The All-Night Sun

by Diane Zinna

  “They were Chinese American women authors. One did memoir. The other fiction.”

  The women stared at me in silence. They clearly thought I was crazy. Gwendolyn laughed, this time a dismissal, letting go of my wrist so abruptly, it fell to the table.

  I rushed to the ladies’ room. In the mirror, I noticed a dark spot on the shoulder of my jacket and picked it off.

  On the waist of my jacket, another dark spot. I pinched it off and looked at it. Hair. Wound round, round, a tight little ball of hair and lint. On my lapel, another. I heard the voice of my old boyfriend: Why can’t you take better care of yourself? I picked them off until the sink was dotted with them.

  I stared hard in the mirror, trying to find my eyes, rubbing the spot on my wrist Gwendolyn had pressed, as if to reroute my blood again. I was losing my place in my body and in my mind. There were no tracks, no veins to me. My blood coursed in waves, sloshed in me when I bent at the waist. I was losing all my linearity.

  In the days since that class, I had kept dreaming that Siri drowned in the Kalmar Sound, but I knew that hadn’t happened. Siri was a strong swimmer. At the blue beach, she was the first one in, and she was able to hold her breath longer than any of the others. The beach at the campground had no real waves. It was tranquil, at times a mirror. Had she been confounded by the darkness? The dune separated her from the lights of the campground. The moon was in and out.

  Mångata.

  Had there been a road shining on the water for her to follow back? Maybe she couldn’t even see the shore.

  In my dream, Siri is on the harbor dock, her legs kicking back and forth over the sides. The rest of us stand behind a perimeter of police tape. Up comes my parents’ car, pulled from the bottom of the harbor with cranes. I see the bumper stickers—that the car has climbed Mount Washington; that they have a daughter on the honor roll at Liberty High School. Water spills out the sides like two waterfalls until it doesn’t. Then it just hangs, suspended there, while authorities on the dock try to decide where to move it.

  In my mind, Siri arches like a dolphin and disappears into the water.

  “Lauren, may I have a word?”

  I turned, and it was Dorothy. The women from the conference room were clustered behind her, peering into the restroom, where I stood, my head soaked from the sink.

  * * *

  —

  IN HER OFFICE, Dorothy told me she wanted all of my ungraded papers on Monday by noon. She had heard too many instances now of my erratic behavior. Going forward, she said, everything had to be from the textbook. She had to approve any topics I taught. I was not allowed to use the overhead projector. She didn’t say why.

  She said I could proctor the midterm and we would talk about the new semester after I turned in my grades. No more, she kept saying to my pleading. She was silent when I cried. Then: I’ll see you on Monday, Lauren.

  At home, I worked on the leftover papers through the night, just points and check marks now, knowing that Dorothy would see them and judge me for anything I wrote that was too personal. But it pained me to read them. As the stack grew thinner, the version of me who listened well to them grew thinner, too. Annie curled against the small of my back. There was no skin between her and my spine. Through the wall came the familiar sound of the Vallapils’ dishwasher whooshing on.

  I stared out into the courtyard of my apartment complex, watching for movement in the other windows, but there was none. I thought about that night months before when the liquid-green lights bounced against the buildings. That night I had been entranced. I’d thought I was witnessing something magical. The next morning I had rushed to tell Siri, but instead, all my history had poured out, and I’d thought the way she understood me was magical, too. Now I realized they were probably just searchlights, or a child playing with a flashlight and tinfoil, something ordinary and sad.

  I fell asleep among my students’ papers. In a dream I revisit the lavender-doored house. It is the morning after Liseberg. Magnus has practically been wooing Siri, pouring her juice, hanging up her sweater. He has cut her violets. He does his best to please Birgit, too, apologizing when he slams the door, making a list for the morning shopping without being asked, cold air breezing out around him as he stands before the open refrigerator with a pad and pen.

