Matt Guest looked over at my speedometer and said, “You’re going too fast. You need to slow down.”
I glanced at the speedometer.
“I’m doing the limit,” I said. “We’re good.”
“No, dude, you’re going too fast.”
“I’m not going too fast,” I said. My anger was breaking through, so I looked over at him and smiled to prove that I was calm and that all was good between us.
“I really think you need to slow down.”
There was a car behind me, riding my bumper. I wasn’t going to slow down.
Matt pulled his phone from his pocket and checked the local speed limit with an app.
“Actually . . .” he said, letting the word linger.
“Actually what?”
“You’re going too slow,” he said. “You’ll want to speed up five kilometers.”
The point of the trip had been for me to absorb the landscape of Lofoten and then incorporate what I’d seen into the revision of my screenplay, but Matt, the film’s director, was hungover when I arrived and insisted I drive the rental. I had jetlag, had never been to Norway, and couldn’t see much of the scenery because I was concentrating on the narrow, twisting road in front of me.
Only an hour into the trip and already I wanted to call it quits. But I couldn’t. If my screenplay went into production, the payout would change my life. As things stood in my current situation, I couldn’t even make minimum payments on my credit cards, and I was running out of legal options.
The screenwriting assignment had come to me because an old college buddy had met the director at a party in London while teaching abroad and, after a few drinks, recommended me. I had published a novel with a small press, the kind of book that was released into the world without any notice whatsoever. Fewer than a hundred people had bought it, and I knew all of them. The book’s publication had made not even the slightest ripple in my life . . . until now. I had never written a screenplay, but I could learn, I told myself. I assumed Matt had searched out my book after the party and read it, but it turned out he was only looking for a competent writer who didn’t belong to the Writers Guild—someone, in other words, he could get on the cheap.
“I read the blurbs,” he had told me over our first Zoom call. “That was all I needed to know.”
“Oh? All right then.” I laughed and said, “You’ll hear no complaints from me!”
The next day I signed the contract.
Two months later, with a completed draft of the screenplay in my suitcase, I was in Norway, north of the Arctic Circle, sitting in a rental car with a man I didn’t know save for our one Zoom call and a few dozen emails. We were heading to the tip of Lofoten, an archipelago that jutted off the coast of northern Norway like a fang. With its bluffs and rivers and fields of purple heather, it was like driving inside of a postcard, except for the air that smelled like codfish—pleasant at first but then, after an hour, nauseating.
“Did you hear me?” Matt said. “You’re going too slow.”
“You want to drive?” I asked. “I get the feeling you want to drive.”
“Nah, I’m good. Just do the speed limit.”
I was ten years older than Matt Guest. I wasn’t accustomed to anyone his age taking a tone with me. I decided it was in both of our best interests to change the subject before I reached over and popped him in the face.
“You’re American,” I said.
“That I am. Cleveland, baby!” He said it with gusto. I couldn’t tell if he was being ironic.
“And you’ve been in Oslo . . . how long?”
“Three years.”
“How’d that happen?”
“Shit, it was easy. I presented the idea of the company to Knut, and Knut wanted a buddy to hang out with.”
The company was Dancing Girls Films, the English-language arm of Knut Krohg’s successful European film production company Kunstnernes Hus. To date, Dancing Girls had not released a movie. As best as I could tell, they didn’t even have a film in production, whereas Kunstnernes Hus had released two hundred and thirteen films over the past thirty years.
“Poor guy is sixty-five,” Matt said, “and never had a best friend.”
“And you’re his best friend now?”
“Dude. I’m his only friend.” He looked over at the speedometer again. Then he turned and rested his head against the window. “Jesus, you should see this. It’s gorgeous.”
“I’m sure it is,” I said. “But I need to concentrate on the road.”
“I feel like a flaming bag of dog crap. If I doze off, just keep driving straight.”
Five minutes later, Matt was snoring. I picked up speed, putting a healthy distance between our rental and the fucker riding my ass. It wasn’t that I wasn’t in the mood to punch someone. I was. And that was the problem.
*
With a trip to Thailand the previous year, I had just started traveling overseas. The reason for the Thailand trip was to find an affordable place to retire. My divorce had left me with a mountain of credit card debt, and I was out of options. Until recently, I had run a kind of shell game in which I could get balance transfer offers for my credit cards, and each time I transferred a balance, it bought me a month without having to make a payment for the new card. But as the debt load rose and the credit score lowered, the balance transfer offers washed up, officially bringing an end to my financial sleight-of-hand. A few months later, I received the email from Matt Guest.
Matt had read a news article about a rescue reindeer in Anchorage, Alaska, and how the reindeer’s owner, who had saved its life, would take the animal into stores, including places where there was a high chance of disaster like wine shops and businesses that sold glass souvenirs. The reindeer had become a beloved part of the community, so much so that sorority girls would stop by the animal’s enclosure after a night out drinking, sit on the other side of the fence, and confess their secrets to the gentle beast.
Matt wrote: We’ve got a Christmas fucking classic on our hands. What if someone steals the reindeer? And what if it’s set in Norway?
I wrote back: Just to be clear. The movie would be in English? But set in Norway?
He replied: Yes.
I didn’t like the idea. It was simpleminded at best, mawkish at worst. But once I sat down and started writing it, a ten-year-old girl entered the story. It took me a good twenty pages to realize that I was writing about my own daughter. My daughter had died of a mysterious bacterial infection when she was ten, but in the screenplay, I didn’t attribute the disease to the girl. I gave it to the reindeer instead. I kept the girl—my daughter—alive and healthy.
