by John Freeman
On the bus ride home, you’d see the city in the distance, looking like a Lite-Brite set. Robin had bigger dreams for us. He liked to talk about them on the ride home sitting with his cheap keyboard on his lap. He had a plan where we would play on a cruise ship. But after a little while I knew that our band would never get that far.
Partly because he was getting stoned all the time. I saved up my money and bought all kinds of things, like a black coat with round white buttons that my dad said reminded him of a domino piece. Robin spent all of his on drugs. When I tried to say something about it, he said it was because he was an artist. It makes sense to be stoned if you are in a rock and roll band and playing at places like CGBG’s. But if you’re like at a ten-year-old’s birthday, I don’t think that it makes sense. Once Robin was sitting on a pink plastic chair with his legs crossed holding a paper cup with iced tea in his hand with his eyes closed for fifteen minutes. He had confetti in his hair the next day. He didn’t even bother to comb it out.
Also he didn’t make love to me anymore because of the drugs. And he stopped wanting to talk about music. He just wanted to borrow my share of the money we made all the time, which I didn’t like. Once I refused to give him five dollars and he called me a bitch right in front of everybody on the street.
“I made you who you are. I got you all these gigs. Why are you being such an ungrateful bitch now?”
“I don’t like the way you’re starting to talk to me,” I said. “You used to like to talk about music.”
I paid attention to all those after-school specials. They made an impression on me. The drug-addict life seemed about as appealing to me as getting cancer. I saw junkies out on the street corners all the time. I did not want to stand on a corner my whole life begging people for crumbs, you know. And having to move out of the way when they wanted me to move out of the way. And scurrying across the street all the time, almost always like two seconds away from getting run over by a car.
Robin was ambitious about what he expected from the world. But I didn’t really need anything like that. I just wanted to be happy. All I desired was a sweet little nest to come home to in the evenings—with all my people in it.
My dad was so proud of his job. He would do push-ups next to the bed in the morning. We always argued about whose turn it was to sit on his back while he did push-ups when we were little. That’s the good life. Get yourself a job that no one else wants, my dad used to say, and no one will try and steal it from you.
So I got a job at Dunkin’ Donuts. I got myself one of those little brown dresses with orange lapels. I got to put pink icing on the donuts every morning. I found that I really liked it. The best part was that I got to bring home donuts for everyone at the end of the day. That’s a perk. The only drawback is the pay stays basically the same until you are like ninety years old.
My parents always made a big sloppy deal out of one another. I think they thought that it was important to kiss in front of us kids. Once my dad said that for dessert he wanted a kiss from my mom’s big sweet lips. She went over and sat on his lap and kissed him. We always screamed and giggled when they did that. I wondered as a kid how come my mother didn’t crush him with her big ass. But I think she was weightless when she sat on him. She was like a beautiful deflating air balloon.
My mother used to say that we weren’t rich in money, but we were rich in all sorts of other things. Like love, I guess she meant.
I broke up with Robin. I started dating Peter, who worked at the donut store with me.
I heard from Robin two years later. He called me from prison. He had one phone call to make. I didn’t know why he was calling me. I didn’t know what I could do for him. But I was yelling at everybody in the apartment to shush. When someone calls you from prison, it is holy and you have to treat it with respect.
He wanted me to sing a Whitney Houston song. He wanted “How Will I Know.” And everybody in my family got quiet and gathered in the hallway. They were all listening too. He liked that song because I think he never really believed that anyone really liked him. He was feeling lonely and wanted to know that even though you felt all alone and like everything was wrong, you might be all wrong about that feeling.
All those nights out playing in our rinky-dink band were really fun, but I never took it seriously. I don’t like those big, big ideas. They are kind of like drugs. I don’t have it in me to be somebody like Whitney Houston. She would fight with Bobby Brown all night long—I could never be in a relationship like that. I just wouldn’t care at all. She cared so much about Bobby Brown that she let him drive her crazy. She just was so afraid of nobody loving her that she would let a dude treat her any way he wanted.
It’s really not my business to figure out who killed Robin. The best thing I can do at the moment is just sing the Whitney Houston song at his funeral. I don’t know if that’ll do Robin any good. I think I need to sing it to me as much as to him. I think I’ll be singing a love song to some sort of dream that was too big for us to have.
