Far Afield

by Susanna Kaysen

  “That’s a thought,” he said.

  “You’re right, though,” Jonathan went on. “We will fit in again at home, eventually. Whatever this is, it’ll wear off. But I don’t think it works the other way. I think you’re wrong. I’d never fit in here.”

  “Sure you could,” said Wooley. “I do.”

  “Oh, come on.” Jonathan leaned toward Wooley. “Do you really believe the people on Fugloy consider you one of them?”

  “I’m their American. I’m an institutionalized deviant. I’m like a movie-star neighbor in Beverly Hills. This is a very loosely organized society, fluid roles, high tolerance for eccentricity—”

  “I know, I know.” Jonathan balked at being lectured on Faroese society. “What you’re kidding yourself about is fitting in.” He crossed his arms and waited for Wooley’s response.

  It was not at all what he expected. Wooley smiled at him—a more genuine, less stagey smile than most of his—and said, “You know, Jonathan, it’s really about where you want to be. Where your heart is.”

  “Home is where the heart is?”

  “Clichés are interesting,” said Wooley. This also surprised Jonathan; it sounded like a remark he would make. “They get to be clichés because they’re true.”

  “I think they just express the norms society is trying to enforce.”

  “Oh, give me a break. You don’t believe that—it doesn’t even mean anything.”

  Jonathan had to admit to himself that this was true: a point to Wooley for knowing it, another for saying it. To even up the score, he said, “I know. It’s the sort of bullshit people spout at each other at Harvard.”

  “They do it everywhere. I mean, we all have to do it, right? Except we don’t now. Vacation from bullshit.”

  “Sometimes,” said Jonathan. “Sometimes it is.”

  Wooley leaned back in his chair. “Man, I feel so free here. Don’t you?”

  “I guess so.” Jonathan thought of his happy days on the dock. “I used to.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jonathan. But he had an idea: it was something to do with the blood. He tried to articulate it. “There’s a barrier between us, a line I can’t cross. I wouldn’t be surprised by that if they were primitive—if we were in the jungle.”

  “You’re not supposed to say that,” Wooley joked.

  “It’s true, though. They’re so much like us, the differences are more shocking.” He went over to the window. The heat of the kitchen had begun to dissipate, and the house without the hum and burble of the stove was too quiet, as if it had stopped breathing. In front of his door some sheep stood with their wet faces turned toward the wind, enduring the weather. “For instance, all this blood,” he ventured. He kept his back to Wooley.

  “Oh, yeah, the grind.”

  “No, I haven’t seen one yet.”

  “If you’ve got some thing about blood, you’re not going to be too happy at a grindadráp.”

  “It’s not the blood itself, really. After Sigurd slaughtered the sheep here, in the kitchen—” Jonathan paused. “I think they are truly innocent,” he said, turning around, “and I know I’m not.”

  “Innocent,” Wooley repeated. He walked over to Jonathan’s side and put a heavy, friendly arm around Jonathan’s shoulder. “You seem pretty innocent to me.”

  Jonathan shook his head. The simplicity of being touched, the heat and weight of Wooley’s arm, made him, briefly, speechless. “I’m not,” he mumbled, “I’m self-conscious.”

  Wooley laughed and leaned harder on Jonathan. “That’s for sure. But that doesn’t make you corrupt—or whatever the opposite of innocent is.”

  “The opposite of innocent is unhappy.”

  Wooley took his arm off Jonathan’s shoulder. “I don’t get what’s bothering you,” he said. “Maybe I don’t understand exactly what you mean by innocent.”

  Jonathan sighed; he felt creeping over him the alienation that: always followed requests to define his terms. Classmates and teachers were forever asking him to do this, as though he spoke a foreign language they didn’t understand. And he knew from experience that “define your terms” was a polite warning that he was talking drivel and was about to get into an argument. He didn’t want to get into an argument with Wooley. They had a long, cold, dark day to get through together—possibly several. The best thing was to lie low.

  “Never mind,” said Jonathan bravely.

