans from the vantage point of a beat-up old flatbed truck he’d loaned them from the plant. They smiled and laughed together, and Max felt himself subconsciously brush his hand across the expensive cashmere knit arm of his father’s sweater, their closeness drowning out the miasma behind them. ‘So, was it fun at least?’, Lars started, but Max knew his question was genuine- perhaps spurned by a youthful jealousy even, and he resisted taking up the defensive. ‘You know…it was’, he admitted. ‘I know all non-violent criminals love to say ‘Well, I never hurt anyone’, but even if I did, I never felt what I was doing was anything implicitly bad, like universally immoral, you know? I bought and sold bullion, artifacts, things, I never saw them as more than objects… our society has fetishized material wealth in a way I’ll never understand.’

Lars looked at him in a way both pitying and fearful; the full realization of the young man he hardly knew yet was still his son hitting him in full. ‘I understand why you’re mad at me. What I did to you, what I did to your mother, you don’t ever have to forgive that’, he started, and Max looked off towards the misty green never-ever-ness beyond the road. ‘I know you think you know the reasons why I came back here, why I left you and your mother. That I cared only for my business, that I never really wanted a family from the start.’ The words burned and Max felt himself processing their weight long after they’d left his father’s mouth. ‘All those years…’, he trailed off. Their eyes were both absent from the warm leather interior of the Land Rover, fixed on a point across the low, fallow hillsides where muddy roads wove like living veins and ended at little red roof cottages; smoke rising in steady, organic rhythm from stone chimneys. Max wished he was in one of them, clad in cheap snow boots and secondhand sweaters, holding a small child, fixated on something more trying and immediate than the ethics of leisure class crime.

‘Well, you probably don’t respect me much now anyways, so I’m just going to speak my mind’, Lars continued. The silhouette of the aluminum plant now loomed in the distance, squat gray warehouses and electroplating tanks sitting on a rocky spit of land like some sort of moon colony, an outpost of man’s necessity amidst all this pastoral timelessness. The sight seemed to fortify him, and he straightened his back against the stiff leather seat, the veins in his wrist bulging against the stiff metal Rolex watchband. ‘There are a few things I need to tell you’, he said, his voice wavering for the first time. ‘I’m a homosexual’, he stated flatly, and Max felt the edges of the little brown hillsides crowd inwards until he lay limp against the glove compartment, the ditches on the side of the road spinning on the edges of his eyelids as his breath growing soft and ragged. He didn’t wake up until the maid brushed hot water against his dry, warm forehead in the bedroom his father had said was meant to be for him but never got to be.

When Max awoke, he felt like a small child again. Vulnerable, set against his will in an alien landscape where the only familiarities present were the things beside him, implicit and obvious. His father was thankfully now it that category. ‘Didn’t you know?’, Max asked between gulps of warm milk, his throat angry and sore from the deluge of having to explain himself to countless strangers, and now his father. ‘Of course I knew- it’s not always that easy. Well, I guess in technicalities sake it is, but obviously there were some circumstances.’

‘Circumstances’, Max thought to himself. They really were cut from the cloth, the way they managed to sum and rationalize life’s absurdities into things like ‘circumstances.’ The way the past never was important enough to crowd the future, or even interfere with the present. ‘I had a partner in Norway the last 2 years we lived together in Los Angeles, so you can see my business trips I took so frequently to Oslo were of another purpose’, Lars stated flatly. Max cringed, but wanted to hear more; he was entranced, moved in a place he’d hidden away for so long he’d forgotten it was there. ‘I even established Lundgren Aluminum in the States as a way to remove myself from this temptation, from a place I didn’t even know was mine anymore’, adding after some time- ‘…So taken was I with the idea of my new freedom and the easy acceptance I’d find here if I chose to come clean.’

The maid entered the room again with a small plate of cheese and smoked salmon on some sort of dense, starchy bread. Max devoured it with the intensity of a child given candy before bedtime, set on the pleasant distraction food provides. ‘I couldn’t stand it though. You know, when you live a life of perpetual distraction, love is completely disarming when it finally finds you. I wouldn’t say I chose this- but then again, everything is a choice. What I am guilty of though, without any doubt, is deception and irresponsibility, and you and your mother aren’t expected to forgive me of this.’ Max seethed, his skin felt foreign, he wanted to shed it and escape into the turquoise mouth of the sea; the golden crescent of sand at Flatraker where he walked with Clark. ‘What is his name?’, Max felt himself start to say, yet the syllables were not his own.

‘Karl’, he exhaled in a breath of pained indifference, yet Max knew the sound of true amour, the way someone’s name could deceive any doubt, and he didn’t press further. The view across the bay towards the village of Karmøy was superb. The passage seemed designed for its eventual purpose; a deepwater Atlantic port where bauxite ore could be transported from war-plagued jungles thousands of miles away. Here it would be transformed by some miracle of science and cheap hydropower into gleaming sheets of metal, the wealth of some 3^rd-world apocalypse now keeping someone’s casserole from getting stale. ‘Are you married?’ Max continued, unperturbed. He knew this string of inquisition was ridiculous, unnecessary; perhaps even self-evident, but he needed some closure in the midst of the present cluster-fuck.

‘We are partners, yes, if that’s what you mean.’ He’s a humanities professor in Bergen. We met at a ‘community open house’ for the aluminum company, where he accused me of being a ‘murderer of the environment and an imperialistic fool…it was love at first sight.’ Max couldn’t help but smile, and they walked together down the long hallway of his surprisingly compact wooden house. It grand, to be certain, but not gaudy in the way he’d expected from the monster of a man his mother hinted at in LA after a few too many glasses of chardonnay.

He knew forgiveness was not going to be obvious or immediate, the bond of common sexuality he felt with this strange man who was his father notwithstanding. Max had told him his own experiences from the get go; he was never one to let uncomfortable truths linger. Lars seemed half-expectant of this. He was not the sort to dwell on metaphysical half-truths of heredity or fate. That Max could tell. The way he looked at Max after he told him was like how one would examine a crystal or a sculpture, dwelling both on its perfections and flaws. They ate dinner in silence. The sound of the plant was distant yet audible, the incessant hum of his little empire the sort of comfort a sheepherder might derive from the soft bleating of his flock at night- a reminder that productivity and wealth were near at hand. They spoke at length into the evening, the dull amber of Max’s beer glass a pleasant insulator against the inky night. They sat facing each other beside the trembling fire in the study, the maid asleep soundly next door. In the spaces between words, they studied each other with the self-conscious fascination of estranged kin, the pieces of oneself rearranged in someone else. Max made him promise he would phone his mother in Los Angeles the next day, and he nodded silently, his hands running across the creases in his worn corduroys with nervous anticipation. He felt the uncomfortable newness of their connection even as he slept- his body was unable to rest completely. He felt tense and ready to spring back to some familiar past-tense place.

The next day they met the police at 13:00 outside the courthouse in Stavanger as instructed. The hour-long ride in Lars’ personal speedboat across the steely blue expanse where Boknafjorden met the North Sea was chilly and beautiful. The week-long trial progressed with painful predictability, Max’s testimony as boring as it was honest. His incarceration period was determined to be 4 months at the minimum security facility outside Bergen, which the conservatives decried a blasphemous slap on the wrist, and the radical liberal’s thought an idiotic show of state power.

The reality, Max decided, lay somewhere between the two, and he hadn’t thought of his upcoming prison stint with shame or dread, just the flat, 2-dimensional acceptance of the inevitable, the workings of a world he’d chosen to be marginalized by. Entering the dreary stone corridors of the ‘Bergen #3 Men’s Correctional Facility’ early the next week, the freezing rain that pelted his back felt like the emergence from a hell unable to be quantified, an ordeal passing so that the next might begin. Not all was gloom though- after a few days of readjustment on the other side of the walls, he steadied himself into an intellectual and physical routine- a purposefulness. His journal bulged with his daily scribbling; manic notes from the underground, he felt. The little prison gym was a break from the pain of writing when his mind tired.

