-Chapter 6-
I chastised myself for how easily he'd been lured towards affection- human after all. To cling to strangers like the family I'd forsaken at home, whose lives kept going forward without me, now a memory painful and abstract. The land to the south of sad, dead Cannes- that was what I needed now. The long white beaches and high limestone cliffs of the islands, ancient myths of Atlantis and the underworld wound into the strange landscape, made human tragedy seem small. I wanted to tell Marie I was sorry, sorry I was an asshole and didn't always love myself, sorry I couldn't stay even another minute, or the shiny chrome railing of the suspension bridge might taunt me as well, might beckon him to inspect the space between it and the sea.
The easy, tranquil life of the Mediterranean had lured me in it seemed, and to break free for the uncertainties and memories of Northern Europe seemed almost foolish. I knew though that men like Guillaume and Benoit were nothing more than transient images across my mind, memories already faded and stale, my future a ‘Fata Morgana’ city, shimmering crystal castles appearing somewhere on the horizon. I thought abstractly of my Sweden, the cold, windy winter afternoons playing on the utilitarian plastic playground outside my parents’ home in the Stockholm suburbs, the smart functionality of Nordic socialism reduced to apartment blocks and drab gray sky. I missed routine, the ordinary and the predictable, the daily brilliances like stopping for a cup of coffee at the Brown library, my lips ever so smug as I stood in line behind the counter and watched the girls stare silently. I tried to put all this vile narcissism, this incessant insecurity behind me as best I could, transfixed now by the sea and the very real, abject dangers ahead.
I was now eager to be clear of the foul, blind coast; its austere villas and green chasms into the sea polluted by the memory of Benoit and what had transpired earlier that day. The boat fixed on a steady course west, I rummaged through piles of accumulated junk in the cabin and found a slim black notebook, its edges salty and yellowed from exposure. I had a new pen to write with, one of the few things I’d bought while in Cannes. It was an expensive and unnecessary ivory ballpoint number, and it made the lines crisper and somehow more astute, the hum of human delirium more tolerable when things could be recorded so neatly. I wrote of the landscape, mostly, as people increasingly tired me- they escaped the intuitive characterization of nature. When I wrote, the pain of Benoit’s death crusted over somewhat, a scab beginning to heal but still imprinted on the wound. My loss was an alien form; a hurt not yet stabilized in the grand scheme of human dullness. The distraction, the focus I needed to write- it filled me with such a wholeness I forgot to care what it was I was writing about even. Sentences of bold nonsense flowed like water past the sleek bow. My eyes deflected out over the sea occasionally, observing our forward progress.
The Cote D'Azure was now flat and 2-dimensional in the distance; one of the muted pastel horizon lines Dali used to paint, with the light at Port Lligat in eerie calm somewhere in the foreground. Indeed, life had attained a quality both tolerable and surreal. The daily idiosyncratic turnings blended together into a slightly dulled reality, one disaffected by wine, the angry sun, and the flat blue sea, always watching. I was done with drugs, done with alcohol, done with waiting. Life was worth coping with raw and undiluted, the measure of understanding only what you could see in front of you. I'd been reading lately Kerouac over morning coffee grinds, but after Cannes I'd formed the firm conclusion that he was dull and sentimental, old Jack. His 'experience' seemed somehow cheap and second-hand, as he was forever chasing women and shirking responsibility. I’d been doing much of the same, I decided, but in my own private greatness; the opposing forces in everything that the enlightened people seemed to speak of- not just befriending the moment, or whatever the fuck old Jack was doing.
I set my sights on Stockholm; the south was beginning to make me restless- the sun closing in claustrophobically, unremitting and bright as ever. I recalled with sudden clarity the last party I’d attended at Brown before 'the escape'. I’d left with sudden spontaneously and ran down towards the docks from that awful Marie Anderson's house, its gaudy roman columns and plaster-marble alcoves hiding his muffled curses and tears. I always had to end up getting so fucking sentimental, just like old Jack- I had to make the injustice of the world personal and immediate. Some muscle-bound fraternity oaf had poked fun at my jacket, a 1920’s sports coat that admittedly looked like something out of a low-budget Great Gatsby re-enactment. On top of this insult though, he’d taken the crisp lapels in his fat, arrogant hands and brought me close to him, speaking into my ear in slurred seriousness. My attempts to recoil from the oaf’s spittle had been unsuccessful, trapped in the grasp of mindless muscle. ‘Listen, I heard about what happened with you and Hastings [Hastings was the football captain I’d had fooled around with harmlessly one day after track practice]. ‘If I ever hear about that again, if I ever, if iye efferr…’ his speech trailed off, the drunkard’s response time hitting him like a slow-motion car crash.
