-Chapter 15-
Forcefully and without warning, I pulled Max down into the blanket now spread between our sprawling legs and the smoky confines of the fire, and I seemed to reach into its radiant heart, removing a large, half-burnt branch, which I placed on some round stones a few meters distant. I piled a few more coals on it so that we were now central amidst a circle of warmth, exothermic with the fervor of the icy night. When I turned and began to kiss Max, I saw him shudder once- his face went tight, the muscles contracting along his cheekbones, and I saw it was not in displeasure, nor was it lust- he had only exhaled his regrets. When he breathed again, he inhaled my humid intentions, and we lay aside each other, arms exploring the firm and the profane, his hands unbuttoning Max’s shirt, grasping the firm fleshy angles to the south. Soon we were naked and I was pressing my weight onto Max with the sincerity of having never touched a man before, Max’s skin somehow transcendent of all the people whose physiques had brushed against mine. Max now rubbed and bit my nipples with ragged, timeless breathe. When he descended further on me, he was a zealous amateur, his lips hesitant of a taste perhaps he’d never known. I rolled over impatiently, wanting to please him in this moment more than ever. When I unbuttoned his pants and pulled down his sleek briefs, I heard and felt a satisfying ‘thwack’ against his abs, a soft moan, fuckkkkk… this was so real. I’d always felt the act of going down, down on a man was shrouded in some vague shame or obligation, I’d always closed my eyes, focused, listened, hating to see their face, but in this case I wanted to see his handsome features, his wild eyes the whole time. His cock was a rigid monolith, perfect and pale, straining against my throat as he thrust himself with purposeless regularity. When he came, he hardly made a sound, the northern lights above were perhaps more attentive and greedy. He tasted salty and delicious, his strong torso humming weakly with content exhaustion. He turned to me and we laid with on a tattered edge of the blanket, which spread ineffectively across our stomachs, his head nestled in that wonderful, impenetrable space just below my neck. We slept under the angry fluorescent sky for a few uncertain hours, the way time slows and coalesces into tight knots when you are asleep in the arms of a new lover.
When I awoke, I was stiff and excited, stirring with the scattered pieces of want that hadn’t been spent the night before, and I found Max tugging at my warm cock slowly, his eyes glazed with singularity. I was soon on top of him, our movement synchronized, great straining waves of man, and I licked Max at first hesitantly and then as if he was set on fire in the desert. My face disappeared into the sharp, firm creases of him, muffling his ambition. I mounted him the way you might enter a room at an important party, hesitant, softly and first, then rocking, certain with excitement, and Max rode in stride with my strong strokes, his cries filling the stale morning air of our valley. When we were finished, it was not as if the act was over, because the attraction, the newness never wavered- its amplitude was a steady wave, all the highs and lows averaged into the present. We packed up camp silently, and even on the hike down to the road in the building silver light of polar afternoon, our only communication seemed to be Max’s erratic, thoughtful steps, his eyes large and wet when they met mine, both thankful and appalled.
When we reached the road, Max spoke, starting to pry once again, to make sure he wouldn’t be forgotten, but he stopped suddenly on his own accords, turning the conversation to the logistics of returning to Bodø by late the next day, when our train was to depart for Haugesund and points south. We soon caught a ride in the cluttered, slightly musty cab of an old Volvo freight truck. The driver was jovial and disinterested in us, and we sat in silence mostly, letting the mountains dissolve into stately green hills as we approached Narvik. It was already noon by the time the truck driver dropped us off in front of a small collection of dull government buildings that compromised ‘downtown’ Narvik, and I wanted to inquire as to the local hostel, not convinced we would make it to Bodø by nightfall. Max sensed my doubt and pulled me close, speaking in a normal voice but acting as if he was whispering some secret wisdom. ‘We’ll be fine… I think there is a bus that goes south along the E-6 to where we need to get, and besides, I told Hakan we’d meet him Wednesday afternoon… it’s barely Sunday.’ ‘Barely Sunday’, I though- either it was or it wasn’t, time wasn’t debatable, and people turned to look at him the way you might regard someone interesting yet affected; their looks carrying a vague suspicion.