Johan Harstad is a Norwegian novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and graphic designer. His novels include Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?—a Kirkus Reviews best book of the year, which has been published in thirteen countries—and Max, Mischa, and the Tet Offensive. He is also the author of 172 Hours on the Moon, which won the 2008 Norwegian Brage Prize in the young adult/children’s literature category; four plays; a collection of short stories; and a prose collection. He lives in Oslo, Norway.
Tara Chace has translated more than twenty-five novels from Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish. Her recent translations include Jo Nesbø’s Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder series (Aladdin, 2010–2017); Johanne Hildebrandt’s Unbroken Line of the Moon (Amazon Crossing, 2016); and Sven Nordqvist’s Adventures of Pettson and Findus series (NorthSouth, 2014–2017). She translated Johan Harstad’s YA sci-fi thriller 172 Hours on the Moon (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2012). An avid reader and language learner, Chace earned her PhD in Scandinavian Languages and Literature from the University of Washington in 2003. She lives in Seattle with her family and their black lab, Zephyr.
Max, Mischa, and the Tet Offensive
JOHAN HARSTAD
TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN BY TARA CHACE
Marin in the morning. I sit on a bench, surrounded by tourists with iPhones and SLR cameras with limitless memory cards and the ability to snap pictures at the same firing rate as a Minigun. Like me, they’re looking down at the Golden Gate Bridge. They’re happy to be here. We’re all happy to be here. We all have our reasons. Our smiles are a language with a million dialects. It’s quarter to eight in the morning and the night’s chill is still in the air. It hasn’t eased even though the day has long since begun. The city at the other end of the bridge, San Francisco. Alcatraz and Berkeley farther away. I haven’t been here before. It’s a beautiful city, not like Los Angeles. In San Francisco, I would have really fit in. We got here yesterday. Slept here last night, in the car. I slept well, undisturbed for almost eight hours, until a German rapped on the windshield and woke me up to ask if it cost anything to park here. Then it was time to get up. Stand up and sit down again, that’s how it is. No reason to go if there’s no place you need to be. I sit on one of the two benches here; I’ve been claiming it for more than an hour, smoking cigarettes and drinking water. Sure, only one of these two activities is socially acceptable around here. Somewhere over there in the city is the theater. I can’t remember off the top of my head what it’s called, but what does it matter? The address is stored in GPS, as is that of the Fairmont, where currently I’m technically checked in. In name if not in spirit as they say. The ensemble has been looking forward to coming here; San Francisco is known for its theater audiences and I wish the cast easier days now, they deserve an audience who’ll welcome them with open arms even if most of what’s slung from the stage is enough to make a person fling himself off the bridge down there. If so, he wouldn’t be the first. Or the last. A troubling n
umber of people kill themselves from that reddish-brown bridge every year, enough that the authorities are considering installing a net to catch all those unhappy and desperate people before they’re lost to us for good. Maybe we should have had that for the theater as well. I’m ashamed to have put on Better Worlds Through Weyland-Yutani. What was I thinking? I suppose it was rage that made me do it; I think I wanted to air the rage onstage in hopes that it would abate. It doesn’t. The audience members obediently accept the text, which tells them that they’re all irrelevant and no one cares about them after all. Terrible to watch. How they applaud their own demise because they don’t think they deserve anything different. I spot a guy jogging across the Golden Gate coming toward Marin County, and for an instant I’m worried he’ll be one of the ones who suddenly give up, climb over the railing and vanish, one of the ones who don’t even hesitate. But he just keeps running, leaning into the headwind down there, a man in his early or late forties, not easy to say for sure from this distance. A half hour later, he comes huffing and puffing up the winding hills and passes me, winded and flushed, with an empty water bottle and sweat pouring from his cap, on which is written the word AWESOME in big, yellow letters on a light blue background. He looks like a man who regrets everything. Sooner or later he, too, will get there. This, I know: at one time, I was one of the ones running.
