Far Afield

by Susanna Kaysen

  Was he at all intimidatable? Jonathan had tried: Harvard, literary references, French, even—desperately—Daniela and her fictional visit. Wooley didn’t bother countering any of these, except Daniela. He claimed to be engaged to a girl in Klaksvík. Jonathan prodded. Well, they were probably going to get engaged. They were sleeping together, and in the Faroes that was considered engaged. Wouldn’t he feel badly when he left and didn’t take her? Jonathan wanted to know. Wooley shook his head. No, she’ll understand. She’s a great girl.

  “Anyhow,” he added, “I might stay.”

  Jonathan’s ire bubbled again at the memory of this. It was worse than if Wooley had been writing his thesis on the same topic; it was grand larceny, emotional plagiarism: How dare he be as captivated as Jonathan?

  Going bush. Like many anthropological ideas, this one had been born in jungles and savannahs and gave off a tropical scent. Some old-timers called it “troppo,” an occupational hazard that began with lassitude and ended by destroying your objectivity. Stories that went, When we got there, two years later, he was living in a hut with three wives. The trouble was, anthropologists were supposed to be living in huts. The three wives were optional but not exceptional. The line between observer and participant was so fine as to defy detection much of the time. It started easily enough. When members of “your” tribe are going on a journey or planning to get married, they slaughter a chicken and read the blood for omens. They offer to read omens for you before your trip back down the river for supplies. What harm can it do? It will certainly give you a better sense of their worldview, and it might give you a little useful information. Pretty soon you have recourse to chicken slaughter every time you have to make a decision.

  Was that what was happening to both of them? Screwing around with Faroese girls (even if only in the mind), scrambling down cliff faces, eating rotten meat? Wooley had been extolling rœst meat after dinner. Rœst meat was in the first stages of corruption, with maggots crawling in it. “You pick them out, and then you boil it,” he explained. Further proof of Wooley’s effective insinuation of himself into society, for the villagers had so far protected Jonathan from knowing about this practice.

  Wooley had long since stopped fussing with drawers and fallen into a hearty sleep complete with snore. Jonathan was awake, chasing his thoughts all over the map.

  There was an important difference, he told himself, between thinking you could be an Amazon chieftain and thinking you could fit in with the Faroese. They had a common heritage, after all. His ancestors were northern Europeans just like theirs. The leap he’d made was more through time than culture: as life was here, so had all life north of France been two, or five, centuries ago. Perhaps racial memory explained his comfort? They were not foreigners, really. The anthropology department agreed with him on this; they had certainly beaten that point to a pulp before granting him permission to do fieldwork in what they said was “not a foreign culture.”

  But he was here now. Jonathan turned over in bed, wishing he could go to sleep. He punched the pillow and began grinding through the evening with Wooley again.

  Of all Jonathan’s faults and quirks, the one that gave him the most trouble was his compulsive comparative thinking. A screen of He’s like that but I’m like this obscured his perceptions of people. Each personality he encountered was a new yardstick by which to measure himself—and frequently he came up short. The Faroes offered some relief from all this. Though a master at self-laceration, Jonathan was unable to pull off the feat of faulting himself for not being, say, a good fisherman, or for not being in a general sense someone who’d spent his life in a village of four hundred on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. Here he saw clearly how much culture determines character: noisy, agitated, superpower America could never produce a calm, ocean-eyed Petur. These people lived in a comprehensible world; he’d grown up in chaos.

  With Wooley, this excuse didn’t hold.

  Equal opportunity. Not quite equal. Wooley seemed to come from money. He’d mentioned his father’s “companies.” Jonathan had noted the plural, and also that Wooley had said he’d gone to high school in Beverly Hills. His carefree attitude might be explained by privilege. But Jonathan knew they were both children of privilege, coddled and pushed to success. Wooley was more of a rebel than Jonathan; his father had expected him to go to work in one of the companies.

  “But hey,” Wooley said, “I had a real great time at college, so I thought, You’d be fucking nuts to trade this for a boardroom.”

