-Chapter 7-
Bergen was functional, gaudy only to please tourists and seabirds, I thought. The brightly shingled houses were a study in square-ness and pastels, perched on slick, shiny rocks. They sat mostly in the shadows of giant, menacing oil rigs- hundred meter tall steel spiders in various states of assembly or disassembly. I marveled with sudden unease at the roughly 400 meters of water that lay a scarce kilometer out from the docks, the deep water fjord that allowed this booming manufacturing industry to exist in such an otherwise improbably location. Bergen was more of a square-jawed lumberman or sturdy miner than the delicate artist or dilettante Coudouliere or Cannes were, it seemed.
I was reminded of a childhood trip to Spokane, Washington, the whole place somehow sad and run-down, an unlikely Detroit of the northwest, caught between America’s modern tech obsession and old-school industry sensibility. Suddenly I hated Spokane, hated Bergen too perhaps; the stubborn refusal to see beyond grimy, cracked pavement and practical matters. Nevertheless, I wanted to give it a fair chance, the extremity of isolation over the past few weeks wearing on my better [or shall we say more pretentious] judgment.
So, I docked somewhat illegitimately along an aging fishing boat, quayside and center, and disembarked for terra firma mystery. The kids were a strange mélange of style and reasonableness. I saw the occasional misfit or artist-impersonator, but most of them looked like they had seen more than their share of life here in this isolated green valley, and the bright lights of Oslo or Stockholm seemed no more tangible than a free trip to the Caribbean or a husband who didn’t drink. Swedes loved to lump Norwegians as drunks and troublemakers, which they probably reciprocated in return, but I sensed no such abuse or malice. Rather they seemed harmless, curious about my Nordic features and American mannerisms; where I might be from and if I’d really sailed all the way from America. That they would doubt this last point seemed slightly ludicrous to me. This was the height of a rather ludicrous era though; where someone might actually attempt something as silly and wasteful as a trans-Atlantic runaway.
I needed coffee, like a seabird needs to see land or a zebra needs stripes. I followed the faint, acrid aroma across the quay and up a steep, narrow cobblestone avenue towards the neighborhood coffee joint. It was hip and Spartan; the aging yellow walls a study in minimalism and thoughtlessness. Bergen seemed too industrial for this sort of unexpected half-assed bohemia, but I embraced it warmly and soon was chatting with Norwegian college students in excited, broken tones, the polyester and nylon edges of their apparel ironically crisp and colorful. The careless future always loomed in the distance though, I thought gravely, even in such pleasant and benign situations. The atmosphere was so suddenly dense with expectation that the only way to lift the weight was to disappear to the bottom of the ocean.
School. I was done, essentially, done with the educating part at least, that which molded and grew mossy in damp New England halls and ivy-covered recesses, content to swallow whatever the professor felt like spouting today. Yet this unseen burden still weighed heavy on me; pinned me down with fear and resentment until sometimes I’d awake in the middle of the night short of breath and sweaty, a million starry eyes fixed over my bed; questioning and inflective. I felt less conspicuous here in Europe, where late 20th-century mania had set in slower and more begrudgingly, where even the young punks in the garbage-strewn ally's knew something wonderful and arcane dwelled beyond the present cultural fixations.
As I stood lost in thought in the tidy line snaking towards the coffee shop door, a girl caught my eye Our brief eye contact, which may not even have happened, was like bright sparks of steel colliding obliquely to my left. She pretended for a moment not to see me then smiled politely at the floor. Her pale Nordic cheeks were a lovely shade of crimson, rosy from his sudden disturbance of her otherwise faceless cool more than the budding autumn nip outside, I hoped. I felt like this girl was purposeful, sent from some half-memory or maybe a future apparition such that their paths had come close to crossing in the past, spurned by geography or bad luck. She was forceful, present- undoubtedly there. The type of girl whose immediacy was a little disarming; who could never hide behind passive feminine curves. Of course she carried a slight aura of aloofness I found sexy, but that was an aside. She wasn’t unattractive; rather, she was bolder- sharper than the average American perhaps. Bored to pieces in this post-modern utopia under the almost-midnight sun, sharp Viking features still distinctly that of a girl. Girls still intimidated me- friends or otherwise, they were removed from my wavelengths and somehow more arcane than men, who generally were upfront and driven by lust and impatience; or so I imagined.