I was endlessly fascinated by how the unconscious mind stirred a bubbling stew of grief and obsession and love and anger, and out of it came a short story or a novel or, as now, a screenplay. This was why I wrote.
Once I realized that I was channeling my subconscious, I wrote the screenplay in a fever dream—twenty pages a day—staring into my computer screen until my eyes felt on fire. As soon I finished the first draft, I emailed it to Matt.
Matt had given it to his girlfriend to read, and by the end of the night I had received an email from him: Goddamn you, Chris, this is brilliant! Sofia hasn’t stopped crying. You bastard! I can’t believe I found you. I’m going to make you famous, dude. This is better than I could ever have imagined! As I read and reread the email, my entire body began to shiver. My Thailand retirement plans had suddenly become within reach.
But since meeting Matt at the airport in Lofoten, he hadn’t mentioned the screenplay.
And now he was asleep.
“Hey, Matt,” I said. “We’re here.”
“What?” He opened his eyes. “Why are you parked?”
“If I kept going,” I said, “we’d be drowning right now.”
He blinked a few times and looked around.
“It’s fucking beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Now what?” I asked. “Do you want to walk around?”
“Not today. Right now, I need some food. I know this great hamburger place. It’s in a gas station, but I promise it’ll be the best goddamned hamburger you’ve ever had.”
I didn’t want to complain that my first meal in Norway would be a hamburger in a gas station, so I shrugged and said, “Sure. Sounds great.”
“We have a lot to talk about,” Matt said.
“About the screenplay?”
“The screenplay. The next screenplay. Your position in the company.”
“My position in the company?”
“Dude,” he said, staring into my eyes with a sincerity that no one had given me in years. “I need that fucking hamburger before I die.”
“Yeah. Right. Where should I go?”
Matt typed something into his phone. A female voice with a British accent said, “Turn right.”
“Oh, Jesus, you have no idea the fantasies I have about her,” Matt said.
“Turn right,” the voice said again.
“Just listen to that sexy-ass voice and do whatever she says.” Matt grinned as though the voice might give us directions to Norway’s Sodom and Gomorrah, an Arctic strip club decorated with shaggy pelts and antlers from long-extinct beasts. It didn’t. It took us directly and unceremoniously to a gas station that sold hamburgers, as Matt had programmed it to do.
*
The cheeseburger tasted like it had come from a high school cafeteria, the kind made from beef and something that wasn’t beef, and then placed in a warming tray for hours. The bun was stale. I assumed Matt’s love for it was born of nostalgia for a particular burger he had eaten when he was a child because it was honestly one of the worst things I’d ever tasted.
“I tried on your underwear,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“We’re about the same size, so I tried it on just to make sure they would fit. There’s a shirt in the bag, too. It’s all in the backseat.”
“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”
My luggage hadn’t arrived. It was stuck somewhere between Dallas and Oslo. I had tried calling the airline, but it was a ninety-minute wait just to talk to someone. The only reason to get the luggage back was to have my prescription medicine and the hardcopy of my screenplay. I couldn’t wear any of the clothes in it because I had foolishly packed a heavy coat, flannels, and thermal long johns. It was eighty-five degrees here. Hotter in the sun.
“You didn’t really try on the underwear, did you?”
“Just one pair,” Matt replied. “I should’ve gotten a pack for myself. You’ll be stunned how goddamned comfy they are. They held onto my gonads like a warm hand. So, tell me. What do you think of the cheeseburger? Be honest.”
I nodded.
“Isn’t it the best you’ve ever had?” he asked.
“The best? I’m not sure I’d go that far,” I said. “I’ve had some pretty good cheeseburgers in my life.”
“Listen,” he said. “I told Knut you should be on the payroll.”
“Oh?” I already had a job. I was manager of a campus bookstore. We didn’t sell books anymore, though. Only school merch. Sweatshirts and shot glasses. We’d even quit stocking textbooks for classes. If someone special-ordered a textbook, it would be drop-shipped from the publisher’s distributor with a hundred-percent markup. It astonished me that anyone ever ordered from us.
“What does Knut think?” I asked.
“Knut thinks it’s a great idea. Have you ever been to China? An oligarch from Guangzhou is funding us for the next three years, so we go there every couple of months. It’s a wild place.”
“Guangzhou?”
“No. China. All of it. It’s like Vegas on steroids.”
“That sounds awful. What would I be doing,” I asked, “to earn a salary?”
“Does it matter?”
It did, but I shrugged like maybe it didn’t.
“I can tell from your screenplay,” Matt said, “that you’re a dark fuck like the rest of us. You’d fit in perfectly.”
I had never thought of myself as dark. It was possible, I supposed, that he had picked up on the subconscious transferal of my daughter’s fatal illness to the reindeer, and that I was working through my own demons in the script. Maybe I hadn’t given Matt the credit he deserved. Maybe he was more attuned to nuance than I’d thought.
I tossed half of my cheeseburger into the trash. I thought I’d done it in such a way that wouldn’t raise Matt’s suspicion, but when I turned around, Matt was staring at my hands and then he looked up at me.
“Didn’t like it?”
“No, it was great. My stomach’s a little wonky after the flight. Airport food.”
“Right,” Matt said, drawing out the word like he didn’t believe me.
