In the fantasy, Quince was with me, but this was where I left him. “Be right back,” I’d tell him. Then I’d walk over to Dan and stand there until he noticed me.
Our reunion would be warm. We’d hug, fondly but briefly, and then Dan would point at the door and ask if I wanted some fresh air. “Sure,” I’d say. I would follow him out.
Outside we’d sit on the curb, not touching but not too far apart, and watch others come and go. Maybe a couple would be arguing in the parking lot, and we’d look away, embarrassed. We’d ask questions about each other’s lives, and be moderately interested in the answers. Then, after a few minutes, we’d hug again and go our separate ways.
I suspected this fantasy was about putting Dan behind me for good. After leaving Alaska, I had struggled to make sense of all that had happened between us. And for a time, I tried to rewrite our relationship as a positive one. Dan was a good guy, I decided, citing evidence: He drove dogs year-round; he was generous with his car; he was Canadian, and Canada had universal health care. I knew I’d been miserable while we were dating, but I told myself, in retrospect, that I’d blamed him too much for my feelings. It weighed on me to have parted with such vitriol. I felt that I could sense Dan’s long-distance hostility.
And so, a year or so after we broke up, I wrote him a letter. I wanted to apologize for how I had wronged him—that I had turned cold toward him, which seemed in retrospect unthoughtful—in the hopes that Dan would, in turn, offer his own apology. After that, maybe we’d be able to leave our grudges behind. Dan accepted my apology warmly, but he knew, he said, that he himself hadn’t done anything wrong. It became very obvious to me last summer, he wrote, that you really need to get a better grasp of what the world is. And yet, he said, he wished me well. How could I disagree with him? We were, it seemed, friends again—a status that put to rest some of my anxieties, if not as many as I had expected.
It was only in dating others and recognizing the contrast that I could no longer sugarcoat my time with Dan. If Dan had been so kind, I asked myself, then why did I sometimes have reactions I couldn’t explain, particularly in sexual situations? Once, making love to the boy from the library, I found myself paralyzed when he turned me over and kissed my back. Because I couldn’t see him, I became convinced that I couldn’t be sure of who he was. More recently, with Quince, I had to suppress feelings of panic when one of us was turned on and the other wasn’t; the discrepancy seemed unspeakably terrible.
If Dan had been so kind—a generous lover, as I’d once, incredibly, described him to a friend—then why did I find myself combing over our sexual encounters, recalling again the burn of his sweat on my skin, or his hands pushing my knees apart, arranging my body to his liking? The memory of one incident in particular filled me with shame, and yet I often thought about it, testing the bruise. We had been in a bed, not a tent, though I couldn’t remember where—maybe in my college dorm room, the fall after my first summer on the ice. After he came, Dan sat up between my legs and grinned. “I’m glad that worked,” he said. “I was going to suggest that you needed a pillow under your hips.”
That was all: two sentences. Innocuous—that sex had been no worse than other sex we’d had. But the memory scathed me. I had failed, even at being raped.
No, I corrected myself every time. I hadn’t been raped. That word, hovering in my consciousness, brought with it an avalanche of self-doubt. It hadn’t been rape, because I could have stopped it. Of course I could have stopped it. What was I, helpless?
The thing was, nothing that had happened to me—not Far, not Dan, not anything—was beyond the normal scope of what happened to women all the time. Some harassment by an authority figure, a few sexual remarks, pressure from an insistent boyfriend? What woman hadn’t experienced those things? It made me the same as everyone else, and luckier than many. It was just a natural result of being female and living in the world. And if you added up the moments of fear, the comments, the touches—well, they certainly weren’t traumatic. Not for me. Not for a tough girl.
On the other hand, if I’d accepted the word rape, maybe I would have discovered other words, ones that could have helped me make sense of my earlier experience: dissociation, counterphobia. Maybe it would help me understand how being back in the north sometimes slipped me into a watchful passivity, a state where others acted around me and I could choose whether or not to respond. What good was a reaction to lines like I could have fucked you or You’re safe now that you’re friends with me? From where inside me would such a reaction come? That organ seemed to be missing. Flirting at the coffee table, talking about dryfish with Helge Jensen—situations whose arcs I could predict—felt like surfing the waves of an ocean that had once pulled me under. As long as I knew what was going on, everything was okay.