The other inmates left him largely alone, he was strong in an intangible way; anomalous, and they feared his strange story more than the reality. When he proved to be pleasant and humble, they saw him as just another victim of the system and perhaps a bit of his own greed. Each night as he slept under thin blankets on the hard bunk, as shadows played across the ice crystals than hung suspenseful from irons bars behind grimy windows, he was visited by new dreams. Some involved his father; some were foggy scenes from past landscapes, the Arizona desert stretched thin across a Dali-esque landscape. Most, however, involved Clark in one way or another, whether he was present or merely a suggestion. Upon his release, the press again descended in some sort of gruesome ritual. Their flashbulbs and microphones failed to faze him as he strode in long, muscular steps across the mossy cobblestones of the prison entrance. His father waited in the car, cigarette shaking in his hand.

‘Spring is coming early this year’, his father said to the passing landscape as they rounded a grassy split of land that finally hid the prison complex completely and forever from his view. Max let himself exhale 4 months of trapped air, noting that indeed the hills looked green and youthful. ‘So, tell me about the summer you lived on Paradox Island’, Lars continued warmly. He watched Max light up with recognition, his eyes sparkling in the way Clark had noted so many times, set like faceted gems aside his sharp nose. The ride home was filled with the quiet urgency of his story, and he felt at times perhaps the role of this man he was told was his father was not so much guardian as friend.

‘You know, I am selling the business’, he continued, as if this was nothing remarkable, just the voluntary relinquishment of three generations of industrial dynasty. In fact, it was the coup-de-grace that would land him even more tabloid attention, along with the inevitable outrage and ridicule of his former conservative cronies in parliament.

‘I’ve done a lot of thinking while you were in there, Max.’ ‘Me too’ he quipped, but he realized his words were more genuine that sarcastic. ‘I love my company, my workers, and my sense of place in the community. I know people- young, alienated people in particular love to demonize the corporate world. Even in a country such as our where the regulation and redistribution of wealth by the state is downright communist compared to say, American capitalism.’ He paused and then chuckled to himself. ‘Not that I’m a fan on American capitalism or anything.’ Max smiled. This was his father; he would never have another, and he wanted to reach aside and hug him so strongly he’d swerve off the road.

‘So are you retiring then, or just ethically exhausted?’, asked Max fearlessly. His father signed slightly, like a seat cushion giving in to being sat on, before answering him. ‘I can’t do this anymore…I need to make peace with your mother, I need to make peace with you, I need to make peace with myself. The direction the company is being pushed by both the state and the board is both tyrannical and incomprehensible…’ he trailed off in his own head for a few minutes as they passed a soggy, flat meadow. It was a brief respite from the rocky palisades of the fjord, where sheep grazed mindlessly below the angry gray sky. ‘You trusted them- you worked with them even, no? At least that’s what the papers said’, Max inquired. ‘Yes…in the beginning I did. Let me say first off, though it seems unrelated, that I never doubted the purpose or utility of the company. You see, modern man demands metals, demands resources melted and cut and reconstituted into the multitude of things we deem necessary.’ Max knew these tangents, the philosophical bents he’d get off on, but he excused it as something necessary for his father. ‘So, though it seems obscene to ship Bauxite ore from central Africa or the Lesser Antilles to Norway, we have two things they don’t have- skilled metallurgists and inexpensive hydropower. Most of this is sub-glacial, by the way, in case any of your friends are those ‘save the fish!’ people.’ Max smiled and nodded knowingly. This was his father, his own strange intellect transposed in someone else, and he felt the bond of kin that had so long eluded him.

‘The Karmøy plant in particular I think is an asset to both the community and the economy’, Lars continued. ‘We are giving people of all skill and education levels the chance to work in a competitive and well-paid field.’ He glanced at Max who gazed at the passing sheep with dull affectedness. ‘I know, I know… this seems like corporate brainwashing, eh? But, you need to realize this is how the world works. It can be fair, it can be awful, and it can be wonderful. A lot of it has to do with who calls the shots.’ He paused for a minute before continuing, the rain now descending in fabulously gray sheets outside the windows.

‘The current parliament wants to regulate the right of labor to organize and simultaneously extend corporate sovereignty to the point where the people fail to reap any benefits of this increased wealth. I think…I think we forget that the government, the Aluminum company, the suit-and-tie diplomats who bustle around Oslo thinking of how important they are- we are all just people.’

Max felt the edges of his lips crease into a smirk, yet he felt so proud of his father’s words, so present in this moment. ‘And, how do we know that we aren’t bad people then?’, he asked. ‘Well, exactly.’ Lars replied. ‘I don’t think they are. But… when you put them in a scheme greater than themselves, something vaguely threatening but also paternal, they become good.’ ‘Or at least cooperative’, Max piped in, to which Lars grinned toothily and sat back against the leather seat, the road unfolding around broad bends before them like a torn map of the future.

When they reached Karmøy some two hours later, he let the maid Helga pamper him with delicious edible things and a warm blanket. A roaring fire crept up the narrow stone column in the back of the great room, like a serpent condemned to forever slither up the confines of a narrow cage. ‘I’m so happy my boy is back’, Helga called to him across the room in her infectious Danish accent. Max nodded warmly, content that this bit of bland love should suffice to fill in all the embarrassing dead space between the good and bad deeds he’d been told he’d just done penance for. A tall, striking man, slightly hunched perhaps from leaning over books or blackboards yet steadfast in his own self-awareness turned the corner from the entranceway and faced Max. He had boyish features and thatchy blond hair, and his eyes seemed lit with a benevolent curiosity. He approached Max, who rose uncertainly from his chair. The room suddenly seemed slightly unsteady and skewed to him now. ‘Karl’, he introduced himself as, and they shook hands firmly, Max careful not to let his own face betray any sense of easy trust or false impressions.

‘So, what shall we talk about?’ Max felt himself start to say, the anger welling up like bubbles from the deep ocean, something stretched across time. ‘My recent prison stint? The fact that the only person I think I’ve ever really connected with is probably doing his own time in some Siberian gulag? Or perhaps we can lighten it up a bit and address the private hell my mother has gone through 8,000 kilometers away in Los Angeles.’ ‘Max…’, Karl began quietly, and just as he seemed ready to back away in embarrassed defeat, the fire, the cold gray sky, the building rain, something drove a spike into his throat and propelled him to speak. ‘You don’t have a monopoly on injustice, ok? I don’t know you, I will likely never know how you feel, but I can tell you a thing of two about various inequities, and how much worse they are if we keep them to ourselves.’

‘Oh, how utilitarian! Let’s just share the shitiness! Aren’t we just one big happy mutant family!’, Max shouted, his foot tapping the polished maple floorboards like a nail gun. Karl sat down beside him on the arm of the plush chair and put his arm around Max’s shoulders. He went limp at his touch, his foot slowed, and he felt himself unconsciously beginning to weep. He wanted to push him away, to punch him, feel the firm flesh of his arrogant chest meet his own way, but he knew this was not going to happen. He cried because sometimes crying is cathartic, beautiful, a means to something beyond ones own shortcomings.

