-Chapter 13-
We sat again on the edge of the futon again, but the awkward distance of the past night was gone. I felt the same surreal kinship, the weird anticipation that wasn’t as much uncomfortable as expected. ‘So, tomorrow I will go and talk to my friend Hakan Skelvik’, Max started, ‘He was sort of the captain of their sailing team, or first mate perhaps, I forget how all the titles work, I’m sure you’ll like him, you and him are cut from the same cloth; fond of boats, rugged-looking, sometimes socially inept…’ He snickered and pushed me back into the stiff futon and onto the worn comforter of indeterminable color. My dinner spilled partly across my lap, warm pancake bits across old corduroys. I wanted to protest, to be mad, but was too caught in the grand scheme Max had planned for my boat, so I silently glared in mock-jest and allowed him the luxury of continuing. ‘He will speak to the other three and see if they are in on this. I’m not promising anything,’ He enunciated the obvious in affected tones, as usual. ‘Me neither’, I added, but Max cut me off. ‘You can really withdraw 50,000 SEK here on such short notice? Where… how is maybe a better question, have you been financing these past 7 months, if you don’t mind me asking?’
I’d anticipated this question but it still stung. Not because I didn’t know the answer, but because the reality of my finances both appalled and sustained me. ‘Well…’ I started. ‘I would be lying if I said I hadn’t planned some aspects of this trip in advance. I mean… not the trip itself happening, of course. That part was fatefully spontaneous. Just the idea. The past 3 summers between school, I was an ‘intern’ of sorts for a branch of my father’s company in New York. The job was mostly a gift, as you’re probably guessing. But, I guess the slight merit on my part was that I got treated largely like shit by the awful young brokers and ‘wealth management advisors’ who supervised me…they made me do some genuinely awful work; staying at the office til 10 or 12 at night checking these lists of numbers for mistakes that had already been checked by someone…Cleaning the bathrooms when the Puerto Rican maid quit because the fucktards [fucktard- what a novel new word! I though to himself] wouldn’t stop harassing her. Asking her is she would give the massages and the like.’ I stopped to catch my breath. When difficult questions were posed I liked to attack them in a fluid, sweeping motion, a diatribe of information and dialogue that was not so much right as it was complete.
‘Anyways, I earned a decent paycheck those summers, which frankly, by the end of the third, I felt like I deserved, though I so disliked the work I never thought of money as appropriate recompense. My living expenses at Brown were minimal; I kept in mostly and seldom took trips, save the occasional ski or climbing weekend, which I usually got out of paying for. So, I had a pretty substantial savings by the end of school, and not entirely an undeserved ‘trust fund’ either.’ ‘Look, you don’t have to prove anything to me’, Max interjected, slightly perturbed. ‘I told you about my family- how difficult do you think my life has truly been? Besides the situations I’ve put myself into, I’m not exactly a candidate for the ‘Nobel young man’s medal of hardship and valor.’ ‘Noble young man’s… hardship…Valor!’ I was beside myself with laughter. I loved that this young man, this lost brother perhaps, could break the icy spell of doubt that filled me otherwise, that poisoned the ambition of a boy who didn’t truly believe he’d was the man he’d become. ‘So, I transferred the money into a Swiss account about a year ago… or, all of it I didn’t need until this summer’, I finished. ‘Aha… smart- what a smart young man. Noble and filled with valor too, perhaps’, Max mocked between mouthfuls of starchy goodness. We put down our plates, wrestling across the futon and now on the floor, play-fighting with a strength reserved for combat in some. For us, it seemed to be necessary; to fulfill the strange dreams, the fallow hopes of some golden forever lying over the next hill, the next paycheck, the next year.
We left the food lying disinterested, naked on those little white porcelain plates with blue floral embellishments that seemed endemic in Scandinavia. Max pulled the comforter off the futon and around us. I held him close, close as Guillaume or Julian or any of his past loves, but there was nothing sexual about this new love, at least not that I was conscious of. It was fraternal in a way neither traditional nor prophetic, only present, the fulfillment of the moment, and I smiled as I dug my face into Max’s tangled reddish wisps; flat hair arranged like pieces of modern sculpture, all rakish angles and acute intersections.
