1.
It was three in the afternoon when my plane landed at the Helsinki airport, but outside my window, dusk was already settling in like a bruise. I retrieved my suitcase, its handle cold, and stumbled to the tourist information desk, where a woman with good teeth and bad English helped me find a hotel near the train station. My plan was to take the first train north, to Lapland, after a night of sleep. She directed me toward the hotel's free shuttle bus waiting outside. Its doors opened just as I was preparing to knock.
The blond bus driver's nametag said Ari, but he told me, the only passenger on the bus, that his name was Kari. The nametag belonged to his twin brother, for whom he was filling in (would I please not tell anybody about that, he asked). When it was clear no one else would be boarding, Ari/Kari turned and spoke to the general area where I was sitting. "We go now," he said.
We trailed a snowplow on the road into Helsinki. On the radio a man's voice sang in English about the pleasures of driving home for Christmas. I asked Kari if he would mind turning it down, and he turned the radio off.
The hotel had three stars on the plaque beneath its name -- one star more than I was accustomed to -- and I experienced the vacuous pride travelers feel when a choice that's been made for them is a good one. Inside, Kari took my luggage upstairs to reception, at which point he moved behind the counter to check me in. No smoking, one night, I told him.
Shortly after I settled into my room the phone stuttered a staccato cry, far from an American brrring. It was Kari telling me he'd be getting off work in an hour. "You like to join me in the lobby for a drink?' he asked.
2.
I said yes, in part, out of relief that the call wasn't from Pankaj, my fiancé. My fiancé still? I was no longer sure. Recently, everything around me felt familiar yet amiss, like the first time you ride in the back seat of your own car.
Dad had died a week before I left for Lapland. He was sixty-eight, his death unexpected. A heart attack. Pankaj had answered the phone. I was in bed, paying bills, in the Morningside Heights apartment Pankaj and I had shared for nearly five years. He came into the bedroom, tentatively, and kneeled on the floor beside me. He did not pray.
"Your father," he said. "Your father."
We left that night for Rhinebeck, where I had grown up. Where Dad had grown up. Where my mother had lived for fifteen years before she disappeared.
3.
I had hired the new Hungarian florist in town to do the flower arrangement. A mistake. A ruby banner hung diagonally, like a beauty contestant's sash, across a garish bouquet near the casket. In large silver lettering: "Be Loved."
The funeral was the first day I envied my brother's ignorance. Since birth Jeremy has never spoken, so it was unclear whether he understood Dad had died. My family would never acknowledge that Jeremy was retarded; my mother used to say he was slow. She vanished when I was fourteen, Jeremy six. In the hollow months that followed her disappearance I convinced myself our family was being punished for our silent shame about Jeremy. I said the forbidden word over and over -- retarded-retardedretarded -- as though I could undo what was fact: I could un-retard him, I could bring my mother home.
While I wiped my tears with my hair -- I had forgotten tissues -- Jeremy picked at the laces of his dress-up shoes. I bent over, pulled the laces out, and slipped them into my purse. Jeremy was accustomed to velcro.
A family friend held a reception. Unthawed strawberries, kosher wine though Dad wasn't Jewish, a woman I had never met sobbing in the corner. Friends and strangers hugged me so tight their chests pushed against mine, alluding to sex, and then vanished. As soon as the last guest had left, the hostess began vacuuming. "All those footprints in the carpet," she said. "They make me tense." I offered to help clean up. She accepted.
Pankaj and I dropped off Jeremy at the Home for Retarded Adults. The main hallway was lined with display cases of women's hats and men's ties. I didn't know why. As I stood below a beret, reporting to the nurse when and what Jeremy had last eaten, Pankaj handed Jeremy a paper bag filled with small plastic bags. The size that wouldn't fit over his head. Jeremy has a thing for plastic bags.
"That was sweet," I said, as we walked to the car. My words didn't match the intensity of my gratitude. From the start, Pankaj had looked out for Jeremy.
We drove back to Dad's house, where we had been staying since we got the phone call. We had left a few lights on and as we approached the front door I half-imagined it had been a hoax. Dad was alive and waiting to surprise us. I unlocked the door. "Hello," I called out.
Pankaj started a fire in the living room. I stared at his large lips and his grey-black eyes, the color of papaya seeds. They were framed by long eyelashes, the kind that old ladies on trains made a fuss over. Pankaj could bat them like a flirtatious girl and somehow look virile, handsome, strong.