‘I’ve booked tickets to Los Angeles next week- you ought to bring enough things for a few weeks, perhaps’, Karl continued, having seemingly said his piece on emotional matters. Max sobbed to himself, his face buried in the fuzzy, tangled edges of his sweater. He felt embarrassed yet proud he could let it all hang out for once. ‘I’ve spoken to your mother, and I think in a way, she understands, though I never expected her to. I love your father deeply; I hope that much is self-evident. I never thought I’d get involved with people like you, chance is such a fickle and hopeless thing…’ ‘Yeah, I suppose you’re alright’, Max managed to say between sobs, and his father now sat on the couch across from them. The wrinkles around his eyes were tight and concerned; he was difficult to read. ‘Do you want to talk about your own guy?’, Karl asked gently, and Max nodded, drawing his face out of the sweater and wiping away the tears. He didn’t like the idea of all this sudden personal deconstruction with a stranger, but the competitiveness in him drew it out anyways- as Karl had said, ‘nobody had a monopoly on inequity.’

‘His name is Clark’, Max started. ‘It’s rather silly, really, all of it.’ ‘No’ said Karl flatly- hotly, actually. ‘Do you know how many years I told myself that? That all my frustrations, all the self-loathing I poured into various degrees and papers, weight machines and alcohol, were just some silly construct? Do you have any idea how many people live their whole lives without truly connecting to one other person? Don’t ever let yourself live someone else’s reality.’ His voice had risen, and Lars now sat on the edge of his seat, face keen and anticipatory, as if he’d seen this before. ‘Look, I’m not saying he’s ‘the one’ or anything. I don’t even know him. And besides, I’ve been through too much bullshit for that kind of naiveté, and I suspect you have too. You have to follow it though- nobody else can truly know that but you. Do you have any way of contacting him now?’ Max started to shake his head, but this morphed into some strange, non-committal half nod.

On the flight to LA the following Wednesday, the nod crowded his thoughts in between playfully competitive games of chess and sprawling conversation with his new friend Karl, who sat on edge of his seat like an 8-year old as the SAS jet hurtled west with his new mutant family in tow. Karl was witty without the pretention, wry without seemingly overly ironic, versed in the strange insecurities and habits of college students as a 2-decade veteran of the humanities department of the University of Bergen. He prodded Max in ways that made him think yet avoided the threatening inquisition the stepparent-stepchild relationship often takes on. They talked about literature, the pros and cons of being gay but never directly addressing gayness itself, and the way foreign landscapes appeared from 35,000 feet. Max generally loved all of it; loved that this man his father had traded his family for was earning his trust slowly despite all his efforts not to trust him.

His mother was not pleased. ‘Everything was ok’, she protested between sobs and a surreal, toothy grin in the grimy LAX arrivals terminal. ‘I was beginning to think things would just work themselves out naturally. Why did you have to come fuck it up?’ The three of them stood at attention like children who know they’ve misbehaved, the presence of an alpha female eliciting an innate respect. ‘Not you baby, I’m so happy to see you’, she added quickly to Max, who hugged her protectively. He smiled into her shoulder, this was how she was, how she’d always been, so get used to it guys, he though. ‘I always knew, you know’, she turned to address Lars. ‘You never had the balls to tell me, but I knew that one day we would just be friends.’ His father nodded sheepishly, his eyes doing a poor job of disguising his relief, like a dog that still keeps its tail between its legs despite its owner’s failure to reprimand a wrongdoing. Their exit from the airport felt surreal and sweaty, the heat of the southern California desert already shaping the city into an eighty-something degree convex oven at 10:00 am. Max was appalled at how little he reconnected with his city. The memories of his UCLA years felt like a dull trickle rather than the desert flood he’d prepared for. As they passed the bright stucco and adobe squalor of his old neighborhood south of the 10 Freeway, he felt like the gaudy green palm fronds and cracked sidewalks were memories of entrapment rather than the bright college memories they should have been. His years amongst them seemed indistinct, though certain details- tan children eating cheap carne asada taco’s on the corner, fire hydrants glowing brilliant red in the sun, forced a sudden smile.

His mother still lived in the same little house in the hills above Brentwood, ‘the shittiest house in the best neighborhood’; she used to joke with him. ‘Los Angeles is really something’, Karl commented as she navigated the steep, winding streets into the hills with ease. ‘You’re not in Norway anymore Karl’, she said wryly, and Max smiled to himself. He vastly preferred it to the idea of some tasteless McMansion in Orange County or Riverside, and the peeling blue paint and drooping date palms beside parched brownish-yellow grass brought a few tears to his eyes. His mother’s Norwegian was still excellent, and she conversed animatedly with Karl in both English and Norwegian. She prodded him jokingly on being ‘just another arts & humanities fag’, which elicited a good laugh out of him. ‘Always a pistol, your mother’, Lars followed, but he knew she was in control, this was her domain, her private inequity here in the fabled Los Angeles hills, and he chose to play his cards conservatively around her. ‘So, are you seeing anybody?’, Lars inquired in a perhaps overly casual tone, as she returned his inquiry with an icy glance, eyes narrow and hot, and Max swore he felt the laser beams burrow through him and into his father.

She lightened slightly though and Max saw it was partly an act- she was an actress after all, both professionally and by nature. ‘Was’, she said flatly, letting the silence build uncomfortably and then letting a girlish laugh echo across the little foyer of their house, her 5 foot 7 blonde nothingness shaking with private amusement. ‘What? You guys are allowed to talk, you know. It’s not like I’ve been sitting here for fifteen years wracking my mind with what to say to you if and when you came back.’ ‘I know, Kate’, Lars responded, slightly hurt, or perhaps just embarrassed. Max shivered unconsciously at hearing his father call his mother by her name, this simple act so foreign to him. Karl meanwhile had brought the luggage into the comically small guest room and was busy fixing dinner.

As if by instinct he had located all necessary ingredients and utensils to produce something delicious, which bubbled with soothing predictability in the kitchen. ‘Pretty useful around the house for an academic, eh?’ his mother prodded Lars. ‘Where did you meet him, some government function or literary event?’ ‘Oh stop, Kate. We met through a few mutual friends, just like normal people do all the time.’ Max winced at the word. Even if they weren’t ‘normal’, couldn’t they just pretend sometimes for everyone else’s sake?

‘I still have your rocks, Max’, Kate informed him apropos of nothing, and he laughed heartily at the recognition of where his own idiosyncrasies came from. ‘I mean, I guess I was hoping you still did.’ ‘Hoping!?’, she trumpeted incredulously. ‘Honey, I thought I was crazy for letting my eighteen year old son run off to Arizona with a thousand bucks you needed for college and I needed for the mortgage.’ She paused for a minute and they watched Lars and Karl’s eyes light up with interest. ‘When I saw how proud, how radiant you where when you came back, I knew it was all going to be ok though.’ Max’s resolve to be strong crumpled like tinfoil at her words, and he stumbled forward, sobbing into her arms. ‘I love you so much mom. I’m sorry I left.’ She was now crying too, silent crystal tears streaked with blush spilled down her velvet skin. They embraced for what felt like hours, his mind letting all the collected bullshit of the past few months filter out like fine sand through a sieve. Lars and Karl had left the room, and stood in the little backyard smoking cigarettes, which Max knew they only did in ‘special circumstances’, as his father would have said.

That evening they dined on linguine with anchovies and pesto, expertly prepared by Karl in the long, emotional hours of late afternoon, when the sun studied them in broad tangerine streaks across the living room. ‘So, how is the aluminum business these days?’, she inquired between mouthfuls of warm green pasta, her fingers sliding across the edges of the salad bowl tinfoil knowingly. ‘It’s beautiful in a way, isn’t it?’, he asked her pleadingly, his eyes following her fingers across the shiny metal paper. ‘Yeah, I suppose, another thing man doesn’t really need… everyone around here is talking about being so sustainable these days, without the slightest idea of how this stuff is really made’, Kate said. ‘Not just this…’, she continued, stealing the conversation expertly. ‘But just about anything you can imagine. I remember when you first told me how some ugly brownish lump of rock from the Caribbean jungles is wrestled from the earth for fractions of a penny, then floats 8,000 miles north only to spit in the face of enough electricity to light up Africa. Then finally, it gives in and provides decent protection for some leftover casserole in Iowa. Jesus Christ.’

