In the water, a twenty-foot Viking ship was being roped and stocked by the deckhands I’d seen from the hut. They were sweating too. The clouds that had passed over the smithy were gone again, revealing a very high sun.
“You will paint all of the time,” Nils said, his tone both commanding and beseeching. “Today,” he said, “okay, the boat. I will fetch you after the ride. So, home for the evening.” He told me that we would be working long days. We would begin tomorrow, formally. For tonight, he suggested that I try painting the ox that roamed around the asylum, for my leisure, for an exercise. Then dinner, he said. He had a fish in the freezer. I didn’t tell him I didn’t eat fish. I figured it would count as blasphemy in this country, though I hardly knew where I would find other food.
The Viking ship’s deckhands waved their blond arms at us. The boat was long and thin, vegetable-like; it had the shape of snow pea and the color of a turnip. Nils led me down the hill to the dock and exchanged a few words with a deckhand. Dozens of passengers had taken their seats, and the crew had untied the boat. I climbed aboard. Nils started back up the hill.
A girl with muscular arms said, “Welcome.” She wore an upturned sack with holes cut out for her head and arms and had a rope tied around her waist. “Velkommen,” she said to us.
• • •
Fifty strangers and I rowed the ninth-century ship out to sea. The strangers were mostly small families—one child with two parents, or two children with their dad. The families, clumped, sat at the center of the deck. A few individuals had taken the single seats around the edge of the boat, where they could look out at the water. As we rowed, the girl captain hollered again and again, “Haroo!”
Over the course of our rowing, the roles shifted. I saw the younger children squint their eyes and become older, concentrated. The fathers, in their shorts, reverted to little boys, looking up at the girl captain, then down at their own legs. The single adults around the perimeter rowed without thinking, lost in separate dreams of the same sea. I was a poor rower. I did not manage to tilt the oar correctly, and I was distracted by my own separate dream:
My sister, wearing a Viking sack, stood at the mast. I looked down at the water in panic. Its color was changing, darkening. We were far out at sea for such an old boat. Sarah was far out at sea for such a young girl. I had to believe she was ready, because she had looked me in the face and told me so. None of us, I saw on the faces of the boys and girls on the center benches, were ready to be where we were—ever farther out in the water, closer and closer to Greenland. The captain was constant, shouting “Haroo!” every other minute.
I looked at the captain’s blond hair and knew my black-haired sister was at that moment sharing our childhood bunk bed with her fiancé. Scott was visiting my parents for the first time since the announcement, spending the weekend at our old apartment, which was slowly being dismantled—my mother taking her things down from the walls, my father folding and refolding his two pairs of pants.
The water grew brighter, shallower. The captain shouted what turned out to be her final “Haroo!” We had rowed in a tidy loop. I saw Nils standing by the dock. We tied the prow’s dragon head to the dock posts. I thanked the captain, complimented her on her sack, and ran up the hill from the water.
“Not enough hours in the day for boat rides,” Nils said when I reached him. We started for the parking lot. I looked up at the incredible, never-setting sun. There would be countless hours in the day.
• • •
Toward the end of our fifteen-minute drive to the artist colony, Nils admitted that the main building had previously been a mental asylum, but he assured me that he had repainted the outer walls blue. Upon arriving, I discovered he’d not just painted them blue, but seven shades of blue, in a wave pattern. The asylum building was three stories high, and ours was the only car in the lot.
“How many artists live here?” I asked.
“You and me.”
While Nils dug around in the trunk, I stayed in the passenger seat and tried to calm myself by watching the wind bend the parking lot weeds. They were the same tall, voluptuous flowers that grew alongside all the roads, and the light in their petals was whiter and cleaner than any I’d seen before. Nils came around the passenger side and knocked on my window. If there was anything worse than being an artist colony’s only artist, I thought, it was being the second. Still, I got out of the car and followed Nils through the asylum’s unlocked front door. He walked straight down the ground-floor hallway. I followed him with my suitcase. We passed a large bathroom and stopped at the second door on the left.