  We all sit quietly at the dinette table. I keep stealing glances at Magnus, but he does not look at me. I am wrapped up in my thoughts of him, of kissing him in the sculpture garden, of the adventures we had in Gothenburg, of how he felt and tasted. When he gets up to go around the wall to the kitchen, I follow him in and ask for a glass. He hands it to me without looking my way, his arm extended fully, as if to keep me as far away as possible. I am hurt. He is willing to let me go so easily.

  Birgit is on the patio. Siri goes into the bathroom to take a shower. As we stand in the kitchen together, I turn to see if Magnus is okay. All the light in the kitchen, the sunlight pouring through the windows and flooding the wide planks of the floors, the chrome of the chair legs, the porcelain arms of the water pitcher, the clear body of the juice carafe. Then he is beside me, shoulder to shoulder.

  “This thing between us,” he says.

  I can’t get air in fast enough. He motions like he is going to grab my shoulders and shake me, but when he makes contact, his hands grasp my hips, drawing them toward his, and I can feel how hard he is, and that he wants me to know it. There is a relenting between us, a falling into each other, an entanglement. His mouth is wet on my neck and shoulders. He lifts me onto the countertop and reaches under my skirt and pulls apart my knees and looks at me. I can feel myself opening to him, I can feel my body changing to let him in, can feel him moving inside me, but also things suddenly changing in the house—the room getting smaller, the roof lowering down just a bit, all the walls growing thinner, all our breaths stronger, ruffling the curtains, shaking out the gutters. I can feel the house coming against me. I can feel Siri stepping into the water, I can feel Birgit leaning over the balcony, her cheek brushing the faces of the soft yellow flowers. With every thrust I fall deeper and deeper into that version of myself. And then: an explosion. The counter creaking from our weight like the whole house could come down on us and on Siri and on Birgit. And then it does.

  I awoke screaming, shaking. From outside, something hit the glass, something black. I crawled away from the window, Annie barking. It seemed to drop: a black splotch on the grass, illuminated by the courtyard lamps.

  I clipped on Annie’s leash and we went outside to see what it was. A small black bird, sitting queerly in the grass. Have you ever seen a bird fluttering on the ground, its wings moving frantically, a motorized fluff of pain, unable to lift off?

  * * *

  —

  THAT MONDAY, I returned to Stella Maris to hand in all the papers and proctor the midterm exam. In my classroom, where unfamiliar students sat waiting for the test to start, the old paper snowflakes fluttered in the window. My students were in another room. Dorothy always switched up the teachers during midterms and finals because she thought it helped ensure objectivity in grading, but the prompt was still the same as last semester’s: In what ways have you changed since you came to the United States? I looked through the crowd, down the center aisle between their too-small desks, and I imagined the pile of essay grading to come.

  I read them the prompt. I told them to begin and they hunched over their work. I watched a young man scraping out an outline in the corner of his paper. He realized I was looking at him. I dropped my eyes to the floor and watched the bouncing shadow of my boot. The students were all quiet. Before long, I called time, and the students passed up their blue books and filed out.

  I was alone in my classroom. I went to the back window and started to pluck the snowflakes down, looking at the sun-faded writing upon them. Where I was lying in my loincloth outfit. Nikhil. Even after everything that had happened, the thought of
him on that first day could still make me smile.

  Dorothy came into the classroom and took the pile of blue books from the teacher’s desk, switched them with another stack. “These are from Professor Ryan’s class,” she said, as though to an empty room. “Due Wednesday.”

  She left the room and the door closed behind her. I drifted toward the desk and sat down, slowly separating out the blue books across the desk like I was playing solitaire. Somehow, I knew what was coming. Part of me wished Frida hadn’t sat for her midterm, that I could avoid reading her response to this question—but when I saw her name on the front of the essay booklet in red ink, I pushed all the rest aside. Frida would talk to me.