But tonight his eyes were tunnel-dark, his eyelashes fey. He was moving slowly, the way you would around a predator you didn't want to enrage. I escaped to my father's study.
The study had been my mother's. She claimed to be working on her dissertation on the environmental battles of indigenous peoples. It was her research that initially took her to Lapland in her late twenties. While there, she'd gotten sidetracked -- that was her word, her explanation. She would sequester herself in the study for a few hours every afternoon, ostensibly writing, but there was a silent understanding in our house that her dissertation would never be finished.
I sat down in Dad's leather chair and opened the drawers of his desk, her desk. I found his address book. Inside, under our last name, Iverton, there were no entries. This was odd: Dad had written me once a month since I'd moved out. Scribbled in miniature handwriting, his letters had described landscaping projects he was working on, or summarized, in too much detail, a film he had recently seen.
I found myself in the "ABC" section, under "Clar." My mother had named me Clarissa, but Dad never called me by my full name. Penned into the book were four addresses for me: one P.O. box in college, one address in Lexington, Kentucky, two in Manhattan. He had entered my new address each time I'd moved and never crossed out the old one. I tired to imagine me living in each of these apartments, carrying on four different lives at once. In my Kentucky life, would my father be dead?
I didn't recognize the majority of names. I assumed these were the owners of homes he had helped landscape. Why hadn't more of his clients shown up for the funeral? The service had been small.
I sorted through the drawers -- old bills, letters postmarked in the early nineties, sea glass, owner's manuals to appliances we no longer owned. In the bottom drawer I found a large manila envelope that appeared not to have been opened more than once or twice. "Clarissa's" was written on the outside. She had been gone for fourteen years, but I immediately recognized my mother's handwriting. Her "S"s were exuberant, forward-leaning "8"s.
I shook the contents out onto the desk: grade-school report cards, notes from teachers commenting on my shyness in class. I didn't recall this about myself, and was surprised and strangely embarrassed -- we like to remember our childhoods a certain way. I sorted through watercolors -- "age 7" in one corner -- a note to the tooth fairy, a photo of me in front of the Washington Monument, wearing a dress patterned with keys.
Beneath a dried leaf, splitting at its stem, I found my birth certificate. I had never seen it before. I read it and read it again. I turned it over. With my forearm, I swept everything else on the desk into a far corner. Papers and a desk calendar dropped to the floor. I moved the certificate to the center of the desk and I read it again.
4.
Pankaj found me sitting on the shower floor, still wearing my bra and black stockings. He stood, blurry, on the other side of the clear door. The birth certificate was in his hand. "Do you want to talk?" he said.
I shook my head. I was emptying the bottles of Dad's dandruff shampoo, like tar, down the drain. Pankaj carefully placed the birth certificate inside the cover of a book about Vargas girls; it had been sitting above the toilet since he had given it to Dad the previous Christmas. Inside, I knew the inscription read: "To Richard, my future father-in-law. With admiration, Pankaj." Pankaj took off his clothes, opened the shower door, and sat next to me on the tiled floor.
"The water's colder when you're sitting," he said, and reached up to adjust the temperature. He picked up the blue bar of soap, Dad's soap, and rubbed it under my armpits. He took my Dad's other, non-dandruff shampoo and washed my hair. We sat in the shower so long the water turned tepid. Pankaj stood up, stepped out, and held a towel open for me.
I crawled out of the shower and Pankaj bent over and rolled off my stockings and unhooked my bra. He wrapped me in the towel and picked me up. I couldn't raise my arms around his neck or help in any way.
He carried me into my childhood bedroom, which had not changed: twin beds, a Sears stereo, and a hundred tiny holes in the wall where I'd thumbtacked my album covers. Pankaj put a blanket over me, tucking it in like he was making a bed. Then he left the room.
I stared at a photo of my father on the bookshelf. His arms like a game-show host, displaying a washer and dryer he bought when I was fifteen. Laundry had been my mother's job, one that we both resisted taking on when she was gone. He had believed the new machines would make her absence less obvious. It had been my favorite picture of my father, but now it seemed to belong to some other teenager.
Pankaj returned.
"He should have told me," I said to his silhouette.
"He was protecting you. He--"
"He was a liar."
Pankaj was holding a bowl and a spoon.
