“Why?”
“What you want to say doesn’t mean what you think it means.”
“I know what I feel.”
He shook his head sadly. For the first time he looked older than me. “The love you feel is for yourself, Roxana. It is your freedom speaking its joy to you.”
It seemed too easy and too hard, too much and not enough all at the same time. What I wanted was to attach, to give myself to him. But he was right. That wasn’t it, not exactly. I couldn’t keep the tears from my voice.
“Will I ever see you again?”
He smiled. “Who knows? Maybe not in my house in Denmark. But we live inside each other here now.”
Everyone cloud icons, the floating notes of a surah in the sky. I resisted the beauty. Even as calm descended, I insisted to myself that I loved him, that this was a reason for the sadness I felt. I pressed my face into his chest.
“Sweet heart,” he said. Two words. “You feel love, Roxana, a terrible openness, so open that it injures you. The pain that tells us that we live, that we have not yet gone into the earth.”
Time, plastic, compressed and decompressed. The lights were put out. Zlatan and I burrowed into each other, searching sleep. I tried to relax, to stretch each of my toes, to unlock my hard-held fists and move my eyes behind their closed lids to the four cardinal directions and then finally cross them, tricks Mama had taught me to summon rest, but it would not come. I drifted on a warm pink sea, almost reaching slumber, but each time I neared its shore I remembered the cut. Zlatan’s eyes opened wide, his blood in my mouth.
Hours passed. I fell into a dream of the white slats of a fence, only to rouse to my pulse beating my temples. By the middle of the night I was irrefutably awake. Zlatan’s embrace became sticky and hot, impossible to stand. I was afraid to break his clasped hands, his fingers interlaced against my chest, just beneath my breasts. I tried to creep from under his arms and roll onto the cooler sheets. When I was almost out, my forehead just behind Zlatan’s wrists, he resettled me in his arms, erasing my progress. A wave of despair washed over me. I jerked my head away from his and sighed loudly. I wanted to dream, but I didn’t. Not at all.
When I woke the light was lavender and strange.
Zlatan came in, bearing coffee. “Good morning.”
“Hi.” I wrapped the duvet around my body, suddenly shy, and took the coffee. When our fingers touched I felt nothing, or almost nothing, a sensation so muted it was painful. Zlatan watched me drink. I wanted him to hold me, but we didn’t seem to know what to do with each other anymore.
He wore a white T-shirt tucked into black jeans. My clothes were crumpled in the far corner like a dead body. I would have to put them back on, turn the underwear inside out. Shake out the wrinkled shirt, the gnarled pants.
He put his hand to my face and a hint of the old feeling rose. We sat like that, his hand on my cheek, both of us staring at the comforter, for a long while.
When he spoke again, Zlatan’s voice was dry. “There is no point in me telling you not to be sad. But do not be sad.”
I stared at the ceiling. “I know it’s dumb. Especially after what you’ve been through.”
Zlatan shook his head. “There is no sadness Olympics, Roxana.”
I laughed, surrendering entirely to tears now.
He took my hand. “You will have my address. I will not be lost to you.”
My mind swelled crazily with hope. I forced it back down to normal size. Zlatan was not going to visit me, would not be my pen pal, my long-distance boyfriend. We were not going to get married in some beautiful place. Why did I always think of weddings?
“I’ll give you my address, too.”
“Of course.” Zlatan let me cry against his chest a while. I drenched his T-shirt, sucked at my own salt like an animal.
The rooms of Zlatan’s house passed through me as I passed through them. Walking felt unnatural after so many hours in bed. When we came upon each other in a hallway or a corner of a room we embraced fiercely. Every time, my tears came back, running into his hair when we kissed.
The beer I drank with lunch exhausted me. For a long time I sat at the table, watching the skylight move leaf shapes across the wood. We had agreed to leave at six, but I wouldn’t look at a clock. I gauged the passage of time by Zlatan’s cleaning rituals, which became more frantic over the course of the afternoon. He swept the floor, did the dishes. Swept again. Eventually he called me into the bedroom.