I’d wanted to tell him it was Hastings idea, he was the one who had been sipping furtively out of an old chrome flask all morning during P.E ‘calisthenics’, which he was exempt from anyways, being an athlete. He’d shown up specifically because of the rumors he’d heard about this Clark Nilsson kid. He’d been nervous, drinking and doubting this half-crazy idea all morning. He’d confronted me in the long, sunlit hallway of the athletic club rooms, pushing me gently against the wall and opening the door into the varsity lounge, where he knew no one else would be at that hour. I agreed because, well, I didn’t have a good reason to disagree, and besides, the reaction from my girlfriends when I told them later, their laughter and ‘Ohhh!’s echoing through the studious tomb of the library, their jealous awe, was worth any stigma or disgrace at the time. That this oaf should confront me in the future over the encounter shouldn’t have surprised me in the slightest, I suppose. It was an outcome of inevitable graveness; consequences for breaking the unspoken rules of late 1970’s college life, despite talk of all the mannered ‘liberalism’ of the times. The oaf, whose name was George, he’d managed to slur into my ear, had now recoiled a few steps. He surveyed me at that crooked angle from which drunk antagonists size up their prey. I should have just walked away then. A decent circle of onlookers had formed around us, curious what the sudden altercation was about. I’d stood my ground silently though- I wanted to see just what this George would do, and when I felt a surprisingly heavy fist across my lower jaw, the salty, warm blood pooling slightly beneath my lip, I simply turned and walked out the door. I reached the confluence of the Anderson’s sprawling garden and the woods behind it before finally dissolving into deep, expansive shudders. Why this memory had surfaced just now bothered me somewhat- perhaps it had to do with the repeated stagnation of my social life, the way I’d jumped from fleeting caricatures of headless youth to solitude, never content with one or the other.
The trip north was generally uneventful, not including the odd encounters with the rainy, fog-enshrouded coast north of the Bay or Biscay and south of the protected, manicured geometry of the English Channel. Here the days were long and at times filled with a vague terror, the boat slicing though endless gray mirage, my only trust in the little ‘N’ the compass needle gesticulated at. I managed to live frugally, making a minimum of stops and living largely off canned goods and wine. My occasional trips into the charming working ports of northern Spain and the ragged, endless French Atlantic coast were more functional than pleasurable. The desire to get to Stockholm became singular and driving, it clouded out reason and the physical exhaustion of keeping a near constant watch. Sometimes I felt I didn’t know where I was going, just north- north into the new. Finally yielding to exhaustion, I spent the better part of a week anchored in a small, benign-looking cove outside the little pastoral hamlet of Gatteville-Le-Phare. It lay some 40 km. east of the city of Cherbourg-Octeville, where generations of English had besieged the French across the scant 50 kilometers of shallow, salty manifest destiny. The French had responded with equal bloodshed and vigor, the imperialism of the U.S clearly a learned skill from earlier times, I thought. Having survived the slightly harrowing oceanic leg of my northern transect, I decided to slow the pace somewhat. The sleepy, camouflaged villages of the ‘inland coast’, as I thought of it, proved good destinations. Each evaded the simple ‘fishing port’ or ‘factory town’ I wanted to frame them as, and instead were fraught with the same resolve and condition of anywhere else, I saw.
The last time I was in Stockholm, August 1968, I was visiting dad’s family in Stureplan, an exclusive and polished neighborhood, if somewhat aged. Stureplan- where young, rich Swedes gathered at night in the square and toasted their mostly perfect futures in the shadows of brooding gray apartment blocks, unaware of the rest of the world. At night while my parents and sister slept behind thick, ancient walls and Nordic design, I’d snuck out alone to Ambassaduer and Spybar. I’d felt caught between mingling silently amongst the throngs of attention-seekers and cool kids, and drinking until words flowed unrestricted. I’d ended up doing both, and stolen glances turned to bold, direct confrontations, mumbling halting Swedish at that wonderful distance that's almost better than a kiss because you can feel someone's breath and intent.
