Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (16 page)

In the corner, two employees were putting the finishing touches on the room. A woman was running a clothing iron over the edges of an ice bench, smoothing the surface. The iron was plugged into a long extension cord.

“After all that time I spent ironing your dress, I wish you wouldn’t wear your seat belt,” my mother once said to me. I had been on my way to a school formal.

Henrik stepped back and looked down. A little girl had run into his legs and was now sitting on the snow-covered ground, staring up at us.

Her parents approached, and the mother said something to Henrik.

Henrik translated for me: “New boots.”

The man was from the West Indies, a glassblower. He and his wife had a store down the road from the hotel, and invited us to stop by. They and other local artists constructed the rooms of the hotel by inflating enormous parachute balloons and packing the outsides of the balloons with snow. When each room had its shape, they deflated the balloons. “Like papier-mâché,” said the woman.

We were gathered around the girl as though she were a fire. The woman picked up her daughter—she had bright blue eyes and cornrowed hair. Eva.

“You watch out, you two,” the mother said. “This baby has inspired more babies than you could imagine.”

I looked at Henrik and saw that he was about to speak, to correct her. But when he opened his mouth, he said, “I can see why.” He stroked the side of Eva’s face with the back of his gloved hand.

Henrik asked the couple if they knew a woman named Olivia, who worked at the hotel. They looked at each other and shook their heads no.

My mother wasn’t the kind of person you forgot once you had met her. “Everyone loves your mother until they stop,” Dad

once said. It was one of the few times I saw him drunk. My mother had been making him martinis all night.

I now had little to say to the couple. There were other people to ask.

“Well, it was nice talking to you,” I said, and backed away. “That was rude,” Henrik said, after he excused himself

from their conversation and caught up with me.

“I have no time to be nice,” I said. “I don’t think you understand.”

“Relax,” he said. “Please, relax.” “I can’t,” I said.

“It’s time for dinner anyway,” Henrik said. “Come. She might be a cook. It is possible.”

“No, it’s not possible.” Dad had done all the cooking.

The restaurant was in the same building as reception. Henrik and I were seated at a small table near a window and a heater. We unzipped and removed the tops of our snowsuits, the sleeves hanging by our feet like tired skins. A red ornament in the shape of a snowflake dangled in front of the window. Henrik spun it.

Our waitress was not my mother. The chef was a man. “She probably doesn’t work here anymore,” I said to Henrik. “She never stayed in one place for very long anyway. I’m such a fool.”

Henrik did not argue.

After dinner, we had two options: retire to our ice beds or return to the bar.

The bar crowd had thinned, and conversations between strangers were expected, encouraged by drink. Three Dutch-men were sticking their tongues to the ice bar while their friend took a picture.

Two of the female bartenders—one with a fake tan and the other looking sickly in comparison—bounded onstage. “We are singing songs we hope you like!” said one. The first song they sang was “Mamma Mia.” They had choreographed their dances, but it was clear by the next song, “Mustang Sally,” that they only had a limited number of moves.

“Are they on a horse or a motorcycle?” I asked Henrik. “I think they’re in a car,” he said. “A Mustang.”

The girl in the passenger seat was miming rolling down her window. The woman in the driver’s seat was cupping her breasts. “Shouldn’t she be keeping her hands on the wheel?” I asked.

I was impatient for the night to be over, for it to be morning, so we could leave.

“Look at my glass,” Henrik said. He was on his third refill. On the side, where his lips had warmed it, the glass was as thin as paper. The women, finished with their set, circled around, collecting melting glasses in a bucket.

“Do I get a new one for free?” Henrik asked the woman who had been driving the Mustang.

She shook her head no.

“I’ll get you another one,” I offered. The woman’s braids, her tan, depressed me.

At the bar, I ordered a drink for Henrik. “Go light on the vodka,” I instructed the bartender, who looked nineteen. I didn’t want to spend the night in an ice room with a drunken man.