We sat facing each other, the ornate headboard curling and jutting behind us.
“Kiss me,” Zlatan said, and I did. “Again.” When I leaned into him he held me off with an open hand and pulled down the collar of his shirt, exposing the wound from last night. A closed eye, a burgundy shadow. “Here.”
I leaned and pressed my mouth to the opening I had made. Grew bolder, licked it. Bolder still I sucked and it opened in my mouth, offering a tiny gel of blood. He closed his arms around me.
I loosed my mouth. “Zlatan.”
“Roxana.” His green eyes floated above me and he gave me a little smile. “We know each other.”
“We know each other,” I repeated.
He pressed his lips to my forehead. One more kiss. Courage was inevitable now. Required. He handed me a slip of paper. His name written in blue ink, Zlatan Zlatar. Gold of gold. Beneath, his address.
He brought his mouth close to my ear and spoke softly. “Put me close to your heart and keep me there.” He pressed his palm against my right breast. I slipped the card deep into my bra.
“Are you ready?” Zlatan asked.
“No,” I said. “Yes.”
“Yes?”
“No.”
He waited.
“No. Yes. Okay.”
He took me back, out of the woods, on the winding road back into the green fields, his truck like the inside of a snow globe, places safe from the world where nothing happened.
Farsø appeared, low-slung buildings clustered together like scared people, and then we were in front of the apartment.
“Well.” Zlatan opened his arms and held me. Memorize this.
Outside, summer, the hum of tree bugs. We kissed, a kiss as lovely as each that had come before, different only because it was the last one. He held me tightly.
“Now you will go inside,” he said. “And you won’t be sad.”
“How is that possible?”
“How is anything possible?” Zlatan asked.
I put my hand to my breast and felt the card.
“Good-bye, Roxana,” he said. “Travel safely.”
He waited as I entered the building and climbed the stairs. On the landing, the door to apartment ø was propped slightly open. When I went to the window in the living room, he was gone.
Søren was in the bedroom. Without thinking I lay down beside him, not even wondering why he was asleep at such an early hour. Normal, I thought vaguely. Maybe these last hours will be normal. His pale face glowed in the artificial dark of the pulled shades. I closed my eyes.
Søren rolled on top of me and buried his nose in my neck, sniffing furiously. My hair, which bore Zlatan’s semen. My neck, bruised by Zlatan’s mouth. He investigated my torso, the waistband of my pants. Thrust his nose into my crotch like a dog, where he finally found what he was seeking and turned away, giving me his back.
Did I dream?
When I woke I was on the couch, as if I had never gone into the bedroom at all.
Later there was singing from the invisible neighbors downstairs. A man and a woman together, loud, voices braiding in a happy duet. A love song, I could tell.
The path to the train station lit in my mind. Søren did not wake. I rose in the dark and began to pack.
4
I FLEW BACKWARD THROUGH TIME, CHASING THE SUN, ITS HOT GLEAM AT EVERY WINDOW EDGE. I did not sleep, not for one moment.
My customs agent’s metal nametag said LUIS F. A young man with shining blue-black hair and a neat mustache. Our fingertips touched brie
fly as he took my passport.
“The purpose of your trip, business or pleasure?”
“Pleasure.”
He flipped the pages, squinting. “You don’t look anything like this. Old picture, huh?”
Sylvie and I had taken them together in April, not four months earlier.
“A long time ago,” I said.
Luis F. marked a blank page with his metal stamp. The little door swung wide.
“Welcome home,” he said.
In the baggage claim an old woman and a young man crept toward the exit, clutching matching rigid orange plastic suitcases. Two girls, maybe fourteen, held hands, anticipating with rapt intensity a bulbous white sack they hoisted off the belt and bore out. A little boy with sweeping black eyebrows stood alone, wearing a crimson blazer and a gray plastic lanyard shaped like a cat.
One by one, they left, until I was alone with the flickering fluorescent tubes and the conveyer belt. Finally out my duffel came, toddling askew, and I took it down.