These men carried their desires on the surface—not hidden, which was where they scared me. “It’s okay for you to touch my hair,” I had told Zoran, “but please don’t lick my neck.” I was getting better at putting my own desires on the surface, too—negotiating a precision of permissions. This power thrilled me.
My second daydream was a memory, a recollection of an evening with Quince that had been perhaps our most troubling. And yet the memory, each time I sank into it, was comforting. It calmed me like nothing else.
This one started, like the other daydream, at a bar—this time at a country bar about two miles from Quince’s farmhouse. It was a busy night, a Friday, and I’d traded my usual root beer for a whiskey ginger while Quince worked the jukebox. The bar was packed, but even as we chatted with neighbors and strangers, Quince and I were linked by an electric sexual tension; behind every side conversation lingered a brilliant suspense for all that we would do back at home.
But then something, or a series of things, shifted the mood slightly, so that even I didn’t notice when the tune of my excitement changed. At one point we slipped out the back door to make out, and noticed only after several minutes of kissing that a strange man was rubbing Quince’s back; Quince had assumed that the hands were mine. Later, somebody bought us drinks—hot pink shots—and I felt obligated to drink the alcohol, even though I was already tipsier than I wanted to be. Finally the drunk man on the next bar stool, after we declined giving him a ride, bent over to reveal a pistol tucked into his boxers.
By the time we got home, I was in an odd mood—drunk, turned on, and more agitated than I realized. I kissed Quince hard in the hallway, pulled him toward the bedroom. I felt numb to his mouth, numb to his hands in my hair, though I was hardly aware of that numbness. What I wanted, I decided with the half of my brain that seemed to be functioning, was sex—mindless, all-encompassing physical comfort, with the deep love and safety that I always felt when Quince and I were together. It was only the intensity of his skin, his body on mine, that could bring me back into the moment and shake whatever odd thing had crawled up into my throat. There was no way but through. With this thought, I stripped off my clothes and climbed into bed, pulling Quince after me. But Quince didn’t get in. He stood by my piled clothes and looked down at me. His white T-shirt covered the skin that I wanted so badly against my own.
“Take off your shirt,” I said.
“You want me to take off my shirt?”
“Yes.”
“Not yet,” he said.
“Please,” I begged. “Take off your shirt.”
He shook his head.
The more he resisted, the more I begged him, until I felt myself shrinking. Everything in the room seemed to grow up around me, so that my naked prostrate body was at the mercy of Quince’s standing clothed one. He was so tall over me. I could hear myself repeating the same request; I couldn’t form any other words to explain what was happening. Finally, exhausted and horrified, I turned away from him and curled into a ball.
Instantly Quince was beside me. In the daydream, this was the moment I returned to: the moment when everything shifted, when the room went from dangerous to safe, and his body from a threat to a comfort.
I was trembling; he wrapped his arms around me and held me still against him, whispering words I couldn’t understand. Gentle words. It’s just us, he whispered. In the morning we’d talk about it: how confused he’d been, how he’d interpreted my requests to remove his shirt to mean that I felt good, that I wanted to have sex, but he’d not wanted to move forward when it was so clear that something was wrong. That night, though, we didn’t talk about anything. We just held each other until we fell asleep.
At times, the comfort of this daydream disturbed me. Was that really what I wanted—to be rescued by some guy? And yet I returned to it again and again. For everything that scared me, the memory reassured me, there was an ending. For everything that scared me, there was another side.
A few days after our dinner in the city, Arild invited me down to the Finnish grillhouse in the RV park. The grillhouse was a little hexagonal building with benches along the walls and a central fire pit, built from a kit by one of the residents, whose name was Henrik. Henrik and his wife and daughter were already sitting on the benches, resting on blue plaid cushions and rolled sheepskins in a haze of smoke. The grillhouse was new—everyone was getting one lately—and they were still working out the kinks. For instance: smoke pooled under the ceiling, and when they tried opening a window, the smoke blew into their faces. But that was a small inconvenience, everyone agreed, for the sense of coziness that the grillhouse provided. Henrik offered Arild some cognac, which he cut with a few drops of diet Fruit Chimpanzee, a local soda that had changed its name from Fruit Champagne after threats of a lawsuit from the French champagne industry. I accepted a lump of chocolate cake on a paper saucer. A fat golden retriever, who was exactly the same color as the birch walls around us, licked my hand compulsively.
