Wild Swims

by Dorthe Nors

  But now she’d made coffee, Lilly had, she’d made coffee and she’d covered the budgie and taken out the nice cups. There wasn’t any more talk about my face. Her little hand was up in my hair, inside the waist of my trousers, and she wanted to get hold of my hand, “Because now we we’re going to have us a cozy time and not talk any more about it.”

  It was the Pharmacist who got me into the club, claiming we’d play chess, but as a bachelor I had to place my body at the disposal of all the cast-off women and their expectations. Then I had a sock they needed to see to, then there was something about my collar, then their feet started hurting and they wanted to be driven home. And among the desperate, Lilly stood out. First she tried to latch on to the Pharmacist, but the other women were on him like hyenas around a cadaver. It was his fine beard, she said, and no doubt you can say some good things about Lilly, but those fancy blouses can’t cover up what can’t be changed. All that frippery, yes, the budgie too, it only drags her down, and then we were sitting there, it was Saturday and the tea lights were lit. She had placed them along the edge of the bookcase, with tinfoil wrapped around the bases so they wouldn’t burn down into the laminate. It had happened to her before, that the tea lights had burned into the laminate, and she’d also had them explode. The liquid wax could be as flammable as gasoline, so she felt safer with tapers. The dignified sort. So long as you didn’t set them up against the curtains, you could count on them. “They’re a bit like you,” she giggled, “so orderly and erect,” she said, scooting her way off the couch and out into the kitchen, where I could hear her rummaging around. “But if we can just stay awake, the little ones should be fine!” she shouted, and I’ve often thought that Lilly’s someone who could easily fall asleep with a cigarette in her hand. I could see her doing that on the couch, beneath the sun-faded pictures of her relatives. There’s one of Lilly hanging there too, from sometime in the ’70s. She’s got her hair crimped with an iron, the way my students crimped theirs back then. There they would sit, trying to make themselves attractive while I struggled with their sloppy logarithm assignments. That is if they weren’t tottering around on those espadrilles that were much too high, as if they’d attached hay bales beneath their feet, good Lord, and their shampoo stank in the classroom. Prostitutes struck me as less manipulative, and more economical, and the last day before Christmas break was the worst. The deep-fried æbleskiver and mulled wine, and we were supposed to talk about the year that had passed. As if the year could do anything else. As if that’s not precisely the way time works, and Lilly’s also hung up school pictures of her aging offspring. There’s something about their faces, something dumplingish and soft. They’ve had far too much candy, those kids, and now they’re living on another side street in the same neighborhood with kids of their own, kids who are also too fat, but that’s not something you can tell Lilly. She doesn’t feel anything, most of the time, but it takes nothing at all to make her feel everything, and then she was sidling through the door with a tray. “We’re having Baileys with coffee,” she said. Baileys and some peppermints she had left over from Christmas. “We’re going to have it a little nice,” she said, and then she squeezed herself in next to me on the couch, her fingers with the defunct wedding bands, and the jingle of amethyst and other costume jewels dangling from her earlobes. I guess she’s harmless enough, it’s all just heat, I know that and the Pharmacist says the same, but Baileys tastes of German rest stops and the corner of some party where nothing’s happening. Besides, Lilly should be able to tell that I’m more one for whiskey. Or a dry cognac with a cigar. I want to play chess! I’m nobody’s pet, and don’t think I don’t know what she, Clara, has under the sink or out by the electric meter. I know all about the liquor from the corner store. It’s starting to pickle her face, to lay her tongue in brine. She can’t hide anything from me. I’ve known her for a dog’s age, and I can’t be led around by the nose anymore. But it was as we were sitting on the couch, me with her free hand on my trouser knee and her with her eye on the Baileys, that she said, “We’re good friends, aren’t we? I know I’m stupid,” she said, “and it can’t be easy for you with all your brains to go around with someone like me,” she said. “So can’t we just be cozy?” And so we were. We sat there and were cozy, and I can’t account for how we got from when she took the last bite of cake to when she was lying there down on the floor, halfway under the coffee table, eyes gawping, mouth too, but even then, when it all was over and done, it looked as if she was forcing me, and I didn’t like it.