Through figments of men I passed down empty corridors to the double glass doors squared in my vision like gates. I saw myself reflected there.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel began in longhand in a blue notebook in the humid dream of summer in the Vesthimmerland region of Jutland in July 2010 and ends on my computer in October in Middle-town, Connecticut, over seven years later. I am deeply grateful to everyone who helped this journey reach its end.
Thank you to my lodestars, my agent Marya Spence and my editor Katie Raissian, for their extraordinary efforts and unstinting belief in this book and its author.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Nervous Breakdown and Your Impossible Voice for publishing excerpts of this book in slightly different form.
To my colleagues and students at New York University; the University of Southern California; Mount Saint Mary’s University; Colorado College; the University of California, Los Angeles; and Wesleyan University for giving me work and space in which to do it.
To the PhD program in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California, Prairie Center of the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Tin House Summer Workshop, the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, Maureen and Tony Eppstein, and Diana Sallinen, for granting me space, quiet, beauty, and friendship.
To my teachers T. C. Boyle, William Handley, Dana Johnson, Mat Johnson, Dinaw Mengestu, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and most especially the radiant Aimee Bender for the time you spent with this novel and with me, for your patience, wisdom, and interest. I am honored to be the product of your teaching.
To the friends who read full or partial drafts, offered helpful ideas, multifarious support and diverse succor, who convinced me to keep going: Shea Abba-Herlihy, Katya Apekina, Diana Arterian, Kendra Atkin, Janalynn Bliss, Val Britton, Jackson Burgess, Susan Buss and Max Buss-Young, Samantha Carrick and Caitlin Eubanks, Katie Davis-Young, Denise Domergue, J. T. Farrell, Cristina Fernández Recasens, Christine Fadden, Kate Folk, Emily Fridlund, Annelyse Gelman, Farah Ghniem, Julian Goard, Lalena Goard, Maricel Goard, Erin Graves, Bryan Hurt, Katy Jarzebowski, Sami Kelso, Daniel Kibblesmith, Alexis Landau, Winona Leon, Karen Lewis, Ruth Madievsky, T. M. McNally, Lewis Meineke, Ceilidh Morgan, Leon Neyfakh, Robert S. Pesich, Jaume Pujadas, Rob Rabiee and Melissa Scott-Rabiee, Zane Ranney, Mariel and Robert Reeves, Narcis Serra, Conxita Boldú and Marina Serra Boldú, Diana Siegel, Ben Weber, Axel Wilhite, Robert Wilhite, Jennifer Wright, Alex Young, and Michelle Young. I beg forgiveness and give thanks to anyone I’ve neglected to name here.
To the Danes who welcomed me lovingly and without reservation: Elna Duelund Jensen, Bente Duelund Jensen and Erling Hess-Nielsen, Torben Duelund Jensen and Ann Hyllested, Nicolai Duelund Jensen and Dorthe Lykke Jacobsen, Mads Peder Lau Pedersen, Lise Steen Nielsen, Andreas Graae and Heidi Jønch-Clausen, Mikael and Heidi Randrup Byrialsen, Sisse Foged Hyllested, Jacob Hyllested-Winge, and Jens Bjering. Thank you for showing me your country and inviting me into your lives.
To my Mendocino clan for keeping me honest and wild: Linda Ruffing, Chuck Henderson, Elias Henderson, Richard Shoemaker, Cassie Henderson, Griffin Hodgkinson, and Stacey Loré.
In memory of my beloved grandparents Adeline and Lawrence Locascio Sr., Charles William Goldfinch, Elizabeth McCaw Goldfinch, and Christina John.
To my family, whose love made this book possible: John, Margaret, Jonathan, and Chloe Stuckey; Nydia Salazar; Dan, Carol, and Daniel McWhirter. Most of all to my mother, Anne; my father, Lawrence; and my sister, Julia.
To Jasper Nighthawk Henderson.
To Theis Duelund Jensen, without whom this book would not exist.
Open Me Page 23
