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Chapters (21)
  1. Praise
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. CONTENTS
  5. IN A DEER STAND
  6. SUN DOGS
  7. HYGGE
  8. BY SYDVEST STATION
  9. BETWEEN OFFICES
  10. THE FAIRGROUND
  11. COMPACTION BIRDS
  12. PERSHING SQUARE
  13. HONEYSUCKLE
  14. ON NARROW PAVED PATHS
  15. INSIDE ST. PAUL’S
  16. THE FREEZER CHEST
  17. MANITOBA
  18. WILD SWIMS
  19. PUSHKIN PRESS
  20. ALSO BY DORTHE NORS
  21. COPYRIGHT

Down on the street there’s sunlight, and Lina places herself in the middle of it, while Kirsten remains over by the front door of the building. She says that that was utterly awful. What they’d just gone through is almost too much for her to process, so she says it again: “I’ve never seen the like. It was awful, wasn’t it, Lina?” Lina rummages for the map and doesn’t answer, but Kirsten says that no one should be like that, the way Elsa was on the fourth floor. “It’s really a disgrace,” she says, looking over at the front entrance. “Do you think she 37has home care?” she asks, but Lina doesn’t answer. They’re somewhere by Sydvest Station, far from home, and she has the map out and starts walking. There are only two buildings to go, and Kirsten mustn’t see that her face is averted, that she feels heat moving deep into her skull and down to her softer parts; that she’s thinking about him. She’s thinking about him and what he said—that it wasn’t love. It couldn’t be, he’d said, and here she’d gone and felt precisely as if it were.38

39

BETWEEN OFFICES

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IT WAS IN BOSTON THAT IT HAPPENED THE FIRST TIME. After a shower, I clipped my toenails and stretched out, read a little. When I turned off the light, it began to come over me. I lay on my back, arms a bit out to the sides, legs heavy, relaxed. My body felt good, I sank down into the soft mattress, and a short while later the bed was no longer a bed but bare earth. Thin vegetation grew up around and through me. That’s what it felt like. It was a chilly day, far from Boston, there was water nearby, and then the bird came. It perched on one of my ribs. Then it started to peck the flesh from my breastbone. It was a quiet act of devotion, and the sky above me was no longer local but some vast firmament, and I disappeared into it.

The next morning, the first thing I noticed was how well rested I felt. The time difference usually bothers me, but I was wide awake under the showerhead, and down in reception. Forty-eight hours in Boston, and I never managed to see anything but well-scrubbed façades and the branch office. Next to the hotel there was a pleasant park I was able to glimpse from the taxi to the airport. It’s always these parks and airports. The fat tourists, the suits, and the neck pillows. The private realm can’t be maintained for any length of time but spreads bacterially, from security through the lines for coffee to the loose bowels in the restrooms.​42