He joined her in that indefinable place between the sheets while it lasted. His hand felt enormous on the small of her back. His thumbs settled into those dimples by her spine. The longer he stared into her skin the more he wondered why humans—his humans—ever migrated from Africa to the Arctic; the ones with such a chronic sense of discontentment that they were led directly into Lutheranism.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked from beneath the sheets.
“Happiness.”
Afterward, Lydia slipped out of the bed for the bathroom and sooner than expected reemerged in a black dress—“Zip me”—and he tried to match her in his casual navy blue suit with brown shoes.
They walked three blocks toward the restaurant and decided, thanks to her new shoes that chafed her heels, to flag down a cab. Lydia spoke the French she had learned during her doctorate as a research and credit requirement. Her accent was imperfect and her phrases dated. The Quebecois were charmed that an American would even try.
The restaurant was larger than Marcus had expected. It was a converted industrial space. The ceilings were vaulted and the ash pillars were concrete and square. Interspersed were rich fabrics of bold and geometric design that contrasted with the polished steel surfaces. The bartender was a beautiful brunette in a sleeveless black dress that plunged to her sternum. Her face said she was uninterested in her own beauty.
They both ordered the lamb shank.
Lydia selected a Brunello di Montalcino and ordered carpaccio with rocket, parmigiano, and capers for a starter. When it arrived she picked off the capers and used his lemon.
The bread was baked in the kitchen. It was hot on arrival. They ripped the crust and steam rose between them.
Marcus is remembering Montreal from Saranac Lake. The other men have retreated down the coastline a few hundred yards and have started a fire. It is the only one nearby. Marcus watches the smoke rise and the orange light flicker off the still lake. He is focusing on the point where the smoke dissipates and becomes part of the vast nothingness beyond; dissolution but also a unification with the infinite. The boy-men by the fire are scorching marshmallows for s’mores and roasting hot dogs that bounce precariously from the tips of twigs. They are enacting a ritual from childhood that has specific rules and expected outcomes. They are also defying the traditional social order—civilization itself—by making the savory and the sweet simultaneously. Rebellion too is part of the American frontier experience.
Marcus sits against a tree in the darkness. The clouds are matte black to the west. Someone is getting wet somewhere. Maybe someone he knows.
The woods here in the Adirondacks are not unlike home—that place where Sigrid used to follow him around, everywhere, when friends came to his house and they’d all run off into the woods, or go for a swim, or cross-country ski or go sledding. He liked having her around more than he admitted. That stopped when their mother’s cancer came. Sigrid was too young to understand. Five years old. He was almost eleven when it started. It irked him that she didn’t feel what he did. That feeling—that distance—only grew.
“She isn’t very sad,” he’d said to his father on one especially bad morning for his mother.
“No. Not really.”
Sigrid was having a conversation with a stuffed camel. She looked perfectly normal and he wondered which of them was broken.
“That’s because she doesn’t know what love is yet,” he’d said.
His father pressed him closer but neither had more to say.
Astrid was dead in a year. That battle was lost. He had not said the right things. He wanted to say the right things with Lydia. He wanted it at the beginning of their friendship so badly, he was willing to steal the exam and cheat on the test. After their first kiss—more a declaration of intent than an act of passion—Marcus started to obsess. He wanted to understand and be deserving of this smart and pretty and vivacious and driven woman, this woman who read books on Saturday nights. Who liked hiking in the woods. Who could talk for hours about history and ideas. Who was passionate about justice but also forgiving in character. A woman—he soon learned—who knew how to turn a cloth napkin into a chicken and make it sing and dance to if you want my body and you think I’m sexy . . .
The day after the kiss Marcus collected all her publications from the library and set about the task of understanding this part of her mind. With the crooning chicken still fresh in his memory, he was surprised to find her analysis of the American experience to be powerfully pessimistic. Most of the work was targeted to academics in peer-reviewed journals, and he tried to make sense of the citations and scholastic shorthand but he wasn’t able to place the debate and so couldn’t fully understand it. What he did find as a guide to Lydia’s mind was an interview conducted by a student journalist for the school paper. Lydia had had a piece accepted in Daedalus, the journal published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Barack Obama’s showing in the polls was getting stronger, and the journalist—a nineteen-year-old junior named Darren Farley—wanted to understand why Lydia’s central thesis in the Daedalus article seemed to run counter to the optimistic and popular mood.
DARREN FARLEY: Professor Jones, your central thesis is that America is not so much ignoring racism as much as it’s inherently incapable of addressing it. How can a country be inherently incapable of something?
LYDIA JONES: I don’t recall using that phrase, inherently incapable, but I did say that the primary structuring ideas of American identity—the ones that sustain us as a culture through time—orient us away from dealing with racism, not toward dealing with it. That’s not quite the same thing, because it leaves open the possibility for learning, but for regular people it will feel the same.
