by David Rakoff
But I cannot help being touched by Magnus’s devotion to his subject. Even the contradictions, the lapses in interrogative rigor, are, in the end, not much different from those of someone who has faith in God or a religion. There’s something quite sweet about his ardent hope that one day he might be granted some access, that the beings he spends all his days documenting might make themselves visible to him. “Oh, I would love to see them, especially to be invited to the cliffs, and I would ask them five thousand questions.” He becomes positively animated as he talks about it, his voice whooping up in excitement. “Where did you get the carpet, where did you get the table, where did you get the stove, have you been abroad?” Recovering his composure, he adds, almost embarrassed, “That’s probably the reason they haven’t invited me.”
It clearly rankles him a little bit that Erla Steffansdottir, a piano teacher and one of Iceland’s most noted elf communicators, claims she has been seeing elves and Hidden People her whole life. Magnus has led me to believe that my chances of meeting Erla would be slim to none, that she is a difficult prima donna, that she will not be helpful, that she traffics in arbitrary rivalries within the elf community.
I’m inclined to believe him after my initial encounter when I call to set up the interview. She actually seems to be sobbing uncontrollably on the other end of the line, all the while talking to me. In her defense, who actually picks up the phone in the middle of a crying jag? Besides, without having to push, she tells me to come the next day at four o’clock.
I was expecting wild gray hair, clanking jewelry, a tatterdemalion velvet cape from whose folds wafted the scent of incense, a house full of candles, dream catchers, cats, and bad art. Instead I found a friendly if somewhat shy woman in her forties living in a lovely apartment on the top floor of a Reykjavík town house with a bay window. Aside from a tiny elf figure made of three painted stones, piled up snowman style outside her front door, Erla’s house is decorated in the tasteful, middle-class aesthetic one might expect of a piano teacher: landscape paintings, old furniture. The place is warm and cozy on a particularly blustering, windy day.
Erla’s friend Bjork is there to translate, although Erla’s English is sufficient to slap me down at our rather awkward beginning. I ask when she first realized she could see Hidden People. “This is very stupid to ask when I see. When I was born. Like that one right there,” she says, indicating a place on the coffee table beside a Danish-modern glass ashtray. She then catches herself. “Oh, that’s right. You can’t see it.” She shakes her head slightly, amused at her forgetfulness that others do not possess her gift. It’s a somewhat disingenuous moment, like when your friend, newly back from a semester in Paris, says to you, “It’s like, uhm, oh I forget the English word, how you say . . . fromage?”
Apparently the coffee table in front of me is a veritable marketplace of elves milling about, many of them in separate dimensions and oblivious to one another. Bjork takes over, essentially ferrying me through this gnomish cocktail party:
“One sits there, two are walking over here, one sits there. When she plays music they come. It attracts them.”
I am suddenly overcome with a completely inappropriate urge: the barely suppressed impulse to slam my hand down on the coffee table really, really hard, right where she’s pointing.
Apparently the elves on the table are in too remote a dimension, and are too small to talk to. Conveniently, every home also comes equipped with a house elf, about the size of the average three-year-old, with whom one can communicate. “Every home?” I ask.
“Yes, you have one in your house in New York, too,” Bjork assures me.
If only my house elf, sick and tired of my skepticism, was taking pains to prove his existence once and for all by cleaning my apartment for me at that very moment, I joke. Leadest of balloons.
Bjork points out that house elves are a privilege, not a right. When the energy of a given house gets too negative, she says, when there is drinking or fighting, the elves will leave. Not terribly surprisingly, mysticism, New Age philosophy, recovery-speak, and elves are conflated as one. Erla says that elves are a manifestation of nature, they are inherently good; without them we would choke on our own pollution. There is almost no more urban a view of nature than this pastoral, idyllic one: Humankind bad, Nature good. As in, drinking and fighting bad, elves and flowers good. But it’s a false dichotomy. After all, following this logic, Sistine chapel bad, Ebola virus good?
Over the course of my trip, I visit three inhabited sites. The Gray Rock, another small pile of rocks covered with wintry grass called the Elf Bank Road, and a third place where Magnus takes me: a boulder that decades previously is said to have wrought havoc on egg production at the nearby poultry farm. What’s extraordinary about all of them is how visually unprepossessing they are. None have the prototypical look of “enchantment” we might associate with fairy tales. They aren’t impressively sized, they are not possessed of anthropomorphic whorls or striations in their surfaces, overhung with gnarled vines. In fact, they are just lichen-covered rocks, resting on yellowing squares of sod. Magnus’s aged dog, Tinna, relieves herself no fewer than three times during the short interval we spend at the chicken rock. You can’t blame the dog; the rock looks like the perfect place to take a leak, sitting as it does at the end of a very unphotogenic gravel driveway, near a covered garage and a chain-link fence. Aside from a very small plaque that reads “Borka Mynjar,” “Place Protected by the City,” there is no discernible effort made to beautify the surroundings. Other than not bulldozing them or blowing them up, there seem to be no concessions made for these mystical neighbors.
