The All-Night Sun

by Diane Zinna

  It had been five days since I went to Gothenburg with Magnus. Five days of Siri growing more critical of me, doing things on her own, calling friends from her bedroom phone and shutting the door. Hej for hello, cheerful hej hej for goodbye, always loud enough for me to hear, over and over, an unending number of friends. I often found myself sitting with Birgit on the balcony amid the yellow flowers, rocking in those two chairs, staring off into space.

  The guidebook had dried out. It was bloated now, all the pages crisp, the binding ruined and gluey. It sat on my night table, and I thought about going through it page by page to write over the faded words and reclaim the memories we’d recorded there. But the trust between us was torn. Siri had found the book that night—after going through my backpack, looking for something. There had once been a time I didn’t mind her going through my things. I remembered, back home, her going into my bedroom that morning after the red-backed man had left. I realized then that I’d liked her going through my possessions, being so at home in my apartment, my things her things, and then this book—our book.

  But it didn’t feel like that anymore. She’d gone through my backpack while I slept. Just what was she trying to find? Things felt bloated, faded, changed.

  I had been looking forward to the camping trip because I thought, somehow, we’d have more time to be together than we did in the house. We’d have to work together to pitch a tent. I imagined we’d gather berries and tell stories near a campfire. We’d make up.

  It was only going to be us. But the day before we left, she invited her friends.

  We were driving to the campsite from the beach. I would be leaving Sweden the following evening. The plan was to camp, then leave for Olofstorp at sunrise so I could make my flight home. Time was slipping away.

  I fiddled with the dial on the radio, though we had not been able to pick up any stations for a long time. Beyond the window, I could see a windmill with blades like bat wings; pretty, abandoned pottery on the roadside; a long, dreamy path that led all the way to the other side of the island. A bicyclist with a white wicker basket full of ferns waved at us. Frida waved back like a little girl. He rang his bell, and I watched him in the side mirror until he was a silver dot far behind us, and the ringing just an imagined note. When Frida saw me smiling at her in the mirror, she crossed her arms again and closed her eyes.

  “When Frida comes to the U.S., we will all three be friends there,” Siri said.

  Frida shrugged, her eyes still shut. “I still have not heard anything from the school. I think I would have heard by now.”

  “You and I will be roommates.” Siri kept turning around to look at her until Frida opened her eyes and laughed.

  We turned onto the campsite road, gravel popping against the underside of Siri’s car. An old man in what appeared to be lederhosen came toward us, and when Siri rolled down her window to pay the entrance fee, Margareta leaned over the seat and peppered him loudly with questions, patting my shoulder as she talked. The smell of cigarette smoke hung in her hair. After he answered her, Margareta sent out a long, shrill list of complaints in Swedish until Siri reminded her to speak in English so I could understand.

  Margareta spat out her translation. “We cannot come back onto the campground after ten o’clock if we leave with the car. I think this is stupid.” Margareta added, “Also, that old man thinks you will not have fun here.”

  “He did not say that,” Siri said.

  Margareta laughed. “Well, I will. I will say it. You won’t have fun, Lauren.”

  Siri said something to Margareta in Swedish, and I looked out the window. Sometimes my inability to communicate in Swedish made me feel free. Then there were times when my red, downcast face said too much. It’s easy for people to see through you when the only thing they can do is see you.

  “In English, Siri! English!” Margareta laughed, her top teeth bared. She enunciated each word for my benefit. “Siri just whispered that I am not supposed to tease you. Are you really that sensitive? Give me a break.” She slumped back between the slim blond girls on either side of her, the collar of her jacket rising up over her mouth.

  I want to remember that Siri hissed at Margareta then, but it was probably the heat rising into my face and ears. Earlier in the trip, Siri would have snapped, “Sluta!” or, in English, for my benefit, so I could hear her defending me: “Shut up.” But since that night I had seen her in the drying closet with the wet guidebook, she’d stopped defending me to the other girls.

