by BRIAN HALL
The other woman peeled off somewhere. No one else is out. Mette walks out the far side of the settlement and continues between more brown and snowy fields. There are almost no trees, even along the road, so the wind has free rein. She has an image of herself flailing her arms in chaotic motion, fucking up in a quirky way. There’s no other ferry today, so if the nutjob isn’t home she’ll have to retrace her steps and throw herself on the mercy of a rich misanthrope. Or just freeze to death. She comes to a path heading left that she has already examined from the Google empyrean. Two more empty fields to left and right, more cold wind smacking her face. Now a frozen marsh. Who would want to live here. She can see the mill ahead, looking of course like its photos: pepperpotty and small, clad in brown shingles, perched on a stone foundation. The sails have been rebuilt, a nutjob job. It stands immediately in front of the beach, which is invisible from this vantage point. Expanse of gray ice and gray sea beyond. The sails are turning. Satisfying riposte to the stiff sea breeze she’s begun to hate.
She hears a dog bark. A Border Collie pops into view over the verge of dead grass and races toward her. A man sticks his head out the mill door and yells, “Lila!,” then says something in Danish. Mette doesn’t know the language, but she’s been told gramps speaks English, so she calls, “It’s all right, I like dogs.” The dog circles at close quarters, sniffing, wagging her tail. Mette continues up to the door, Lila following.
“Can I help you?” the man asks from the doorway in unaccented English. Like his mill, he’s recognizable from an old photo Mette has seen, from the commune days. He’s short like her mother, with pale blue eyes. Trim gray hair and beard, fit body. Wiry, you could say. An escape artist, her mother says.
“Maybe,” she says. “I’m Saskia’s daughter, Mette.”
“Of course you are.” He stands back from the door. “Welcome.”
She mounts the stone steps. “Lila, you stay out for now,” he says. Inside is an octagonal room, brighter than Mette expected, owing to three large windows in the west, south, and east walls. The northwest, southwest, southeast, and northeast walls are each filled floor to ceiling with books. The door she came through is in the north wall. In the middle of the room, descending from the ceiling and sinking into the floor, is the beveled wooden beam of the mill shaft, rotating. A circular table has been built around the shaft.
“Take off your shoes.” He points to a vinyl mat. “Choose a pair of slippers.” To the left of the door is a wooden case holding eight pairs in different sizes and colors. “Hang your pack there.” To the right of the door is a row of six wrought-iron hooks. “Have a seat.” He gestures toward one of the two chairs at the table. “Coffee or tea? Your mother was always a coffee drinker.”
“Me, too.”
“Sit.”
She does so. He busies himself at a stove and countertop beneath the east window, taking a kettle, coffee tin, steel bowl, and whisk from shelves on either side of the window frame. From a shelf above the window he grabs flour and baking soda and fetches milk and eggs out of a mini-fridge below the south window. He works fast.
She finds it unpleasant to speak to anyone she doesn’t know, so instead she examines the room. Everything is made out of wood. The floor, ceiling, and walls are old and darkly gleaming, the bookshelves, table, chairs, and counters are of a newer blond material, maybe birch, designed simply and built with precision. Surfaces are immaculate. The window frames and muntins are weathered wood, freshly painted white. Each window is square, divided into twenty-five small square panes. For some reason it looks nautical. Maybe old galleons had windows like these in the captain’s quarters. Or maybe it’s the view of the sea outside the south window. The walls slope inward so that the individually anchored shelves give the impression of bookcases that ought to fall over, but somehow don’t. The books seem to float around her head. Below the west window is a wooden storage chest, built with the same neatness. Two shelves on each side of the south and west windows, making eight in all, are hinged, so that they can be lowered when needed, then raised again and hooked to eye bolts to keep them out of the way. A wooden ship’s ladder next to the coat hooks to the right of the door leads to the upper floor. Efficient use of a small space. Maybe it’s that Danish predilection for “coziness” Mette’s mother has told her about. Whatever it is, Mette loves it. Get rid of the old man, move this excellent room to Brooklyn.
He hands her a cup of coffee, saying something that sounds like vairssko.
“Thank you.”
“Milk, cream, sugar?”
“No, thank you.”
“Biscuits will be ready in seven minutes. I love biscuits. So American! Fast food before McDonald’s.”
“Mm.”
“I noticed you were examining my little place. You like it?”
“Yes.”
He gestures to the shaft, rotating next to them. “My apologies for the creaking. You get used to it.”
“It’s okay, it sounds like a ship in a storm.” Or to be precise, like a video-game sound effect for a ship in a storm.
“Exactly.” He sits down, leaning toward her.
She leans back.
He says, “This mill was built a hundred and fifty years ago, to pump seawater out of the marsh. After that it was turned into a grist mill. These old mills, once they go out of service, the vanes, or the arms—what do you call them in English?”
“Sails.”
“Perfect! In Danish we call them ‘wings.’ I like sails better. The sails don’t last long, the canvas rots, the frames fall apart. I rebuilt all that.”
“Nice job.” It’s what he seems to want.
