After fifteen more minutes in which we moved up only one spot, Edwin said, “Jonas, the queue is not moving.”
The Dutch boys muttered their agreement. I was too tired to resist. We squeezed our way through the crowd and out of the line.
“Exchange students,” a guy said to his friend in Swedish as we passed. “It must be past their bedtime.”
“Is it past our bedtime?” I said in Swedish.
The guy looked at his friend and laughed nervously. “We thought you were American.”
“I am.” I cocked my fist back and punched the boy in the face.
The boy fell back a step and grabbed his face but didn’t fall. I waited for him to swing back. But he didn’t. There was stunned silence. I could feel everyone staring at me, but when I looked back, they looked away.
“What the hell?” the boy’s friend said.
“Tell your friend to stop talking shit,” I said.
“He was just talking!”
“It’s not pleasant,” I said.
The boy was quiet for a second. “It’s not pleasant?”
Edwin put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me away.
* * *
We returned to the dorm after a silent walk home. Edwin unlocked his room, and the Dutch boys sat down around his table. Edwin wrapped some ice in a paper towel and handed it to me. I put it on my knuckle.
“You have any beers?” I said.
A look of panic spread across Edwin’s face.
“On second thought,” I said, “I should probably call it an early night. Thank you for the ice.”
“No problem,” Edwin said.
After I left, I heard the Dutch boys talking in hushed tones, probably about me. I went back to my room to wallow. Back in Eugene, I’d had this fantasy of returning to college armed with the knowledge I’d gained in my twenties. I would be all the things I wasn’t the first time around: confident, comfortable, cool. But on the tenth anniversary of my entry into college life, I found myself living in a dorm again, just as clueless and angry as I had been the first time around.
* * *
The year after college, I had moved to Austin to live with Stella and her longtime boyfriend, Zach, in a condo his father had bought as an investment. Stella was my favorite person, and I had always liked Zach, a kind and goofy guy with a calming presence and a lack of need to dominate. He was good to Stella—had been good to her even when the rest of us were competing to prove our manhood by being mean to girls. He didn’t make fun of her opinions in front of others and never complained about her when she was out of the room. Since they’d started dating, people had stopped asking me why Stella and I weren’t going out, and I could stop explaining that she was the perfect friend, and people could stop raising their eyebrows at my explanation, assuming that when a guy is friends with a pretty girl he must be harboring unrequited feelings. When Zach had asked if I wanted to live in their second bedroom, I didn’t even have to think about it.
Shortly after moving in, we had met one of our neighbors by the pool, a tanned and muscular twentysomething named Travis who repeated your name at every opportunity. He invited us to a kickback at his condo. I didn’t want to go to a party where I had no standing—the roommate of the girl the host really wanted to invite—but Stella said that we should make some friends in town. The upside of going was that I could justify sneaking an extra dose of oxy to prepare for the evening. As far as Stella and Zach knew, I used drugs like everyone else, doing a little coke or molly every month or so—not taking pills once or twice a day, as I was doing at the time. There were friends I’d made over the last few years who had no idea that my high self wasn’t just my normal personality.
At Travis’s, pleasantly high, I sat down in an overly air-conditioned living room with a leather sectional couch, framed movie posters, and an acoustic guitar hanging from the wall. Travis stood up frequently to refill his drink and announce things, two girls sat on one section of the couch and scrolled through their phones, and three guys sat on another section and talked over each other about the crazy things people had done at their fraternities. I smiled at one of the girls a few times, but she didn’t see me. I added in a joke about a football scandal the guys were discussing, but no one heard me.
“Jonas, a hedge fund isn’t a fish, because it can fly,” Travis said in the longest conversation I had that evening, “but it isn’t a bird, because it can swim.”
Stella gave me a covert eyebrow-raise to apologize.
As my high waned, Zach, always the perfect guest, left to buy more beers, and Travis, starting to sound a little sloppy, told Stella he had a circular bed in his room. “I’ll show it to you.”
