Don't I Know You?

by Marni Jackson

  Shell mouthed a silent thank you to me and turned to Taylor. “Are you, like, working for Apple full-time—or vice versa?”

  Taylor laughed. “I try to do two days a week when I’m not performing. I like to get right into people’s houses whenever I can, you know? It helps me actually connect with how they live.”

  I brought out a tray with the still-percolating crisp, bowls, spoons, and a carton of Kawartha Dairy vanilla. We sat around the dining-room table, where three laptops stood open and glowing like treasure chests. Leonard shut them down.

  “This is excellent,” said Taylor, taking tiny spoonfuls so as not to burn her lips. She had the prettiest mouth. “Thanks, guys. Normal is so rare for me.”

  “And it’s good to have regular ice cream for a change,” Leonard murmured. Through the window we could see the Mr. Softee truck parked in the laneway behind us.

  “Is that your neighbor’s?” Taylor asked.

  “No, it’s Leonard’s.”

  “I use it as a studio of sorts.”

  She clapped her hands. “That is so cool! You record in there?”

  “Yes, I have a little analog system set up. But mostly I use the PA to work on material. Shell and I like to drive around the city and broadcast the new tunes. I find it helpful to see how people in the street react. You know—do they clutch their ears and run away?” He chuckled.

  “Right on! Getting out of the studio, man! Things can get so complicated when they don’t need to be.”

  “Yes,” said Leonard, giving her an appreciative gaze. “And people have very fixed ideas about how music ought to sound.”

  “A lot of people still can’t stand his voice,” Shell piped up, and then blushed.

  “That’s true,” he said, smiling.

  In the corner of the dining room were a couple canvas backpacks, some packages of dried soup, Ziploc bags of trail mix, and an ax. I had almost finished the tedious job of organizing the food and gear for our expedition.

  Taylor went over to the pile of equipment.

  “Whoa. Are you guys joining the military or something?”

  “No, we’re going on a canoe trip,” said Shell, “with some Norwegian guy who’s here to write a story about Canada. Look, we even have bear spray.” She took a canister out of the top of a pack and held it up. It had a cartoon of a charging grizzly on the front.

  “I am so jealous!” said Taylor. “I have never even been in a canoe, that’s the one thing I haven’t done!” Her face clouded over.

  Leonard caught my eye and I gave a why-not shrug. She was young and strong, at least.

  “Then you should definitely come with us,” he said, touching Taylor’s wrist.

  “But we’re leaving, like, tomorrow,” said Shell. “For four days.” Her brow furrowed. She had registered Leonard’s enthusiasm.

  “Done!” said Taylor. She pulled out her phone and made a call.

  “Ed, please clear my schedule, I’m going to be out of touch for the next few days. And let Apple know I’m on pause for now.”

  Her eyes shone. “This makes me really happy. Will there be reception in the woods?”

  “I doubt it,” and “probably” Shell and I answered in unison.

  I looked at Taylor’s platform sneakers, which were roughly my size. She could wear my old Timberlands, I guessed. I hoped this wasn’t all a big mistake. It was one thing to lead a bunch of newbies into the woods, but I did not want to deal with any twisted ankles on the portages. Part of our route was along the Madawaska, where the trails could be steep.

  Also, I hadn’t been in a canoe since the two college summers I’d spent working for a Temagami outfitter. But Shell had been a camp counselor, and Taylor was a quick study, obviously. We’d manage. As for Leonard, he was old for this sort of thing, but he knew how to husband his energy. A three-hour concert is a kind of expedition too.

  It was mostly the group dynamics I was worried about. The wild card was Karl Ove Knausgaard, who was flying in that night. Not a barrel of laughs, to judge from his books. Leonard had an ardent following in Norway, but that didn’t mean that Knausgaard was a fan. And when I told Leonard about My Struggle, the writer’s hugely popular, 3,600-page, six-volume novel, he hadn’t even heard of it.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have the patience for reading fiction anymore,” he said.

  * * *

  But let me explain how Karl Ove came into the picture, because that was really strange.

