American by Day

by Derek B. Miller

  Morten places his right hand, with his wedding ring, on top of the stack of letters.

  “I knew you two were writing but I didn’t know much about it.”

  “I suppose,” he says, “I wanted it to remain between Marcus and me for a while. I wasn’t trying to keep it a secret from you. I just felt . . .”—he stops for a moment to consider what feelings he might have had—“. . . that you and I have had so much time together, alone, that perhaps I owed it to Marcus to do something apart. Just the two of us.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “He’s forty-six.”

  “I know,” she says.

  “I can’t come to terms with all the time that’s passed.”

  Morten drinks another aquavit. Sigrid refills both glasses.

  As close as she and her father had become, there was little joy in the house. Intimacy and love, she learned, did not coincide necessarily with happiness or pleasure. The absence of her mother created a strangeness to the world, as if the palette of the sky had inexplicably shifted and the mind never became fully accepting of that new condition. Her father was not a successful guide, and together they treated what was lost as though it had merely been misplaced—as if, on some off-chance, Astrid might return. It did not startle Sigrid, as a little girl, to learn that her mother died as much as it baffled her that her mother would continue to be dead each morning and repeatedly not return.

  “I’ll need to read these,” Sigrid says, reaching over and patting the stack of letters.

  The sun is finally behind the western hills. Though the sky is still blue, the kitchen grows darker and much colder. Morten stands and closes the window above the sink. He lights four candles on the kitchen table.

  She actually needs an answer to a more pressing question.

  “So. You were joking about America. We’ll make some more calls tomorrow.”

  “I bought you a ticket. Even put a tour book in your room. Read the letters on the plane.”

  “I’m not going to fly to another continent without a valid and considered reason. We have not, by any stretch, exhausted our options from here.”

  “Two possibilities,” Morten says. “He’s fine. Like when this was sent. In which case, you have visited your brother after years apart and you rejoice in each other’s company while you use the opportunity to talk through the fact, my daughter, that you recently killed a man, only to have another die in your arms moments later.”

  She begins to object, but he raises a hand. He is not finished.

  “A reunion is long past due. Your circumstances alone warrant this. But if, by chance,” says Morten, shifting the second letter forward and pulling the first back, “he needs your help, which is the other possibility, you’ll be there to help him. There is no downside. It is the right thing to do. And it’s all better than you moping around the farm.”

  “I wanted to come home and relax.”

  “Do this instead.”

  “America’s weird,” she says with confidence.

  “And wonderful. It’s both. Or so I’m told. I’ve never been. They’re having an election in under three months where they might vote a black man into the White House. Go be a part of history. Your plane leaves tomorrow. Icelandair to Montreal. You’ll pass through customs and then take a small plane to a town called—unimaginatively—Watertown. I figure you can rent a car from there or take the bus to your final destination. You don’t need a visa from Norway. You can stay for three months as a visitor. Go. Have an adventure.”

  “In upstate New York?”

  “Adventures are mostly about the people,” he conceded. “You should know that his letters took a dark turn about two months ago. Something happened. He didn’t mention what. I tried to draw him out further but he wasn’t forthcoming with details. I suspected that his romance ended harshly, and perhaps on her terms. I don’t know what I did wrong that both of my children should be in their forties and not have a spouse and children.”

  “Not this again, please,” Sigrid says.

  “Women think they can wait forever these days. It’s an illusion. You know the rate of miscarriages after the age of . . .”

  “I’m not waiting for anything, pappa. I’m living my life, which will be what it will be.”

  “Ah . . . the Doris Day approach to planning.”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “No. Why would anyone anymore.”

  Morten empties the glass of aquavit and Sigrid reaches to fill it again, but he covers the glass with his palm.

  “How’s your head?” he asks her.

  “Fine. How’s yours?”

  “Five weeks ago you were hit on the head by a criminal who popped out of a closet. How’s your head?”

  “How’s your duck?”

  “What is it with you and that duck?” her father asks.

  “You named it.”

  “Ferdinand. He has personality.”

  “He has nutritional value. Which he is likely to lose if he has a name.”

  “I watched a film recently about a farmer who trained a pig to be a sheepdog. There was a duck in the film. He was very funny.”

  “We’re going to eat that duck, pappa.”

  “It’ll be much harder now that he has a name.”

  Sigrid leaves her father alone at the table shortly afterward. She kisses him on the forehead and wishes him a good night as he packs a Danish pipe with Cavendish tobacco and disappears into a cloud of aromatic smoke. Sigrid retires to her room with Marcus’s letters and the intention of trying to take seriously the idea of traveling to the United States of America on a plane leaving tomorrow for an adventure to reunite with her brother in order to please her father.

  The suitcase from Oslo contains only one nightgown, and she slips into it and then under the soft white bed sheets that protect her from the itchy but warm woolen blanket on top. Under the reassuring weight of the blanket she switches on the reading lamp to her right and opens Marcus’s final letter.

