Such Good Work

by Johannes Lichtman

  Sex had become more fun since I stopped taking drugs, but the one-night stands I’d had after Anja were still anxiety producing, which meant that even sex was often more enjoyable retrospectively—thinking about it or jacking off to memories of it later.

  I started the dryer and tried to think of something that I enjoyed more when it was happening than when it was over.

  It took a while, but I finally came up with one thing: I enjoyed being high much more when it was happening than when it was over. I never wanted the high to end.

  I sat on the dryer for a while and chewed the thought over.

  IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, ALAN KURDI’S body washed up on the shore of Turkey, then up on the front page of every newspaper in Europe. A little boy, facedown in the sand, wearing the tiniest shoes you’d ever seen. I first saw the picture when I was in line at the market. It filled the front page of three different papers on display by the registers. The boy was so small. I turned away. Looking would just make me feel bad and nothing would change. When I got home, I saw the picture again on social media. I stared at it for maybe thirty seconds. I closed the window and everything was tinted dark. I felt awful. But then I opened an NBA season preview. By the end of the article, the awful feeling was gone.

  * * *

  The picture kept popping up on Facebook, along with outraged captions. How could we let this happen? How could we, in Europe, in 2015, let this happen?

  Then came the editorials. It wasn’t enough to just post outraged status updates on Facebook. Alan Kurdi was just one of many who were dying on terrible midnight journeys from Turkey to Greece, one of the many dying in refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon, one of the many stuck in a Syrian civil war too terrible for words.

  When I read these editorials, I agreed with the journalists while also hating the journalists. I didn’t feel that they cared about any of it. It was more as if they had seen an opportunity to correct some runny-nosed sentimentality and raise their own cultural capital with a few quickly googled facts.

  Then came the picture from the Vienna train station: the information sheet welcoming refugees to Austria, explaining who to go to for services, and ending with the promise: You are safe. I saw the picture on Facebook ten times in a single day.

  Next came videos from train stations in Munich and Amsterdam: white children welcoming brown children, Europeans giving water bottles and toys to Middle Eastern families, rows of whites standing on the platforms to cheer for arriving refugees. Finally, the videos started popping up from Malmö Central—Swedes lined up to high-five the Syrian men, women, and children passing through the gauntlet of applause.

  I had mixed feelings. But I couldn’t deny the lump in my throat every time I clicked.

  * * *

  One morning, I was sitting in the Malmö University Library, trying to read a work of literary theory written in English by a German academic. German academics wrote in an English that was more indecipherable to me than German. I was midway through my third attempt at a sentence (. . . primarily in order to unmask interpellation in a postcolonial context vis-à-vis the master-slave dialectic . . .) when I looked out the window and saw workers outside building something. Across the canal that separated the library from Skeppsbron, just behind the boat where the Noah’s Ark party had been, yellow-vested workers were fencing off a little square by the canal with six-foot chain-link fences. The next day, they brought in massive shipping containers on a truck. They stacked them four containers long and two containers high, as if they were building an ugly two-story house. Then they put a porch swing out front and planted poles in the ground from which they hung white Christmas lights. Then police officers and people in Red Cross vests planted themselves outside. Then the workers hung a banner: REFUGEES WELCOME.

  * * *

  Over the following week, I sat staring out the window at families waiting outside the refugee processing center. They were ushered in by Red Cross volunteers, mothers lugging children and looking worried, children lugging bags and looking tired, and fathers nodding at the volunteers’ words, keeping their heads up and trying to look in control. Despite the efforts to make the shipping containers look friendly, they were still shipping containers. A teenage boy sat on the swing staring at his phone, waiting. I saw him waiting the next day and the day after that, and I began to wonder what he was waiting for. It made me sad in a useless way. I wanted to walk up to him and give him my jacket. I wanted someone to see me giving him my jacket, film it, put it on the internet, and watch the video go viral, inspiring thousands to give jackets. But he already had a jacket.