She was carrying a rather dog-eared copy of William S. Burroughs’s 'The Naked Lunch', and wore a few of the requisite post-beatnik accoutrements, but I could tell she was no slave to trends. She was very self-conscious, I noted, probably carrying a slightly elevated sense of self-worth. I of course was guilty of these forgivable sins of prolonged youth, and I liked her that much more. She’d ordered a double cappuccino if I was not mistaken and now stood impatiently, an idling motor beside the little serving table while a languid barista toiled behind the counter, in no particular hurry it seemed. This was my moment, I thought decisively, and I fumbled an already off-script introduction, devolving quickly into mingled English apologies and Norwegian compliments. She didn't skip a beat, however, and countered my insistent flubbing with a hollow smile and more blushing. 'Great, I blew it', I thought dejectedly.
My now strong, rough hands squeezed the little yellow earthen coffee mug to death. In the next instant though, she turned back around to face me with an appallingly difficult to read expression and slowly, forcefully took my hand in hers. She led me out of the shop and into and into a small stone alcove facing the icy fjord on one side and a dejected dumpster belonging to the coffee shop on the other. The obscene duality of this setting never dawned on me though, because the next thing I knew, she was kissing me so forcefully I thought I’d accidentally inhaled her soul just to get a damn breath in, whoa, what the hell was going on!? This chick didn't fuck around, that's for sure, I thought abstractly between shallow breaths and weakening thoughts of escape. She freed herself of me just as fast as we'd locked lips, and stood smiling in no particular direction, more towards the sad amber light filtering over the distant reaches of the fjord than at me.
‘Why couldn't things be a little more linear?’ I thought as the girl, whose name was Annika and whose English wasn't very good [Naked Lunch translated to Norwegian? Ah, Globalism] sat smoking cheap eastern European cigarettes and leafing through the book to find a piece of choice prose she 'just had to show me' because only other writers understand each other, she’d gushed. I’d had glimpsed several largish, plastic cylinders in the recesses of her vintage 20's handbag, and I thought I’d seen the beginning syllables of several fairly non-trivial antipsychotics before she brought the faux-pearl clasps to a sharp close. The hunt for the 'Naked Lunch' phrase done for the moment, it seemed.
She was 24, possibly affiliated with some University, and had just completed a prestigious 6-month internship with an ad agency in Oslo. She must have some sort of record too, or at least an honorable mention for carrying 6 feet of young woman so casually and attractively, I though. Even with strong features and towering height, she managed to avoid looking tomboyish or adolescent; instead, her aesthetic was unconventional, sexy but implacable, resistant of the 10-second assessment college boys seemed so fond of.
Crazy or not, I needed company now like the Arctic tern yearns for land after 10,000 miles at sea, and she didn't seem to have any plans for the evening or a lifetime. Her hair was the perfect shade of sunflower- neither bright nor dull, trapped in its own effervescent sheen. It sat in thick tangled slabs atop her head, oblivious to its own charm. I hadn't wanted to know a girl like this since, well, ever was a strong word, but it had to work until he found a better substitute. We were both young and immortal and vaguely wild, but I felt that the trip had finally transcended my self-fulfillment and I was experiencing things objectively for the first time. She was from Tromso, far to the north, a bleak and windswept place where the sun fucked mercilessly with one's perception of time and space. Its only charm perhaps lay in the sleek Nordic beings that managed to survive this Arctic moonscape, their icy breath the exhalation of some strange perseverance.
She’d been attending University in Stockholm, on full scholarship for creative writing, but soon dropped her novelist ambitions to pursue the more hip and lucrative fields of design and advertising. In the uncertain fall of sophomore year, she’d met a young man 3 years her senior in a graduate-level design seminar, and he waxed and waned against her better judgment for the next 2 years. Shed’ followed his material arrogance across Scandinavia and back into Norway, where he was forced to shack up with his parents after his start-up ad agency tanked due to too many party's and too few billboards. She immediately fell in love with Bergen's no-bullshit industrial sensibility, ditched him in her ongoing effort to disconnect from the 'Stureplan set', which she’d fell in with over the past few years. [I wondered if she’d known Helena? Such possibilities were too strange and plausible to bring up now, I decided.]
Her ex Bjorn, Stureplan, and dying were all off-limit topics, she’d informed me curtly, after which she began a somewhat tangential monologue in Norwegian about the fucked modern Scandinavia where young people slavishly complied to the latest trends with no thoughts of consequence or identity; a place mythically ‘cool’ in the unknowing eyes of Americans and ever other Europeans. She’d abandoned her mannered urban style when she left the city it seemed, and now wore a strange mélange of faux-bohemian and crazy bag lady, minus the dumpy looks and haggard stoop, of course, I chuckled to myself.
