Out of the wind I fly

High on my bicycle

The sky, tonight, was that kind of blue you find only in Dutch harbors

And the clouds drifting across it said nothing to me, nothing

Harmful or wonderful, nothing

At all, and that was just fine.

 
I spied a cat or a night monster

Crouching by a tire in the darkness

He watched me as I flew by.

I have fashioned a ring out of my own hair. My hair is blonde, but it’s that kind of dirty, dishwater blonde that everyone has and no one cares about. I wear my ring on my fourth finger (if you count your thumb, one-two-three-four) to remind me that some people don’t have any hair. Like people with cancer and bald people. Like my grandpa with his big swimming blue eyes behind his trifocals (trifocals, I mean come on, who on Earth needs trifocals, bifocals are ridiculous enough, I tried them once when I was twelve and man were they a pain). Who else doesn’t have any hair? Let’s see. People in India. I feel bad for them. You know, those skinny brown men with their white loincloths lounging in alleys shaking tin cans at tourists. Those guys. What a terrible existence. I mean, once I didn’t have enough money to buy any lunch and that was horrible. I had to work four straight hours without anything to eat. And when I came home there was nothing in the fridge I mean NOTHING, there were like condiments and lettuce and I mean I am not going to put some ketchup on a piece of lettuce, I doubt even the guy in India would want that for his lunch, and he hasn’t eaten in like twenty years.

Before the red rug that squished between my toes

became the wooden floor, and

Before the mural of the little boy under the apple tree was

smothered by yellow paint,

the silver mobile in my ceiling corner chimed.

A scarlet carpet made the hot room hotter.

Sun burned the dry sidewalk,

licked the brown grass.

The blue Victorian across the street with the doll door and

arched windows lay back

in leaf-enshrouded cool.

I wanted always to live in that blue house.

At night I remember:

the old neighbor lady’s safety light

shone neon into my room,

drawing lines on my wall that

lit up the boy’s painted face, and made the

apple leaves glisten.

But it was hot in my room and

my small hands were sweating.

I touched the window and

my fingerprint stayed.

“A mumble grumble hermpf,”

said the man on the bus.

“Ah, of course,” said I –

“She shouldn’t make such a fuss.”

“Harumph aburgle furgle,”

he continued with ease.

“I quite agree,” said I –

“It’s a terrible disease.”

He smiled with blackened teeth

and a “Hoo!” that stunk of grime.

“Caroomble barble dub.”

I think he wished to know the time.

“It’s three o’clock,” I said with grace

“And my, the day flies fast.”

He turned to gaze upon the street,

Replying: “Funglemashed.”

He looked at me, all-knowingly

from under dirt-caked locks

and tapped his finger on his brow,

orating: “Parflepox.”

I nodded sagely, watching as

he hobbled to his feet,

proclaiming “Garble farble fush!”

and, laughing, found the street.

I waved goodbye to my new friend,

then grinned and shook my head.

He’ll never know I understood

not one word of what was said.

I was seventeen years old and the sun hadn’t set for three weeks. In Harstad, the pavement had just emerged from under Norway’s six-month winter blanket of snow; the air smelled like seawater, and cows, and little yellow flowers. Laura and I were making our way to Sandra’s house for the evening’s festivities – there being very little to do on a Saturday night unless it involved drinking hjemmebrent, home-made alcohol meticulously brewed by Scandinavia’s teenage entrepreneurs. The road from Laura’s farmhouse was wide, and pale gray, and silent except for the sound of our sneakers. Laura was tall and fair, and she intimidated me. It didn’t matter that I had been living with her for the past four months, sharing her bed, her house, her friends, and her life. She was loud, and bold, and angry, and clever, and athletic – everything I sometimes wanted to be but thought I was very far from achieving. As of late, our time together alone was mostly silent.

My introduction to alcohol was entirely Laura’s doing. She facilitated most of my early interactions with liquor; before I went to live in Norway, my drinking experiences had been few and far-between. I had never thrown up before from being drunk. The drinking culture in Norway is no joke; it is all-encompassing and an essential coming-of-age rite in small towns like Harstad. All the little dramas of the universe were played out under the influence of hjemmebrent. Laura made sure I was thoroughly initiated. This party was only one of the many that shaped my understanding of Norwegian youth culture – it presented me with a lopsided lens behind which I could hide, observe, and make excuses for the parts of myself I didn’t like.