  Jonathan found Wooley’s flat California delivery of flat California-style sentences disconcerting, because it gave the impression that he was stupid, and he was not. Stupid people were not accepted into the doctoral program in anthropology at Berkeley, nor were they given large traveling fellowships.

  “What got you into anthropology?” Jonathan asked. He didn’t want to know, but there was no way to deflect the conversation from Wooley’s accomplishments.

  “I was in soc”—pronounced soash, making Jonathan wince; he was used to the staid Harvard term soc rel, for social relations—“and I did a study of Chicano gangs in LA for my senior thesis. They were bad.” What a posturer, thought Jonathan. “Man, they had these amazing jackets. They had like jacket art. It was fantastic. Anyhow, my professor said I ought to go into anthro. He said I had the perfect observational distance for it. I don’t know what the fuck he meant, but I did it.”

  So he was a braggart, and an insensitively flagrant one. Jonathan had met plenty, though most were the sort who weave their braggadocio into conversation subtly. Still, he was sensitive enough to see there wasn’t much difference in the end. But here came the trouble spot. Wooley was crass, self-important, a blunderbuss of a guy, and Jonathan could only wonder why he too didn’t possess these qualities, even though he found them distasteful. Because Wooley didn’t find himself distasteful, and he seemed to be having an easier time living than Jonathan.

  Possibly Wooley had doubts invisible to the naked eye—to Jonathan’s naked eye, anyhow? He didn’t think so. Jonathan believed himself to be the only person in the world with a large discrepancy between inner and outer self, and his uniqueness in misery was dear to him. It was a loophole through which he could escape from failure, loneliness—even his own incessant measuring. For at the heart of his belief was this spectacular disavowal: It wasn’t really me, you have never known me.

  But what had been a comfort, a plumb line to a private reality, seemed now, at three o’clock in the morning in his chilly, foreign bed, odd and not comforting. A terrible question, which had never occurred to him before, presented itself: If his actions, words, and “self” were not the real Jonathan, then where was that Jonathan? For years he’d assumed that a finer, smarter, more capable Jonathan lurked in the wings waiting for his cue. But what was the cue? And what evidence did he have that the Other Jonathan was going to make an appearance?

  Jonathan sat up in bed, transfixed by a new possibility: the Other Jonathan didn’t exist. That would certainly explain his failure to show up. Jonathan’s eyes widened; he realized he couldn’t imagine living without this shadow self, though he knew that he did, in the sense that it was everyday Jonathan who spoke and ate and made dinner for Wooley. Nothing, not Harvard, not the Faroes, not Daniela, had ever conjured this better Jonathan, and still Jonathan had believed in him.

  Oh, if there was no Jonathan-Messiah, to save him from himself! Then this was life. As it was, it would be. He would envy Wooley and disdain him, and no wise, skillful Jonathan would rise from the ashes of those base emotions to command Wooley’s respect; he would wait for Daniela to call, and she would or wouldn’t do so according to her inclination, and no magic dance performed by the delicious Other Jonathan could fix her inclination toward him. Worst of all, he would have no excuse for his incapacities and reluctances—not that he’d ever used it with anyone except himself. But it had been there, a chant that sounded, now, like something from first grade: You’ll see, you’ll see. What wou
ld they see? They would see more of what they saw. Which was? Him. Plain old everyday Jonathan.

  He sank back under his eiderdown. The whole business was fundamentally embarrassing. He’d spent years deluding himself. Memories—little barbs of shame—popped into his mind: the papers whose mediocre grades he’d dismissed by dismissing the intelligence of his teachers, who after all didn’t have the wit to detect the brilliance of the Other Jonathan; the high-school debating team that didn’t include him because he was “above” such sophomoric intellectual activity; the parties where he’d been ignored by people too ignorant to notice how interesting he was. But hadn’t he thought his paper rather good, hadn’t he tried out for the debating team, and hadn’t he spent too much time at parties watching others enjoy themselves?