"Applesauce," he said. "It's all that was in the fridge."
"Didn't anyone bring anything over?" I asked. "Isn't that what people do?"
"Sorry," he said.
"Sorry?" I said. "What are you sorry about?" You're the only one who doesn't have anything to apologize for."
He didn't answer, and, at the time, I took this as a sign of modesty. We both twisted into the same twin bed.
A few hours later I learned why he was sorry.
"Are you awake?" he said.
I nodded and then said yes.
"I knew."
"You knew what?"
"I knew about Richard. That he wasn't your real dad."
In the dark, I tried to see Pankaj's mouth.
"How long have you known?" I said. I spoke slowly. I didn't want any room for misinterpretation.
"A long time."
"Like days?"
"Longer. Since we were--"
"Engaged?" I said.
"Teenagers."
"What?"
He said nothing.
"How?"
"Your mom told me."
"What? Why?"
"Well, let me think about what happened."
Pankaj was stalling, preparing a lie.
"Don't make me wait."
"Your mom told my mom."
"Fifteen years ago?"
"About that time."
"Fifteen years! Almost half my life. More than half my life."
Pankaj exhaled.
"So everybody knows? Dad knew? My mom? You, Gita? Gita! Your fucking mom knows who my real fucking father is and I don't? What the fuck is this? Does the fucking florist who can't even fucking spell know?"
"No."
"Really, Pankaj. Was this posted at the train station?"
"I didn't want to know. I wish I didn't."
"Fuck you," I said. "And tonight was the right time to tell me?"
"I'm sorry," he said. "I guess I felt deceitful, with you in the shower like that. I thought it would make things easier if I told you I knew. Later, you would never forgive me."
I switched on the bedside lamp. I stood up, stared at the bookshelf, pulled at the spine of my first-year Russian textbook and threw it to the floor. The carpet absorbed its thud. I had wanted thunder.
"On all the days," I said, and threw down another book, this one a dictionary, unabridged.
"Stop saying that," Pankaj yelled, "and stop with the books."
"You and Dad are the same. When you don't tell someone something like that, you are fucking with their life."
"I understand how you must feel," he said. He was sitting up in bed. He was wearing one of Dad's old sweatshirts.
"Take that off," I said.
"I'm sorry. I didn't pack well." He removed the sweatshirt, folded it neatly, and placed it on the bedside table.
"First of all, you do not understand how I feel. So take that back."
"You're right. I don't know, but I can imagine..."
"Imagine! You can't imagine anything. Has every person you know been betraying you for fifteen years?"
"Not everyone knows--"
"Shut up. Has every one close to you--your father, your fiancée, your who-the-fuck-knows been lying to you? Answer me."
"No," he said. He stood to comfort me.
"Stay away," I said. I pulled an old doll off the shelf and held it between us.
He stared at the doll, as though addressing her. "I know you're angry with me right now."
"You're a genius, really. Not only at philosophy, but at emotions. You know that I'm angry with you. Wow."
"What can I do for you?" he said. "I think you need some sleep. Everything will be better in the morning." He looked scared.
"Really? Will Dad not be dead in the morning? Will my fiancé not be a liar? Will it turn out tomorrow morning that not everyone betrayed me? Ah! Morning!"
"Please stop saying that word," Pankaj said.
"Morning?"
"Stop saying betrayed. You make it sound like--"
"Like what? Like I was betrayed?"
"Please go to sleep. Everything will be better tomorrow. I promise."
"You promise?" I said. I was now holding the doll to my chest. It was an ugly doll. I didn't know where it had come from or why I had kept it. "I suppose I should be happy now that I know, right? Dad was a cuckold. And I have a fucking father in fucking Finland."
"He wasn't a cuckold," Pankaj said. "You were born before your mom met Richard."
I sat down on the floor.
"Where does the word cuckold come from, anyway?" Pankaj said.
"I don't know but I think you're right. This is a good time for an etymological discussion. While we're at it, why don't we figure out where asshole comes from? Where get out of my room comes from."
"I was trying to change the subject," he said. His voice cracked like a boy's. "Listen, I'm going to go downstairs for a little bit. I'll be there if you need anything." He headed toward the door. His chest looked hairier than usual, his legs skinnier.
"Is there anything else you have to tell me?" I said. "Any other surprises? If so, tell me now. I'm serious. I should know everything and get it over with."