‘I always knew you were the one, even if the physical connection was never there’, his father began in awe, his mouth slack and eyes hazy, as if still processing her words. ‘Oh, stop… please’ Kate laughed. ‘It was there, that much you should remember, unless you’ve been knocked in the head in the rolling plant again.’ ‘Not in front of Max…’, his father asked self-consciously, but she brushed him off like the August desert rain building outside. ‘Honey, did I ever tell you that story of my first real date with you father?’ she asked Max. He shook his head. ‘Oh boy, everyone fill your wine glasses for this one.’ She relished watching Lars squirm in his chair slightly, but Max knew this was as requisite in the healing process as it seemed tacky. ‘So….’, she started, every syllable dripping with delicious freshness. ‘I was an exchange student in Bergen for a year in college, and some of my roommates decided to show me around ‘the countryside’, which, as an impressionable 21 year old girl, seemed like the height of cultural authenticity, so we set off towards the south one weekend.’

‘One of the boys I was with, I forget his name, he told me we should go to Haugesund. His family lived there and it was the coastal Norwegian fishing town, he’d told me proudly.’ She paused to make sure they were all paying attention, which they were. ‘So we went to Haugesund that Saturday. We wandered the town for a bit, scoffing at little crafts and knick knack tourist places as if were weren’t tourists ourselves, the way insecure 20-something’s do.’ ‘Oh I know, mom’, Max replied knowingly, but she failed to skip a beat, lost in her recollection. ‘That night, we went out to this bar…not one of those places where young people meet up trade stories of their brief life experiences… this was a dive.’ He cringed somewhat hearing his mom appropriate language like that, but remembered she was quite the cool cat in her day- still was, and he ought not judge. ‘So here was are in this place that looked like your grandma’s basement on a bad acid trip, and this guy walks in.’ ‘This guy’, pointing at his father, who smiled subtly. ‘I mean the age range alone in there was probably 16 to 75. High school kids, alcoholics, dock workers, maimed or injured fisherman- we got the genuine cultural experience, that’s for sure. People probably pay for that kinda shit these days.’

‘Mom!’, Max started, but she failed to heed him. ‘Anyways, so your father walks in. He looked ridiculous.’ ‘Actually, I looked great, it was all you wannabe bohemians and alcoholics that looked ridiculous’, he piped in.

‘Let me continue, Lars’, she said with a sly grin, and he conceded. ‘He was wearing some kind of pressed polo shirt, possibly as ascot’ [I was not!’] ‘And a sweater around his back, you know, the way those chubby-faced boys who go to golf clubs and fraternity meetings every weekend do. So, we are all eyeing him, you know, partly because we are tourists, but also because he was by far the most interesting thing happening there.’ ‘Damn right!’ Lars piped in proudly, but she didn’t let him gloat. ‘So, he shoots us this look like ‘You wouldn’t even be fit to scrub my mansion’s toilets’, but really, I know he’s checking me out.’ ‘You are so self-absorbed’, Lars interjected. ‘Oh, I’m the one whose self-absorbed. Was I wearing the ascot, tell me?’ They were now all practically on the floor in stitches, Karl wheezing slightly from the intensity of his laughter.

‘Anyways, hold on, y’all’ [she still let her southern roots slip occasionally, Max thought to himself], ‘I still haven’t gotten to the best part. So, he shoots us this glare, and we figure, whatever, Haugesund has to have at least one rich prick, right? So we go to the bar to order another round of cheap G&T’s or whatever. He sit’s down awkwardly on this stool for like 10 seconds, then makes a beeline for this imaginary spot between me and the bar, from which he proceeds to ask what I’d like to drink and offer a tour of his father’s aluminum factory in the same sentence.’ They all enjoyed a collective chuckle before allowing her highness Ms. Lundgren to continue. ‘So, having had a few drinks, but not enough to forget I’m just some dumb American girl and this is the best chance I’ve had in 4 months of landing a cute local, I say yes. The next day, I meet him at ‘8:00 AM sharp’, outside the little hostel we were shacked up in. He was so formal…’ she continued nostalgically. ‘Like, the whole time I’m just wallowing in this growing feeling of being totally unworthy of this strange dandy who swept me off my feet in the crappiest bar in Norway.’ ‘I’m pretty sure I was the unworthy one…’, Lars interjected with a self-conscious smile, but she didn’t let him finish.

‘He was so gentlemanly, such a snappy dresser- I should have known.’ ‘Oh, stop Kate’ Lars protested mechanically, but he was too lost in the story to argue much. Karl sat beside him in silent approval. ‘So he drives me in his little safari-esque Land Rover down some muddy path into the forest, and I’m half-expecting to be led to some ’romantic’ spot where he’s going to try and put the moves on me.’ ‘But…’, his father started. She pushed his voice aside easily. ‘But, we soon came out into this huge clearing next to the water, and I swore I’d never seen a factory so big in my life. It was like a cheesy space-city from a George Orwell novel, all these giant gray and white compartments stacked on top of each other, little plumes of white steam rising from hidden pipes, the occasional ‘thwack’ or dull boom of something happening inside ringing through the woods. It was so romantic.’ Max laughed, but sensed she was being genuine.

‘So, anyways, he tells me this is the ‘secret’ entrance so he doesn’t have to go through security, and I dismiss the brief notion that this is just some dapper but crazy townie who is helping me break into a private business. But, we walk in these big steel doors’ [‘Aluminum. Don’t say that word.’ Lars corrected automatically], ‘And all these big burly bearded guys are giving him high fives and head nods. So I figure, ok, this kid is the real deal. The workers are all checking me out, or perhaps I was just being insecure, in any case, I felt like a fish on Mars.’ He loved the way she appropriated euphemisms to her own off liking, never once thinking of how other people might regard her. ‘We proceed to walk through the whole damn place. I mean, I was exhausted by the end of it. You know how big it is, Max.’ Max nodded silently. ‘So, about half way through, your father is walking out of some kind of gangway over these giant shiny rollers, through which tinfoil [aluminum foil, Lars corrected] is pouring out like Victoria Falls in March. He slips on some kind of grease or something, and ‘bam!’, hits his head on one of these roller things. The operator was a quick study, thank god, or he might have ended up wrapped around a sandwich or casserole somewhere.’ They laughed uneasily. ‘Anyways, he had a hell of a welt on his forehead. They took him to the local hospital, and guess who missed the next week of school nursing him back to health? It was destiny.’

They all put down their forks and applauded her heartily, and she rose and did a quirky little bow, eliciting more chuckling. ‘Thank you, thank you…now accepting donation’s for the ‘Buy Kate Lundgren a new house’ fund.’ ‘Kate…’, began his father, returning to her original question. ‘I am selling the business.’ She failed to gasp or sigh or engage in any reaction of obvious consequence. She merely nodded and waited for him to continue. ‘My heart’s just not in it anymore’, Lars continued. ‘I want to do good- and not just for myself. The way the board, the government, and the mining division are all going, I can’t do this anymore. I’m tired.’ They all regarded him silently, and even for Max, to whom this was now week-old news, the admission of defeat was bittersweet, the exposure of weakness in a man he’d decided at a young age was infallible.

He ended up spending almost two weeks in Los Angeles, his mother proving too much like the older sister he never had, fun and irreverent to their estrangement, understanding of all the reasons he’d had to leave. He felt the time slip away indistinctly under the hazy sun and languid palms, their neighborhood surprisingly free of the dull suburban pretense he recalled from his adolescent years there. Soon though the easy contentment of a solid roof over his head and family amongst him withered under the Southern California sun, and he became increasingly aware of a singularity. He had to go north again.

