I type these words, as I have each morning that week—only harder and faster than I had typed them the morning before. With minimal variations, I describe a woman sitting in front of a mirror, applying makeup on her wedding day. Then I hit the same spot as always and I freeze up completely. I cannot seem to get inside her head. Anything I imagine seems completely wrong. I do not know what she is thinking.
So I sit. And I sip my coffee. And I try not to think about my leg. I backspace a few times and then space quickly forward, as if pouncing upon the next sentence, but I pause again. So I wind the paper up and down a little. And I pop open the door on the side where the ribbon goes in. And I wish I had a laptop. And I stare out the window at the pines in the dark. The sun never rises and the sun never sets. It is just dark all the time. When I arrived, I noticed a crooked, stone bell tower, but I have yet to hear any bells to mark the passing of time. Without my wristwatch, the only indication of a day’s passing is that periodically there is an odd piercing column of light visible through the window. It comes up from way beyond the woods, for maybe two or three hours, and vanishes again. Whenever it appears, I give up on writing and I go about making a few cautious inquiries about my missing friend.
The Laxness-Hallgrímsson Writers’ Colony is a labyrinth of ancient hallways and rooms that are mostly empty. It was once a medieval church, built into the foot of the Akrafjall Mountain for the fishermen of Akranes. Because timber is scarce in Iceland, when the writers took over they removed hundreds of stones from the walls and used the hollows to shelve books. There must be thousands in every room—all written by Icelanders, in their native language.
Lazily I make my way down to the “chapel,” which has been converted into a gathering space for the various writers residing at the colony. Its three crucifixes have been draped with black cloth, and the pews were long ago ripped out of the long, narrow transept and replaced with long stone tables, where those of us with writer’s block or an urge to stretch our legs can engage in a little social activity—or try to, in our socially stunted, introverted, writerly ways. When I arrive, a small cadre of playwrights is busily painting with watercolors. I sit down with a smile, grab a brush, and dip it into a golden-colored paint, waiting for someone to pass me a sheet of paper. A quick look around the table shows that I am not welcome.
“Private session,” a woman with thinning gray hair says, grabbing the brush away from me. “For dramatists only.”
I have no clue if she is someone in charge or another of the writers. She does not look like a Franklin, though. Upon arrival, I was greeted by a toothless man who did not correct me when I addressed him as Mr. Zaff, and when I handed him my bags, he began combing through them. I thought perhaps this was just heightened security, until he rushed off with all my pens.
Down at the other end of the table, two old men with leonine manes of shock-white hair are having a discussion in some strange tongue, jabbing at a thick stack of pages between them. Hoping they are fiction writers, like me, I walk toward them, but they quickly lean into a huddle and lower their voices. All week I have been trying to pal up with someone who might have seen Jeffrey around, but writers tend to be the least extroverted people in the universe, even in Iceland.
My teeth begin to chatter and I decide to try to find something warming to eat in the kitchen. On the way down the hallway I hear a woman’s voice, yelling fitfully in a nails-on-chalkboard brogue. “Na, na, na,” she insists. “That’s’nt how is’posed to be! That’s’nt it at all!” When I come upon her, I find that she is completely alone.
She is quite pretty, not much younger than myself, and stares bluntly at me, as if she’s expecting a reply. So I say, “I know the feeling.” She blinks twice and steps closer. “Writing not quite going as you want it to?” I add. She tugs at the neckline of her loose, black sweater-coat, and for a second she seems about to pull it off. Then, without warning, she vomits all over the stone floor. I barely leap back in time to avoid the spew, and when I do, pain sparks like a string of firecrackers up my leg and my spine and all out from there, and I crumble to the ground, just a foot or so away from the puddle. Steam rises up through the chill of the hallway.
“Is there a nurse or a doctor anywhere?” I yell into the empty corridor. In the distance I hear hurried footsteps, but as soon as the girl hears them she goes flying down the hallway, swooping her arms around, batlike. My leg is hurting too much to chase after her, so I wait there for whoever is coming the other way. It turns out to be not a nurse but a gigantic man with spiked black hair and a bull’s ring through his septum.