"No," he said.
"No what?"
"No more surprises," Pankaj said. "I'm sorry."
"Please leave," I said.
"Do you care if I come back here to sleep, to check in on you? I don't want to sleep in your dad's room." He gestured toward the sweatshirt.
"I don't care what you do. Just leave. And don't sleep in my dad's bed. Or whoever the fuck he is."
Pankaj closed the door. I went to bed and took the ugly doll with me.
5.
When I woke it was still dark. I stared at the person sleeping in the twin bed next to mine. There must be someone else, I thought. There must be someone I'm closer to. I made my way to the bathroom and sat on the toilet but couldn't pee. I curled over so my eyes were pressed to my knees. I stared at the floor. I picked up a piece of dental floss that had missed the garbage can and tossed it in.
Dad's red, white, and blue headband hung from the bathroom doorknob. A John McEnroe fan, Dad wore the headband whenever he worked in the garden, his gray hair rising up from the top like exhaust. I sniffed the headband -- it smelled of soil -- and put it on my head.
I walked downstairs and turned on the radio. Dad had it set to jazz. Behind the couch stood two globes. I spun the older, more expensive one around so fast it rattled on its stand. Then I found Dad's toolbox and, using a saw, I cut the globe loose from its brass arm, holding it at a tilt. It fell to the floor and I kicked it like a soccer ball. It split into three large pieces. Nothing was inside.
I stepped out into the garden, now shaded in dark hues and snow. Our birdfeeder swung from a branch, jostled by wind. For over a decade now it had been hanging from a coat hanger -- a temporary solution that, like many, had endured. I moved a deck chair beneath the tree. I took the birdfeeder down, seeds falling on me like wedding rice.
6.
At seven I opened the door to my room and stared at Pankaj. I would leave him, I decided. After this was over, in a week or a month, I would travel to Missoula or Memphis and find a man who fixed planes or raced horses and didn't need love, who hadn't loved anyone. He and I would kiss over dinner with pizza in our mouths. He and I would know no one else in the world.
I slipped into the narrow bed where Pankaj was sleeping and rested my cheek on the edge of the pillow. I felt him stirring.
I'm going to leave you, I thought.
"Don't you ever leave me," I whispered.
7.
The next morning we drove back to the city in silence. In my lap I held an ice tray. I pressed ice against my eyes to stop the swelling. When each cube began melting I would throw it in the back seat, then extract a new, colder one from the tray.
In the coming nights, Pankaj slept on the couch, I slept in our bedroom with a wicker laundry hamper in front of the door. I had first intended the hamper to block the door, but that had proven to be a nuisance -- I'd had to move it, stuffed and overflowing with unwashed clothes, every time I needed to go to the bathroom.
But I left the hamper two feet from the entrance. If Pankaj came into the bedroom he would ask, "What's this for?"
"To hamper you," I would say.
8.
But Pankaj hadn't once tried to come into the bedroom. Instead, he spent the first few hours of each night sitting outside the bedroom door, explaining to me how he didn't think what he'd done was wrong. Why I shouldn't be hurt. How I was in shock from Dad's death, from what I'd learned.
The phone rang less than usual. "Everyone's trying to give you space," Pankaj said. Cowards, all of them, I thought, trying to spare themselves.
Pankaj's mother, Gita, called.
"Not a chance," I said.
Pankaj had been three years ahead of me in high school, and his mother and my mother had been close -- for a while. Every relationship with my mother came with an expiration date.
Gita was a short, round woman who had studied classical dance in India. She had once been beautiful, and at sixty, still flirted her way out of parking tickets, middle seats on airplanes, a vase that slipped from her fingers at a crystal store. When I was fourteen she showed me her swami closet -- a linen closet in her upstairs hallway where she kept photos of ancestors. Every morning, she told me, she would honor the dead, and when she was done, ring a small bell. I had always loved Gita. I had wished she was my mother, even before mine was gone.
The fourth or fifth time she called, Pankaj pleaded with me to talk to her.
"She was in on it too," I said to the door between us.
"You're acting like this was a conspiracy," he said. "Please. My mother cares about you."
"Your mother also cares about ringing a fucking bell every morning. Who does she think she is? Big Ben?"
Silence. He mumbled something to his mother and hung up.
"I never knew you could be so nasty," he said. "You made her cry."