  * * *

  That weekend, I went with Bengt to Moriskan, a large nightclub in Möllevången. This Middle Eastern neighborhood in central Malmö had recently become a hip place for young white people to live. The club was a long behemoth with domed Moorish Revival turrets that glowed whitely over Folkets Park at night. It was a caricature of a mosque, designed by an Eastern European architect as a dance hall for workers from the shipyards during the orientalist boom of the early twentieth century. It looked as if it were pulled not from Istanbul, but from a Las Vegas hotel called Istanbul, Istanbul.

  Bengt and I paid our covers at the door, got our stamps, and checked out each of the club’s three stages. A Yugoslav rock band was playing in the little dance hall on the left, a Brazilian samba party with a DJ was in the big dance hall straight ahead, and a Swedish jazzy-swing quartet was jitterbugging away in the pub area to the right. We bought beers and made our way into the big dance hall, where tall North African boys in tight white jeans stood on the peripheries of the crowd looking for dance partners. Eyes followed the Africans whenever they moved, regardless of whether it was to dance with a white girl, dance with a brown girl, or simply to get a drink at the bar. Bengt led me through the room confidently. I envied how he always looked like he knew where he was going. Even at a club where we didn’t know anyone, he would push past people with confidence as if a big group of his friends were waiting for him just on the other side of the room. He would lead us to the DJ stage, which he would step onto like he was boarding a bus. Then he would salsa dance.

  “Why are you salsa dancing?” I had once asked, struggling to be heard over the bone-jangling bass of the techno playing in the Sorgenfri warehouse.

  “Because I know how to salsa,” Bengt had screamed back, before resuming maraca-shaking his fists and solo-stepping in place on the stage.

  This evening, when we got to the front of the room at Moriskan, I said, “Let’s not dance on the stage,” right as Bengt jumped onstage. It was a massive edifice with a DJ table in the middle and fifteen feet of open space on either side. I sighed and tried to act like I was comfortable at the foot of the stage, watching Bengt salsa his way through the Brazilian music. As always, I was surprised by the nonappearance of a bouncer to pull Bengt off the stage. If this had been America, Bengt would have been half-nelsoned to the ground in about two seconds. A drunk girl pushed past me and put one knee, then the other, on the stage. She unfolded her legs and strutted up to Bengt. They made eye contact. The dancing began.

  I had once been uncomfortable with the ease with which Bengt attracted women. When I met a girl at a bar, it felt like a happy accident. I’d happen to sit down next to someone friendly on the smoking patio. A girl would accidentally take my debit card from the bartender instead of her own and a conversation would be struck up. There was nothing accidental about Bengt. He approached girls or they approached him. He never bragged about it or made a big show of it, the way some men did, which made me more jealous. If Bengt had been a showboating pickup artist, I could’ve just dismissed him as that sad brand of man who gets more joy from telling his friends about the hot girl he fucked than he got from the fucking itself.

  I had wondered if I should be more confident and nonchalant, like Bengt. But if I did the things Bengt did—approached women with his recklessness—I would have suffered hangover shame so bad that I’d have to return to drugs. I had spent a lot of t
ime thinking about what I could do to make women react to me the way they reacted to Bengt, until one day it hit me: Bengt was just better looking than me. He had a strong chin, blue eyes, and effortless hair that always settled in interesting ways despite appearing untended. There was nothing I could do about that. I never worried about it again.

  Onstage, the dancing was not going well. The girl was trying to grind on Bengt, but he refused to stop salsa-ing. He kept trying to lead her with his eyes, and she kept grabbing him and rubbing herself on him. Eventually he hopped off the stage.

  “Marry that girl,” I said.

  “I was trying to, but she kept grabbing me. I think she needed to hold on for balance.”