She saw Bjorn occasionally around town; he now delivered pizzas and worked the night shift at the gas spot a few days a week, though his mob-connected uncle was supposed to be getting him a union steelworker gig at the yards, she informed me sullenly. Tired of all this past-tense introspection, I invited her for a walk down to the narrow, almost fallow little strip of parkland that ran along the giant gray steelyards and out towards the sea. She laughed heartily and informed me this park was the sole territory of druggies, bums, and mischievous adolescents. I countered with the fact that we might as well be included in the last category, so it was ok. They crossed the disorganized edge of downtown and soon were in pleasant stride in the fading afternoon light along a little asphalt path that split the park in two.
I felt warm and content seeing the old people lift their heads and nod appreciatively from their benches at our seemingly well-matched vitality, my love-to-be classic and unobtrusive. Annika took my hand and then promptly scolded herself out loud for trusting strange men- Americans nonetheless. I just laughed and squeezed her hand a little harder, the blood thick and viscous, coursing silently between them. She told me she was uncertain- money was low, and the awful 'Stureplan Set' and their doughy, slick-haired boys in pressed-polo's wanted her to come back to Stockholm. They could support her, they claimed, but she didn't need supporting, oh no, she informed me proudly- she had come of age here amongst the somber steel oil rigs, spiders breaking through the mushy gray clouds and into the blue yonder.
I told her I was uncertain of many things, but my affection for her would remain steadfast and sincere if she let it be. She smiled and pulled my left hand snug against her warm, smooth abdomen, causing me to shiver slightly. Funny how tied to touch we are, unable to transcend our physics. Where we would be the next day, the next week, the next decade remained blissfully irrelevant. I smiled shyly at first then broad and toothy at the realization freedom from human bullshit only was truly realized when you had someone to share it with. Silently, mutually, we turned their stride around and back towards town. They walked uphill along a narrow, cobbled avenue towards a glowing little red-roofed cottage whose bright, modern colors saved it from dinginess. I followed Annika in as she deftly slid a key into the old brass lock and led me into a low, almost claustrophobic kitchen. It was awash in books; books piled on the fridge, reclining casually over the edges of the sink, forming little paper waves along the floor, with not a morsel of food in sight.
She made no attempt to apologize and instead reached in the little economy fridge and offered me a beer. To my delight, it was not Carlsberg. While I marveled at the strange Norwegian ale, she quickly opened several of the polyethylene cylinders and dispensed 3 pills down her throat with one deft sip of beer; sliding the bottles back into her handbag. She smiled weakly, baring her insecurities a bit for the first time. I decided not to inquire, seating myself instead on a fuzzy brown couch that looked like it had survived several curbside stints. She proceeded to weep, slowly, protractedly, and I felt a pinprick of agitation as her sniffles built into a curling, cavernous crescendo of wailing. It forced her surprisingly slender 6 feet into slow shudders and intermittent chills. She’d abandoned preparing 'Fika', traditional Scandinavian mid-afternoon coffee and cakes, as it was already 6PM and emotions prevailed.
Instead, she sat beside me on the shabby couch and curled against my sea-weathered frame like a child would take shelter against war, huddled instinctively whilst all hell broke loose outside. Her sobs soon subsided though and a bright, almost eerie smile crossed her lips. I tried to remember the few notes I’d taken in Psych-101 on 'Bipolar mood disorders' and other archaic psychiatric diagnosis of the late 1970's.
'I don't even fucking know you' she whispered in a trance-like fixation, eyes on a point along the dull yellow walls that must have seemed like the vanishing point of our civilization to her, both opaque and transparent. I responded by kissing her neck subtly, meekly- like a dog that licks its owner in love expecting to be slapped. Instead, she pulled me closer, until I felt our surface area intertwined like layers of an onion. Whether she was the outer and I was the inner was insignificant when we retreated to her bedroom, stumbling, giggling, and insistent like the incoming tide. The next morning I awoke dazed and slightly panicked at the thought of the Stranger alone at her mooring in Bergen. Probably pirated away by blond hooligans by now, I thought, a party boat set for Oslo. She was fine though- both the boat and Annika, asleep under prismatic blue skies, bathed in the cool liquid of morning. I left her pulling at the covers half-awake and set off for his morning run. My legs were still uncertain and shy like a newborn calf’s, after so many days at sea.