"Boo hoo hoo," I said.
9.
I had to wait three days for my passport, my first. Otherwise I would have left immediately.
Each night that I was sequestered Pankaj pushed an article or two under the bedroom door. This was something he did -- he searched through the Hunter College library and photocopied articles he thought I might like. Never was the copy too dark or too light, never was a marginal letter cut off. He'd staple each article and keep it stored unbent and unsullied in a folder until he got it to me. So much thought was put into a staple; its placement was always diagonal, its grasp tight. The articles were usually in reference to something we'd talked about. The last one had been about the elephant sculpture in front of the U.N. Its penis was so large they covered it with a shrub.
Now, in the weeks after Dad's death, Pankaj tried to coax me to read articles about grieving, about shock. He slid them under the door; I ignored them. On the night before I left for Finland, Pankaj sat outside pleading with me to read something he'd copied from a philosophy journal. "I think it might help you understand your mother," he said.
I pulled out two loud-ticking alarm clocks I'd come across when furtively packing, and held one clock up to each ear. All I could hear was time.
10.
I left our apartment at six a.m., passing Pankaj sleeping on the couch, his right foot extended on the coffee table. No one knew I was going anywhere. Disappearing is nothing.
11.
The desk in my Helsinki hotel room had a thin phonebook in its top drawer. Finland was so small that every listing fit into the same volume, the numbers organized by town. I flipped to the town of Inari and scanned the names until I got to "Valkepää." He was listed. I shut the phonebook and flossed my teeth. I refound the number and dialed. A man answered and I hung up.
I showered in sulfur-smelling water. The shower floor was the same surface, same elevation, as that of the rest of the bathroom, but with a drain. I washed my hair with hotel shampoo -- miniature bottles that pictured warmer landscapes. The towels were too small. I sniffed the clothes I'd worn during travel, found they had the plane smell of Band-Aids, and dressed in corduroy pants, a blouse, and two sweaters.
Nobody in the world knows where I am. I felt like a bank robber, safe in Mexico. A minute later: Nobody in the world could find me if they wanted to. I felt unworthy of being sought.
I turned on the television, using the remote, though the room was so narrow I sat two feet away from the small screen. I settled on a Berenstain Bears cartoon dubbed in Finnish. It was impressive how closely the mouth movements of the Bears seemed to match the dubbed words. Finnish, apparently, was the Bears' native language.
I have some experience in these matters. I perfect subtitles for a small company called Soutitre. The films that come to me have usually been shoddily translated, and are full of anachronistic language ("But madam, I love thee") and literal interpretations ("My heart is a rotten plum"). I don't have to speak the original language. My job is to make sure the English translation is smooth, the grammar correct.
I get paid by the minute. Eight dollars. Seven hundred and twenty dollars for a ninety-minute film; $960 for two hours. I am forever counting.
12.
At six, I descended to the lobby in the glass elevator. Kari was standing on the first floor, and my instinct upon seeing him was to push the button for the fifth floor and call the meeting off. But he had seen me. He was waiting, with a cup of something in each hand.
"Hello," he said, but it sounded like, "How low?"
Good question.
He offered me one of the cups. "Glögi. It's a holiday drink."
"What's in it?" I asked, sniffing. The cup was warm in my palms.
"It's hot wine."
I found the gesture sweet, charming even, until, looking past him into the reception area, I spotted a table where it was being given out for free. I took a sip, then another. Warmth rose to my face, to my ears.
Kari said I looked nice and asked if I had showered.
"Yes," I said, and added, "it was a long trip."
I didn't clean up for you.
"I was thinking," he said, "that we go somewhere else, not the hotel bar."
I shrugged and said that I'd like to get out, see a little bit of Helsinki. I only had one night there.
"Yes, thank you for understanding. I don't want anyone at the hotel to think I'm hitting you."
"Hitting me?"
"Yes," Kari said. "Let me think where we go." He put his fist under his wide chin to prove that he was thinking.
"I know a place," Kari said. He smiled.
We walked outside and I paused -- something like blood had been shed on the cobblestone street.
"I guess some people don't like the glögi so much," Kari said.
The sky was moonless, black, the street crowded with people. So late and so many. And then I realized it was only six o'clock.
