by David Rakoff
I’m thinking of all the things I will buy with the money that comes rolling in when eventually this subplot continues and Len Rosenfeld is a semiregular character. I’ve planned it all out: I can see Mimi’s argument with her boyfriend that precipitates her tearful flight to New York. Her first tremulous arrival at my atelier-cum-bachelor-pad. She has caught me in the midst of dressing down some weeping supermodel. The mask is definitely off, and I am yelling, “Do you honestly think I would let you do Gregor’s show? You don’t do anything without my say-so. And you wanna know why, babycakes? Because I own y—” I sense someone behind me. I turn around. I switch faces immediately. “Mimi, isn’t it?” I purr, pleased and quietly triumphant. I invite her in, “No, of course it’s not a bad time . . . a business discussion. I’m just really glad to see you.” I feign surprise to hear that she has nowhere to stay, no friends, no family in town. Conveniently, I have extra room. A great many of my models stay there. Len at this point might even look at her and say something like “Hey, Mimi, mi casa es su casa.” She is overwhelmed by my generosity and her good fortune. One of my minions—Kara, let’s call her (who, in a later episode, while pressing into Mimi’s uncomprehending hands a faded yearbook photograph of the winsome innocent creature that she, Kara, used to be before I used her up, will exhort Mimi to “get out while she still can!” but for now, a narcotized and silent girl)—shows Mimi to one of the guest rooms upstairs. The camera holds on my face as I watch their ascent. I roll my tongue around in my closed mouth as if I were tasting something indescribably sweet and delicious.
Weeks later, when I tune in to watch the show, I see myself give Mimi my card. I see myself urge her to call me, and I see myself leave. And then I watch as Mimi takes my business card in her hand. After studying it briefly, she crumples my Pine Bluff future into a ball and lights it with a match. Like most things made of paper, it burns.
HIDDEN PEOPLE
It is not pleasant to have my bluff so thoroughly called. My idle claim of being a translucent-skinned neurasthenic who cares nothing for sunlight is incontrovertibly shattered after a mere ten minutes of ambling through the duty-free shop at Keflavík airport in Iceland at ten in the morning. The November sky outside is still as dark as four A.M., precisely the time it would be for me if I were still back in New York. But I am not back in New York and should, by all rights, be enjoying that cognitive dissonance that is the happy dividend of transatlantic air travel: the European day, brightly risen and well under way six hours before its time. I find myself existentially, spirit-robbingly sad as I look over the shelves of vacuum-packed salmon, tinned smoked puffin, lumpfish caviar, and licorice, waiting for a ride into Reykjavík. By the time I have been in Iceland for an hour I am a walking Edvard Munch lithograph. All is blackness in my heart as well as outside the windows of the bus during the hour-long trip into town. The vehicle fishtails wildly, buffeted by inhospitable winds. When I get back to New York, I think to myself, I shall never again denigrate the light. I will start a letter-writing campaign to institute National Photosynthesis Day. I will join a tanning salon.
I have come to do a story on Iceland’s Hidden People, invisible beings from another dimension who, along with elves and trolls, are a mainstay of the country’s folklore. It was a newspaper story about the Hidden People who live in Grásteinn—literally Gray Rock—one of Reykjavík’s most renowned boulders, that brought me here. Grásteinn sits, cracked in two, fat and satisfied on its own square of sod just to the side of State Road #1, leading north out of the city, surveying the highway traffic that it has managed to divert not once, but twice.
Viktor Ingolfsson is chief of the publishing unit for the Icelandic Public Roads Administration. He has brought me to the rock. Any and all newsworthy incidents that occur anywhere along Iceland’s twelve thousand kilometers of road are Viktor’s bailiwick.
Incidents like Grásteinn. In 1971 plans were under way to resurface Road #1, making it necessary to detonate Gray Rock. Suddenly locals came forward and protested the destruction, claiming that it was inhabited. It was claimed that any desecration of the Hidden People’s home would result in innumerable and unfathomable bad things. This is nothing new; accounts of construction accidents, malfunctioning equipment, and garden-variety bad luck associated with unheeded warnings have entered the national mythology. So despite no history of Hidden People tales attached to the rock prior to 1971, the Public Roads Administration bowed to the protests and spared the boulder.