  Dahlström, Frida

  Comp 003

  A Time I Experienced Change

  What is change? A lot of people probably think I have a lot to write about in the way of change. I am nineteen years old, and I am away from home and in America for the first time, that’s change. But the change that I will write about in this essay is the change that occurred in my way of thinking about coming to America. In this essay I will discuss my original dream, how I planned to obtain it, and how it came to be.

  I had many friends from school but my favorite and oldest friend had her own dream, which was to be living in the United States doing anything. Her name was Siri. She was one year ahead of me and the thought of her leaving hurt me, but I endured it for one year. She came back to see me in the summertime and brought with her a friend from the U.S. who had been her professor. My friend had already grown up and become so different since I knew her. I saw her having in common a lot with this teacher and it hurt me more than having lost her for the whole year. I tried to reclaim my friendship but it was so difficult I always felt at odds with them both. I decided to make my dream to move to the U.S. as well.

  My friend helped me figure out how to apply to this university for being able to stay in the U.S. with her too. She said I could join her in the fall and be her roommate. She talked to me about her dream of being independent coming true. Everything was going to be back to the same or even better. Then, a nightmare in real life. My friend died during our holiday we call Midsommar.

  We all blame Professor Cress. She let Siri go off with a strange man. She should be ashamed. I bet she is ashamed, and that is why she does not return the family’s calls. Here at school she acts like it never happened. She denies being friends with Siri. She thinks we’re all her friends. How sad! To pick out the pretty girls in the class to make her own club. She tried to recruit me, but I’m too sharp. I transferred out. Flirts with the male students. Her shirts are too low cut. Makes us listen to all her old stories, her ideas on things. She made us sit around her in a circle like she’s our leader or something. She uses us to get her own needs met, just like she used Siri Bergström. She uses her class like her own personal therapy session. We don’t care about your dead parents, Professor Cress! Get over yourself!

  Do you know what it’s like to be the one person who does not fall in the golden circle? She is cruel with favorites. She has never shown any compassion toward me. So I say she is a fraud.

  Why did she pressure me to transfer from her class? Could it be because I know what really happened between her and Siri? That she invited herself to Sweden, where Siri sought a respite from her with her family and old good friends? How every minute had to be spent together to the point that Siri even told me she was afraid of her?

  What is change? Looking in the mirror and not knowing who you are anymore. That is change. I still came, I thought it was a good decision, but I was stupid, and I’m failing all these classes. My opinion is changed. I knew that Siri would want me to have this experience or else I would not have come. I thought I would feel closer to her to be here, but I don’t feel her spirit in this place, and she was too good for any of the people here. I thought I would come here and live out our dreams for both of us. In conclusion, I believe living for one person is hard enough.

  The blue book had eight wide-ruled white pages. The writing stopped after the third page, but I continued to turn them, white page, slowly, white page, until I was finally shutting the little blue book and staring at its back cover. I was supposed to give the essay a grade, then pass it on to one of the others to read and assign a grade. The final grade would be the average of the two.

  I felt dizzy, like I was spinning. I didn’t believe what Frida had written, but I knew she was desperately trying to get to me and hold me accountable for something. She would connect with me or destroy me. I couldn’t push her away anymore. I grabbed my blue books and my coat and rushed outside.

  If the bell that hung from the dormitory bridge could have rung, it would have sounded then.

  I DROVE DOWN to the spot on campus where the two roads fed into one. The boys’ dormitory on the left, the girls’ on the right. I backed my car into a space and got out, all slow motion. I told the girl at the front desk I was looking for Frida Dahlström’s room. Third floor—the international floor, she said.

  I ascended the stairs. There were sounds of people above, below, all my steps amplified. Colorful ads for local bands and sorority rush lined the halls. On the second-floor landing, music was playing. Many of the doors on the hall were open and girls moved in and out of them, calling to their friends. The smell of shampoo. A girl brushed past me with her toiletries in a pink case. Her hair was wet and draped over her shoulders, darkly soaking her shirt.

