L8: Fornebu

Hello hustlers,

Been a while. First off, I have to apologize: to paraphrase the dril tweet, you do not, under any circumstances, have to “hand it” to COVID-19. In my last letter I said it felt good for me personally to recontextualize Wuhan as “city where I was sad when I was twenty-one” to something that wasn’t about me at all, thus reminding me the world continues to exist when I’m not there and I’m not life’s main character. However, obviously the virus: is bad. I apologize for being glib about it.

Before getting into anything else, I owe it to myself not to mention my collaborators to promote what I actually do, so here’s what happened since last letter:

1. Miss Misery, a 7 episode web series about a couple experimenting with an open relationship, was released online. Co-created with Jade Blair, it’s an official selection of the Miami Web Fest, the Seoul Web Fest, and the International Online Web Fest, and Chandler Levack in the CBC said “Miss Misery has some of the funniest and most perceptive dialogue in all of Canadian media.” The show’s IG is the place for further updates.

2. The publishers of my 2016 book of short stories, The Jokes, asked me to make a video reading one of that book’s stories, which is here. It is short, because my stories are short. In the video, you can see the kitchen of where I was living the last five months.

Okay so: it’s been so long since my last letter that we’ve skipped over an entire era: Fornebu. At the end of February I left Athens and came to Oslo. Hanna met me at the airport, which has stained hardwood floors and, like Norway generally, very good-looking people, and walking through this Scandinavian transit palace you can’t help but feel you’ve been bumped up a level in life.

I wish I could say the privilege grotesquerie ends here, but it does not, and since it’s my duty to transcribe life no matter what, I have to tell you about Fornebu.

So Hanna’s cousin is an EU diplomat for Norway who lives in Brussels (as you may know, Norway is not actually in the EU; it is merely party to the EEA (European Economic Agreement); I suppose this requires some diplomacy). The EU pays for her and her family to live in Belgium, and legally she can’t rent out her house, so it has to sit there unused, so she offered it to Hanna around Christmas. Hanna moved there mid-February, and I joined her March 1. I can’t think of a better way to describe Fornebu than an “upscale peninsula.” It’s hard to analogize to a larger city, or at least the ones I know. Fornebu is a newly ‘revitalized’ area outside the city limits with a business park, a mall, and beautiful, newly built homes. The whole area used to be an airport, but now it’s just impeccably manicured greenspace and artificial ponds, plus guys looking up at drones. The unit we lived in was a narrow three-floor townhouse with spaces between each plank on both staircases which allowed sound to travel extremely well and made it feel like one big three-story Nordic-pine recording studio. Lux living, very little privacy. Our little residential complex comprised three buildings panopticonned around a small playground area perpetually teeming with kids, chatting parents, and unnecessarily evenly spaced mini-scooters. On the open side were three refuse receptacles (paper, plastic, garbage/compost (differentiated via colored bags scanned by sensors, apparently)) which pneumatically shoomped stuff away three times a day. Our neighbor was a Dutch guy named Daniel who worked for Cisco, which, as the name implies, is a company of cis people who serve enterprise network solutions to modem manufacturers and the NSA. The daycare was sports-themed. Everything was made out of wood.

My lockdown in effect began then, March 1, a few weeks before most other people in North America and Europe. I didn’t have to stay in—I just didn’t have anywhere to go. My income, such as it was, was still mostly interviewing and writing profiles of CEOs and entrepreneurs, which I could do from anywhere, and the bus to town was expensive—about $11 round trip in Canadian dollars, which is what most of my dollars still are. So I stayed at home. My CEO-profiling job was actually just at that point drying up, though I didn’t know it, so I mostly just worked on a novel and watched my bank account dwindle from the $150 of groceries we’d have delivered to us every few days.

Later on, when the weather improved and the days got super long, Fornebu became a kind of beach-side paradise, but I have to remind myself of the early conditions. So:

When it began, Norway actually had one the top 10 worst infection rates in the world, which was apparently blamed on Norwegian vacationers returning from the treacherous and much-talked-about Austrian ski resort of Ischgl and the surrounding area. I remember being on a video call with my parents in March and I was explaining to them what I had read, probably in this Atlantic piece from James Hamblin, on how bad it was likely to be around the world, and they were kind of like “how different could it be from SARS, or the flu,” which you will recall a lot of people were like.

At that time I was still imagining I could continue to fund my dirtbag ascetic lifestyle by convincing magazine editors to pay me to write (more on this in another letter), and one of the first things I did was get on a video call with a Canadian doctor friend of mine for an update on the Toronto ER he works in. Not a lot was happening yet so there wasn’t really a story there. A little later I contacted two Canadian epidemiologists who were willing to talk, but my angle by then was public shaming of non-mask-wearers, and I was behind a wave of similar pieces by about a week and couldn’t land that.

