-Chapter 16-
When I awoke, I was filled the subtle pain of impending action, of things that didn’t need to happen, but would happen eventually, and thus should not be delayed any further. I imagined Max swarmed with media hounds, the police triumphantly recounting their arrest of a willing pacifist, a man practiced in absurdity for no sake other than its own. I gathered my bags, a large hiking pack I’d modified over the past 8 months at sea to serve as my terrestrial piece-de-resistance, and a smaller duffle bag, the leathery canvas edges yellowed from salt and sun. As much as I liked to think my luggage was some sort of ersatz bohemian coincidence, it was in fact a close reflection of my youth. The navy blue embroidered nametag on the white canvas, the expensive hiking pack cluttered with various straps and fabrics both necessary and superfluous. I walked with surprising ease despite all this bulk, my shoulders having filled out nicely in the course of the past year, I noted with smug self-consciousness.
The station was as I’d remembered it, the details of its sharp Nordic tile work no longer beautiful or unusual, just there. I boarded the same train they had recently returned on, the brightly painted locomotive idling impatiently ahead of the platform. It was a serpent breathing hot steam and diesel fumes, awaiting some unseen impetus. I climbed the steps into the passenger car with affected indifference, casting bored, practiced glances across my shoulder at my fellow passengers. They must have seen a young man both terrified and irritable. I hated starting things this way- the process allowed for too much thought and regret; rather it was better to be thrown headlong into the midst of something, where coping sulkily was no longer an option.
As the train pulled wearily away from the platform, I saw the path ahead and realized we would pass quite close to the police station. It was still quite early, a little past seven, and I pulled the little rough wool blanket from the pack, feigning sleep partly because the muted black light I saw under the itchy wool was possibly the face of god, and partly because knowing I was so proximal to Max was worse than seeing him through bars or glass. As we passed the station I pulled the matted edge of the blanket away briefly and saw a half-dozen vans parked haphazardly outside, bearing insignia of various state news agencies. Reporters and cameramen clustered around the little wooden door like ants on a dropped ice cream cone in August, awaiting, savoring news-to-be; their subject somewhere nearby.
I returned beneath the blanket and pushed hard against the dirty, cracked polyester as if to suppress the rage that threatened to spill from my head. Really though it was the suddenness of solitude, the pointed unfairness of it all that worked me over the edge, and I exhaled with a loud yell, not a scream, but an appeal to baser instincts- the primal cry of hurt in a man. The handful of other passengers in the car turned and glared at me with reproachful curiosity, but quickly returned to their listless reading and napping, the sight of a young man in angst excusable perhaps. We reached Trondheim a little before noon, and I decided not to venture into the city for lunch, as my connection to Sweden left in some 50 minutes. I thought it too much to bear the sight of a place both new and familiar, shrouded in the ambiguity of recent association. I wondered silently what could have become if our journey has passed through here, Max’s footsteps spry and immortal on the rough stone cobbles of the old town centre. I settled for a meal of middling normalcy amongst hurried travelers and loitering teens in the little train station café, the sun ever more earnest through the faux stained glass windows, promising to set so early that one was scarcely aware of the passing of the day.
The muted browns and greens of the passing forest had desensitized me to the austere beauty of the north, I felt, and the sweeping polar chasms became a steady blur as we shot east towards Sundsvall. I’d expected some sort of in-train customs inspection once we crossed the border, but found no such formality. Rather, a tired-looking woman casually noted my passport and seemed convinced of my stated plans. I felt the earnest weight of these ‘plans’ I barely knew myself filling the dull, cold air of the little fluorescent-lit inspection room inside the station. Sundsvall glowed meekly outside, overwhelmed by the arctic night. I walked a block east towards the harbor, which even in the inky nightscape was obviously a fine natural asset. Deep and sheltered, it formed a sweeping comma of rock and sand pressed against a frigid arm of the Baltic. I found a hostel tucked between two prosperous looking hotels, it must be nuzzled by their wayside success I figured- it was decidedly warm, refined without pomp or procession. Stepping in, I felt the cautious warmth of the smart, forward-looking young people who sat on old wooden benches and slightly haggard couches in the little social room adjacent the lobby, eyeing me with the vagabond’s approval as I waited for the clerk to bring a key.