  The third-floor landing had a big picture window that framed the foggy campus. I noticed one dark rooftop way in the distance. A small triangle, the edge of a bandage. I imagined tugging it, peeling away the blankness and exposing the other buildings, the parking lot, the chapel, the dune, the beach, the Kalmar Sound, like a wound.

  It didn’t occur to me that Frida might not be in her room. She was surely in, waiting for me. I passed a Coke machine that buzzed like a bug zapper. On the cinder-block hallway walls, there were magazine cutouts of skinny models, girls with huge, doelike eyes, signs along a path. Perfume ads. Men hanging on girls; girls reclining in boats in bikinis; girls embracing each other.

  I stopped before an open door. Inside, Frida stood on her tiptoes, peering over a hot plate, stirring ramen noodles. She wore striped socks to her knees and shorts in the heat of the dorm room. There was an open box of wheat crackers on her rumpled bed. She looked at me in an unsurprised way, her eyes ringed with black eyeliner, making them look as big as those staring out from the perfume ads in the hall.

  “Am I in trouble?” she said.

  On her bed was a pink plaid comforter. Above it, glossy pictures: Margareta’s double-toothed smile. Karin with her baby daughter in her arms. Lots of Siri. The photos were arranged in a heart shape. On the opposite side of the room there was an empty desk and a bed with a bare, striped mattress.

  She followed my eyes. “I don’t have a roommate. They assigned me one, but the girl left early.”

  I went to the bare bed and let myself sit down upon it. A round candle was burning on a trunk in the middle of the room.

  “Siri was supposed to be my roommate this year. Remember?”

  I pulled the blue book out of my coat and showed it to her, damp from my skin. “Why did you write these things?”

  She sat on her bed and scuttled back against the wall.

  “I have no one to talk to about how I’m feeling.” She scratched at her head, her neck.

  “Then tell me.”

  “She was found floating in the inner tube—”

  “No. She didn’t die at Midsommar. I was there.”

  “That man made her go swimming—that man you let her go with—and he just left her there. She couldn’t find a way to swim back in. The water was too cold. She floated out in the cold water until Magnus found her.”

  “I was there. Frida, I was with Magnus when he found her. She talked to me when Magnus brought
her out of the water. She looked up at me. She was angry with me. Don’t you think I remember every second of that?”

  “Karin told me you let her go with that man.”

  “Siri did what she wanted! She never listened to me!”

  Frida closed her eyes. She couldn’t see my hands bunched into fists.

  “Karin went after her. She went looking for help.”

  She shook, though her legs were pink from the radiator heat. Her ramen started to steam. Something was changing in her.

  “She didn’t want to go to the hospital. She thought that guy Viktor had drugged her drink and that she’d get in trouble. She was afraid that if she got arrested, they wouldn’t let her return to school. We wrapped her in the blanket. She stayed in the tent.”

  “What happened, Frida?”

  Even though I knew I needed to, I didn’t want to hear it.

  “It was chaos. You left with Margareta. Magnus was yelling at everyone. Where were you? Back to the United States! You cannot miss your plane, yeah? You were done with us. She kept crying that Viktor’s drink was in her chest. But it was water in her lungs.”

  Her voice seemed to be turning inside out. It was a strong tide suddenly reversing, and I could hear her hatred for me going inward. I felt the undertow of her.

  “She begged me not to let Magnus take her. She said it was another instance of him being overprotective, and I listened to her. Oh God, I had missed her. I loved her. I loved being the one to zip the tent closed, to scream in his face, to tell her what he looked like when he stormed away.”

  Her eyes were so blue. It was like she was looking through me, into space. Her voice was a shell I crushed to my own ear.

  “I couldn’t ever say no to her,” she said. “Saying yes kept us close.”

  And with that, everything stopped.

  The wave of emotion, the pull of her, the anger in me—it stopped.