  Siri parked the car, and we dragged our camping equipment from the trunk. The air smelled of kerosene. Karin and Margareta thrust their backpacks at Frida and gave each other piggyback rides, all of us following Siri down the path, toward our numbered plot. Siri: the leader, the queen bee. I felt a sense of foreboding, that she’d be buzzing like this the whole night, this version of herself that made me feel so utterly alone.

  Beyond the squat seagrass and the small hairy dunes that buffeted the dirt road, the campground’s trailers and domed tents came into view. No one tended a blaze that rose from wood stacked in a teepee shape in the distance. The girls cooed, as though the fire were a baby. And then I noticed all the people.

  It looked like a vast, partially clothed tailgate party.

  The lots had trailer hookups, and RVs were parked everywhere. The campground reminded me of an old drive-in theater. I thought I could hear the crisp white noise of those speakers you would hang on your car window. But it was the sea, somewhere in the background, beyond the straggly wood that surrounded the campsite.

  Different kinds of music competed from each direction. Close by, two women sunbathed topless on sleeping bags outside their tent.

  A clutch of teenage boys sat in a circle of lawn chairs in the lot across from us. They all wore colored wigs and their camper was missing its wheels. A clothesline stretched from their window to a tree, hung with gray clothes and beach towels. They were drinking beer and had a boom box in the middle of their circle. When they saw us, one of them reached forward and turned the volume way up, trying to get our attention.

  I suddenly felt much older.

  “Ignore them. They are raggares,” Margareta said, pulling a cigarette out of a pack with her mouth. “How do you say? Lowlifes. Don’t tell them you’re from America. They’ll never leave you alone.” The cigarette dangled from her lip as she barked orders at the girls, who wrestled with the camping equipment and goofed around. “It is my family’s tent,” Margareta complained. “They should be more careful.”

  Margareta’s English didn’t last. When I placed the metal stakes too close together, she breathed out a string of Swedish condemnations, grabbed them from me, and hammered them in herself. Karin and Frida unfolded the noxious brown tarp that would form the tent’s walls, and Margareta yelled at them when they complained how bad it smelled. There was a small piece of flowered fabric and we attached it with buttons to the inside of the tent—a curtain for the tent’s one window. They took pictures of one another peeking out from behind it.

  The boys across the lot turned up their techno music again. I could feel its beat in my stomach. One of them, tall, wearing a bright purple wig, came over and started speaking to me in Swedish, pointing at my camera. He was offering to take our picture. He said something about the tent that made the girls laugh. I handed him the camera and the girls posed for him. I went to our pile of equipment and rooted out our night’s provisions. Aside from my case of beer, there was a box of sandwiches and a clinking pillowcase full of heavy bottles—scarlet, amber, absinthe green—taken from Frida’s parents’ liquor cabinet at home.

  Frida spread out a furry blanket on the ground beside the tent. Though it smelled lightly of wet dog, it looked soft and inviting. I lay down on my back upon it, and she caught my gaze.

  “Älg,” she said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The blanket. It is moose,” sh
e said, opening a bottle of vodka.

  The other boys made their way over to talk. I could feel the tip of Siri’s toe poking me in my ribs. I squinted up at her.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Other people are lying down.” I gestured toward the topless girls across the way.

  “Stand up and talk with us,” she said.

  “Where do I go if I have to use the bathroom?”

  “Say again?” She couldn’t hear me over the now-booming music.

  “I need to use the bathroom.”

  “That way. See that building?” She pointed to a square white building in the distance. “That is the toilet block. Want me to come with you?”

  “No, I’ll be fine.”

  I excused myself and navigated between trailers, homey encampments and trees, beach blankets, little campfires, and sleeping bodies. The scene quickly grew more complex, so that soon I had to edge sideways to make my way through the crowd.

  The building smelled of pine and mildew. There was a line for the toilets. Inside, a shallow flood coated the buckling, tectonic tiles, and the girl in front of me stood barefoot in it. She wore ropes of jingly anklets and had long, straight blond hair. I noticed her bitten-down nails when she clutched the door frame. She turned to me.