'A Private Greatness' Chapter 18

-Chapter 18-

Vancouver, Canada, January 20^th, 1979.

We sat on the tumbling granite blocks of the seawall, pushed up against the fantastic greenness of Jericho Park on one side and a crescent of golden sand that looked gray in the cold winter drizzle on the other. It would stop soon though, Peder informed me, the rain ‘rarely lasted more than a couple of hours.’ I knew this was bullshit, but being the visitor I decided to heed my quasi-guide’s advice when it came to local meteorological eccentricities.

‘So, Angelina, how do you like UBC?’, he turned and asked the young woman beside him. She sat indifferent to the drizzle, nibbling hesitantly on a Panini from the Italian joint up the block, her crisp golden hair slightly tangled and wild beneath the drooping edges of a cheap umbrella. ‘Let’s walk up Alma to West Broadway’, she replied, deflecting the question partly because she was young, partly because she was beautiful, but mostly because she could. ‘Angie! Why you muzz be zo difficult to our fine young man here?’ Peder scolded, but I could tell it had nothing to do with me. There was something intimidating about this girls indifferent, placeless aura- she was kind, that much I could tell, but you had to slowly earn it; to unwrap her niceness from its shell. A decade of living in an apartment in projects of downtown’s eastside while her mother cleaned apartments in North Beach for wealthy Asian-Canadian families who treated her like some kind of expendable native had hardened her a bit.

The trip from Saint Petersburg had been perhaps the best handling of overwhelming stress yet in my life, I decided. From the moment we’d checked out of the hotel, Peder had been an inconsolable mess. Even when I’d showed him his ticket under a false name and the fake state I.D I’d paid some kid 500 rubles to make in an ally that morning, he was a man possessed by fear. He stuttered, he stumbled; he barely seemed to know himself. I suppose I could hardly blame him. Even the fake moustache, new clothes, and haircut/shave we’d arranged the day before seemed to do little to quell his terror. On the plane, our seats surprisingly plush for economy class, I remembered treating Peder like some sort of invalid half-uncle; not the former chemistry professor from Moscow he was. He’d managed to fuck up everything, I thought somewhat irritably, from the silence the passengers around him craved on the overnight flight to spilling coffee in his lap, his hands shaking uncontrollably. My sympathy and respect for Peder never wavered though- he was the tragic protagonist of a neoclassical Russian novel, his plight both absurd and a reflection on the degradation of the human condition by a culturally whitewashed state. It was only when we landed on Canadian terra firma that his tremors finally subsided. He was safe, he was safe- I’d told him this so many times now, but for once the reality seemed to have sunk in. We made our way in exhausted half-reality through the sinuous airport, other travelers cringing at our bleary-eyed ghoulishness, despite the relative norm of such a state amongst the people in the international terminal.

Upon reaching a payphone, he could barely control his fingers to lift if from the receiver, so I dialed Caroline’s number and asked for her politely. A tired, distant-sounding woman answered, probably expecting an indignant Japanese businessman wondering why his apartment hadn’t been cleaned well enough. ‘Caroline… Car… Caro…’ Peder whispered in disbelief, before collapsing onto the dirty white tiles of the little airport lounge. Several nearby travelers rushed to the scene, and for once I was sufficiently overwhelmed not to act with haste. A young man claiming to be a doctor revived him seemingly without the need of any medical knowledge. He’d simply passed out from the emotion, and possibly dehydration, he informed me blandly. No more coffee, I decided. I took the receiver and explained our arrival to Caroline, who was sobbing in deep gasps of gratitude and what was probably confusion. I handed the phone to Peder, feeling strange that so much pain could be channeled through this piece of grey plastic and wire, and they were able to resume their conversation. They spoke now in quick, hushed Russian. Her ability to keep up after all these years, not even a native Russian herself, was unbelievable and touching. Peder managed to hobble out to a cab, physically fine yet so wracked with extenuating turmoil, the joyful conflictions of reunion, that I treated him with the care and reservation usually reserved for the elderly.

We would not go directly to Caroline’s little apartment, as much as he needed to see her, he told me he also needed vindication, redemption from the all-consuming sin of doubt, so he called Mikhail. Mikhail was a realtor, an investor, and a dreamer, Peder informed me gravely. He was trustworthy, but he felt even trust had its own timelines, and the man he had trusted for two decades with the care of his prize apartment on the hip Kitsilano waterfront might now be renting it to crackheads or have it full of cats or something similarly awful. Mikhail was incredulous, as he probably should have been. Hearing Peder’s sad, muted cries of authenticity across the static-filled receiver, I could easily imagine Mikhail’s words on the other end. ‘No, this is not, I think you have the wrong number… no, no, that can’t be. Peder? Peder Zherov? Yez, yez of course zee apartment eez fine. Jesus, I thought you vhere dead in Kresty?!’ ‘When you have seen horrors like I have, everyzhing kind of go away when you vant it to’, he informed me as we pushed our luggage on an inadequate little cart. An amicable Pakistani man loaded it into the trunk of a waiting taxi and we were off into the great green cityscape.

Mikhail was in a meeting- the investors from his recent gold exploration venture were not happy, apparently, so he wouldn’t be able to meet us until 4. Some 2 hours distant, Peder informed me, as if I wasn’t looking at my watch. I liked that he cared enough, thought enough about me to let me know the obvious- our friendship was now something unspoken. Caroline had to work until 6, he said. As much as this might be the defining moment of the decade for her, she couldn’t ignore the defining moment of the week, which was paying rent on time for once to avoid the eviction call.

So, we met Angelina here along the dull granite blocks of the Jericho Park seawall, since she’d decided her intro to modern European literature class was less important than ‘meeting some dude who claims to be my father.’ ‘I still don’t know…’ she said skeptically as she walked arm in arm with Peder up Alma Street to the coffee place she’d told me I would ‘just die for.’ He could tell she knew it was him though- she quivered slightly when she walked, her eyes fixed on a distant vanishing point, hands in his like the little girl she’d never been allowed to be.

We sipped coffee and ate trim little pastries filled with some sort of midday food inside the apocalyptically modern space of Café Intelligensia. Angelina stared silently at her father, who, in doing likewise, seemed to understand that words or stories were no substitute for each other’s unfettered proximity. ‘Is your mother re-marry now?’, he asked her fearfully, but also with rational expectance, knowing it would not have been unreasonable of her to do so. ‘No…well, she was, briefly, you would have liked him, I think- he was kind, goofy in a endearing way, he was a landscape architect for the city…she always manages to attract these guys out of her league’ ‘Angie!’ Peder reprimanded sharply, but his eyes betrayed him, they seemed to know the kernel of truth in her words. ‘But… you know how she can be difficult sometimes.’ He nodded with glum acceptance. She was so smart, so inquisitive, his Caroline, she would have shone like the natural star she was if she’d had the opportunities. Peder still chastised himself for failing to push her into enrolling when they lived in Moscow where taught at the technical college- he had the money, she had the time. She seemed to derive some sort of grim pleasure out of the menial work that ebbed into the long hours of the day, or so Angelina claimed. She said it exposed people’s real person, he said it only wore her down.

‘So zhey no longer together?’, he asked Angelina with poorly-disguised interest. ‘Zhey no longer together’, she answered him in mock accent, his arm playfully batting hers aside. ‘Did you think I was dead?’ he asked more seriously, and she sat back in her little neon plastic chair for a minute, studying the drizzle outside acutely before replying. ‘Look, I thought of you a lot. That much is obvious. You’re my father and I’ve felt you not being there my whole life. But, when you’re stuck in the daily struggle for some food and a roof over your head, you have to push other things aside, no matter how important.’ ‘You have no idea how hard she works…’, she trailed off, lost in the hazy fog that butted up insistently against the window.