  BY SYDVEST STATION

  THEY’RE READY. THEY HAVE A COLLECTION CAN, A BAG with the cancer logo, and two streets by Sydvest Station with an apartment co-op and some rental flats, and Kirsten has no idea what she’s in for, just that it’ll be exciting to try collecting money for the Cancer Society in a neighborhood like this, while Lina steels herself for the awkwardness of standing so far from home in her white sneakers and rattling the can. She’s also tired, and at the same time her head is full of him and what he said. It hurt her, and she’s felt tired ever since, like she could fall asleep on her feet. But Kirsten’s game, and Lina smiles at her and says that she is too, and then they get started.

  At the first building no one answers initially, even though they press all the buttons on the intercom, but it must be the guy on the fifth floor who finally lets them in, as he ends up being the only one who contributes. He gives them twenty kroner, and then they giggle all the way downstairs because it’s the first money they’ve ever collected, but also because they’re nervous. Some of the doors make it clear how odd people can be. They put stickers with Rottweilers, Bambi, and Cinderella around their nameplates, which sometimes are galvanized and other times written in ballpoint and stuck up with masking tape. There are also doors that send mixed messages, and the two of them talk about how you never know what awaits you when you knock on someone’s door. True enough, Lina thinks to herself, musing that Kirsten for instance doesn’t know that he said what he said. In fact nobody knows that he told her that—that her love couldn’t be genuine. That no one really loved that way. It was just compensation, he’d said, but she doesn’t want to tell Kirsten that. She’s certain her reaction would be textbook, and nothing’s worse than someone who goes by the book, Lina thinks, saying nothing, and then Kirsten suggests that they start using the decorations on each door to guess what sort of person might answer.

  They guess wrong almost every time, but that’s what makes it fun, even when some of the people who open the doors are strange. They speak indistinctly, or they answer the door in their PJs, and many of them seem annoyed. One man is grumpy about being woken up on a Sunday morning and he snaps at them. Other places, there’s a rustling behind the door. People whisper inside, though everything’s audible out on the landing: “Don’t open it. I’m sick and tired of all these people asking for money,” says a woman behind one door, while at another, a kid comes out and slots some change in the can while Mommy and Daddy look on. They clap and say, “How clever,” and Lina thinks that people are weird. Their flats smell intimate, and filth is one thing, but their cleaning solutions seem like something you don’t really want to know about either, and “Hello, we’re from the Cancer Society, would you like to support our work?”

  That’s their spiel. But it’s not really true. Neither she nor Kirsten has anything to do with the Cancer Society, and personally, she doesn’t want to have anything to do with them either. This is all about spending a Sunday with a friend, and since they came up with the business of the door decorations in the second stairwell, Lina’s also been feeling like a tourist— plus she supposes that what they’re doing is a form of begging. Ringing on strange people’s doorbells to demand love and respect, Lina thinks, and in the fifth building she’s on the point of remonstrating with a young man who says through the letter slot that he has no money but is a big fan of what they do. She wants to tell him that she isn’t doing anything. “All I’m doing is trying to move on after my emotional life
went to the dogs, so shove it, motherfucker, you goddamn loser,” she thinks of saying—if she were the type to say such things. But she isn’t. She knows perfectly well that she’s more the type to focus on how sticky the floors seem in some of the flats and how gross it is, and that, despite all the door decoration, people aren’t very modest about their lives. That some places stink of medicine and dogs. Even though people aren’t allowed to have dogs in apartments like these, and even if they are, they shouldn’t be, Lina tells Kirsten, and Kirsten says she glimpsed a fighting dog through the letter slot of the fifth-floor flat in the seventh building, where the tenant, a younger woman, gave them two hundred because, as she put it, “My own life has been affected.”

  Welcome to the club, Lina thinks, thrusting the can toward Kirsten because it feels like it’s begun to stick to her fingers. Welcome to the club, is all I can say, she thinks. But she doesn’t say it aloud.

