Such Good Work

by Johannes Lichtman

  I drank until the bottle was empty, then tucked it behind the trash can under the sink. I curled back into bed and felt calm. It wasn’t so much that I was drunk, but that, for the first time in forever, I wasn’t agonizing over whether to do it. The decision had already been made. Now there was nothing required of me.

  * * *

  So I started drinking again and nothing terrible happened. I didn’t take any drugs. Parties were easier to attend. People were easier to be around. Words were easier to speak and hear. Waking up in the morning was a little harder but not that bad. The only downside I noticed was that on the day after drinking, even if I woke up feeling okay, my ability to function eroded by the hour. By four in the afternoon, reading would be difficult, and I’d stare at the page until the words blurred. I’d scan through a text on the history of vernacular in the European novel, but no meaning would pass back to my brain. By seven in the evening I could barely carry on a conversation until I started drinking again. I certainly couldn’t write—the BuzzFeed novel was going nowhere and the jellyfish story refused to be written. But I hadn’t been able to write since I quit drugs, so it didn’t feel like I was losing much there.

  * * *

  It was on a hungover Sunday night near the end of the term that I picked my first stupid fight with Anja. We had gone to a party at one of the student nations the night before, and I’d had eleven drinks. Anja had drunk a fair amount herself, but the difference was that, once we got to the party, Anja would stop drinking so she could dance, and I would drink faster so that I could dance. When we’d gotten home, we’d had fun rough sex, slept like drunks, and woken up sore from clenching the wrong muscles all night.

  In the afternoon, I had taken the train up to Helsingborg to have lunch with family friends, and when I’d returned, in a bad mood for no good reason, I’d texted Anja to see if she wanted to come over. She’d written back that she was making dinner with three of the Dutch boys from our floor, but that she would come by later.

  I knew that my anger didn’t make sense. I didn’t like making group dinners, and I had been the one who’d left for the afternoon without inviting Anja. She slept over most nights and would be doing so again tonight. But the anger refused to be wrangled by logic. I didn’t like that she thought she could just have me waiting for her whenever she was done. I didn’t like that she was favoring other boys over me.

  When she came to my room a few hours later, she was all smiles.

  “Hi!” She kissed me and asked me about my day, and I said it was fine, and she asked what I’d done, and I said nothing much, and she asked if I wanted to Löffel, which was not a verb but simply the noun for “spoon,” and I said sure, so we lay down in bed and spooned.

  “Is something wrong?” she said to the wall she was facing.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  We lay there in silence for a while until I felt something wet on my arm.

  “Are you crying?” I said.

  “No.”

  I turned her over, took her chin between my fingers, and gently lifted her face up.

  “You’re crying.”

  “Not very much.”

  “What’s wrong?” I said, trying to make my voice soft.

  “I have been waiting all day to see you and you don’t want to talk to me.”

  My anger had settled between us like a pouting child. “I do want to talk to you.”

  “No, you don’t. I’m moving, and whenever I bring it up, you change the subject. And now you’ve decided that you don’t want to be together anymore, and you’re trying to make me break up with you. It’s not very nice.”

  “It’s not that.” Though maybe it was partly that. She was right that I hadn’t wanted to commit to a long-distance relationship. “I was just annoyed that you wanted to see your guy friends instead of seeing me.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah.”

  She sniffled. “I thought it was much worse.”

  “No, that’s it.”

  Then she punched me in the chest—very hard considering how little space there was between us for her to wind up.

  “Ow!”

  “You are such an idiot! You make me feel bad for something so stupid.”

  I said that she was right and that it was a stupid thing for me to be upset about. “But you don’t have to hit me. I have soft bones.”

  “There is no such thing as soft bones.”

  I pulled her close to show that I could still be close. I told her that I wasn’t trying to get her to break up with me. I shared a thought that I’d been toying with for a while: that we could meet in Hamburg—not too far from Lund or from her family’s home in eastern Germany—for New Year’s.

  “Okay,” she said happily. She was quiet for a while. “You will have a very good time in Germany.”

  “Of course I will—you’ll be there.” I kissed her. “Am I still an idiot?”

  “Yes. But you are my idiot.”

  * * *

  Getting out of the shower the following morning, I found that I had a small bruise on my chest.

  “Look what you did to me,” I said to Anja that evening as she pulled off my shirt.

  “Oh my God!” She dropped the shirt and covered her mouth. “I am so sorry!”

  “It doesn’t hurt.”

  “I hit you and it bruised!”

  “It’s just a little bruise.” I realized she was actually worried. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “It is a big deal! I can’t believe I hurt you.”

  “You didn’t hurt me, Katze.” I pulled her into a hug. “It’s an affection bruise.”

  “There is no such thing as an affection bruise,” she said, crying. “There is no such thing.”

  * * *

  In Eugene, during my months of relapsing and editing memoirs, I had once brought home a girl from the Barn Light, who, after sex, wanted to massage my shoulders.

  “I’m training to be a masseuse,” she explained. Which made sense, since no professional would want to practice their profession in their free time.

  “Train away.”

