Sleeping Around

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Sleeping Around Page 13

by Brian Thacker


  Twenty minutes later we were driving into Legoland. In the middle of this barren landscape was Reykjavík. The world’s most northerly capital city is a Lego-like mishmash of ancient wooden houses with bright primary-coloured tin roofs and futuristic buildings made of concrete, steel, glass and lava. The whole scene was as dramatically composed as a theatrical set: The colours of the city buildings looked all the brighter against the dark, jagged backdrop of mountains in the middle distance and their snowy tips created an even stronger contrast with a sky of the deepest blue you can imagine.

  The bus station was on the edge of town sandwiched between two busy roads and a windswept field. Just to remind me that it was cold outside the cosy warmth of the bus, large chunks of ice were lying on the ground. There was only one person outside the bus terminal building waiting to greet the bus. It was Smári. The first thing I said to him when I stepped off the bus was ‘Aren’t you cold?’ Smári was wearing a light jacket and long-sleeved T-shirt (and pants of course). ‘No, I’m fine,’ he said as my teeth began to chatter. Smári had long blonde frizzy hair tied back in a ponytail and he was wearing a black bowler hat. Although Smári had never lived in Ireland, he spoke English with a disconcerting mixture of an Icelandic accent and an Irish lilt. He sounded like the lost love child of Bono and Björk. His Irish father had come to Iceland for a holiday, fallen in love with a local girl and moved here.

  On the very bracing ten-minute walk to Smári’s apartment, we passed a large modern glass building. ‘That’s where I work,’ Smári enthused. A large sign on the front of the building read ‘deCODE Genetics Corporation’.

  ‘I haven’t been for a while, though,’ he added. Smári hadn’t been to work for three weeks. ‘I work whenever,’ he shrugged. ‘They know I’ve got study.’

  ‘What do they, um, do or make in there?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a biopharmaceutical company that applies its discoveries in human genetics to the development of drugs for common diseases using DNA-based diagnostics, bioinformatics, genotyping and structural biology,’ Smári explained. Okay, he may have lost me there, but he continued, ‘Iceland has become the world leader in gene discovery because of its success in identifying gene stems using the Icelandic Health Sector Database, which contains the medical records and genealogical and genetic data of every single Icelander. Iceland is the ideal testing ground for genetic research because the population gene pool is pretty much pure.’ What Smári was trying to say, I think, is that the entire country is virtually one big, somewhat inbred, happy family.

  ‘You won’t find more than eight degrees of separation in familial connections between people in Iceland,’ Smári proclaimed. ‘We have a genealogical website which lists everyone in Iceland. You can pick any two names and the site will find a shared relative.’

  As we negotiated our way around a series of frozen puddles, Smári challenged me to name a famous Icelander.

  ‘I know two!’ I said proudly. ‘Björk and Eidur Gudjohnsen.’ [Gudjohnsen is a former Chelsea player and probably Iceland’s most famous sportsman.]

  ‘Björk and I share the same great, great, great grandmother,’ he said. ‘And Eidur Gudjohnsen is my uncle.’

  ‘Wow! Your uncle.’

  ‘Actually no, I haven’t checked him yet, but he’s probably my cousin or something.’

  Smári did however find some relative revelations when the site first went online. His childhood friend’s great grandfather was the brother of his great grandfather.

  Smári lived in ‘student quarters’, a series of apartment blocks not far from the university. Outside the entrance was a bike rack full of unlocked bicycles. Smári’s front door was also unlocked and he couldn’t even remember when he’d last seen his front-door key. I suppose there’s not much chance of theft in Iceland when you could very well be stealing from your second cousin.

  I winced with revulsion when I walked into Smári’s apartment. The entire apartment smelled of a heady mix of mouldy socks and rotten eggs. I actually gagged a few times while he gave me a very short tour of his apartment. It was a very short tour because there were only two rooms. The main room, which was tiny, looked crowded with stuff even though there was hardly anything in it. Squashed into the small space was a double bed, kitchen cupboards and a sink, a fridge, a stove, a small desk with a computer, a bookshelf and a couch that was smaller than José’s mini-couch in Santiago. Not that I could really see much of the couch, or the bench, or the desk. Every surface was littered with empty mega-litre plastic Pepsi bottles, jumbo chip packets and empty bowls of pot noodles. On the couch lay a couple of open pizza boxes with half-eaten slices of pizza in them. Basically, it was like most ‘student quarters’ I’d seen (and lived in).