Sandra’s house was small but immensely comfortable, like every Norwegian house I’ve ever been in. Wooden floors, pantry filled to the brim with wonderful crumbly things in packets, refrigerator packed with milk from the cow next door, cheese, the occasional delicious øl, sliced salami and liters of fizzy orange soda. A spacious living room with leather couches, potted plants and a discreet television in the corner. Outside was, of course, a small wooden patio with tiny christmas lights strung around the beams. And if you turned your head to the right you looked out onto the fjord – a meeting of sea and mountain. This being June and above the Arctic Circle, the sun would merely sit on the horizon during the time we like to call “night”.

At eight o’clock Laura and I arrived at the door. We were warmly greeted by Sandra, ørjan, and André, already pink-cheeked and merry. They had several other people there, whose names and faces have left my memory. A small group but a jovial one. I liked ‘the trio’, as I termed them, because they were mischievous and funny and dark and I was completely in love with André. He was small, blonde, sarcastic, had rosy cheeks in any weather, deep green eyes, and flirted incessantly with me. He also smoked clove cigarettes and had been in trouble with the law more than once. Any occasion on which I could see him was a good one. Laura was blissfully ignorant of this situation, which was exactly what I wanted. When we stepped inside the house, André immediately presented me with a very suspicious looking bottle of tequila.

It looked like this:

“Imported from Mexico, man!” said Andre gleefully. I adored listening to Andre speak English. It made his lips move in a way that made me want to renounce my U.S. citizenship.

“Andre, this bottle has a skull wearing a sombrero on it and it says ‘Black Death’. Are you sure this is legal?”

“Oh, absolutely. It’s Mexico, baby! I think we need it to be drinken! Eh, Drunked? Fast.” He put the bottle down on the kitchen counter and commanded Sandra to fetch shot glasses, as many as she had. The ones drinking the tequila were pronounced to be myself, Andre, and Orjan. This was my first encounter with tequila, in which I was instructed about the necessity of lemon and salt. Once these items were procured and set up properly on the counter, Andre announced that we were going to say ‘1, 2, 3!’ in as many languages as we collectively knew, taking a shot after the ‘3′. Well, we definitely had English and Norwegian, so that was two. I knew French, making three, Laura knew some German – 4 – and somebody there randomly knew how to count to ten in Mandarin Chinese. five languages, five shots of the Black Death.

The tequila slammed into the back of my throat with the power of five armed Mexican gangsters. I wasn’t blurry at all – on the contrary, I was remarkably sharp-eyed, which was even more dangerous because I usually gauged my level of intoxication by how well I could see. I remember the top of my head feeling hot.

The party had magically migrated downstairs, to Sandra’s basement. I don’t remember what I was doing while everybody moved, I just remember suddenly realizing that I was completely alone. Loud, thumping music resonated from the basement stairs. It suddenly occurred to me that I had to get downstairs, as soon as possible, by the quickest means possible, which was definitely out the front door, around the house and through the little backdoor leading to the basement. It simply didn’t register that I could just walk down the stairs. Maybe I was trying to be funny and surprise them. I put my glass down and jogged out the front door, down the steps, turned left, found the back stairs, went down them, and starting knocking on the door that led to the basement. The music inside was extremely loud, or at least seemed that way; nobody answered the door, of course. I knocked harder – still no answer from inside, only the incessant thumping of the bass. I began pounding with both fists; I was like Ninja Blythe, impervious to pain. With the strength of the Black Death rushing through my veins, I could have pounded until my hands bled, which they fortunately did not, because another dim lightbulb had just appeared over my head: Of course! They were in Sandra’s bedroom, that’s why they couldn’t hear me! And look, there’s Sandra’s bedroom window! Why, I bet if I start knocking on the window, they’ll come unlock the door. That is definitely the thing to do. I stumbled up a couple of steps so I was level with her window, and began banging on it. I paused. No stir from inside. Didn’t they miss me? The blinds were drawn on the window, and I was struck with the paranoid thought that something was going on in Sandra’s bedroom that involved Andre and I wasn’t there. My skewed logic continued unabated. I thought “Wow, I’ve been going about this all wrong! I’ll bet they’ll be able to hear me if I knock with my knee! That will make a loud noise!”