I exhaled deeply, my breath slightly pained and uneven. He told me he was scared. I said he didn’t have to do it; he could follow me out of the country. The authorities still didn’t have a lead on him and it was doubtful he would be detained given his familial status and the fact that he was neither a suspect nor possibility as far as most were concerned. He replied that he had to submit, he had to feel the vulnerability he’d never been granted. His father’s response was imminent- certain to be something that would incite the action he couldn’t find anywhere else. ‘Action direct!’, he’d fancifully called his new plan, and I admired him too much to add my take on the situation, which was ‘Jail direct.’ We slept equally close and his dreams were strange and comforting- he saw them together off Port Lligat, Dali’s horizon breaking the dead, frothy water at the edge of the lighthouse, the two of us naked in a rowboat, the oars ineffective and short.
When I woke, I observed the angle of the light between certain of the windows in the modern building across the street, the cold, monolithic offices of Lundgren Aluminum AB, and decided based on their refractive index that I would not run away that morning. The thought had paralyzed me since the early hours- I’d laid awake and listless, arms pulling at Max in his sleep to make sure he was still there. The ground had possibly given way sometime earlier, and the walls leered menacingly inward, focusing my ability to leave silently and now if I wanted.
I needed to return the boat, I’d decided firmly just before dawn. Not even so much return, as I was never a believer in the ability of some half-assed reconciliation attempt to undo past sins, but I needed to be terrestrial, earthbound. The voyage of the Stranger was a strange apparition, something never quite there. The pieces of the trip only fit together in retrospect, and I needed something more consequential than luck and foolhardy endurance to guide me. The details were of course peripheral- even the central plot seemed to wander with the weather and god’s will. I would, however, follow Max’s instructions, and I steeled myself for the tasks ahead, reminding Max to make sure that the sailors understood all the circumstances, not just the salary and itinerary.
The morning passed in uneventful terror and at quarter past one we met with Hakan Skelvik, the head of our little contingent, and talked about plans. Hakan was, as Max had predicted, a fine character and an odd Norwegian analogue to myself- edgy, uncertain yet confident, high on his own brief successes such that his failures, or perhaps just mistakes, seemed peripheral. He was of average height, strong but subtle, his face a mirror of the sea, a shifting map. He was not someone I would have pegged as trusting. Perhaps due to our small age difference though- he was only 5 years my senior at the most- Hakan seemed to understand my predicament implicitly, the unbelievable details not affecting him as I thought they would.
We ducked into a nearby coffeehouse, as the edges of a trailing, slanted drizzle had now morphed into snow. It came in great white sheets from the direction of the Hardangervidda, the endless gray slabs of rock and ice that sat squat and roughly hewn in the wild border country to the east. The windswept mountains from which gods and trolls descended to influence man, so the Vikings had said. We sat in a corner protected from the full view of what was building outside. It reminded me of where I’d sat with Max that first night, warm and insular. ‘You can see how desperate we are for work, taking on such a crazy offer’, Hakan said in surprisingly good English, then, searching for a word in an agitated, distracted state, he gave in to rushed Norwegian inflections. Hands waving, Max struggled to translate in time. ‘The new government, they don’t care about the arts, about national pride in the unique skills we have, that mariners should be valued beyond the GDP increase their latest haul of fish or towing out to sea of an oil rig adds. We are turning into a Stalinist state… or maybe just a modern one’ he trailed off in disgust, turning his face towards the sea. After a minute or two of silence, he regained his formerly warm demeanor and apologized for his slight outburst. He told me the work was of obvious importance, and he had always wanted to sail a small craft [the Stranger was ‘small’ by their standards, I thought in mixed awe and jealousy] across that stretch of the Atlantic. ‘I will not romanticize the details, however. Though I’ve never sailed with you, I trust you have some remarkable skill, or perhaps perseverance, to make it here alone. I’m not much of a believer in divine providence, or whatever they call it when god intervenes, but if I was I’d say you were well taken care of.’ ‘Thank you…’ I mumbled embarrassedly- I had indeed been blessed with extraordinary luck, a confluence of intent not always my own. The elements were never quite in sync with me- merely close enough that their taunts failed to be fatal, only a reminder or mortality.