That land would ever seem hostile compared to the fierce blue depths seemed unfathomable, but I was now truly aqueous, or at least amphibian, compelled to wander like Annika's mind. When I returned to her after 45 breathlessly short minutes, she was busy fixing breakfast, industrious and pleasant, laughing about how she could at least rationalize her trust of strangers in that they were generally attractive and interesting.
We ate unhealthy and delicious Norwegian traditions swallowed with the now universal coffee and orange juice; the benchmarks of globalization. Afterword I invited her out for a walk, which seemed rather arrogant, as this was her town [of the moment at least] and here I was playing bastard tour guide. She quickly offered a compromise, however, since she had to keep her appointments, which today included volunteering at the shelter for abused women [' A lot of Norwegian men are alcoholic pigs'] and her weekly reading club ['they’re all fucking crazy!']. However, seeing as I was the latest guest of honor, she informed me she’d be glad to entertain me otherwise. We visited her favorite 'art gallery', which was actually a semi-abandoned warehouse where young people in various states of Bohemian trance squatted amidst partially fabricated oil derricks and black, snake-like lengths of pneumatic hose, which awaited their gruesome rigor mortis atop some North Sea rig. I envied the fatalistic beauty of the Norwegians, their crude bargain with elements of nature both inhospitable and uncaring. They carried their aesthetic isolation like a great silent burden, insecurities oblivious to the rest of the world.
After some poorly communicated small talk with the warehouse denizens, we walked away from the water towards the manicured brick and stone buildings of Bergen’s Universitet. Beyond it lay the sort of gray, geometric ghetto that validated every Nixon-worshipping, socialist-fearing American NeoCon. Drab apartment blocks sat festooned in graffiti and their own humble immigrant woes, blue eyes burning into the brown dirt paths from hillsides beyond. She needed to show me this, she said, to prove that we were all the same, the immigrants, the 'Stureplan Set', the Americans, the crazies, all ‘entrenched in the latest enunciation of bullshit, of fallow dreams and mindless perseverance’, she muttered to the sky.
Beyond this though, there were playgrounds, functional state-sponsored affairs with bright, blocky colors and cheap wood chip floors, where children played because they knew nothing else. They didn't know yet that they were brown or yellow or black or inferior, just excited and restless. We sat on 2 unoccupied swings beside a little girl in a burka and a boy with a yarmulke. They were 5 at the most and oblivious to both the insecurity of their 20-something neighbors and their own people’s uneasy truce. We took shallow, thoughtful swings and spoke of their childhoods, mine in the ancient hardwood forests of blueblood New England, hers in a cheap tenement flat outside Tromso with her smart but vaguely abusive and unabashedly alcoholic parents. She told me of how they routinely slept until noon, called in sick for likely the last time at their state temp placement, fought, fucked in a cursory make-up manner, and released a traumatized but resilient Annika into the wild arctic tundra. There she had built forts and hunted grouse and hares with outcast Sami children, the long-marginalized Scandinavian Inuit. It was there that she learned tolerance, acceptance of a childhood largely unchangeable, and longing for a future indelibly her own.
She used to hit her mother, she admitted sadly. Not forcefully, not with the intent to harm, but to make amends. To equalize the hurt, to show her she could be strong like her father. He was a giant, a bronze-cast Viking of a steelworker turned work-seeker, blue eyes set under tangles of wiry blond curls, tinged with an angry gray. Her parents still loved her and she loved them, she informed me matter-of-factly, but things were irrevocably different, as she so simply put it. They were cordial now, business-casual almost, the pain of estranged love best put aside for politeness. I was tired of trying to understand family estrangement. Putting all this surprisingly personal dialogue aside, I invited her out for a day sail, as thoughts of teenage punks vandalizing my prize girl down by the steelyards left me uneasy and restless to act. We set out from the decaying wharf around 10 am, a lazy, almost coincidental start, framed by slivers of steely light filtering down the green valley walls. I decided to motor out of the inner harbor as fjord winds in the morning were difficult as it was. They were temperamental such that I wouldn't risk embarrassing myself in front of her, making 20 short tacks to gain a kilometer upwind. The fact that she was something as unusual as a wholly terrestrial Norwegian never dawned on me. She seemed so adept and lithe in any environment, able to fit herself into strange circumstances like me.