  It is typed—not handwritten. It looks as if it has actually been produced on a mechanical typewriter. She runs her fingers across the back of the page and feels the subtle embossing produced by the type hammer striking the page.

  The paper is American-sized, eight and a half by eleven inches, rather than the nearly universal A4, which runs a bit narrower. She’s read a piece in Aftenposten about how America is one of three countries left in the world retaining imperial measures rather than adopting the metric system. The other two are Liberia and Myanmar.

  “Weird place.”

  The letter reads:

  Dear pappa,

  It happened again. You told me the first time that I didn’t understand. That I misunderstood everything. Well, I’m a grown man now and it happened a second time and this time I understand it all too well. And more than that. It has forced me to see it all with a line of sight unobstructed by the years and the events and the decisions in between. What I now understand is that it was my fault. It was also yours but you, I forgive.

  Your son,

  Marcus.

  Side Effects

  Sigrid flies out of Oslo’s Gardermoen Airport on an Ice­land­air Boeing 757. Her father had upgraded her to “Saga Class,” either generously or because he couldn’t resist the term.

  Traveling internationally is still fresh and she admits to herself a certain excitement when boarding the plane and turning toward the left—the business class—when being handed the headphones. The steward, very handsome, smiles at her for her good fortune and good taste at paying for a wider seat.

  She has attended a few European conferences that have aimed to link academics with policymakers on matters of organized crime, cross-border cooperation, interagency workforce guidelines, new findings on smuggling routes, and the confusing overlap between criminal and terrorist activity. Three trips to Brussels. One to Geneva. But rather than exchanging ideas, the academic and policy prac­ti­tion­ers were more likely to exchange fluids. Little was pro
duced by such events aside from bastard children, misunderstandings, and heartbreak, so she stopped going when she had the choice.

  More interesting and applicable to her job is Norway’s 1,600-kilometer border with Sweden, which has made smuggling and illegal immigration more of a problem since Norway joined the Schengen Agreement in 2001. That agreement opened the borders for freer movement of goods and people. It also created new undercover opportunities in Sweden in cooperation with the police in Gothenburg and Stockholm. She liked her Swedish police colleagues, aside from their stuffiness, and working undercover helped her rise more quickly in the ranks. But there were no planes in those jobs.

  The first flight is only a few hours. There would have been enough time for a movie, but she opts for music and reverie. She chooses classical; a selection from the Budapest Festival Orchestra, who are playing something by Vivaldi. It is a solid choice as background noise to blot out the engines.

  Norway disappears below her and exposes proof that there is a wider world. It looks like fresh air outside but it is separated from her by layers of plastic.

  The latte-colored seat beside her is empty, and she stretches out by filling it with the correspondence between her father and brother, a bottle of water, the in-flight magazine, and that book by David Sedaris she’d failed to even start reading on the beach. It was one of two books she’d brought along. As the sun breaks through the clouds she feels momentarily hip and up to date. She opens to the copyright page. The cover art, she learns, is called Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette and is an oil on canvas piece by Van Gogh, sheltered in Amsterdam. Sigrid is no expert on these things, but the style seems to have more in common with Elvis on black velvet than The Starry Night.

  The only reason she’d been at a bookstore at all was because Eli had insisted she start reading again. This was after Eli’s victory with the television streaming service, and—strangely—she didn’t find the two contradictory at all.

  “You want me to start reading again because I don’t have a cat?” Sigrid quipped.

  “What does a cat have to do with it?”

  She returns the book to her bag for a second time because the author’s chipper tone disrupts her angst about finding Marcus.

  The second book—insisted upon by Eli—is about yet another alcoholic male cop with a secret past unable to get along with authority. For no logical reason, though, he’s taking point against a serial killer in a Nordic country with one of the lowest crime rates in the history of the world. The murders are so ghastly, they should have made global headlines but instead only rattle the tranquility of a small town from which no one ever moves away or thinks to worry.

  After an hour she is bored. As a professional investigator herself, she would have liked—just once—to have seen something of her own experience at least obliquely referenced inside a book that professes to be about her own life. Instead, the fictional investigation proceeds on instinct, character, happenstance, natural talent, and coincidence. It is a world without procedures, rules, templates, investigation strategies, analytical frameworks, resource allocation plans, time lines or punch clocks. It is uninformed by the realities of police work and does not acknowledge the existence of women unless they are the source of sexual tension or else have been physically dismembered.

  She flags down a stewardess, who has been wearing the same smile since takeoff, and orders a Bloody Mary with a slice of lemon.

  The letters demand her attention but she’s not ready to read them. Sigrid opens her iPad and creates a simple spreadsheet, which she populates expertly with the dates franked by the U.S. Postal Service on each letter. She builds a chronology that results in time series data about when the letters were sent. She has no questions or hypotheses now. She is simply setting up the frameworks that will allow for patterns to emerge from the data. From these, observations will be made that should lead to questions derived from the facts of the case. This is “terra firma.” Observation first. Questions next. Interpretation last.

