Such Good Work

by Johannes Lichtman

  “Do you know why we hiccup?” Anja said.

  “I do not.”

  “It’s a leftover from when we were amphibians. We used to breathe through gills in hiccuping motions.”

  “Do you know that there’s a jellyfish that lives forever?”

  “Nothing lives forever, Jonas.”

  “It does! It’s an immortal jellyfish. One of my students did a report on it when I was teaching.”

  She scratched her chin. “Hmm. I don’t know if I believe in this immortal jellyfish. I’ll do some research.”

  “I don’t know if I believe in your hiccuping story. I don’t remember ever breathing through gills.”

  She rolled over and pulled all the blanket with her. “You must have a bad memory.”

  * * *

  Lund was a college town in the south of Sweden, with narrow cobblestone streets, a nine-hundred-year-old twin-towered cathedral, and, if you could find a window higher than ten stories to look out, a view of Denmark across the Sound. It was nothing like an American college town, except it was full of forty thousand young people who couldn’t go out until they’d drunk enough to start liking themselves.

  The exchange students I lived with—mostly German, Dutch, Spanish, French, and Italian twenty-year-olds from the Erasmus program—communicated in broken English. Which meant that my already-bad Swedish stagnated while my English deteriorated. Dutch English was good, but tended to put a rising inflection at the end of sentences, as if everything were a question. German English tended to conflate fun and funny, and to change the verb party to make party. Spanish English tended to not be English.

  The exchange students in the dormitory could dance for hours. Once a week, I would tag along with them, mainly so that Anja didn’t think I was boring. We’d go dancing in the nations—the centuries-old student clubs around Lund, housed in basements full of strobe lights, smoke, and overactive music. I would take part in their circle dancing for five minutes at a time. Then I would go outside and smoke. Sometimes Anja came and talked to me while I smoked, which I found touching. But most of the time I went outside by myself. I smoked twenty, thirty cigarettes a night. I smoked through the nausea, then went back inside, ordered another glass of water with a lime wedge in a cocktail-size plastic cup, and danced for another five minutes. Dancing was a continuous struggle to appear comfortable while tremendously uncomfortable. Sobriety was a continuous struggle to appear comfortable while tremendously uncomfortable.

  * * *

  My university classes had been a shock, despite the years I’d already spent on a bachelor’s in English and a master’s in creative writing. In my first lecture, a middle-aged Swedish professor, who was said to be the foremost expert in the world on Tomas Tranströmer, stepped into the classroom wearing tight jeans rolled up two folds to reveal blue dress socks and expensive brown leather loafers. He was white, tall, and stylish in that way that Swedish men often are at the age when American men begin to assert their independence from their wives by wearing the most creatively awful clothes imaginable. He began the class with “We, as intellectuals, must always consider the meaning behind the meaning.”

  The professor didn’t use air quotes around the word intellectuals. He didn’t qualify the statement or define what he meant by intellectuals, nor did he seem to know how ridiculous he sounded. But my classmates exchanged no titters or knowing looks. I was annoyed, then envious. To live outside quotation marks like that—to take yourself seriously and not realize how ridiculous it was to do so.

  At break, I would walk out front to smoke with my Swedish classmates, who would dive into long earnest debates that quickly left the texts of the novels behind altogether in favor of politics, economic systems, or postcolonial issues. It was all strange to me. In the US, I had been taught to quote from the texts, to return to the texts, to honor and analyze and never stray too far from the texts.

  I started hanging out with a handsome Swedish hipster from my class who was a few years my junior. Bengt was funny and smart. He wrote culture columns and book reviews for a newspaper in the nearby city of Malmö. But he had this annoying tendency to want to find the bourgeois sellout element in every work of art.

  Once, we were sitting at Café Ariman, a student hangout near the cathedral, Bengt with a beer and me with a coffee, talking about a recent American movie. Bengt had no thoughts to offer about the film, except to go on and on about the clumsy product placement, as if the ability to spot the product placement were a sign of intelligence—a sign that you weren’t being fooled. Whatever the filmmaker was trying to do wasn’t as important as Bengt’s observations. I saw this approach to criticism among a lot of my classmates: show how smart you are by finding the one problem. It bugged me. But I also admired the Swedish ability to ask the piercing question of art: Is what you’re doing worthwhile? I didn’t see this question as much in American criticism. The question in American reviews was more how well you did what you were doing.

  But my thoughts about what art or literature did or should do were all hypothetical, since I wasn’t writing at all. Without self-consciousness-killing drugs, I couldn’t get more than a paragraph into writing before I hated what I’d written too much to go on. I tried to start a novel about a BuzzFeed writer going off the rails—a novel told in listicles—but I couldn’t even manage writing ten-item lists. I longed for that manic expulsion that I’d get when I was pilled-up and lightning brained, going all day until the computer died and I’d have to scribble on shopping lists, paper towels, or the copyright pages of paperbacks.

  But now whenever I caught myself wanting to get high, I’d look back on the stories and essays I’d published during my drug years. Twelve in all, most of them in small journals, some on the websites of larger magazines. They were sometimes interesting. Sometimes insightful. Sometimes clever. But always hollow. How were you supposed to write human emotion when you could get more joy from a pill than you could from another person?