  She climbed onto my back. “Relax.”

  “I am relaxed.”

  “You keep clenching your muscles.”

  “Do I?”

  “Take a deep breath. And let your shoulders sink.” She waited. “See—that’s what relaxing feels like.”

  “That is nice.”

  She kneaded my shoulders and I zoned out.

  “You’re doing it again! Relax!”

  “The yelling is definitely helping with the relaxation!”

  “Sorry.” She sighed. “But it’s like you think I’m going to hit you.”

  I’d never been worried that a woman was going to actually hit me. With Alexandra, she was so much smaller than me that, on the two occasions she tried to attack me, the righteousness I gained from her violence far outweighed any harm. But I was always bracing since I didn’t know what would set her off. Finding out that I’d hooked up with one of her friends during one of our breakups, she wouldn’t be mad for more than a few hours. But if I turned in a story to workshop that featured a narrator with a blond love interest, when Alexandra was a brunette, she would storm out of the classroom. Once she left a theater in the middle of a movie and drove off without me because I laughed at a scene she thought was degrading.

  But she also had to brace for punches. Not knowing about the drugs, it must have been hard for her to know when I would be laughing and generous, and when I’d be distant or invite the attention of other women out of spite. An innocuous comment, if she made it in the middle of an oxy comedown she didn’t know was happening, could close me off for the entire night. I never hit her, but the threat of my silent rages must have hung over her as much as the threat of her storm-outs and glass-breaking hung over me.

  * * *

  On the day that Anja moved back to Germany, I rode the bus with her to Lund Central. She crie
d when the train arrived. Sadness snuck up on me, unexpectedly, since I would be seeing her again in twelve days for New Year’s. We kissed and waved and she was gone.

  That night I got drunk alone, and the next day I sat in my room with the curtains closed, drinking, and scrolling through things I’d published when I was still writing. I wanted to figure out how I’d done it. I pulled up an essay I’d written about the literary depictions of hangovers.

  The greatest hangover scene in literature? Is it from Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree? Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim? Or is the best hangover scene, as Amis himself suggested, from Kafka’s Metamorphosis, when Gregor Samsa awoke to find that he’d turned into a bug and that people would not stop yelling at him to go to work?

  The question of the best hangover scene is especially relevant to American literature because American writers love to drink. Tom Dardis argued that the Lost Generation of American writers had glorified alcohol in a way that writers from other countries had not. He argued that Prohibition had made getting as drunk as possible as often as possible a social statement, and that Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald all partook. Once Prohibition ended and getting fucked-up was just getting fucked-up, the Great American Writers were already addicted.

  If you went to grad school for writing, you heard the lesson repeated over and over from older writers: Alcohol does not make you a better writer. Drugs do not make you a better writer. I knew that Denis Johnson wrote Jesus’ Son only once he got clean. That David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest only after he quit drinking. That Cormac McCarthy wrote Suttree sober. The eccentric professor in Wilmington had told me about his days at Iowa with the great alcoholics and assured me that the tragic substance abuse you read about in biographies was not as charming in real life. The myth lost some of its luster when you were in a room with the great alcoholic and he was ruining the party—hitting on the female undergraduates until they cried and then pissing himself on the couch.

  Even if the drunk didn’t piss himself, he never wanted to listen. Every old barfly who sat down next to me in Lula’s told stories upon stories, lies upon lies, without ever waiting for a response or giving me a chance to speak. Raymond Carver had told his students to write dialogue in non sequiturs because no one listened to each other anyway. Which was true—if you were a drunk. But one of the beautiful things about Carver’s later stories, the ones he wrote after getting sober, was how his characters did listen to one another, and how this communication presented opportunities for connections—if only momentary—that you didn’t see much in his earlier stories. When my dad would get drunk, before he left when I was fourteen, he would express gratitude through self-pity. My mom always refused to leave him, but she never hesitated to leave him with me when he was drunk. “You’re the only person who’s ever listened to me,” he’d tell me. But whenever I tried to talk, he’d cut me off and then dive into a misty-eyed monologue about how his own father had never loved him, and his mother had hated him, and how he would never treat me like that. It was instructive to see that a person could feel so sorry for himself without feeling sorry for anyone else.

  I skimmed the next few paragraphs of my essay (there should be a name for the sadness that comes from catching yourself skimming your own writing) until a sentence made me stop: Since I’ve quit drinking, I’ve noticed that . . .

  I read it again. At the time I’d published the essay, I was drinking every night and spending every waking hour high. I had kept a bottle of tramadol on the nightstand to help me get out of bed in the morning. But here I had published a piece of nonfiction claiming to use the lessons I’d learned in sobriety.

  It shouldn’t have been such a shock to see it. I used to tell the women I brought home from bars that I was in the midst of quitting heroin, uttering these words while still high, sometimes on heroin but more often on pain pills. Sometimes I made up stories to tell them, but more often I hinted at tragedy I didn’t want to share. The truth was too boring: My life, like all lives, regularly presented me with pain. When I found a drug that made the pain go away, I took it. I got high because I liked to get high. I drank because I liked to drink. Even during the last year of grad school in Wilmington, when my fellow aspiring novelist and drinking buddy had disappeared for two months following a breakup, and I’d had to go with two other classmates to pull him out of a motel room and carry him to the car to take him to rehab (thirty pounds lighter, skin bruised and yellow, he’d lost the ability to walk)—even then I had thought, I’m not like that.