After lunch, I drove toward the cabin Matt had rented for us. On our way there, we passed dozens of red houses and barns, past quaint, hand-painted signs, past farmers’ markets with raspberries that looked plump even from a distance.
“Pull over,” he said and pointed to several rows of fish drying in the sun.
We got out and examined the fish. There were hundreds, maybe even thousands, all hanging from wooden racks. We’d been passing similar racks all day.
“Why aren’t you taking photos?” he asked. “This is the kind of stuff I want in the screenplay.”
“All right,” I said.
I took a closeup of a fish eye. The rows of dead and drying fish looked like something from a horror movie.
“Is that it? One photo? C’mon, man. I want you to really capture this place. You can’t write about it if you haven’t been here.”
“Poe wrote about Lofoten without coming here,” I said.
“Who?”
“Edgar Allan Poe?” Surely he’d heard of Poe.
“You’re full of shit,” Matt said. After a pause, he said, “Did he?”
“Actually, yes, he did. And he’d never been here.”
“Okay, sure. But he had to write about it without being here. I mean, how the fuck would he have gotten here?”
“Ship?” I offered.
I took another photo.
“Stockfish,” Matt said. “They’ll sell the worst pieces to a company in Nigeria. This shit is like gold there.” He smiled. “Did your precious Edgar Allan Poe ever write about that?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t read the story.”
Matt stared at me as though trying to determine if I was fucking with him.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s check into the cabin. You’re going to love this place. It has a hot tub outside.”
“You want me to keep driving?”
“Who else is going to drive?” he said.
*
It was evening by the time we got to the cabin, but it was still light out. It was that time of year in northern Norway when it never got dark. There were no keys for the cabin, just a pad next to the door and a code. It was two stories tall and on a dirt road of identical cabins, all of them painted red. A river ran behind our place. Or maybe it was a stream. Or a creek. Or a brook. Until now, it hadn’t crossed my mind to learn the difference, but maybe, now that I was a screenwriter, I should.
After we checked in, Matt tossed a clear package of opened underwear at me. He really had tried on a pair. I made a mental note not to wear the pair that had been balled-up and stuffed back into the packaging—the very pair that had lovingly cupped his gonads. He pulled a crumpled shirt from a shopping bag and tossed it at me, too. It was green and shiny, like fake silk, populated with large pineapples all over the front and back. The shirt screamed tourist but for the wrong country. There was no way it wasn’t a joke.
“A thank you would be nice,” Matt said.
I dropped it all onto the couch and walked to the kitchen. There were three cans of Ringnes Pilsner in the fridge, probably left over from the previous guest. I took one and headed outside. I leaned against the rental car and popped it open.
A man in the cabin across from ours was busy stuffing something into the trunk of his car. When he straightened up and saw me, he waved. He looked like a professional skier—tall and muscular with blond hair. Even from this distance, I could tell that his teeth were extraordinarily straight and white.
I waved back.
Matt came out and said, “Who’s that?”
“How should I know?”
The man gave a friendly nod toward Matt before heading back into his cabin.
“Have you ever seen a Norwegian porno?” Matt asked.
“Can’t say that I have.”
“The woman gets on top of the guy, and it’s just up and down, up and down, up and down. No variation. Nothing. Just up and down. Hell, she might as well be on a pogo stick.”
“Is that what you were doing? Watching Norwegian pornos?”
He shrugged. “Any word on your luggage?”
“Not yet.”
“That shirt I bought you? I grabbed it off the discount rack before I left Oslo. Didn’t have a hell of a lot of time to shop.”
“It’s shiny,” I said. “And that’s a lot of pineapples for one shirt.”
“You’re divorced, right?” he asked.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to talk about it.
“I’m thinking about making a documentary about how women destroy men’s lives,” he said. “I know, I know, it’s not politically correct, but can you imagine how many men could say they’ve finally been seen? It’s not like I’m saying women aren’t victims. What I’d be saying is, men are victims, too.”
I nodded. I was listening but also wondering why he had tried on my underwear if he didn’t have time to shop.
“Hey, sorry. I think the flight here finally caught up to me,” I said. “I’m wiped.”
“Sure. Go on.” He winked at me. “Get your beauty sleep.”
I finished the last of the beer and went back inside.
*
That night I woke up to a peculiar noise, possibly a large animal.
It was after three in the morning. I slid out of bed and walked to the window. It was dimmer out than earlier, but the sun was still up, just lower and less bright.
Across the way, in front of her cabin, a woman who looked nine months pregnant was kneeling on the ground and scooping up a handful of dirt. With her free hand, she pinched some of the dirt and held it close to her face. When my own wife was pregnant with our daughter, she went through a period late in her pregnancy where she had a taste for unusual foods, things that weren’t even readily available, like blood sausages and head cheese, things she had never before laid eyes on, let alone eaten. I had a memory of her now, also pregnant, on her knees outside, and it felt like someone had taken hold of my guts and twisted them.
The door to the cabin opened, and the skier stepped out. “What are you doing?” he asked her.
I couldn’t hear her answer, but he joined her on the ground, sifting through the dirt.
“Here it is!” he said. He held something up toward the midnight sun. I saw it flash. Was it a contact lens? The center stone of a ring?
He stood and then helped his wife up off the ground, and together they headed back into their cabin.
I returned to bed.
