The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  In the story of the blind men and the elephant, what’s usually ignored is the fact that each man’s description was correct. What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife, the mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn’t that they were blind—it’s that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp.

  For Faye, the larger truth, the thing that holds up every important episode in her life like a beam holding up a house is this: Faye is the one who flees. The one who panics and escapes, who fled Iowa to avoid disgrace, who will flee from Chicago and into marriage, who will flee her family and who will eventually flee the country. And the more she believes she only has one true self, the more she flees to find it. She’s like someone trapped in quicksand whose efforts to escape only make her drown faster.

  Will she ever understand this? Who knows. Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.

  These thoughts are far away from her now. Now everything is simple: She is a body in congress with another body. And his body is warm, and pressing all over into hers, and the taste of his skin is like salt and ammonia. At dawn she will begin using her head again, but for now it is this simple—as simple as taste. She is a body perceiving the world, and all her senses are filled.

  35

  THE ONLY OTHER PERSON in the church who knows what they are doing is Allen Ginsberg, who is sitting cross-legged, leaning against a wall and smiling. He could see them duck behind the altar, could see their candlelit shadows, could hear the familiar jangle of a belt undone. This makes him happy, these kids enjoying their exhausted and soiled flesh. Good for them. It reminds him of that sunflower poem he wrote so long ago—what is it, ten years? Fifteen? No matter. We’re not our skin of grime, he had written, we’re golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset…

  Yes, he thinks. And as he closes his eyes and lets sleep come, he feels satisfied and delighted.

  For he knows he was right.

  | PART TEN |

  DELEVERAGING

  Late Summer 2011

  1

  ONCE AGAIN, Faye had lied to her son.

  Once again, there was something she felt too ashamed to tell him. In Chicago, at the airport, he had asked where she planned to go, and she lied to him. She said she didn’t know, that she’d figure it out in London. But in fact she knew exactly where she was going: as soon as she discovered she’d be traveling alone, she resolved to come here, to Hammerfest, Norway. Her father’s hometown.

  The way her father had described it, the family’s home in Hammerfest was a resplendent thing: on the edge of town, a wide three-story wooden house with a view out to the ocean, a long pier where the family could fish for an afternoon and come away with a bucketful of arctic char, a field in front that waved golden with barley through the summer, a small pen for the animals—a few goats, sheep, a horse—the whole spread marked by a line of beautiful blue-green spruces that caught so much snow in winter that the snow sometimes fell off them in great loud thwumps. The house was repainted every spring a bright salmon-red after the winter elements dulled the previous year’s coat. Faye remembers sitting at her father’s feet listening to this and fully internalizing this vision of her family’s ancestry and later adding to it in her mind, putting a jagged mountain range in the background, covering the beaches with the volcanic black sand she saw once in National Geographic—whatever other beautiful thing she encountered in some movie or magazine, any place that seemed to be rural and idyllic and foreign, they all became this place, the home in Hammerfest. It drew together all her fantasies by slow childhood accretion. It became the depository for all the best things, and eventually her image of it was equal parts Nordic and French countryside and Tuscan fields and that great scene in The Sound of Music of singing and spinning in the grassy Bavarian hills.

  The real Hammerfest, Faye discovers, does not look like this at all. After a quick flight from England to Oslo, and another flight in a de Havilland that seemed too big for its propellers to keep up, she lands in Hammerfest to find a rocky, hardscrabble place devoid of any growing thing except the hardiest and prickliest of shrubs and thicket. A place that whistles with the wind of the arctic circle, a wind that carries on it a sweet petrochemical vapor. For this is an oil town. A gas town. Fishing boats are dwarfed by massive orange container ships taking liquid natural gas and crude oil to refineries that dot the coastline, to round white storage and distillation tanks that look, from the air, like mushrooms sprouting from some dead thing. Offshore platforms drilling reservoired gas are visible from town. No fields of gently swaying barley but rather empty lots with discarded equipment rusted and petrolic. Rocky hills, craggy and covered with lichen. No beaches but rather a bouldered and inaccessible cliff side that looks like the aftermath of an accident involving dynamite. The houses painted brightly in yellows and oranges are more a bulwark against the dark winter than evidence of actual cheer. How could this be the beautiful place she imagined? It seems so foreign.

  She had thought she’d find somebody at the tourist office who could help her, but when she said she was looking for the Andresen farm they looked at her like she was out of her mind. No Andresen farm, they said. No farms at all, they said. So she described the house and they said that house wouldn’t exist anymore. The Germans would have destroyed it in the war. They destroyed that specific house? They destroyed every house. Faye was given a pamphlet for the Museum of Reconstruction. She said she was looking for a place with a fair bit of land and maybe some spruce trees and a house that faced the water. Might they know where she could find a place like that? They said that could describe a lot of places and told her to walk around. Walk around? Yes, it’s not a big city. So that’s what she’s doing. Faye walks Hammerfest’s perimeter looking for something that matches her father’s description, a farm at the edge of town with a view of the water. She passes flimsy square apartment buildings that seem huddled together for warmth. No fields whatsoever, no farms. She moves out farther, where the terrain is stony, weedy, the only plants able to survive are those that root into the rock itself, hard crunchy grasses that go dormant during the two months of darkness that come during winters above the arctic circle. Faye feels like a fool. She’s been walking for hours. She had actually thought she knew what to expect here, she had actually believed in her own fantasy. All these years and still she’s making the old mistakes. She finds a path of trampled-down grass that leads over a nearby ridge and she follows it, lost in dismal thought, saying out loud at roughly every second step, “Stupid. Stupid.” For that’s what she is, stupid, and every stupid decision she’s ever made has led her here, to this stupid place, alone on a chalk-dusty path at the godforsaken end of the world.