  Things with Flo-Q were going well. I had been promoted from writing copy for faucets and showerheads to their top spa features—the hydrotherapy tubs, infinity pools, and living-wall waterfalls. Leanna had been fired and my new boss liked to encourage my creativity, so I began to quote little water-related passages from literature (or “liquiture” as he liked to call it). To the Lighthouse has lots, obviously. I found some good stuff in The Road by Cormac McCarthy too. After the world has been destroyed, water suddenly becomes a big deal.

  “It’s a bit dark, but that can be a good thing,” my boss said when he read the quotes. “Just stay away from the shower scene in Psycho.”

  One morning, on the hunt for fresh inspiration, I sat down with Knausgaard’s latest novel, a 740-page sequel to My Struggle called The Truth. Bathrooms and plumbing, I noticed, are a recurring motif, which is not a surprise. Our faces in the morning, our fears at four a.m., the sad mortal ring in the toilet bowl—they all confront us with the truth in the bathroom. Perhaps this is why I have no shame about my work for Flo-Q.

  Knausgaard likes to take his readers into all the little shifts of consciousness that accompany us in the course of a normal day. So I was happily lodged inside his brain when I turned to page 243 and was shocked to find the scene below. The narrator has just returned to the house in Tromsø, Norway, that he had shared with his wife, Solvi, before their divorce and her sudden accidental death.

  “I went round to the side of the house to the outdoor shower, a folly of ours given the climate in Tromsø. But we had just come back from Thailand that winter and felt nostalgic for bathing out of doors, so we had made a little stall out of birch, and ordered a special showerhead on the internet, [my emphasis]. Covered with tiny nozzles, it was as broad and round as the face of a sunflower. But it turned out we didn’t have the water pressure to sustain the flow. After standing several times under an icy trickle, shivering, we abandoned our dream of the shower. And in a sense that meager trickle marked the beginning of the end of us.”

  It was an unmistakable reference to the Rainmaker, a wall-mounted twelve-inch-diameter nickel-plated showerhead that is a perennial Flo-Q bestseller. And the phrasing was exactly mine: “The Rainmaker, broad and round as the face of a sunflower, will transport you to a steamy Costa Rican forest…” Knausgaard had poached my simile.

  I was pondering my next move when an email arrived from my boss, forwarding a message:

  Dear Flo-Q

  In the course of doing some research, it has come to my attention that there are striking similarities between a passage in my current novel “The Truth” and phrases that occur in the Luxury Showerhead section of your website. I would be grateful if you could put me in touch with the writer so we can discuss this matter further.

  Sincerely,

  Karl Ove Knausgaard.

  Was he accusing me of plagiarism?

  I wrote back immediately. I began by saying that I was a great admirer of his work, and was rereading Book Two: A Man in Love for the second time. This was not strategic flattery, it was true. With its relentless self-scrutiny and searching earnestness My Struggle does invite parody. The way in which he exposes the people close to him raises moral questions too. But there is also something necessary about it that makes more conventional fiction seem hollow and contrived in comparison. You are trying to capture how it feels to be alive, I loftily wrote. And that includes paying attention to all the in-between moments in life: pushing a stroller, turning on a tap, standing under a shower.

  But, I continued, it
had shocked me to stumble on the sunflower simile, a phrase I thought I had invented. (I didn’t add that a large showerhead so closely resembles the face of a sunflower that it requires only the tiniest scrap of imagination to make the analogy. It was neither my finest moment nor his.)

  Instead I told him how honored I felt that our imaginations had aligned like this, if only for one phrase. Then I signed off by saying that Flo-Q products were “internationally revered in their field, much as you are in yours.” (I still shudder to recall this.)

  Here is what Karl Ove wrote back to me:

  Dear Rose,

  Thank you for your message and your kind words about my work. I confess that I sometimes have a great fear that I am boring my readers, so your belief in the value of the mundane helps me to face another day of writing.

  Of course, I accept your explanation about the “alignment of our imaginations”—a lovely thought. I was only shocked, as you must have been, to come across a figure of speech I assumed was mine alone.

