Monika Fagerholm: The Glitter Scene

1967, the Summer of Love, a new hour of creation, we are the Woodstock Nation . And so it was Jimi Hendrix who was playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He played it like a scream, just the guitar, no words. Without wrath, without the slightest hint of being bothered or as if he wanted to beg for some kind of sympathy. He played the national anthem like it had never been played before, so that there was room for all meanings, nuances.

And DeeDee on a bench in the park, 1967, 1969? It was the summer of hate in any case, the summer of hate, and for me it wasn’t just about going and watching Jefferson Airplane in Central Park and enjoying LSD. It was about sitting on a bench in the park, drinking wine and doing double hits of heroin.

And I wondered if there was some systematic plan somewhere with the purpose of fucking up people in this country, deliberately letting all of the drugs in the country fuck up idiots like me whom they saw as a burden. Everyone knew that the CIA was on the opium smugglers’ side so that the countries they ruled over wouldn’t be sold to Communist China and become red. And because it was so profitable, drugs are money, and where did all of those orange methadone crackers come from? Was it just part of the deal?

IN ANY CASE IT IS DAMNED DISCOURAGING BEING SIXTEEN YEARS OLD SITTING ON A PARK BENCH KNOWING THAT NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING IS GOING TO CHANGE.

THE CHILD, FLUORESCENT . Johanna. In the room of dreams, time, history. Pins The Child, fluorescent on the wall. The woman on the meadow with the child in her arms, a black-and-white photo, in a thunderstorm, lightning. The child of light/in the light.

An explosion, transcendence.

She is the Child, fluorescent.

Johanna in the room, looks out the window.

The meadow, which reveals itself on the other side of the windowpane in the light of the Winter Garden, dusk is now falling. A corner of the woods farther away, Tobias’s greenhouse on the side of the road, like a quivering yellow spot in the rain.

Lille . Breathes on the windowpane, an island of mist spreads over the glass, erasing the view. Breathes over and over again, so that the island becomes very large and then writes LILLE in the mist in large, clear letters with her index finger.

Several times over, faster and faster, until the name is obliterated and the window is clear and transparent again.

The road, on the side, the Piss Factory.

From The Return of the Marsh Queen, Chapter 1. Where did the music start?

Patti and the factory, the Piss Factory . Somewhere, where there really was not anything, not the friendly middle-class family you grew up in. But poverty, the factory, ugly, fat ladies in the factory. During your lunch break you snuck out to the bookstore to buy your Rimbaud, and then you sat by the conveyor belt and tried to concentrate, your Rimbaud in your head: Rimbaud who was supposed to save your life but you could not know that yet. You thought you were stuck there, forever, in the factory.

The road is about thirty feet from the house where Johanna lives: one direction leading toward the Second Cape, the Winter Garden, and the main country road and the town center and the school in the other. The road: a shiny, dark line cutting through the deserted landscape.

See the road as a line—

She is Johanna, the child in the light/the child of light. She is the Child, fluorescent.

The house where they live, she and her aunt Solveig. At the foot of the hill on the First Cape, just the two of them. Earlier, quite often, there was also a small cousin, Robin, who had a mother, Allison, who worked on boats and was gone a lot. Robin liked being with Solveig and Johanna—especially Johanna, in Johanna’s room. They built the world’s largest race car track, yellow plastic rails joined together across the entire room, a thousand loops. Released small cars on the track, they traveled quickly, too quickly, flying out. But then Allison and Robin moved to another city and Robin stopped coming altogether. Stopped working on the boats, making beauty trips , as people said about her in Torpesonish. “And how are the storks in Portugal doing?” she would ask Johanna, happily ruffling her hair. Then Solveig would get so angry at her there would almost be a fight.

Allison was Torpe’s sister, the Torpe Solveig once was married to—back then they were living on the Torpesonish homestead at the Outer Marsh. Torpe is in Germany now, remarried, works on different construction sites there. Solveig had a cleaning business once, but now and for a long time already she has been working in real estate. Here, in the District. Has almost always been here. And in this place, not in this house, but in another one. It was called the cousin’s house, it burned down, the outbuildings and the barn were torn down and Solveig built this instead.

But otherwise, been there done that , you do not talk to Solveig about the past. She has closed that chapter, a lot of troubles. Almost the only thing Solveig wants to remember from her childhood and that she talks about sometimes is how when she was little and went to the swimming school at the Second Cape, she saved another little girl, a classmate in the swimming school named Susette Packlén, from drowning. She, Solveig, Sister Blue, the teacher’s assistant in Tobias’s swimming school; together with her twin sister Rita who was Sister Red. They were called that because of the color of their swimsuits, otherwise it was almost impossible to tell them apart, they looked so much alike. Solveig’s twin sister, Rita. Solveig has closed that chapter too. And the Winter Garden, Rita’s Winter Garden. Ritsch . Solveig has closed the curtains in the kitchen. To Solveig the Winter Garden does not exist.

But Tobias exists. As said, he once was the teacher at the swimming school. Yes, the same Tobias who has the greenhouse on the side of the road a little ways away from the house. Johanna likes Tobias, likes going to the greenhouse and spending time with him there.

There used to be another cousin in the house, Irene, Solveig’s girl. Much older, already grown up. The fall before the Winter Garden opened on the Second Cape, New Year’s Eve 1999, Irene moved away from home to start studying in another town to be a nurse. Later she went to Norway, works at an EMT station high up in the mountains. Beautiful cards, which Solveig hangs on the refrigerator, come from there, from Norway. Beautiful landscapes, restful. Reminiscent of how Irene is, or was, when she was still living in the house.