“Thank you. The grindstones were still in the cellar when I bought the place. I grind my own wheat and barley. I ran a horizontal shaft through a culvert to pump seawater out of my garden, so I grow most of my own food. I also have batteries under the mill cap, so I make my own electricity and sell part of it to the grid.”
“You’re like Thoreau.”
“Please. Thoreau was a lazy tourist.” He pops up. “Biscuits are ready. Can you smell them?”
He brings them to the table wrapped in a cloth in a wicker basket, sets out two plates, forks, butter, and knife. “What do you Americans say? ‘Dig in.’ I love it.” He forks open a biscuit, starts buttering. “When Danish housewives had guests for tea in the old days, they always served rolls and butter first. The hope was that the guests would fill up on the cheap stuff, before they brought out the cake. I don’t have any cake, so eat up.”
She tries a biscuit. It’s very good.
“No butter?” He pushes the dish toward her. For the first time she notices that his right hand is missing the ring finger and pinkie. “Danish butter is the best in the world.”
“No thanks.”
“Biscuits without butter?” He looks skeptical.
“I prefer it that way.”
“Suit yourself.” He pauses for a second. “I’m trying to remember an American phrase I always liked. Oh, yes—‘It’s your funeral.’”
“What happened to your hand?” she asks. Her mother never mentioned anything about that.
He holds the hand palm up in front of himself, traces the scar line from the middle finger to the medial edge of the palm with the first two fingers of his other hand. “I lost an argument with a bomb I was making.” He’s turned on an eye-twinkle, like a battery-powered Santa Claus.
“Why were you making a bomb?”
He waves that aside. “Good liberal reasons. Wasn’t supposed to hurt anyone. Like a good little liberal I ended up hurting only myself.”
“Did you get in trouble? You must have been caught.”
“You’re imagining this happened in a well-regulated country.”
She waits for him to go on, but it seems to be all he’s going to say. She wonders if he’s doing what her mother says he likes to do, i.e.,
make shit up. The scar forming the diagonal edge of his reduced palm is dramatic, but neat. Would a bomb leave no peripheral scarring?
“Have another biscuit,” he says, holding the basket toward her.
She takes one. They really are exceptionally good.
“I briefly considered attaching what you Americans call a lazy Susan to the mill shaft just above the table,” he says. “But the shaft turns too fast most of the time. Did you know that the lazy Susan was invented by the Oneida Community? You must know about them.”
“No.”
“Shame on you. They were in upstate New York, not far from the old commune. A hundred years before us hippies and our newfangled ideas, the Oneidans believed in eating each other’s food and fucking each other’s partners. Land of the free, home of the depraved.”
It occurs to her that he hasn’t asked her why she’s here. Nor does he appear to be politely concealing curiosity. She wonders if he’d be happy to sit here all day and keep slinging bullshit in her direction. “I’m thinking about killing myself,” she says.
“Of course you are. And you came to see me because I attempted suicide when your mother was young. That’s a real gripe of hers, I’m sure she’s mentioned it more than once.”
She has to hand it to the old man, he’s quick on his feet.
He gestures toward her. “All done?”
It takes her a moment to realize he’s asking if she’s done eating. “Yes.”
He carries plates, cups, and cutlery to a small sink next to his cooking counter, squirts soap, turns on water. He says over his shoulder, “If you want me to talk you out of it, you’ve come to the wrong place.”
“I don’t want you to talk me out of it.”
He rinses, dries, and stores the dishes away behind a door under the counter in a matter of seconds, sits back down at the table. “So what then?”
“I want to know why you did it. And whether you failed on purpose.”
He gives her a small smile, and himself a little scratch on the beard. “I could say it’s none of your business.” The bottom lids of his eyes rise slightly, making his gaze look more intense, maybe “piercing,” owing to his light blue irises. Mette dimly imagines that some people would find this mesmerizing. “But I’m not sure that I would mean it. I like the way you talk openly about suicide. I don’t share the Christian attitude that it’s a shameful thing. On the contrary, it’s the greatest freedom we humans possess, our only god-like power. It’s no surprise that a wannabe omnipotent bully like Yahweh would proscribe it. And capitalist societies happily go along with the taboo. Underpaid workers must stay at their posts. Finally, most people want to believe that suicide is shameful, or a betrayal of loved ones, or an act of cowardice, because the real cowardice is that they don’t want that freedom. Their terror of it shows what a profound freedom it is.”
He pauses. Mette doesn’t say anything.
“To answer your second question first, I didn’t fail on purpose. I didn’t fail at all, and if your mother says I did, she either doesn’t know what she’s talking about or she’s being malicious. Seppuku is supposed to be completed by an attendant, who has taken a vow to perform that duty. My attendant was your grandmother, Lauren, and she broke her vow.”
He pauses again. He seems to be waiting for an objection. Mette has no interest in making one.
“I will say, however, that I’m glad she did—I mean, break her vow. Because my decision to kill myself was a mistake.”
“Obviously,” Mette says.
“Why do you say that?”