In the morning, I wasn’t sure if I had seen what I’d seen or if I had dreamed it. I wasn’t sure why I assumed they were married. Because she was pregnant? Because I had once been married? Jetlag had muddied my thinking. I took a shower and, wearing my shiny new pineapple shirt, went downstairs. I checked the fridge for food, but there was nothing, not even the remaining beer. I made coffee, my only option.
When Matt came downstairs, I wanted to ask him if he had seen a pregnant woman outside on her knees sifting through dirt, but before I could say anything, he said, “I told Knut about your idea for the documentary.”
“What idea?”
“The one about men as victims.” He frowned and shook his head. “He hated it. He thought it was a terrible idea.”
“It was your idea,” I said, “not mine.”
“Not anymore.” He grinned and looked in the fridge. “Jesus. We need food. Come on. Let’s go.”
We drove to a nearby restaurant, our first sit-down meal since arriving, and were seated with a view of hills that could’ve been the cover of a coffee table book. I saw several orange-beaked puffins with miniature duck feet. Even the fog was cinematic. I wasn’t sure what anyone actually did here to pass the day, but no one could say that it wasn’t a magical place.
The server came over and handed us our menus. She looked too young to be legally employed, but I knew nothing about labor laws in Norway. In fact, I knew practically nothing about Norway except the few things I had Googled while writing the screenplay. Her smile, genuine and self-conscious, suggested that she hadn’t been in the workforce for long. Her face was strikingly without a blemish. It reminded me of the purity of paint when you first pry open the can, before it’s stirred and fouled.
Matt looked up from his phone. “Well, hello!”
The server averted her eyes for just a moment before asking if we’d like something to drink.
“Just a Coke for me,” Matt said. “But this guy? Total lush. He might need something a little harder.”
“Diet Coke for me,” I said.
“He probably has a bottle of whiskey in his pocket,” he said to her in a stage whisper. He winked. “Your English is really good. Where did you learn it?”
“In school,” she said. She lifted one shoulder, a half-hearted shrug. “It’s not so good. My English.”
“I’m sure you hear this all the time, but you look like an actress.” Matt looked at me: “Doesn’t she look like an actress?”
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t going to play this game.
“I’ll be right back with your drinks.” Smiling, she left us alone.
“What’re you doing?” I asked.
“Just being friendly.”
“She looks fifteen.”
“Oh, come on,” Matt said. “Look how happy I just made her. Nothing wrong with that.” He sighed. “I don’t know, man. Maybe you’re not cut out for joining our team, after all. You’re a little . . . uptight. Not that I’m telling you anything you don’t already know.”
“I have a job,” I said.
“Bookstore manager? That’s a job?”
Matt reached over and shook my shoulders, as though trying to wake me up.
“Dude, you’re one talented motherfucker,” he said. “You shouldn’t be wasting your life in a bookstore. Imagine what Bukowski would have written if he hadn’t spent his life working in a post office.”
“Imagine what he wouldn’t have written,” I said, thinking about Post Office, Bukowski’s most regarded novel.
The server returned and delivered our drinks.
“Ready?” she asked, pen poised.
“What do you think of his shirt?” Matt asked, pointing at me.
She eyed the many pineapples and tried not to laugh.
“Exactly,” Matt said. “So, listen. We’re here to shoot a movie. My name’s Matt Guest. I’m the director. And this here is the writer.” He snapped his fingers, as though trying to remember my name.
“Chris,” I said and offered a curt nod. “I’ll take the cod burger? No sauce.”
“Plain?” she asked.
“Does it come with lettuce and tomato?”
She kept stealing glances at Matt. Instead of answering my question, she said, “Really? A movie?”
“Yes indeed. We’re scouting locations right now,” Matt said. “Hey, you want to come along with us? You could be our guide.”
I tried conveying through the intensity of my glare for him to stop his bullshit, but I couldn’t get him to look over at me.
The server laughed. “I wish. But I need to work.”
“Ah, too bad. What’s your name?”
“Frida.”
“Frida! My god! What a beautiful name. You know what, Frida?” He reached for his wallet and pulled out his card. “I’m going to put you in our movie.”
“Stop kidding,” Frida said.
“I’m not kidding. Here’s my card. And here,” he said, pointing to the bottom of the card, “is my cell phone number. You should text me your email address so I can send you a contract.”
Frida shook her head. “You’re joking.”
“No. Look.” He typed his own name into the Google search bar on his phone and showed her the results. Under several photos of him were the words film director.
“Oh my God.”
“See?” Matt grinned. “Oh, and I’ll have what he’s having. But I’ll take the sauce. Because I don’t eat like a child.” Matt looked at me said, “Oh, come on! It’s a joke.”
Frida turned and walked to the kitchen, but she picked up her pace for the last ten yards, no doubt to share the good news with her friends.
“So . . . she’s in the movie now?” I asked. “Just like that?”
“Why not? Hell, she could play the girl.”
“The girl is ten.”
“I know,” Matt said. He sighed, his second time today. His sighing wasn’t lost on me. “We need to talk about that.”
“We do?”
“Not now. Later. Let’s enjoy our lunch.”
What did we need to talk about? The screenplay had made his girlfriend cry.
“You didn’t actually tell Knut that the documentary idea was mine, did you?” I asked.
“I did. And he was offended by it. I’d never heard him this angry.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No,” he said. “I’m most definitely not kidding.”
“Great.”
I had foolishly packed my blood pressure medicine in my suitcase instead of my carry-on. I felt my heart tighten like a fist and wondered if the medicine had indeed kept me alive longer than I should have been. I was fifty-two, but the last ten years had taken a toll on me.
