“But, do we still believe that I want to have these episodes?”
“I don’t think people in your situation want either one thing or the other. It is all about loss of control. Or, wanting to lose control.”
He turned and looked at the opaque window. His expression suggested a man allowing magnificent scenery to inspire new lines of thought.
“Why don’t you write, Jane? Why not start writing again?” She saw his rosy ideas about the author’s vocation reflected in his face. “After all, many have felt that writing has a therapeutic effect. And for you, it is also a profession. I see patients at your stage who simply cling to their work and find that it helps them.”
She didn’t have the strength to explain her problem. Once, back in 2003 or perhaps 2004, Jane’s editor had sent her a copy of a travelogue called Stranger on a Train by the British writer Jenny Diski. Because you think alike, it said on the Post-it note that fell out of the Bubble Wrap envelope. In an especially memorable passage, Diski described her last conversation with a dying friend. When Jane reread that passage recently, it had seemed to express the reason why she no longer wrote: The nonsense of language reaching towards the void it was not equipped for, developed as it was by the living for the living, made us laugh.
To make Dr. Rice’s forehead smoother, she told him instead about her traveling plans. It felt as if she had held back from telling him to achieve the maximum effect.
“Now Jane, this is…” Dr. Rice gave the thumbs up, boyishly. He couldn’t help himself. That was how his old hand would still show enthusiasm, and one of the few things in this world that were still beautiful.
“That changes everything,” Dr. Rice said. “It points to what I said earlier about initiative and change. I’m biting my tongue, Jane. Norway! Now, I imagine that’s a chilly country, Jane! Just how cold, I wonder? Come on, tell me, how cold can it get?”
8
SHE IS SHIVERING where she lies, fully clothed, inside the sleeping bag, and watches the world outside the tent. The wind has died down, she notes, but the fog is still there. It covers the ground—and she still can’t avoid evaluating nature in literary images—like a thick rug.
She misses chiding her college students for using that kind of worn-out simile. Correcting them but making them feel valued at the same time, allowing their youthful, hopeful minds to believe that every one of them is a unique individual and their world will be truly different from that of their parents.
A thick rug on the ground? But of course, writing about nature is actually impossible. One never writes about nature but about various cultural perceptions of it. To speak about it at all, just to name its parts, turns nature into something it is not.
She thinks back to all the rebellious young men she has taught over the years—there was at least one in each class. Why did she let herself be provoked by them? After all, they kept writing, these young men, which demonstrated their belief that the human talent for language could capture all the most terrible, most saddening phenomena on Earth. Deep down, they were optimists, not misanthropists. Their texts investigated immorality, breaches of norms, but never reached rock bottom: the place where concepts do not exist.
When you begin to think that your writing is no more than a construction you use to say something about another lot of constructions, and that, meanwhile, the most profound truths of the human condition are forever beyond your reach—then you stop writing. You resign from your post teaching creative writing in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Your farewell address to the Faculty of Arts makes your colleagues look down at their casual shoes and exchange discreetly supportive glances. Afterward, they address you with raised eyebrows and far-too-bright voices: “Thank you, Jane. That was so good.” You have to take on board that the only two people in the audience who have grasped anything of what you said are José Pérez, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, and Art Wilder, who is something in Accounts. Art’s wife tried out tandem parachuting in Niagara Falls in 1992 and died in an accident while Art, who had stayed safely on the ground, was watching. You realized this when Art got up and left in the middle of your address. And José comes up afterward, takes your hand, holds it between both of his, and says, “My god, Jane. I know how you feel. Theoretically.”
Then, you take up genealogy. You travel to Norway.
The first nights in Norway, she stayed in a motel room that reminded her of motel rooms back home, apart from all the wood paneling. Before resigning from her university post, she prepared a final handout for the creative writing students, which included extracts from two Scandinavian novels in translation. It so happened that both pieces contained passages in which the protagonist is lying on his back observing knots in the wooden ceiling panels. It seemed a pleasant, meditative thing to do. Thus art improves on reality.
Still, the motel room provided nice physical containment. An electric radiator next to her bed gave off a faint smell of the past being burned. She had a plastic bag full of provisions. The food was all alien; none of the packaging aroused memories, there were no preferred brands, no favorite chocolate bars. The rental car she had picked up at the airport was parked in front of her door. She had been in touch with the family who, as far as she knew, were some of her closest relatives in Norway, and told them that she would like a couple of days in Oslo to acclimatize. Visit the Opera House, for instance. In the end, all she did was speed through the capital city without really noticing it—or, not so much “through” as “underneath,” inside a gloomy system of tunnels. Once out of the tunnels, she drove on for another half hour before checking in at the motel. After settling in, she started smoking again (her last cigarette had been twelve years ago), drank exceptionally expensive beer, and prepared instant noodles with a small kettle on the dressing table. She found it possible to bear watching TV, even American reality shows that hadn’t been dubbed, and no longer looked out for signs or coded messages in the programs. But she still could not sleep; if she drifted off, it rarely lasted for more than a few minutes at a time.
One morning, her cell phone rang. She staggered in her large Snoopy sweatshirt over to her bag and, before answering, said her name out loud twice to make sure she wouldn’t sound utterly unhinged. The caller was Lars Christian Askeland-Nilsen.
“There you are! Great!” He seemed to be reading his English sentences off a list.
“Do you really think so?”
“Of course.”
It was just that insecurity of hers that made her spend her first days in Norway alone. She had been looking forward to meeting her long-lost relatives but had begun to doubt if the invitation to stay with them was genuinely meant. Perhaps he had simply urged her to visit the country in general? Perhaps she had introduced the idea of staying with them and Lars Christian had simply affirmed it would be all right? Or perhaps he had just come out with one of these weird Norwegian hrump noises, meaning roughly I’m hearing you?
In the background, she picked out what must be Eva’s voice and another that probably belonged to their daughter, Camilla. Lars Christian said that their son, Martin was away at summer camp.
“Wow, summer camp.”
“Yes, he’s growing up so fast.”
“That’s so true,” Jane said, as if she had followed the boy’s growth from the sidelines for years. She wasn’t even sure there was a word that described their relationship.