The Sunlit Night (10 page)

I marveled at the firm red peppers that had made it up here. This was a very unusual dot of land, stationed in arctic waters. An older woman went ahead and put two of the peppers into her basket. I switched into gear.

“Milk,” I said aloud, and looked to my side for Nils. He had wandered out toward the bananas. Nils’s expertise was so convincing, in his painting (I wanted to learn) and his driving (I would never learn) and his never worrying (you’re either born this way or not); in my helplessness, I wanted to enter into complete symbiosis with him: eating whatever he ate, paying squarely for my half, following him here when he came and home when he went. Home to an asylum, I thought. I pushed myself toward the refrigerators.

The milk was sold only in paper quarts. It came in seven colors. A man reached in front of me and selected a green quart. So did I. (It turned out to be kefir, a sour milk delicacy that is as thick as yogurt.) I imagined putting the kefir in my tea and cereal, so I found those things in their aisles too. I selected a hunk of cheese from a massive array of cheese hunks, all inscrutably brown. I found Nils.

His basket was full of fish and beer. He looked into my basket and nodded at the kefir, impressed.

I didn’t feel comfortable asking Nils about toilet paper, so I asked him where I could find spaghetti. We walked together past the ice cream section, past all the tomato-stewed-mackerel pastes for bread, past the frozen pizza section, past the wall of bread loaves—unsliced and sorted by coarseness—into the very back of the store, where we found the pastas and sauces. In an adjacent housecleaning aisle, I found all the toilet paper I could ever need, sorted according to indecipherable descriptions of softness. Nils joined the checkout line. I caught up with him and placed my items on the belt behind his.

The cashier looked at me, turned to Nils, and said,
“Pussy?”

Nils said,
“Ja.”

I said,
“What?”

The cashier bagged Nils’s beers and advanced my pasta to the bar-code scanner.

“Pussy?”
she asked me.

I didn’t respond.

“A bag, a bag,” Nils chimed. “Do you want a bag?”

I said, “Please. Thank you.”

The cashier bagged my items, double-bagging the quart of kefir.

We drove home to the asylum.

•    •    •

Nils and I each had our own floor, and each floor had its own industrial kitchen. I could hear Nils’s footsteps in the kitchen directly above mine, shuffling between the sink and the freezer. I put my purchases in their right places, doing little to fill the vast emptiness of the cupboards.

Out the kitchen window, fields extended back toward the horizon, which I had always known to be a line, but in this case was a mountain wall. Farmhouses dotted the fields, each with a truck at its door. Nils had stopped moving above me. The colony fell silent. For the first time I was afraid of its size, its noiselessness, its solitude. My parents wanted to know that I’d arrived, and I wanted to hear their voices. I retrieved my laptop from my quiet new room, carried it back to the kitchen, and centered it on the table, watching trees shaking in the window behind the screen.

My mother was also shaking. Behind her, bowls lined across the counter were filled with raspberries. I looked into the tiny camera and told them I had arrived safely and had been warmly welcomed. I told them I was comfortable. I didn’t tell them about the three-story building where I lived with one middle-aged man.

“You’re way up there,” my mother said.

“And they’re here,” my father said.

“We put them in your room,” my mother told me. “Scott took your bottom bunk.” I pictured Scott climbing up the bunk bed’s ladder at night, my sister a brunette Rapunzel.

“The schmo waltzed in here asking me how the
scribbles
are coming along.”

“He doesn’t have a good heart,” said my mother.

“I’m losing my stomach.” My father showed me how white his tongue had turned. “I have to keep myself from retching.”

“I have to start melting the ice cream.” My mother turned her back to the camera and shrank on my screen as she walked back into the kitchen. I saw her bend down to the freezer, the rear pockets of her jeans suddenly visible, and set two pints of Häagen-Dazs on the counter.

“I was hoping,” I told my father, “that we could take this as a new era. And buck up.”

I thought it was a new era. One in which the constant fret over why Sarah was still
dating
this person would be relieved by the sheer elevation of her
marrying
him. And that my family could, consequentially, buck up.

“I can’t stand to be in a room with him,” my father said. He pinched the bridge of his nose.

My mother ran back to the screen from the kitchen, wiping freezer frost onto her apron, shouting toward the computer, “I am frightened for her!”

“Why couldn’t she marry somebody more like me?” my father asked.

Outrage blacked out my thoughts for a moment, and when they came back, I found myself thinking about the Viking ship. How the families and the strangers had resembled one another. How each husband had been born and raised a stranger to his eventual wife, and their eventual children had each arrived as a stranger to both parents. I couldn’t really say what a stranger was anymore, having encountered Nils—who was both stranger and sole companion to me, for the time being—and these islands in general, whose mountains were transforming in my perception from dinosaur spines into my most reliable friends. My sister’s fiancé was hardly, after three years, a stranger to us. All the same, my parents did not seem interested in expanding our family.

“That’s a ludicrous thing to say,” I told my father.

“No.” He leaned close to the webcam, such that his hair filled the whole of my screen.

Sarah had taken a stand, he went on to say, against the values with which they had raised her. Against the artistic, which this guy wasn’t, against the Jewish, which this guy certainly wasn’t, against the delicate and the disciplined, both of which my father had counted out from Scott’s first mention of Xbox, against the essential fineness my family valued and could not find in the Glennys of San Francisco. He took it as a personal rejection.

When I didn’t answer, my father resumed the conversation with a story of the dinner they’d all shared the night before. They had been sitting at the table, Scott speaking about how excited he and Sarah felt, and my mother had gone into her bedroom and begun to cry.

“It’s not right,” my father said.

