“Know what, Trooper? There’s no point in this. I worry about you, that’s all. You’re so terribly codependent.”
After this I was stuck for a while in no man’s land between the two women, like melted cheese between two slices of toast. I talked to Mother on the phone every now and then, but spent my days with Zola. I woke up next to her and cooked with her and in the evenings after we’d tidied up, I’d tell her stories from work about people who wanted to buy out their neighbors in order to build a sauna in the basement, and colleagues who bought dogs to go jogging with but ended up keeping them in a pet hotel while they themselves developed a high-maintenance cocaine addiction. Zola had no faith in my profession. She believed real estate agencies were the final indicator of the degeneration of modern man, the moral bankruptcy of capitalism, and the distorted image of people who stare into the bathroom mirror to define their lives, but perceive nothing but the tiles. I should quit and elope with her to Ireland.
“Ireland!?” Mother was practically foaming at the mouth.
“Just for a while. Zola’s going to study geology.”
“I’d think the best place for that would be Iceland.”
“We just want a change of scenery.”
“Ahh . . . well, of course you do,” she said in a calmer tone tainted with newfound excitement. “This will be great! I’ve got lots of frequent flyer miles.”
In order to appease Zola I decided to enroll in a practical course in Dublin’s Trinity College, settling on a diploma in Freudian Analysis. My first class was unlike anything I’d tried before. I became a spokesman for phenomenology, an advocate of idealism; dressed in striped shirts and tweed jackets that underlined my transformed status in human society. Fellow students envied my naïve passion for Sigmund and wondered at the intimate, personal relationship I formed with him. As I stared into my own essence, a whole new world of theory opened up like a blender for the miscellaneous gumbo of soul and psyche.
The guileless euphoria over my relationship with the psychoanalyst only lasted a couple of weeks, however. I realized that even though my Austrian friend had great insight into the human soul, his writings were lacking in practical solutions. I was left with a deep, almost tormented understanding of an impossible situation, and in my desperation I went and bought insanely expensive tickets for The Lord of the Dance—Michael Flatley in order to entertain Mother during her visit. But instead of seizing the opportunity to take a break from each other, Zola and Mother both insisted on going and ended up getting hammered in the local pub after the show. I never understood what happened, but assumed that Zola’s wild nature had echoed the hysterical humor Mother would embrace after her third drink and abandon on the thirteenth.
Yet the cracks were starting to show. We’d moved abroad to get away from it all but somehow ended up with Icelandair’s most common export; our apartment became a haven for binge drinking friends who wanted a weekend off, worn out and overworked, tormented by sleet and something they called “Despiceland Syndrome”—one of those viral concepts from some TV show that people used and abused to express their disdain for Iceland. I had no idea we had so many friends in Reykjavik and was taken aback by the constant turnaround on our living room couch of different bodies; naked, snoring, and even fucking. When an old classmate of Zola’s from elementary school called and asked to stay while she held a three-week art exhibition on Grafton Street I was so miserable that I threw up on one of her paintings and took a thirteen-hour walk out of the city, ending up in a hotel room by an emerald lake complete with a couple of romantic swans. There was no phone in my room and I didn’t reach Zola until the next afternoon. She forgave me, but that was the beginning of the end.
I still don’t know why the move to Dublin was so ill-fated, what forces finally tore us apart. I had loved Zola with a fervor that I couldn’t put into words, but that was the gauge for all my days and dreams for the future. When she left me I broke. I cried, filling up the glasses I downed in Dublin’s hotel minibars until I returned to Iceland a ruined man, red-eyed and crushed by a despair I thought I could never shake. A couple of days later I moved in with Mother.
As soon as the plane takes off from Keflavik she turns to me, on her third drink, as if she’d been listening in on my thoughts: “You know, Trooper, nothing has grieved me more than love.”
Chapter 3
Four hours later we found ourselves outside the terminal building in Amsterdam. Shards of sunlight pierced the thick cloud lining and formed a rainbow over the parking lot. I felt like I was in an ad for a cellphone company with a theme of Nordic happiness and that I should call all my friends at fantastic roaming rates. The filtered rays cast a gray hue over the morning and reminded me of Lóa, a school friend who’d abused tanning beds and ended up with melanoma. It turned out that I didn’t have the maturity or strength of character to stand by her in her illness and she put an end to our friendship from her hospital bed, paler than she’d ever been, one foot in the grave. Years later, around the time Zola and I were breaking up, when I had as good as buried the incident, Mother pointed out that I was hardly likely to hold on to a woman when even the dying felt they were better off without me. She had a knack for putting the events of my life in context; the harsher the statement, the truer it rang. Like a veiled subconscious with make-up, she knew me better than the feet that carried me.
“I’ll wait here while you find us a car,” she said and sat down on a bench. I left her there with our luggage and walked toward an old fashioned car I’d spotted out in the parking lot. The car had a Libertas logo on its side doors and leaning against it was a short and slender man in his forties with black hair, dressed in a white shirt and khakis.
“Mister Hermann Willyson, sir?” he asked in English. “I am your driver. I shall drive you to Lowland.”
“Hello,” I said, offering my hand. “I think Mother and I need to check in at the hotel first and get rid of our luggage, if that’s okay? My mother is, well . . . it’s been a long journey.”
“Very good, sir. I shall drive you.”
I walked back to Mother, who was stubbing out a cigarette on the sidewalk. The driver followed and stopped by the bench. “Mam Briem, Mam, I am the driver,” he said and smiled, picked up her bags, and walked back to the car.
“We have a chauffeur? How fancy.”
I took her arm and led her to the car, which impressed her just as much as the driver. When we drove off he turned down the Bollywood music blaring from the radio. “Mam Briem, Mam,” he said when we got out on the freeway.
“Eva,” Mother insisted. “For heaven’s sake call me Eva.”
“Eva, Mam? OK. Does EvaMam want to go to the hotel, Mam, or straight to Lowland?”
“Whatever suits you best, dear. I’m up for anything.”
She leaned back and stared out the window. The seats were soft and the view clear through the large, untainted windows that made Mother admire the vehicle even more. “We’ll go to the hotel,” I said, leaning toward the driver. “Mother needs to . . .”
“Nei, nei, nei,” she said slowly but loudly, with her legs stretched out over the backseat. “No special needs, bitte schön, not on my behalf. As if we’re not perfectly fine here in this luxury?” She waved a cigarette over the driver’s head to indicate that she would like to smoke in the car, and within seconds the interior became a version of my past. The acrid smell awoke memories of being carsick in Mother’s friend’s minivan during poorly-air-conditioned road trips. I rolled down my window and breathed in Holland. Mother was in her own world so when I pulled my head back into the car I felt duty-bound to strike up a conversation with the driver and asked about the car.
“It’s an Ambassador, sir. Indian car. 1800 ISZ.”
“Oh? I didn’t know you could get them here.”
“I brought it with me from Nainital, sir. That is my town in India.”
“And