“You all right?” he asks gruffly, reaching to help me up. All the nails on his right hand are polished black. He seems to be wearing mascara. The sound of atonal jazz is coming from a set of bulky headphones around his neck. “You tossed up?”
“No,” I insist, a little too firmly. “There was this girl. Talking to herself in here. And then she tossed . . . er . . . threw up and ran off that way.”
The man stares at me as if I am crazy, and for a moment I’m not so sure he’s wrong. Not for the first time I wonder if I have, in fact, arrived at a madhouse by mistake. As if reading my mind, the tall man slowly bends down and takes a long sniff of the acrid puddle on the floor.
“Black death,” he says ominously.
“Excuse me?” I ask. I did not spend an entire month alone in a hospital bed only to come to Iceland to catch the plague.
“Brennivín. It’s our national liquor. Svarti dauði—or ‘Black Death’—what we call it here,” he says. “It ought to have a skull and crossbones on the label. Smells of caraway seeds, yeah?”
Without getting too close, I inhale sharply. I get a whiff of bile and beneath it, the faint anise scent of caraway, indeed.
“Sounds like you ran into Molly Collins. Loves the stuff. Says it’s inspiring. Iceland’s answer to absinthe, only twice as disgusting.” He takes a giant step over the puddle and grips my hand in his icy one. “Einar Thorlac.”
Einar leads me to the kitchen, where I wash myself off. Then, in the large clean fridge, he locates some skyr—a local dairy product that is somewhere between cheese and yogurt—and hands it to me. He grabs some greenish blood sausage for himself. Einar soon proves to be, by far, the friendliest person I have met in the colony since I arrived.
“Everyone in Iceland wants to be a writer,” he explains to me smugly while we eat. “Like in America how you all want to eat slug poops on TV for money.”
“Hey,” I interrupt, thinking of the daytime sociological atrocities I’d seen on the hospital television. “Some of us actually draw the line at the slugs themselves.”
“We here in Iceland have just three hundred thousand people, and each year we publish one thousand new novels.”
This number seems astounding for any populace, but I have a harder time believing there can be so much to say about this place—which from my window appears to be just an endless, frozen expanse of cold blue trees and snow.
“One book for every three hundred people, every year? That puts even Brooklyn to shame.”
Einar lets out a deep belly laugh and asks me some questions about living in New York City, where I haven’t really lived in years—mostly how I can live there, what with the many heroin addicts and muggings. And I tell him that it isn’t like that so much anymore, and he seems a bit let down. Eventually, the inevitable question comes.
“So how is your writing coming along?” he asks me.
“Quite well,” I lie. How can you confess writer’s block to someone whose countrymen crank out a Library of Alexandria each year? “And you?”
“I wrote seventeen words this morning,” he says proudly. “But I’m a poet. For me that’s very good.”
We share a laugh and then stare out the window and wonder if the weather will ever clear up. The strange light is on again, cutting through the darkness.
“What is that?” I ask, gesturing to it.
“The Friðarsúlan,” he says. “Mea
ning ‘Imagine Peace Column.’ Yoko Ono built it out on the island of Viðey in memory of John.”
He pauses while I look confused, then adds, “Lennon?”
“Yes, I’m familiar with his work,” I say quickly. “Just didn’t know his crazy widow had built a giant spotlight in the middle of a frozen ocean for him.”
Einar is shocked that this news has not reached America, particularly in the great city where Lennon was shot by one of the many crazies who no longer overrun the place. We’re preoccupied, I explain—what with all the slug poops.
“It runs entirely off of geothermal energy,” he says proudly. “On the side is written ‘Hugsa Sér Frið’—that’s ‘Imagine Peace’—in twenty-four languages.”
Both of us stare out at the light, which glows bright and steady. It has been snowing ceaselessly for the whole week that I have been here and, even for Iceland, it is apparently untenable. All the roads are closed—the taxi that took me here from the airport ferry drove a snowplow ahead of it and charged me a small fortune. I’m praying the Oakeses will reimburse me, should I locate their son. My mind drifts back to my hospital stay, weeks ago.
