“You know, Frank,” says Irv as they pull away, “if you lose the belly you might find your pockets.”
“Doesn’t seem worth the effort,” Frank says.
“All right, Lieutenant,” says Irv, “let’s go get our man before this thing gets out of hand.”
With a confident yank on the repaired pull cord, Alfonzo starts the outboard that produces a gentle put-put sound not unlike a lawnmower.
“Things aren’t out of hand yet?” asks Alfonzo.
“What, this?” Irv says, scanning the wreckage behind them. “This is nothing.”
With a twist of the throttle on the tiller, the team sets off to find Sigrid, their stolen boat, and Marcus Ødegård as Irving Wylie places a call to a certain Ms. Weaver.
The Lost Boys
There is no path beneath Sigrid’s ruined shoes. Her feet occasionally disappear entirely beneath heavy ferns, and the massive leaves batter her legs. She holds her mobile phone with its compass and GPS coordinates before her like a divining stick. She follows its direction through the scruff and scree of virgin woods and clouds of gnats that swarm silently in beams of yellow sunlight breaking, periodically, through the upper canopy. Below, here on earth, Sigrid walks among the splays of sunlight that punctuate and light the forest floor.
Sigrid is no tracker and no scout-sniper like Sheldon Horowitz. She can’t tell whether someone has been here a moment ago or never. She looks for telltale signs within her urban skill set: maybe a discarded Kvikklunsj bar wrapper, for example, or a whiff of Gillette aftershave. That would be the kind of evidence she could use.
She decides that all those natives squatting down to taste the earth must have been full of shit, and she raises the phone higher, putting her full faith in the technological power of the satellite constellation system.
Periodically her messenger bag snags and she yanks it free. She yanks it hard. She yanks it because she is angry at Irv.
And she is angry at Marcus.
And she is angry at her father.
She is angry at men. All men. For their stupidity, their lies, their egotism, their irrelevant words, their aggressive personalities and hairy backs. She is angry at them for what they did and didn’t do. For what they say and leave unsaid. For the timbre of their voices and the length of their strides, the ease by which they open jars and their inexplicable incapacity to return even the smallest objects to their rightful locations. She is sick of investing in them without dividend, trusting in them without reward, and pouring her guts out in motels—with words, emotion, trust, nostalgia, laments, confessions—to wake up the next day—feeling good, feeling closer, feeling unburdened and more earthy and connected and natural and complete—and be abandoned at her own moment of need, and set free, once again, to solve everything herself.
“No,” he’d said, when asked if he had anything to add. “No.” Nothing more. Nothing to explain himself or apologize or come to her defense.
And maybe a small part of her is angry at her mother, too.
Sigrid kicks through the understory and follows her compass toward some arbitrary spot on this earth. And on finding Marcus—if she does, and so help him God—he had better be there with open arms, a smile, and an apology.
As on the university campus, she can hear the conversation they are clearly not going to have. For some reason she imagines him—like a toad—sitting on a log:
“Oh, Sigrid, it’s so nice to see you. Thank you for coming for me,” he won’t say.
“It was a major pain in my ass, Marcus. I should be at home in Hedmark reading a bad romance about a bellboy and a duchess. And instead I’m . . . Where the hell are we, anyway?”
“Over there”—he’d point to a spot between three trees—“is the actual middle of nowhere. Not only in New York or America. But the entire galaxy. We’re about eight meters away from it. The actual thing.”
“You couldn’t be bothered to sit there for the simple poetry of it?”
“There’s nothing to sit on in the middle of nowhere. I don’t think the universe wants us to loiter for too long.”
“I’m being followed,” she’d explain, “by Friar Tuck and the rest of the merry men, and when they get here, I’m going to stand in front of you so they don’t kill you on sight for a crime you didn’t commit, OK? Because they tend to shoot citizens on sight, I’m learning.”
“Dad thinks this is about Mom. He’s right. Don’t you remember? Didn’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“Remember!”
“There’s nothing to remember. She had cancer, she died in her sleep. It was terrible, but I’ve come to realize as an adult that it was the best we could have hoped for given the circumstances. There was no cure. There still isn’t. There’s no regret here, Marcus, only sadness.”
“You are lucky,” he’d say to her, as he would always say to her.
It rather annoyed her.
Luck?
She kicks through the woods. She kicks at the woods. She hates this. And she hates hating it, because she used to love it. Absolutely adored everything about it. They used to do this; they’d play hide-and-seek in the woods behind the farm. As far as they knew, the woods there extended eastward all the way through Norway and Sweden to the Gulf of Bothnia, which was—in their juvenile imaginations—populated by Caribbean pirates and Arabs in dhows bringing spices and lanterns and magic from the southern realms into the uncharted lands of the world’s northern domains. There, in the hills, they’d walk together; they would search for evidence of ancient civilizations and cultures colliding to make new languages and poetry that could unlock doors in the trunks of trees that would lead them down spiral staircases to where they would spy on teams of Vikings carving new navies with glittering swords illuminated by magical orbs that would circle around, overhead, each one representing