In 1999 road expansion necessitated Grásteinn’s being moved yet again. By this time the intervening decades had lent the rock a legitimacy, a bona fide national importance. Where originally it had been moved with a big bulldozer and a push—such brusque treatment that resulted in the rock’s cracking in two—the photographs that Viktor shows me of the most recent operation show a sling of yellow nylon belts: a rock coddled like an egg.
The pictures of this delicate procedure are in the internal newsletter of the PRA. Viktor puts out two weekly publications—one internal, the other for widespread consumption. The public newsletter made no mention of this second Grásteinn incident.
Viktor has been working for the PRA for thirty years, since his first summer job there as a boy of fourteen. Prior to my arrival, he had sent me an article he had written about the Hidden People sites under the PRA’s jurisdiction. It is titled “The Public Roads Administration and the Belief in Elves.” It turns out to be quite beautifully written—in addition to his day job, Viktor is a novelist; his third book has been on the national best-seller list for months—and the craft is evident in what, in other hands, would be nothing more than a press release.
The article is a minor classic of shifting tone, a fascinating mixture of weary exasperation and respect for the feelings of others. He writes: “. . . a lot of time goes into answering the same old questions. . . . This text . . . can be looked upon as the author’s interpretation of the PRA’s view on the issue. It will not answer the question of whether the PRA’s employees do or do not believe in elves and ‘Hidden People’ because opinion differs greatly and it tends to be a rather personal matter. However, you may assume that the author severely doubts the existence of such phenomena.” About the alleged curses and tales of accidents surrounding construction, he gently chides the reader, “. . . everybody has their ups and downs in life and we all suffer blows . . . you should ask yourself when was the last time something equally bad happened and who was bothered that time?”
The New York Times story that piqued my interest has made Viktor the focus of much foreign attention. If he is sick of being called by reporters (he was very easy to find; the old wives’ tale about the Icelandic telephone directory being listed by first names turns out to be completely true), he makes an intermittently good show of hiding it. When I ask him what his other duties as publishing director are, he cheerfully replies, “Oh, I do all sorts of strange things. Like talk to you people.” Viktor has offered to show me around some of Reykjavík’s enchanted spots. But first, to give me a proper look at the city, we drive up to the Pearl, a huge glass bubble housing a café, revolving restaurant, and an observation deck that sits on a hill above the city. The sphere, which does indeed shimmer like a pearl, is built on top of the huge cisterns the size of oil tanks that hold the city’s hot-water supply. Viktor explains that Reykjavík is heated geothermally, making it the cleanest capital city on earth. “You might smell a little sulfur when you shower. I don’t notice it anymore,” he tells me. That “slight smell of sulfur” proves to be an almost unbearably nauseating stench for the uninitiated.
The view from atop the Pearl is not what I had expected. I had envisioned a baby Amsterdam, all spun-sugar northern European architecture: spires, gables, cobblestones. Despite being over two hundred years old, it is surprisingly new. It turns out to be a very Bauhaus kind of town with a very low horizon, only a few stories high, and very many of the buildings, houses included, are clad in corrugated metal siding. It looks not a little like a vast A
udi dealership.
Getting back into the car on an overcast afternoon, he admits openly that these Hidden People incidents, when they come up, represent a PR problem for the Public Roads Administration. They then have to brace themselves for being labeled as insensitive. There’s also the danger that such reports will open the floodgates and all manner of copycat stories will come rushing in, despite the fact that, according to Viktor, very few people actually believe in this quaint folk tradition. If that’s so, I wonder aloud, why make any concession?
“Because the people who do believe, they are pretty serious about it,” he says.
I counter as how we certainly have people who believe in a lot of things that no one else does and we would never think to listen to them.