As for that other type of concession, the kind selling gnome ware, clothing printed with “I was a succubus in a boulder in Reykjavík and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” or stuffed elves, there is none. I see this as a lost opportunity, marketing-wise. In four days in Reykjavík I have seen a total of maybe eight elves, not one of them for sale.
I can’t chalk this reserve up to embarrassment. Not everyone has the same concerns as Viktor, hoping to keep reports and stories at a minimum. Even a circus barker like Magnus with his school pulls his punches and sells nothing more pricey than a bus tour and some pancakes. This reserve is almost incomprehensible to a North American, where even the vague impression of the face of Mother Theresa peeking out of the pastry folds of a cinnamon bun was enough to turn the coffee shop where it appeared into a shrine, however briefly. It almost seems as though folks are taking their cues from the Hidden People themselves, respecting their concealment and according them the peace and quiet of beloved, beleaguered stars.
On my way out of the city to Keflavík airport I get a sustained look at the landscape that was dark upon my arrival. In the weak afternoon light, it is an unrelievedly monochromatic view: flat, vaguely undulating black rock, cracked all over with a tracery of fissures. To the right the vast gray sea, and to the left in the distance the strange hills, looking like whales resting on their sides, each one isolated against the horizon. At one point we drive within half a mile of the perfect cone of a young volcano. In the gray sky, the darker gray curtain of a rainstorm travels back and forth over the land, over the bus.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare describes the Athenian wood that lies just beyond the gates of the city as a place “. . . where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows; Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and eglantine”: It’s crowded in that Athenian forest. You can’t take two steps without bumping into some confused lover or rude mechanical sporting the head of an ass. By contrast, Icelanders were frequently all alone in the wilderness, with no blossom-heavy branches concealing countless magical faeries. The spaces yawn open, wide, and disconnected. And it is our nature to connect, to create for ourselves a fully formed community where none exists. We are hardwired for it. As Theseus says:
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, f
rom earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
EXTRAORDINARY ALIEN
There is no welcoming decoration on the walls at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Manhattan. Nor do the people who work there seem particularly happy to see any of us who have come that morning for our green card interviews.
After the metal detectors and bag check, we are thumbprinted. The woman administering the procedure is suspicious and exasperated by some “highly abnormal striations in the pads of my digits.” A Chinese couple is greeted by their lawyer, who is as young and eager as a puppy. He pumps the husband’s hand vigorously and then, exuberance unabated, he grabs the wife by the shoulders and kisses her on the cheek. She looks horrified.
I have more in common with the English-speaking Americans working behind the desk. I already work in the United States, and I am American educated. There are even very real differences in my case. My green card comes through something called the “extraordinary alien” program. A bit of a joke, really, since the only really extraordinary thing about me is my level of access to the writers of national stature whom I’ve met through my day job and the many friends I have who work at prominent magazines and book publishers with creamy letterhead. All of these people have provided me with written statements attesting to the government that I should be allowed to stay in this country. It is a dossier of connection and privilege. The usual eighteen-month-to-two-year waiting period for approval was, in my case, four weeks. Even my eventual green card is different: “E-1,” the highest grade, apparently, although I still have no idea what that means.
I am a first-generation Canadian. My circumstances did not necessitate flight, unlike most every generation of my family before me, as well as everyone else in the waiting room. I am aping the immigrant experience that, for so many here, is a deadly serious one. After two hours I approach the woman at the desk, hoping she has by now forgotten my thumbs, and say, my voice authoritative yet quiet and nonregional, like my countryman Peter Jennings:
“I’m sorry. I was under the impression that I didn’t need an interview this morning.”
It works. I am ushered in immediately. The cubicle of the young INS employee is smaller than my office. I am approved and out on the street in ten minutes. As I make my way to the subway, my heart is like that of my countrywoman Joni Mitchell: “full and hollow like a cactus tree.” Strange, since with green card in hand—something I had yearned for over many years with a near physical ache—a lot of my problems had largely been eliminated. My presence in these United States was legally secure. Now I could work part-time or not at all. Up until then, securing and keeping a job was an exercise in a kind of Blanche DuBois patronage, depending as I did upon the kindness of my employers not to fire me or rat me out to the feds.
There was also the equal and opposite danger that I might find myself trapped in indentured servitude in a less than ideal situation. I once interviewed for a job assisting a man with whom I knew people in common. Terrifyingly, rather than singing his praises, our mutual friends could only lamely volunteer that he had “conquered a lot of his personal demons” and was now much more in control of his anger. “He still feels bad about throwing that mail meter at his employee’s head, and that was years ago!”
His office was also his home. A loft on a busy thoroughfare in SoHo; an airy, open space decorated in an unyielding, hard-edged Helmut Newton, S/M style, with hostile glass-and-black-leather furnishings. The metal legs of all the tables were in the shape of branches barbed with iron thorns. I was to meet him there, and we would talk and then go for supper, for which he would pay. I was at a point in my life when the prospect of a free meal still held real excitement. I wore a suit.
He produced country-western dance revues for theme parks. He had just started taking these shows over to India. As his assistant I would make a living wage, a novelty for me back then. In return, he told me, “You make my life easier. Whatever that means!” he snorted.