  Two-thirty in the morning on an island far from home was an odd time and place to get the news that he, his parents, and his elite schools had all been wrong. He was not brilliant or unusual; he—and they—had merely assumed that he was. Everybody in Cambridge assumed this of himself, but surely not everybody could be right. Despite his shock, Jonathan broke into a grin at the thought of an entire city obsessed with intellectual glamour, each citizen returning home at night to explain to his mate or his mirror why he was more insightful, better informed, or just plain smarter than everybody he’d spent the day with.

  What a world. Jonathan was a veteran of many such fervent self-promotion campaigns (usually involving the mirror), but he’d never before questioned the justice of meritocracy. He’d never had to, he saw, because he’d thought he was at the top of the heap or bound to get there eventually. And it is the losers in any system who are the grumblers, the visionaries. Jonathan bereft of his perfect phantom and cut off from a place at the top was not so keen on survival of the smartest as he’d been even three hours earlier, when he’d smugly noted Wooley’s unsophisticated speech patterns.

  But if King Brain were deposed, what would the world be like? Jonathan couldn’t imagine. Though, he supposed, he was at the moment living in such a world. The Faroese didn’t use their brains as weapons (this seemed the most accurate description of the Cambridge usage); the Faroese seemed to take people as they came—maybe. He couldn’t tell, really, if they did. They seemed to take him as he came, but perhaps he wasn’t a conclusive example. And even if they did, wouldn’t that mean he’d have to stay here forever to avoid a confrontation with the second-rateness that awaited him at home?

  Jonathan pulled the eiderdown over his head and sighed into the warm darkness. It was a lot to lose, the promise of greatness. And was his next task to learn the rankings on some diminished scale of ambitions? Adequate, well done, rather interesting—such terms had seemed the very equivalent of failure; they might now encompass his shrunken future.

  Sobered, exhausted, and still quantifying, he fell asleep completely covered, like a corpse.

  Wooley had brought terrible weather with him. It was raining hard the afternoon he arrived, and by the next morning the wind had risen to a near gale, blowing the rain in bands across the horizon and stirring the sea to a black-and-white fury. From the kitchen window Jonathan could see great towers of foam and spray shooting up from the jetty where the waves broke. He stood at the sink looking at these formations of water—they were as transient and suggestive as clouds—and drinking his coffee, while Wooley sat at the table drinking his.

  Ten-thirty, coffee finished, and Jonathan felt a knot of tension: What were they going to do today? Telepathic Wooley suddenly said, “How about a walk?”

  “In this weather?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go out to the cliffs and watch the storm.”

  It sounded better than festering in the kitchen. “Okay,” said Jonathan. He wished he had a long slicker like Wooley’s. Then when Wooley was all suited up, he was glad he didn’t; he might get wet, but he wouldn’t look like a male model.

  Their progress through town drew many a face to many a rain-streaked window. Sigurd made the unprecedented move of leaving his spot behind the counter and putting his head out the door to say good morning.

  “Terrible weather,” he called.

  “I reckon so,” said Jonathan.

  “My name is Jim Wooley,” said Wooley, moving on Sigurd with his hand out.

  “Well, good day to you,” Sigurd said. He looked astonished.

  “We’re going for a walk,” Wooley continued. His accent was atrocious.

  “Eh?” Sigurd looked at Jonathan.

  “A walk,” Jonathan translated, “out to the cliffs.”

  “Don’t get blown over,” Sigurd said. Then he laughed. “Even a man as big as you”—he tipped his head toward Wooley—“can get blown over.”

  “So, so, so,” said Wooley. He had that part down all right, Jonathan noted. “Where’s the best spot to see the spray?”

  “Eh?” said Sigurd. He squinted.

  “The spray,” said Wooley, louder than before.

  “Oh. The spray.” Sigurd nodded.

  “We want to see the big sprays,” Wooley said.

  Sigurd understood this time and launched into a detailed description of where to see big sprays, which Jonathan had trouble following. The gist of it seemed to be that there was a big rock out west near the “troll house,” where there was good spray when the storm came from the north, as this one did. The troll house was a new landmark, though. Jonathan didn’t think he’d recognize it.

  “The troll house—” he started.

  “I know it,” Wooley interrupted, in English.

  “How can you know it?” Jonathan protested. “You’ve never been here before.”

  “It’s a kind of rock. I’ll show you.”