He explains Reykjavík’s unique situation to me: “This is a small community, you see. So basically everyone knows everyone, almost. You really have to listen to everyone, because you could probably meet them at a party in a little while. When you scream at someone in traffic in New York you know you’re not going to meet them again, so you do it, but not so much here.”
His reasoning is valid, even if only mathematically. There are arguably as many people within a half-mile radius of my apartment—that’s just ten blocks in any direction—as there are in the entire country of Iceland. I am infinitely more tolerant of the psychotic woman with Tourette’s syndrome who walks up and down my block all day long every day, starting at six A.M., precisely because I see her every day. Although effectively a complete stranger, she is more than that. She is my neighbor. Plus, she seems to enjoy picking up litter. But that’s not the point; the fact is, we all live with daily superstitions, vestiges of ancient beliefs: otherwise completely pragmatic grown-ups who refuse to walk underneath ladders; brief interruptions in conversation while someone scrambles around to find some wood to knock on.
Arni Bjornsson is a cultural anthropologist and head of the Ethnological Department at the National Museum. He is a sweet-looking, beetle-browed grandfatherly type. A man in his seventies, originally from a farm in the countryside, he closely mirrors Iceland’s emergence into the modern age. Like Viktor, Arni also seems wistfully regretful that the pretext that gets someone like me on a plane and over to Iceland is to scrutinize this daffy, essentially nonrepresentative aspect of a society that is distinguished in countless other ways—the oldest parliament in the world, the legendary consistency of its gene pool, the highest number of published poets per capita on earth. Imagine you are outside a jazz club, a place devoted to a quintessentially American art form, and a reporter from elsewhere comes up and, microphone in hand, starts quizzing you on why so many high-rises here don’t have thirteenth floors.
When Arni speaks of his childhood in rural Iceland, he distills very clearly the ambivalent relationship it seems most Icelanders have with these myths. “I didn’t believe, but I didn’t exclude the possibility. In my own farm there were two cliffs, and it was said that some Hidden People lived there, and you should not cut the grass near the cliffs because it belonged to the Hidden People. There were stories about men who had not obeyed this rule and they had some accidents.”
This turns out to be a paradigmatic model, which I hear over and over again: the Story of the Grass Belonging to the Hidden People That Must Never Be Cut; Erma Bombeck “My Husband Is So Lazy . . .” joke as folkloric myth.
The other model of story that keeps coming up is one of benevolent wish fulfillment as opposed to disguised admonition. In these stories, mortal women fall into slumbers from which they cannot be woken. In this dream state they are visited by Hidden People. They are taken into Hidden People’s homes, invariably more comfortable than their own, and also invariably, having performed some service or having been fallen in love with, these mortal women are given pieces of fine cloth, much finer than anything available to them in their waking lives.
Hidden People are neither intrinsically malevolent nor are they smaller than human beings. It seems that their seminal differences lie in their concealment and the greater comfort of their hidden lives.
“The Hidden People are like human beings, but if anything, they are more beautiful, they are better clothed. The world of the Hidden People was a sort of dream world for the poor people. They had better houses, furniture, clothes, food. Iceland is a land of contrast. Geologically it is a very young country, glaciers, volcanoes, earthquakes, lava streams, there was no stability. This instability has an effect on national character. When we think that there were practically no towns in Iceland until the nineteenth century, people with vivid fantasies on the individual and very scattered farms, they found themselves neighbors in the nearby cliffs and hills.”
Freud’s theory of dreams is ultimately that they are, at heart, disguised versions of unacceptable wishes, of infantile desires whose fulfillment is necessarily unhealthy or unattainable. In a country as physically inhospitable as Iceland once was, with its spread-out, sparse population, things as basic as warmth, clothing, sufficient food, and companionship might all be seen as inappropriate eruptions from the id. Despite having been in Reykjavík only a few days, I understand Iceland’s particular brand of desolation. In an effort to banish the blues during those few hours between when the sun goes down at about four and the time when it might be appropriate to start drinking, I take myself to see Fight Club, which, while featuring an awfully good performance by the four-inch band of flesh across Brad Pitt’s stomach just above his pubic hair, does little to lift my spirits.
