Nathan Hill - The Nix

In the story of the blind men and the elephant, what’s usually ignored is the fact that each man’s description was correct. What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife, the mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn’t that they were blind — it’s that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp.

For Faye, the larger truth, the thing that holds up every important episode in her life like a beam holding up a house is this: Faye is the one who flees. The one who panics and escapes, who fled Iowa to avoid disgrace, who will flee from Chicago and into marriage, who will flee her family and who will eventually flee the country. And the more she believes she only has one true self, the more she flees to find it. She’s like someone trapped in quicksand whose efforts to escape only make her drown faster.

Will she ever understand this? Who knows. Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.

These thoughts are far away from her now. Now everything is simple: She is a body in congress with another body. And his body is warm, and pressing all over into hers, and the taste of his skin is like salt and ammonia. At dawn she will begin using her head again, but for now it is this simple — as simple as taste. She is a body perceiving the world, and all her senses are filled.

THE ONLY OTHER PERSON in the church who knows what they are doing is Allen Ginsberg, who is sitting cross-legged, leaning against a wall and smiling. He could see them duck behind the altar, could see their candlelit shadows, could hear the familiar jangle of a belt undone. This makes him happy, these kids enjoying their exhausted and soiled flesh. Good for them. It reminds him of that sunflower poem he wrote so long ago — what is it, ten years? Fifteen? No matter. We’re not our skin of grime, he had written, we’re golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset…

Yes, he thinks. And as he closes his eyes and lets sleep come, he feels satisfied and delighted.

For he knows he was right.

ONCE AGAIN, Faye had lied to her son.

Once again, there was something she felt too ashamed to tell him. In Chicago, at the airport, he had asked where she planned to go, and she lied to him. She said she didn’t know, that she’d figure it out in London. But in fact she knew exactly where she was going: as soon as she discovered she’d be traveling alone, she resolved to come here, to Hammerfest, Norway. Her father’s hometown.

The way her father had described it, the family’s home in Hammerfest was a resplendent thing: on the edge of town, a wide three-story wooden house with a view out to the ocean, a long pier where the family could fish for an afternoon and come away with a bucketful of arctic char, a field in front that waved golden with barley through the summer, a small pen for the animals — a few goats, sheep, a horse — the whole spread marked by a line of beautiful blue-green spruces that caught so much snow in winter that the snow sometimes fell off them in great loud thwumps. The house was repainted every spring a bright salmon-red after the winter elements dulled the previous year’s coat. Faye remembers sitting at her father’s feet listening to this and fully internalizing this vision of her family’s ancestry and later adding to it in her mind, putting a jagged mountain range in the background, covering the beaches with the volcanic black sand she saw once in National Geographic —whatever other beautiful thing she encountered in some movie or magazine, any place that seemed to be rural and idyllic and foreign, they all became this place, the home in Hammerfest. It drew together all her fantasies by slow childhood accretion. It became the depository for all the best things, and eventually her image of it was equal parts Nordic and French countryside and Tuscan fields and that great scene in The Sound of Music of singing and spinning in the grassy Bavarian hills.

The real Hammerfest, Faye discovers, does not look like this at all. After a quick flight from England to Oslo, and another flight in a de Havilland that seemed too big for its propellers to keep up, she lands in Hammerfest to find a rocky, hardscrabble place devoid of any growing thing except the hardiest and prickliest of shrubs and thicket. A place that whistles with the wind of the arctic circle, a wind that carries on it a sweet petrochemical vapor. For this is an oil town. A gas town. Fishing boats are dwarfed by massive orange container ships taking liquid natural gas and crude oil to refineries that dot the coastline, to round white storage and distillation tanks that look, from the air, like mushrooms sprouting from some dead thing. Offshore platforms drilling reservoired gas are visible from town. No fields of gently swaying barley but rather empty lots with discarded equipment rusted and petrolic. Rocky hills, craggy and covered with lichen. No beaches but rather a bouldered and inaccessible cliff side that looks like the aftermath of an accident involving dynamite. The houses painted brightly in yellows and oranges are more a bulwark against the dark winter than evidence of actual cheer. How could this be the beautiful place she imagined? It seems so foreign.

She had thought she’d find somebody at the tourist office who could help her, but when she said she was looking for the Andresen farm they looked at her like she was out of her mind. No Andresen farm, they said. No farms at all, they said. So she described the house and they said that house wouldn’t exist anymore. The Germans would have destroyed it in the war. They destroyed that specific house? They destroyed every house. Faye was given a pamphlet for the Museum of Reconstruction. She said she was looking for a place with a fair bit of land and maybe some spruce trees and a house that faced the water. Might they know where she could find a place like that? They said that could describe a lot of places and told her to walk around. Walk around? Yes, it’s not a big city. So that’s what she’s doing. Faye walks Hammerfest’s perimeter looking for something that matches her father’s description, a farm at the edge of town with a view of the water. She passes flimsy square apartment buildings that seem huddled together for warmth. No fields whatsoever, no farms. She moves out farther, where the terrain is stony, weedy, the only plants able to survive are those that root into the rock itself, hard crunchy grasses that go dormant during the two months of darkness that come during winters above the arctic circle. Faye feels like a fool. She’s been walking for hours. She had actually thought she knew what to expect here, she had actually believed in her own fantasy. All these years and still she’s making the old mistakes. She finds a path of trampled-down grass that leads over a nearby ridge and she follows it, lost in dismal thought, saying out loud at roughly every second step, “Stupid. Stupid.” For that’s what she is, stupid, and every stupid decision she’s ever made has led her here, to this stupid place, alone on a chalk-dusty path at the godforsaken end of the world.