She was impressed by my sudden nautical finesse, yet her insistent skepticism of all things pried out difficult questions. 'Don't you get scared, out so far from land or anyone else?', she asked boldly, and I replied honestly. 'Of course, goose [she probably didn't know this term of endearment, but that was irrelevant], ‘it's actually quite terrifying- sometimes I feel like I should just give up and let the sea swallow me up, but the boat won't allow it, nor will the wind.' She seemed satisfied, and sat against the salt-crusted seat cushions on the aft cockpit, wrapped in an old wool blanket against the wind. I managed to finesse the fickle wind into something resembling a broad reach N40W, the scraggly land falling away in dull green sheets, a landscape only recently exposed from miles of silent blue ice. She liked corners, I observed. In her little house, she had quickly taken up residence in the shabby corner formed by mustard yellow walls and a couch that looked like it had seen a dumpster or curb in its time. She relaxed only when 2 sides of the world were closed, when she could scan her surroundings in a single gesture. For someone who’d spent so much of their life trapped by folly and circumstance, this was understandable, but she didn't get it, I thought in heated frustration- didn't even begin to understand her own perfection.
I seemed to attract these types, fragile yet resilient, framed by a world too fast and manic to just let people be. My own life, what it had become, was both empowering and appalling. I thought distantly of his family back home, who must be in the end stages of grief and the beginnings of dull acceptance. I would never forgive myself for this; this trespass against trust so basic and selfish even youth couldn't excuse it. I vowed to make it up to them one day, to return with a boat my own, a savings account, a family perhaps- the tapestries of adulthood. Things I wanted partly because my mother wanted them, and partly because, goddammit, they were worthwhile goals and youthful narcissism couldn't cover that up. My sister was now 22, probably just figuring out what to do after college, basking briefly in the vague light of freedom that comes after school and before career.
She would probably go to grad school though, I thought with some jealousy- she was such an academic, so damn smart but lacking in the itchy creative yearnings I seemed so afflicted with, too disciplined to let go. I’d always felt hidden partly in her shadow, too different for direct comparison. Her quiet, subtle confidence and endless loyalty to friends and school; likable in a way I never managed to cultivate. We’d been close, in a way that sometimes felt perfunctory, but I knew my love was true and our differences hindered only the expression of it. Last I heard she’d been busy moving into her senior year room in Kirkland House. I imagined her nerdy and likable boyfriend trailing his feet lazily in the crisp red leaves that swirled through Cambridge that time of year, early fall harkening a return to academia and the warm insulation of college.
I hated myself suddenly, as the winds finally stabilized to a solid 12 or 13 knots from the southeast, the outer islands of the fjord appearing like green buttons floating in liquid mercury. Hated my unlikableness, the escapism, the fatal strength that never quite measured up to the rigid stick I held over my head. Annika meanwhile had taken the helm and was smiling and laughing warmly, the feeling of piloting a large boat in open water probably as intoxicating as it had been for me the first time. I shook himself from this untimely introspection and slowly guided her hands on the wheel a few degrees to starboard. Sheeting in the main deftly, I felt vaguely aroused by the sound of the crisp metal cogs ratcheting in the sails.
She asked shyly where we were going; her tone curious more than apprehensive, and I realized our little sail had no real course or destination. I asked her which islands out here were her favorite and she replied she had never ventured this far out in the fjord. Only once had she been out of Bergen harbor, with some pimply, impish fisherman's son who thought he could charm her by driving his little wooden skiff way too fast, almost flipping on the wake of an outgoing tugboat. The landscape now reminded me of the Labrador coast, a study in muted grays and green. Stubbly stone and grass islands sat awash with loudmouthed, excessive wildlife- seabirds and seals, imported sheep and goats, everyone eating and shitting and squawking. A larger island framed by somber granite cliffs appeared on the horizon perhaps 5 kilometers to the east, and I saw as we approached that a little pocket beach lay hidden between the rocks, a hundred meter wide swath of pale gold sand almost tropical in the building afternoon light.
This seemed like a good destination and I explained to her the sometimes complex logistic of anchoring in a narrow cove- without a chart, nonetheless. Foolhardy perhaps, but now necessary as the course of the day had been cemented in her approval. I instructed her briskly to go sit up on the varnished maple bowsprit and she obeyed excitedly, grabbing the steel shroud cables for balance as she manned the ever-important 'rock watch' position. I thought of dropping sail now and motoring safely into the little cove, but this seemed like cheating now that I’d prepared her for a little display of nautical showmanship, so we carried on. She was a quick learner, observant and practical, and easily understood my English instructions as to bringing down the sails and throwing the anchor. The entrance to the little cove was marked by an ugly black ledge. 5 meters wide perhaps, it was covered in pale brown seaweed and gnarled barnacles on which several large seals basked lazily, their dog-like eyes following me as we tacked deftly around the rocks.