For the most part, however, the nasty brutishness of the elements in present-day Reykjavík is really no more than a phantom pain. Still, the stories that hearken from that hardscrabble time are fondly remembered and closely guarded by people. Arni cites a study that found that 10 percent of the population firmly believed in Hidden People, 10 percent firmly disbelieved, and the remaining 80 percent hovered somewhere along the continuum of skepticism. This seems fairly well borne out when I talk to people. They can all recall local stories about rocks that must be avoided, grass that must not be cut, construction snafus, and the like. One young woman—a super hip chick in a long black skirt, shiny dark red top, glittery boa, and black felt platform boots—claims to have seen an elf once. When I press her for details, though, she can conjure up little more than the standard Disney details of a beard and a little hat. Interestingly, wherever the people I interview land on the spectrum of credulity, pretty well all of them think that it’s at the very least only sporting to make an effort at belief.
It is that yearning quality, that sense that it’s at least nice to believe in Hidden People, that comes up again and again, even from a skeptic like Arni. The tales are a vestige of a pre-urban Iceland. They are a holdover from what came before. And the physical record of what came before seems to be disappearing at an alarming rate in Reykjavík. Everywhere I look there is new construction. Urbanization is intrinsically a violent process. It elicits a terrified nostalgia; it makes us want to hold fast to what we feel is being lost: this was at the heart of the Arts and Crafts Movement of the nineteenth century, with its concentration on handiwork, on the nonindustrial; in part it’s what made the Brothers Grimm decide to compile their oral ethnography of indigenous German folk tales when they did; even Martha Stewart’s monomaniacal obsession with the homemade is born of a similar impulse. An impulse to, if not stop time, at least slow it down some, preserve some sense of history.
To hear Magnus Skarphedinsson tell it, he founded his Elf School in a similar spirit of folkloric anthropology. The school offers four-hour seminars, mostly for foreigners. The course includes a bus tour of the main elf and Hidden People sites in Reykjavík, followed by a typical Icelandic coffee and pancake breakfast. It’s all pleasantly low rent. The sign on the door is a paper flyer decorated with a drawing of a cartoon ghost, complete with the sheet on its head and its hands outstretched; some elves building a sweet little house; and a horseman being guided through the night by a hooded spirit, hovering in a nimbus of fire. The Elf Scho
ol also offers aura readings and past-life explorations. In the hallway outside Magnus’s office stands a plaster elf about three feet high. He has a gray beard and a green hat and britches. Garden-variety garden gnome.
Within that 10 percent of people who yearn for Hidden People to exist, Magnus, it seems, yearns the most. But he covers this yearning with a veneer of clinical dispassion. “I’m just a historian. A scientist,” he says. He refers to what he sees as a general disbelief as a “dilemma.” He is convinced that if similar funding were poured into the scientific research of Hidden People as it is into other areas, like medicine, we would have conclusive proof of their existence. When I ask precisely what specific kind of scientific testing might be addressed, Magnus leaves it at “finding all the dimensions other than our own.” Magnus is clearly on the bus, despite his claims of neutrality.
He leads me through the different types of elves. Some are humanoid while some are more simian. They range in size from less than an inch up to just under five feet. Magnus speaks about Hidden People as an anthropologist or census taker might. In contrast with elves, Hidden People are completely human, divisible into three types: those who are about a foot taller than us and dress in ancient Icelandic garb; a little-known group who dress all in blue and are sometimes even blue skinned; and the main population of Hidden People, numbering up to some thirty thousand individuals, who “are totally like us but a little smaller, and their clothing is like ours but about fifty years from the past.”
This last detail makes things a little clearer. It can’t simply be a matter of fashions taking a generation to penetrate the spirit dimension. I’d like to believe in a world of benevolent and beautiful creatures who live in rocks as much as the next guy, but it seems decidedly to be falling down on one’s scientific method job not to inquire more deeply into the fact that the vast majority of Hidden People sightings have them dressed in the clothing of, oh, I don’t know, one’s dead relatives.