Henrik’s daughter was studying leadership at the university in Tromsø. She wore a pink bow around her ponytail and had tucked her jeans into turquoise socks. She scooted closer to me. The trick to leadership, she explained, was to offer people something they needed but didn’t know they needed. After that, they would need you. It made sense. She lit a cigarette and handed it to me, but I gave it back. I was supposed to be like her, I thought, but she was a different species. We sat politely beside each other until she left to drive back to the city.
Nearby, Henrik was talking politics. He thought Norway was having problems, the gist being that everyone was on welfare instead of working, and even if they did work, the outlanders worked three times harder for the same salaries. Then they quit, the outlanders, and went home to their lousy impoverished countries with Norwegian unemployment and Norwegian child support and lived like small kings—with servants and mansions!—on the taxpayers’ dime of the few Norwegians who actually were working. He’d read in a men’s soft-porn magazine that Norway had a democracy of 3 million but supported 180 million people. As soon as the oil ran out—BANG, Norway would collapse. Like Spain, he said. His mouth twitched into a smile whenever he stopped for breath. Arild sat leaning toward him, but Henrik’s wife, who was knitting a purple chenille blanket with her feet tucked under her, didn’t even look up. Smoke swirled around her face.
Arild finished his drink, and Henrik made him a new one. He offered me one but I shook my head.
Outside, threads of whitecaps rose on the water. It could have been any time of day or night. Lowering his voice, Henrik confessed that his family was having more immediate problems, too. Their house was haunted.
When he said it, his wife looked up from her knitting for the first time all evening. She sighed.
The trouble had started years ago, when they moved into their new home on Kvaløya, near the city. It began with the usual, windows and doors opening on their own, silent untraceable phone calls, the sound of breathing in dark rooms. A blond boy ran into the kitchen, noticed Henrik, and vanished into the air. His wife woke repeatedly to the feeling of being held down by unseen hands. Their daughter heard voices. She was afraid to sleep alone.
Finally they found a psychic willing to diagnose the problem. When she entered their house, even the psychic got scared. She explained that they lived over an ancient trail that souls still followed, and that a blacksmith had once raped a woman in what was now their living room. Did I know what the word rape meant? Henrik asked me.
Before I could answer, Arild interrupted. “Rape,” he told me. “I’ll show you later.” He laughed loosely. The others groaned, but I stared at him. Arild was the only man here whom I trusted not to think such things. My heart pounded and I petted the dog for comfort, concentrating: soft head, soft ears. Soft head. Soft head.
It was quiet now, but Arild seemed not to notice. He took a sip of cognac and smiled.
Henrik cleared his throat. Anyway—and this was the thing—anyway, once they accepted the ghosts, things got better. It seemed that the ghosts just wanted to be acknowledged. And it took the family a while, a few years, but they learned that the sound of breathing was only bad if you let it be bad. It made sense, if you thought about it, for souls to stick to a place. After the body was gone, where else could they go? The soul was like water—it couldn’t be broken. I asked if they’d thought about moving. He said it wouldn’t help. At this point, the ghosts were riding their shoulders. The ghosts had been riding their shoulders for years.
“But you’d undo it, though, if you could?” I said. “You’d rather live without it.”
Henrik and his wife looked at each other a long time. Finally she shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was deeper than I expected. “We’re so used to living with it.”
Arild’s face was blank again. “There’s a lot we don’t know between the earth and the sky,” he said.
How could he be so calm now? I couldn’t bring myself to meet his eyes.
It was late, almost 3 A.M. I thanked Henrik for the cake and excused myself, leaving the others to their drinks and stories. It wasn’t until I stood in the grass outside, squinting against the wind that whipped off the water, that I could breathe properly. When I walked the gravel road to the shop, my feet seemed to roll beneath me, as if I were a passenger in my body. I was grateful for the light.