I wanted to smile their way, to prove I was also young and lost and willing to be found by strangers, but the effort it would have took, the subsequent engagement, seemed all too difficult at the time. I found the room easily, it was a small, tidy affair- economical but friendly. The cheap personal touches like sculpted towels on the bed and a single mint 5 years past its prime made me smirk slightly, they beckoned towards my own shortcomings, perhaps. Having unpacked the bare minimum of what was needed for the brief stay at the hostel, I walked with practiced leisure down the little hall to the social room and café I’d passed earlier. The congregation was still assembled- a half-dozen university students, by the look of it of that uncertain age, the early 20’s in poor light and modern fatigue looking deceptively like the late teens, or late twenties even. Our demographic was deprived of the certainty of social standing that came with true adulthood, I thought- we always stood on the edge of a sharp ridge that fell away precipitously in several directions at once. They acknowledged me warmly and without pretense, and when I started to introduce myself in Swedish not quite as seamless as I would have liked to think, they laughed and continued in practiced English. Their speech was affected with the classic Scandinavian lilt, both comical and earnest. They were mostly together; traveling north to the technical university in Lulea from points south, some sort of brief school holiday having recently adjourned.
Too exhausted from the past few days’ tribulations to delve into my unabridged story, I told them I was a recent college graduate, American but Swedish-born- exploring my ‘homeland’ from a new perspective. They seemed satisfied with this, and probably wrote me off as another wealthy American with time and savings to kill. I sensed they were intrigued by my solitude though, my willingness to forsake familiarity along the way. They wanted of course to discuss American pop culture of the times, to pry slices of hip wisdom from my experiences, but I told them I was equally disconnected. Even when I’d lived in Rhode Island, when my friends were the type of languid Bohemian appropriators they sought to emulate- I was never really on the same page as them. I told them I’d come from Norway, and one of them asked if I’d seen the news earlier today of the arrest of the mysterious thief Max Lundgren. I winced and feigned ignorance, but they saw briefly how it pained me and quickly changed the subject to the state of Swedish politics, an evident source of contention amongst the liberal youth of the times. I wanted to slap them, wanted to shake them with the rage of knowing that their ‘conservatives’ were more liberal than most ‘socialist’ American politicians but I refrained- this was not the time for acting out, I reminded myself ostensibly.
They shared the remains of their dinner with me- a few sandwich halves and a little cheap, off-color wine, which I devoured gratefully, aware they might think him some sort of eccentric slumming his way around Scandinavia, having made my robust means quite evident earlier. They seemed to accept me unquestioningly though; perhaps aware themselves of the pain of introspection at the tender yet hardened age of 25. I bid farewell to them with curt politeness, hating to linger and end up telling more of my story- baring the awkward parts to strangers, as I’d become habituated. I wanted to lie on the hard, small bed, to feel its edges cut into my back and stare at the ceiling for a while, to wonder what came before it and all the other terrible shit man had made, but instead I turned without planning and headed out the door into the night. The northern lights were flickering to the east, the shone over the black expanse of the Gulf of Bothnia like fluorescent missiles, each one angry and honed on some fatalistic rock or island in the sea, its edges trailing off beyond the neat rows of yellow and red buildings compromising Sundsvall centre.
Compared to the vaguely malevolent and redemptive Norwegian fjordlands, the east coast of Sweden was positively pastoral, an American Midwest rolling thoughtlessly into the sea. The neat fields and hedgerows seemed at odds with nature’s cruel polar geometry. I decided 10 steps from the hostel door that I would take the ferry. The train was ridiculous. It went; oh he was certain it went, as all things did in these parts. I wasn’t prepared for the north though, the true north without Max, without the strong alpine peaks that sheltered one from the full brunt of it; the terrifying view across a landscape that only closed stubbornly along the horizon line.
I was certain the ferry would be pleasant and efficient- a pamphlet I’d snagged in the tourist kiosk outside the train station had insisted it was the ‘premier way to Finland’, leaving daily to Vaasa, from which my track-bound travels might resume. The childish thrill of travel was gone though; I saw it now through dull, adult functionality- to move from point A to point B, and then remain hopelessly stationary, tethered to someone else’s plans rather than the momentum of the trip. Armed with a new certainty of plans, I approached the centre square with confidence- it belonged to me as much as the old woman a stones throw away. She likely had been born here and soon would pass through to the next layer of the universe here. She eyed my even stride approvingly as she shuffled across the cold, icy cobblestones. I wandered for another ten minutes, down one street and up the next, the urgent awareness of self that followed me silently through new towns had left, it seemed, and I was left with an odd sense of belonging, of having come back to an old place. I entered a small coffee shop shortly past ten, assuming the time here was the same as it was in Haugesund. It was warm and Spartan, and some shitty modern art hung at unusual angles from one wall. The other was completely covered in what appeared to be signatures, their traces seemingly delivered by drunken grandiosity. Lit by the wonderful impudence of their young signees, I figured. I ordered in Americano in fairly good Swedish. I always ordered an Americano. The young barista seemed bored and sympathetic, he was 20 at the oldest, perhaps only in high school, caught in his own narcissism such that his handsome and balanced features seemed like an abstraction, a strange afterthought.