I didn't go home with anyone though, and the evenings generally imploded. Perhaps I’d wanted this. Sweden was hazy, clouded with my own mania. It crumpled under the weight of child-like expectation, really of nobody but myself, I realized. Stockholm had been both chaotic and abandoned those August nights- little knots of people drunk, aimless, traveling, or just out for a walk between the resolute cobblestone boulevards. The rich kids in Stureplan were cynically known as 'Bratten' or brats. The men looked spoiled and smug, with meticulously slicked-back hair and pressed polo shirts over slim white chinos. The girls all fit the well-worn title of style-assassins, witless appropriators of a lifestyle bred by boredom and money. Their clothes fit snugly over that enviably Nordic bone structure. Usually this came with a well-worn smirk, the contentment watching everyday mortals roam the long streets at night- Stureplan belonged to them.
I interjected too much of the past with the present when I was in Sweden. My childhood there couldn't be resolved over simple place- it defied the physics of flat, geometric landscapes where red-roofed farms and stone churches dotted muted fields, as seen from the window seat on an ascending SAS jet to New York. The young Swedes loved New York, they sometimes idolized the stubborn American landscape of steel and glass, failed mortgages and four-car garages 5 cars too big. I suppose I was an idealist too; I romanticized Stockholm as unfailingly friendly and utilitarian. A place where harsh realities of the Nordic seasons and the sacrifices demanded by the welfare state hid behind blonde, blue-eyed wonder. Their style was so fucking easy; without pretense or trend worshipping, but then again, who wasn’t just a pawn in someone else’s trend? Cynicism was easy, the solution, now that was harder.
I remembered that asshole Tristan Hedges making fun of my mannerisms at a party a few years ago- I'd crossed the unspoken divide of the American prepster ethic, and the blueblood muscle-bound twerps didn't appreciate the infringement. "I'm just having fun", I’d demurred quietly, too intimidated by Hedges unflinching cockiness to spin off a quick retort. I hoped now I was still just having fun.
There was something so noble about the large majority of the world, even within the good ol’ U-S-of-A, who knew nothing of the pasty boredom bred by the old wealth of leafy suburbia, where people withered under technocratic rain. Not that people in the humid stench of rural India or some leafy Appalachian hollow didn't lust after the same crap rich people did- I never intended to be preachy; just a preacher. What was more, vis-à-vis some perverse poverty ethic I’d imagined, they found satisfaction in subtle yet rich connections to the land and the seasons, the land of burning tires and lean-faced children. Something we seemed to tune out with 'climate control' and 'on demand' everything. The autumn was turning slowly, with satisfying effervescence it fizzled south and brought cool, calm skies and crisp evenings to the sea.
I was now in Stockholm -finally. It was late September- October tomorrow in fact, and I was so much in the present it hurt. It was pretty and old, dressed in the cold, austere grays and regal reds that framed most of Northern Europe, as I’d remembered it- a reserved welcome. The young Swedes of late were liberal and stylish, as I'd heard- versed in western trends, yet beset with the same urban [or was it urbane?] tedium of my friends back in Rhode Island. The behemoth of the modern State was not accommodating, or perhaps too accommodating of their needs.
I found a mooring at a little marina for surprisingly cheap- 50 Kronor a night, given its location a few hundred meters from the imposing stone palisades of the royal palace and parliamentary buildings. I'd developed a slightly grizzled polish from the wind and the cold, whipping rain at sea the past few weeks. After a vigorous scrub in the little shower stall below deck, scalding water and sharp scrub brushes stinging my pink flesh, I set out into the city to find a barber and a good dinner. It was late afternoon, almost 6, and the last embers of sub-Arctic half-light drowned themselves over the cityscape of low apartment flats and insistently modernist steel and glass affairs. I noticed a few girls sitting on the quay across from me, looking towards The Stranger and whispering to each other. The oldest, perhaps my own age or a few years older, was tall and intimidating, with sunflower blond hair cut all uneven and ragged across her strong, arrogant face. Her neck was slim and oddly delicate below that intense, almost violent Nordic bone structure- a Viking anew.