On the local front, since I don’t speak Norwegian, all my updates were coming from Hanna. She was working a 9-5 then, and she’d come home and be like, “oh yeah, all schools are shutting down tomorrow.” Or: “the Prime Minister did a dance today.” Much later she said she’d forgot to mention this trend all over the country of children drawing rainbows and taping them up in windows with the caption “alt blir bra,” which translates to “everything will be fine.”

One person for whom everything won’t be fine is the wife of Norwegian billionaire Tom Hagen, who was probably killed by him. This is a case we followed throughout March and April, which came to a climax shortly after the time on the Norwegian calendar called Påskekrim. Meaning “Easter crime,” this is a Norwegian tradition that, during Easter, you watch crime movies and TV, and read crime novels. No one I’ve spoken to really had a good explanation of the causal relationship between the chocolate-infused celebration of Jesus’ birth and stories about murder. This official travel page explains that Norwegians get a lot of time off for Easter, and so “[they] have time to read.” Okay. Anyway, 70-year-old Tom Hagen, Norway’s 172nd richest person, was arrested on his way to work on April 28th, for probably murdering his wife. He had probably faked her abduction two years ago, probably impersonating kidnappers who demanded a €9 million ransom in an extra-anonymous cryptocurrency called Monero. During a certain period there were new updates to this case coming in every few days, and Hanna would keep me up to date.

While we were exploring the vegan coconut dessert balls at Meny, I was talking to friends in New York. This was when the cases there were surging. I FaceTimed with an immunocompromised friend who had a morgue truck at the end of her block, who had bought her own set of plates and cutlery because her roommates weren’t being careful enough, who had just finished spending months taking her former landlord to court. She was venturing outside her apartment once every two weeks, contemplating getting on a plane to Washington State with a 27 (?) year old cat. She was strung out.

But you can read New Yorkers’ own accounts of their lives. Here’s what I was doing in Fornebu: I was writing a novel, I was jogging 20-minute laps around a circular street that a friend of Hanna’s called the “tenderloin” of Fornebu, which I would usually do two of before dinner. I listened to “The Daily” NYT podcast every day. Hanna and I listened to Esther Perel podcasts as we solved 1000- and 2000-piece jigsaw puzzles of pirate maps on the kitchen table. Tiny plastic bottles of ginger cayenne juice were on sale for 10 kroner (CAD$1.50) for what seemed like months, and we drank them every day. We drank these, plus lay mint “Immune System” strips across our tongues, plus took multivitamins, as potions against the virus. We also washed our hands a lot. The official Norwegian policy for what seemed like forever was to stay 1 meter apart from people (as opposed to 2 where most people I know live), but at the end of March they increased it to 2—though a month ago they eased it back down to 1. The official policy here has always been to not wear a face mask, which seems wild except that the infection rate, after the early scare, has been extremely low, and declining steadily from a high point of 386 confirmed one-day cases on March 27. Since mid-May the average has been about 20 cases/day, and a few weeks ago it wasn’t unusual to have 10, 5, or even 0 new daily cases throughout the entire country, but the borders opened back up again on July 15 and since then the numbers seem to be creeping up. The policy is still to not wear a mask, but I bought my first masks last week, in anticipation of what the travelers may bring. The total confirmed cases throughout all of Norway, for the time being, remains under 10,000—9,208 as of this writing.

At the end of April and the beginning of May we released Miss Misery online, as mentioned above. Throughout May I was still going very hard on my novel, but in my calendar I see I’ve written “Break from novel” on May 29. By then my money was getting pretty low and I started focusing on figuring out new ways to make money, which is a whole other topic that I’ll get more into in another letter. I did write the scripts for a set of training videos for British Columbia’s government’s “how to do an online job interview,” so that was something. The most notable thing that happened in May, I suppose, was attending a “Constitution Day” celebration at one of Hanna’s friend’s apartments. This was May 17. Norway was under Danish rule for 300 years (1537-1814), was free and independent for five minutes in 1814 during which it created a constitution, and then, under duress, reluctantly accepted a “personal union” with Sweden, meaning a shared monarch (the “person”) but different laws. Swedish rule lasted until 1905. The tradition is to celebrate the 1814 constitution by drinking all day and taking it easy, which is quite easy indeed as from my perspective Norwegians with their oil fund and 5 weeks paid holidays and so on are already taking it fairly easy on the regular. It was rainy, so the celebration mostly took place indoors. Hanna and I brought our own Thermos of coffee and plastic baggy of chocolate banana bread and tried to maintain social distance, which became increasingly lax in proportion to the circulated frizzante and whiskey. The most reportable aspect of the proceedings was that most of the women and some of the men wore their “bunad,” which is basically what you would imagine an 18th century Norwegian debutant(e) would wear to a wedding they expected to be a little drafty. For the women, elaborately embroidered ankle-length dresses worn over a puffy white shirt of thick cotton; for the men, knickerbockers with tassels and stiff black jackets. Each region of Norway has their own design, like Scottish tartans, and there are specific sartorial inflections to denote whether or not you’re married. Real “trad” shit. All the more so in that, though based on 18th- and 19th-century designs, the word bunad itself is 20th-century coinage linked to a popularist mythmaking revival, and the popularity of bunader is apparently steadily increasing.