It was the room he had chosen for me. I didn’t know which room was his, even which floor. Nils carried my suitcase up in his arms over the threshold of the room. I knew I was marrying myself to something right then, stranded and strangely overjoyed, on this nontropical island in the middle of the Norwegian Sea. There was a bell ringing, and out the window of my room it proved to be the collar bell of a sheep. Four sheep had entered the parking lot.
I advanced to the windowsill and Nils retreated, leaving me to my new quarters. I stared at the animals, the only other living creatures in sight, and it was so easy to cast them as my family: I, the littlest with the clanging bell; my sister, the gangly-legged female closer to the road; my father, the curly one who hadn’t been sheared; my mother, the lean, round-eyed matriarch. It was good to see us again. It was good that we’d transformed and were adapting to new environments, growing steadier hooves.
I turned away from the mirage in the window and made my bed with white sheets and a striped blanket that Nils had left for me. The hallway bathroom didn’t have any toilet paper. I wondered again about Nils. It was easy to imagine that Nils never pooped. I didn’t know where he’d gone. I walked as quietly as possible and peeked inside the first floor’s kitchen, but he wasn’t there. I stood in the center of the hall and stared to the hall’s end in both directions; it was long and full of terrible little doors. One could go insane from the floor plan, if one wasn’t already.
“Nils!” I shouted.
From the parking lot, echoing down the corridor, a long, low, “Ja?” It could have been either man or animal answering me. No lights had been turned on in the asylum. I ran toward the smell of sheep dung that wafted in from the open entry. Nils stood centered in the parking lot, his trunk open, the sheep shy and keeping to the lot’s distant corner. I approached Nils, and the sheep drew farther away, out toward the open back fields.
“Where are you going?” I said.
“Town,” he said. “Where are you going?”
“Town,” I said, thrilled that there was such a place.
• • •
We drove down the hill and the town came into sight immediately—it wasn’t far, and it wasn’t large. I had never lived in a town. When I thought about it, I had never visited a grocery store by car. The Gristedes where we shopped in New York had been on the ground floor of our apartment building. My bedroom’s fire escape hung six stories above its front door. I had occasionally walked down to it barefoot. And when I thought about it, I didn’t know what I needed from this town. Some milk. A couple pounds of pasta would last me a long time, if Nils wasn’t driving down again soon.
Halfway between the asylum and the town, Nils pulled over and turned off the car. “It’s blue,” he exclaimed, pointing down to a rocky lake beside the road, and also up to the sky. “Blue and orange. Are complementary colors,” Nils said urgently. “If you look at something orange, a paper, for fifteen seconds, and then you look at a white paper, your eye makes blue. The same with yellow and violet. I use yellow and red, and the eye wants violet, so it is living.”
“It is living,” I affirmed, and Nils restarted the car, looking relieved.
It ran for only two minutes before we entered the REMA 1000 parking lot. We pulled in behind a departing station wagon and joined the shoppers. While I hadn’t caught the population number for Leknes, it seemed the entire town was in this grocery sto
re. A long line formed behind each of the six checkout counters. It wasn’t surprising, somehow, that we all needed milk. The terrain of these northern islands could only be tempered by protein, by sips, by cups, the smallest things under our control.
I marveled at the firm red peppers that had made it up here. This was a very unusual dot of land, stationed in arctic waters. An older woman went ahead and put two of the peppers into her basket. I switched into gear.
“Milk,” I said aloud, and looked to my side for Nils. He had wandered out toward the bananas. Nils’s expertise was so convincing, in his painting (I wanted to learn) and his driving (I would never learn) and his never worrying (you’re either born this way or not); in my helplessness, I wanted to enter into complete symbiosis with him: eating whatever he ate, paying squarely for my half, following him here when he came and home when he went. Home to an asylum, I thought. I pushed myself toward the refrigerators.