“Well, fuck him,” I said.
“Oh ho!” Matt said. I had gotten his attention. “Where’s this Christopher Armstrong been? I like this guy.”
Keeping my voice low, I said, “You really shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing with that girl.”
“What . . . her?” He shrugged. “You’re probably right.” He looked at my shirt. “I also probably should have picked out a different shirt. You look fucking ridiculous.” He cupped his head with both hands and massaged his temples. “What can I say? I make a lot of bad life choices.”
When he stopped massaging, he turned his attention to his phone and didn’t look up again until the food arrived—two seemingly identical sandwiches. I removed the bun from mine and checked to make sure they hadn’t made a mistake. They hadn’t. I was grateful for the small things. Some days the small things were the only things keeping me going.
*
One week before our daughter was born, I had found my wife, Tanya, in the family cemetery, just beyond the wrought-iron fence of the back yard. She looked like she was digging a new plot. I called out her name from the back stoop, as though calling out to an animal to chase it away. Crouched, Tanya looked up at me, eyes glowing from the moonlight. She was neither embarrassed nor angry. I should have gone out there and helped her up, as the skier had helped up his wife, but she looked away and, continuing to scoop dirt up into her hands, began putting it into her mouth, struggling to eat it. Because I was frightened, or maybe because it was easier to pretend it wasn’t happening, I shut the door and returned to bed, willing myself to sleep. In the morning I didn’t mention to Tanya what I’d seen and she didn’t offer up an explanation.
“What’re you thinking?” Matt asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“I’m never not thinking. Even when I think I’m not thinking, I’m thinking about something. Nothing deep, mind you. Usually, it’s about some girl I hooked up with in college.”
“Good for you.”
“How did we get so old?” Matt asked.
“Speak for yourself.”
At Matt’s insistence, I drove us to a beach. I parked near a flock of sheep on a hill.
“Why’d you park so close to the hill?” Matt asked. “I’ll probably sprain my ankle trying to get out of the goddamned car.”
I prided myself on my parallel parking skills. It had taken only one try. And I had parked exactly the same distance from the incline as every other car parked next to the incline.
“The car would have been sticking out,” I said, “and then you’d complain that someone might hit it.”
“Are we having an argument, sweetie?” Matt asked.
“I don’t know. You tell me. And don’t call me sweetie.”
After he got out of the car without any apparent struggle, he said, “Any news on your suitcase?”
“It’s officially in Norway,” I said.
“What? It’s here? And you didn’t tell me?”
“It’s not here-here. It’s in Oslo. It’ll be on the next flight. And then we have to pick it up at the airport.”
“Are you kidding? We have to pick it up? Can’t they deliver it?”
“Tell you what. I’ll pick it up. How’s that?”
“Aw. We are having an argument,” Matt said.
The beach was surprisingly crowded. It was an unseasonably hot day. Women of all ages were dressed in bathing suits. Kids ran across the sand. The water was roiling from all the waders and swimmers. If sharks were in these waters, they’d have swum closer to investigate.
“Should we talk about the screenplay now?” I asked.
“Not yet. You should be taking notes.”
“About what?”
“About everything you’re seeing.”
“I’m not writing a novel,” I said. “You’re the one who’s going to shoot it. Do I really need to research the kind of flower that grows here?”
Matt said, “Are you shitting me? The whole point of this trip is for you to absorb life here. To understand how people here live. Not to read some stupid Edgar Allan Poe story and think you understand a place.”
“I didn’t read the story. Remember?”
“Oh yeah, that’s right. You didn’t even read it. And yet you think you know everything about this place.”
“Is that what I said? That I know everything?”
Matt’s phone buzzed. An incoming call. “Christ. Just what I need. It’s Knut.” He answered the phone. “Knut! Buddy! How’s it hanging? What? Ah, you know. Just another difficult writer. I know, I know, they’re all the same. Yes, I told him not to pursue the documentary idea. Yes, I told him you were offended by it. Hell, I was offended by it, and you know how hard it is to offend me.” He looked at me and shrugged.
I walked away.
I headed for the beach even though the sun was blazing and I was pale. It hadn’t crossed my mind that I might need sunscreen in the Arctic. It also hadn’t occurred to me that there would be a heat wave while I was here. No wonder glaciers were melting and the world was burning.
I looked around for Matt, but I couldn’t see him. I pulled out my phone and checked my messages. Nothing.
I opened my phone’s Kindle and found a free copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s collected stories. I scrolled until I found his Lofoten story and read the first paragraph: We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag. For some minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak.
I closed the app, turned off the screen, and returned the phone to my pocket.
I saw, in the distance, the pregnant woman I had seen in what might have been a dream. She was sitting in a beach chair by herself, idly running a hand through the sand. The skier-husband was nowhere to be found. I wondered if her baby, floating in its amniotic sea, could feel the temperature rising as its mother exposed her belly to an unforgiving sun.
I looked around for Matt again and spotted him sitting in the driver’s seat of the car. When I walked closer, I saw that he was taking photos with his phone. There was nothing in front of the car except for another car and two girls retrieving something from the car’s trunk. The girls were nine or ten. Eleven, tops. They were around my daughter’s age. They wore bathing suits. One had on a two-piece; the other, a one-piece. I couldn’t see what they were retrieving, but they were bent over trying to reach it, and Matt was busy snapping photos of them. So lost was he in his task, he was utterly unaware of my presence.
