The All-Night Sun

by Diane Zinna

  I lifted myself up on my arm, and Siri slid the flowers under my pillow. “What do I have to promise?”

  “This is serious.”

  “Okay. I promise. Tell me.”

  “You have to promise me you won’t dream of Magnus.”

  WHEN I WOKE, there were sounds like whirring motors close to me, grinding sounds, mechanical sounds. The sound of a shovel. When the sounds were human, they were screams. Real or imagined, my own, I don’t know. I tried to get away from the sounds, but I was underground. I was in Magnus’s field, buried alive, and the rain had made quicksand of the ground and sucked me under.

  It was the tent. The tent had collapsed from the weight of the rain. The thin vinyl was stuck against my body and face like plastic wrap. I couldn’t breathe. Scraping at the tent with my fingernails, I peeled it off and choked for air. Water poured onto the ground into the grass, in streams.

  There was a light burning in the square window of one of the Playboy RVs, and I could hear voices laughing inside. I rushed toward it and tripped on a metal stake. I couldn’t recover my footing. The mud was gripping my shoes. I crawled to the RV and opened the door. Pillows were propped in a circle on the floor and a bucket was catching water coming through the roof, but now there was no light, and no one inside. There were food wrappers all over the floor, and the air smelled sour. In the corner of a wide glass aquarium, a large white snake, jawing something, coiled slowly. I backed out, and the door clapped shut.

  Siri had gone to get me something to eat. How long ago did she leave me? The campsite had changed while I slept. Now it was imbued with a mean magic, and I couldn’t tell what was real and what was not. It must have been Viktor’s drink. I could feel the pieces of gelatin in my throat, the dirt, the grass. I told myself I was hallucinating, but it didn’t help me.

  In the distance, I could see tents, and bright dots like fireflies that could have been the glow of cigarettes. Drenched and cold, I moved from tree to tree trying to find shelter from the rain. The water in the grass was rising, and everywhere I stepped I was tripping on a soggy body or stepping into a dead campfire. The strings that tied tents to their stakes coiled and struck out at my bare legs.

  I would not be able to find my way back to our drenched tent in the dark. It lay on the ground someplace, inside-out upon itself. I cut my foot on a broken glass bottle, and blood trickled into the grass. The campsite drank it up.

  In the morning, when it was light, I might be able to make my way back along the grass through the woods to our deflated tent. But now, I was compelled to go farther into the darkness, farther from the center of myself. Around me, shadows danced black-on-black. They were the Nix rising from the wet ground, a swarming, thriving, waterlogged assembly. They reclined near the trees. Some snaked toward me over the tents with long, pale limbs. Some were legless, flailing their arms; some were Mylar-skinned satyrs with silver tails.

  Some, I knew, were Näcken. The ties of the tents were his fiddle strings, and anywhere I stepped could be a sinkhole that could suck me out to bob adrift on the sea. The girl in Siri’s story made the decision to stab herself in the heart rather than go to live with Näcken, and the pale water lilies of his pool turned red with her blood. All around me, flowers sprouted like hungry leeches in the moonlight, mouths gaping, anticipating I would make a similar decision.

  I felt crazed, thirsty. My skin was soaking up the rain, and because of the water, the insanity of the campsite, I suddenly knew—I just knew—that Näcken had first drowned in a car.

  I would never find my way back. I saw people standing by the toilet block. I launched myself toward them; I’m not sure what I thought I would do—how would I greet them? I was so afraid, so wet and shivering and sick. When I came to them, they looked at me with disdain and disappeared. Maybe they were ghosts. If so, they weren’t my ghosts. My ghosts liked to rub their hands in my hair. They talked with voices like syrup.

  I stumbled inside. It was empty. The wall was piled high with clear trash bags. I washed my face, and my skin felt so chafed and loose, like it could be rubbed right off. But there was something about the buzzing fluorescent light that was calming me down. I knew I was seeing things and couldn’t trust myself. I dried my face, neck, and legs with brown paper towels. Beneath the radiator, I found an abandoned comb and parted my hair so neatly. Calm, calm. I could breathe again.