In June, the nights became “tropical,” which is a Norwegian term of art that means the temperature doesn’t drop below 20° all night. The first time I heard this it made me think about how in Canada anglophones live their life through a language created in a time and place far removed from its contemporary speakers. As far as I know English-speaking Canadians, at least in the part of the country I’m from, have no expressions like this that are inextricably tied to their location. Or maybe that’s just my own fish-in-water blindspot, I’m not sure. Anyway, the weather became nice, in June, is what I’m saying. It turned out the house was a ten minute walk to a beach on a fjord, which I understand is an extension of a Scandinavian body of water they call Skagerrak, which is not considered part of but is highly contiguous to the North Sea; which is the cul-de-sac of the Atlantic Ocean between here and England. So, since the weather started to permit it around mid-June, and since we knew we’d be vacating Fornebu by mid-July, we started going to the beach several times a week, sometimes every day. I would print out whatever writing project I was working on and tape the pages into a large format notebook and edit it with a pen in the shade of a tree on one of the little grassy hills overlooking the beach. I like the pen/notebook thing—there’re all those studies about your brain working better with a pen, you know? I think they’re true. We’d break for lunch and buy a Naturli’ plant-based burger from the food stand. Naturli’ is a Danish company and the burgers taste way better than Beyond ones, have a much better texture, and are cheaper.

The world started to open up again throughout June and July, and things are now almost back to normal. City buses full, cafés and restaurants full-ish, though distanced. Some cashiers have plastic in front of them, but most don’t. The streets continue to seem very empty to me, but I’ve been told July is Norway is vacation month, so many people are away.

Well that’s about it. I’ll leave you with a story about going to a party thrown by the king’s milkmaid. A few weeks ago we were supposed to go camping with some of Hanna’s friends, one of whom I’m currently living with, with Hanna, named Karoline. Bad weather canceled camping, but another friend, the king’s milkmaid, compensated by throwing a party in the king’s barn. This is the king of Norway. He has a barn. Hanna’s friend lives on the grounds for very cheap in exchange for milking the king’s cows (Hanna informs me she lives “in a very nice apartment” and only milks the cows “one weekend per month” and “is an architect”). Anyway, I guess she can throw parties in the barn whenever she likes. So we went. It was actually relatively close to Fornebu.

This was coming at the end of a long period of what was, for me, basically total isolation. Hanna at first had coworkers, but then everything shut down, and, with the exception of about three hours on Constitution Day, I had barely interacted with anyone in person other than Hanna since February. Most Norwegians speak English very well, but I was still worried that in a party setting there might be group inertia and I’d be standing on the outside of a circle of melodious and indecipherable discourse. But people were nice, seemed untaxed by English speaking, and I had a good time. Hanna caught up with friends and I played this game that was a hybrid of crokinole and billiards that you play with a half-sized cue. My partner was a barbate Russian historian who when we were finished told me he was alarmed that when he taught his courses online in the fall he’d have to compete with YouTube. I too am nervous about my future but I went off to dance with Hanna.

Music was exactly the same as what the equivalent party of culture-type people in their thirties would be anywhere in the English-speaking world: Lizzo, Madonna, etc. Hanna and I had never danced together before, but I’d heard her talk about how much she likes dancing. In the Fornebu house, we would both kind of dance around in our socks in this particular goofy way, but now I saw that on the dance floor she danced in the same way! I thought it was very cute. I put on this cover of Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” by Lost + Found and RuthAnne that I was going absolutely bonkers over when I was alone in Athens. It had no perceivable effect on the crowd.

At 1 a.m. the host, the king’s milkmaid, served this big professional spread of food so people could keep partying all night. This is apparently her signature party move. Pulled pork, hummus, bread, slaw. We ate off paper plates. I found myself beside the host, and I asked her if she ever saw the king. She said not really, but the queen, whose name is Sonja, exercises almost every day in the grass outside, flanked by four 70 year old “Amazonians”—Sonja herself is 83, so these are her spry young bodyguards, and, one hopes, pals. Everyone was surprised to learn that the king and queen actually live on the grounds most of the time. Throughout the lockdown, it seems, the queen has been keeping her routine.

This party was right around the longest day of the year, and it was already getting light again by the time people were stacking their used snack plates and heading back out to the dance floor. The sun started to come up for real about 3:30 a.m., and I went outside and took some pictures. Soon after that Hanna joined me outside, and she called a cab service. We waited in the driveway together, near a big sign by the road that I guess advertised the location of the king’s cows. The party was still going pretty strong. The cab came, we got in the back, and Hanna directed the curiously GPS-less cabbie along the smooth empty roads. I looked out the window. I hadn’t taken a cab all year, and it was nice to lean back and watch the extremely early subarctic sunrise.