DF: Which ones orient us away from it? I mean . . . most people would think that liberty and justice for all, and equality and civil rights and all those superhero values are the ones that are most American. Aren’t they?
LJ: In my view, all those wonderful values are reposed on something else. We think they’re core, but they aren’t. If you take all the words you just used—all those superhero values, as you call them—and cluster them like a little galaxy on the blackboard, you can ask yourself a helpful question, which is: ‘What’s the gravitational center that holds those ideas together? What is the organizing principle, as it were, that keeps them in orbit?’ If you spend time on it, you’ll find that a productive answer is ‘individualism’ and the worth of the single person. In one way, that is very beautiful. But it’s also pretty unyielding. If you are entirely focused on the individual, you end up with blinders on for other things. Conservatives—and a lot of white people generally—cling to the idea that we’re all racially free now and we’re equal and there’s no more work to be done. Some say this because they’re racist. But a lot of them aren’t in my view. They do it because of their cherished belief in American individualism. When liberals or people of color draw attention to race, it sounds to conservatives and libertarians and individualists like we’re splitting people into groups, rather than helping them overcome the condition of being born into a group. Individualists claim to be aspiring to unity. In a twisted way, they think that focusing on and addressing racism is itself a kind of racism because it subordinates individuals to group status.
DF: So individualism is the problem?
LJ: It’s not so much a problem as a paradox, isn’t it? It’s both the problem and the solution. What we’re up against now is a conservative movement anchored in a way of seeing Americanness that says that any attention to group problems, or trying to actively support diversity through representation is actually divisive and discriminatory itself. This, by the way, is why they call liberals un-American. Any attention to group suffering or group needs is divisive in their view. People of color cry out, saying that we’re in pain, but they deny the pain and say it’s an individual pain, not a group one. They see the entire world through this individualism prism—or that’s what I call it in the article, anyway. It neg
ates discussions of race and racism. In my view, this perspective is overpowering and insurmountable maybe because it’s deeper than race. It’s deeper than politics. It’s a culturally organizing system. It’s how we achieve Americanness. It’s how we do Americanness. It’s a kind of performance. If this is true, America can win battles against racism in court or in passing new laws and adopting new policies, but we’ll never win the war on history and circumstance because it requires people seeing with different eyes; eyes that would force them to unravel and redefine their American selves. And that’s the one thing we can’t do, because it’s the only thing that binds us all together. One can’t escape the observation that America historically enslaves groups, but only frees individuals.
He sat on this knowledge for weeks like it was a guilty secret—as though he had stolen a furtive look at her diary and knew more about her than she would ever have told him. It felt as though any look in its direction, any admission that her conclusions were real—any attention given to their racial identities—would wake them from a dream or break a spell. He wasn’t delusional about the depth of their bond, but he needed to find a way of overcoming what might be the cause of their future ending. He couldn’t look past the obvious irony: He wanted to elevate their uniqueness by negating the very history that Lydia had argued was essential to their condition. But . . . he was Norwegian. Did American race relations extend to him? Is whiteness contagious?
“How is everything?” the Canadian waiter had asked.
Marcus didn’t answer. He was watching Lydia sprinkle flaked salt on a piece of bread.
“Fine, thank you,” Lydia had said.
That is when her phone rang. The ringtone was old-fashioned, the way home phones in America used to sound. Their main courses had not yet arrived. The waiter cleared the table as she reached into her purse and checked the number.
“It’s Karen,” she whispered, the candlelight reflecting off her eyes and the phone.
Her sister. She needed to take this.
Jeffrey—with whom Marcus had played chess twice and lost, with whom he’d played Battleship once and won—had been shot by the police. He was dead.
Marcus could hear Karen choking on her grief on the phone. The sounds were pre-verbal, pre-human. Anguish.
Lydia’s impulse was to make Karen’s pain stop. As she opened her mouth to speak, though, the breathlessness entered her too. It swelled inside her, silently, and her eyes filled with tears as her free hand moved—not toward Marcus—but to her own throat. When she finally gasped for air it sounded like a valve opening and a cold wind rushed into her, filling her, and remaining there.
Marcus led her to the parking lot. In the car—in time, and once the engine started to cover the sound, she sobbed. He raised his hand to place it on her back but he didn’t dare.
In the dark, smelling of fine cologne and perfume, and rent from all capacity for speech, they drove back to the United States across the border, where the guards asked, again, if they had anything to declare.
The boys with the melted chocolate meals would be gone tomorrow, they’d said. It is just as well. It is only a matter of time, Marcus thinks, before the police arrive here; before the black helicopters appear through the rain clouds and pierce the night with their blinking red and green lights—an orange shadow aglow in their cockpits, their pilots soaring over the water like mystical demigods, whirling their blades for divine justice with no sense of its value.