When I returned to Henrik, he stared at me.� “I think I found her,” he said.�

“What?” I turned to look behind me.� “I can’t be sure, but . . .”�

“I don’t care. Just tell me.”�

“The singing woman knows Olivia.”�

I watched his lips after they had stopped moving, to see if I �

had misunderstood. “What? How?”

“She says a woman named Olivia runs the wilderness trips.” “Wilderness trips,” I repeated, trying to make sense of the

words.

“We can sign up tomorrow morning.”

I was still holding his drink. I extended my hand and gave it to him. “Henrik,” I said, and then said nothing.

In the locker room, we prepared for bed. Henrik opened the locker, handed me my clothes. I couldn’t speak. I tried to pay attention as the troll woman cautioned us to not dress too warmly. Extra layers could make you sweat in the night, then

freeze, she explained. The troll handed us each a cotton sheet to wrap around our bodies. I didn’t understand why, but I took one.

Henrik and I sprinted through the hotel in our long underwear and boots.
Why didn’t anyone tell me how bad those culottes looked on me?
Our room was in the back, the farthest from the entrance. I parted the curtain and ducked through the arched doorway. A large block of ice, covered with reindeer skin, stood in the middle of the room. Lights ran around the edges of the bed, illuminating it, like a game show.

I laid out my sleeping bag on the right side of the bed— with Pankaj, I slept on the left. I secured my hat and tightened its ties around my chin. I clicked off the light switch and pulled the hood of the sleeping bag up over my head.

“Are you awake?” I said to Henrik. He didn’t answer.

“Are you awake?” I said again, a little louder, to wake him if he was on the cusp.

Nothing.

Inside my sleeping bag, I took off my gloves and placed my fingers on my stomach. I could feel something deeper than hunger.

I woke up at five in the morning. I had to pee. I slipped out of my sleeping bag and into my boots and sprinted through the

corridors of the hotel. Beneath my feet, the ice sounded like twigs snapping. The cold speared at my shins.

I made my way to the bathroom—it was in the main building—and then to the shower room. I was alone. I undressed, turned on all five shower heads, sat on the floor, and closed my eyes. I turned toward one of the streams of water and felt it thrum against my forehead.

The truth about my relationship with Pankaj: twice, when he told me he loved me, I pretended to be asleep.

I was waiting outside the door to the activity center when it opened at eight a.m. I told an employee named Helga I was curious about the wilderness trip.

“Yes, you take snowmobile out to cabin and there you have huskies and dinner and warm fire. And tomorrow you take snowmobile back.”

“Who’s at the cabin?”�

“The woman who takes care of the cabin.”� “What’s her name?” I asked.�

“Liv is her name, I think.”� “Olivia?”�

“Yes, Livia.”�

I said I’d like to sign up for the trip, that night.�

Helga waited for her computer to boot up. She squinted at �

the screen. “There are two couples going. Swedish it looks like. And Japanese. How many for you?”

“There are two of us.”

She quoted me a price in kroner. I did the math. Fifteen hundred dollars.

“Only one then,” I said.

Point Zer
o
�
‌

I returned to the ice room. Henrik was sitting up in his sleeping bag, drinking something red.

“Lingonberry juice,” he said. His hat was perched sideways on his head, making him look like a child in need of care. “A woman came this morning, carrying a tray. Where were you?”

“I couldn’t sleep after five. I got up, took a shower, had breakfast, asked about the wilderness trip.” I told him the cost, and he swore in Sami. “That’s ridiculous,” he said.

“I’ll stay at my friend’s house in Alta,” he offered. “You’ll be okay?”

I told him I would be fine from here on out. “What’s
herehonhout
?”

“From now until the future.”

“And when we get to the future you will fall apart?”

The trip didn’t leave until late that afternoon. We decided to spend the day at the Alta Dam. Henrik made a call and discovered we needed a tour guide, someone who had access to the gates and to the tunnel that led to the dam itself.

Our guide, Günter, was German. We met him at a gas station—the only clear landmark he could think of—and stepped out of the car to introduce ourselves. Günter moved to Alta when his Norwegian girlfriend got a job at the local museum. I stared at the underside of his nose as he spoke. It was a large nose, and he was tall and swayed backward when standing.