  “Are you American?”

  “Yes.”

  “I love Americans.” Her light blue eyes drifted back into her head. She lurched. The girls at the front of the line caught her just before she fell facedown on the wet floor.

  After using the toilet, I stood at the sink and took stock of my image in the mirror. I looked tired and pale. The blonde staggered up and stared at me in the mirror. “Hej again,” she said. “I’m Sunny.”

  “Lauren.”

  “Is that your real hair color?” Her fingers floated near my head like she was trying to trace the shape of it. The bottled blond had lost its luster, and the two inches of black dye on the ends made me look strange. I pulled my hair into a tight ponytail and wiped at the makeup that had settled under my eyes.

  “No, it’s not real.”

  “I’m not feeling well,” she said. She splashed her face with water and got some on me. “Would you walk me back to my blanket?”

  The campground had an eerie, greenhouse light. When we got to her blanket, Sunny released her viselike grip on my arm and collapsed onto the bunchy fabric, staring up through the trees into the sunshine.

  “Stay with me. Eat candy,” she said, tossing a plastic bag up to me. They were the white and pink car-shaped marshmallow candies called Bilar. “Tell me about America.”

  Pools of gold light dappled the hoods of nearby vehicles, patches of grass, the centers of sleeping bags. The clear solstice light had been my reason to teach Siri the word gloaming. I loved that light.

  “I’ve been trying not to think about America. I’ve been here for three weeks. I return tomorrow night.”

  “You don’t celebrate Midsommar in the USA.”

  “No. One of my friends told me that I should come see it for myself.”

  “Did your friend tell you about our ghosts?” Sunny asked. “They get confused because there is no darkness, and then they get caught up in the trees, the flowers, even our dreams. Do you have ghosts in America?”

  “Some,” I answered.

  “Did any of your American ghosts follow you here to Sweden?”

  Her eyes were red around the rims. She stretched her arms over her head, closed her eyes, and stuffed her mouth with Bilar.

  I walked away without answering her. She was drunk. She was a teenager who didn’t know anything about my past. Her questions shouldn’t have upset me.

  I had a hard time finding my way back. Hundreds more people seemed to have arrived, and things were getting louder and out of control. I was sure it was evening, but the sun just stayed out, hanging there with its one orange eye.

  When I got back, the girls and boys were flush with rumors they’d heard while I was gone. Siri translated them. There was a skinny dog running loose down on the beach, and they didn’t know who it belonged to. She looked like she was dripping milk—wasn’t that sad? And there was a man selling salted licorice, but no one had seen him yet. Desperate for conversation, I tried to ask the girls if they were going to try to find the dog, or if they wanted licorice when the man came by, but they didn’t seem to hear me.

  Were my own ghosts floating around me? Were they hanging on the cuffs of my sleeves? I felt I’d dragged them across the campground as they clutched my ankles. Their hands were on my throat, now, muffling my voice, making it softer and softer. Vaguely I heard my name, and I saw Siri reaching out to hug me. She kissed my cheek. Her hair smelled of salt water and was still tinged blue from the swim at Neptuni Åkrar.

  “We’re going to do a dance now!” she said. “You can follow us. It’s not hard.”

  Karin and Frida screwed their big cans of beer down into the dirt. The girls all clasped hands and danced in a circle, singing a traditional song called “Små Grodorna.” For a moment it was easy to imagine them as children in costumes and braids, and not as the netherworldly teens with whom I had crossed the bridge that morning. The refrain resounded across the campground, and people came out of their tents to cheer them on, swinging their arms over one another’s shoulders and swaying. When the girls finally fell to the ground in a tumble of giddy missteps and exhaustion, a roar went up around us.