I shook hands with Hakan warmly, and we agreed to reunite at the docks on December 4th, one week from today, to meet the rest of the crew and arrange payment and air travel logistics for the four. I tugged at Max’s sleeve absentmindedly as we left the café, the way a child might. Not to irritate, but to reassure itself that their parent, their guardian is still there, still large and invincible. Not that I’d relinquished any of my independence to Max, though I partly wanted to. Rather I felt it grow in the presence of such natural company, such that I no longer woke with the usual pangs of doubt. We had acquired a strange, organic harmony, the two of us, and time [or lack thereof] together could not invalidate this. ‘Could you be my brother?’, I asked into the sleeve of Max’s coat, so that it came out muffled and ambiguous. I hated myself for asking this. ‘No’, Max stated flatly, pushing away, then pulling me closer again beside him so that he tripped and caught himself on the uneven cobbles, a few old people nearby watching our antics with a mix of youthful nostalgia and sterner disapproval. ‘Well, it’s not likely, at least’, he softened a bit and admitted, ‘And besides, my genetics are better than that.’ ‘Oh really, Mr. bored bourgeoisie adventurer turned criminal?’ ‘Don’t speak of yourself in the third person, it’s not a flattering impression of your sanity’ Max countered between laughs, and we carried on in this manner all the way home, heedless of the looks from the old people and now some young folks too. Ours was a camaraderie not allowed by the supposedly modern take on masculinity- the unspoken ethics of conduct that allowed only lustful, sexual energy behind closed doors, or stiff friendship in the open, with no room for all the wonderful intermediaries.
We stopped at the library, not the public one, which Max informed me was ‘no good’, but at the one belonging to the curious school that sat at the top of the gray hill. It was apparently called ‘St. Gustav’s’ and one of the better private preparatory schools in the country. I was surprised such things existed in this era of supposedly ideal state education, and Max replied they didn’t until rather recently, a product of Norway’s idealization of the American privatization model; the myth that the private sector could do everything better. We entered a large, almost palatial hall, its ceilings adorned in the type of early 19th century romantic frescos and embellishments that would now be derided as kitsch if they weren’t so old. These covered up barren, hand-hewn stonework probably dating back to the early Dark ages, some ancient defense against marauding peasants or the plague or such. It was funny how kitsch of one era becomes high art of the next, I mused. Once the historical context was forgotten, we were free to create new, incongruous trends with complete disregard for the past. We found the geography section, easily located by the ten-foot high map cases that leered outward menacingly, their ancient wooden drawers in various states of closure or disclosure. Max quickly located several good road and topographic maps of the northern part of the country. To the north, great mountains ranges and circuitous fjords, making ground transportation nearly impossible, I thought, increasingly desiccated the coast. I asked about the logistics of getting to these places, these little red and blue dots that on a mapped seemed ethereal and fictitious, and the promise of a human settlement at that particular point doubtful. Max responded that he had been as far north as Narvik, a cold, windswept iron ore port to the North Sea located in the inner reaches of the great channel that split the northern reaches of the country in two. It wound inland almost as far as the Swedish border before becoming stymied in the vast, impenetrable network of valleys and alpine bogs of the Tornetrask, a place even the Sámi had traditionally let be.
I asked if we were going all the way to Tromsø, and Max responded that of course we were, though he warned me I should bring plenty of books and other entertainment. It would be dark some 16 or 18 hours of the day already there, and likely as cold and irritably beautiful as such a tremendous skew of human light cycles suggested. We would take the NSB train north to BODØ, the northern terminus of the NordRail line. From there, we’d drive on the E6 to its end in Tromsø, from which the journey would either continue or reverse itself. I wanted to ask what the point was to spend 16 hours on a train, then another 6 in a car, only to stay in a foreign, lunar-esque settlement a few days and then reverse the trip, but I knew Max’s answer would be something vague and entitled. A diatribe on ‘the experience’, which I had no basis on which to argue against- my romantic delusions were equally grandiose. We set off late the following afternoon, and I was secretly distressed by our seemingly untimely departure. For me, all trips to unfamiliar places began with the rising of the sun, or shortly thereafter, any postponement of this was lackadaisical and unacceptable. Max assured me that it was only because of the train schedule. As I packed carefully, methodically the night before, watching him squirm listlessly on the wide white bed in his room, scratchy old records mumbling in the background and thin strings of cigarette smoke wafting like spider webs through the stale air, I knew if wasn’t just the train schedule. Max was just one of those, one of those perpetually distracted people, those who can’t ever commit to a task lest something come up in the process.