One morning I had opened my eyes to find a beautiful older woman in a dark pantsuit sitting by my side. For a moment I’d thought it was my mother, but soon I realized that it was someone else’s mother—Mrs. Pauline Oakes. Not entirely certain that she was not a by-product of my morphine drip, I ventured a hello. Glad to see me awake, she skipped the pleasantries and got straight to the point.
“My father called from Africa, about your . . . accident. At first we thought he was completely out of his mind. He kept saying Jeffrey had been hurt. But then a nice young man from North Carolina whose family is well known in the telecom business was there, and he confirmed that you were actually just a friend of Jeffrey’s and, well—. Look, let’s just take all that nonsense from the past and leave it there. Close the book, as it were.”
I must have nodded groggily. I barely remembered who I was, let alone who Jeffrey was. Let alone why I’d been in Africa.
“Jeffrey has checked himself in to some writers’ colony in Iceland, and he hasn’t called or written in two months. And, despite the threat of a lawsuit, the caretaker there has refused to respond to me.”
Mr. and Mrs. Oakes were the owners of Oakes International, which imported and exported wines and other luxury foods around the globe, and they had more or less raised Jeffrey in the vineyards of the Loire Valley, the caviar farms of the Black Sea, the Merino sheep pastures of Norwich, and in the finest real estate in all of Manhattan.
“How do you know he’s still there?” I asked.
“Someone just ordered twelve bottles of the Petit Pineau to the colony,” she said. “The 1998. That’s Jeffrey’s favorite.”
“What do you want me to do about it?” I asked. Maybe she didn’t know that Jeffrey and I hadn’t been on speaking terms in more than ten years, though we’d been quite close before his worldwide success had settled in, and unsettled him.
Mrs. Oakes made a face. “You’re a writer, too, aren’t you?” She said “writer” as if it were approximately one rung beneath sanitation engineer. “I’ll pay you to go there and find my son. If you can persuade Jeffrey to come home, I’ll be quite grateful.”
She said “grateful” in a way that made me feel that there would be even more money involved if I succeeded. When I stared blankly at my swollen, bandaged leg, she coughed and added, “And, seeing as you have no health insurance to speak of, as a sign of good faith, and on the condition you won’t sue my father for any involvement in your injury, my husband has already settled your sizeable hospital bill.”
She got up and gave me a smile that was almost kind, and then she left. For a long time I lay in bed, jamming the buttons on the TV remote that was built into the side rail, scanning endless airwaves. Feisty judges hollered at civil court plaintiffs about unpaid child support. “Real” housewives who appeared to be 90 percent silicone drank and squabbled over their marital troubles. Parents herded their eight, twelve, possibly thirty-seven children about like goats. I thought about Mrs. Oakes, worrying after her son. I thought about my own mother, to whom I hadn’t spoken in years. She did not even know that I had nearly died. She might even be dead herself. How would I know?
Shaking off these sobering thoughts, I half consider asking Einar for a bottle of Brennivín.
When I look back at the table, I notice that both Einar’s plate and mine have been cleared. He is flipping through a small book of poems that he has pulled down from a nearby shelf—even the kitchenette has perhaps a hundred books tucked into its walls.
“Did you clear that? Was someone else in here just now?” I ask, thinking that the elusive Franklin W. Zaff must be close by at last.
Einar shrugs, nonplussed. “The caretaker tries not to distract us. Unless of course it was the elves.”
He smirks slightly at this last statement, and I cannot tell if he is serious. According to the brochure I found, Icelanders are extremely superstitious about what they call “hidden people”—rumored to live underground and inside of rocks. Superstitious to the point where Reykjavik’s new state-of-the-art opera house was carefully constructed so as not to disturb the surrounding bedrock and features a crystalline upper floor resembling the mythical dwellings of the hidden people. Perhaps they hoped to entice a few to come up and check out Le Nozze di Figaro.
“Don’t tell me you believe in that stuff,” I say.