She looked at me with the sort of calculated indifference that makes you wonder why people can't just be people; their emotions tied to actions and not just hollow lust. Suddenly self-conscious and reserved after so many days at sea, I made a quiet promise to be forthright in Stockholm, to walk with a light spring in my step, assertive but not stupid; an observer and the observed. Her name was Helena, she informed me like an afterthought as she broke seamlessly into the rhythm of my stride across the quay. Her friends looked on in awe and horror. She had used the rather lame pretense of asking the time and bumming a cig off me [I lost the whole damn pack! she swore in perfect English]. She then launched unabashedly into her real motives: late the previous night [or early this morning?] she'd had a vision, a dream of a young American man who would come on a ship the next morning. He would arrive at 6 in the evening at the Kungsholm Marina, and he would bring her salvation.
The details of this vision were that it occurred after the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol and cocaine, both of which she fucking hated. She informed me of this halfway through a sneeze so that the words came out high-pitched and theatrical, and I laughed inappropriately. She felt obliged to partake in these things when in the company her Stureplan friends, however, lest the experience of clinging vicariously to someone else's life lose its edge. She was "actually quite a smarty" she told me, but was on indefinite leave from the Royal Technical College after deciding she needed to take some time 'away from engineering and indifference.' I was still wary- my mind raced and my extremities tingled with possibility, but I sensed there was something else, a beautiful girl caught in addict limbo perhaps, hustling herself on the street or selling dope under the pretense of 'visions' and American men. Yet the further we walked, still not far out of earshot of Helena's friends ['they all have jobs and boyfriends' she informed me sullenly] I began to think she was 'the real deal', as my friends liked to say. 'Shit like this doesn't happen in real life though, this is the substance of self-fulfilling paperbacks and lukewarm fantasies', I thought. The idea of an imperfect stranger, a beautiful stranger, approaching me for nothing more than companionship and curiosity seemed absurd, yet somehow par for the course. Stockholm was gorgeous yet also somber- the sun struck at oblique, creeping angles at this latitude, and the streets were a maze of shadows leering grotesquely. I asked her where we were going, and for the first time I saw past her confident shell as she managed a nervous smile and said 'well, where do you want to go?' 'Your bedroom', I thought with a vague smirk, but turned off this urge, this girl was more complex than that, perhaps not a physical object at all, but a real companion, a confidant, a stay-up-until-4-in-the-morning-and-talk-about-shit kind of friend… how long had he known her; 10 minutes!? 'This is my problem', I thought, 'I pathologically trust.'
Her body was boyish and fit, a somehow linear mix of womanly curves and angular, bony bits. She reminded me of a teenage boy with boobs and long, stalk-like legs. Her torso was like a weathered Roman bust perched on stilts. She excited me in a way that intimidated- if she'd challenged me to a triathlon or even a race down the block, I might decline with a prick of embarrassment for fear of losing spectacularly. She didn't walk, she sailed, compromising gravity in a way that seemed graceful and ridiculous at the same time. I mentioned Stureplan and she scoffed deridingly. ‘That’s for '2-dimensional people and pricks', she informed me sharply. I was a little hurt and a tad confused; hadn’t she just been partying there last night? Besides, I'd developed this complex, this fantasy of the young and smart and tragically flawed dwelling in that square that I took any criticism of the place personally. She saw the disappointment in my face and apologized, she hadn't really meant it; she was just trying to impress me a little bit. 'Who does that!?', I thought in genuine awe. Not the criticizing-something-you-like-to-seem-cool part- that was a universal human attribute of insecurity, but immediately confessing her sin. That sort of honesty was disarming, it made you look at your shoes or change the subject. I vowed to play on a level field and admitted that I had dropped out of school [fled was a better adjective perhaps], stolen a boat, and sailed across the Atlantic.
I thought she was going to kiss me. Her eyes lost their fiery blue glare for a second and dilated blankly. She tottered forward a half step and caught herself, then stared up at me like an atheist who has just seen the face of god in a dirty puddle. "No! no no no. That can't be. Clark, you are a fan-fucking-tastic storyteller [she must be an expat if some sort, you don't learn words like that in Swedish grammar school, he thought], but you must be straight with me. So, what brings you here from the States?' She clearly didn't believe me. Refused to. The boat was right there.