The next maneuver required considerable precision, and my veins dilated deliciously with adrenaline as I jibed quite smoothly and Annika screamed from the bow, 'Rock Clark, Rock'!, followed by several muffled Norwegian curses. Instinctively U cranked the wheel hart to port and the boat slid smoothly by a bulging apparition of murky granite in light green water, centimeters to spare by the looks of it. The sea had an almost equatorial transparency here, the sandy bottom and stone cascades hiding nothing.
At the end of the perhaps 10 meter long sunken ledge, a broken jumble of white fiberglass splinters lay eerily still along the sandy bottom, a relatively recent wreck by the look if it. A Rhodes-19 style day craft, probably an unlucky family or a pair of drunken students, I thought with a chill. No swimming here, I decided quickly- I’d always carried a deep paranoia of swimming near shipwrecks or piers. Any such obstruction of the water seemed sinister and unsafe. With Annika's now expert assistance, we anchored safely in a benign 3 or 4 fathoms turquoise water perhaps 50 meters from the beach. The afternoon was sun hitting an Indian summer crescendo, perhaps 22 or 23 Celsius here in the Scandinavian tropics, I thought contently. They embarked for shore in the little wooden skiff, its gaudy pastel paint now chipped and salted, reminiscent of the battered fishing boats so ubiquitous along the Spanish Mediterranean.
The boat rocked clumsily as Annika rowed ashore. She was inexperienced but strong, determined to wrest control of the sea through the battered wooden oars. We landed with that wonderful grainy 'whoooosh' of a small boat ascending sand. I tied the painter line to some pinkish granite knobs adorning a nearby boulder, vestiges of an ancient magma cooling miles under what would one day become Norway. We unpacked the hastily assembled picnic. It was comically incomplete- a half-empty bottle of wine, 1 apple, 3 pears, a block of cheese that had seen better days, and some indeterminate Nordic bread, white and dense like the people. She, like myself, feared waking up mediocre one day, answerable to no one but herself, trapped in a cycle of false reconciliation with god. Or so the moment seemed to tell me.
Her eyes spoke volumes of self-deprecation and distrust, yet she managed to sparkle; to radiate a subtle sheen that was equal parts Neutrogena commercial and sincere brightness. She ate like a bird- in fleeting, apprehensive bites. She sampled everything but committed to nothing, except the wine of course, which she seemed to down in a single gesture. This left me with the rest of the alcohol, a lukewarm can of Carlsberg Hof, pillaged from her mostly empty fridge that morning. Not that the situation needed chemical enhancement anyways, I thought happily. Here on some sort of Arctic Riviera, watched only by seabirds and seals. They seemed supremely bored by our presence, these transient humans searching for something other than shelter and sustenance.
The sun had reached its apex and was now fading sublimely into a distant green hillside, then diving headlong into the cold black expanse of water that led out into the North Sea. A few rectangular, geometric dots framed the western horizon, outgoing container ships bound for Rio or New York. I liked their crisp disturbance of the vanishing point, the way they made no apologies rising from an unperturbed plane in piles of green and blue squares, steel cradles carrying the ingredients of modern civilization. Somehow Annika's womanly curves bothered me; the fact that she was round and organic and of this earth. I missed the arrogant, defiant jawlines of Benoit or Guillaume, their surreal masculine folly. Girls were scary in that they camouflaged so well into nature, content largely with the ways things were and would always be, rather then forever upending the world. I felt like a stubborn weed, pulling myself out of the ground and replanting new roots.
She seemed to sense my distraction and pulled me into a slow, lazy kiss, the kind where you have a moment to worry whether you’re doing a good job, tonguing too deep, too shallow, too slow. I was doing a goods job though, I told myself firmly, and I pulled her into the warm sand, muffled giggles both protesting and encouraging. She was too sublime to realize the fallacy of her own existence; that she might awake one day and find herself old, dull, worn. This would never happen- I wouldn't allow it. They lay on their backs side by side, blocking the sun ineffectively with freckled hands, allowing silvery slivers to pass between greasy, crumb-covered fingers, burrowing their backs into the sand like desert beetles.