We did in fact make it to Bodø, though the circumstances involved several oddly [or perhaps divinely] timed rides, a ferry across a bit of intruding fjord that cleaved the highway near Skaberget, and an arrival both shabby and grand. The driver of our last ride practically expelled us onto the sidewalk just before midnight outside the little motel we’d stayed in, both awed and disgusted by these two vagabond dreamers that had shared a few hours of his drive. Max got a room in the little fluorescent-lit office, and when he collapsed on the stiff, cheap bed, it was somehow different between us. When he held me, it felt strangely mechanical, and he only seemed to soften from exhaustion, the contentment of the previous night now a memory. Perhaps it was just something reserved for special places, which this was not. When I awoke though, Max held me firmly against the drafty chill, and it appeared that things might have mended from the stress of the previous day’s travels.
My safeness was guaranteed even as we went further south, I thought, which I was beginning to think of as the land of uncertainty. Bodø was I’d remembered it a week earlier- large enough to be a provincial capital of sorts, but small enough that travelers and oddities like us stood out. I recalled Annika had mentioned this place, her mother was from here and she had visited it often as a small child. I imagined her young and restless, her future mania then the excusable impatience of an active child. Her crooked, stuttering bangs across her forehead then and forever, as she played on some state-sponsored playground in the gray edges of Bodø’s sparse suburbia. I missed her, missed her strange hair and firm breasts and blind trust, but I knew it wasn’t the pairing of left and right shoes I felt like Max and I were, the way we fit into each others plans with such unwitting satisfaction.
The train back to Haugesund was tedious and long, the landscape passing us in fleeting frames of rock and grass and low thorny bushes, from which red-roofed houses, sturdy and stoic, would occasionally emerge in the distance. I hated to think of what was next, but it was also imperative to return the Stranger to whence she had come. I was not simply making amends, half-assed fixing of the unfixable, but closing a chapter of distinct uncertainty, freeing myself to make future mistakes and decide just what to do about Max. I eyed him critically as we sped south in the steel and polyester womb of the NSB Arctic Express- a fleeting poltergeist amidst this strange assembly of mountains and sea. Max was emphatically of this place- bred from the cold resiliency and ill-tempered clouds, and I admitted I would never understand him in this way. He held the scarf across his cheeks and gazed out on the ebbing hills with one eye up against the glass window, pushed into a tight corner the way he liked to be. I felt the 4th wall between us had sprung invisible and solid at some point the day before, and I steeled myself for our departure. Our paths would diverge like the tracks that split ahead, one branch curving inland and leading up through empty, hollow valleys to Finland, the other bound for the university kids and bright seaside colors of Trondheim.
I slept fitfully, in short pieces of fuzzy discontent, rest overcoming me only when the stiff muscles of my back relented; softened from exhaustion against the cheap mattress in our little bunk. It was Wednesday morning when we reached Haugesund again, and the sun was full and enthusiastic, having heard of our pending meeting it seemed. We pulled into the low, modern alcove of the station shortly before ten. Travelers sped briskly on foot, edges of smart scarves and overcoats catching the slivers of light that filtered through the steel canopy. We walked confidently from the station back to Max’s flat, broad, self-assured steps nothing more than a clever act to distract others, and hopefully ourselves, from the terrifying gravity of the day. Lunch at the same café we’d met outside of, the 2 weeks since then hardly registering with me as a discrete time period- its edges were already blurred and extrasensory, I felt. When we met Hakan Skelvik a few hours later at the boat, I was determined to see the deal through. I’d axed the last of my reservations over salty lox and dill sauce across the slabs of white, wholesome bread we’d shared at the café, the food a sort of secret promise that this was my land; salty and pale.
‘Thank you’, Hakan said with a hint of embarrassment over the amount, but also a glowing pride over the difficulty and commitment ahead. I handed him a typed receipt for the 50,000 kronor I had transferred from my Swiss account into a Nordeabank repository Hakan had opened the past week. The bank teller had eyed me first with warm approval- I’d spoken well, I’d been young, strong, and ambitious in all the safest ways. When I’d told her the amount and handed over the Swiss account slip embossed with vain little gold and silver emblems and mysterious watermarks however, her face widened with incredulousness. Max, always aside my deflection of the law these days it seems, assuaged her suspicions somewhat with a well-placed comment about ‘visiting his father’s plant in Karmøy later that week.’ The clerk flinched slightly in the self-conscious way one reacts to finding out you’ve met a pseudo-celebrity, or a dubiously wealthy character. She completed the transaction methodically, filling out the requisite paperwork in neat, practiced penmanship. Hakan seemed pleased with results of the exchange, he introduced the rest of the crew, Knut, 27 and previously a hand in the local canning plant, Grete, 25 and strong, her lean, boyish frame standing impatiently on the balls on her feet in salt-crusted canvas pants, and Jens, 30, an accomplished racer who had crewed on small, fast boats from New Zealand to Spain, but missed the cold, dangerous waters of his home, and now did some contract work with the local steel union between racing gigs. They way they spoke to each other, Clark could tell there existed a degree of trust implicit and time-tested, the type of bond necessary to bring a small craft safely across a stretch of ocean as mean and notorious as the North sea. The walked over to the boat, she sat regal and calm at her mooring, an air of practiced indifference to her surroundings seemed to surround her, having endured such tribulation and uncertainty at sea that now nothing was guaranteed.