I pounded on the car’s window, startling him out of his trance.
He powered down the window.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.
“What’s it look like I’m doing? I’m sitting in the car.”
“You know what I mean,” I said.
“Stand back. The person who parked this car didn’t know what the hell they were doing. I’ll pull it out so you can get in without twisting an ankle like I almost did.”
“But you didn’t twist your ankle.”
“I said almost.”
The car was already running, the air on. He honked the horn, startling the two girls, and then he motioned for them to get out of the way. The girls ignored him, pulling free an inflatable duck from the recesses of the trunk. Then, with each other’s help, they shut the trunk and headed back toward the beach. The taller of the two girls turned back for one final look at Matt and then, by association, at me. Though I had done nothing wrong, I felt the sting of guilt.
Matt pulled forward and backwards several times before mercifully freeing the car. It would have taken me backing up only once and then pulling forward to achieve the same result, but I said nothing. I got into the passenger side. Matt looked nervous. I thought it was because I had caught him photographing minors, but he just said, “Fucking Knut. I mean, he’s a sweetheart of a guy. Saved my ass more times than I can count. But when he gets angry, he’s like a child. It’s like storm clouds gather over him. He can’t see light for days.”
“What’s the problem?”
“He’s still pissed about your idea.”
“It wasn’t my idea.”
“For all intents and purposes, it was your idea, okay?”
“Jesus.”
“I know.”
Matt thought I was commiserating with him. I wasn’t.
He turned onto the main road. Within seconds, he was driving over the speed limit. I mentioned it to him.
“So?” he asked and picked up speed, bringing home his lack of concern.
I looked at his phone on the armrest console. I wondered what other kinds of photos were stored on it. What dark secrets was this man harboring?
Before coming on this trip, I had googled him but found very little. His father had directed a few films in Hollywood in the 1980s. Nothing notable. Slasher movies, mostly. Straight-to-video fare, all of them. But Matt? Nothing.
“You grew up in LA?” I asked.
“Do me a favor,” he said, “and charge my phone. The charger is already plugged in.” I plugged the charger’s cord into his phone. I waited for an answer to my question, but Matt offered nothing.
“What’s the luggage situation look like?”
“It’s waiting for me at the airport.”
“Hunh,” he said. “I guess you didn’t need a new shirt or underwear after all.” He looked at me. “You owe me. Clothes don’t grow on trees.” When he looked back at the road, he swerved, momentarily losing control of the car.
“Jesus!” he yelled. “I thought that goddamned sheep was closer to the road than it was.”
“You want me to drive?” I asked.
“Fuck off.” After a few minutes of silence, he said, “We’re going to a bluff to celebrate.”
“What are we celebrating?”
“Knut gave me the okay to let you in, despite your stupid idea.”
“Into what?”
“The company. You’re one of us now!”
We hadn’t talked about salary or logistics. I wasn’t even sure what he was talking about. What were my duties? Was I supposed to move to Norway?
“Oh. Cool,” I said.
“That’s all the excitement you can muster? Oh. Cool?”
“I mean . . . what are the details? What’s the salary? What are my duties?”
“Don’t worry about any of that. We’ll take care of you. Do I look like I’m hurting? The answer is no, I’m not hurting.”
“All right then,” I said with all the conviction I could fake.
“All right then!” Matt said and smiled. “You’re my ride or die, bro! Let’s fucking do this!”
*
We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag.
Below: the Norwegian Sea.
From my research, the Greenland shark populated the sea below, living for as long as five-hundred years, which meant there were sharks in these very waters right now that were already over three-hundred-years old when Edgar Allan Poe wrote his story about Lofoten, a place about which he had only dreamed.
Reindeer, on the other hand, lived to be only fifteen-years old—a curiously short lifespan for an animal its size, and yet fifteen was five years longer than my daughter, Annie, had lived.
Matt pulled a bottle of Bivorst Vodka from the backpack he’d brought along.
“This bottle? It set me back $500. It’s distilled at the foot of the Lyngen Alps, east of Tromsø, just north of here.”
I nodded. I didn’t care.
He pulled two glasses from the backpack. He opened the bottle and poured two healthy swigs.
“Welcome to the family!” he said. “Skål!”
“Skål!” I said.
We clinked glasses and downed our shots.
“Smooth, isn’t it?” Matt asked.
It was vodka. How smooth could it possibly be?
“Mmmmmm,” I said, noncommittally.
“Another?”
“Nah, I’m good.”
“Come on!”
“Okay. One more.”
We each did one more shot.
Matt said, “Instead of getting you a different shirt, I should have gotten an identical one for myself. That way, we’d both look like idiots.”
“You don’t need a shirt for that.”
“Funny guy,” Matt said and laughed, thinking I was joking. He motioned with his head at the view. “Look at this. If there’s a more beautiful place on the planet, I don’t know it.”
I couldn’t disagree. Norway was beautiful, and where we were standing, atop a bluff, made me feel like I was in a movie about my life. The serendipitous way I had ended up here, coupled with an unbearable sense of loss, gave the moment a kind of hyper-clarity that I had only previously experienced after taking psilocybin in college. On mushrooms, everything felt simultaneously real and not real at all, and I had wanted nothing more than to remain in that in-between space forever.
“Your screenplay,” Matt said.
I said nothing.