  “Do you mean unpremeditated or instinctive? Something like that?” Wooley had moved a few steps away from Jonathan and was looking at him. “Untrammeled, like?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Jonathan turned on the water to fill a pot for coffee, then remembered that the hot plate was out of commission. Buoyed by his surge of irritation, he said, “What I mean is that they just live, while all I do is think about living.”

  “Instinctive.” Wooley nodded.

  “It’s not that simple,” snapped Jonathan. Wooley looked expectant, but Jonathan didn’t know what to say next. If he said nothing, they could avoid the argument; his mind emptied obligingly.

  “Is that all you’re going to say?” Wooley sat down at the table again. “Come on, Jonathan. What else have we got to do? Let’s discuss Faroese character.”

  Jonathan had thought they were discussing his character. Confused, he joined Wooley at the table and cut himself a piece of Tilsit from the heap of food in front of them.

  “Your idea is that they’re noble savages, right?” Wooley had hold of the butter knife again and was sketching imaginary columns with it on the table. “And my idea is that they’re modern men in particularly inhospitable circumstances.” He looked up from his columns. “See, my theory is that if you took these people and put them in Baltimore or some provincial capital in France, they’d fit right in. They’re gossipy, bourgeois, family-oriented—”

  “Twenty minutes ago you were telling me how anarchic the society is.” Jonathan was startled by how much he disliked Wooley at this moment. “And my idea is not that they’re noble savages—that’s your idea of my idea.”

  “Okay. What is your idea, then?”

  Many responses flashed through Jonathan’s mind, ranging from a mild I’m not sure yet to a wild None of your business. Put on the spot, he couldn’t come up with anything meriting the label idea, yet he’d felt himself coming closer, this last month, to a way of seeing the Faroes: a pattern deeper than the web of social ties, which was complicated enough but was not the whole story. He’d had visions in which the islands and their surrounding waters were transparent, revealing every dart of life within (worms, ants, mussels clamped to rocks), and all this life was transparent too, so that he saw the heart of each bird, fish, sheep, and person beating in unison—as though together rock, water, fin, feather, and bone made one breathing organism, one body that constituted the Faroes. It was not a metaphor; Jonathan seeing this vision (it was infrequent but clear) knew he was seeing the truth—some kind of truth. But he was not about to say this to Wooley.

  The most he was willing to say was, “I really don’t think they are modern, not in any meaningful sense.”

  “Yes?” Wooley was waiting for more.

  “Peasants. You don’t consider peasants modern, do you?”

  “There are no more peasants, Jonathan. There’s nobody left in the world with a small, integrated universe. People know too much—except really isolated tribes.”

  “Is that the line out at Berkeley? No more peasants?”

  “Hey, look,” said Wooley, “I’m not trying to have a fight.”

  “Oh,” said Jonathan.

  “I’m just trying to find out what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m thinking they’re peasants, with just the sort of small, integrated universe you say people don’t have anymore. They’re positively medieval, is what I’m thinking. And I’m also thinking that you think my ideas are half-baked.” Jonathan delivered this speech in a series of angry bursts that were satisfying to produ
ce and left him feeling exposed and uncomfortable. He wished his words back—or at least his tone. Couldn’t he have said the same thing with self-assurance or humor?

  “Give yourself a break, Jonathan,” said Wooley. “You’re not the first person with a half-baked idea. Maybe it’ll turn out to be a good idea, when you finish with it. And maybe it won’t. It’s not such a big deal. Don’t be so hard on yourself. I mean, you know, we’re all just assholes, trying to get by the best we can.”

  The We’re All Assholes Theory: Jonathan had heard it before and he wasn’t surprised to hear it now. He’d set himself up for it with his insecure little tirade. Along with “define your terms,” this theory was an important weapon in the Cambridge intelligence war. Nobody who said We’re all assholes included himself in the diagnosis. Jonathan knew the real message was You are an asshole. And that wasn’t the only insult being offered; the deeper insult was to people’s dreams.

