I got up and looked out the window: Sure enough, people were shooting fireworks out their windows onto the street. It was 10:00 a.m. I dressed and put on a jacket, sat down on the single hard iron chair on the balcony, lit a cigarette, and took in the normality with which the Germans treated the chaos—the way they sidestepped explosions on their way to get their coffee. Pointy red silos with long wooden stems were scattered about the street. I made a note to remember this for my Dagerman essay. I had a headache. My muscles hurt. I couldn’t remember the last time my body had felt good. Hamburg had not made me feel differently from Lund, but I determined that today I would have a good time and make sure that Anja also had a good time.
I went inside, put bread in the toaster, boiled some eggs, and put on water for Anja’s tea. When the teakettle started whistling, Anja emerged from bed sleepy faced and sweatpants-ed.
“How are you feeling, Katze?”
She sniffled and stretched her arms over her head. “Much better.” She put her arms around my neck and leaned into me. When I brought out the eggs and bread, she said, “Ohhh. I am so lucky.”
It occurred to me that I might be in love with her.
* * *
After breakfast, we walked to the train and narrowly missed being hit by a firework. On the train, Anja rested her head on my shoulder and I ran my fingers through her hair. We got off in the city center, walked down the stairs, and saw German boys on the street shooting fireworks at one another, laughing, yelling in German what I imagined to be “I just hit you with a firework! Ha ha ha!”
We walked across one of the countless bridges that connected either side of the city’s canals. Anja told me that Hamburg had more bridges than Venice.
“Suck it, Italy,” I said.
“Yes, suck it, Italy.”
One of the bridges was weighted with little locks that couples had bolted to the guardrail to commemorate their love.
“I should have brought a lock,” I said.
“Very bad planning, Jonas.”
I took off my left glove and tied the fingers around the railing. “There.”
“A glove—how romantic!”
“Don’t make fun.”
Anja stuck her tongue out at me. But then she pulled out her phone and took a picture of the glove. We began to walk away, but she said, “Don’t forget your glove.”
“I’m leaving it.”
“Why?”
“As a symbol.”
“Of what?”
“Of a glove.”
She punched me in the arm, but then put her gloved hand in my bare one and tucked her fingers between mine.
* * *
That evening, after sharing a bottle of champagne and having sex at the apartment, we took the train to the west side of the city to have New Year’s dinner with her friends.
“Where do you know them from?” I asked her on the train.
“From university, in Greifswald.”
“I picture that part of eastern Germany as a forest full of dragons.”
“There are no dragons in Greifswald, Jonas.”
“What does Greifswald mean?”
“ ‘Forest of the griffins.’ ” She paused. “I understand when I hear it that this does not strengthen my argument.”
* * *
The apartment building was part of a rectangle of concrete apartment blocks with a shared courtyard. As Anja knocked on the door, I prepared for a night of smiling and nodding, and the occasional German phrase. But when the door opened, we were greeted by four blond Germans, two guys and two girls, speaking enthusiastic English. I tried to repay their English by being super interested in everything they said. I was ushered into the living room with the boys, while the girls pulled Anja into the kitchen. The boys asked me questions about Los Angeles and played me German rap while they readied a sort of long indoor grill on the table. The girls brought in plates of meat and vegetables, which I was told that you skewered like shish kebabs and then topped with slices of cheese.
Everyone gathered in the living room to watch an old short film called Dinner for One, which the whole country apparently watched every New Year’s Eve. Around eleven, we all walked to the train to go see the fireworks by the harbor. On the way, I saw a yellow cat run across the street.
“Katze!” I yelled. “Die Katze ist auf dem Strasse!”
“Ja, ja.” Anja patted me on the arm, her friends looking confused. “Very good, Jonas. The cat is on the street.”
* * *
We descended from the elevated tracks downtown to thick crowds of people, boats glowing on the water, and the biggest snowball fight I had ever seen. Except instead of snowballs everyone was throwing fireworks. I ducked my head and narrowly missed getting hit in the face.