We meet in the gym at the school outside Stavanger every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in our dark blue tracksuits with Forus and Gausel Athletic Club printed on the back, always on time, well, at least Stig and I always arrive at the same time; we slide our bikes into their spots on the bike rack and shiver in the cool afternoon air. Then Andri comes, a few minutes later. “Sorry,” he says, “my mom kind of took her time with dinner.” She always does. Cooking isn’t her forte.
We’ve been told we have a lot of potential, that we can go far, we have athletic potential, and our coaches, mostly local parents who have varying degrees of a clue about sports, complain incessantly about all the kids who suddenly stop coming when they hit fourteen, fifteen. But we’re going to stick with it, we’re sure of it. I’ve started to believe it, because neither of my parents has said a word about moving anywhere at all and it’s 1989, more than a year has gone by, it’s early October and I’m twelve years old. I think we’re going to stay. So no way am I going to disappoint Sean, the physiotherapist from Ireland who always overestimates the shape we’re in and sends us out on impossibly long runs with built-in hill interval training inspired by Spetsnaz forces, or Ola, the bald, good-natured meditation guru who can never figure out the floodlights and lets us run hurdles and throw the javelin in the dark on the soccer field and who, when we come inside where it’s warm for the last half hour, puts together these bizarre, multidimensional obstacle courses in the gym which are just as hard to comprehend as to complete.
Yeah, we’re going to stick with it, even after we turn fifteen. Of course we will.
We run and it feels like we’re going to die. And it’s cold out. That’s how I remember all the training back then, as something that took place in the fall, or late in winter, while it was dark in Norway, and there were reflections on the asphalt from the cold rain that had fallen. We must have trained in the spring, too, and in the summer, but anyway that’s how I remember it, and our breath always showed and we had to keep moving to stay warm and the streetlights disappeared behind us as we ran farther and farther each time, always to places we’d never been before, with no idea when we’d get back to school again. It’s Stig, Andri, and me, together with Sean’s eldest son and another seventeen-year-old from my sister Ulrikke’s class who digs Springsteen, both of them to our horror. The two older kids always take the lead and know where we’re supposed to go, probably hoping that we three youngsters panting along after them will fall behind and eventually throw in the towel, turn around, and go home again crestfallen. But we never give up. We really sink our teeth into it as we pass the twenty-kilometers-of-nonstop-running mark and are sure we’ll never make it back alive. We stick it out for the first fifteen minutes, the first half hour, always the hardest, the toughest, with a stitch in our sides and breathing that’s impossible to control, we converse in dependent clauses to shift our focus or just to prove that we still have enough breath left to do this; we run throughout all of Forus, and all the places have their own names, too, I remember all the street names: We run up Ulsbergbakken and Heddeveien, through the woods, and along Godesetdalen; eventually our voices go completely quiet, they’re replaced by the sounds of our running shoes against wet asphalt and our regular breathing, in and out, in and out, in step, our breathing synchronized, we’re like full-speed human metronomes, organic machines that just go and go and go, and soon it gets darker around us, the distance between the streetlights and the houses increases, we’re out in the countryside now, past the farms and the fields on Jåttåveien. Something strange happens in our heads as we stop thinking about how tiring what we’re doing is, as body and brain part ways, each leaving the other to do its own thing. This is what Ola has described so many times to his meditation students, letting your head fly. So, that’s exactly what I do. I let it fly and we run down toward the highway and Hinna, and I leave myself and am raised, higher and higher, I can no longer hear our sounds, and the landscape opens up, I see us from above as we run through the last evidence that the industrial neighborhood we live in was ever an agricultural area, far from the city, far from the world. I rise higher and stare down at the housing developments and streets and schools and stores and factories that surround the dark green fields where the last of the horses stand still and graze, oblivious to what’s happening, and in the middle of all this I can just barely make out five people running, faster than they were in the beginning, their legs jut out again and again from their lower bodies and pull them forward, it’s an amazing sight, and then I lose us in the cloud layer for a second. I don’t find us again until we’re past Jåttåvågen where the Condeep bases for oil and gas production platforms are built before being sent out into the North Sea. We’re on our way back now, and I think we’re glowing, at least I know I am, but I’m not tired, none of us are; we’re indefatigable, we’re on the cusp