So, I lifted my right, denim-covered leg, and swung my knee in toward the small window. It banged hard against the glass, and I waited for someone inside to open the blinds. Nothing. I tried again, this time with a fuller swing. As my knee connected with the window, something totally beyond imagination occurred. The window broke; a spider’s web of cracks appeared in the pane, the epicenter being a large, round circle of crushed glass. I was horrified. The possibility of this happening was something I had not factored in to my plans. I stared drunkenly at the window for a good ten seconds before coming to the conclusion that I had to get out of there, fast. I had to run. And I absolutely could not tell anyone about this, ever. I would take this with me to the grave. I turned and ran back up the stairs, limping very slightly, turned right, found the front door still open, ran through it and jumped on to the couch just as the party began to emerge from the basement. Andre, seeing me there alone, said “Oh, hey! Where have you been? We were wondering when you were coming down!”

I fiddled with the coasters on the table. “Oh, I’ve just been, you know, hanging out. Up here. Drinking,” I said, raising the empty glass in front of me with a wink.

“Ah good,” said Andre. “That’s what I like to hear.” He swaggered over and nestled next to me on the couch, beer teetering precariously on the edge of the table. He put his arm around me.

I’m assuming we had some sort of conversation, though really I can’t remember what it was or what we talked about. I believe we discussed bisexuality, because this girl Linn  was there, whom I had kissed a couple of parties ago, and you’d think I had killed someone, the way the gossip spread. Harstad was no different from any other small town in that respect. The next thing I remember was the sensation of something warm trickling down my leg, inside my jeans. At this point I had completely forgotten about the window incident. “Weird!” was the only word that floated through my head. I excused myself and went to the bathroom. Sandra’s mother was in the middle of remodeling, so all that was in the downstairs bathroom was a toilet. No sink, no toilet paper, no garbage can, no cupboards. Just a toilet. I went in, sat on the toilet and rolled up my pants. Blood was streaming from my knee, covering the entire front section of my calf. “Holy Jesus!” I said out loud in a drunken panic. I thought I’d been bitten by something, until it all came rushing back in a monsoon of clarity. I rolled my pants back down, stepped out the bathroom door, waved at the people on the couch, dashed upstairs to the other bathroom and locked the door. I frantically searched the cupboards: no Band-Aids, gauze, medical tape, nothing. I grabbed a bunch of toilet paper, rolled it up and applied pressure to my wound (still good in an emergency, even when smashed out of my mind), sitting straight-legged on the bathroom floor. I don’t know how long I sat there; it may have been thirty minutes. I didn’t yet know about how alcohol makes it difficult for blood to clot, which would explain the unusual amount of bleeding. I was in absolutely no pain, by the way.

When I was brave enough to peek under the toilet paper, the bleeding had subsided. I wrapped some toilet paper around my knee a bunch of times, tied it in a knot, flushed the soiled paper, washed my hands, and headed back downstairs to the party. The next day, when Laura asked what on earth had happened to my knee, I told her I couldn’t remember and that I must have fallen down. I never told her, or anybody, what had really happened. I didn’t have any money to give them to fix the window, so I kept it a deep, dark secret. It was only two years later, when I arrived back in Norway to attend Laura’s funeral, that I finally told Sandra what really happened to her window that night.

The white elephant in our car

scratches his huge floppy earlobe:

he fidgets, nestled

in the backseat by my sister.

He is like a walrus in a puddle.

My family discusses noodles.

Great belly shaking, he rattles

the window;

one hulking pale appendage

goes right through the windshield

and the glass shards

rain onto my jeans.

My leg bleeds

as we discuss dust,

elbows

and shopping carts.

His trunk curls around

my brother’s neck

like a fleshy winter scarf

and my father elaborates on

the finer points of

faucet heads,

fingernail clippings,

and the letter ‘y’.

We laugh as we are shoved violently

to the far corners of our vehicle

by the massive weight of the pachyderm.

We can barely breathe

so we whisper

with our last words

that the grass

is a particularly nice shade of green this year.

Hello
what’s your name?
you seem to be a tiny person
whereas I, in my mass
take up large spaces
by moving a single red-lidded toe.

you seem to know a tiny thought

share with me?

how does your earth turn?
you seem to know about dancing
and russian history
and blue morning in the forest
when it glimmering comes
over the redwoods.

can you teach me
how to take up less space
how to make myself
tiny like you

can you teach me
how to make my curls straight
and how to make them
grin
with a tiny word?