  * * *

  One afternoon, I biked down to the ICA supermarket on Tunavägen, housed in an ugly little concrete strip mall between the dorms. I picked out my groceries, then stacked my bread, my spreadable butter, my packet of ham, and my chocolate bar on the conveyor belt. There was no temptation to buy alcohol in the grocery store because Sweden didn’t sell alcohol in grocery stores—you had to visit the state-run Systembolaget, which had prohibitive hours to encourage moderation. Even in Systembolaget, there were no refrigerated shelves. Beer was sold at room temperature. There would be no spontaneous drinking.

  At the grocery checkout, a newsstand displayed the three evening papers above the three morning papers. The headlines of all the morning papers were about civil war in Syria and the stream of refugees trying to get to Europe. The evening papers carried headlines of soccer and the drunk-driving arrest of a reality-TV star. One of the evening papers had a picture of hawk-faced Zlatan Ibrahimović, the most famous man in Sweden, in profile, looking dissatisfied in his PSG jersey, with the headline “Zlatan to Blanc: Get It Together or I’m Outta Here!”

  I asked the cashier for two packs of Lucky Strikes, in Swedish, but when I said, “Lucky Strikes,” the cashier asked for my ID in English. I had almost no accent, but whenever I said foreign words in Swedish, I pronounced them American and it gave me away.

  I bagged my groceries and walked toward the revolving door just as Anja was coming through it. She wore a winter coat and a giant knit scarf.

  “Hello, Jonas!” Her smile was like a hug, though we didn’t hug in public. I assumed it was a German thing.

  “What are you up to?” I said.

  “I was buying some things for my costume for the party next week.”

  “What party?”

  “The Noah’s Ark party in Malmö. Aren’t you going?”

  “I hadn’t heard about it.”

  “Everybody dresses like an animal and the ship sails around the harbor all night. It’s going to be very fun. You should go!”

  “That doe
sn’t sound like my kind of party. But you could come by before?”

  “Don’t be an old man!”

  “I am an old man.”

  “It will be fun.”

  “I don’t have an animal costume.”

  “I can make you one. What would you like to be?”

  I tried to think of the most unmakeable costume. “An octopus.”

  “I will make you an octopus.”

  “How are you going to make an octopus costume?”

  “I am a scientist, Jonas. Goodbye.” With that, she scampered away.

  Since we’d slept together, I had found myself wondering what Anja was thinking, what she wanted, how she saw our relationship—things I had never cared about when I was high. It was maddening to find that I couldn’t figure out the answers on my own. One day I asked her if she considered herself my girlfriend. She answered that she considered herself happy with me. It was, I had to admit, a skillful evasion, especially for someone speaking her second language.

  I wondered what her life was like in German. I had been trying to learn German through a computer program, but every vocab slide was just a picture of a cat being on top of things.

  Die Katze ist auf dem Tisch.

  Die Katze ist auf dem Haus.

  I wondered what she was saying when she laughed with her German friends, what she was saying when her mother called and her voice turned soft, what she had said to past boyfriends when they were lying in bed.

  Die Katze ist auf dem Tisch.

  Die Katze ist auf dem Haus.

  * * *

  That night, I startled awake just as I was falling into sleep.

  “Did you have a bad dream?” Anja put her hand on my chest.

  “I dreamt that I couldn’t wake up.”

  Anja told me that people sometimes startled themselves awake as they were falling asleep due to a genetic leftover from when we were monkeys, when sleep meant the possibility of falling out of a tree. Our brains had to simulate the event before it happened and we hurt ourselves.

  “But you do not have to worry. I will catch you if you fall.”

  “Or if I dream that I’m falling?”

  “Yes, I will catch that, too.”

  Anja went back to sleep and I lay awake trying to think of ways to be less needy. When I’d organized my days around drugs, relationships had been a burden. When I was done talking to someone, I’d often find, to my great annoyance, that the person still wanted to talk to me. Then I’d be stuck there wasting away my high listening to someone else’s monologue. Unless I needed an audience or sex, it was usually better to just be high alone. But now whenever I was alone, I found myself longing for Anja, Stella, roommates from college I hadn’t talked to in years, teachers from childhood, everyone I’d ever met.

  * * *

  I woke up late for class. Anja had already left. I jumped on my bike and raced through the cold wind. I didn’t have time to make my usual morning coffee, and by the time the course let out, it was three in the afternoon and my head was burning with caffeine aches. I jumped on my bike again and darted out of the newly renovated languages-and-literatures building, past the old brick-and-ivy university library, under the arch of the department of gender studies, and onto the gravel paths of Lundagård, the central area of the university. I passed the brick tower that housed the student union, the old pink Versailles-like university building, and the fountain into which champagne-drunk newly graduated students would dive. Finally, I cut out onto the street, toward the city center and the Central Station. I pedaled hard until I got to the Espresso House, a ubiquitous chain that was bringing the Starbucks experience to Sweden. I ordered a coffee, drank it too fast, and scalded my tongue. I drank until I couldn’t remember what the headache felt like.