“Look out for the fireworks,” said one of Anja’s friends.
We pushed our way through the crowd and found a spot by the railing overlooking the water. There we stood and counted down the seconds. At midnight, an orgy of fireworks erupted on all sides: from the decks of the boats, from the happy drunks standing next to us, from the windows of the train passing on the elevated tracks overhead. Anja and I kissed while everything whistled and popped.
I felt the cold on Anja’s cheek as she leaned into my ear. “Happy New Year, Jonas.”
“Happy New Year, Anja.”
“When will I see you again?”
Despite myself, despite how happy I felt, I panicked. I didn’t want to have a trip hanging over me—daily messages and check-ins and responsibility for someone else looming for weeks or months.
“We’ll see,” I said. “Soon.”
* * *
After the fireworks chaos, we made our way to the Reeperbahn. The street was overfull. You didn’t walk so much as rock forward with the crowd, then rock back a few steps when someone vomited or got hit by a firework, then rock forward again. Neon signs in the outline of guitars, elephants, and women lit up the sidewalks, and long queues from the clubs stretched out into the street.
Anja’s friends had bought us all tickets to a club that would be open until eight in the morning. I was hoping Anja would get tired and want to go home before me, as I was always scared of being the boring one who wanted to go home. Even with alcohol, when I was clean, I couldn’t maintain the energy to stay out all night. But if I took drugs, I could stay out all night. Then Anja would have a better time, too. And then I—
“Stop it!” I hissed.
“What did you say?” Anja yelled to be heard over the noise.
“Nothing.”
When we got inside the pulsating room, I bought a round of tequila shots and reminded myself that no one here would have oxycodone and it wasn’t worth giving up all that work for coke or speed, or for heroin, a bad batch of which could kill me. We made our way to a giant dance floor framed by fake palm trees. Behind a DJ stage was a massive clock, which was counting down to the New Year in Rio de Janeiro at 3:00 a.m. German time. We danced and I tried to not think about my dancing, but the tequila hadn’t changed anything.
“I’m going to go outside to smoke,” I told Anja.
“Do you want me to come?” Her cheeks were still red from the cold and she wore a cute black dress with tights. She was smiling the way she used to smile at me when I first met her.
“No, stay with your friends. You need to warm up if you’re going to keep up with my dancing!”
She laughed and kissed me on the cheek.
I asked a bartender in bad German where I could find a smoking area, and he pointed to a narrow, glassed-off corridor behind some tables on the far end of the dance floor. It reminded me of the little glassed-off smoking room at the Atlanta airport, which, the last time I was there, had struck me as the most depressing place in the world. Out of oxy, I had taken two MDMA capsules on a flight from North Carolina to LA that connected in Atlanta, and it was in this smoking room that the pills started to hit me. They didn’t land in that edge-softening way, but instead struck like a terror bolt. All the fat, solitary sm
okers, with their rolling suitcases and cell phones and futureless eyes, had scared the shit out of me. As I smoked in the little Hamburg smoking room, I tried to call up that feeling of terror from Atlanta and focus on it to subdue the craving.
I went to the bathroom, where a little stall had a metal toilet that looked like what I imagined a minimum-security prison bathroom might look like. I thought of how I used to sneak into bathrooms to take pills or bump lines of heroin, and I felt sad that my old self, the one who did these things, was gone. He didn’t have to be gone, though. I could bring him back—if only for tonight. But then I remembered someone I hadn’t thought of in a long time.
He was a guy from AA in Eugene whom I hated. He would say things like “When I was loaded, I used to have to be the smartest guy in every room. And the problem was, I had the diploma to show that I was! That certainly didn’t quiet my ego.”
Like: “Trust me, I’ve spilled more in my life than you’ve drunk.”
Like: “When I started AA, I used to think sobriety was sexually transmitted.”
Yet this asshole had, in the parking lot once after a meeting, said something that stuck with me.
“You’re how old?” he’d asked me without saying hello.