The milk was sold only in paper quarts. It came in seven colors. A man reached in front of me and selected a green quart. So did I. (It turned out to be kefir, a sour milk delicacy that is as thick as yogurt.) I imagined putting the kefir in my tea and cereal, so I found those things in their aisles too. I selected a hunk of cheese from a massive array of cheese hunks, all inscrutably brown. I found Nils.
His basket was full of fish and beer. He looked into my basket and nodded at the kefir, impressed.
I didn’t feel comfortable asking Nils about toilet paper, so I asked him where I could find spaghetti. We walked together past the ice cream section, past all the tomato-stewed-mackerel pastes for bread, past the frozen pizza section, past the wall of bread loaves—unsliced and sorted by coarseness—into the very back of the store, where we found the pastas and sauces. In an adjacent housecleaning aisle, I found all the toilet paper I could ever need, sorted according to indecipherable descriptions of softness. Nils joined the checkout line. I caught up with him and placed my items on the belt behind his.
The cashier looked at me, turned to Nils, and said, “Pussy?”
Nils said, “Ja.”
I said, “What?”
The cashier bagged Nils’s beers and advanced my pasta to the bar-code scanner.
“Pussy?” she asked me.
I didn’t respond.
“A bag, a bag,” Nils chimed. “Do you want a bag?”
I said, “Please. Thank you.”
The cashier bagged my items, double-bagging the quart of kefir.
We drove home to the asylum.
• • •
Nils and I each had our own floor, and each floor had its own industrial kitchen. I could hear Nils’s footsteps in the kitchen directly above mine, shuffling between the sink and the freezer. I put my purchases in their right places, doing little to fill the vast emptiness of the cupboards.
Out the kitchen window, fields extended back toward the horizon, which I had always known to be a line, but in this case was a mountain wall. Farmhouses dotted the fields, each with a truck at its door. Nils had stopped moving above me. The colony fell silent. For the first time I was afraid of its size, its noiselessness, its solitude. My parents wanted to know that I’d arrived, and I wanted to hear their voices. I retrieved my laptop from my quiet new room, carried it back to the kitchen, and centered it on the table, watching trees shaking in the window behind the screen.
My mother was also shaking. Behind her, bowls lined across the counter were filled with raspberries. I looked into the tiny camera and told them I had arrived safely and had been warmly welcomed. I told them I was comfortable. I didn’t tell them about the three-story building where I lived with one middle-aged man.
“You’re way up there,” my mother said.
“And they’re here,” my father said.
“We put them in your room,” my mother told me. “Scott took your bottom bunk.” I pictured Scott climbing up the bunk bed’s ladder at night, my sister a brunette Rapunzel.
“The schmo waltzed in here asking me how the scribbles are coming along.”
“He doesn’t have a good heart,” said my mother.
“I’m losing my stomach.” My father showed me how white his tongue had turned. “I have to keep myself from retching.”
“I have to start melting the ice cream.” My mother turned her back to the camera and shrank on my screen as she walked back into the kitchen. I saw her bend down to the freezer, the rear pockets of her jeans suddenly visible, and set two pints of Häagen-Dazs on the counter.
“I was hoping,” I told my father, “that we could take this as a new era. And buck up.”
I thought it was a new era. One in which the constant fret over why Sarah was still dating this person would be relieved by the sheer elevation of her marrying him. And that my family could, consequentially, buck up.
“I can’t stand to be in a room with him,” my father said. He pinched the bridge of his nose.
My mother ran back to the screen from the kitchen, wiping freezer frost onto her apron, shouting toward the computer, “I am frightened for her!”
“Why couldn’t she marry somebody more like me?” my father asked.