Henrik moved to the backseat of the car; Günter ducked as he got into the passenger seat, and directed me to the dam. We drove past an abandoned checkpoint known as Point Zero. “This is where they began building the road to the dam,” Günter said. “Before this, there was no road out there. Here at Point Zero is where all the Sami would protest, yes?” he said, looking at Henrik. “Where they would chain themselves together. There were a thousand of them. They had to ship in policemen from the south. There are some funniest stories from that time actually. For example, there was a bus company the policemen would hire to take the demonstrants from Point Zero back to Alta, but then the company would pick up more demonstrants in Alta and bring them back to the protest. They were being paid both ways, yes?”

“It’s
demonstrators
,” I said. “Not
demonstrants
.”

Günter paused, stared at me, and continued. He told us the controversy over the dam divided many families. But there were also stories of policemen and protesters falling in love. They were still married and lived in Alta, he said.

We approached another bridge. “This is a famous bridge,” Günter continued, “because some of the Sami protesters tried

to blow it up. But they didn’t know what they were doing, so one of the men blew off his arm. He had to leave Norway for many years afterwards. It is said that he is the only terrorist in Norwegian history.”

“Not the only one,” Henrik said quietly. “Just more famous.” I turned to look at him briefly over my shoulder.

“A few days after that my cousin tried a similar interven-tion. But he didn’t even get to the bridge. He lost his hand and an eye.”

“Really?” I said. “Isak’s brother?”

“No, another cousin. Older. Anna Kristine’s son.”

“Where is he now?” Karin had told me that he wasn’t right in the head, and I had assumed he lived in a home, like Jeremy.

“He’s been at an insane asylum in Tromsø for years.” I glanced at Henrik in the rearview mirror.

“Anna Kristine says she knew the day he was born that something wasn’t right with him,” Henrik said, averting his eyes from mine. He stared out the window, peering down as we crossed the bridge.

We approached a small mountain with a gate at its base. Günter punched in a code, and the gate unlocked and lifted. We drove inside the tunnel and registered our names and nationalities. “In case something happens they’ll know how many people to search for,” Günter explained. I studied the registration book;

we were the first visitors to the dam in over a week. We parked the car. The tunnel had a paved road, but the walls looked like those of a cave. Water dripped and echoed.

We walked with flashlights toward a door.
OBSERVATION DECK THIS WAY
, read a sign. Günter pushed on the door, but it didn’t open. He tried shouldering it. “Frozen,” he said.

“I have some matches,” Henrik offered. He lit a match, and the breeze blew it out. He tried again. He held the lit match close to the lock on the door, and the snow started to melt. Three more matches, and the door could be opened.

Wind churned into the tunnel. We stepped outside, pulling up our hoods. Günter propped the door open with his scarf, to ensure we wouldn’t get locked out. We walked to the center of the observation deck. The dam was three hundred feet wide, and the deck spanned the length of it. Water channeled through the pipes beneath us—the sounds of an untuned organ.

I stared out into the distance, at the easy turns the river took.

What kind of woman leaves her family to live above the Arctic Circle?

Then again:
What kind of woman pretends to be asleep when her fiancé tells her he loves her?

We dropped Günter off at the gas station, and Henrik drove us back to the hotel. I said good-bye to him and made a plan to meet him in the same place the next morning.

“Good luck,” he said. He looked at me a moment too long. I arrived at the activity center, dressed and packed for the trip,

and was asked to wait for the others from the group to check in. Half an hour passed before a squat man approached me. He was wearing a ski hat with a rainbow-colored pompom on top.

“You go on wilderness adventure?” he asked. I nodded. His name was Olaf, and he would be my guide.

“Clarissa,” I said, and shook his hand. He had hair on his knuckles.

“You are only one,” Olaf said. “The others did not come.”

I had hoped to hide behind them, to observe my mother unnoticed. “What if I change my mind and go tomorrow night?” I asked.

“You lose all money,” he said.

“The woman named Olivia is at the hut?” I asked. “Yes, she is there.”

“And she stays there all night?”