“Twenty-seven,” I had answered, ambushed, at a loss for how to escape the conversation.
“I’m fifty-two.” He’d paused. “And what’s your poison?”
“Heroin.”
“Are you rich?”
“No.”
“If I told you that you could have a million dollars, but you’d wake up fifty-two years old, like me, would you take that trade?”
“No.”
“Smart man. Twenty-five years for a million dollars is a terrible trade. That’s only forty thousand dollars a year. But what if I said that I’d give you a quarter million dollars for just five years of your life. You wake up tomorrow, thirty-two years old, and you have a quarter million dollars in your bank account.”
“I don’t think I’d take that either.”
“Smart man. Still not worth it. But how about this: How much money are you making now?”
“About twenty-four thousand dollars.”
“What if I told you that I’d give you three times your annual salary—seventy-two thousand dollars—for just one year of your life? You wake up tomorrow seventy-two thousand dollars richer, but one year older.”
I thought about it. I wouldn’t have to worry about bills for a few years. I could just write. But nothing about the idea of the money made me happy. Nothing about the idea of losing another year made me happy. “Probably not.”
“You wouldn’t trade one year of your life for seventy-two thousand dollars?”
“I don’t think so. No.”
The guy stared at me, and for the first time, though I knew that this was as practiced as every other word he uttered, I felt as if he were actually looking at me instead of some interchangeable audience. “If you wouldn’t trade even a year of your life for seventy-two thousand dollars, then why the fuck would you trade your entire life for heroin?”
* * *
The next morning, I woke before Anja. My head throbbed. But I hadn’t gotten high. That was something at least. I got up and drank several glasses of water until my head felt better. I walked over to the window and saw the street sprinkled with glass and cardboard husks of fireworks.
I made coffee for myself and tea for Anja and brought them to the bedroom.
“Lucky me,” Anja said, stretched out her arms, and rubbed her eyes in that lovely way she did when she’d had a good sleep.
I handed her the steaming cup. We drank, then cuddled, and I felt, if not good, at least content.
Then Anja sat up and said, “I do not think we should see each other after this.”
I said nothing.
“I cannot be both together and not together.”
She waited for me to respond. Part of me wanted to say that we should just be together, 100 percent. That I would come visit in a few weeks. Then she would come visit in a few weeks. It wasn’t that far—it wasn’t that expensive. But part of me was relieved that she was leaving me. That I wouldn’t have to leave her. That I could be alone, with nothing required of me.
“It feels like I’m waiting for you to decide what you want,” she said. “But I do not want to wait anymore.”
I took a deep breath. I waited for the words to come out, but they didn’t. I was remembering the moment as something sad that happened a long time ago. “If that’s what you want,” I finally said.
“Okay.” She paused. “That’s what we’ll do.” She kissed me on the cheek and got out of bed.
Malmö, Sweden
Spring/Summer 2015
IN MARCH, I DECIDED TO move to Malmö. Since returning from Hamburg, I’d spent the nights after class alone in my dorm room and the weekends drinking heavily with my neighbor Laurent, a nineteen-year-old French kid who seemed to admire me for some reason. We would bike to the student nations to dance and drink, then bike back, smoking and laughing about all the cheesy Swedish guys prancing around the clubs like aristocratic jeans models. But in the sober afternoons, Laurent and I would once again be a twenty-nine-year-old American and a French teenager with nothing to talk about. Without Anja, I was lonely in Lund, and I was worried about the choices loneliness would inspire. Bengt and my other classmates lived in Malmö. And Malmö was a city; it was harder to be alone in a city.