The 4 sailors boarded a small wooden dory belonging to Hakan’s family, and he rowed in strong, even strokes to her edge, climbing aboard and inspecting the rigging and hardware with the ease of those intimately familiar with the workings of elite sailboats. She was still elite, having been resurrected like a phoenix from the ashes, Clark thought to himself, saved from the dull habits of weekend cruising and motoring out to Block island or Nantucket in the summer, her full dignity robbed by an aging couple uncertain of how to fly this magnificent beast. This of course did not excuse the fundamental wrong of Clark’s theft, but he felt at least he respected his folly; his fault had evolved into a primal connection, a reason to keep traveling. ‘She is beautiful, this style is almost patented by the old-school New England boatbuilders, you don’t often see this craftsmanship here in pleasure boats’, Jens commented sharply, spit escaping slightly between his teeth and the snus pouch he seemed to always have tucked behind his lower lip. ‘She’s not a ‘pleasure boat’, she’s a racing boat with a bad history’, Grete piped in, her hands touching the bright chrome winch cylinders knowingly. The Stranger seemed to purr appreciatively with all this new excitement, her rigging appearing unnaturally bright and new in the late afternoon sunlight, skewed perhaps by his bittersweet farewell.
Max had gone back to his flat briefly to phone SAS and make flight reservations for them back to Oslo, a generous 6 weeks ahead, which should put them ‘under no stress of tight deadlines on the passage’, he’d informed me, as if I was the one about to sail across the North Atlantic. I sort of wanted to be, to disappear into the cold teal creases of the North Sea once again. We left the boat sitting silently amidst its own warm glow- it looked anticipatory, ready to be sprung unto the dangerous, black edges of the continent once again. ‘I’m sorry’, Max mouthed almost in silence, he had now acquired the habit, or need perhaps, of speaking within inches of my face, such that everything seemed either brilliant or bothersome. ‘I will go back in the morning and gather my things’, he said, deflecting the obvious. I knew that my farewell to the Stranger would be sad and lacking in completeness, but I focused my mind instead on the pale golden beach at Flatraker, the little cabin where we’d met Anna and Johan. The memories of the near past somehow transfixed me in a way the allowed dealing with the present.
‘So tomorrow is Thursday’, Max started mundanely, perhaps aware of the necessity of dull routine at this odd juncture of plans. ‘I know’, I replied with a hint of annoyance, but really I did not know, barely knew today had followed yesterday, and I found comfort in Max’s neurotic planning, the way reality was only synthesized from someone else’s rules. ‘You should think about the train schedules’, he followed insistently, and I almost snapped right then. ‘Oh, so now that the boat is gone, I’ve suddenly got plans and a purpose, eh?’, I sneered, but I softened instinctively when I saw Max’s betrayal- I couldn’t hurt him, even if he needed it, we were brothers in the way men come back from battle and their wives never quite understand how they long for their fallen comrades, the pieces of themselves left on some muddy field. I once again derailed the conversation, pulled up the ugly roots of a water lily sitting in the placid pond of our plans, and Max endured, as usual. ‘So I’ll drive you to the station then tomorrow afternoon, after we see Hakan and his crew off at the docks?’ ‘Yes, yes we talked about this, didn’t we? I don’t want any ‘stuff’ though… you’re the one with all the stuff. Which you ought to collect and organize, by the way, as a lot of I imagine will be impractical for land.’ ‘Yes, mother’, I mimed childishly, and wrapped my arm around Max’s torso so that he stumbled forward and old people out for their daily walk stopped and stared at us with what might be vague disapproval; I could never read their wrinkled eyes right. We are dinner in Max’s flat, it was lacking in flavor or substance the way last suppers ought to be, I thought, and we assumed the roles of practiced awkwardness we’d found that first evening, on the hard, uncomfortable edge of the futon, side by side. ‘Isn’t it funny how affected we are by strangers, how family and the people we endure day in and day out fade beside someone who might not even be that remarkable?’, Max proselytized, and I kicked his shin with some force. ‘I am not remarkable. I’m just aware. Most people never get the chance to become that which they were meant to be.’ ‘Oh, stop…’ Max chided, and we wrestled on the futon amidst the unappealing remains of dinner and the watchful silver rectangles of the Lundgren Aluminum AB offices across the way.