When we boarded the train, I thought it felt like entering a glass and steel tomb. The sleek, rounded bits engineered into a northbound bullet, a capsule exempt from time, ephemeral in its surroundings. The journey north was unremarkable in the spatial sense- the landscape was remarkably uniform, given its tendency to dissolve into deep green chasms and rocky passages. The vegetation slowly succumbed to the elements; little stunted trees no more than a meter high, growing horizontally in sheltered alcoves along the tracks. Latitude was so much more noticeable than longitude, I thought, as the train made an elegant sigmoid around the edge of the Sognefjorden. It disappeared into a tunnel and remerged on the far shore, seemingly indifferent to the stubborn landscape. We had purchased two beds in a business class sleeper car, a ‘small concession to the finality of the trip’, Max had told me, to which I nodded sadly. We slept fitfully, in brief periods where I still felt cognizant of their northern progress, the shadows of passing towns playing vaguely across the little bedside windows. They teased me to get off at the next station and leave Max behind, to return to the Stranger and my former ‘plans’, Oslo still sitting alone and available to the south. I couldn’t rationalize, couldn’t commit to the idea of a finality, a breaking point from which my life had to subsequently evolve- everything had to be fluid with me. The fact that people bothered me so inexorably, that they activated all my unflattering eccentricities should have drawn me closer to Max, to Annika, to Guillaume, to the memory of the beaches that were little islands unto themselves, but instead, it only pushed me away.
I awoke when the smell of strong, acrid coffee flowed up and into my head like old thoughts, and Max stood before me in a sort of ersatz leisure suit, ill-fitting and bohemian without any nod toward present style, holding a coffee mug. I stretched as best I could in the tight confines of the bunk, and accepted the coffee gratefully. Max wore that wonderful gold scarf; the smart little emblems of his family crest arranged in neat rows, spilling from his strong neck down across his chest. It made him look like some sort of lost Nordic Bedouin, a nomad in his own land. We took a walk a few cars up, and several pimply, pubescent boys eyed us suspiciously, their lips upturned in a snicker at Max’s odd outfit. I passed them indifferently, to judge them as immature or simple would be hypocritical, we all evolved from unlikable, ragged children, I thought; what determined us was where we went from there.
The train lurched slightly, and then came to a grinding halt. The round, pale woman manning the pastry cart stooped forward instinctively to protect her piles of sweet, crystallized things and coffee canteens, clearly accustomed to these sudden stops. My fears of an outage or mechanical breakdown abated when I saw several beat up ATV’s approach the tracks from a nearby bush trail, kicking up clouds of dirt and revealing a dozen or so Saami locals when the dust cleared. They were squat, strong people, of various degrees of Nordic mixing, tied to the landscape with equal fervor of the lichen or stubborn ice, yet their marginalization spoke the tale of native peoples everywhere. A few families disembarked the train in a forward car, and I craned my head round the window to watch. They exchanged hugs and animate greetings with the ATV contingent, and a balding, tired looking porter opened an underside compartment and removed an incredible amount of stuff. Duffle bags, suitcases, shopping bags bearing the names of duty-free liquor outfits and trendy Oslo department stores, great bundles of packaged food hastily tied together with string, all erupting from the bowels of the train as the porter struggled to remove it officiously.
‘They get their annual state welfare checks in late October’, Max informed me. ‘Sometimes, they stay in their villages and save the money or buy reindeer or new snowmobiles, but more often it seems they go to Oslo, where they buy a tremendous amount of crap. Then they lug it all back home a few weeks later and have to scrape through the winter.’ I wanted to reprimand him on such brazen cultural typecasting, but remembered that compassion can take many forms, and besides, this was his country, not mine. I watched them arrange the contents of the cargo holds in great towering bundles on the little ATV’s. A small child usually sat dangerously near the end of the vehicle, hands up, preventing the whole lot from tumbling down. I saw briefly the eyes on an old grandmother, the way her pupils mirrored the frozen bogs and strange Arctic sun beyond us, and I thought perhaps we were not as separate as I’d believed. The train lurched forward and soon regained its momentum, winding through frozen, silent valleys whose sides rose in sweeping green commas, stippled with boulders and craggy hollows, forgotten by everyone it seemed.
The day evolved slowly. Like fine tea steeping, I wanted to let my mind dwell before it jumped to any new conclusions. The landscape was increasingly austere- contemplative almost. With the sun such an inconsistent presence, the only things that could be relied on were the cold and the wind, at least this time of year. We arrived in Bodø shortly before nightfall, which was not to say particularly late. We decided to spend the night here before renting a compact car the next morning and fulfilling the will of some deranged Arctic gods that specified we be present in the alien, hostile land around Tromso for 4 days or so, before returning to the land of desk calculators and furrowed eyebrows. I felt I’d assumed a new persona; a purposeful entrenchment on the earth, no longer nomadic in the way of the wayward mariner or lost adventurer. This was not to say I knew anything about tomorrow or yesterday, just the gnawing tolerability of now. However fleeting, however questionable, I had some purpose now, and that was to see Max safely through our new manifest destiny, the plans he had outlined now cogs and spokes turning in the great machinery of our world. The train sped along, oblivious to all this strange inflection.
