Into this comes a banging sound like a troll hammering at the door of a farmhouse.
“What!” groans Sigrid.
Melinda sticks her head in. “You’re up?”
“What time is it?”
“About eight thirty.”
“Why’s it so dark?”
“It’s nighttime. It’s usually dark.”
“What do you mean, nighttime?”
“You’ve been sleeping for four hours. It’s eighty thirty. At night. Wednesday. August 13. 2008. Third rock from the sun.”
“Oh dear God.”
Melinda crosses her arms and ankles and falls like timber against the door frame with a smirk on her face. “You’ve got jet lag. I’ve heard about this. I don’t travel much myself, but I went to Paris once when I was eleven, and when I came home, me and my sister would fall asleep around five in the afternoon and wake up at three in the morning and go downstairs to watch TV. But there was nothing on except these scary B movies from the 1950s; which I guess is how we shook the jet lag, because after a few days of that we simply refused to go to sleep at all and that put us right back on schedule.”
“I don’t think that’s going to work for me,” Sigrid says, wiping slobber from the corner of her mouth.
“Have you tried Ambien?”
“I don’t want to talk about Ambien.”
“I know some scary movies, though. Have you seen Twenty-Eight Days Later? I almost pissed myself. Or Aliens Two? That was awesome. Blair Witch Project? I couldn’t sleep. That final scene? Frankly, I don’t know why I do it to myself. Why do any of us? Especially zombie movies. They freak me out and I have an actual gun in the house. I don’t think a country with so many guns should make so many horror movies.”
“It’s the other way around,” Sigrid says, using her fingers to unstitch her eyelashes.
“How do you mean?” Melinda asks.
Rubbing her face, Sigrid blinks fast and often to try to jump-start her face in the hopes it will remember how to do this by itself. “We have a lot of new immigrants in Norway. We have to take these classes on culture. Our instructor was an American with questionable taste in movies. She said American culture is all about individualism. It’s not just an idea. It’s what she called a performance. The way you perform individualism is through self-reliance. But acting self-reliant usually means acting alone. And being alone is a weaker position than working together. That’s America’s paradox—your individualism is a strong cultural trait that weakens you as a community and you just can’t see it. You worry that working together undermines your myth of self-reliance, so you hyperexaggerate its value to mask the fear. If you don’t do this, you lose your sense of being American. You’re basically doomed.”
“What does this have to do with jet lag?”
“Nothing. We’re talking about horror movies. You’re the one who linked the two.”
“OK,” says Melinda. “Explain the horror movies.”
“Every horror movie ends with someone being self-reliant and overcoming her own fear or else failing to do that and dying. I can’t think of a single one where the horror was overcome through strategy, cooperation, teamwork, or planning. It’s a terrible machine you’ve created. It’s why you all buy guns rather than build institutions. None of it makes you safer, but it does make you more American.”
Melinda doesn’t move from the wall. “I was issued my gun.”
“Try not to shoot anybody.”
“You don’t talk like a cop. You talk like . . .” Melinda looks to the ceiling, where the answer is usually plastered. “Some kind of college professor who used to sit around thinking about this stuff all the time but now doesn’t care anymore because he knows too much about it and doesn’t have any questions left.”
“That’s a pretty good description.”
“Thanks.”
“Catching bad guys means outsmarting them,” Sigrid says. “Knowing how people think, and why, gives you insight into what they might do. Or not. I need some coffee,” Sigrid adds.
“You’re gonna need to open your eyes at some point too.”
Melinda’s apartment—when it comes into focus—proves itself to have been tastefully decorated in inexpensive but stylish furniture. Sigrid sees how Melinda has leaned toward the modernist and Swedish side of the spectrum rather than the country cottage style, thereby brightening the small space. Further, she’s accented the sofa, tables and chairs with vibrant colors. It creates a sense of being settled and present in her life that Sigrid reads as an unexpected maturity.
“Do you have a computer with internet access here?” Sigrid asks Melinda.
“Are you joking?”
“Why you do keep asking me that?”
“Something about the way you talk.”
“No, I’m not joking.”
“There’s a laptop over there.”
Sigrid sits herself down on a comfy chair and starts poking around looking for inspiration that will lead to a plan that will lead to some time away from Melinda, who is starting to make her feel slightly guilty, because she seems like a genuinely good kid in need of a mentor, but the circumstances dictate that Sigrid needs to find Marcus without a chaperone. She does have an idea, if an imperfect one, about how to find Marcus in his wilderness fortress, and she wants to explore that possibility as far away from the sheriff and his people as possible—if only to give Marcus a real chance to explain himself and let the two of them work together to find a solution to the predicament.
“Target is really open until eleven at night?”
“Midnight on Saturdays. Not in Norway?”
“Not exactly.”
The shootout at the summer cabin last month began with the murder of a Serbian woman in the Oslo neighborhood of Tøyen. She had run to a neighboring apartment with her seven-year-old son for shelter, and it was provided by an eighty-two-year-old Jewish American—and Korean War vet—named Sheldon Horowitz. The woman didn’t make it, but the old man took it on himself to protect the boy by disappearing into the Norwegian landscape. For four days he evaded the city police, the district police, CCTV cameras, a helicopter, and the Balkan mafia. He didn’t speak Norwegian, he didn’t spend