  This theory was directed at discrepancies between ambition and capacity, at those too blind to make reasonable assessments of their own abilities, at those who, despite failure, still hoped to succeed. Simple arrogance wouldn’t trigger it; Jonathan had watched the brilliant be as arrogant as they pleased without anybody telling them they were assholes. And in a weird attempt at chumminess, the brilliant would sometimes spout this theory as if they were taken in by its masquerade of democracy, as if they didn’t see into its vicious heart.

  But Jonathan was not taken in; at least, he knew what was really being said. He’d certainly had enough opportunities to try his hand at translating it. His parents, his teachers, and many of his friends had told him that everybody was an asshole and that he shouldn’t be so hard on himself. What made it insulting were the standards to which these same people held him and the assurances they’d given him that he was a brilliant lad bound for glory. Which was true? They couldn’t both be true, Jonathan knew that much. Did he or did he not have a right to his ambitions?

  According to Wooley, he did not. And the worst part about hearing this from Wooley was hearing the echoes of his own exhortations to himself two nights before, during his struggle to abandon the Other Jonathan—that being whose desires matched his endowments. Hadn’t he told himself to regulate his hopes? Hadn’t he told himself to forget about being the best and get used to being merely okay?

  It is a universal truth that what we may say to ourselves we do not want to hear from others, and Jonathan wasn’t surprised to feel his throat burning with anger at Wooley. He was again tempted to say a number of nasty things and again bit them back in the interests of peace—and maturity. It wasn’t Wooley’s fault that Jonathan was disappointed in himself; he couldn’t even blame Wooley for the ancient crime of being the bearer of bad news, since he’d got the news already. Explaining this to himself did nothing for Jonathan’s anger, which was now charring his stomach as well as his mouth.

  Jonathan jumped up from the table and began pacing the room, trying to work off some of his agitation. Movement helped. With each circuit of the kitchen his thoughts grew clearer. Up to the window, which framed the ragged, stormy view: Was he going to be judged and judge himself by standards he questioned? Back to the stove, cold and quiet: He did question them, didn’t he? Over to the hall door, where bursts of air whistled around the hinges: Maybe questioning wasn’t enough; he’d been willing to ditch the Other Jonathan, who after all embodied hope, however awkwardly. Into the hall, where the cold stairway rose to the obscured second floor and appeared to go nowhere: Why not ditch the whole world he’d been brought up to see—which was exactly that, the visible, evident, proof-is-in-the-pudding universe?

  Jonathan stood in the hall, looking up the stairs into darkness. There was another world, he was sure of it. It couldn’t be true that the unsuccessful weren’t entitled to their dreams, that the mediocre life wasn’t worth living. And it couldn’t be true that people were known by their accomplishments or that the past was an accurate predictor of the future.

  He thought of his parents’ enlightened pessimism that had cast its shadow over him for as long as he could remember: the sober assessments of his third-grade paintings, the reasoned criticisms of his fourth-grade classmates, the guarded encouragement given his early passion for novels (guarded because where, exactly, would this lead?). They were convinced they saw the seeds of the end in every beginning.

  Suddenly he understood what he meant by innocence—that is, he knew how to say it: no expectations of the future, no claim to know what it would be. Put more simply: belief in chance and transformation. And only a heart that had forsworn the whole idea of knowing on a grand scale could beat comfortably to that unpredictable rhythm.

  Jonathan’s head was light and clear, and he was breathing deeply, as if after a long winter he stood outside in sunshine. He went back into the kitchen. He was not an asshole, and he was going to tell that to Wooley.

  He sat down at the table.

  “Did you figure it out?” Wooley asked.

  “Figure what out?”

  “Whatever you went back there to figure out.”

  “Yes,” said Jonathan. Then he completely surprised himself by saying, “We are all assholes.”

  “That’s what I said,” said Wooley, with his inevitable grin.

  “I mean, I mean—” Jonathan was carried away by how everything seemed to have flipped around. “We are. People—we’re just confused and worried about ourselves, aren’t we?”

  “Everybody I’ve ever met seemed to be. At least, basically they were, even if they looked okay. About something.” Wooley leaned toward Jonathan. “Everybody’s worried about something, you can bet on it.”