  ‘Um, is that my bed?’ I asked gravely.

  ‘No, I’ve got this for you,’ Smári said as he dragged a blow-up mattress out from under his bed. Well, that was a new one for my slumber collection.

  There was something else quite disconcerting about the room. Scrawled on a large whiteboard mounted on the wall and all over the glass door leading to the small balcony were the ravings of a lunatic. Well, that’s what it looked like. They were actually complicated mathematical formulas that Smári had been working on as part of his course. ‘I’ve been working on this one formula for over a week and I’m still not close to an answer,’ he said, adding another x2 = y2 to the bottom of the mess of symbols and numbers.

  He wouldn’t get much help from me. I don’t know my pi from a pastie. I couldn’t even understand the names of most of the subjects Smári was studying at university, which included Applied Linear Statistical Models, Algorithm Analysis, Numerical Analysis and Life in the Universe.

  ‘One time I had a difficult formula,’ Smári said. ‘And I’d worked on it for hours without any luck, so I went to the pub and got drunk. When I woke up in the morning I saw that in my drunken state I’d scribbled numbers all over the board.’

  ‘Did it make any sense?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, it was the right answer.’

  We finished our very brief apartment tour in the bathroom where the rancid smell was even more intense. And there they were. The evil-smelling culprits were Smári’s socks, which were hanging over the shower rod. Smári must have noticed me wincing, because he said, ‘We’re so used to the stink that we forget other people aren’t used to it.’

  ‘Oh yeah, it is a little smelly,’ I said in between gags.

  ‘Get used to it, because everyone’s place smells like this.’

  Wow, the entire country must be inflicted with foot rot.

  ‘It’s the sulphur in the water,’ Smári said.

  Ahh, so it wasn’t the socks. Smári then went on to explain that almost the entire country is one big active volcano that sits on a thin crust of land above a subterranean cauldron of molten rock and the result is an abundance of geothermally heated, and somewhat smelly, sulphur-rich water. This gives Icelanders an endless supply of hot water, which also heats their homes and even keeps the streets and footpaths free of snow and ice during the winter.

  If only they would turn up the heating on the footpaths, because within a few minutes of leaving the apartment to walk downtown I was shivering again (Smári didn’t own a car, much to my chilly chagrin). When we strolled past a frozen lake called Tjörn (which means pond in Icelandic), I noticed that one end wasn’t frozen and was crammed with flapping ducks and swans.

  ‘I wonder why that bit’s not frozen,’ I said.

  Smári then spent the next ten minutes explaining why with a complex mathematical equation. Apparently it’s the water density times the volume times the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. Or something like that.

  The setting sun cast long shadows and a golden glow over the city as we wandered down stone-paved streets past brightly painted peaked-roof buildings. ‘The sun sets at around five-thirty this time of year,’ Smári said.

  ‘What about in mid-winter?’

  ‘At Christmas the sun do
esn’t rise until noon, then sets two hours later.’

  Gee, that must be depressing, I thought.

  ‘People get depressed in winter,’ Smári continued. ‘Then, in summer, people get insomnia, and that’s just as depressing.’ At the height of summer, the sun sets at midnight and is back up again less than three hours later.

  When we reached town we stopped at a cafe for a beer. Most of the hip, cool-looking people in the cafe were tapping away on laptops. ‘Just about every pub and cafe has free wireless internet connection,’ Smári told me as we ordered our beers. ‘We also have the world’s highest per capita internet access.’

  And, I imagine, the world’s highest per capita quota of cafes with very little conversation going on. Even groups of friends sitting at tables were stuck in their own little computer worlds.