  They walk purposefully from building to building, or at least Kirsten does. As for Lina, she’s just along for the ride now, because she’s tired. That’s the way it’s been lately. Perhaps it’s the spring light and the long walks, but it’s more what he said. It wasn’t genuine, all that love. It was just something she’d fabricated to make time—no, her life—pass, and afterward she sat there utterly still, and the silence felt like a balm. But now it was time to move on, and the days just kept coming, and she wanted to sit down on the curb and let Kirsten run up staircases eleven and twelve. She won’t let herself do that though, but when they reach number fifteen, she starts letting Kirsten say where they come from, contenting herself with standing in the background and helping out if people can’t get the coins through the slot. That seems to work okay. The collecting can grows heavier and heavier, and that’s great, Kirsten says, even here by Sydvest Station, and then, on the fourth floor of the seventeenth building, they come to an odd door. It’s so odd that Kirsten outdoes herself, trying to guess who might live behind it. “Holy shit,” says Kirsten, laughing because a rubber skeleton is hanging on the door and the person’s called Elsa. Elsa’s got a stainless-steel nameplate and a peephole, but the skeleton blocks the hole, so she couldn’t see out if she wanted to. Lina tells Kirsten it’s the kind of skeleton that’ll glow in the dark if all the lights on the stairs go out; her nephew once had an entire can of small insects made from the same sort of rubber. When he’d been tucked in and the light in his room turned off, they glowed everywhere. He’d taped some to the ceiling, while others were under his bed among the Lego bricks, creeping and crawling, illuminated like those fish in the depths of the Mariana Trench. “If it were night, that skeleton would be the only source of light in the entire staircase,” Lina says, and Kirsten bursts into laughter and says she’s got a notion that Elsa’s pretty spry. “She’s got a sense of humor,” Kirsten says. “She’s a party of one,” and then she raps on the door, though Lina’s about to say that maybe they should skip this door.

  But now they’ve knocked, and at first it’s quiet, and there’s this listening attitude they’ve developed, head raised and ear cocked toward the door. It doesn’t sound as if anyone’s home. Or actually it does. Someone’s moving about in the entryway, and just a moment before there were footsteps, and now someone is muttering within. “Someone’s muttering in there,” Kirsten says, and Lina nods, but just because people mutter in their hallways, that doesn’t mean that anyone’s coming out, so Kirsten places her mouth close to the glow-in-the-dark rubber and says that they’re from the Cancer Society, collecting donations, and “Would you like to support our work?”

  There’s no answer, but they can tell she’s standing right on the other side of the door, Elsa is. “Nothing’s happening here,” Lina whispers, but Kirsten won’t relent and shouts “Hello?” and suddenly there’s scratching on the laminate door, a security chain scrapes along its track, the handle’s depressed, and then the door opens—and not just a crack. It opens wide, and there she is. Elsa stands erect in her bathrobe on her side of the threshold. It’s a small entryway, and she fills the space with her wiry hair and gaping mouth. “Cancer Society,” Kirsten says, rattling the can, and Lina wishes she would leave off, for anyone could tell just by looking that Elsa doesn’t have a clue what it is they want. She stands there, heavy and bony and with wet strands of hair plastered to her skull, and Lina can see that the only teeth she’s got left in her head are the front lower two, and they’re the wrong teeth to have left, Lina thinks, unable to keep her eyes off them. “Do you have any spare change?” ventures Kirsten, but Elsa doesn’t react as she ought to. She just releases the door handle and goggles at them, and it’s unbearable to watch, Lina thinks. It’s embarrassing, and now Elsa’s starting to rock back and forth in the doorway, perhaps because she’s begun to recognize something about the scene, but now it’s too late. It’s too late because Kirsten’s become uncertain and doesn’t know how to respond. Kirsten is used to always knowing how to handle a situation, but not with Elsa, and then Kirsten’s smile evaporates and Lina can see the sticky floor, and Elsa mutters, but what she says makes no sense, and then Kirsten wants to leave, just leave, and Elsa, who accidentally opened the door for the Cancer Society, loses her grip on her bathrobe. The robe slips to the side so they can see Elsa as she is, and Kirsten wants to leave. She tugs Lina’s elbow to signal that they should leave. But they can’t just leave, thinks Lina, and she takes a step forward and says, “You must really excuse us for disturbing you. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday,” and then she reaches in and closes the door in Elsa’s face.