I felt like sinking slowly into the rounded quartz particles, cushioned by increasing pressure until he himself was crushed into little rounded particles, sieved though sand and finally descended like a meteor into the earth's fiery interior, recycled into rock on some distant volcano. She spoke of recent novels; that she was done with dense behemoths like War & Peace and Atlas Shrugged. Instead she was fascinated by novellas and short stories, which were the 'media pop tarts of thinking people', she informed me matter-of-factly. 'God, she is too much', I thought undeservingly. I felt slight when standing in the full light of her manic intellect. Her hands shook slightly when she became excited; they resonated with an internal frequency I guessed might be equal parts anti-psychotic side effect and genuine buzz.
The tide was retreating rapidly, and I knew we they missed our window back through the rather narrow passage inland between the island and the mainland, it would be a battle back to Bergen, even motoring. I hated to break the calm of the moment but felt compelled to act, if for no other reason than that the sand was cooling with a vague finality. The thought of a chilly evening on the beach waiting out the tide sounded more unpleasant than adventurous. I guided her back towards the little skiff, her balance now visibly irregular. She did not protest in the slightest. Rather, her lips formed a shallow, self-conscious grin that seemed to understand both the nautical and emotional aspects of the situation.
As they motored across the little cove to the waiting Stranger, she drew close to me and whispered in hushed urgency, 'I don't want to go back'. As much as I’d been expecting a similarly grandiose statement, it still caught me off guard. I drew silently inward for a few minutes trying to formulate a response that was both compassionate and firm. Obviously her statement was meant to insinuate that if we just turned the boat 180 degrees and headed out to sea and south to the misty tropics she would hardly protest, a willingly kidnapped maiden, but I refused to give in to this logic and instead offered a compromise. 'Look, I like you a lot too. I would use the word love, except I feel as if I've known you for so long, that's implied. Even though I've only known you for 24, maybe 30 hours, which brings me to my next point, which is that I have hurt people before, and probably will again, even when I love them, mostly when I love them. So I don't want to hurt you.'
She looked at me softly, silently, from a humble, acute angle as if for the first time, the tears welling slowly as she made no attempt to wipe them away. 'You’re an asshole', she mouthed in half-whispered Norwegian. I knew enough of the language to understand this, but not enough to admit my folly and embrace her once and forever, so we rode silently home on favorable northwestern winds while the stars massed overhead like some kind of vast cosmic conspiracy. She in her usual post on the aft cockpit seat cushions, back pressed into that wool blanket like it was the only solid thing left in the world. A large oil tanker appeared quite suddenly from behind a passing island, likely set on autopilot down the center of the fjord's 400 meter deep main channel, the captain already thinking of his family in Athens or Dubai. I knew the ship had the right of way and I should alter our course to avoid passing too close. In my distraction over Annika though I failed to tack in time and passed dangerously close to the hulking black mass of the tanker. Its rigid steel deck sailed through the sky fifty meters away like a floating factory. Annika screamed to pay more attention, but I ignored her and dug deeper into his own churning thoughts, letting the building chill of the night insulate me from her.
I wanted to make amends, but not really- she scared me, foiled my plans at independence from all others except The Stranger, who was beautiful in that she provided and asked for nothing difficult in return. I was too selfish, too weird to expect unequivocal love, I thought sadly, at least not right now. That meant relinquishing the lavish attention I always imagined strangers heaped on me in foreign ports, coffee shops, sidewalks- exchanging it for the real attention of just one person.
We made an unremarkable return to Bergen, save the tanker encounter and the continual gathering and effervescence of the stars overhead. I smiled slightly at finding my previous mooring unoccupied. We rode across the choppy water of the harbor to the docks silently as well, save the catcalls and adolescent laughter slowly building into a typical Saturday night on the Bergen waterfront. She smiled now slightly too, though I couldn't tell if this was a vestige of her insanity, recognizing friends amongst the laughter onshore, or preparation for apologizing or accusing me of something else. I hoped for the latter. They tied up the skiff along the docks, and he took her hand helping her onto the quay. She stood aside me on the weathered cobblestones facing the busy downtown, not in front of me, not behind me, but precisely aside, as if singling her self out for some task with which I was not involved. We waited a minute perhaps then both started into apologies at the same time, fumbling new excuses and then self-conscious laughter, as if aware for the first time of the storybook absurdity of our situation, the transnational conflagration here on the docks of Bergen, Norway.