“I gave it to my son to read.”
“You have a son?”
“He’s thirteen. From my first marriage. Lives in Kansas. I emailed it to him.”
“Oh.” And then: “Kansas?”
“I trust his judgment fully. He read it, and . . .”
“Yeah?”
“He hated the girl in it.”
“Your son,” I said, “who’s thirteen and living in Kansas. He hated the girl in it.”
“He thought she was, I don’t know, kind of a stuck-up little bitch. Not his words . . . mine.”
I felt a vein in my neck begin to throb. Matt shrugged.
“He said, and I quote, ‘Why should I care about this stupid movie?’”
“You told me that your girlfriend cried when she read it.”
“She has issues. I don’t want to get into them.”
“But your son?”
“My son’s a smart kid. He’s in AP Biology or something. He has a lot of friends. He let them read it, too. They came back with the same opinion.” Matt took a deep breath before saying what he’d been putting off saying since I had arrived.
“Look,” he said. “I think we need to get rid of the girl. Or make her eighteen. Teenage boys . . . you need to get their hormones pumping. They have a twisted fantasy life. What they don’t want is to watch a two-hour movie about a fucking dying reindeer and a ten-year-old girl. Sorry, buddy.”
I stared past him, into the Norwegian Sea. There was no way he would survive a fall from the bluff.
“Hey. You okay there?” he asked.
I wanted to push him off the bluff so bad, I wanted to watch his head bust open and spray across the stones below—it would be so easy to make him lose his balance—but the fact that I hadn’t yet pushed him meant that I still had impulse control, which meant, in turn, that Matt wouldn’t die today—at least not by my hands.
“Yeah, no, I’m good,” I said. “Just spaced out for a minute.”
“I thought I lost you, my dude.” He laughed.
“Nah, I’m fine. It’s been a long, few days.”
“You’re telling me?”
“So, if I’m hearing what you’re saying,” I said, “you want me to make my daughter fuckable.”
“Your daughter?”
“No,” I said, unaware of what I had said until it was repeated back to me. I was so tired. So tired. “No, not my daughter. The girl in the movie.”
“When you put it that way, it sounds crass. But . . . yeah. Pretty much.”
“And older.”
“Definitely older. There’s no reason she can’t be.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.
His expression quickly morphed from worried to happy. He had the emotional range of a child. I imagined him as a boy shadowing his father on the set of low-budget splatter movie: frightened one second, laughing the next.
“Really? This is awesome news, man. Knut was worried you’d get pissed. But I told him you’re good people.” Matt patted my shoulder. “C’mon. You’re driving. I’m drinking.”
“Naturally,” I said and followed him down the rocky bluff and back to the car.
*
My daughter, Annie, had died of a bacterial infection one week after she’d fallen ill from it. I wanted answers. Each time doctors greeted me with platitudes or, worse, indifference, I drilled down, demanding something more meaningful, more substantive. I treated her death like a homicide investigation and not what it was: a fluke of nature. People died unexpectedly every day, but I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that my daughter was one of them. To no one’s surprise, I drove away my wife, Tanya, by not letting up. It wasn’t until Tanya left me and I lost pretty much everything that I finally let it go—as much as one can let go of a recurring nightmare. It was as though my pursuit had been the only way I knew how to punish myself, and after it had taken its toll on me, after there was nothing left to squeeze out of me except my last breath, I said, Okay, enough.
As I pulled up in front of our cabin, the skier and the pregnant woman also pulled up. They had two kids. Girls. I squinted. I powered down the dust-coated window for a better look. I could see now that they were the same girls that Matt had been taking photos of. Drunk, Matt had fallen sound asleep on the drive, oblivious now to our arrival home. When the girls looked over at our car, I could tell that they recognized us. I reached back down to power up the window but pulled on the wrong control switch. I could hear a grinding noise, but nothing was moving. The family headed into their cabin but not before the two girls had taken one last appraising look, confirming their suspicions.
“Fuck,” I said.
Matt’s phone was in his lap, the screen still glowing. I picked it up and opened the app for his photos.
There were dozens of photos of the two girls as they searched the car’s trunk, but the photos were not, as I had expected, lurid. There was something eerie and beautiful about them, the way the sun had created a starburst, almost entirely obscuring both girls. You had to squint to see them. One of the sheep stood off to the side, on the incline, higher than the car. It looked like it was floating. Matt’s own reflection was in the photo as an omniscient ghost. The photos weren’t anything like what I had expected. In fact, they looked like a series of photos taken from inside somebody’s dream—or maybe from the afterlife. I had to stop looking—I was starting to get choked up.
When I tossed the phone back onto his lap, Matt woke up.
“What?” he said. “What’s happening?”
“We’re home. The phone slipped out of your hand.”
“Christ. I drank at least a hundred dollars’ worth of vodka,” he said.
“At least a hundred,” I said. “You ready to go inside?”
He nodded. He opened the car door and vomited.
“Oh wow,” he said and vomited again.
“Come on, big boy. Let’s get you near a toilet.”
I led Matt to the bathroom and left him in a shapeless heap against the wall. He looked like a man whose bones had all been removed. Having been cooped up inside a small, enclosed space for hours with someone drinking vodka had made me queasy, so I went back outside for fresh air. I had no idea what time it was. I wasn’t even sure if it was a.m. or p.m. It was so odd to be in a place that was so different from where I was from. What was it like to live among five-hundred-year-old sharks? What was it like to smell cod fish every day? What was it like to grow up in a place where the sun remains above the horizon for seventy-five consecutive days and nights?