  Sitting there in the Espresso House, caffeinated and headache-cured, it hit me: I could still get high.

  I could take the train to Copenhagen and score.

  I could be there in forty minutes.

  * * *

  I biked from Espresso House to the train station, then back to Espresso House, six times. I didn’t board any trains.

  * * *

  I knocked on Anja’s door, but no one answered. I sat in my room thinking of someone I could call, but it wasn’t even 8:00 a.m. yet on the West Coast. The internet told me that I could find an AA meeting in nearby Malmö that evening. But it had taken me weeks to get myself to an AA meeting conducted in a language where I was fluent in euphemism—I wasn’t about to attend one in Swedish. I sat down and made a list of the consequences of using. My brain made a companion list where every point started with But . . .

  Eventually I took some allergy medicine and passed out.

  * * *

  The next morning, I woke to a knock on the door. I struggled to reenter the world; there was no part of me interested in making the journey. But I pushed my eyes open and got out of bed.

  When I opened the door, I found Anja standing there, smiling. She held up an old purple sweatshirt, with the area below the neck cut into eight strips, sewn into arms. “It’s an octopus!”

  I batted the gangly tentacles, the six nonfunctional limbs stuffed with socks. “This is the best octopus costume I’ve ever seen.” I pulled her inside and kissed her hard and she laughed.

  “It’s perfect,” I said. “You’re perfect.”

  “Yes, this is what I have been trying to explain to you.”

  * * *

  After sex, we played gin rummy. Germans, at least the Germans in my dorm, loved playing cards. Given that poker and gin were the only games I knew, and given that Germans, at least the Germans in my dorm, were terrible at explaining card games in English (“When you put down a queen and then he puts down a queen, then two queens have been put down, and then you know, okay, two queens are down, so it’s until the next turn, unless it is broken”), Anja and I played gin. This morning I won the first ninety-five points, then Anja won back eleven.

  “The groundhog eats slowly,” she said, gloating.

  “What?”

  “It’s an expression. The groundhog eats slowly but is warm all winter.”

  “That sounds made-up.”

  “You are made-up. Mühsam ernährt sich das Eichhörnchen.”

  She spelled it out for me. I typed it into my phone. “It says that means ‘Troublesome eats the squirrel.’ ”

  “This is a bad translation!”

  I laughed. I wondered if Anja made sobriety okay or if she was just a distraction from thinking about drugs. I wondered if I was just a distraction for her until she returned to Germany and her real life. She was young but she had long known the things I was just now learning. I imagined her on the phone with her friends back in Germany: Americans are so different. They don’t know how to live.

  * * *

  Early one morning later in the week, still awake following a sleepless night, I walked out toward the mail room to get some air. As I was about to pass Anja’s room—I wasn’t going to knock and wake her, but I liked passing by her room anyway—the door opened and a tall man exited. He whispered something in German. I heard her laugh.

  * * *

  Spanish Richard had once told me about the reminder cards he made for whenever he had a craving. I pulled my own worn set of cards that I’d made months ago from between the covers of a large, unread book on literary theory.

  This feeling will not last forever.

  One day you will be nostalgic for this day.

  God will take away your pain if you let him/her.

  I’d never told Anja about the cards. It was less embarrassing to be addicted to drugs than to believe in God. Looking at them today, I wondered what they’d accomplished—or if they had ever accomplished anything.

  * * *

  I biked to the train station; I biked to Espresso House. I drank a coffee; I biked to the train station. I pulled into an alley; I screamed into my sleeve. A group of handsome Swedish college boys in peacoats stopped to stare at me. I yelled, in Swedi
sh, “What are you staring at?” But they walked on, refusing to fight. I didn’t board any trains.

  * * *

  That evening, as I stomped through the door and into the dormitory hallway, Anja peeked out of her room, as if she’d been out to check every time the front door opened. When she saw me, she rushed into the hall.

  “Hey,” I said, and tried to walk past her.

  But she put her hand on my chest and stopped me. “Hey.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I want to explain.”

  “About what?”

  “About Uli this morning.”

  “There’s nothing to explain.”

  She looked down. “It’s very complicated.”

  “It’s not complicated at all. We’re not together. You can do whatever you want.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Because it’s true.”

  “It’s not true. It’s just . . .” She paused. “Sometimes I don’t know how things are with you. You are very difficult to understand.”

  “At least now I know how things are with you.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  I walked past her, into my room, locked the door, and punched the wall. The wall was made of cheap material. It spiderwebbed around the impact like a windshield hit by a pebble.

  * * *

  It was Friday night and I was in line outside a student nation with some of the Dutch boys from my dorm waiting to get into the party. In front of us the Swedish students spoke Swedish and the international students spoke sputtering English.

  “The queue has not moved for half an hour?” said Edwin, a tall, happy Dutchman who was studying something to do with technology. “We should go back.”

  I didn’t want to go back. I had made up my mind that it would be all right for me to drink, just this once, just tonight. Alcohol couldn’t lead to drugs when there were no drugs around. But we had to get inside to get the alcohol.

  “Let’s give it ten more minutes,” I said.

  “They are letting one in for one out?” Edwin said.

  “We’ve waited this long.”