  “Stupid,” she says, staring at her feet, climbing the path that leads steeply uphill and over the ridge ahead, thinking that coming here was stupid, looking for the old house was stupid, even her clothing is stupid—little white flat-soled shoes totally inappropriate for hiking over tundra, and a thin shirt she hugs around herself because even though it is summer, it is brisk. Just a few more stupid choices in a life full of them, she thinks. It was stupid to come here. It was stupid to get back in contact with Samuel, whom she felt responsible for after abandoning him to Henry, which was also stupid. No, that wasn’t stupid, but marrying Henry in the first place was stupid, and leaving Chicago was stupid. And on and on it goes as Faye continues up the hill, tracing back her long line of bad decisions. What had started it? What put her on the path to this stupid life? She doesn’t know.
When she looks back on it, all she sees is that old familiar desire to be alone. To be free of people and their judgments and their messy entanglements. Because whenever she got tangled up with someone, disaster always followed. She got tangled up with Margaret in high school only to become a town pariah. And with Alice in college only to be arrested and plunged into violence and mayhem. And with Henry only to wreck the child they had together.

  She had been relieved at the airport when Samuel’s name appeared on the no-fly list. She feels bad about this now, but it’s true. She felt these opposing emotions: joy that Samuel no longer seemed to hate her, and relief that he wasn’t coming with her. For how could she have endured the entire flight to London with him—a whole ocean of questions? Never mind traveling with him and living with him wherever they ended up (he seemed to prefer Jakarta, for some reason). His need was too much—it was always too much—for her to bear.

  How could she tell Samuel that she was going to Hammerfest because of a silly ghost story? The one she heard as a child, the story her father told her about the nisse on the night of her first panic attack. The story had stayed with her all this time, and when Samuel mentioned Alice’s name, she was reminded of something her old friend told her long ago: The way to get rid of a ghost is to take it home.

  Which is stupid, such superstition. “Stupid, stupid,” she says.

  It’s as if she really is haunted. All this time she thought maybe her father had brought some curse from the old country, some ghost. Only now she thinks maybe she’s not haunted but rather she’s the one doing the haunting. Maybe the curse is her. Because every time she’s gotten close to someone she has paid for it. And maybe it’s appropriate she’s now here, in the remotest part of the world, alone. Nobody to get tangled up with. No more lives to destroy.

  She reaches the top of the ridge lost in thought, brooding on these bitter things, when she becomes aware of a presence. She looks up to see a horse standing in the path, maybe twenty feet ahead, where the ridge begins sloping back downhill to a small valley. She flinches and exclaims a surprised “Oh!” when she sees it, but the horse does not seem startled. It is not moving. It is not eating. She does not seem to have interrupted anything. It’s eerie—like it’s been expecting her. The horse is white and tensely muscled. Its flanks occasionally shiver. Big round black eyes that seem to consider her wisely. A bit in its mouth, reins around its neck, no saddle. It stares at her as if it’s just asked an important question and is waiting for her to respond.

  “Hello,” she says. The horse is not afraid of her, nor is it friendly. It is simply that Faye occupies its whole attention at the moment. It’s actually a little creepy, the way it seems to be waiting for her to do something or say something, though she does not know what. She takes a step toward it, and the horse has no reaction. She takes another step. Still nothing.

  “Who are you?” she says, and even as she says it the answer bursts into her head: It’s a nix. After all these years, it has appeared to her, here, on a ridge high above the frigid harbor, in Norway, in the northernmost city in the world. She has found herself in a fairy tale.

  The horse looks unblinkingly straight at her as if to say, I know who you are. And she feels herself drawn to it, wanting to touch it, to rub her hand along its ribs and bound onto it and let it do whatever it wishes to do. It would be a fitting end, she thinks.

  She comes closer, and even as she reaches up to pet the beast’s face, still it does not flinch. Still it waits. She touches it on that spot between its eyes, that spot she always thinks will be softer than it really is, the skull so close to the surface there, all thin fur and bone.

  “Were you waiting for me?” she says into its ear, which is gray and black and flecked silver and looks like a porcelain teacup. She wonders if she can leap onto its back, if she can manage the jump. That would be the hardest part. The next part would be simple. If the horse began galloping, it would reach the nearby cliff in maybe a dozen strides. The fall down to the water would take only seconds. It amazes her that after such a long life, the end could come that quickly.