I was always torn between Max’s aesthetics and his character; they were congruent but also irreverent, tied to different internal mechanisms, like day and night. His eyes sat between a deep rift of thought, his face was always contorted by the vague edges of concentration, always tied to some distant process that was uniquely his own. I lay on the bed and looked at him without hesitation or diversion; it was like looking into the sun, if you stared at someone’s face too long, you risked melting your eyes into the sharp singularity, the burning light. We slept uneventfully, save the predictable occasion of me stumbling into Max’s room shortly past 3 in the morning. Like a lost child, I couldn’t stand the isolation of my own body. The morning came with unusual insistence, it seemed, probably exacerbated by my unwillingness to face the practiced tasks ahead. I pulled at my hair, unsure whether it was Max’s or my own; we lay on the broad, stiff bed tangled in the same panicked thoughts. The alarm impolitely signaled the arrival of 8 AM, and as I fixed black, acrid coffee on the little economy stove, my movements felt stiff and mechanical, too uncertain of anything to commit. I softened slightly when the sun entered the room in sweeping, bright curves, the dull walls somehow erased of their socialist functionality and replaced by the brand of American opulence I’d been raised on. Max stayed at the flat, restlessly arranging and then deconstructing piles of things, his thoughts scattered across the sharp corners of the 3 little rooms. I’d gone down to the boat to finish packing, and I organized and condensed his worldly possession with distracted efficiency, the suitcases and backpacks filling methodically as I held a private funeral for each item. The associations spilled over like the sea on that first inky night I’d left Newport, when the swells rode up over the bow in terrifying synchronism.
When I finally left the boat shortly before noon, I walked up to the shiny maple profile of the bowsprit, it edges battered and repaired with ersatz bits of glue and varnish from encounters with shipping containers and unseen ledges. My approach was at first a confident stride, the strong steps of someone who knows his own empire, his pride in something great and obvious, but I soon faltered. My head throbbed with the immediacy of abandonment, and I crawled the final feet to its edge, tears welling and my frame convulsing in deep, unconscious sobs. It wasn’t even mine, I was a thief, a nothing; I reminded myself. I kissed the wood once, hesitantly almost, as if it wasn’t really there, and then retreated to the aft gangway I’d rigged to the docks, a weary suitcase in each hand. An old fisherman was watching the procession from a few boats ahead and smiled sadly; he seemed to understand what was happening. I found Max sitting on the edge of the futon, frozen since our parting a few hours earlier, it seemed, his gaze out towards the harbor both smug and terrified. His belongings lay organized and awaiting some further instruction in a neat rectangular pile near his feet. He was feigning the casual indifference I had come to expect from him with surprising accuracy. I only saw the fear, the jagged white light of forthcoming retribution, when I focused his eyes on the scarf. It quivered perceptively, the little gold emblems restless with the fear of their owner. He was so on his own space that my silent crouching on the edge of the void next to him failed to register. He only relaxed when he felt the weight of his chest relieved by my touch, our embrace forceful and indefinite in time. I pushed him into the mattress and tore off his shirt, breathing the heavy rhythms of farewell. I knew we didn’t have time for this; sex in the middle of the day was such a guilty pleasure, but we both needed it. When he came he tasted like the distant mountains we’d left behind; salty and exotic.