  Down on the street there’s sunlight, and Lina places herself in the middle of it, while Kirsten remains over by the front door of the building. She says that that was utterly awful. What they’d just gone through is almost too much for her to process, so she says it again: “I’ve never seen the like. It was awful, wasn’t it, Lina?” Lina rummages for the map and doesn’t answer, but Kirsten says that no one should be like that, the way Elsa was on the fourth floor. “It’s really a disgrace,” she says, looking over at the front entrance. “Do you think she has home care?” she asks, but Lina doesn’t answer. They’re somewhere by Sydvest Station, far from home, and she has the map out and starts walking. There are only two buildings to go, and Kirsten mustn’t see that her face is averted, that she feels heat moving deep into her skull and down to her softer parts; that she’s thinking about him. She’s thinking about him and what he said—that it wasn’t love. It couldn’t be, he’d said, and here she’d gone and felt precisely as if it were.

  BETWEEN OFFICES

  IT WAS IN BOSTON THAT IT HAPPENED THE FIRST TIME. After a shower, I clipped my toenails and stretched out, read a little. When I turned off the light, it began to come over me. I lay on my back, arms a bit out to the sides, legs heavy, relaxed. My body felt good, I sank down into the soft mattress, and a short while later the bed was no longer a bed but bare earth. Thin vegetation grew up around and through me. That’s what it felt like. It was a chilly day, far from Boston, there was water nearby, and then the bird came. It perched on one of my ribs. Then it started to peck the flesh from my breastbone. It was a quiet act of devotion, and the sky above me was no longer local but some vast firmament, and I disappeared into it.

  The next morning, the first thing I noticed was how well rested I felt. The time difference usually bothers me, but I was wide awake under the showerhead, and down in reception. Forty-eight hours in Boston, and I never managed to see anything but well-scrubbed façades and the branch office. Next to the hotel there was a pleasant park I was able to glimpse from the taxi to the airport. It’s always these parks and airports. The fat tourists, the suits, and the neck pillows. The private realm can’t be maintained for any length of time but spreads bacterially, from security through the lines for coffee to the loose bowels in the restrooms.​

  I had a window seat on the morning flight to Minneapolis. I’d never been to Minneapolis before, but one branch resembles the next. I sat comfortably in my seat. Far below me, a lake of
oceanic proportions, and the rivers ran, as rivers do, like thick arteries across the terrain. Through slitted eyes I regarded my hands on the armrests. The bones of each hand looked like bone beads; the tendons were milky, and the red was what Mom called pluckmeat. The plane’s narrow porthole opened out onto the clouds and, seen between them, the prairie below, and I dropped off. I was woken by the usual announcement that we’d begun our descent. Far beneath me, a watercourse was doubling on itself like a large intestine.

  Upon landing, I drove straight to the branch office, where I presented targets and lifted the veil on future projects. They’d bought pizza for after. Then we sat there—I with the staff list, they with scarcely concealed discomfort in their faces. “How Nordic,” I said, referring to the Scandinavian surnames on the list. “Vestergaard, Dahl, Svensson, Moller,” I read aloud, and then they smiled. While these descendants of the Scandinavian exodus gnawed the last soft dough from their pizza crusts, I set their names in historic perspective. “Your name means the western farm, your name’s a valley, you’re the son of the guy called Sven, and someplace in your relatives’ distant past, a man walks around as a miller. My own name is a town by the German border, and I grew up in farm country. When we were going to have a chicken for dinner, my father chopped its head off, and afterward my mother put the entire chicken in a great big pot of boiling water. Then my mother plucked the feathers.” I demonstrated with my hands how she did it. “Feathers everywhere, especially the steaming down on her fingers. She couldn’t get the down off her fingers, it was a chore,” I explained. They were watching me closely, and I imagined some ruddy-faced peasant from a village south of Sæby staring back at me through their emigrant eyes as if I were the parish clerk.