  The front of my long, wet sweatshirt was emblazoned with lightning-bolt lettering: Fäbodjäntan. So I had bought it. The surfers had said it wasn’t for me, but it was. The farmer’s daughter. When did I buy this? Before or after I drank another cup that Viktor had made especially for me? Hadn’t he poured it for me in their broken-down RV, under a blacklight, a drink that glowed like he’d squeezed all the jelly from a neon sign? I took off the sweatshirt, wrung it out in the sink, and draped it over the radiator. I stood beside it in my bra impatiently, as though I were waiting for a train.

  I hurried into a stall, suddenly sick. When people came in, I watched them through the thin crack between the door and stall until they left. My skin burned. Looking down, I could see that name again, its lightning-bolt script tattooed upon my chest, red edged, infected. I couldn’t tell if it was misspelled. I thought, What a shame if it is misspelled, this tattoo that covers my whole body.

  I heard someone call my name. I resolved not to respond unless it was the sun itself calling me. I stared through the thin crack between the door and stall and saw one blue eye looming back.

  “Lauren, are you in there?”

  The person jostled the stall door, then reached underneath to grab at my feet. I tried to stomp the person’s hands.

  “Stop it!” the person yelled. “Lauren, it’s Karin.”

  She busted open the stall door and pulled me into the light.

  “Oh my God, you were in the rain!” She took off her jacket and handed it to me. She had an umbrella with her and propped it against the radiator.

  “I cut my foot on a bottle,” I told her. I looked down at my feet. There was the cut, but it was closing. I reached for the sweatshirt I’d left on the radiator, but it was gone. I was still dressed, and in the same clothes I’d worn all day.

  “It was that stupid Viktor’s drink,” she said. “Can you walk?” I was terrified that the hallucinations would begin again if I went back out into the dark. I cried into her shoulder, and she stroked my back. After a while, I let her lead me outside.

  She narrated our journey in careful English. Now we are near the big trees, now we are across from the swing sets. The rain was easing, and people were coming out again. They were at home in the blackness. I wasn’t used to it. I didn’t want it. I had come to Sweden to see the night erased.

  “Where have you all been?” I asked.

  “There was a party,” Karin said.

  A group of girls came toward us. Siri was among them in her cropped pink pants and giant, unruly crown. They made her laugh and she coughed hard. She wore her aviator sunglasses and was being held up by a girl I didn’t recognize.

  When she saw me, she shouted out: “Professor!”

  Professor, teacher, Ms. Cress. I hated when she called me by these names. How long had I lain slumped in the bathroom stall? I imagined all my bottled blond was grown out to gray roots. She tried to embrace me. Her body was cold. Her hands were freezing. Leaves from her crown scraped my face around my eyes.

  “Are you having a good time?” she asked.

  “I’m not feeling well,” I said. “I hurt myself. I hurt my foot.”

  She turned from me and sang a few lines of a Swedish song with a girl I didn’t know. They were holding hands, clasping their hands together in one thick fist and shaking it in time to their melody. All of her was in that fist, none of her left for me.

  A few feet away, I saw three older men standing beneath a tree, staring—they were watching Siri. When it started to r
ain again, Siri grabbed Karin’s umbrella and twirled it. The men laughed. I tried to see Siri the way they saw her. There was something jittery and staccato about her movements. Siri spun the umbrella over our heads, and when I went to steady her from falling, I could feel her shaking all over.

  “Siri,” I whispered, “what was in Viktor’s drink?”

  “Karin, what was in Viktor’s drink?” she asked dreamily. Karin didn’t say anything; I could see she too had noticed the nearby men. The tall man in the center had a bright yellow stripe across his jacket.

  “The tent collapsed,” I said, bargaining with Siri’s drunkenness. “I’ve been seeing things.” I wanted her to snap out of it. “I’d like to sleep in your car. Give me your keys.”

