I knew that the tickets were nonrefundable, but at $200 each, they accounted for most of the money I had at the time. I called the airline, and after twenty minutes on hold, I was patched through to a woman with a South Asian accent.
She asked the reason I was canceling my trip.
“I had planned the trip with my girlfriend. But she broke up with me.” I heard myself sounding sad. I wasn’t sure whether it was real sadness, an attempt to get sympathy and my money back, or a combination of the two.
“One moment.” The woman was gone for a while. I heard clicking and voices in the background. I imagined a room full of overeducated Indians helping Americans with their airline tickets.
“Are you still there?” she said.
“Yes.”
“This ticket is not refundable.”
“Okay.” I paused. “Is there anything you can do?”
“I can cancel the ticket for you. But you will not get a refund.”
“Can I change it to a different ticket?”
“Yes, but you will have to pay the full price of the new ticket.”
“Okay.” This time I knew the despair was real. More than the money, I had to salvage something. “I realize I am not entitled to a refund. But is there anything you can do?”
“The ticket is not refundable,” she said in the same tone, which wasn’t unkind. She spoke as if I hadn’t heard her the first time and she wanted to provide me with the information I needed.
“Okay.” Even if she could type in an override to refund my ticket, doing so would break the rules. I could think of no reason why she should jeopardize her job for someone she’d never met just because his girlfriend had broken up with him.
I said goodbye and hung up. I sat down on the wood floor of my Wilmington living room, slanted by years of humidity. I put my face in my palms. At least I hadn’t yelled at the woman or asked to speak to her manager. I took some pills and felt a little better. Or maybe not better. Just like someone had turned down the volume. I went to the airline’s website and found a phone number with an Atlanta area code instead of an 800 number. I called and waited until a woman with a Southern accent answered. She sounded white.
I told her that I needed to cancel my ticket.
“Is there any particular reason? Or did your plans just change?”
“Well.” I took a breath, again not sure whether I needed to gather my strength or just wanted to sound like I did. “This was supposed to be an anniversary trip with my girlfriend. But she broke up with me today. So I have to cancel the ticket.”
The woman sighed. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that.” This time I knew it was real: I did appreciate it. I appreciated it a lot. What a nice thing for her to say.
“Can I put you on hold for a second?”
“Sure.”
For a few minutes, there was no Muzak, no background noise, just a faint static.
Then she returned. “So, usually this ticket is totally nonrefundable. And I can’t give you your money back. But given the circumstances, I’m going to give you a voucher that you can use for the full ticket price to buy a ticket in the future. I—”
“Thank you so much! You have no idea how much I appreciate it.”
Her tone of voice didn’t change when she said, “We do what we can, when we can.”
“You have made a very shitty day much less shitty.”
“I hope you get through this,” she said.
For the rest of the afternoon, all I thought about was the ticket. I was so happy.
But that night I woke in despair. My girlfriend had left. I reached out to the nightstand, but the bottle was empty, so I hurried to the kitchen, where four backup pills were stored under the silverware. I chewed them down even though they tasted like paint and chewing them ruined the high. But soon everything calmed down. I thought about why the second customer-service rep had refunded my ticket when the first rep hadn’t. Was it because the second woman shared my skin color and my nationality? Or had she, due to location, had more access to someone who could offer me a refund? Or had she just felt like helping me out when the first woman hadn’t?
I couldn’t say. But for weeks after that, whenever I was drowning in Percocet and Xanax and Dilaudid and heroin, I’d hear the woman’s voice say, “I hope you get through this,” and I’d pull my hand off my own head and give myself a second to breathe.
* * *
The following night, I went for a run into a swirling wind. I felt the wind pushing at my side, flapping my jacket into itself. When I turned left on Drottninggatan at the vegan Indian restaurant, the wind hit me straight on. I ran into the headwind for a block, two blocks, and watched the streetlights swinging back and forth on their lines, the whole street rocking and blinking. My legs burned with the effort of just going forward. Finally I gave up and turned back.
* * *
I needed to stop looking at the news. I needed to stop looking at social media and the stupid comments all these stupid people who didn’t know a thing about anything were posting. I wanted to get high but not to feel a certain way—just like I wanted to stop feeling this way. Alcohol wasn’t working. Running wasn’t working. Reading wasn’t working. Writing wasn’t working. How stupid I had been to think that the fullness of my days had been the driving force behind my happiness. It must have been newness, not fullness, that had me feeling happy—the newness of living a life without drugs. Now that the newness had worn off, I found myself just the way I’d always been, scrolling through airline tickets and apartment listings in foreign cities, searching for a place where I could be someone else.
* * *
Two thirty a.m. and I couldn’t sleep. It was twenty-two degrees and snowy outside. The cold breached the cheap insulation by my bed, yet I was sweating. I always sweated when I wanted something and couldn’t have it—wanted to sleep but lay awake, wanted to leave a conversation but had to stay, wanted an answer but was left sitting in front of the computer clicking refresh. I wanted to teach the boys Swedish. I wanted to tell them that they were doing well, that it was impressive how quickly they were picking up the language. I wanted to shake their hands and pat them on their shoulders.