We walked to an intersection, where Kari paused and looked around, as though trying to figure out the direction of the wind. We proceeded down the hill and toward the gray bay, shaped like a fist. He stopped at one point to run into a Diesel clothing store. I waited outside, surprised by the volume of techno blaring from the building. He didn't ask me to come in. I assumed he was getting directions.
The cold on my ears was sudden and burning. I pulled up the hood of my parka. It was, like all hats and hoods, too big for my small head. I had no peripheral vision.
"This way," Kari said, emerging from the store. We passed glögi stands that appeared to have been set up for the Christmas season, and an improbable number of hair salons and bars that looked alike, all lined with shelves of backlit bottles. Red tulips stood in the window of every store. There wasn't a poinsettia in sight.
As we walked, Kari became no more and no less interesting. He was at school studying to be a pharmacist. His parents lived up north. His brother was currently on vacation in Greece. "I'm a winter widow," he said.
I must have looked surprised.
"My girlfriend's studying in Holland," he explained.
We walked in silence for a moment. Two young women without coats ran out of a parked car and into a bar. Their arms were crossed over their chests, at nipple line.
"What are you doing here?" Kari asked. His intonation was misplaced; his question sounded like an accusation.
"I'm a real winter widow," I said. "My fiancé and his family, they all died."
"I'm sorry," Kari said.
"It's okay," I said. "It was their time."
13.
I looked to my left, where I expected to see Kari, but he wasn't there. At one point in our walk, he must have turned. I circled around in place until I felt a hand on my elbow. "Didn't you see me?" he said. I shook my head no, my hood swinging left and right.
I hadn't been touched by anyone since Pankaj, the liar, had tried to comfort me. Kari saw my eyes on his hand and let go.
"Sorry," he said.
I forced myself to smile. "About what?"
I was impressed by his choice of bar. It was on a back street, and from the outside looked candle-lit, warm. Inside, groups of friends convened around blond wood tables bordered by benches. Plum-colored tulips were mixed with red berries and placed in the center of each table.
Kari gave his last name to the hostess. It sounded short but looked long when she wrote it down. The plans had evidently changed to include dinner. I didn't mind -- I had a night to kill. Another woman escorted us to the bar's wooden stools. A third came by for our coats.
I gave her mine, along with my hat and scarf, and then shivered.
"Why do you do that?" Kari asked.
"What?"
"What you just did...what do you call it?" He imitated me, doing an exaggerated shudder.
I told him it was called shivering.
"But that's not real," he said.
"Not real? You mean not natural."
"Yes, it's not natural. You don't sliver because you're cold."
I shivered again.
Kari had changed clothes since driving the bus. He was wearing a black and white speckled sweater that made me sad. All that effort put into making something so ugly.
"How old are you?" I asked.
"Twenty-three," he said. He was adding a few years.
"And you?"
"Twenty-six," I lied, subtracting.
Kari ordered a rum and coke. I ordered a vodka and cranberry.
We knocked glasses and I studied Kari's face. He had pale, doughy skin and I could see the palimpsest of teenage acne.
I took another look around the bar, at the woman who'd written down his last name, whatever it was. She was wearing camouflage pants and was admiring another waitress's camouflage belt. Gone were the deep jungle patterns of the 80s; these were sand-colored, period-specific. Fashion knows no bounds.
Kari and I got our dinner at the bar.
"So why are you here only one night?" Kari asked.
I told him I was going to Lapland.
"Which part?"
"Finnish Lapland," I said. "Around Inari."
"You're going to see some Sami," Kari said. "They're like your, what do you call the people who wear feathers? Indian?"
"Native American."
In my guidebook I had read about discrimination toward the Sami, that they'd only become Finnish or Swedish or Norwegian citizens within the last generation.
"My parents work at tourist agency for ski area in the north," Kari said. "One year they can't open the ski ride because a Sami man said his reindeer likes to eat there. He said the reindeer was there first. That stupid reindeer made everyone lose much money."
Kari picked the cherry out of his drink and made a slow production of biting it off from its stem. This was supposed to be sensual.
"You know how you can tell a Sami?" he offered. "They're short and they walk with their legs like this." Kari got up from his bar stool and stood bow-legged.
"Sit down," I said. He did.
"This is because they hang their babies from sacks on the wall and that's how their legs grow. And typical, they are darker and shorter than other Scandinavians."
"Sit down," I said. What I meant to say was "Stop."
"But I am already sitted."
14.