He eyed me with faint curiosity as he prepared the espresso, so practiced was the task itself that he could allow one eye to fix itself on me blankly, or perhaps intently- I struggled to read faces anymore. He pushed the mug towards me across the little Formica counter; his face tight and expressive, drawn into little quivering bunches of muscle and skin. He wore a patterned scarf of indeterminate length and composition; it hung with purposeful messiness around strong shoulders, balanced on a body that knew the mindless repetition of exercise necessary to gain social standing at his age. I pictured him at some house party the evening prior, prancing around in shirtless arrogance, cheap beer in hand, and making foulmouthed statements of absurd consequence. The girls would be watching, smiling, waiting for him to let his guard down and just kiss them already, damnit. I’d wanted my drink to go, but figured it was ok; everything was ok, I’d traded uncertainty for the contentment of the moment. To sit and let things be, drink in hand. The café was empty. Snowflakes fell in appalling regularity outside the tall glass windows; intent on smothering the remains of fall I’d hoped might be prolonged. Winter was such an ultimatum, a promise to get my shit together and go home, though home no longer had a finite meaning. The young man informed me in an absent tone that they would be closing in fifteen minutes. I barked back that he should have made my drink ‘to go’ then, though I had to admit that neither the cold wandering nor the little hostel room seemed particularly appealing.
‘How did you end up in Sundsvall? This isn’t exactly a hot tourist destination’, he asked while dragging a dirty rag inefficiently across the counter, the veins on his arms dilating slightly as he settled begrudgingly into the closing routine. ‘Yeah, well, I’m not a tourist’, I started defensively, but softened upon seeing the young man’s vulnerability, the way his eyes retreated into the foreground, having had enough of pretending to be disinterested in everything. ‘I’m Stefan’, he continued, ‘and if you want I can show you around a little bit since I don’t want to have to think about school tomorrow.’ His mannerisms seemed genuine but slightly off, a prelude to the setting sun of careless adolescence, perhaps. ‘How old are you?’, I asked, figuring I ought to keep with the incongruous progression of our conversation, the way his syllables all seemed to end with the delicious weight of expectation. ‘Old enough’, he countered with a downward smile at the counter. ‘Really? Well, I ought to go back to the hostel…tomorrow I leave early on the ferry to Vaasa.’
‘Finland? If you say so… though I don’t know why you want to leave our little paradise’, he enunciated sarcastically.
‘Ok, show me around a bit’, I conceded, my fear of another run in with fate countered by the dreary arctic evening and the impending departure from the Nordic welfare state, its bear-hug now feeling more claustrophobic than secure.
Stefan killed the lights and I waited expectantly outside the door as he brought down an excessive-looking metal grate over the door, the type I would have expected in an East Village bodega, not innocent northern Sweden.
‘Not as safe as you might imagine here’, Stefan said, reading my mind. ‘A lot of kids my age are into drugs… bad drugs’, he continued, sure to make the distinction between the good ones, I noted humorously. ‘Either that or they have a kid themselves’, he continued, his grave tone suggesting this was a far worse fate. I had to agree, and I laughed slightly as I prodded my new acquaintance without reservation, asking him if he could be counted amongst the latter. He shot me a reproachful glance as he locked the door, as if such an accusation was too absurd to merit response, and we joined hands unexpectedly, both searching for respite from the biting wind in coat pockets and instead ending up in the tangles something else, of an evening whose purpose was as uncertain as it was physical. Sure, I didn’t need sex. Nobody did. But, empires and wars weren’t built on need, per say, as the fulfillment of it only led to continued existence. We walked with seeming aimlessness for a few minutes, it might have been an hour, the evening was murky and warm with Stefan’s blood, it possessed a youthful vigor I didn’t know if even I had anymore.