The skier opened his cabin door, and I nodded at him. He didn’t return the nod. Instead, he crossed the dirt road and walked right up to me.
“You took photos of my girls?”
“What? No, no,” I said.
“They said you were watching them. Taking photos. Why are you following us? Who are you?”
I frowned and shook my head, trying to inhabit the mind of someone who didn’t know anything.
“Are you calling them liars? My girls?”
“Absolutely not, but . . . I didn’t even know you had girls until a few minutes ago when you got home from the beach.”
He cocked his head, thinking.
Oh shit, I thought.
“How did you know we were at the beach?” He asked calmly, but his eyes were unblinking and his hands clenched into fists.
“Look,” I said, but before I could say anything else, he reached up and grabbed my throat. He pushed his thumbs into my windpipe. I tried reaching up to take hold of his arms, but he was strong and slammed me backwards against the cabin door. His two thumbs were crushing my windpipe, making it impossible for me to breathe. I’m going to die, I thought. He slammed the back of my head against the door several times. In some distant part of my consciousness, I held out hope that Matt would hear the noise and come outside to save me, but I also knew that this wasn’t going to happen, that I was alone. I had reached a point in my life where I could no longer rely on anyone for help.
The skier’s wife stepped outside. “Stop! You’re killing him!” she yelled.
She had a British accent. I wasn’t sure why this comforted me, but it did. Her voice sounded like the voice inside the car, the confident voice that pleasantly led us everywhere we wanted to go. When the skier loosened his grip on my neck, I reached up to my throat and fell to my knees. I coughed and, as I tried breathing in, wheezed. I pitched forward until my face hit the ground. I was having difficulty sucking air into my lungs. From my new position, I watched the blond skier retreat, returning to his wife, to his family. I could smell the dirt. I thought of my wife in the cemetery. What minerals, I wondered, were found in the soil of fallen confederate soldiers and stillborn babies and beloved pets? What was it that she had craved so much? What did death taste like?
After what felt like an hour, I forced myself up and brushed off my pants, and then I went inside the cabin.
The next morning, Matt came downstairs and found me sitting at the kitchen table. I hadn’t slept. I had changed back into the shirt I had worn on the flight here.
“What the fuck happened to you?” he asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
“Fair enough.” And that was all he needed to hear to let it go. Never mind that my neck was bruised or that my eyes were swollen.
“Hey, want to go get your suitcase?”
I nodded.
I parted the curtains and looked out the window. The skier’s car was gone.
“Okay, but we need to leave right now,” I said.
“Give me a minute. I need coffee first.”
“No,” I said. “Right. Now.”
“Dude. You’re scaring me.” Matt stared at me for a good minute before adding, “Why’d you let me drink so much?”
“Me? Let you? I’m not your keeper. I’m no one’s keeper. Not anymore. Can we go now?”
We said nothing on the way to the airport, but when I stepped out of the car, I leaned inside and said, “I’m heading back home. I already booked a flight.”
“Son of a bitch. I knew it!” Matt said. “I told Knut you weren’t serious about any of this. I told him you were a goddamned flake. Just like all the others.”
“I thought you were the one convincing Knut to let me into the company. And like the others? Who else have you flown out here?”
Matt said, “What difference does it make now?”
I knew if I walked away I would likely never get out of debt and I could kiss my Thailand retirement plan goodbye. I thought of the Poe story: For some minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak.
I sighed and said, “Listen. The last time my wife and I went on a vacation, we drove through Colorado at night. She drove. I fell asleep. Later that night, in a motel in Gunnison, she said, ‘I’m so unhappy, I almost drove us off the top of the mountain pass.’”
Matt shrugged. “So?”
“So. If she hadn’t told me, I’d never have known how close I came to dying. And now I think about it every day.” I considered telling him how close I came to pushing him off the bluff, but I couldn’t do to him what my wife had done to me. You have to love someone to admit to them that you almost killed them.
Matt stared at me. His face was a blank slate. I shut the car door. As I made my way to the airport entrance, I looked back, expecting to see Matt watching me, maybe thinking that I’d change my mind, but he had already driven away.
The airport was the smallest I’d ever seen—a waiting room, essentially, with a garage attached to it. The garage door was open, and I saw my suitcase inside. No one was guarding it, so I walked into the garage and approached what was mine.
Inside the suitcase were flannel shirts, thermal underwear, a winter coat, and a screenplay. The screenplay was about a beloved reindeer that sacrificed its life so a young girl could live forever. It was one-hundred-and-three pages long. Two brass fasteners held it together. The paper was acid-free and from a ream of five hundred sheets. In the last scene, seven months after the reindeer’s Christmas Day demise, the girl looks out her bedroom window and thinks she sees the reindeer, but it’s only the moving shadows of tree branches as the moon pours yellow light over the snow blanketing the family cemetery.
I unzipped a side pocket, removed my blood pressure medicine, and then headed for the waiting area, leaving the suitcase behind. I sat in a hard plastic chair and sighed, realizing that I had gotten the last scene all wrong. There was no snow. The trees I had imagined didn’t exist here. The scene took place in July, so it would still be light outside, not dark. There would be no moon. There would be no shadows from the moon. As for the ten-year-old girl? Nothing had saved her. She wouldn’t live forever. In fact, her story was already over before the movie even began.