‘Angie, how your studies at UBC?’ Peder continued amicably, so consumed by the brilliant tangibility of her presence that her previous remark simply deflected off him. ‘Good… look dad, father-you-might-be, as I’ve never called anyone ‘dad’ before, least in recent memory- we can talk about all this later? Right now, we need to pay for this wonderful coffee and food, and figure out if the damn 6 bus to downtown is running on schedule again.’ All business, I thought- she’d make a hell of a wife for someone- not as a possession, I hoped I never contemplated such chauvinistic idealism, but as a companion of the highest degree, a compliment to someone who ‘didn’t fuck around’; the words spoken in her magical parlance.

She went up to the counter to pay, but I stopped her and fished out a foreign-feeling Canadian bill, waving her purse aside. The money felt crisp and alien in my hands, a symbolic token acquired at the airport Western Union booth, to be snatched back by the hands of authority when we were somehow extradited by the strong arm of mother Russia. She smiled slightly, as if to say ‘Thank you, but I’m still waiting for an explanation as to why this lone young man accompanied my father on a highly personal escape from a Soviet prison.’ I wanted to tell her, no- I wanted her just to know that I was a co-conspirator, an accomplice in this perpetual scheme of escape. That I had nowhere to go, and thus our paths had crossed because making myself hostage to someone else’s plans was easier than setting off into the great aloneness of the world. We did indeed manage to catch the number 6 bus across town, which she claimed had made life a ‘royal pain’ lately. Construction on the nearby major artery of Granville Street had diverted the course of her daily school commute some ten blocks to the south, and damnit if the world didn’t know her inconvenience.

I relished the feeling of being swallowed up in the vast machinery of a new city, to become another unimportant bus passenger or brisk pedestrian, surrounded by the wonderful apathy of strangers. The bus was indeed circuitous and crowded; it smelled vaguely of Asian grocery items, which hung in limp plastic bags around the wrists of elderly Korean and Chinese women, their mysterious chatter filling the narrow plastic rectangle. When we arrived at what Angelina said was our stop beside an unremarkable row of faded concrete apartment blocks on the eastside of downtown, Peder was beside himself again. He shook, he stuttered, he sweated, he was a man wracked with the nervousness of prolonging more than regret. One could hardly blame him, and our attempts to quell his fears did little. ‘Jeez, Peder, we ought to get you drunk down on Granville Street first’, chided Angelina, but I could tell she also had her reservations. Her eyes were large and moist; their pupils slightly distant and confused, as if eyeing a vague horizon line across which the sun might either rise or set depending on the occasion.

She led us down the stairs behind the squat ten-story building. Its unimproved brick façade was a sort of weeping wall for the downtrodden classes of Vancouver, judging from the collection of candles, flowers, trash, and various drug paraphernalia that littered the sidewalk along its broken edges. I wondered whether this was standard urban rubbish or some awful collection of makeshift memorials to recent street violence was unknown. Either reality was a stark contrast to the collection of hip, urban wealth I’d imagined the city. We followed her with the pained self-consciousness of impending confrontation; the way odd details of the present like a half-painted railing or a misspelled fire escape sign jump out when you are focused so intently on the near future.

Angelina opened the sinister looking double lock with bored efficiency, and Caroline stood perhaps 5 meters across the surprisingly large and airy room that compromised the majority if not the entirety of the apartment. She walked over to Peder deliberately, slowly, each step echoing the intent of the last one, and took him strongly in her arms. His shaking eased slowly, like an overinflated balloon deflating unspectacularly instead of exploding into pieces. There were no tears, not even words for the first few minutes, and I followed Angelina’s lead, awkwardly inspecting the cheap linoleum floor [it was spotless], then following her silently into the little kitchen alcove. She offered me a half-glass of warm sake and a few pieces of sashimi from the fridge [‘my one indulgence’, she said, though I sensed the Japanese businessmen who compromised her mother’s business gave her some for free].

The apartment was indeed a large room, a sort of drab basement studio cleverly partitioned into a half-bedroom with two small futons and a vague appropriation of a kitchen. It was too small to qualify as the real deal, but undeniably a cooking space. I felt it was easiest in times of emotional peril to loose oneself in physical details such as this. My evaluation was cruel and pedantic, noting the obvious such that I wouldn’t have to face the accusatory wails and cries filling the space behind us. Angelina did the same. Peder and Caroline carried on in a generally lost manner for perhaps another half hour, speaking an indecipherable blend of Russian, English, and the universal language of past-due emotion. When they finally turned to address the two young people before them, I saw in a sense the two halves of a soul stitched together again. Roughly, but undeniably of the same cloth- they smiled in strange unison, they laughed in the private way one laugh’s around loved ones, and I couldn’t help but smile at the wonderful absurdity of human life.

Caroline was indeed a beautiful woman, yet she seemed prematurely worn. Her eyes spoke of the awfulness of a subservient routine, a private unfairness carried out for the sake of her daughter. Peder seemed to understand that forgiveness, no matter how necessary, was not going to come overnight. She carried herself with obvious pride, though she knew the limitations of the world and the necessity of playing by its strange rules better than most her age, I suspected. Peder insisted we begin to move the next day into his apartment in Kitsilano, and the two women before him were both angry and compliant. They wanted him to know the years of stale sacrifice here; this was not just a place to be abandoned like some white-trash accoutrement of hard times. The burden of it had to be lifted slowly, deliberately. It was a wound that failed to close immediately, however hastened.

Putting off all these heavy thoughts of new beginnings or a closed past, Angelina, forever the mediator, suggested we go down the street to her favorite neighborhood dinner spot, which she called ‘ghetto sushi’. ‘Not that it’s bad or anything…I mean, this is Vancouver, it’s just, well…cheap’, she added with a laugh. ‘I come all za vhey from Russia to finally be vith my beautiful daughter zand vife, and you vant get cheap zushi first night?’ mocked Peder playfully, but he knew she ran the show. She was so strong, so resilient against the layers of bullshit the world heaped on her, he didn’t dare question his little girl who was now a young woman bent on defining the world by her own terms.

‘Zo, any nice Russian boys at your school, perhaps?’ ventured Peder to Angelina, who raised her chin to the sky for a few seconds, as if exalting the setting edges of the sun for an answer to this profound mystery, her eyes ablaze with fatal irony. ‘I’m a lesbian, Peder’, she replied flatly, then softened her tone and nudged his arm, towering youthfully over his rounded, hunched movements. ‘Do you even know what that means? I mean, those probably aren’t allowed in the USSR or something, right?’ She paused for a minute before adding with a sharp laugh ‘Well, perhaps as private entertainers for high-ranking KGB and comrades, we all know how much straight men love to fetishize that stuff.’ This got a genuine belly laugh out of him, and he put his arm around her without pretense or unfamiliarity. ‘Angie, golubushka, sweetheart… you know I’ll always love you.’ ‘Dad…’, she started, horrified a few seconds later at her unconscious use of the word. ‘It’s not a big deal, really. Some girls like guys, some girls like girls. End of story.’ ‘I…I never…’ he started in protest, but she dismissed him with a twist of her perfectly rounded shoulders. They were strong without being masculine, woven of pale European sinew that seemed to shine under her thin silver jacket, the shiny polyester a reflection of her effortless style.