“These people in India,” he continued with laughter, “have never seen a C and W show before. Never.”
He was a very specific type of man. The type of man who breaks into a noncontextual smile on an isolated word and then turns it off just as quickly. It is a frightening habit that conveys that it is taking all of the speaker’s energy, socialization, or neuroleptic medication not to haul off and punch—or throw a mail meter at the head of—the listener for their stupidity. “When we opened last year (smile) at Six Flags Benares (smile), it was like we were Hindu gods or something.”
His assistant of ten years, the fellow I would be replacing, had the unphotosynthesized pallor and stooped gait of someone who has been living under the basement stairs. He brought in one of their brochures for me to see. In it, clean young men and women in pressed jeans and gingham twirled lariats and danced. They had been captured on film, mid–“Yellow Rose of Texas,” smiling wildly, furiously baring both rows of teeth, as if they had been set on fire.
“So, David (smile). What do you want to do with your life?” he asked me.
“Well, I haven’t really deci—”
“Because, the thing is (smile),” he continued, “I’m not really looking for someone who’s window-shopping (smile) for a career.”
I was twenty-three years old at the time. My only power lay in my capacity to say no to men like this. Unsatisfying as my current job was at that time, as I looked around that loft, I saw the clear narrative arc of what my life there would be: from the initial impatient word-processing tutorial, the subsequent paranoid recriminations that I was stealing office supplies (which, of course, would be true), on until the final confrontation with him yelling at my retreating, weeping form: “You’ll never work in country-western theme park musical revues for South Asian export again!”
So why was I standing here on lower Broadway feeling so Canadian? Why now, of all times, this sudden fear of having my essential Canadian-ness erased? I had been on a mission from the day I first came to New York at the age of seventeen to pass for native, but suddenly I felt the need to proclaim my difference.
And we are different, in subtle yet formidable ways. My countryman Robertson Davies summed it up when he pointed out that the national character of Canadians, such as it is, owes a great deal more to the stoic reserve of Scandinavia—its latitudinal and climatic sister—than it does to the United States.
There are even more galvanizing aspects to the Canadian psyche than mere reticence. There is the collective fear, at least when I was growing up, of becoming too big for our britches. To paraphrase Lorne Michaels (my countryman), it’s the kind of place where they award Miss Canada to the runner-up, because the prettiest already gets to be prettiest. Rather than demanding liberty or, failing that, death, we are a country forever giving up our seats to the elderly, all the while thanking one another for not smoking.
Which is not to say that we are raised without national pride; we just think it goeth before a fall. Sometimes, though, we just can’t help ourselves. Canadians always know who’s Canadian. Say “John Kenneth Galbraith,” “Kate Nelligan,” “Hume Cronyn,” “Banting and Best,” “the Cowboy Junkies,” or “Monty Hall” (facilitator of the deal, that ultimate American art form) to Canadians and watch a flicker cross their eyes like the shadow from an angel’s wing. After a polite interval, three seconds or so, they will say, as if an afterthought: “He’s Canadian, you know.”
And it’s not limited to prominent people, either. Those individually wrapped slices of processed orange cheese food are known as Canadian singles (a dubious honor, to be sure). The mechanical arm on the space shuttle used for making interstellar repairs—the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System—is also known as the Canadarm. In fact, the shuttle is never referred to on the Canadian news without its Homeric moniker, as in “The American space shutt
le, with its Canadarm . . . blew up today.” Indeed, ask Canadians what they think a space shuttle is for and likely as not they will respond, “Oh, to go up into space and move stuff around . . . with an arm.”
When I was growing up, families like mine played “Who’s Canadian?” with the same all-consuming devotion with which we played “Who’s a Jew?” (leaving out Meyer Lansky and the Son of Sam, of course). Can you then imagine the double triumph in the households of my youth in spotting the Canadian Jew? Lorne Greene! You fairly cannot conceive of anyone more heroic than Lorne Greene, nor the crestfallen sadness when people realized that Andrea Martin of SCTV wasn’t just not Jewish—she is Armenian—but is from Maine, having just lived in Canada. This was quickly rationalized and Ms. Martin claimed as one of our own with the reasoning “Armenians are very similar, and Maine is very close, and she lived here so long.”
We are stealth aliens, like the Communists in the propaganda films of the 1950s, using our outward similarities to infiltrate American culture and do it one better. Canadians have been ironically redefining the very essence of the American media for decades. Take, for example, the codifying guru of them all, Marshall McLuhan.
So why not rejoice at the fact that I am permanently and legally below the forty-ninth parallel? Moreover, I am extraordinary, for goodness’ sake, if only for my thumbs. Put me on national television and let me espouse gun control and socialized medicine! Let’s put the “u” back in colour before anyone notices!
My friend Jim used to get weepy whenever the customs workers at Kennedy would say, “Welcome home, Mr. Woods.” He was grooving on the theatrics of nationality. I understand that. There was a Kodak commercial in which a young Asian American girl, presumably a war orphan, now a valedictorian, thanks her white adoptive parents. I cried shamelessly whenever it came on. I was moved by that myth of belonging, of being from somewhere. And, I suppose, of then being from somewhere else.