I told her I’d stay at the youth hostel and probably set off down the coast to Oslo the next morning if the weather was good. She embraced me unashamedly and told him that was probably a good idea. Fishing a scrap of "Atlas Shrugged' which curiously clung to several other pages looking freshly ripped [I didn't care for Rand's compassionless capitalism either, but damn!], she proceeded to write her full name [Lindquist was a beautiful surname…], phone number, and address. I thought of doing the same but realized it meant nothing given the circumstances. Instead I clung to her so strongly and singularly she had to push away slightly to breathe, exhaling with the pain of pending nothingness. We exchanged a single, warm, polite kiss, and parted ways as the moon finally appeared over the alpine slopes to the east. It was sheepish and waning, a yellow sickle that seemed to pantomime my disappointment.
I considered roaming the night for an hour or two, risk getting caught up in yet another chance encounter, yet mental more than physical weariness pulled me back down the steep wooden steps into the skiff and out across the little marina. I pulled excessively with each oar stroke such that little rebellious ripples formed around the edges of the salty wood, urging me to slow my pace and my thoughts before I did something rash. 'That went about as poorly as I thought it could have', I thought dejectedly, yet in another way, the mere fact that it had gone was worthwhile enough, that I had enjoyed the surreal moment of the past 2 days enough to realize its fleetingness. Like the reformed druggie who opposes legalization or the 2nd generation immigrant turned Republican, I told myself it wouldn't have worked anyways. I had a policy of not getting involved with the real crazies- myself notwithstanding, of course. She, meanwhile, had gone directly home, finished a bottle of wine perhaps only a third empty to begin with, tried to call her friend Clara, and, fed up with the busy signal and her series of one-life stands, collapsed on that shabby brown couch into fitful sleep.
I had followed a similar path, minus the alcohol and attempted phone call. I wondered, as he lay pushed as far against the bunk walls as his body would allow, if all people who slept uneasily were somehow joined telepathically at the moment of their unrest, the singularity of sleep uniting us all. I was completely decided about leaving for Oslo in the morning. The night passed in deep tranquility, not serene by any means, but providing much needed respite from thinking. The next morning dawned blue and calm, the little nautical flags that would wave wildly in even the slightest breeze frozen like statues on their mastpoles. 'So much for not using a lot of fuel', I thought with a slight hint of annoyance. I motored over to the little dingy petrol station that sat in the hulking shadow of the steelyards and proceeded to barter in poor Norwegian with a similarly dingy old man over the price of 60 gallons of fuel. We reached a reasonable compromise, and I went ashore to buy a cup of coffee while the pump struggled to remove the fuel from the tank and into the Stranger.
I loved the subtle nuances of young body language, the way his people carried their insecurities. So versed in the eccentricities of style, yet devoid of the confidence so many seemingly dull old people seem to have. 20th Century life was such a race to nowhere, I thought with a touch of contention. Space, computers; people were talking about a future where people would communicate on mobile telephones; where film didn’t exist anymore. The progression all seemed so obvious and utilitarian, I thought coolly. Everyone was running, manically advancing technology such that we might inevitably lust for something else. I ended up in the same shop he had met Annika in. Finding it temporarily free of young people to make me self-conscious, I breathed in relief and ordered an Americano [they had some special called the 'Norge-iano', but I could only imagine the black, acrid brew my Swedish grandmother still drank daily]. I made no attempt now to hide his idiosyncrasies, which at present included a seemingly never ending throat-tickle and an insatiable desire to rub his front teeth at nervous moments. 'Look at how nonchalant and casual I am at this moment', I was of course trying to insinuate, but to the average onlooker, this probably translated to 'look at the kind of slob who would probably eat a booger in front of the Queen.'
No matter, I figured, the real gems, or inclusion-filled diamonds rather, I liked to think of them as- well, I’d find them regardless. I couldn't escape their approval or disapproval. I got coffee and sipped fervent, deep slurps, walking with surprising lightness given the weight of upcoming travels back down the winding cobblestone street to the fuel station. The old man had just finished, and sat smoking cheap cigarettes at an alarmingly close distance to the giant steel fuel tank. We exchanged pleasantries and I cast off the little slip, the oil-slicked and candy wrapper strewn water replaced by cool, swift currents. A surprisingly good wind revealed itself fully once out of the wind shadow of the big northern mountains. The glaciers shone high on distant peaks, winding down ancient valleys on their laborious route to the sea, carving homes for trolls and wild blonde wolf children.
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