It would be best if Sigrid didn’t come, Marcus thinks as he pushes forward the cylinder release on his Taurus .38 revolver and counts the rounds. She doesn’t need to see this. He knows what it looks like when a story is over and he understands how the parts must fulfill their dramatic promises. Lydia’s parents need her story to end in a way that removes all doubt. The police need a villain. The black community does too. And it’s fine. He deserves it. He did then, and he does now. It is better this way.
Still. It would be better for Sigrid to hear about it all later. Like the first time.
The Sofa
This motel, Sigrid learns, doesn’t even have an ice machine. It crouches in the woods behind a black pool of asphalt that shimmers in the rain, the oil rising to the surface and distorting the inverted letters mounted on the roof—L-E-T-O-M.
Her brief internet search for Saranac Lake back at the police station had made the town look picturesque. This motel was not in those photos.
The window is open and Sigrid sits on the edge of the bed. The colors inside are warm but uninviting. Burnt umber in the bedspread. Yellow from the aged bulbs. A red carpet worn to the white threads at the door. She is the only one staying here tonight aside from the fat man in the office watching a game show.
It had been easier getting here than she’d expected. Irv’s people are helpful and accommodating, but their willingness to drive her out here without his sign-off confirmed her suspicion that they are too officious and overly yielding to authority—whether real or imagined. If it were her team she would start demanding more critical thinking.
The main office at the sheriff’s station has a television mounted to the wall on a swing arm, and Sigrid had been able to see it from her jail cell. The news report from the Target parking lot had been broadcast live. She watched a well-dressed black man carry a colorful umbrella and talk to the crowd of people as Melinda exited the patrol car. A ticker ran across the bottom of the screen telling of the deescalating tensions.
There was no more drama to watch and, she realized, no more reason for her to remain at the police station. The time had come to move on.
Setting out for the Adirondacks alone felt right. Irv could catch up later. Or not. At this point, finding Marcus was more important.
She may not have needed Irv but she did still need a ride. Taking another American bus deliberately was not going to happen. That smell of rotting processed meat and stale cigarettes, the whiff of urine from the platforms, the exhaust fumes, the sweaty feet up on the armrests . . . there had to be another way.
Leaving her jail cell, she found a young deputy out in the main room named Eddie Caldwell. There was something in his face that made Sigrid believe he had never experienced pain.
“Irv wants you to drive me to Saranac Lake,” Sigrid had said. “We have to leave now. You know who I am, right?”
Eddie looked skeptical but also impressionable, so Sigrid leaned into the lie. “I’m Chief Inspector Sigrid Ødegård. And we’re running a little late. I wouldn’t mind a bit of hustle.”
Eddie grabbed his jacket and told a woman named Alice he’d be back in a few hours, and off they went.
Sigrid’s first motel visit had been shared with two bottles of second-rate blended whiskey and a gigantic bucket of ice. She’d spent her time wiggling her toes and staring at them. This time, Sigrid wants to do better.
Tomorrow she plans to visit Frank Allman, the local sheriff, as soon as the station opens at nine in the morning. It is her assumption that Frank will be there and Irv will not. This should give her time alone to apprise Allman of the situation with Marcus and to see whether he’s inclined toward a thoughtful and considered approach to finding him or—in the vein of Irv’s SERT commander, Pinkerton—he’s preparing to burn the forest to find Marcus. If it’s the latter, Sigrid will have to put her new plan into motion.
This new plan, unlike her failed biker-bar plan, is going to work. All that’s required is a map, Marcus’s GPS coordinates, and—if the situation turns dire—a lot of alcohol. In a few minutes she’ll have everything she needs.
She takes the key and leaves.
The motel is a dump, yes, but its saving grace is its proximity to an all-night liquor store. Outside, along a path worn into the grass by the side of the road, Sigrid draws in the evening smells of warm pavement and fresh rain before entering a surprisingly well-stocked freestanding garage of a liquor store. An electronic bing-bing announces her entrance, but no one inside acknowledges it. She collects a green plastic basket with two sta
inless handles and swings it from her arm while whistling a new song by Maria Mena.
In Norway there is only one store for alcohol and it can be found in cities all across the country: the Wine Monopoly. It is state-owned and taxed beyond reason, and the cheapest bottle of fermented Austrian sludge costs around seventeen dollars. Here, though. Oh . . . here it is different. Here is where a plan comes together at the right price.
When Sigrid and Marcus were children they would find discarded soda and beer bottles in a creek that ran through the center of the village. They’d soak off the labels, wash them off, and then—in the deepest, darkest, deadest of night, way, way after eight o’clock—they’d balance the colored bottles on upturned flashlights, casting an eerie green aura across the room, turning their cozy home into a flickering cloud of nuclear mist. Into that toxic cloud they’d tell ghost stories until someone—usually Marcus—freaked out.
All those bottles are here. And so are all those blended whiskeys for people who can’t afford or appreciate the single-malts in aisle three. And, yes, there are her friends from the Isle of Skye, and the Highlands, and a few Lowlands, and—look!—a sale on almost-properly-shaped whiskey glasses.
American by Day Page 21