of something big, we’re going to start middle school soon, our lives will begin as soon as next year and it’s impossible to know what will happen after that, reality will open wide and we’ll be in the thick of it. We fight our way up the final stretch, the interminable Gauselbakken, still alive, still with energy left. I can see my own face as I reach the top, see the school and know we’re there, I can see myself and I know what I’m thinking, because I’m thinking about my parents, I’m thinking that it’s Friday and soon, after a final half hour indoors where we’ll get to play our way through an intense round of floorball before we break for the evening, I’ll say goodbye to my friends and hop onto my bike, ride home, and my mom will take a loaf of garlic bread out of the oven and set it in front of me, along with a glass of soda, I’ll eat a little and then I’ll go shower, and while I’m drying off and putting on clean clothes, I’ll hear the theme song at the beginning of Norge Rundt, the show everyone watches on Friday nights, and smell the scent of wood burning in the fireplace and hear my dad say something to my mom and hear her laugh shortly before she comes and knocks on my door and says the pizza’s ready, and then we’ll sit there together in the living room, on the brown sofa across from the fancy sofa that we never dare sit on unless we have guests which we almost never do, and Ulrikke is out with her friends so I have them to myself, my parents, who I believe love each other. My dad asks if practice was hard and I tell him what route we took and how the landscape changed and he asks if I saw those three enormous concrete legs down in the bay for the newest Condeep which will be done soon and I nod, move more of the homemade pizza onto my plate and refill my soda and that’s how these evenings usually proceed, until they drift into something more unclear that begins to dissolve. I think it’s because I’m tired, it’s been a long week, I ran so far and now I
’m going to bed, so I go back into the bathroom again, brush my teeth as thoroughly as I can and hang my clothes over the side of the tub before returning to my room, get under my covers and wait for someone to come kiss me good night, because I still like that, I’m not too old for that, and my mom comes in only minutes later, she walks so quietly, that’s the way her feet are tuned, differently from my father’s who stomps through the world in a way that gives the impression he’s wearing snowshoes trudging through heavy snow and needs to make sure his footing is secure. With my mother, it’s like she’s always afraid the ice will give way and that the icy-blue water will well up at her. Although they express it differently, what my parents share is that neither fully trusts the ground beneath them.
“Are you tired?” she asks, sitting down on the edge of my bed.
“Think so.”
“You can sleep in tomorrow, you know, since it’s Saturday.”
“Yeah,” I respond. “Tomorrow’s Saturday.”
This is the same Saturday that my parents—while Ulrikke sits on the armrest of a chair with her arms folded demonstratively because she has places to be and doesn’t have time for impromptu family meetings like this, and I sit expectantly on a dining table chair beside her—tell us we’re going to move to the United States that summer, as soon as school gets out.
It is fall. It is fall 1989 and then the new decade. The winter and spring of 1990. These are the final weeks of life in elementary school and the graduation party at Anne’s house after the last regular day of school in the middle of June, a party that starts at exactly 6:00 p.m. and ends at 10:00 p.m. At the latest. We dance to Percy Sledge and eat rolls and buns and someone has hung a disco ball from the ceiling to nudge the atmosphere slightly in a nightclub direction. A lot of the people present have actually been out dancing several times and seen how things are done. Not Stig or Andri or me. But to some extent we’re all in the same boat, each of us from this class that has been together for six years spends the evening in a celebration that conceals our sadness and nervousness about the group we’ve belonged to no longer existing, we’ve bidden a respectful farewell to our homeroom teacher and promised to come visit (probably only two of the girls will actually do it, and only one time, slightly embarrassed as they realize that this is one of those things people say but don’t do because now they’re busy with new classes), when fall comes we’ll all be enrolled in other classes, some of us will end up at other schools farther away. We will have longer commutes to school, new teachers, new classmates to compete with or be teased by. We’ve existed together for almost as long as we can remember, we’ve had our assigned seats and we know everything about each other. Who sat across from whom, behind whom, two rows behind and to the right; none of that will carry forward. But at the same time, we can hardly wait, summer will feel incredibly long before we reach the other side of it, where the future awaits and middle school begins. Luckily there’s no coming back here. From here on out you just get older and things get steadily harder. It’s a matter of seizing the opportunities that arise. The world is going to smell different now. Like victory.