The damage sustained by modern fiction is colossal. The ramifications are greater than if the authors had been educated in biology before Darwin or physics before Einstein. For it means that the person who watches a lot of TV, reads a lot of books, and sees a lot of movies has probably developed a more outdated and conservative notion of what it means to be human than people who have been able to keep their consumption of fiction at a lower level, and who obtain their knowledge from practically any other sphere of human activity.
Will TV series, movies, and literature then be able to find another paradigm for structuring their narratives? In other words, will fiction — whether found in books, in movie theaters, or on TV screens — be able to survive as anything but a deception and opiate of the people? It is doubtful, for the “psychoanalytical cultural tradition has
1. Of course, not all 20th-century novels take place by a harbor or involve violent fathers. Here it is only the structure that interests me, and in this respect the examples are endless: detective novels where the villain’s character is “nuanced” and “rounded” through flashbacks to his boyhood; family chronicles in which childhood traumas have an inexorably determining effect on the rest of life; psychological novels where insight into a primeval trauma translates into behavioral change; etc., etc., etc. There is no end to the stream of novels in which separate events constitute a narrative only because they are pinned to a unity that has been postulated by psychoanalysis.
27
There’s room for no more than thirty boats in this small natural harbor. Even then, that’s only if they’re moored several boats deep, so that kids playing on board have to scamper across the boats of other holiday visitors to reach land.
The two jetties are crescent-shaped promontories of granite rock, while the harbor’s only building is a kiosk, an old wooden shed painted barn red. We parked the car behind it so we could buy ice cream and extra water, but it turns out they also sell fresh-baked heart-shaped waffles with jam, scoops of ice cream, and whipped cream.
Together with blond happy tan Swedes, Bernard and I wait in line to buy our waffles, standing with an arm around each other’s waist. We’re wearing shorts, sunglasses, and sunscreen. Gulls swoop in low over the boulders beyond the harbor, and we’ll clamber around on the rocks as soon as we’ve had our waffles and coffee. Later we can hike up the path between the fields or walk along the coast to the edge of the woods where cows are grazing.
When a family gets up from one of the tables, I hurry over, draping my pullover across the back of one chair and tipping a second one forward so its backrest leans against the edge of the table. The table’s ours now. I trot back to the line and wrap my arms around Bernard, and we kiss as if I’d been gone a long time. The couple behind us smile conspiratorially; perhaps they discovered love recently too.
I’ve been over to look through the window of the old wooden kiosk, and they have a large selection of ice cream, but the best kind with waffles is plain vanilla.
“One scoop of vanilla,” I say to Bernard as we stand in line. “And coffee.”
“I’ll have the same,” he says. “Plus a chocolate-covered marshmallow on top.”
I squeeze him tighter when he says this. I don’t know why, there’s just something about the simple fact that he’d like a chocolate-covered marshmallow that makes me want to fall into him and disappear even more than I already did. Or maybe it’s his tone of voice, or the way the strong sunlight falls upon his almost-white hair, or the smell of warm waffles combined with the way he scratches his neck.
It’s so clear we were born to be together — there’s no avoiding it, it’s constantly clear — yet somehow it becomes even more obvious when he says plus a chocolate-covered marshmallow on top, or when he gazes out over the glassy Kattegat Sea and screws up his eyes because the light is so harsh, or when he takes another two steps forward in line, with steps I’m learning could only be his.
The couple behind us is smiling again, and though I smiled back at their infatuated, wide-open faces before, now I turn away. I suppose I’m feeling a tad bashful, and Bernard must sense this, for he nudges me over in front of him until I feel his chest warming my back.
We don’t say anything else until it’s our turn at the counter. Behind the glass stands a thin old man with a large nose. Maybe he’s run this kiosk every summer since he was young. By his side is a plump teenage girl, perhaps his granddaughter. Or the daughter of a friend. Will she stand here for another fifty years too?
We get our orders and carry the limp paper plates with the waffles over to our table. The tables and chairs stand directly on the bare granite; they look old, with thin metal frames and wooden seats and backs where the white paint has flaked off.
“See that gull over there?” I ask. “A second ago it caught a fish.”
“What, did it dive?”
“Yes. It flew over by that red boat, and suddenly it plunged, straight down. Like a raptor.”
“Do you want to sit in this chair? Then it’ll be easier for you to see over there.”
“No, I’m just fine sitting here.”
In this manner we continue to unwind, together in the emptiness.
“You think the people sitting over by that poster are Danes?”
“Did you hear them speak Danish?”
“No, it’s just that … there’s something about them.”
Then we grow quiet again.
We’re so close to Denmark. But here in Sweden, no one knows who we are.
We walk out onto the rocks, maintaining our balance all the way down to the water, sometimes holding hands and other times proceeding separately and using the rocks for support. We stretch out upon a great flat stone, feeling the sun on our faces, our bodies. The heat, the calm, the distant sound of chattering children someplace behind us. Our bodies dissolve. And then the shadows are long; we must have lain here for hours, my head upon his chest and his head upon mine, my bare knee over his bare thigh, his hairy thigh across my belly, my nose against his … my eyes … my heel in a puddle of water on the rock.
We walk back toward the harbor and the kiosk. The low sun is golden over the fields and accentuates each rise, each rocky projection here where the Halland Ridge subsides to topsoil and thence to shore and sea. We walk down a path through fields of grain, then up along a rise until we come to a parasol over a table with cardboard baskets of strawberries. A sign says 3 °CROWNS. We take two baskets, leave a hundred-crown note and take forty crowns in change from the small pail of money on the table. We’ll eat the berries tonight, after we’ve eaten dinner in the restaurant beneath the guesthouse where we’re staying. We can eat them in the dark down by the shore or up among the elderly visitors on the guesthouse grounds.
And so it continues: nothing happening. Nothing at last. Nothing, nothing, transparently nothing.
• • •
During dinner that evening, Bernard tells me about the first time he took Lærke to a swimming pool after the accident.
Three months had passed and she still had no initiative at all. She essentially remained sitting wherever Bernard or the staff at the rehab center placed her. She never ventured to do anything of her own accord, and her face never lit up because of something she felt or thought on her own.
Bernard arranged with one of Lærke’s girlfriends who had stuck with her since the car wreck to help Lærke in the dressing room. He stood outside for a long time, waiting for them to come out, and when they emerged and Lærke saw all the water, she started to flail about, out of sheer excitement — her right arm flew up and down, she squealed loudly and started to run toward the water. She fell right away, of course, but they had a good grip on her so she didn’t hit the tiles; they helped her up, and then she started flailing and running and fell once more. Lærke’s friend and Bernard both began to laugh, because it was such a relief to see Lærke suddenly as unmanageable as an overexcited three-year-old. Something had finally gotten through to her.