  When I finally dragged my jaw off the ground to drink the beer that cost $12 a glass, it tasted horrible. It was probably very nice, but with my cold it tasted like dishwater. Smári finished his beer before I’d even taken two sips. I certainly wouldn’t be keeping up with him unless I was prepared to re-mortgage the house. I didn’t really feel like finishing the beer, but for twelve dollars I even drank the very last soppy dregs (or two dollars’ worth).

  On the short walk from the cafe into the city centre, Smári pointed out Hofdi House, where Ronny Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev agreed in 1986 that pointing nuclear-armed missiles at each other might not be such a good idea after all. Smári was pointing out all sorts of things, but my cold-induced fuzzy brain was having trouble taking it all in.

  The city centre looked more like a small village centre. Even though Laugavegur, the main drag, was full of boutique shops, pubs, discos, theatres and restaurants, it looked positively tiny. We walked past the prime minister’s office, which was a modest two-storey building that had no fence around it and no security guards. ‘I think Iceland is the only country in the world where the prime minister’s name is listed in the phone book,’ Smári said.

  If I did decide to look him up in the phone book, Smári told me that I would need to look up his first name as Icelanders address each other by their first names. Surnames are just made up of the Christian name of the father with the suffix ‘dottir’ or ‘son’.

  ‘Here is a good example of Icelandic sarcasm,’ Smári said as we passed a small bluestone building. ‘It used to be a prison and now it’s the Ministry of Finance.’

  It’s amazing that although Reykjavík is the size of a country town, it is a capital city with all that entails, including government buildings, media, arts, museums, headquarters of major companies and all the infrastructure involved in running a country. And, according to Smári, the population is smart, beautiful and a bit smelly. Iceland has the world’s highest per capita ratio of Nobel prizewinners and Miss Worlds, and 60 per cent of Iceland’s national income still comes from fish.

  We met up with Smári’s friend Johann in the city centre to grab a bite from ‘one of the cheapest places in town’. I liked that idea. And so did my bank balance.

  ‘I offered you my couch,’ Johann said when we met. ‘But you said that you’d already found one.’

  ‘Oh, you have a robot called Benjamin,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Good, he was busy tonight, though.’

  What a coincidence. Johann was Smari’s best friend (and possibly his cousin).

  The restaurant did look cheap, but the cheapest thing on the menu was a seventeen-dollar crepe. We all ordered crepes. Like Smári, Johann had a job that had something to do with logarithms and Pythagoras’s theorem. And, also like Smári, Johann was only wearing a light jacket and a T-shirt. When I asked if they were both a little bonkers, Johann told me that, although the Arctic Circle was less than 300 kilometres away, the Gulf Stream so moderates temperatures that in winter Reykjavík is never freezing.

  ‘But it’s, um, freezing now,’ I said with a shudder.

  ‘We’re used to it,’ Johann said. ‘Even in summer the average temperature is only thirteen degrees.’

  ‘It got to twenty-three degrees one summer a few years ago!’ Smári said brightly.

  ‘Oh, that’s too hot for me,’ Johann winced. ‘Zero is the perfect temperature for me.’

  After we finished our dinner Smári announced, ‘Let’s go get some dinner.’

  Our crepe was just an appetiser.

  As we tottered down the road Smári said, ‘I’m going to take you to the most famous restaurant in Iceland.’

  Oh dear. If a simple crepe was seventeen dollars, how expensive would the most famous restaurant in Iceland be?

  ‘Dignitaries, celebrities and politicians have eaten there,’ Smári said. ‘President Clinton went there twice.’

  Oh dear. The soup is probably 50 dollars.

  I was just about to say that I was already full from the rather diminutive crepe when we rounded a corner and Smári announced, ‘Here we are!’ We had stopped in front of a hot dog stand.

  ‘The most famous restaurant in all of Iceland,’ Smári said proudly. The hot dog stand was called Bæjarins beztu pylsur, which translates as ‘The best hot dogs in town’. And it wasn’t just the best hot dogs in town. On the wall was a newspaper clipping from The Guardian newspaper in the UK, which selected Bæjarins beztu pylsur as the best hot dog stand in all of Europe.