  “I don’t know where it is,” she said. “It’s all the way back in the parking lot. And it’s dark now. You won’t be able to find it.”

  The men stepped forward. They asked Siri something in Swedish.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She turned to Karin. “Just how young am I?”

  “Let’s go,” Karin said.

  Siri took off her sunglasses and I could see that her pretty eyes were nearly black, her pupils so wide. The man with the striped jacket smiled at her.

  “Siri, let’s go,” I whispered, reaching out for her.

  “Leave me alone! Oh, my God! You are such a bore!” She fell down and the man with the striped jacket reached forward to help her.

  “She’s okay,” I said. I pushed past him to lift Siri’s head from the dirt. He looked from me to her.

  “English?” he said.

  “American!” Siri yelled out, laughing. Her shirt was up around her stomach. Karin knelt down and together we lifted her up.

  “American. Which? Who is American?” the man asked.

  “You like Americans, huh? You want to fuck an American?”

  “Siri, stop,” I whispered.

  “She is such a bore, but yes, she is American,” Siri said. “She’s a fucking bore, but she likes to do it. She’ll do it with anybody,” she said. “Even the worst person. Even the one person…”

  Her words sloughed off my drunk-sick fog.

  “Don’t any of you want to fuck an American tonight?”

  She was laughing as she said it.

  “Siri, please stop.” I heard my voice crack.

  The man in the striped jacket turned to Siri. “Nej. But you might be fun.”

  Siri yelled something in Swedish and took Karin and me by our hands. We pushed past the men and ran toward the parking lot. Siri held my hand loosely. For the first time, I got the feeling that if I slipped away she would not have stopped.

  Karin and Siri rapped on the side door of a red van I hadn’t seen before. It slid open. Many people were inside, avoiding the rain. Arms reached out, grabbed Siri, pulled her inside. Karin and I climbed up after her. I sat opposite Siri. They slid the door closed.

  It was warm. We were all sitting on a mattress that took up the area behind the front seats. The inside walls of the van were bare red metal. Above us a tiny disco ball caught the light and shot it out in squares around us. There were bodies bundled up inside down comforters on the floor. Others sat around the perimeter of the van.

  I could still feel that sensation in my palm, the way her hand had been slipping from mine. What was I doing here? I needed time alone with her, to talk this out, to hear the lilt of her regular speech, to feel her eyes rest on me instead of darting away.

  I didn’t recognize any of these faces. I wondered if Margareta and Frida were buried somewhere in the blankets. People passed around a box of chicken-flavored crackers. Siri stared at me from the other side of the van, until Karin saw it and slid the aviator glasses over Siri’s eyes to spare me.

  Even the worst person, she’d said. Even the one person.

  I had confided things to Siri I rarely admitted to myself. I’d traded myself away too easily. I’d told her of my old house on Long Island in the days after my parents’ death. Beautiful, repaired, blooms of impatiens, the neat porch, the watered lawn. How I’d made our house look pretty again on the outside, but with all the men coming and going, and the darkness and crudeness they brought with them, my parents’ home became, on the inside, a dark Villa Villekulla. All was awry inside. A horse may as well have been standing in my living room. A shrieking monkey made my bed and made it again. My parents are buccaneer captains lost at sea, that’s all, they’re coming back, you must leave now, please go before they return. That man smoked in their bed while I twisted in the mirror, trying to see my own back.

  I’d told her about the night when two men came calling at the door of my apartment at once. They fought outside my apartment until Mr. Vallapil came out and chased them off with his broom. Ravi and Khushi were protective of me after that. I was so ashamed. I thought I’d left that behind me in New York. But my vulnerability was a feral scent. And no matter where I moved, it came with me.

  My eyes adjusted to the light. A teenage boy sat at the back of the van. He wore what appeared to be a crown with a large star in the center. His eyes were flat and dark, but he smiled easily. When he asked for the cracker box, it was immediately passed to him. He told me his name was Björn and that this was his van. He asked me if I had everything I needed, and I said yes, looking away.