We left the flat, its interior now surgically clean yet full of fallow, suspended thoughts and the musky odor of excited young men, I thought sadly. As Max turned the little brass key and the lock clicked into place dutifully, the silver light from the lone windows gleamed on the note to the landlord. It sat placidly on the counter amidst the spoils of our modest bacchanal the evening prior. I thought it odd that our brief adventure should end in such mundane order, and I tried to process the images before me in abstract subjectivity, devoid of the emotion I wanted to give them. We walked in silence to Max’s car, the sky a brilliant conflagration of polar sun and interfering clouds, like an acid trip fantasia strung out over Haugesund’s snug little heart. I walked beside Max, formal, indifferent perhaps, my mind wandering around the following weeks and months as if they had already happened. When he reached the little garage behind his building, the old Volvo station wagon seemed almost like a dogcatcher’s paddy or one of the unmarked white vans they used to transport immigrant detainees- a grim piece of steel and gasoline whose trips were always one way.
We made the brief trip up the hill to the station, and upon parking, Max instructed me to wait in the car for him to unload his luggage, upon which we would bid farewell to each other in the mild, almost offensively commonplace atmosphere of the little alcove between the station and the apartment building next door. His eyes were warm but strong as he hefted the bulky suitcases in effortless grace. His strength was detached from his mental state, it seemed- it was infallible and could be called on even in such strange times. The artifacts of his life now stacked neatly beside the station door, be beckoned me to step out of the car. I opened the door and nearly collapsed on the sidewalk, my legs shaking slightly as I made a few slow steps forward. My mind felt filled with the dull hum of private delirium. Max steadied me, his hands instinctive and natural on my frame, and we embraced silently for several minutes. The edges of the sky pushed inwards as the sun descended over the back of the drab gray apartment block in front of us- the last sunset perhaps, I thought detachedly.
Max brushed my cheek so softly that I failed to register his touch until he’d pressed both palms firmly across my face. He kissed me once. Forcefully but in a motion that betrayed his intensity, ducking back in a fluid afterthought, the old woman walking by behind us barely registering what she’d just seen. Words had ceased between them some time ago, and Max now offered a single, fleeting smile. Its warmth glowed with such radiance that even after it had cooled, the heat lingered like fog, shrouding me from the reality of departure. I watched him open the door confidently and enter the station, the policemen inside caught in his daily pedantry and unaware of the forthcoming national crime drama. Unable to stand the present any longer, I turned the car around with awkward indifference, a delivery truck driving slamming on its brakes and honking angrily. I didn’t care. Nobody could affect me; I was already affected. The world that had been made of many bright, patterned pieces had broken into sad, silvery slivers, their shadows larger that the light they reflected back.
I drove back to the flat. The rent was paid through Christmas, and Max had offered to let me stay there as long as I wanted. The stale aftertaste of our experience that lingered around the flat was too much to bear though; the unseen weight of Max’s thoughtless perfection hung on the dirty sheets and clean dishes alike. I finished arranging my things. They were neat and tidy, glowing slightly with the anticipation of new travels, it seemed. I like how they had been pared down into a collection I could realistically travel with; the material world so insistent and ordered. I found a yellowed phonebook and dialed the NSB offices in Trondheim, some three hours north. From here I had calculated I could cross into Sweden and eventually through the frozen, sparking bogs of Lapland into Finland via rail. Eventually, I would arrive in Helsinki, from which the Trans-Siberian Railway could be reached through further circuitous and uncertain methods. It seemed insane. It was insane. Off to the wild Siberian Taiga with winter fast arriving, armed with only certain funds and uncertain memories, purging my experience with Max, with Annika, with Guillaume, with everyone who’d even shown me undivided interest. I had 10,000 USD left, according to the woman speaking in strangely inflected English at Royal Banc Suisse. Not a trivial sum, one that made me further evaluate the weight of my life in the financial mirror. She’d sounded ancient and distant on the phone, her answer merely valid because I had no reason to argue it.
My father had an account with them, he was a ‘high net worth individual’, he’d told me once after a few too many gin & tonics, but aspired to be what they called an ‘ultra high net worth individual’, the sad hollowness of his self-goading laugh still fresh in my mind some ten years later. I now aspired simply to know myself, the grave magnitude of this goal offset by my father’s cold failure in this regard, the way he socialized almost pathologically with other ‘high net worth individuals’, their insecurities so plain. I walked to the train station to buy a ticket for the next morning in patterned light swirling with snowflakes. They seemed almost invisible except when pierced by the dull amber haze of a streetlight, their sad magnificence filtered by urban necessity. I slept that night with my back pressed firmly against the wall beside Max’s bed, even to touch its warm, soft creases with my side was an admission of guilt, a treason against our world; that which might not have even really happened at all.
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