  Was any of this going to be productive and give her insight into Marcus, his life, and—if necessary—his whereabouts? Who knows. That’s how it really works in police investigations. No wonder no one writes about it.

  Taking a break, she flips from the music selection to the films. One involves robots beating each other up. It looks promising. Unfortunately there is no time left to watch it all; she’d hate to miss the third act.

  “Ma’am?” comes a man’s voice.

  Sigrid looks up. A handsome man is smiling at her and she can’t think of a good reason why.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re working quite intensely,” he says in English.

  “Is that a problem?”

  “No. I . . . was wondering if you’d like a drink.”

  The man is wearing an outfit provided by an airline, they are not in a bar, and he’s leaning in for an intimate and yet completely unthreatening personal conversation in the way that only gay men can. But for a brief, awkward, and mentally unhealthy moment she registers none of this and basks only in the blinding light of his generosity.

  “Sure,” she says.

  “The same?”

  “Sure,” she says.

  “What are you working on?”

  “A Bloody Mary.”

  “I meant the document.”

  “Oh,” she says, looking down. “I’m looking for emergent patterns in the data using a grounded approach in order to advance a missing persons case.”

  “Wow.”

  Mistaking his surprise with interest, she continues: “It’s really about ordering my thoughts at the beginning of the investigative process. Getting my hands into the material. That’s all. The fact is, all scientists—and investigators, too—know that most spontaneous insights happen only when you’re steeped in the data. I like to think that intuitive sparks are a function of creativity and analysis rubbing against each other.”

  She smiles at him and in that moment a crystallizing chill runs through her body. In its wake comes adrenaline and clarity. What she sees is a young man smiling back at her with a look of absolute pity. He places her second Bloody Mary on a square napkin in front of her as one might provide mush to a moron at an asylum. In watching his gesture it dawns on Sigrid that she might never—not metaphorically but for real—ever have sex again.

  The thought makes her both terrified and strangely relieved.

  “If there’s anything else you need,” he says, “just ask.” Sigrid smiles at him gently, knowing that he is, at that moment, her primary caregiver.

  Sigrid passes through Reykjavik without incident or interest, boards the second plane, and tries to sleep part of the way to Canada. They are chasing the sun by flying west during the daytime, and so, like at home, night never comes.

  Her friend Eli always has solutions to problems that aren’t her own. In this case, when Sigrid sent her a brief email from the farm telling her about the unexpected trip to the U.S., Eli recommended a drug for jet lag called Ambien, which is called Stilnoct in Norway. She swore by it and insisted that Sigrid buy some at the pharmacy before leaving for America. Her husband, a doctor, could send the prescription to the local pharmacy.

  Eli often traveled to Los Angeles because she works in the film industry doing something called “development,” which Sigrid has never understood and does not take much interest in either. Eli’s time in L.A. has clearly contributed to her view that drugs can help with any naturally occurring problem.

  In the morning, while packing, Sigrid looked up the drug on the internet. It is American, so she checked with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which states, “AMBIEN may cause serious side effects: After taking AMBIEN,” it began, before changing the typeface to bold, “you may get up out of bed while not being fully awake and do an activity that you do not know you are doing. The next morning, you may not remember that you did anything during the night.” To ensure it was not misunderstood, the FDA provided a bullet-pointed list of things you
might do during the night that you wouldn’t remember, including these:

  driving a car (“sleep-driving”)

  making and eating food

  talking on the phone

  having sex

  sleep-walking

  This was not a theoretical list made to be illustrative. Rather, it was a list of things that had “reportedly happened.”

  Sigrid decided not to buy Ambien at the pharmacy and instead take her chances with jet lag.

  She arrives in Montreal having slept almost three hours. She passes through customs and collects her rolling luggage. She is stopped by a small border control beagle with floppy ears and brown eyes. It sniffs her bags and crotch for drugs, bombs, and cheese.

  It is early evening, local time, and well past midnight back in Norway. She transfers to yet another gate for her third airplane; this one to Watertown, New York, USA. On that plane she does little more than hold on to the arms of her tiny chair and hope that the propeller plane—possibly borrowed from an Indiana Jones film—doesn’t crash.

  When she arrives she is pale, constipated, and tired. The summer evening is colder than she’d expected. The taxi that collects her is a monstrous American sedan not sold in Norway. She sits small and low in the back seat as the driver silently delivers her to a Holiday Inn close to the airport. It is properly dark when she checks in. The carpeted hallway smells of mothballs and lemon. She opens her hotel room door by inserting a white plastic card. A light turns green; the future is open.

  Sigrid removes her shoes and parks the suitcase by the dresser knowing she will not unpack. She washes her hands and face in the bathroom after being shocked by the unflattering glow of the fluorescent bulbs.