'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.