The restaurant was a sort of hovel in a fading section of neighboring Little Japan. It was thoroughly removed from the trendy high-rises of the district’s heart, where various efforts in retail reality competed for space on the steel and glass grid work above downtown. Peder and Caroline hardly ate, lost in the translation of both recent and distant woes, and deservingly exhausted as well. Their company was enough sustenance for the night, it seemed. Angie and I ate ravenously. Great slabs of bright, wet fish glistening across a glass divider, the diminutive Japanese man behind the counter conversing animatedly with her about the recent turn of events while expertly taming a yellowtail filet- her presence was evidently a regular occasion here. ‘Try this’, she said suddenly, thrusting a slice of marbled red flesh towards my mouth between two slender chopsticks. I inhaled it in a smooth motion, noting the wonderfully complex aftertaste, the almost metallic tinge of the sea. The flavors, the odd blend of ocean-bound minerals brought back such strong memories of my first few days on the Stranger that I had to steady myself on the chair, Angelina trying to look away politely. I wanted this to be the logical progression, the next step in the future I’d determined was hopelessly unavoidable, yet somehow things weren’t right. The memory of the sea was fuzzy and warm; it recalled the way the water felt on a warm August night in Maine, black and opaque, encompassing my whole experience evenly.

Caroline was reserved; she knew she had the upper hand over Peder. Her hurt was a private affair that could be used to wield whatever influence over him she wanted, but I knew she wasn’t like this. Watching them converse in hushed urgency, lost in the exotic newness of their proximity, I couldn’t help but think of Max. The way I’d felt that night on the rocky slopes of Moysalen, hopelessly present tense. How impermanent someone can be if you don’t make it work; work the operative idea as well as action. ‘So, when do you want to start moving to Kitsilano?’ Peder inquired hopefully, yet Caroline’s eyes stayed unflinching and forward, chopsticks stabbing a slice of fatty tuna expertly. ‘You think it’s so easy to forget where I’ve been, to abandon my little home I’ve made for myself and my daughter without help from anyone’, she started coldly. Angelina mediated the tenseness with sudden clarity, her arm around her mother in a pose both conciliatory and protective. She knew the facts, the details were foreign and frankly unimportant, I thought- that she should give in again to his earnest love was inevitable. ‘So, what will you do here, Mr. Zherov?’ Caroline said is slight jest, a sly smile playing across her youthful face.

Her husband, former or present, responded with icy humility, his face taking the form of a man who knows defeat but still thinks in terms of possibilities. ‘Whatever I can find…I used to zhink knowledge was universal. Like algebra or the rain, it didn’t need a language of its own to be understood. But, I know there is sacrifice with zee freedom I’ve acquired, eh? I certainly vill not be first engineer or professor to come to zee ‘promised land’ to pump gas or sweep parks, but I think zhese people…zhese…’ He trailed off in a hazy blur of thought, his face neither sad nor happy, just accepting of the facts as they were. Determined and progressive as ever though, he forged ahead- he was unperturbed by Caroline’s bluntness. ‘We vill live in apartment in Kits Beach, I vind job zoon as possible, vich I think my good friend Mikhail can help vith… you, Angie, Clark, and myself.

‘Clark…’ he started, as if to deflect any doubt they had as to their new companion and my place in this personal drama, ‘Clark eez type of young man I zink I can say vith some authority from my teaching and traveling days eez becoming exceedingly rare in zhis vorld.’ I blushed reflexively at hearing my name, my sudden involvement, yet Peder’s words were also hollow in the light of my own stresses. I was tired of compliments that did me no good; that neither propelled me to self-improvement or strengthened the kinship I felt with half-strangers like Peder. In a way, his words now did both, but I felt so alien here at a shabby strip-mall sushi joint in a cold, rainy corner of the Pacific Northwest that the supposed straightforwardness of human empathy did me no good. We talked for another ten or fifteen minutes, the conversation obvious logistical chatter about the upcoming move. It was laced with Peder and Angelina’s infectious self-deprecation, the way they so bravely bared their supposed shortcomings to anyone who wanted to listen. Caroline was also in this group, I suspected- she’d internalized so much unfairness that things would always be skewed, always cast in the shadow of survival rather than the luxury of idle moments.

We walked in silence back to the little apartment. Our footsteps echoed dully through the hum of the city; the incessant drone of people doing things largely because they were told they had to do so. I slept poorly, which I felt had nothing to do with the fact that we were still some 8 hours behind Saint Petersburg time. It was more to do with the resetting of arcane internal mechanisms to this new place, the loss of the subtle Nordic aesthetic I’d become so fond of. It wasn’t the people, people were attractive everywhere, I thought resolutely, ugly too, both in their souls and their skin. It was the implacable details that eluded me; the way my thoughts of Max were always colored by the frigid teal waters of the Lofoten Islands, the hard edge of the little futon in his flat the resting place for these distant thoughts. My money was dwindling. The exact amount was always a mystery to me, in purposeful sabotage to practicality or planning. I wondered if I might find work here in something professional, something you could explain at a cocktail party or a bar without elaborate justification and gesticulating.

When he awoke, the sky outside was gray and boiling, lost in its own dreary thoughts of pending rain. I saw the stark modernity of downtown, the steel and glass islands to the west shining in terrifying 3-dimensionality. To the north, across a large train yard and some sort of ragged industrial carcass, the mountains of the infamous Coast range rose steep and unapologetic from the sea. Their flanks were a study in permutations of green. I felt the nervous excitement of freedom I’d first felt with Max, the idea that I could leave silently now and be on my own without further thought or consequence, however tied I seemed to these people. I made breakfast with quiet, mindless efficiency as they slept, delighting in their tired approval when they wandered into the little alcove that served as a kitchen, the position of the sun and hence the position of the morning obscured by the building clouds. Caroline drank a large cup of black, cheap coffee in a single fell swoop. Her eyes seemed set on the dull necessity of the workday ahead, from which she might gleam some detail of her condition, or at least a paycheck. She said she didn’t mind the work: that the pay was decent and the tasks simple, but I could tell her mind seethed in subtle conflict, the endless ‘what-if’s’ that haunted me also visited her.

The next week passed at a speed that was difficult to gauge. The reference points of reality these days were such that I couldn’t tell if I was on the train or merely watching it go by on the platform. Mikhail, who proved to be honest and clean-cut in the way of middle-aged men of limited means who have nothing to prove to anyone, helped us move into the 4^th floor townhouse in Kitsilano. It felt like a tomb, its interior sterile and musty from a decade or two of planned neglect. God knows why they didn’t rent it out, but somehow I knew it fit the story; that it all had to be this way. Not that anything was planned at this point, I decided a few weeks later while watching the sun drown itself in the cold gray Pacific from the rooftop deck of our building. Angelina passed me the smoldering joint she held from the shallow end of the heated pool.

‘Thanks’, I mumbled, afraid to have my eyes directly on her; she was naked and the ‘closed to repairs’ sign was cleverly hung across the pool deck door. ‘You ever wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t met, if you hadn’t stumbled on Max in some fishing village?’, she pried. She was high and I tried to disregard her comment but couldn’t. ‘You know I don’t like to talk about him’, I protested meekly to her, refusing to see him directly in my mind, his name the thinness of my memories. ‘Yah, I know, love is terrible sometimes’, she conceded. ‘But it’s better to have had that realness; the shiny edges of the greatness you get from someone else, than to never have felt anything.’ ‘You get so weird when you’re high’, I chided, but I knew she was right. I hated how I felt I had to diffuse moments like this instead of letting them stew in their own strange momentum.

I dove into the deep end and came up behind her, mock wrestling into the shallow end and up onto the hardwood floor around the pool where little wisps of moss grew between the boards, the incessant greening of Vancouver. ‘You ever think you might be too cool for your own good?’, I pushed her. ‘Think about toning down a bit, you know, the girls are all afraid of you because you’re not accessible enough.’ ‘Fuck accessible!’ she sang, mid swan-dive into the pool. I laughed and could hardly blame her. Ours was a strange lot; caught between or own private greatness and our shortcomings, which lacked the definition, the cementing permanence of true adulthood.