She shrugs. “You’re still here. Despite plenty of opportunities to kill yourself later. You’ve clearly decided it’s better to live.”
“That’s right. For me.”
“Of course for you. It says nothing about me.”
“That’s right. But maybe you’re confused in the same way that I was, so let me continue.”
“Please.”
“I was confusing the desire to suffer with the desire to die. Many people make this mistake. They want to suffer, and death looks like the biggest dose of suffering available. But it’s nothing of the sort. Suffering has to be experienced, whereas death ends experience. Cutting is a far more rational response to this desire, and I applaud the kids who thought it up. Cutting is a modern phenomenon because modern life inflicts far less physical pain on the individual than many people want. On the other hand, there are people even in modern life who are unwillingly suffering, either physically or mentally, and they want to end that suffering. For them, suicide is rational.”
“Why did you want to suffer?”
“Why does anyone? I thought I deserved it. I had let people down. I’d tried to lead them to a better way of life, and I’d failed.” He glances out the west window. “The sun’s about to go down, let’s take a walk.”
The old man likes to give orders. But Mette came to him for help, so it’s reasonable to accommodate him. She puts on her jacket and shoes and follows him out the door. Circling around the mill, he steps down to the stony beach and calls for the dog, who comes racing along the waterline. The old man fondles her ears and turns west. Lila heads in the same general direction, dipping in close to sniff a hand or back of knee, then swinging wide to explore tufts and hollows, tail high and happy. The sun is a bleary smudge behind thin clouds, hovering just above the sea line. The ice, Mette now sees, stretches away from the shore for only about fifty yards, even though the water in the Baltic is of low salinity and here quite shallow. It has been a mild winter, on the whole.
“Any suicide that’s painful or disfiguring is likely an expression of self-hatred or shame, rather than a true desire to die,” he says. “People with terminal illnesses who decide to kill themselves don’t blow their brains out or slit their wrists, they take an excess of painkiller and tie a bag around their heads. Your mother has always been angry at her mother for not fighting the cancer. But Lauren made the decision to end her suffering. That’s a healthy attitude. When people tell you that you should continue to suffer so that they won’t be ‘abandoned,’ or ‘heart-broken,’ or whatever manipulative formulation they choose, they’re being selfish. That this isn’t obvious to everyone is a tribute to how effective the propaganda against suicide has been.”
A small hole has opened in the cloud cover right at the horizon, and as the sun’s full diameter passes it, an edge of the photosphere is revealed as a blinding spark. They both stop, bringing their hands to their foreheads and gazing at the light past the edges of their palms. The gorgeous gleam lasts five seconds, then is gone. Now Mette has a spot of retinal gray in the center of her vision.
He walks on. She follows. It’s his rodeo. “I won’t ask you why you’re considering suicide, because that’s none of my business. But tell me, what methods have you considered?”
“I haven’t figured out the logistics yet.”
He makes a dismissive gesture. “Logistics are trivial. What I mean is, when you consider suicide, what image comes to mind?”
“Well, for one, I’ve thought about jumping off a high place.”
“Yeah, you see, that’s suspect. Maybe your imagined fall is inspired by the capital-f Fall. You feel like a sinner.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Your theory’s too clever.”
“Clever means smart.”
“Unless it means too clever.”
“The disfigurement from a fall is horrific. And the pain might be indescribable. No one really knows how long consciousness continues after the body is wrecked. There are stories about guillotined people’s heads looking around in the basket for a number of seconds. Besides, you might land on someone and kill him. Or fall in view of a child and traumatize him.”
“Or her. Or them.”
“It’s self-punishing and antisocial. It says, ‘Look at me.’
None of these motivations are pure. Lila, come away from there!”
“My mother always said you had a thing about purity.”
“Did she also ever tell you that ad hominem remarks indicate the weakness of an argument? Lila!”
A good point, actually. She’s starting to both like and detest this man in equal measure. A funny feeling.
He stops abruptly and turns to gesture at the shore ice and the open water beyond. “Right there is the truest method of suicide there is. Hypothermia, followed by drowning. Those who’ve experienced it accidentally and survived report that they felt a comforting sleepiness, followed by a powerful euphoria. In the moment, they wanted to die. It’s how I’ll kill myself when the time comes. Just walk out my door one winter day.”
“When the time comes?”
“I have no intention of becoming decrepit.”
“Sure. If you’re otherwise content, though, the bitch is deciding when.”
“It won’t be for me.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s head back,” he says.
“Sure thing.” She really wants to add “boss,” but restrains herself.
Lila’s now far up the shore, so he does that wide-mouthed whistle with the tucked upper lip she’s always wished she could do. Lila bounds back and they turn around. There’s still a lot of light in the sky. At this high latitude it will get dark much more slowly than in New York.
“I did think about walking into the Pacific Ocean,” she says.
“Not the Atlantic?”
“I was in Seattle.”
“But you didn’t do it.”
“I decided to come see you first.”
“This visit seems like evidence of uncertainty. Which of course is an argument for holding off.”
“Maybe.”