  I want also to say that I have now read much of your work on the Flo-Q site, with growing admiration. I applaud your attention to detail (the “tired” shimmer of brushed aluminum). There are moments in your copy that succeed in giving a difficult subject—plumbing—a human, even poetic dimension.

  Perhaps there is a favor I can ask of you? I have recently agreed to write a travel story about your country for the New York Times Magazine, a follow-up to a much-hated piece of mine about a car trip through the United States.

  However, I have no idea how to go about this. I dislike interviewing people and have little feel for landscape. My memory is bad, and whenever I take notes I can never read them later. All this concerns me.

  My editor at the magazine has strongly urged me to take part in a canoe-camping trip or similar wilderness activity to reflect the abundance of this sort of thing in Canada. I understand that you are based in Toronto, where my journey begins, in September.

  So I come to my point: any guidance you could offer me regarding canoe adventures in your area would be gratefully received. And may your imagination continue to align with mine.

  Sincerely,

  Karl Ove Knausgaard.

  I replied that September would be the ideal time for a canoe trip, given the fall colors. I offered to organize a four-day excursion for him through the northwest corner of Algonquin Park, an area made famous by the Group of Seven painters. My Flo-Q boss seemed keen on the idea. (“If you can get a picture of him under a waterfall, that would be great.”) The NYT editor approved the plan, and as Leonard and Shell were running out of Netflix options, they were keen to join me. With Taylor, that would make five of us, in two canoes.

  But I said nothing to Knausgaard about his celebrated trip mates. The wilderness treats everyone alike. I simply booked him a room at the Intercontinental and left a message the night he arrived, saying we’d pick him up at six thirty a.m., and be on the water by noon.

  * * *

  “Don’t hold it like a baseball bat. Put your right hand on the top of the paddle, and keep your left low on the shaft. Then reach forward and dig it in. You’re shoveling water, basically.”

  “But if I lean out, won’t we tip?”

  Karl Ove was in the bow of my canoe. I had been under the impression that all Norwegians skied and spent time in the woods, but this was clearly not the case. It turns out that he had never slept in a tent and insisted on bringing along a large down pillow, which he said accompanied him everywhere.

  “It is my stuffed animal,” he said, shrugging. His thick pewter-colored hair was swept back in a leonine manner. He wore the sort of sunglasses with side bits that shut out all the light. Without them, his gaze was so direct as to be uncomfortable and his handsomeness was in a class of its own.

  But he had a touching timidity as well. I noticed the way he treated each new environment, whether it was the hotel lobby or a doughnut shop, as an unmapped foreign country. He seemed at pains to preserve his lack of worldliness—not so easy, once the world discovers you.

  “Whenever you see someone canoeing in a movie, the actors are always holding the paddles wrong,” I said to make him feel better. He moved his left hand down the shaft and began to propel us forward with stabbing strokes. I had lent him an old flannel shirt of Eric’s, which fit him perfectly.

  “Good. That’s the idea.”

  The blue canoe surged past us.

  “Is this not gorgeous?” said Taylor. She was sitting up straight, kneeling properly, paddling in perfect sync with Leonard and Shell. At the end of each stroke she gave the paddle a little twist, like someone signing her name with a flourish.

  We made our way across Round Lake, a route I had taken years before. Nothing had changed. After a broad and windy stretch, the lake narrowed into a meander that wound its way snakelike through a corridor of reeds. It went on and on; we had to follow it blindly, bumping into the banks as our canoes navigated the tight corners.

  “Will there be moose?” asked Karl Ove.

  “Quite possibly.”

  “Have you ever seen the males fighting, with their antlers?”

  “No, but I was on a trip once where we were chased by a bull moose in rut.”

  “‘In rut’?”

  “In heat. During the fall mating season. They can be dangerous then.”

  “Oh.” He paused. “But that’s now.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be fine.”

  “And I hope to see the Northern Lights as well. For the story.”

  “Isn’t Norway where people go to photograph them?”