At three hundred thousand, Malmö was the third-largest city in Sweden. It was just across the Öresund strait from Copenhagen and was twelve miles southwest of Lund, so I could easily commute to the university. But while Lund was an ancient city of learning, Malmö had a bad reputation. The city, which had sprung up around the shipbuilding industry during the industrial revolution, had become Sweden’s hub of immigration. One Swede told me, “If you’ve seen Malmö, you’ve seen the world—if you know what I mean.” People in Lund said it was so dangerous in Rosengård, Malmö’s notorious housing project, that the fire department wouldn’t respond to calls without a police escort. More than once I’d heard Malmö compared to a Swedish Detroit, but from my visits to Bengt’s apartment, Malmö felt more like a Swedish Oakland—across the bridge from an international metropolis, other-ized by its neighbors, postindustrializing in a hurry.
In the early nineties, as Malmö’s shipbuilding industry was dying, the city government began investing in culture. It renovated theaters and concert halls. It built a sleek university downtown, the buildings of which lined the harbor near the Central Station. In 2000, the Öresund Bridge, connecting Malmö to Copenhagen and Sweden to the Continent, was completed. The local paper started using the old insult about the number of immigrants in Malmö, “If you’ve seen Malmö, you’ve seen the world,” as a marketing slogan. The city’s promotional materials stated that 169 of the world’s nationalities were represented in Malmö. A grassroots group even aimed at bringing residents from the remaining twenty-four UN-recognized countries of the world to permanently live in Malmö, to make it the only city housing citizens of every country in the world.
In the aughts, the city sold off the giant shipbuilding crane that had hung over the western harbor like a gateway and in its place erected a new symbol: a neo-futurist skyscraper called the Turning Torso. The Turning Torso was a spiraling Epcot Center–ish tower that, at fifty-four stories, was the tallest building in Scandinavia. It was, unfortunately, surrounded by some of the most normal-size buildings in Scandinavia—four-story luxury condos—and it looked like a very tall person in a room full of shoes.
But Malmö wasn’t ugly. Glowing canals ran through the city center unextravagantly before emptying into the Öresund. Turn-of-the-century five-story apartment buildings with pastel turrets blended with the postwar concrete apartment slabs to make downtown blocks look like the offspring of Stockholm and the Soviet Union. Danes were moving to Malmö to save money on rent, commuting to Copenhagen by train over the bridge. Swedish writers, musicians
, and artists were now moving to Malmö instead of Stockholm to save money on rent. Artsy undergrads and almost all the grad students from Lund were moving to Malmö to save money on rent. The word gentrifiering had recently been introduced to Swedish.
I, too, would save money on rent, as I told Stella when I emailed her about my move. Easily relatable news made correspondence easier, and in her return email, Stella told me how excited she was for me and insisted that we Skype. It was so nice to see her grainy face on the screen, telling me how exotic my life was. She and Zach had just moved back to our college town, San Luis Obispo, and she was working at a winery.
“But everyone there keeps talking to me about wine,” she said. “It’s so boring.”
I also wrote to Anja to tell her of the move. We were trading emails that didn’t say much but indicated that we were still thinking about each other. She would tell me about her studies and I would tell her about mine, and I would make up funny stories of things that hadn’t actually happened to me, based on the things that had, in hopes of making her laugh. But the time between her messages was getting longer, first every day, then every other day, now every week or two. I missed her. But I couldn’t tell her I missed her since I didn’t know how long the feeling would last.
* * *
My new apartment was a spacious one-bedroom on the fourth floor of a drab concrete building with sky-blue balconies hanging off the side in a cheery addition. It was in the urban area of Värnhem, about a mile east of the Central Station, near Bengt’s apartment, and cost thirty-five hundred kronor, a little less than $500, a month.
In the two blocks from the Värnhem bus stop to my new home were three kebab and falafel places, an African market, a neighborhood bar filled with alcoholics, a nautical-themed bar filled with alcoholics, a goodwill shop, and a Serbian bakery that displayed old bread in the window along with the sign FOR DISPLAY ONLY—BREAD INSIDE IS FRESH. The newer establishments included a locally sourced all-sourdough bakery, an upscale-grocery-chain store, a vegan Indian restaurant, and a fitness store that sold tank tops and protein powder and displayed yoga pants on window mannequins (whose asses I frequently caught myself checking out).
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