The motel we stayed in was drab and modern, a pre-fabricated assault on the stubborn polar landscape. We ate a similarly dull, functional dinner, mushy meat and vegetables robbed of their honor by microwave ovens. Wandering the residential neighborhood a few blocks to the south in the fading light, which played across the barren hills in a curious second sunset, I held Max’s hand firmly. The initial gray of perma-twilight turned imperceptibly into the inky black of true night, streaked occasionally with brilliant green and blue inflections of the Aurora Borealis, which seemed to speak its own princely language. I loved walking the frozen streets, Max aside me in some unspoken synchronicity, crunching the icy road grime into fantastically shiny little bits under the streetlamp’s hazy glow. I saw people through their windows, curtains almost always open, their brand of Nordic hospitality reserved but transparent. I saw a young family eating dinner, the father’s eyes full of deep, worn creases, premature aging from the polar exposure, his hands like giant fishhooks as he bent to cut a piece of salmon for his son, who stood in awe of this kind beast who provided for him at all times. The mother looked out the window towards the sea, caught in some kind of internal friction I couldn’t quite grasp, and I averted my eyes as I thought she might have seen me looking at her. Holding Max closer, I glanced up and caught her smiling at them out of the corner of my eye, her approval warm and surprising.
We made a little loop up the wide, winding avenue, a street of the sort first modeled in some state urban planning office in Oslo or Trondheim. The little green Styrofoam toothpick trees and cardboard houses were replaced by modest private plots of worry and hope here in the land that was to be claimed and conquered by the state, since no one else seemed to want it. I awoke the next morning in a corner whose sharp confines pleased him, a cheaply insulated white wall on one side, and the softly rising pale chest of Mr. Max Lundgren on the other, pushing me towards the wall and the equally pale sunrise filling the space beyond it. We decided it was too sad and bland to stay at the motel for breakfast, so we ate in a small, worn café where nobody spoke English that seemed to me the Norwegian approximation of the American diner, minus the kitschy chrome and porcelain conversation.
I wanted to tell the new strangers I saw how much I loved them, how much I loved everyone in the least perfunctory way, but distraction more than social code prevented me. My eyes diverted to the incoming ferry, a large, rectangular green vessel painted in state functionality and announcing itself as ‘Highway E-10’, which I thought rather odd, as a boat could not also be a highway, as far as I knew. Max had left to go talk to the car rental guy, and when he returned, seem distracted by the sight of the ferry as well, his eyes averting the incoming clouds on the western horizon, their undersides gray and billowing. ‘The guy wanted 100 Kronor a day for a little 2-seater Saab’, he said suddenly, and added ‘So! We will take the ferry across to the Lofoten islands instead, which was is in an hour, so farewell my dear Bodø!’ He said the last bit rather dramatically and with a kiss blown to the wind from his elaborately wrapped gold scarf, such that several nearby customers looked his way and sized us up with some judgment and mostly indifference that comes with witnessing genuine oddity in a location so accustomed to the same. We walked down to the steel and concrete ferry docks, boarding the mysterious green rectangle after a brief wait. I took a seat on a somber benchrow on the upper enclosed observation deck. The teal water churned with the force of massive engines backing the ferry out of the loading docks, and Max remarked on the weird quality of the sea at such latitudes.
I sat for a long time looking out over the procession ahead, the plane of even, terrifyingly cold water receding behind the boat, only to reappear ahead; its edges blending like quicksand around our progress. Max asked me what was on my mind, which was unusual for him, to vocalize such things rather than prodding and speculating silently. I told him only the distant mountains and him clouded my thoughts. The rest of the ferry ride was chilly and prone to the surreal memories of childhood and artificially transcribed place that all long trips eventually imparted on me. I felt old and introspective, sitting next to Max as the boat slid into its neat, familiar northern terminus in the snug port of Moskenes. This was the western edge of the Lofoten islands, a mysterious and wild archipelago I had heard in my own Nordic youth, its name tied to some hazy memory, the details perhaps purposefully blurred such that the present experience was that much more enjoyable.
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