  The rain started hard again. The cadence of the soft conversation, the closeness of new men, Siri’s little foot poking out of the blankets by me—I was somehow lulled to sleep by these sad instruments.

  I WATCHED SIRI sleep across from me. I could just see the top of her flowered crown. Sweden. It had been impulsive and stupid to come here. Drunk or drugged and sick, surrounded by teenagers. The van was warm and red and glowing, a capsule, shuttling me toward something. I wiped at the sweat on my cheeks, pushed the blankets off with my feet. Sweden no longer felt like a place of magic. It felt like a mistake.

  Siri reminded me of who I was once, of the person I might have been at eighteen, who I could pretend to be on this other side of the world. But that night, lying in the mud and with bloodshot eyes, she’d told those men I was a bore and a slut. There are reasons students and teachers shouldn’t be friends. Sometimes the rules only seem silly because you aren’t able to see far enough ahead.

  I tried to push it out of my mind. She was just drunk, I told myself. People say things they don’t mean sometimes. But she was the one who knew all the parts of me. The Siri I knew had X-ray vision. She could see through me. Not everyone could.

  Sometimes after classes ended, as my performance adrenaline waned, I would gaze back at my neat, chalk-written notes upon the blackboard like they’d appeared out of nowhere. Grammar examples bearing my father’s name so I could read it over and over during my grading. The final paragraph of a sample essay—arguing, in conclusion, something about my hometown, far away, a place the students didn’t know to be real. The names of the two ferries that docked in Port Llewelyn at night after making their hour-long passages between the north shore of Long Island and Connecticut. Mapped sentences with words from my own life. Perspiration between me and my clothes.

  A boyfriend once told me, “Other people have lost their parents. You’re not the only one.”

  But Siri.

  I thought of our horses at the stables, stuck in that ring together, no place to go but around and around. That is why I thought they were us. If they could jump the rail and run, would they go in different directions? Round and round, stuck in grief. I didn’t think of it that way then. I was stuck because I kept myself at a distance. Siri was stuck because she kept the people who wanted to help her away. She’d throw them from her back and run.

  No. When Siri woke, I’d tell her that I’d forgiven her while she slept. We needn’t mention it again. Go back to sleep, I’d say. I’ll be right here counting the moments left until the sun comes up in the van windows. The way
your father used to, like we’re family. It won’t be long. Seconds left of darkness, and then all will be right.

  I thought of that man, Jason, at the stables that day, who had been so entranced by Siri, her high voice, her beauty. That was the day I told her I was scared to be alone. That I had a way of convincing men we shared a connection. Had I tricked Siri the same way? Or had she tricked me?

  But we had traded stories from our pasts.

  Not the stories that mattered. You never told her about your scars. She never told you about her mother.

  But we had traded the words we felt were beautiful in each other’s languages.

  Languid. Gloaming. Verdant. Do you even remember any of the words she shared with you? Or was this just another version of your game?

  I couldn’t shake it. Things felt different now, and all those memories that I played over for myself didn’t feel comforting, but like grief.

  I imagined them like that instant photograph Jason had taken—a blur, soon fading, something Siri would throw away.

  * * *

  —

  EVERYONE WAS ASLEEP but me and Björn. Two other boys had passed out upright, with their backs against each other. One girl lolled in the center of the van. Karin and Siri slept, subsumed by the covers.

  Björn looked either college-age or just out of school and in his first job. He reclined with his legs stretched toward me. He was chewing gum, or maybe tobacco.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “The United States.”

  “Your friend is so much younger than you.”

  “She’s not that much younger.”

  “Well, you’re older. Older than all of us, right?”

  There was a flash of lightning in a faraway cloud. I smelled the after-rain air. Things were peaceful, damp, and cool. I found myself thinking about “All Summer in a Day.” Sitting there in the van with the door open, feeling the breeze, looking into the expanse of sky, it was like I was sitting with my legs dangling from Margot’s open closet door. Now the lock is picked open. Now what? Someone come and take me home, I thought back to myself.