I got up, showered the sweat off, and dressed. I grabbed four pairs of wool socks and my second pair of boots—brown leather, a little over a year old, worn but not worn-out—and placed them in an IKEA bag. I walked into the quietly falling snow, out past the canals, past the constellations of lights over the railroad tracks, and down to the Central Station. Aziz probably wouldn’t be there using the Wi-Fi at this hour. But maybe he would.
* * *
The station was occupied but quiet, in the way a basketball arena gets quiet when a player just broke his leg. It was not nearly as crowded as the night I had been coming back from Ulrika’s, but there were still a few clusters of sleeping bags squeezed against the walls. Four teenagers sat at a Burger King table quietly checking their phones. I imagined that the station had more privacy at this hour than the transit home.
I sat down at the table next to the boys. “Hello,” I said softly in English.
They all looked up, startled. I took out my phone like I was there waiting for a train—just using the Wi-Fi. The boys seemed to settle when they saw I wasn’t there to evict them.
“English?” I said quietly.
“Yes,” one of the boys said. He was young looking, short and skinny like I had been as a teen.
I held out the IKEA bag. “I have these extra socks—maybe you can give them to people who need them?”
The boy looked confused.
“These are for you.” I handed him the bag.
The boy looked inside. “Yes, okay.”
“There’s also a pair of shoes in there. Size forty-five. Do you know anyone who has size forty-five shoes?”
The boy asked one of the other boys something in what sounded like Arabic.
The other boy nodded.
“His father
.”
“Then maybe he can give them to his father?”
“Yes, thank you.”
I looked at my phone. “I have to catch a train. Good night.”
“Yes, good night.”
“Good night,” the other boys repeated quietly. One of them waved.
A sign at the other end of the station told me that the Öresund train to Copenhagen was leaving at 3:25 a.m. But I didn’t board any trains.
* * *
On the walk home, I decided that people should take turns caring about the world in four-month shifts. But under this system, my shift wouldn’t even be over yet.
* * *
I woke up thinking of the boys. Then Anja. She was doing an internship semester on a Greek island, getting her diving certification and studying marine life. I would see her underwater pictures online sometimes, but we hadn’t written in over a month. I missed her. But I couldn’t say if I would have wanted her next to me if she’d been present as her real self, with the problems and difficulties that came with a real person, rather than as my memory of her warmth. I wondered what the boys were doing. I thought of how scared they must have been. Or if nothing else, how bored they must have been. I thought of the difficulty of waiting: how difficult it was to wake up to another day of nothing. They needed school. They needed stimulation and structure. They were so happy to have it for just a few hours a week.
I got out of bed, looked out at the white-gray morning, and wrote to Torsten to ask how things were going.
We’re still pretty much on lockdown over here, he wrote. There have been some threats, so we’re asking the boys to stay in as much as possible, though they can leave if they want to. But the space isn’t made to accommodate so many boys all day.
I wrote back, How about we try a Language Café tonight?
Torsten said that he didn’t know if they could bring that many boys on the walk to the university—they were short-staffed and there were still security concerns.
What if we come meet you at a location close to the home and walk the boys over? I wrote.
So that evening, Katja and I met Torsten and a dozen boys on a street corner that I assumed was near the transit home. It was a whole new group with nicer clothes—jeans with more fashionable fits and jackets that looked like they’d been bought for the people wearing them. The boys all wanted to talk to Katja; I walked behind them with Torsten. Aziz wasn’t there. I didn’t want Torsten to notice how anxious the absence of Aziz made me, so I asked about the new kids first.
“They’re mostly from Syria. A couple are from Iraq. But the flow has slowed since the borders tightened. And because of the country’s infrastructure, refugees from Afghanistan are the least likely to have a passport.”
I had recently read a ranking of the world’s “best passports.” Sweden and Germany were tied for the top spot—a Swedish or German passport could get you into 158 countries. Afghanistan was dead last.
“There are still millions in Greece, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan,” Torsten said. “But everyone here is giving up.”
I had noticed the outrage at the border closing had died down. Outside of the far left, the growing feeling seemed to be that Sweden had done enough—that 160,000 or 170,000 refugees was all that could be expected of a country of 10 million to welcome in one year.
“Is Aziz here?” I asked as casually as I could.
“He was transferred. I’m afraid you’ll have to find someone else to mentor.”
“That’s great news!” I said, trying to choke the quiver in my voice. “He was so excited to start school. Where did he get transferred to?”
“Outside Norrköping. It’s a semi-independent living facility. The boys each have their own room, with a shared kitchen, and a social worker lives there with them. It’s kind of like a dormitory. It will be good for someone as independent as Aziz.”
“That’ll be perfect! I’m so happy for him!”