‘You know, I’ve never been with anyone’, Stefan said apropos of nothing, his frankness startling. ‘Well, I mean, I’ve been with people, sure, but never longer.’ ‘I think that’s perfectly acceptable for an eighteen year old’, I whispered firmly into his ear. ‘How did you know I was eighteen?’ ‘Your too smart to stick around here after high school, but too old to be a punk anymore’ ‘Pshh… you don’t even know me. You’re probably one of those rich, bored drop-outs who never felt a calling to anyone but yourself.’ ‘Oh, and now you know me? Fuck off’, I started to say, but cut myself short and worked my hand up Stefan’s arm, past his wrist, covered in a matted collection of Indian bracelets, and up across the smooth, firm plane of his forearms, feeling each vein which stood like a miniature mountain range across the pale white flatness. We walked in silence for several blocks, and I noted in silent alarm that we were going away from the hostel. I’d fallen into the easy trap of trusting a confident stranger, and it was as wonderful as always. We entered an alleyway between several humble buildings, the mason work cheap and gaudy despite its obvious age. He opened a small door deftly, the motion of the key into the brass lock so quick and thoughtless I only registered it after we’d entered the apartment. It was one of those affairs where one was confident all four walls could be touched at the same time with a little maneuvering. Stefan’s pants were comical, too tight, too faded, too absorbed in their own strange hipness. They now bulged slightly near his waist, and he pulled my hand towards him, his eyes closed and his breath warm and inconsistent. We made love the way you do when you’re wonderfully inexperienced, and his figure cut such a youthful profile across the shadow of the moon on the cheap little bed that I stopped my advances momentarily to admire it. He said he rowed every day and I believed him. everything was taunt and anticipatory on him, and he quickly wore me out.
It was shortly after midnight when we finished. Well- finished was a poor word- I thought as I lay at a distance from which aside and inside where difficult to distinguish. Finished implied that the lust had to be put aside or forgotten, rather, we just were, and I felt grateful I didn’t have to ask this beautiful young punk if I could stay the night- he was already sleeping. I awoke not of my own accord, but when the sun pried the plastic blinds open with forceful insistence, a celestial reminder that I couldn’t afford to dally around. The ferry to Finland left in a mere hour. Stefan had class- he was smart, sharp, infected with the same degree of habitual slacking that I saw in myself as a late teenager. I wanted to pry, wanted to continue the delicious proximity we shared now for just a more minutes. Perhaps find out why this kid was living by himself at an age when most were helplessly tethered to parental plans, but I decided it was better to go. ‘You need to be in class in 45 minutes’, I mouthed ineffectually into the edge of a pillow. ‘Well, you need to be on a boat to Finland in less time than that’, Stefan mimed, and he laughed as I frantically dressed myself and tried to make myself presentable in the little bathroom next door, though I had no one to present myself to but him. I was afraid to tell this local, this almost stranger, though I now loathed the term as it brought back memories of the boat, about my lack of real plans.
Plans were for other people, I rationalized- I wanted to believe the lie that I was operating outside the realm of responsibility or consequences, that the trip now had its own momentum worth following. I left the apartment silently, swiftly- we made no attempt to exchange information, and Stefan smiled once, as if a smile was an item from a vending machine. We embraced in what felt less mechanical and more natural that I’d expected; the love between us as real as it was thin. I made it back to the hostel shortly before 8, and the concierge, the same old woman with the patterned creased face and dark eyes seemed neither surprised nor disapproving of my obvious overnight absence. ‘Swedes understand these things’, I thought to myself, but really it was just an expression of something universal, the empathy some people have and others don’t, ‘culture’ only a human construct of division. I left the hostel; it seemed to reek of disappointment, of sad past tense things. The students had left, and seemed to have taken its formerly cheery disposition with them. The walk to the ferry docks took longer than expected, the passing buildings large and unfriendly once I crossed the small river that emptied into the sea on the other side of the city centre.
Walking along side a cracked asphalt strip beside the highway, I thought of how weeds took root wherever they could, that they did not hesitate to piece man’s insistent, foolhardy geometry, they were organic constructs that only sought sun and space. I wished he had their resilience, the way they defied time and the brilliantly methodical planning of the Nordic welfare states. They were now weak and fallow, regaled in dull shades of gray, prepared to succumb to winter’s will and perhaps allow something new to spring from the same spot, unaware of its predecessors. I didn’t want to be aware that I was someone’s successor, the less-than-spectacular follow up to someone else’s plans. The madness would cave in and surround me in its terrifying hum if I didn’t believe my own delusions. I barely made the ferry. The man at the ticket counter was irate and insistent that I shouldn’t even be allowed to get on, since reservations were supposed to be made in advance. I flashed a non-trivial bill in desperation and immediately regretted it, but the man relented, his face caught in the guilt-ridden smirk of taking a bribe. As I boarded the boat, luggage smartly consolidated for once and making me look half the purposeful business traveler or young graduate student, I scanned the horizon of people on the sundeck for Max.