His friends laughed.
Stella said, “I can picture it fine from here—like a normal bed, but round?”
Travis said he’d had the bed custom-made by his friend’s start-up. “They pair you with an engineer to design your ideal bed, and then they make it, deliver it, and set it up in your room. And it’s exactly the way you designed it!”
“Cool,” Stella said.
“Do you know how much it cost?”
“A hundred dollars.”
“Try four thousand.” Travis paused. “Come see it, Stella.”
“I’m good here, thanks.”
I began to zone out, fantasizing about impressing these people I hated: performing a song on the acoustic guitar, heroically fighting off a masked intruder, being wildly famous. There was something in me that needed praise and violence.
But then Stella was saying, “Jesus Christ, let it go!,” and Travis was saying, “Quit being such a bitch and just come look at my bed!,” and I was throwing a Budweiser bottle at him. It hit him in the forehead not like shattering glass but like a decidedly solid rock.
“Whoa!” his friends yelled, and jumped up.
Travis brought his hand to his forehead in search of blood that wasn’t there. “That was a mistake. That was a fucking mistake.” He stood up—he was about my height but wider in the shoulders—and pulled one arm across his chest, then the other arm, then tried to crack his neck a few times.
“Are you stretching?” I said.
“You’re about to find out.” He waited for his friends to hold him back.
I began to laugh. “What are you going to do about it? You’re not even a fish.”
He took a step toward me.
One of his friends held him back and yelled at me, “You need to go!”
Stella grabbed me by the arm and led me out the door.
In the courtyard, we ran into Zach, carrying a twenty-four-pack. “Where are you going?”
“Come on.” Stella led us back home.
“What happened?” Zach put the case down on the counter and opened a beer.
“Travis was being a dick to me so Jonas threw a bottle at his head.”
Zach took a sip and nodded. “Good.” He reached into the case and handed me a beer.
The next morning, after a sleepless night in which I both regretted throwing the bottle and not throwing more bottles, I went out to breakfast with Zach and Stella.
When Zach went to the register to pay the check, Stella put her hand on mine. “You know I love you. But you’re so dumb. Please be more careful.”
“I will,” I said and felt good and bad at the same time.
* * *
I waited up all night and all morning for the Lund police to come around, but they never did. In the afternoon, I watched the garbage blow across the courtyard from the window of my dorm room and thought of how I should call Stella and Zach. But it was 6:00 a.m. in California. I was slow-brained from sleeplessness, and now that I knew that the police weren’t going to knock on the door, I wished that Anja would. Then there was a knock on the door.
I opened to find Edwin typing on his phone.
“Hey, I’m sorry about last night—”
“It’s Floyd Mayweather!” He looked up as if surprised to see me. “Did you knock anybody out today?”
“Not yet.”
“We are pre-partying down the hall!” Then, suddenly somber: “But it’s over now because we drank all the beer. But Floyd Mayweather! You must come to the Noah’s Ark party tonight and protect us!”
* * *
That night I dressed in my octopus costume and took the train to Malmö. It was only a twelve-minute train ride to Malmö Central, but I had never been to the city before, as it had been described to me as a postindustrial ghetto that had given Sweden Zlatan Ibrahimović and nothing else. When I stepped off the train, the downtown looked nothing like what I’d pictured. There were bridges, glowing canals, an elegant hotel with a copper roof, and sleek glass-fronted buildings along the water. It looked old but recently remodeled.
I walked down toward the harbor. The party boat, docked in the canal that let out into the Sound, hadn’t opened its doors yet. Students were lined up at the waterfront: a hundred monkeys, reindeer, leopards, alligators, fish, bats, and cats, ready to desecrate the legacy of a central Christian narrative.
I saw Anja up ahead. Before we stopped speaking, she had told me that she was going as a Bambi, which I had told her was a character, not an animal. (To which she had responded, “No.”) She wore a fur vest and face paint, with long black lashes glued to her eyelids. Next to her stood Uli, with a Batman mask, black jeans, and a black T-shirt. I looked around for the Dutch boys. Just then, a herd of tall men in horse-head masks ran toward me. I clenched my fists and took a step back.