  “Why don’t they admit it?” Jonathan was really puzzled by this.

  “Why should they admit it? They figure everybody knows it already.”

  “I didn’t know.” Jonathan sighed.

  “Well, if that isn’t innocence, I don’t know what is.” Wooley punched him in the shoulder, a locker-room gesture.

  Jonathan looked at Wooley. He didn’t like being punched—the assumption of intimacy, the heartiness that passed as affection between men—and he didn’t like Wooley any better than he had yesterday. But these dislikes didn’t seem so important anymore. It was as though he’d been granted a present tense, in which people and events could come and go without setting off shock waves that reverberated into the past. This was an unforeseen balm. Jonathan had always figured that if relief from misery existed, it would take the form of insight into the deeper connections between Now and Then: that was how he imagined psychoanalysis worked. Instead, the conduit that had led inexorably back to all his failings and disappointments, so that each new episode was poured, so to speak, into an old mold, seemed to have closed. He didn’t want Wooley for a friend: so what? He couldn’t generate any more feeling about it than that.

  “You’ll have to come visit me on Fugloy,” said Wooley.

  “It doesn’t look like you’re ever going to get back to Fugloy.”

  “This storm will break tomorrow.” Wooley ambled to the front door and put his head out. “I bet you. I bet you a bottle of aquavit that I’m on the afternoon boat.”

  “Can you get aquavit?”

  Wooley winked.

  “I can’t get any,” Jonathan said. “I tried the day you came.” He remembered Wooley’s alleged flask. “You have some with you, don’t you?”

  Wooley winked again.

  “Let’s drink it.” Wooley didn’t answer. Jonathan took another tack. “Let’s take it next door as a thank-you for dinner.”

  “I need it,” said Wooley.

  “That’s what Sigurd said to me when I tried to buy some. What do you mean, need it?”

  “I need it for the boat.” Wooley came back to the table. “I hate boats,” he said.

  “You hate boats! How can you manage here?”

  “That’s why I need the aquavit.” Wooley came back to the table. “How about that for a ridiculous problem?”

 
“Well,” Jonathan made an effort to be sympathetic, “it’s a difficult problem to have in the Faroes.” Then he couldn’t resist asking, “How did you get the aquavit?”

  “I told a friend on Fugloy that I was scared of boats, and he got me a bottle.”

  Could life be so simple? Was announcing fear part of living in the muddled new world? Jonathan began to slip into a sad reverie, thinking of how he’d never trusted (or even believed) in people’s goodwill, and was pleased to be interrupted by a commotion at the front door, which culminated in the entrance of Heðin, dripping, wind-whipped, and full of instructions.

  “Get dressed. It’s too cold in here. You have to come to my house. We’ll play cards. Put the food back in the refrigerator. Tomorrow the power will be fixed. Turn the light switches off so that when it comes back you don’t blow a fuse. Come on.”

  He was outside again before either of them had as much as stood up.

  Many hours later, full of eggs (Jonathan) and rœst meat (Wooley), tea, and talk, heavy-headed from the hot, moist air of the Dahls’ kitchen, and quite a number of kroner poorer from playing a whistlike card game whose rules Heðin had barely explained, assuring them that they’d “figure it out,” they stood on the dark road watching the wind blow the white storm clouds south toward the Continent. Stars blinked in the sky above the harbor, and a Turkish crescent of a moon pointed its horns west.

  “You were right,” said Jonathan. “The storm’s over.”

  Wooley kicked a stone back and forth. “Home to Fugloy,” he said. He kicked the stone to Jonathan, who let it lie. “Maybe I’ll stop in Klaksvík.”

  “For your girl?”

  Wooley nodded. “How about yours?”

  Jonathan shivered. “It’s cold,” he said, turning back to the house.

  “Hey, Jonathan,” Wooley said.

  Jonathan turned around. But Wooley didn’t say anything. “Yes?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Thanks for the visit.”

  “You’re welcome.” Jonathan waited; Wooley seemed to have more to say.