It was nonsensical; of course he wouldn’t be here, couldn’t be here, but it helped passed the intense moments of doubt when I considered running towards the stern as we prepared to leave the docks, pushing aside the deck hands and leaping haphazardly towards terra firma once again. I really could have done it; just the thought, the insanity drove me towards some silent compulsion scarcely my own. The search occupied me though, and I ended up with a few slight look-alikes- alas, their tall, strong builds and blond disposition was as unusual here as a navy blue sports coat at the Brown social clubs I’d always avoided.
I dreaded Finland already- the flat, swampy expanse I’d always imagined as a B-grade Sweden, whose inhabitants possessed some of the less desirable Eastern European characteristics; shrouded in their strange indecipherable language. I knew this elitist rubbish, but its dark undertone comforted me in a strange way, it reminded me this was our land, a place from which I could relax and project unto others. At least I told myself this, the Sweden of my youth having morphed into a place I both knew and misunderstood. The trip was long and seemingly circuitous. This was probably just an effect of the odd geometry of the Gulf of Bothnia, which, according to the little used copy of ‘Geology of Scandinavia’ I’d acquired for a few Kronor, was actually rising at an alarming centimeter of so a year. The land below it was rebounding upwards from the weight of the last ice sheets; isostacy, it was called, one of those linguistically pleasing science words.
It fascinated me that such natural phenomena were not only real, but also genuinely demonstrable, and I vowed to absorb myself in nature’s fantastic eccentricities. To see the islands before me, bleak in the low-angled December light, as the phoenix of an arctic Atlantis, crystal castles rising from the cold black sea. Indeed, time staggered by imperceptibly, and when we pulled into the brightly painted docks in Vaasa shortly before 8 in the evening, the fluorescent maze of icy islands now belonging to Finland through which we’d passed seemed like a distant apparition, a figment of the rising land, not something real I’d just seen. At these moments I wondered sometimes if real was a feeling, if it could be shared or sought or forgotten just like anything else.
I made no attempt to speak Finnish, but the Fin’s seemed to understand, and for once I felt the cool relief of not having to feign something better than being another bored young American. They took me as a Swede through and through. I found a room in an inexpensive hotel; it looked like a Soviet bunker from the outside but turned out to be pleasantly decorated in some cheap but smart appropriation of the famously modern Finnish style. A flirty girl of perhaps 17 or 18 made me a simple meal of salmon and potatoes, which I tipped her generously for; it was such wholesome, divine food- I felt that one was inevitably tied to the cuisine of one’s homeland, and it tasted like unconditional love. I kept my eyes purposefully off of her- she was pretty in that fragile, affected way of the rural starlet.
Vaasa was a caricature of Nordic efficiency and utilitarianism; its modest size betraying an almost sinister concentration of people. Most of them seemed to live in dreary gray apartment blocks, their edges sitting haphazardly askew to the rounded bluntness of the landscape. I walked with the aimlessness of someone who knows that their time in a new place is limited, insignificant, and prone to the fickle changes of weather or luck. The trip to St. Petersburg was fuzzy, passing in fleeting frames of soggy green marshes and long strips of dull grass truncated at strange angles against the woods. They seemed supernaturally dark and sinister in the December twilight, and the occasional gray, sad village we passed spoke of the tattered edges of the Iron Curtain.
We passed a collection of lakes I’d henceforth not known possible; such was the concentration of their dull organic forms. The train rounded its way around and sometime across them, and sometimes one could see into their half-frozen depths. When we arrived in Helsinki, I dared not linger. Max had told me it was a place where bright modernity ruled over common sense, where the state reinvented itself into fantastic collages of cultural appropriation. I had dismissed this as another one of his strange tangents, but now I saw some of what he meant. An effort to appease and supersede a place that seemed like a sprawling backwater of the Scandinavian Peninsula, a place where the stagnant waters of the inner Atlantic pooled hopelessly, I thought in secret shame. This was not to say that the Fins were secondary in any way- I thought them quite wonderful, their strange tongue and indifferent posturing somehow complimenting the landscape. They seemed to melt seamlessly into the sharp angles and neon shades of Helsinki’s hip districts- they were part of the bold new wave as much as the Americans tried to be.
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