  We bought another round of beers and squeezed to the front of the Yugoslav rock room, watched the band for two songs, then squeezed through the crowd and into the pub room. No one seemed to care about our pushing and squeezing. In the pub room, the singer of the Swedish swing band, a small blond in flapper gear, was saying that this song was about how it was time to open borders. Everyone cheered.

  “It’s nice that you’re all finally coming around to the idea of open borders,” she said. “Though I don’t know why it took so long. We’ve been playing this song for over a year.”

  Then the band cut into a trombone-heavy minor-key ditty with the chorus We need to open borders / because we are all people. It rhymed in Swedish.

  I wanted to tell Bengt that I found this all a bit self-aggrandizing, but I didn’t know how to say self-aggrandizing in Swedish.

  I cupped my hand over his ear. “It’s kind of gross, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” Bengt made a face. “Swedes shouldn’t play this kind of music.”

  I laughed. “No, I mean the message. It’s kind of, I don’t know. It’s like they think they’re Jesus or something.”

  “Absolutely,” Bengt agreed, though I hadn’t said what I wanted to say. “I’m not sure who they think they are.”

  We finished our beers and Bengt said, “You should come to the rally next week.”

  “What rally?”

  “Torsten posted about it on Facebook. The Refugees Welcome rally in Stortorget.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “I think it will be really good. Or it may be bad.” Bengt looked up at the jitterbugging band. “But it can’t be worse than this.”

  * * *

  When I took the bus home that night—after leaving Bengt at the kebab stand with a girl who had dark hair and lovely eyebrows—I thought about the jitterbugging band. White people were using the suffering of others to raise their own cultural capital: through editorials, outraged status updates, train-station selfies, and, as it turned out, swing music.

  But it wasn’t helpful to stand on the sidelines criticizing people trying to do something they thought was good, no matter how oblivious or unhelpful the do-gooders’ help was. Their self-aggrandizement was gross. Their minute-maid sentimentality did nothing for the victim. But Swedish borders were now open. One hundred thousand refugees would be welcomed into the country in 2015. Even if the cheering at the train station was fleeting, it was better to arrive to cheers than to the tear gas offered at the Hungarian border. It was better that Sweden was spending its money on building the refugee processing center by the canals than spending its money to take out ads in Middle Eastern newspapers telling refugees they were not welcome, as the Danish government had done. If the European white person used the Middle Eastern refugee to help himself, but the Middle Eastern refugee was also immediately helped—if also dehumanized—by the process, maybe it was a temporarily worthwhile bargain. But then the question was if the terms of the bargain could ever evolve.

  I felt pride that I lived in a country that postered bus stops and train stations with the words REFUGEES WELCOME. But I also wondered: Which refugees were welcome? Over the past week, I’d been forgoing my schoolwork to read about Sweden’s immigration history and the debate surrounding the Roma. The entry of Romania into the EU in 2007 had allowed Romanian Roma, often called Gypsies, free passage into other EU countries. At first, Swedes had felt sorry for the Rom migrants. Panhandling and homelessness had not been part of the Swedish welfare state, and to see a Rom woman sitting outside Systembolaget in almost every Swedish city, in a pose like the ones I’d seen on my Christmas charity tour—with a laminated picture of her children leaning against an empty coffee cup—was a shock. Her hands would be clasped in prayer, begging for coins to send home. Since these were the Roma that Swedes saw, it didn’t matter how many migrants had paying jobs—they were invisible.

  Since the seventies, Sweden had prided itself on one of the most liberal asylum policies in the world, opening its doors to Chileans, Persians, Kurds, Iraqis, Palestinians, Yugoslavs, Somalis, Eritreans, and Afghans. In the aftermath of the American invasion of Iraq, more Iraqi refugees had been relocated to the Stockholm suburb of Södertälje than to the United States and Canada combined.

  But the Rom migration was different.

  Smoking between classes one afternoon, Bengt said that while most Swedes could, in principle, agree that the purpose of the EU zone was not just for middle-class citizens to improve their lot, but for all EU citizens to have economic opportunity, Swedes disagreed on what counted as “opportunity.”