“Are you ready to party, Mayweather?” Edwin yelled, pulling up his mask, patting me on the chest drunkenly.
“We’re boarding up the windows tonight!” I said, unclenching my fists.
The Dutch boys laughed and offered me high fives. They liked it when I used American slang they hadn’t heard. But they all watched American television and listened to American music, and I had run out of American slang they hadn’t heard after the first week. I had since been making things up.
I lit a cigarette with one of my two working arms.
* * *
The boat was a double-decker called The Dubliner. I followed the Dutch into the lower level, where a dance floor had opened and a few dozen animals were already dancing terribly.
Edwin told me about Johan’s Ark, a life-size replica of Noah’s Ark built to biblical specifications by a Dutch creationist.
“That sounds like something an American would build,” I said.
“It does!”
The walls of the dance floor flashed Studio 54–like with hundreds of colored lightbulbs. I found myself dancing in a circle with the Dutch. Anja and Uli and a few other Germans from the dorm joined the circle. I wanted Anja to look at me the way she used to look at me from across the room. But if she had looked at me, I would probably just have looked away. The DJ played a nineties rock song mashed up with a dance beat under a loop of a few lines from Obama’s inauguration address. Edwin danced in a spastic rhythm that made sense because he appeared totally comfortable in it.
I walked over to Anja and leaned in. “I’m going to go smoke.”
She leaned over to my ear, cupped her hand, said, “Okay,” and started dancing again.
* * *
I had always thought of getting high as taking a vacation from myself—a break that I had earned from all the hours I spent being me. I had considered this a very intellectual way of thinking about it, until I’d started attending meetings and heard heroin addicts and tweakers and homeless pill fiends say that they’d thought of getting high as taking a little vacation from themselves.
“But the vacation always ends, man,” Big Ed had said. He’d lost his legs when he fell from the extended ladder of a stolen fire engine that his friend was driving. “You always have to come home to you.”
On the top deck of the boat, I saw a boy in a full-body alligator costume, something like a football mascot might wear, holding up a girl in butterfly wings. She straddled his waist, pulled him toward her, and stretched over the railing suicidally. I lit my cigarette and looked out at the verdigris rooftops of downtown Malmö. We hadn’t left the dock.
I found a security guard with a shaved head and a red tattoo of an eagle on his left forearm. I asked him in Swedish why the cruise hadn’t left the dock.
The security guard said that this wasn’t a cruise—it was just a party on a boat.
“You think we want to go out on open water with two hundred drunk college students?”
I wanted to ask him about his tattoo, then about drugs and if he knew someone who sold them. But the small talk that preceded asking for drugs sounded all wrong in my head, and in trying to translate You getting into anything later tonight? into Swedish, I remembered that I didn’t do drugs anymore.
* * *
Back in North Carolina, right before I tried to quit for the first time, I had, hoping to subdue a heroin hangover, taken too much methadone and Valium. The combination had left me struggling to stay awake in a frightening way that was nothing like falling asleep. I walked out of my apartment telling myself, “You’re awake, you’re awake,” focusing hard on every step, every breath. I found a taxi and rode to the emergency room.
At the desk I was met by a young woman in sky-blue scrubs. “How can I help you?”
That’s when I woke to the mistake I was making—the control I’d be giving up as soon as I told her what I’d done. They could do whatever they wanted to me in there.
“I don’t have insurance. I can’t afford this.” I turned and hurried to the exit.
Just as I reached the door, I heard the nurse yell, “Wait!”
She came running after me. Her voice sounded so worried that I would’ve told her whatever she wanted to know.
“You have to sign this form.” She handed me a paper. “It says that you’re leaving of your own accord and that you accept the risks.”
I’d signed the paper and left. I hadn’t died, of course—I’d just gotten sick and then slept so deeply that I was surprised when I woke up.