I noticed that I was speaking too loudly and tried to tone it down. I hadn’t even taken Aziz to Burger King. Who would teach him Swedish now? Who would know his sister’s name? Who would tell him that he was doing well? He’d start his new life and have no use for another clumsy Samaritan whose sincerity he’d be forced to navigate. I’d never see him again. His last memory of me would be of my forcing him to make meatballs.
“I’m so happy for Aziz,” I said to Torsten.
* * *
With only twelve boys at the Language Café, the volunteer-to-student ratio was almost one-to-one. All the volunteers that day were female, except for Ali and me. With Katja I sat down at a table next to a boy wearing an Oakland Raiders baseball cap. The boy looked at me, then at his classmates, clearly unhappy that he was stuck with a man when all these blond women were tutoring the other boys.
The boy sitting next to Katja smiled at me.
“Hello,” I said to him. “My name is Jonas.”
“Hassan,” the boy next to Katja said, and reached over the table to shake my hand.
I also introduced myself to the boy in the Raiders hat, and he shook my hand lightly. He mumbled something I couldn’t hear. Then he pulled out his phone and started scrolling.
Hassan snapped at him in what I assumed was Arabic, and the boy with the Raiders hat put the phone away. We started going over a worksheet about colors, Katja and Hassan making great progress, while my student barely paid attention to my tutorial of yellow, red, black. He kept staring at Katja. The tops of her breasts were visible between scarf and shirt.
“Hey.” I snapped to get the boy’s attention. The boy turned to me with a sheepish grin.
“He is always looking at girls,” Hassan said.
Katja laughed and the boy with the hat laughed.
“Is he disappointed that he’s stuck with me when everyone else has a girl tutor?”
“Yes,” Hassan said. “But he is always making trouble.”
“The Oakland Raiders,” I said to Hassan, pointing at the other boy’s hat. “Tell him I know them. They’re a football team where I’m from. I’ve been to their games.”
Hassan translated. The boy looked at me as if to say, And?
I wanted to talk to Aziz. I wanted to make sure that the people taking care of him were good. I wanted to help him learn about Sweden. But, really, what did I know about Sweden? What could I do for him that he couldn’t do for himself?
* * *
The next day, I read an article in the Malmö paper about a local college student who had traveled to Lesbos for a week to help the refugees stranded there.
It was an amazing experience, she said. I don’t want to do anything here now. I just want to go back there.
She hadn’t arranged her visit with any organization. She had just showed up and walked around until she found some Red Cross employees. Then she’d helped them make sandwiches.
It changed my life, she said.
I felt shitty. Here I was doing a few hours a week of basic language exercises, without inconveniencing myself in the slightest, and people were traveling to Greece to help. But then I scrolled down to the comments.
Congratulations, the first comment read. You just spent thousands of kronor to do work that was already being done, just so you could say you’d been there. You made things harder for the Red Cross, who now had another person to worry about!
While I didn’t like their tone, I realized that the commenter was right. It was one thing when a doctor, a contractor, or a teacher trained in a relevant subject traveled to a crisis zone to offer expertise. It was something different when a tourist wasted money that could have been better used on aid so they could spread butter on sandwiches. If I traveled to Lesbos, with no medical training and no knowledge of Arabic, Dari, or Greek, I would have been even more useless than I was here. I fantasized about how pills could make this all go away. But then I reminded myself how I would feel even worse than I felt now—if that was possible—when I woke up from my high. I was running out of mon
ey, but I logged on to UNHCR’s website and donated a few hundred kronor and felt not at all better.
* * *
I came home from a long day at the university—a nice ten-hour break from thinking about everything—to find a large brown envelope with American stamps on the floor by the mail slot. I ripped it open and pulled out two contributors’ copies of the magazine with my story in it. On the cover was a glossy photograph of a woman standing in a field. It was a real magazine, with a magazine shape and magazine pages, rather than with the self-published-paperback feel of the previous journals that had published my stories. I turned to the table of contents and found my name. My stomach hiccuped.
I found my story and began to read, bracing for the shame and regret I felt whenever I read something I’d written months earlier.
My students turned in drawings of animals with extraordinary life spans.
I learned that there were species of tubeworm that lived for up to one hundred and seventy years.
Arctic whales more than two hundred years old.
Clams with a life expectancy of four hundred.
Sponges that had been alive for more than a millennium.
A kind of jellyfish—the immortal jellyfish—that, after reaching sexual maturity, could revert to infancy again and again, maybe forever.
I read the whole story in ten minutes and found, to my surprise, that I still liked it. It sounded like a real short story by a real writer. I ripped it out of the magazine, folded it in an envelope, and took it down the street to mail to Anja in Greece.
* * *
Later in the week, I met with Katja and Ali at Balthazar.
“I don’t think we’ll be doing this for much longer,” Katja said. “Torsten says that there are only twenty boys at the home now. Fewer and fewer are coming over the border. We may have to find a new group to work with.”
Such Good Work Page 20