My mother left the screen again, and I saw her by the fridge, blueberry cartons stacked from her hands to her chin. She had served vanilla ice cream with mixed berries every summer that I could remember. The same white porcelain bowls. It was soothing to see the tradition return, though I wondered whether any of them could stomach ice cream at that moment, and the kitchen was being packed away, each appliance into its original box, the boxes split between my parents according to who used which more.

“They’ll be coming out of the room soon,” my mother said, “for ice cream.”

“I wish they’d stay in there,” growled my father.

My mother asked him to set the juices out on the table. I told them to enjoy the visit and celebrate Sarah. My mother spilled half a carton of blueberries onto the floor and dove down to clean them up. My father signed off.

I looked up from my screen and out the kitchen window. In the fields, the trees were still shaking. I saw the asylum’s pet ox wandering between them and testing his horns against the trunks. I wanted, as many often want, to talk with the animal. The only way was to keep perfectly silent. The ox lifted his head, walked a little way into the open, and stood nobly by a patch of low-growing crops, waiting for his portrait to be painted.

•    •    •

Nils started the car just before midnight, when it was still very bright, and we drove northwest from Leknes. It was the clearest night he’d seen on the islands.

We listened to Radio Norge, the national station, whose most frequently played song was Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” Nils announced he would speak only in Norwegian for the rest of the night. When he flattened his Lofoten map over the dashboard, allowing me to pick a direction, I pointed at the word
EGGUM
. It was a place near Borg, up the road from the museum, on the northern shore. His reply was,
“Det kan vi.”
That can we.

Along the way, vocabulary basics. One sheep on the roadside:
Sau
. A horse:
En hest
. The horse:
Hesten
. Nils pointed a finger to his chest, said,
Jeg
, pointed at me, said,
Du. Jeg
, I said.
Du
, he said. We were getting somewhere.

We hunted the midnight sun, and found it behind each mountain, over every pond and fjord, doubling itself on the smooth surfaces of those waters, and in the windows of Nils’s car, and on the lenses of his glasses. We wanted to get somehow closer to it, as close as possible. That’s how Eggum helped us. As shown on Nils’s map, it was the northward-facing, beachy top of our island. Between Eggum and the North Pole lay one final landmass, a polar-bear-inhabited block called Svalbard. But Eggum was inhabited by people, if sparsely, and was even marked with a sculpture of a human head.

When we sat on the beach there, between the sculpture and a damaged World War II radar fort, our eyes met the sun’s stare. Nils filled two tin mugs with instant coffee and balanced them on a flat-topped rock. We sat on a boulder that faced due north, and in the glare of that final waterfront I couldn’t say how much of the night we would spend there, or what kind of togetherness ours was.

I wanted to keep the conversation simple, to avoid a host of complications. Waves made the rocks look like dolphins jumping, I told Nils, or a whale’s tale flipping up. “
Ja
, but it is rocks,” Nils said. He looked at his watch and said,
“Klar
?
”

One o’clock, two o’clock—these were the hours in Lofoten when the sun came down to the sea, colored the water and mountains, and sat on the brink of the horizon before starting back up again. It never left our sight, or the sight of the world, whose ponds and grasses seemed to be watching the sun along with us, mimicking it and lighting up for all the night travelers to see.

Nils said,
“Bra,”
with great sincerity in his voice, meaning, “Good.”

These hours were characterized by a wildness of colors, the combined power of a sunset and sunrise. It was easy to watch the horizon for hours straight, the sun in perpetual motion, the sky turning orange and cranberry until at three it returned to blue, and I felt ready for bed. Nils rose from his rock and said we would begin Yellow Room work in four hours. He called himself
kjempetrøtt
, “super-tired,” to teach me
kjempe
, the prefix that super-sized anything. Best to sleep now, he said, if we were to sleep any.

Radio Norge filled the slow ride back with Journey, A-ha, Dolly Parton, and a metal band called the Sins of Thy Beloved.

The light behind the mountain at Utakleiv Beach was gold; it looked like a biblical place. The foothills were patchy, balding. Tall plants formed patches for the road’s elbows. In every meadow grew white and yellow grasses. Waterfall veins streaked the mountains, and a little rain in the air prepared the sky for rainbows. We drove through a passing wink of colors, a natural hologram.

It had been a very long day, and this had been our day off. I pictured the barn’s thousand wooden surfaces that needed sanding, priming, painting. I didn’t know whether Nils would become my friend or my uncle, whether he had a wife, whether, in the absence of all other society, our ages separated us as much as they otherwise would. The space we shared was immense, and we were both petite people who barely filled our own rooms. I took off the clothes I had worn since boarding the Hurtigruten, twenty-four hours and many fjords earlier. I stood by the window and nobody could see me—even the sheep had gone.

Nighttime, though it was completely indistinguishable from the day, was a relative of other darknesses in other parts of the world, I remembered, where men lost their minds. It may have been merely the hallway I feared. I had nothing to fear from Nils. Had he wanted anything from me, he could have taken it easily in the kitchen, or the car, or the empty places along the northern shore where we’d pulled over. He hadn’t made any such move. The parking lot lay illuminated in the perpetual morning out my window. I drew the curtains and locked my door, foolishly, against the empty asylum, or against my only companion, or against anything that woke in the weird bright night.

•    •    •

The next day lasted three weeks. The sun stayed above us, as if it had nowhere else to be. Nils and I spent mornings in the barn and nights in the car. We slept at miscellaneous times—drawing the asylum’s curtains, we could choose when night was. The barn grew richer and wilder. It was the only marker of time passing. As Nils made his way around the exterior walls, covering the brown wood with his signature marigold, a square sun seemed to rise from the hilltop. From down the road, there it was: a small, brilliant box. Up close, it was strange and enormous. Its lemon color loomed over the lime-green grass. Nils considered trimming the windows and doors in white, to add a little mildness, to serve as cream. He expected the KORO officers would be mild-mannered men.