I’d actually gotten several interviews that past week- one of Mikhail’s good friends was a consultant of some clout in the mineral exploration industry, and had passed on my cleverly elaborated but not untruthful resume on to a few colleagues. The truth was obvious enough, I’d decided, and my ‘B.S in geology at Brown’ was valid- life had just interfered with acquiring the damn piece of paper that said it was so. Still though, the guilt of being caught in a lie haunted me- the fact that the rules, no matter how inconsequential they were in the scheme of things, never bent to you; they only made you flex around their rigid forms. I bought a suit, a smart number that was a half-concession to the strict standards of the business world, I figured. When I walked down the steel and glass chasms of the financial district to my first trial, as I liked to call them, I only felt like a caricature to myself. The rest of the city only took note only of my classic looks and nervous gait, the slim leather shoes snagging on all the ridiculous appropriations I felt one had to perform in order to be taken seriously.

I was in fact taken seriously, despite my doubts- my first interviewer was a fellow nautical enthusiast and had a touch of my hopeless wanderlust, despite his stature as a minor pariah as far as the environmentalists and hipsters were concerned, he’d warned me jokingly from the get go. He was in fact an honest and straightforward man, 50-something if I’d had to guess. He had certain qualities of my father that I’d forgotten I missed so intensely. He loved his work and his people, and saw natural resources and the Faustian bargain man made in acquiring them in a balanced and thoughtful light. I couldn’t help but say yes when I got the offer in the mail the next week. ‘You know, this is primarily an office job’, Stephen, or Mr. Beckham, as I felt more comfortable calling him, warned me jokingly as he wandered the long hallways of Imperial Resources on my first day. The gears of my mind were busy processing the fantastic array of maps and aerial photos before me. ‘I know, Mr. Beckham, I just think Imperial has some great properties, I guess’, I answered in what I knew was a slightly lame reconciliation attempt, but Mr. Beckham chuckled again and failed to skip a beat.

‘Of course we have great properties…you are working for us now! But, bias aside, I’ve worked for a number of different junior mining companies, some great, some middling, and some blatant stock scams.’ His honesty to a green hand like me was both fascinating and intimidating. ‘This is most certainly the best. As an economic geologist, you are going to find in your career that it is important to know how to ‘play the game’.’ ‘I’m not sure if I follow…’, I started, but he knew I was partly playing up humility in the face of the new boss. The way a dog nervously sits beside its owner, both certain of its protection and caught in the neurosis of pleasing. ‘I suppose what I’m saying’, he continued, ‘is that you will learn many things, perhaps not a master of any of them -though some are- but versed in the language of the sell and the find.’ Stephen was a Canadian of solid northern Ontario stock. His thatchy blond hair hung in distressed clumps on a square, confident head; his shoulders slumped slightly from years of office tedium. Despite this, he was still filled with the purpose found in long, trying days in the field, pack heavy with rock samples and map boards. ‘We are sort of like modern day adventurer’s, huh?’, I answered in quiet contemplation.

‘Sort of…? Damn right we are. This might an office just like the Scotiabank or Canadian Tire hives across the street, but we don’t operate like them.’ [He loved bee analogies, I noted…though eccentricities aside, the cubicle and corridor world was rather hive-like, roles and spaces falling into neat little compartments]. I found the work fulfilling and purposeful, hive-dwelling aside. The following few weeks were both an exercise in the removal of personal freedom from doubt and showing the world I could do it; I could play by their rules convincingly. My map work was neat and meticulous; without the pained embellishments of a wandering mind I was generally so prone to. I’d begun to relish the 9 to 5 routine and the small one-bedroom apartment it afforded me a few blocks towards Kits Beach from Peder’s family. Sometimes I thought of Max at night, as I lay under excessive down comforters and crisp white sheets, the floral designs on my pillow an obscene and vaguely hurtful reminder of the world of strange patterns I’d left in Norway, the lingering guilt of a theft never truly amended.

I found myself settled into the bland wonderfulness of knowing roughly what one will do the next day, yet the absence of the people I felt I’d condensed a decade of intimacy into a chance encounter with started to wear on me. I saw Angelina occasionally- we’d gotten drunk and slept together perhaps 2 or 3 times. The occasions seemed hazy and distant, though my forehead pricked with nervous physical excitement at the memory. Her skin had been warm and expansive, ‘not what I had expected for a lesbian’, I’d chided her the first time they undressed together on the rooftop pool patio, the city lights reflecting on her firm breasts, the water bath-like and protective. ‘Great, now you think I’m one of those’ she exhaled in a single worried, drunken breath. ‘Haven’t you… haven’t you ever been confused?’, she followed with pleading lightness. ‘God…if only you knew’, I thought to myself, but I resisted the urge to spill the whole story to her, smiling and allowing a single nod to relax my comic stoicism. I felt safe inside her, our intimacy not love but a silent pact forged against the barbarities of an enemy world, a rainy cityscape that hassled us when all we wanted to do was find a place in it.

Angelina indeed became my closest confidant against the cold, rainy urban jungle, and we saw each other a few times a week. Usually we were engaged in something benign and public like a few hours conversation about the world’s unfairness over a double espresso or the sashimi lunch special down the block. At one rendezvous in early May though, when the cherry blossoms shone like waxy candy on the branches that hung over the downtown mall, she informed me with nervous excitement she had a girlfriend, a girl ‘like a vision.’ I was happy for her, but I could feel the intensity of their burgeoning relationship in the way she spoke of Katia, a Czech girl on exchange for the year from the music conservatory in Prague. As Angelina withdrew from me unconsciously and into her own new world, I distanced myself from her as well. At night in the sleek rectangular bed that sat squat and vaguely malevolent against the tall windows of my studio, I would lie awake and hold the bunched up edges of the comforter between me, the memories of Max fading as much as I tried to channel them. I did not think of him in the present, did not contemplate if he was incarcerated, released, escaped, or lost in some own fantastic vision of his own making. Rather, I decided it was silly and futile to dwell on Max, when only walking on alone could ameliorate all the fucked up uncertainty.

I was well liked at work considering my relative inexperience, and I felt the warm, unspoken approval of both my coworkers and the mysterious maps of the Yukon and Central America that hung watchfully over my desk. Lost in the pleasant distraction of a new routine, I’d almost forgotten how little time off I’d been given. Truthfully, it was probably my choice to stay into the bleary mid-evening hours, when adjacent buildings became lit like strange pieces of fluorescent modern art, random squares basking in the dull yellow glow of office productivity. I hardly ever ate or lingered at home- it was too easy and nice to become swallowed up into the translucent fabric of the city, to enjoy the private narcissism of recognition from strangers in a sushi joint or coffee shop rather than engage my problems head on. Every other weekend day I allowed myself to escape the city and drive or take the bus up to Squamish or Whistler, where I might meet a few friends for rock climbing or mountain biking. The deliciously moist greenness of the Coast Range draped over everything like a wet towel, and I felt people came here to either get lost or find themselves. I wasn’t sure which I fit into, but I loved the Northwest aesthetic and it’s unwitting rewiring of my life anyways.

Rock climbing had also begun to bring me the joy it used to, or perhaps just distraction. No, I decided firmly, it was indeed a passion and something I would cling to in times both difficult and easy. Still though, I refused to let myself become one of those infamous climbing bums I recalled reading about with such fervent jealously, the type who sacrificed everything for a life of steep thrills. Not that there was anything wrong with this reckless pursuit of happiness. I just knew it meant more to me when weighed in equal expenditure with the toils of an 11-hour day plotting drill intercepts on graph paper, the little colored pencils like devilish arrows, bent on spearing my muffled creativity. I wanted to be subordinate to something, in slightly wonderful fear of physical or emotional consequences. Climbing pushed these buttons in just the right way. I was strong but not invincible, amateur but not mediocre, skilled but not beyond making technical mistakes on the rock- the steep, bullet-hard granite walls or Squamish or the Eldred Valley like frozen waves crashing over the mossy forest.