  The adrenaline of the dance slowly drained away. I stood in various clusters of people as they talked in Swedish. I smiled when they smiled, and I laughed sometimes when they laughed. I had thought before that being without language was like being a child, but maybe it was more like being a dog, watching for clues and picking up on pack rhythms. After a while, I crawled into the tent for refuge.

  A few minutes later, two immense RVs pulled up and parked side by side on the adjacent lot. I could feel the bass of their sound systems thumping in my chest. I looked out. People were standing around staring at the vehicles, which both had the Playboy bunny spray-painted on their sides.

  Siri came into the tent and zipped us in. “They are going to be loud and annoying, right?” She came to my side and peered out of the window with me. “But we will be louder and more annoying, yes?”

  “Do you have gangs in Sweden?” I asked.

  “Hmm. Yes. I guess we do. But those guys are not gangs. There are no Playboy gangs.” She reached across me and buttoned the curtain into place, as though that would keep them out.

  I fumbled in my pocket for my lipstick and applied it, feeling for the outer edges of my mouth. Siri stared at me until I looked at her.

  “Are you going to just stay inside the tent?” she asked.

  I was exhausted from smiling and from the crowd, the pit in my stomach that told me something was wrong between us. I stared at her, willing myself to see her the way I used to, so simply, so clearly, only good. With a chill, I imagined her with a purple rose behind her ear. Was that what I’d been doing? Only allowing myself to see her one way?

  Margareta tapped on the side of the tent, and the fabric fluttered near my head. “Siri! Karin såg Magnus vid bilarna. He came.”

  I looked up.

  “I don’t want to see him,” Siri said. “If he comes over here, tell him I’m gone.” She pulled a pair of aviator sunglasses out of the front of her shirt. “Look at these. Some guy gave me these.” She slid them on.

  “Did she just say that Magnus is here?”

  She held out her palm for my lipstick, and I handed it to her, trying not to meet her eyes.

  “I don’t even know why he would come here. This isn’t his kind of thing.” She quickly traced her mouth and handed the lipstick back to me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not your kind of thing either.”

  I smoothed the flannel of my sleeping bag and
felt her staring at me.

  “Come out of the tent, Lauren. Please? It is your last night here. We can still make it fun.”

  I didn’t want to make it fun. I wanted to find a way to talk to her. I wanted us to be alone again, where we could find our way back to what had pulled us together at the start.

  Siri unzipped the tent and scuttled out, calling my name like a song. Did she want me here anymore? Were we pretending? I crawled out behind her. A tall boy in a purple wig named Viktor was opening bottles of beer and handing them around. Everyone was dancing. It felt like pretend.

  I looked up for the sun and saw it glimmering in the wet green leaves above me. I pulled out my camera to take pictures. I looked through the viewfinder and moved it around the scene: Margareta and Viktor, now kissing each other on the neck. I adjusted the lens up above their heads, to the tops of the vehicles, to the trees, to a Mylar balloon caught in some branches, a clothes hanger stuck on another. I pulled the camera away from my face and looked with my own eyes.

  The trees were blooming. Siri came up beside me. She noticed me looking at the flowering boughs. Her friends were dancing spasmodically now behind her, all waving limbs and stripping themselves bare.

  “Why don’t we walk into town?” she said softly. “It is a beautiful old town, and I bet we could find a Midsommar’s pole.”

  A flash. Viktor had Siri’s camera, and he’d captured me, probably looking so relieved, so eager to have her to myself again for a while.

  SIRI AND I left the campsite, and we made it to the village square in Loftsvik by late afternoon. We flip-flopped along the town’s stone streets and poked into different storefronts, my head clearing as we went. We walked into a surf shop, its doorway strung with beads. There was a boy behind the counter with shaggy blond hair and a necklace made from shell pieces. Siri asked him where we could find a midsommarstång in town, and they talked in Swedish while I strolled around the shop. The walls were covered with rock music posters and advertisements for Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax. Candy-colored bodyboards were propped in the corners, and racks were stuffed with everything from bikinis to winter coats. All the seasons, all pressed together.