  Sigurd was watching this exchange closely. “Jo-Na-Than,” he said. “You bring this American for a temun tonight. Okay? We’ll have a nice after-dinner temun.” He winked, so Jonathan would know just what he meant.

  “Thanks,” Jonathan said. He remembered Sigurd’s assertion that Wooley had a flask of something. Maybe he could get Wooley to bring it out before dinner and spend the entire evening soaked in aquavit.

  A troll house, Wooley explained as they left town, heads down against the wind, was any large boulder sitting alone on land in the bøur—near the village. “They think that’s where trolls live,” he added.

  “I got that,” said Jonathan.

  Sarcasm rolled off Wooley as easily as rain off his fancy slicker. He began to whistle. He had a true and melodious whistle, and he was doing an old favorite of Jonathan’s, “Loch Lomond.” Bear long ago had sung Jonathan to sleep with it. “I’ll be in Scotland before you,” whistled Wooley.

  “But me and my true love,” Jonathan joined in, singing.

  “We’ll never meet again,” Wooley whistled.

  “On the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond,” they ended together. And it sounded so nicely mournful, singing and whistling this sad song in the rain, that they went through the verses again, Wooley weaving a pattern of trill and quaver with his really quite marvelous whistle.

  “Here’s the troll house.” Wooley broke off the music. “The big rock should be right down there.” They peered carefully over the cliff, which at this point on the island rose more than three hundred feet straight up from the sea.

  There were several big rocks, one of those strange strings of stone droppings that occasionally decorated these shores. Tides had carved out a cave in one, and into this hole the sea poured and swirled, roaring. Huge white sheets of water rose from the impact of ocean on the other rocks, and a pale salt mist rose even higher than the waves, spreading up and across the cliffs to add its moisture to their already wet faces.

  “Great, hunh?” Wooley yelled.

  Jonathan could only see his mouth moving, the noise of the water was so deafening. But he nodded.

  “Louder than Niagara,” Wooley yelled. “God,” he spread his wet arms wide, “what a great country!”

  Jonathan found Wooley’s enthusiasm embarrassing. He busied himself with leaning
forward so that some of the rain collected in the folds of his slicker would run onto the turf instead of onto his jeans.

  “Wet.” Wooley offered this comment at high volume. Jonathan nodded. “Go?” asked Wooley, moving inland ten feet.

  The wind was at their backs as they walked home, shortening the journey considerably and soaking the parts of them that had managed to stay dry on the way out.

  “Let’s stop at the dock and get some fish,” Jonathan said. “That way we won’t have to go out again.”

  “We need milk too,” said Wooley.

  Jonathan was struck by that we need; he had never shared a household, and in his fantasies of doing so, it was always a woman’s voice saying we need. Still, he liked hearing it, even though Wooley was speaking. Something about the phrase was comforting and conjured images of coziness in a warm, well-supplied home.

  But the reality of supply, that day in Skopun, did not meet demand. The milk bucket at Sigurd’s was down to the dregs already, though usually the whole milk lasted until after lunch. “Everybody’s coming in for milk because tomorrow maybe it won’t arrive,” Sigurd explained.

  “Why?” Jonathan asked.

  “Weather,” said Sigurd, terse.

  “Where does it come from?”

  “From Sandur.” Sigurd gestured south, toward that other country ten miles across the island. “Milk from Sandur.”

  “Why couldn’t it arrive? Doesn’t it come on a truck?”

  Sigurd didn’t answer this. “Cheese?” he suggested.

  Jonathan bought half a liter of watery milk, some cheese, and a few potatoes. Wooley didn’t offer to pay. As Jonathan was digging coins out of his wet pocket, Sigurd added a box of eggs to the pile.

  “Get these,” he ordered.

  “Why?”

  Sigurd ducked this question too. “See you tonight,” he said, with his theatrical wink.

  The dock was nearly deserted. All the boats were fastened down and empty, and they banged against each other with dull, water-muffled thuds. Two young men were sheltering beneath the overhang of the fish factory’s loading platform. Jonathan was glad to see that Heðin was one of them.