  Then Faye hears a sound, a voice carried on the wind from the valley below. A woman is down there walking toward her, yelling something in Norwegian. And beyond her, just past her, is a house: a small square thing with a deck in back that faces the water, a path down to a rickety wooden dock, a big garden out front, a few spruce trees, a small pasture for a couple of goats, a couple of sheep. The house is gray and weathered, but in the places that are protected from the wind—under the eaves and behind window shutters—Faye can see the lingering color of old paint: salmon-red.

  She almost falls over at the sight. It’s not how she imagined it, but still she recognizes it. It’s familiar, as if she’d been here many times before.

  When the woman reaches her, Faye can see she’s handsome and young, maybe Samuel’s age, with the same striking features she sees all the time in this country: fair skin, blue eyes, long straight hair that delicate color halfway between blond and cotton. She’s smiling and saying something that Faye does not understand.

  “This must be your horse,” Faye says. She feels self-conscious about using English so presumptuously, but she has no alternative.

  The woman does not seem offended, though. She cocks her head at this new information and seems to process it for a moment, then says, “British?”

  “American.”

  “Ah,” she says, nodding, as if this solves some important mystery. “The horse wanders off sometimes. Thank you for catching him.”

  “I didn’t really catch him. He was standing here when I found him. It’s more like he caught me.”

  The woman introduces herself—her name is Lillian. She’s wearing gray herringbone pants of some sturdy-looking material, a light blue sweater, a wool scarf that looks homemade. She’s the very picture of unassuming Nordic style—restrained and elegant. Certain women can wear a scarf effortlessly. Lillian takes the horse by the reins and together they all begin walking back down toward the house. Faye wonders if this might be a distant relative, a cousin, for this is almost certainly the place. So many of the details match, even if the version her father told was exaggerated: not a field in the front yard but rather a garden; not a long line of spruces but only two; not a great pier over the water but instead a small flimsy-looking dock perhaps large enough for a canoe. Faye wonders whether he was self-consciously lying and puffing it up, or if, in the years since he left, in his imagination, the house really did grow in its proportions and majesty.

  Lillian, meanwhile, is pleasantly making conversation, asking Faye where she’s from, how she’s enjoying her travels, where she’s gone. She suggests restaurants to try, nearby sights to see.

  “This is your house?” Faye asks.

  “It’s my mother’s.”

  “Does she live here too?”

  “Of course.”

  “How long has she lived here?”

  “Most of her life.”

  The garden out front is wild with life, a great efflorescence of bushes and grasses and flowers thick and barely domesticated. It’s an eccentric and rowdy garden, a place where nature has been encouraged to its messy ends. Lillian leads the horse into its pen and closes a rickety gate that she secures with a bit of twine tied in a knot. She thanks Faye for helping return the animal.

  “I hope you enjoy your vacation,” she says.

  And even though this is what Faye has come here to find, she’s feeling tongue-tied and nervous now, not sure exactly what to say or how to proceed, not sure how to explain everything.

  “Listen, I’m not really on vacation.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m looking for someone. Old family, actually. Relatives of mine.”

  “What’s the name? Maybe I can help.”

  Faye swallows. She doesn’t know why she’s so anxious saying it: “Andresen.”

  “Andresen,” Lillian says. “That’s a pretty common name.”

  “Yes. But, you see,
I think this is it. What I mean is, I think my family used to live here, in this house.”

  “Nobody in our family was named Andresen, or moved to America. Are you sure you have the right town?”

  “My father is Frank Andresen? When he lived here he went by Fridtjof.”

  “Fridtjof,” Lillian says, and this seems to take a moment to register as she looks up in concentration trying to access why that name sounds familiar. But then suddenly she finds it and she looks at Faye and her stare feels piercing.

  “You know Fridtjof?”

  “I’m his daughter.”

  “Oh, my,” she says, and she grabs Faye by the wrist. “Come this way.”

  She leads Faye into the house, first through a pantry full of vegetables elaborately canned and pickled and labeled, through a warm kitchen where some bready thing is baking, the air smelling of yeast and cardamom, and into a small living room with squeaky wood floors and wood furniture that seems antique and handmade.

  “Wait here,” says Lillian, who lets go of Faye’s wrist and disappears through another door. The room she’s left in is cozy and richly decorated with blankets and pillows and photographs on the walls. Presumably family photos, which Faye studies. None of the people here look familiar, except for certain of the men who have a quality around the eyes that Faye recognizes from her father—or maybe she’s imagining it?—a familiar kind of squint, a familiar way with the eyebrow, the slight wrinkle between the eyes. There are lamps and chandeliers and candles and sconces all over, presumably to light the place brilliantly during the interminable winter darkness. A big stone fireplace occupies one wall. Another wall is filled with books with unassuming white spines and titles Faye does not recognize. A laptop computer that seems anachronistic in the otherwise old-fashioned room. Faye can hear Lillian speaking through the door, speaking gently but quickly. Faye does not know a single word of Norwegian, so the language is only a phonic event for her, its vowels sounding a little flat, almost like German spoken in a minor key. Like most languages that are not American English, it seems to move too fast.