Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (3 page)

“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 up 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.

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 was seven when my mother was pregnant with Jeremy. After her water broke, she called a babysitter to spend the night with me. The babysitter, Tara, was seventeen. She wore a low-cut shirt and, as she leaned over to help me with my Peter Pan coloring book, I could see the tattoo of an eagle spanning her braless breasts. In red crayon, she scribbled the word
fag
above Peter Pan’s head.

“When your parents come home, they’ll bring your new brother or sister to meet you,” she said. “Isn’t that exciting?”

I nodded.

But when my parents came home, my new brother, Jeremy, wasn’t with them. My father and mother retreated to their bedroom early. I could hear my mother’s sobs through the door, and Dad’s murmurs of comfort. I tried to enter their bedroom, but the door was locked—it had never been locked before— and I was left standing in the hallway, staring at the repeating reflection of myself in the faceted glass doorknob.

The next day, in the car on the way to the hospital, my mother turned to me. “I almost forgot to tell you,” she said. “Your brother was born with something wrong with him.”

“Will he get better?” I asked.

“No, he’ll be that way his whole life,” she said.

I caught Dad’s eye in the rearview mirror. He stared at me until my mother, who was sitting in the passenger seat, read-justed the mirror so she could see her reflection.

—

I didn’t open the door to Dad’s bedroom. I didn’t want to know if he had made the bed that morning, his last morning.

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 bird feeder 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 bird feeder down, seeds falling on me like wedding rice.

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.

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 a cube began melting, I would throw it in the backseat, 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.

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 her 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.

I had to wait three days for a 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 unsul-lied 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 UN. Its penis was so large they covered it with a shrub.

Now, in the days after Dad’s funeral, 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.

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. I learned this from my mother.

The desk in my Helsinki hotel room had a thin phone book 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 “Valkeapää.” He was listed. I shut the phone book and flossed my teeth. I found the number again 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 anachro-nistic 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. For a ninety-minute film, $720; for two hours, $960. I am forever counting.

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 had only 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 inflection 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.”

Travel is made for liars. Or liars are made by travel.

I had given a different explanation to the Belgian deejay sitting next to me on the flight from New York to Brussels. She grated on my nerves, and I wasn’t sure why. She was too eager, too loud, and I decided I could be mean to her. “Do you think that’s the Great Lakes?” she asked, looking over me and out the window.

Two hours earlier, we had departed eastward out of Kennedy. “Yes,” I said. “I’m quite sure that’s the Great Lakes.”

I turned my head into my pillow and closed my eyes. Minutes later, she tapped me on the shoulder. “You are sleeping?” she asked.

She woke me up a second time as the duty-free cart squeezed through the main cabin. She wanted to make sure I was up, in case there was something I wanted to buy; she rec-ommended a certain face cream.

“It do you wonder,” she said, squinting at my forehead.

After the cart had passed and the deejay had made her pur-chases, she asked why I was going to Finland.