Einar shrugs. “Most Icelanders don’t believe, really. We just don’t not believe. Some of us think of them as a mischievous force, not little things with pointy ears.”
I scoff and mutter, “Say what you want about reality TV, but at least in America we don’t believe in elves.”
“Oh,” Einar says wryly. “Well. You win.”
Figuring I may as well take my chance, I lean in closely and ask Einar if he knows another American, my age, staying at the colony, named Jeffrey Oakes.
He arches his pieced eyebrows and leans in. “Jeffrey Oakes?” He whispers even though there is no one else in the room—except perhaps the elves. “He’s here?”
I nod. “At least he was here. I’m sort of looking for him.”
Einar shakes his head. “I haven’t seen him. But the caretaker’s office is over at the carriage house. Zaff’ll tell you what room to find your friend in.”
I wince, looking out the window. The dark carriage house appears to be a half mile away, up a snowy hill that I’m not sure I can climb, given my leg.
Einar invites me to stop by his room later to try a little Brennivín. The lining of my throat prickles at the thought of some new, strange nectar of the writing gods. But even as I promise to join him, the smell of Molly’s caraway-tainted puke rises in my nostrils again, and I have second thoughts. Einar goes back to round his word count up to an even twenty for the day, and I return to my own room. There are six more books on my nightstand and my sheets have been changed. My typewriter has been reloaded with paper and my morning’s stalled draft has been placed on a pile with the dozens of similar drafts from previous mornings. I begin to put on every warm item of clothing I own. I decide I am going to make it out to the carriage house and find the man in charge of this exceedingly strange colony—and perhaps, even, Jeffrey. If I die in the attempt at least I won’t have to finish my novel.
Reaching the carriage house seems even more impossible as soon as I am outside in the brutal elements. Even bundled in two coats, I feel the glacial cold freezing the marrow inside my bones. It is still dark out and the air carries the faint smell of a distant icy sea. My injury forces my steps to be deliberate as I traverse the waist-high snowbanks that cover the path. As I tunnel up the hill, I wonder how Franklin W. Zaff could possibly be doing any caretaking without maintaining a better path through these mounds of ice. The edges are so high that I can’t see the cabin after a while. But I keep a bearing on that strange light in the sky, as it reflects off snow that is falling stead
ily, many miles away.
My leg is throbbing and I think I am barely halfway there. I turn around and see that the walls of my path have collapsed in places, and it will be hardly easier to get back down again. There is a new, duller pain in my fingertips and toes that I suspect vaguely as probably frostbite. I wonder what would happen if I lost my fingers. Screw the toes. I could live without toes. But without fingers I couldn’t hit the keys on the typewriter or grip a pen. At first I think this may be some sort of sweet relief—a reprieve from writing the same scene over and over. But the writing over and over isn’t really a sign of madness. It’s the only thing letting the madness out. With grim certainty I decide that if I feel a finger snapping off I’ll do the only sensible thing and lie down and die. I wonder if they’d find me—in six months or so—after the thaw. I wonder if they’d understand why I’d given up.
After a few minutes I carve my way into a small rocky outcropping. Just as I’m about to go around it, I see that I can get on top of it. And this gets my head above the drifts. Then I can see it—off to what I think is the southeast—a pillar of white light rising out of the choppy sea, just past the horizon. I forget my pain in moments. There is something absolutely insane yet incredible about it—a memorial built in the middle of nowhere at all, crying “Imagine Peace” to the descendants of last millennium’s Vikings. It is the sort of singular, absurd devotional that only great love can inspire. This is what I am trying to build each morning with my steam train of words. Something everlasting for a love that didn’t last. When I have my breath back, I press on, carving my way steadily to the door of the old carriage house.
I let myself in and find, to my extreme disappointment, that the lights are out and no one is there. As I enter I stumble roughly over a wooden mailing crate that has been set just beside the door, and nearly fly headlong toward a sleekly modern desk. I catch myself on its edge, and though my leg flares angrily in pain and I knock over quite a few papers, I manage to avoid smashing my head. The room is lit only by the faint glow of Yoko’s distant light.
The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel Page 21