  I had always believed that the problem with alcoholics was not that they drank but that they drank in the daytime. I never drank in the morning and couldn’t understand why anyone would do so—it was so exhausting. You ended up tired and headache-squinting and hangover-cranky before you even went to bed. But now, without drugs to relieve my hangovers, I began to understand exactly why writers drank in the morning. As I noodled around with these thoughts, I looked at the closed curtains of my room. I looked at my fourth Carlsberg Elefant Öl of the afternoon on the table.

  I stood up and poured the rest of the can into the sink.

  “I will not drink anymore,” I said to myself. “I will not drink anymore in the daytime.”

  THE NIGHT BEFORE MY SWEDISH classmates left town to visit their families for Christmas, I went to a little party my hipster friend from class, Bengt, was having at his place in Malmö. Bengt lived on the fifth floor of a block-long brick building on Sallerupsvägen, a busy street in the gentrifying blue-collar neighborhood of Värnhem. We’d go out for beers in Lund every week or two, but I’d never before been to his apartment.

  “What’s up!” he said in English, opening the door and giving me a hug. He wore skinny jeans rolled up to the ankle and a long-sleeved island-print shirt rolled up past his skinny biceps.

  “Tjena, grabben!” I answered—some approximation of “Hey, buddy!” that I had settled on as my greeting for friends.

  Bengt’s studio was packed with people talking at drunk volumes. Karin, a cute girl Bengt had recently started seeing, was laughing loudly, and she gave me a big hug though I had only met her once. From class I saw Samuel, Jakob, Lennart, and Adam there, along with two girls and a boy that I didn’t know, who I assumed were Karin’s friends. We sat in a circle on the floor, as Bengt had no furniture besides a box-spring-less mattress. We drank warmish beer from the cans everyone had bought at Systembolaget before closing time. We crowded around the windowsill to smoke out the window. They told stories in Swedish. I interjected a comment or one-liner here and there, but I couldn’t yet manage a full story in Swedish.

  I found myself smoking with Karin, who asked what I thought about something—a word that I had recently seen on the front pages of the Swedish papers without understanding what it meant. The headlines suggested that this word was a big deal, and that it had something to do with the nationalist Sweden Democrats and the center-right Moderates.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  Karin said that it was a fiasco, and that this was what happened when you—and then she said a few words that I didn’t understand, sprinkled with a few words (patriarchy, right-wing) that I did.

  My Swedish politics were confused at best. The previous summer, I had watched the conservative prime minister deliver a speech in which he explained that refugees would soon pour into Europe from the Middle East and that Swedes would have to “open their hearts” to these people, even if it meant cutting domestic spending. The amazing thing was that, outside of the extremist Sweden Democrats, all the conservative parties were on board with the sentiment. If to open your hearts and wallets to Muslim refugees was right-wing, then what was left-wing?

  In the US, I was pretty far left. In Sweden, I thought I was center-left. I agreed with the Swedish left on opposing the privatization of schools and hospitals, which, according to my classmates, had proved disastrous during the previous eight years of center-right governing. But I was frustrated by the Swedish leftist feeling that everything tha
t they disagreed with was the worst thing ever, given that the situation in Sweden was better than almost anywhere else in the world. I couldn’t stand their tone of whining entitlement. But this scared the shit out of me, because when I said “whining entitlement,” I sounded just like an American Republican.

  I had been lost in the lead-up to the 2014 parliamentary elections in September, the first election that I had lived in Sweden and been eligible to vote in. In the US, I would know exactly what was meant by, for example, “family values,” “integrity of marriage,” and “real Americans,” but in Sweden, I lacked the context to read between the lines and understand the meaning of each party’s political language. I struggled to understand what words like integration, which was spelled the same in Swedish, meant. Only later did I learn that integration meant blaming immigrants for not learning Swedish quickly enough, while ignoring that the segregation in Swedish cities and the segregation of Swedish schools made learning Swedish a monumental task. I read party platforms and thought that almost all of them sounded reasonable, since I couldn’t understand what they were really saying.

  On top of that, Sweden had nine parties to choose from. I was used to a two-party system, in which what you were, Democrat or Republican, determined not only which news you read, but which world you lived in. I had tried to explain this to Swedes who asked about American politics. I’d used the split between the two realities to explain how America could support, for example, gun rights when so many Americans were being killed in mass shootings.

  Swedish politics were polarized, but not in the same way as American politics. Swedish voters would sometimes change parties from election to election based on the party’s recent performance and current platform. Swedish newspapers even offered long questionnaires in election years to match you with the party to which you were best suited. In early September, I had spent an afternoon at my computer, reading the Wikipedia entries for each party, then filling in bubbles on the questionnaires.