Our third round of drinks arrived. I was drinking to keep awake. Kari looked toward the television above the bar. I strained my head to see what he was watching. Some sport.
"Handball," Kari explained. "I play it, too. I'm good."
I asked, stupidly, if it was a hard sport.
"Oh, yes," he said, tucking his dirty blond hair behind his ears. "Men who play are very strong. Good athletes."
We watched the handball game in silence. "Not an exciting game, this one," Kari said, turning his attention back to me.
"What do you want to do next?" he asked.
"What are our options?" I pictured myself lying in my hotel room bed, alone, dark shadows crowding my head.
Kari turned in his chair so his legs were on either side of mine. "You know what our options are," he said, and pressed my legs together. I fought my reflex to press outward. I had terrible taste in flings.
"And don't worry," he added, now tightening his knees' grip on mine. "I picked something up when I went into the Diesel store."
I tried to think what it could be -- a hat? A vest? A better sweater?
"They give out free condoms there." He opened his hand like a magician at the end of a trick, displaying his surprise. "I learned from last time I was with someone like you."
"Like me?"
"Yeah," he said. "Enough like you. She wasn't American, she was Finnish."
I laughed in his face.
"Ready?" he asked.
I nodded. I needed to leave.
When the check came we divided it. From his pocket, Kari pulled out a folded but crisp five Euro bill and left it for the bartender. It was the same bill that I had given Kari earlier when he had driven me to the hotel. I was glad to see him get rid of it. It felt wrong to go to bed with a man who had your tip in his pocket.
15.
"No one else is on this floor," Kari said, as I unlocked the door to my room. "I made sure you were private," he said.
I stepped into the room and was re-surprised by how small it was. Kari sat on the bed and handed me one of the two beers he'd brought up from the refrigerator behind the reception desk. He drank his quickly. He got up to pee; when he returned he reeked of beer and urine.
I checked the closets for a blanket. I stood on tiptoes to reach the top shelf. A force came from behind me and at first I thought I was falling. Kari's hands were below my ribs and he was lifting me. When I pulled the blanket out from the shelf it fell to the floor -- I wasn't prepared for its weight.
Kari sat down on the bed with me in his lap. He cupped a hand over my breast and blew into my ear -- fish breath. He removed his hand from my breast and stuck two fingers into my mouth. Bite, I thought. I fought the instinct and sucked on his wide fingers. They tasted like coins.
He pushed me onto the bed, his belt buckle digging into my belly. I peeled off his sweater and shirt. He tugged my blouse over my head, scratching my nose with the second button.
He flipped me over onto my stomach and traced my spine; I knew he would. It surprises everyone, the dark hair that lines the center of my back. I've had it since I was fourteen and underweight. Lunago, the doctors called it -- the same fur that lines a fetus's body in the womb.
Everything I knew about my body I had learned from the four men I'd been with. I knew that my nipples were large for such small breasts. That my flat stomach was my best feature. That my arms were shapeless. If someone told me they liked my arms I knew they were lying.
Kari was no longer touching me. I assumed he was masturbating.
I rolled onto my back and looked at him. His face was pale. He put his head on my breast, suckled at a spot a few inches away from my nipple, and then bounded off the bed and into the bathroom. He didn't bother closing the door.
He threw up twice -- once near the toilet, once inside. A part of me was relieved that what had started had ended. I tried not to act too cheerful as I filled a glass with water from the sink. I held it out to him and he knocked it away.
He passed out on his stomach, one hand on the base of the toilet. I removed a sheet from the bed and draped it over him.
I was tempted to call the front desk. "He's one of yours," I'd say.
I could leave, but where would I go?
I pulled the hotel desk chair close to the television and turned it on, the volume off. I held the remote in my hand but leaned forward to change the channels on the TV itself -- Bill Cosby talking about nutrition, an interview with an amputee -- and eventually found what I knew was an Italian movie with Finnish subtitles. I'd worked on the English subtitles for this film. Usually, I can't bear to look at a project I've worked on after it's done, but this morning was different. I knew the lines the actress was saying, and, in my head, I recited the English translation of her accusations. She was angry for five minutes, ten minutes. She was angry for most of the film. Though the volume was still turned off, when she screamed, I, too, opened my mouth. We screamed silently together.
An excerpt from "Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name," by Vendela Vida. Copyright 2007. Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins and Mary Evans Inc.