  “Yes, but I moved to Sweden some time ago.”

  I looked behind us for the others. Leonard was trailing his stern paddle in the water, doing a lazy J as Shell dug away in the bow and Taylor used her paddle to push them off the grassy banks.

  “This is like a corn maze!” Taylor called. “How’s my stroke, Rose, am I good?”

  I gave her a thumbs-up.

  We turned another corner and lost sight of them. The current flowed more strongly and all we had to do was steer as our canoe brushed through leathery green lily pads. A few yellow flowers sat on the surface like teacups.

  “This is incredible,” said Karl Ove softly. “It’s like I’m traveling through the folds in my brain. I love it.”

  When we had picked him up that morning he had looked so tired, greeting me with an apprehensive, teeth-baring smile. “Everything here is somewhat familiar but askew,” he said. I had never been to Norway and pictured it as a large white LEGO railway station, with colorfully clad people moving about in trams and on skis, silently and efficiently. Like the vestibule of heaven.

  “Where are you heading after this?” I asked him as we paddled on.

  “Out west. A place called Jasper.”

  “Oh, you’ll love the Rockies,” I said. “Your sense of time completely shifts in the mountains. You can feel the great patience of the Earth.”

  Karl Ove absorbed this.

  “And the west is interesting right now, geopolitically.”

  “To tell the truth, I have no interest in doing interesting things.” He laughed. “Can we pause now to have a cigarette?”

  We stopped paddling and he lit one.

  “My wife and children beg me to quit, but I find it very hard,” said Karl Ove. “Will you join me?”

  I hadn’t smoked since college, but sometimes even good habits should be broken. Cautiously he turned around in the bow and passed me a cigarette, some Swedish brand. I leaned forward to catch a light from his match, inhaled, and coughed.

  “Cigarettes are like punctuation for me,” he said. “I can’t write without them.”

  “How’s that going? Your new book.” I could feel the shape of my lungs from the smoke.

  “It is very problematic,” he said. “Hideous, really.” He drew hungrily on the cigarette until it sizzled and tossed the bottom half into the water.

  “Why?”

  “Originally I had set out to wr
ite about my life—not to invent a story, but to go more deeply into my own experience—and then when the first two volumes came out and made a stir, my life changed. I had to do readings and publicity and go on television.”

  Far behind us, I could hear Taylor singing a Willie Nelson tune. The meander was now widening into a river.

  “I felt I had to live up to this person I spoke about whenever I answered questions in an interview. I wanted to please my readers, of course, I wanted to be good at the business of impersonating a famous author. But it was also undermining my ability to write in an honest way.”

  “The same thing kind of happens on Facebook,” I said. “The pressure to create a public identity—usually someone happier and more successful. It’s like we’re all authoring ourselves.”

  He stopped paddling and turned in profile so that I could hear him.

  “Yes, I think you’re right. So in the process I have become, what is the word, a merkvare, a brand … like Pepto-Bismol.” He slapped a deerfly that was darting at his head. “Yet there is no reward in remaining unread and obscure.”

  I was getting used to Karl Ove’s rhythms. He was either completely silent or else he would talk like this and wind on and on, like the meander. On the drive up he had spoken at length about his dead alcoholic father. He seemed a bit lost inside himself, so I changed the subject.

  “I’m working on a book too. But just a thriller.”

  “Is that right? Will you kill me off in the woods for your story?” he said with his charmingly reluctant smile.

  “Perhaps. It does need a body. It’s about a dead Canadian painter, who may have been murdered.”

  “My friend Jo Nesbø has become very successful writing thrillers. I wish I had the knack.”

  “I can only write when I don’t take it seriously. If I imagine a million readers, I freeze up.”

  “I’m afraid I’m exactly the opposite. I take everything too seriously. It’s exhausting.”

  “You ‘slip into the Masterpiece.’”

  “What?”

  “It’s a line from one of Leonard’s songs. About losing your grip.”

  Karl Ove looked at his big silver watch. “It’s now midnight in Oslo. My body is longing to be horizontal. Will we stop soon?”