* * *
The bass pounded the deck from below. I walked back over to the security guard.
“You know where I can find some ladd?” I said in Swedish. Ladd was the only slang for drugs that I knew in Swedish. It meant “cocaine,” which was not exactly what I wanted—but, communication-wise, it would have to do.
“Why would I know that?”
I shrugged. I offered the security guard a cigarette. The guard accepted. I lit it for him, cupping my hand around the flame, then igniting the sleeve of a dangling octopus arm. “Shit.” I swatted at the arm until the fire was out.
The guard laughed. “I don’t have any coke. But I might have a friend who has pills.”
“What kind?”
“MDMA.”
“Does he have the pills that kill pain?”
“What?”
“Strong painkilling medicine?”
“Sometimes he has Dolol.”
A rush of warmth shot up through me. I remembered seeing a mention of Dolol in a book by a Palestinian Danish poet. It was the European name for tramadol, which, while not nearly as good as oxycodone, gave you a nice calm ride, like a weekend trip to a nearby city, which would have been nothing special if not for the fact that you lived in a shithole.
“Let me find an ATM. Don’t go anywhere.”
“Where would I go?”
I stomped out my cigarette and speed-walked back to the door. A voice screamed in my head, but it was distant, like a child being beaten next door. I was already alone in my room with the pills.
“Hey, octopus!”
I turned around.
“I was calling after you many times.” Anja walked toward me. She was out of breath and had a little sheen of sweat on her makeup.
“I was lost in thought.”
“What were you thinking about?” She stopped in front of me.
I scratched at one of my working arms. I was impatient to get the money. “I hate dancing. That’s what I was thinking ab
out.”
“I know you do.” She laughed. “Every time you dance you look like you’re trying to solve a math problem.”
“So then why do you dance with me?”
“Because I like dancing with you.”
“Okay.” I needed to leave. “I have to find a bathroom.”
“If you spoke German, I think I could make you understand.”
I sighed. “Make me understand what?”
She tilted her head and looked at me, like, Come on. Then she leaned in and whispered the softest German. It started with “Du bist.” At one point she said “aber ich.” But I didn’t understand the rest.
“What did you say?”
She threw up her hands in exasperation. “If I could say it in English, I would say it in English!”
She grabbed an empty sleeve and tugged me close.
We stood there for a while and I felt like I could stay there for a while longer—that I could carry on with both the body and the mind I had been assigned.
ABOUT A MONTH BEFORE THE end of the semester and Anja’s return to Germany, I found myself, unable to sleep, squeezed into the only nook of the mattress that Anja had not starfished herself across. She had chosen me over Uli, which made me happy, at first. But as the joy settled into contentment, it slid from my attention, the way an aching tooth stops existing the day it stops aching. Tonight, instead of thinking about how the girl I liked was sleeping next to me, my brain was replaying all the lies I would tell when I used to get high. I’d start a conversation with a stranger at a bar—ask for a lighter or something—and then just start lying. Wherever the strangers said they were from or whatever they said they did for a living, I would, without thinking, respond, “I spent some time in Wyoming,” “I used to work the late shift at a gas station,” “My mom was actually a nurse.” Then I’d make up a story on the spot—just to talk, just to be heard. I loved the feeling of talking without fear or purpose. I’d wake up the next morning plagued by memories, worried that I’d see the person again and not remember what stories I’d already told them.
I wanted to hear Anja’s voice and escape my memories, but she was asleep. I remembered that she had the remnants of a liter bottle of Coca-Cola mixed with vodka—the preferred drink of the Germans in my dorm—left in her bag. Without much thought between wanting it and taking it, I snuck out of bed, found the bottle in her purse, brought it to the bathroom, closed the door, twisted the cap off, heard the slight fizz, and took my first drink since I’d moved to Sweden. The vodka-Coke was room temperature, a little flat, and you could barely feel the burn from the diluted liquor. But it was there.
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