Outrage blacked out my thoughts for a moment, and when they came back, I found myself thinking about the Viking ship. How the families and the strangers had resembled one another. How each husband had been born and raised a stranger to his eventual wife, and their eventual children had each arrived as a stranger to both parents. I couldn’t really say what a stranger was anymore, having encountered Nils—who was both stranger and sole companion to me, for the time being—and these islands in general, whose mountains were transforming in my perception from dinosaur spines into my most reliable friends. My sister’s fiancé was hardly, after three years, a stranger to us. All the same, my parents did not seem interested in expanding our family.
“That’s a ludicrous thing to say,” I told my father.
“No.” He leaned close to the webcam, such that his hair filled the whole of my screen.
Sarah had taken a stand, he went on to say, against the values with which they had raised her. Against the artistic, which this guy wasn’t, against the Jewish, which this guy certainly wasn’t, against the delicate and the disciplined, both of which my father had counted out from Scott’s first mention of Xbox, against the essential fineness my family valued and could not find in the Glennys of San Francisco. He took it as a personal rejection.
When I didn’t answer, my father resumed the conversation with a story of the dinner they’d all shared the night before. They had been sitting at the table, Scott speaking about how excited he and Sarah felt, and my mother had gone into her bedroom and begun to cry.
“It’s not right,” my father said.
My mother left the screen again, and I saw her by the fridge, blueberry cartons stacked from her hands to her chin. She had served vanilla ice cream with mixed berries every summer that I could remember. The same white porcelain bowls. It was soothing to see the tradition return, though I wondered whether any of them could stomach ice cream at that moment, and the kitchen was being packed away, each appliance into its original box, the boxes split between my parents according to who used which more.
“They’ll be coming out of the room soon,” my mother said, “for ice cream.”
“I wish they’d stay in there,” growled my father.
My mother asked him to set the juices out on the table. I told them to enjoy the visit and celebrate Sarah. My mother spilled half a carton of blueberries onto the floor and dove down to clean them up. My father signed off.
I looked up from my screen and out the kitchen window. In the fields, the trees were still shaking. I saw the asylum’s pet ox wandering between them and testing his horns against the trunks. I wanted, as many often want, to talk with the animal. The only way was to keep perfectly silent. The ox lifted his head, walked a little way into the open, and stood nobly by a patch of low-growing crops, waiting for his portrait to be painted.
• • •
We listened to Radio Norge, the national station, whose most frequently played song was Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” Nils announced he would speak only in Norwegian for the rest of the night. When he flattened his Lofoten map over the dashboard, allowing me to pick a direction, I pointed at the word EGGUM. It was a place near Borg, up the road from the museum, on the northern shore. His reply was, “Det kan vi.” That can we.
Along the way, vocabulary basics. One sheep on the roadside: Sau. A horse: En hest. The horse: Hesten. Nils pointed a finger to his chest, said, Jeg, pointed at me, said, Du. Jeg, I said. Du, he said. We were getting somewhere.
We hunted the midnight sun, and found it behind each mountain, over every pond and fjord, doubling itself on the smooth surfaces of those waters, and in the windows of Nils’s car, and on the lenses of his glasses. We wanted to get somehow closer to it, as close as possible. That’s how Eggum helped us. As shown on Nils’s map, it was the northward-facing, beachy top of our island. Between Eggum and the North Pole lay one final landmass, a polar-bear-inhabited block called Svalbard. But Eggum was inhabited by people, if sparsely, and was even marked with a sculpture of a human head.
When we sat on the beach there, between the sculpture and a damaged World War II radar fort, our eyes met the sun’s stare. Nils filled two tin mugs with instant coffee and balanced them on a flat-topped rock. We sat on a boulder that faced due north, and in the glare of that final waterfront I couldn’t say how much of the night we would spend there, or what kind of togetherness ours was.
I wanted to keep the conversation simple, to avoid a host of complications. Waves made the rocks look like dolphins jumping, I told Nils, or a whale’s tale flipping up. “Ja, but it is rocks,” Nils said. He looked at his watch and said, “Klar?”
The Sunlit Night Page 7