If I’d really wanted to I could have shown her the old yellowed registration plaque below deck stating ownership by "Mr. Charles Starling, Newport, Rhode Island.” Not Clark Nilsson. Yet even this probably wouldn't have sold her: she'd already changed the subject to where he wanted to eat, clearly uncomfortable with further dialogue on the matter, external or otherwise. I wouldn't let it go though, and pressed her one last time. She laughed, a quick, bitter chuckle, one that admits defeat yet also questions justice, a departure from her normally airy cheer. "Really, its absurd', she started, but then trailed off. 'What!?' I was losing my patience with this strange girl. 'It was in the dream. He was going to come on a stolen sailboat, from the states, and be tall and indifferently blond. Last bit shoulda tripped me out already I suppose... gotta stop these damn projections.’ Now clearly having crossed into the realm of unconscious insanity, I was evermore intrigued. I wanted to know what made her tick, or rather what didn’t, perhaps.
This girl was heavy. Someone worth pursuing, someone worth a hard, cold winter full of enduring the ridicule of native Swedes over my language skills while waiting chipped tables in Stockholm to be with; the yacht deteriorating in some cheap boatyard. Helena careened sideways, off kilter like a falling tree, and my mind flashed to thoughts of the hospital, getting her stomach pumped, the authorities demanding I show some ID, all my grand plans of escape coming unwound. No though, she wasn't high, she wasn't drunk, just fucked up on life, as cliché as it sounded, she really was. Either that or a tad mental, but that was a whole different story, and one I didn't have the capacity to deal with at the moment. She said she had to go, quite suddenly, and thanked me for the cigarette, setting off at a healthy clip down Stromgaten. Her gait was reminiscent of a moose that ends up on a highway, directed back into the woods not by conscious effort, but as a by-product of its peculiar amble.
I wanted to tell her to stop, but I knew the effort was furtive, only leading in the direction of misdirected attachment. Our brief encounter was of the type that restored some of my faith in the modern state of affairs though perhaps nothing more, I thought sadly.
The air was now tinged with a distinctive chill. I thought of the first frost soon to come to New England, my friends and classmates given me up for lost or dead as they trod through piling auburn leaves on the Brown campus. My exterior was now rough and salt crusted; freckled and mottled by the sun in others. Though I made no conscious effort to lift weights or exercise, I felt I bulged with imperceptible vitality, youthful ignorance of ever becoming aged. It was with this newfound resolve that I’d set off to the north to discover and find, rather than prove, which were to be the key differences in the coming months. I spent another week in Stockholm, enjoying excessive amounts of ‘Swedish pizza’, a concession to my childhood that helped clear my mind of the unsettling encounter with Helena. This monument to culinary carelessness translated to anything you could ever imagine as a topping heaped on usually sub-par crust; a gastronomic horror show sure to make any Italian cringe. It was delicious- covered in mussels, anchovies, vegetables, and some sort of fleshy, pickled things whose identity evaded me, probably for the better, but added wonderfully to the ensuing taste mélange.
Attempts at re-creating a nostalgia that sprung from a much younger, simpler time in my life could only propel me so long, however. Soon I was restless again for something new, something that wouldn’t fill me with sharp pangs for family and the nagging ‘what-ifs’ of a life interrupted at the age of six. So, I did the requisite things I thought I ought to do; the bars and exclusive clubs in Stureplan and now-gentrified Sodermalm as well not quite what I’d imagined. The narrow avenues were filled with a charm that was ephemeral and bright, it escaped in hissing bubbles over my head, dissipating into the air when I tried to capture it.
So, I headed back around Scandinavia to the west, to the jagged, icy coast I’d glimpsed with nervous awe as a small child, the SAS jet ascending silently over the fjordlands and into the North Atlantic, bound for New York. 3 weeks at sea passed with imperceptible speed- they blurred and sublimated into the finite haze of autumn.
Before I knew it, I stood on the windy, chilly docks beside the fishing boats and half-finished oil rigs in Bergen, Norwegian aesthetics already winning me over as I scanned the waterside promenade. It was a busy Saturday morning, and for October 1st, the air was surprisingly mild. ‘It must be the marine temperance’, I thought firmly, recalling how moist and warm Seattle and even Anchorage were, buffered by the sea from the full brunt of the Arctic. The slight chill was ever-present though- the insistent reminder that one was entering fall at 60-something degrees north. I liked the building contrast with the Mediterranean I’d been experiencing at sea the past weeks. The trip from Stockholm had been gray, looming, at times quite terrifying. More often though it was a subtler, vaguely malevolent threat that hovered over the edge of the glassy green swells like cold fog in the morning.
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