The next morning, at 11 A.M., Arild called my cell phone to wake me up. It was Sunday, so we drank our coffee at the kitchen table. “Speaking of last night, I saw a terrible thing today,” he told me. “Five bicyclists rode past the shop—and they were headless. The worst part was that the last one, he was singing.” Arild watched me until I laughed.
I didn’t laugh at the joke. I laughed, after a long moment, because whatever hardness, roughness, I sensed in the men of the Arctic, Arild knew it well—and it didn’t quite fit him, either. Sometimes he messed up the script. But nobody belonged in the Northland more than he did.
From any of the other men in Mortenhals, Arild’s comment in the grillhouse would have been nothing, a dumb joke to roll my eyes at. But from Arild it had stung. And yet I had never felt threatened by him, not once. In fact, Arild was the reason I had finally gotten rid of the stun gun the summer before.
For weeks after arriving in Mortenhals, I had kept the stun gun in the bottom of my backpack, strapped into its holster, buried under my dirty clothes. I could feel its weight when I hoisted my bag, heavy and reassuring, and could snake my hand through my laundry to double-check that it was there. I was always aware of the weapon, but I felt no need to keep it easily accessible. It was protection enough to know I had it.
Arild had said that I could spend time in his apartment whenever I needed a quiet space, even if he wasn’t home. One rainy day I took him up on it, reveling in the full bookshelves and the wide windows overlooking the fjord. And there in his mother’s living room, surrounded by her paintings, I pulled the stun gun from my bag and felt ashamed. The people I’d met had welcomed me, had offered me what I needed; and in carrying the stun gun, it was I who harbored violence, not them. The gun was one man’s fist in another man’s house, and I didn’t want any of it.
The problem was, I didn’t know how to
get rid of the stun gun. For one thing, it was illegal, and it had a serial number etched into the bottom, which meant it might be traceable. But mostly I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. If I threw it away, or hid it somewhere deep in the woods, there was still the chance that someone could find it. I thought of borrowing a boat and dropping the gun into the middle of the fjord, but what if it electrocuted the water? Was that even possible? It seemed a foolish risk. So I carried the stun gun into the mountains, to a place where a cliff gave way to boulders. I climbed to the top of the cliff and threw the gun as hard as I could toward the rocks below. Then I climbed back down to examine the damage.
Apart from a few small scratches, the stun gun was unharmed.
I sat down on a rock and tried to think. Alpine blueberry plants clustered by my feet, their berries small and pink, and a few orange ants climbed among them. A stinging nettle grew behind the rock, its leaves curling upward
The way I saw it, there was only one solution. I lifted the gun, held it in front of me, tried to steady my arms. Then I pressed the lightning button and didn’t let go.
The sound exploded; electricity shot from my hands and dissolved, crackling the air in front of me; the gun pulsed with the force of it, a strange, strong pulse that traveled up my arms and into my chest. I squeezed my eyes closed, steadied my arms, willed the popping and the lightning and the charged air to pass.
And then it did. With a last flicker, the stun gun fell still.
I scraped off the serial number with a hunting knife. I wrapped the depleted weapon in eight layers of duct tape and left it in a trash can. And I kept the charger.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THOSE LAST DAYS IN THE MUSEUM before I returned to the States, to Quince, were strange. Loose and loaded. I ran the shop while Arild hayed, leaving at intervals to help him fork the dry hay into the barn. In free moments, I cataloged and photographed the artifacts of the Old Store, counting hundreds of stockings and bottles and radios and bells and hairpins. I needed to trust that I would come back, that this home would stay for me, and it helped to make myself as useful as possible. I found myself wanting to leave things: my work boots, my mug on the shelf by the coffee table. Often, when I saw Arild, I had the urge to tell him all that he had become for me, but instead I turned back to the work at hand, pitching hay even harder. Behind us, the lambs with their fat bodies wailed for milk. Arild whispered to them sweet nothings: Hey you, lookit you, yeh want some milk? Some good milk? Lookit you, your tail wagging, hey you you you . . .
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