  ‘You can even get a Bill Clinton hot dog,’ Smári said.

  ‘Does it come with a free cigar?’ I smirked.

  We all ordered a pylsa with the lot and, best of all, because Smári’s friend from university was manning the stand, our hot dogs were free.

  Johann had to get home. ‘My apartment is disgusting and I’ve got a couch surfer from Australia arriving at midnight,’ he said before scurrying off. It was dark now and the sky dazzled with constellations burning big and so bright they seemed within reach. Some were so bright in fact that I thought they were planes in low approach to the runway.

  ‘Do you think couch-surfing hosts and guests ever, like, get it on?’ I asked Smári as we trudged back to his apartment. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ I hastily added. ‘I’m not going to try and make a move on you, I was just thinking about Johann and the Australian girl.’

  ‘Johann has a girlfriend, but I don’t think it would happen that often anyway.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose,’ I said. ‘If you’re a male host, then it’s pretty sleazy coming on to a girl you’ve invited into your house. And the opposite is even worse, when a girl invites you to stay then you try to stay in her bed.’

  A few minutes later we passed a bookshop and Smári asked, ‘Do you mind if we go in here?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ I enthused.

  If Smári had asked if I wanted to go into a vacuum cleaner shop, I would have said yes. Anything to get out of the cold for a minute. The bookshop was called Mals & Menningar and it had a huge selection of books in both Icelandic and English.

  ‘Iceland has the highest literacy rate in the world and there are more books published here per capita than any other country,’ Smári said, as I flicked through a Harry Potter book in Icelandic (Harry Potter og eldbikarinn).

  When we got back to Smári’s apartment I discovered why he knew so many facts and trivia about Iceland and, well, the world in general. Smári was one of the main contributors to the Icelandic version of Wikipedia and he’d personally added a few thousand articles and pages to the site. It’s amazing what you can achieve without a television. Smári was also writing a novel. In English. It was an historical Icelandic fantasy-fiction story. If Smári managed to get his book published, he would join the nation’s average of one in ten people who will publish a book of prose or poetry within their lifetime.

  Smári told me that he spent a lot of time on the computer either writing, researching, programming or—now and again—downloading a movie or TV show to watch. As this trip unfolded I was witnessing first-hand how the computer is turning the world into one big shared household. Sm�
�ri showed me a video on YouTube that both Bob in Chicago and Pedro in Rio had also shown me. The internet-connected folk from every corner of the globe are all watching the same YouTube videos, reading each other’s blogs, buying each other’s junk on eBay, finding info on Wikipedia, chatting to friends on MySpace and Facebook, and all Googling like crazy.

  I went to show Smári something on the net and when I Googled for the link, he said, ‘Do you know how Google works?’

  ‘Um, you type something in and it finds stuff with that, err, name in it.’

  ‘Google assigns a numeric weighting from zero to ten for each webpage on the net, which denotes the site’s importance according to Google,’ Smari said as he rubbed out the equation on the glass door and began writing seemingly random letters and numbers in adjoining boxes. ‘It’s called page-rank and . . . blah blah logarithmic inbound links . . . blah blah analysis algorithm . . . blah blah hyperlinks . . .’

  Smári was still explaining and drawing boxes of numbers and letters when I’d set up the air mattress and hopped into bed.

  I woke up at four in the morning lying flat on the hard floor. My air mattress had deflated. I tried to blow it back up again, but the hole was too big for my mouth. Then I remembered that there was an electric mattress pump under Smári’s bed. I very quietly tiptoed past Smári and carefully plugged in the pump. I even delicately flicked the switch, so there wouldn’t be a loud ‘clicking’ noise to wake Smári. Then . . .

  ‘VRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!’

  The pump sounded like a small plane taking off. Smári flew out of bed and landed on the floor with a thud. ‘What? Shit! Who’s there?’ Smári shrieked, with wild eyes and even wilder hair.

  When I woke up again later, Smári was already up and sitting at the computer in his baggy underpants watching the sci-fi television series Babylon 5. ‘Gee, it looks like a beautiful day today,’ I said. The bright morning sun was streaming through the window.

 

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