  “Does panhandling count as opportunity?” he said. “I don’t know. You feel bad when you see them on the streets. You give them money, but you don’t have enough to give to all of them. You wonder what’s the best solution. But it doesn’t seem like any solution is a good one.”

  The far left showed their righteousness by canonizing the Roma, and the far right played on the worst stereotypes about the Roma to bolster their anti-immigrant agenda, but those in the vast middle seemed to have an unspoken desire to find a way to get the Roma off the streets without passing any racist laws that made Swedes feel bad about themselves.

  I told Bengt that I thought it was the dissonance between Sweden’s identification as an open nation that welcomed those in need, and the actual resentment Swedes felt toward people who were so poor and oppressed that begging on a cold sidewalk ten hours a day was better than home, that had led to the shocking success of the Sweden Democrats in the 2014 elections.

  “Sure,” Bengt said. “When presented with evidence that you’re not the person you thought yourself to be, the natural reaction isn’t to look in the mirror. The natural reaction is to get angry at the person who robbed you of your delusion.”

  The rise of the fascists in 2014 had led to an anxiety Swedes were still struggling with in the fall of 2015. But the refugee situation in the Middle East might have been the cure for the country’s psychic pain. The pictures of Alan Kurdi’s body were easy to understand. This was the person we wanted to save.

  * * *

  After a few failed attempts to schedule another Skype date, Stella and I finally conquered the nine-hour time difference. When she popped onto the screen, her pixelated face lit up, and she yelled, “Jonas!”

  I felt my shoulders relax at the sound of her voice.

  I started to catch her up on what I’d been doing over the past few months but quickly ran out of things to say. Life felt so full, but it was either full of things that were happening only in my head or that required more backstory than they were worth.

  “Oh, but I’m getting a story published,” I said, suddenly remembering. “It’s in a good magazine. I’m pretty excited.”

  “Oh my God! Asshole! Way to bury the lede!” She looked so happy on the screen. “I’m proud of you.”

  “Thank you.” This was when we would have hugged, but without the hug I didn’t know how to fill the space. “But what’s new with you?”

  “Well. Zach finally proposed. We’re getting married.”

  “Oh my God! Asshole! Way to bury the lede!”

  Stella laughed. “I know, right?”

  I was happy for them. I’d never felt more at home than the year I’d spent with them in Austin.

  Stella
said that the wedding would be in the summer and that I had to come. I felt my stomach sink. I told her that I would try, but that money was tight. Which wasn’t completely true—money would be tight if I spent eight thousand kronor on a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles, but I could make it work. I wanted to be there for her and Zach. But if I went back to the US, I might get stuck there and get stuck in drugs again. After we hung up, I thought of how there would be people at the wedding—people I’d known for years—who had no idea that they’d never seen me sober. How was I supposed to talk to them?

  * * *

  Word of the Refugees Welcome rally had been spreading on social media, and attendance was expected to number in the thousands—which was a high number for a pro-something rally, rather than the better-attended anti-something protests.

  Bengt and I walked from Malmö Central on sidewalks crowded with lively young people. Stortorget was packed. Thousands of people held red-and-white banners and flags. I stood on the edge of the square, on the steps that held a large statue of a man on horseback, and snapped a picture of the crowd.

  Bengt and I took a spot behind a group of teenagers holding up a banner calling for the destruction of the capitalist system that had created the refugee crisis in the first place. Two girls were holding up the banner. A serious-looking boy dressed in black patrolled back and forth between the two girls, lifting one girl’s elbow, telling the other to hold the sign higher. I wasn’t looking forward to two hours standing behind this boy. I wasn’t looking forward to listening to political speeches. I wasn’t looking forward to being part of an audience. But there was something happening here that mattered. Even if I wasn’t a part of it, I wanted to understand it.