The Tricking of Freya (48 page)

Oh, I kept myself busy all right. The fact is, dear reader, I was having a
fabulous time.

And there was Saemundur. Yes, I know. I'd promised not to let myself get
distracted, but really, I reasoned, what harm could it do? There were more
than enough hours in an Icelandic summer day-I could spare a few for
Saemundur when he zipped across the lake to Ulfur's house of books.
Mostly he was out of the city, leading tours of glaciers, ice caves, volcanoes,
and other remote badlands, but it seemed that whenever he was back in
town he found an excuse to come by his father's place. When Johanna re marked sarcastically that she'd seen her little brother more in the month of
June than in the entire preceding year, I began to wonder if I might have
something to do with Saemundur's unannounced visits. Perhaps he had begun to wonder if he was, in fact, Birdie's child? If so, he never mentioned it
again, and I didn't press the subject. Time would tell, I hoped. Or maybe he
thought nothing of the sort. Maybe instead he felt some obligation toward
me, implicated as he was in my last disastrous visit? Not that I blamed him,
of course. In fact, I wondered if part of his mystique for me was that he
had, quite literally, saved my life.

"I have to thank you," I told him one night. We were sitting in the
kitchen after everyone else had gone to bed.

"For what?"

"Saving my life, back then. Alerting the police that we were at Askja. I
don't think anyone would have found us in time, if it weren't for you."

"Nice of you to say. But when you look at it another way, it's all my fault.
I should never have given Birdie those jeep driving lessons. It was obvious
she was up to no good."

"Did you know what she was planning?"

"Not exactly, no. But I felt guilty all the same. And then when I heard
she'd committed suicide-"

"Just a minute," I interrupted. "Don't go taking credit for that. You'll
have to get in line. As it turns out, everyone I knew and loved felt responsible for Birdie's suicide: my mother, Stefan, Sigga. Even your father. And
me.

"You?"

"Especially me. She killed herself on my fourteenth birthday, you know."

"I didn't."

We sat in silence, staring into our empty coffee cups. It occurred to me
then that they all felt sorry for me, Ulfur and Johanna, Saemundur. That's
why they were being nice to me, indulging me and my investigation. It was
nothing but pity. And I was nothing if not pitiable, or so I thought. The tide
of enthusiasm I'd been riding crashed in that moment. I was crying, damn
it, in front of Saemundur. He reached for my hand, but I jerked it back,
pushed my chair from the table.

"Enough sob stories for tonight."

"Freya-"

After that night we didn't mention Birdie anymore, but Saemundur kept
coming around, and I couldn't keep myself from looking forward to his visits. One evening when Saemundur had joined us for dinner, Johanna asked
after his girlfriend. I flinched. A girlfriend? Of course Saemundur would
have a girlfriend. What had I expected?

But he shrugged it off. "Halla? Oh, it's nothing serious with her."

"It never is, is it?"

"I did try marriage, you know. It was a resounding failure."

"You were married?" I blurted out.

"In my twenties. For three years. It seems I'm too selfish, erratic, and arrogant to make a proper husband."

"No surprise there," Johanna remarked.

Saemundur knew better than to take me to more clubs. Usually he'd
spirit me off to some odd spot or another. The river Ellidaar, where you can
fish for salmon in the middle of Reykjavik. The graveyard on the other side of
the lake, where violets and pansies gleamed at the foot of moss-encrusted
gravestones. One day near the end of my third week in Reykjavik we visited
the town of Hafnarfjordur, nestled in the Burfell lava field. After parking
Saemundur's motorcycle, we walked along a street where brightly painted
houses seemed to sprout from clumps of black lava.

"Hafnarfjordur is a key fishing center, but more important, it is home to
a large population of elves. The residents are making quite a business off
that these days. Giving elf tours and selling trinkets."

"People are so gullible. What a bunch of nonsense."

"Nonsense? You don't need to go that far, Freya. What happened to that
idealistic little girl I once met?"

"Turned into a cynical New Yorker. Don't tell me you believe in elves,
Saemundur."

"I won't say I don't. And you'll find that's the case with most Icelanders.
Supposedly over 90 percent of us believe in elves. Or rather, don't disbelieve
in them. Anyway, that's why there are so many odd twists to the streets here
in Hafnarfjordur." We were walking up a hillside where the road abruptly circled a large boulder. "That rock there is an elf home. Construction crews
build around such spots, or face the consequences."

"Consequences?"

"All sorts of bad luck. Accidents to the crew, that sort of thing. It's standard practice all over Iceland. There are just more elves here in Hafnarf-
jordur. So more crooked roads."

"And what do these elves look like? Have you ever seen one?"

"Not personally, no. And remember, there are different kinds of elves.
Like the huldufolk. Hidden People. They live in the rocks, in a parallel world
to ours. They're the same size as us too. They look ... human. And sometimes they steal human babies."

"Maybe that's what happened to Birdie's child, stolen by the Hidden
People." It actually seemed plausible to me, at the moment. "That's why my
search is so futile."

"Don't tell me you're giving up."

"No, but I'm not getting anywhere in Reykjavik. I've been through everyone on your father's list who's not dead or on vacation. All dead ends. I'm
thinking it's time to visit Sigga's niece Thorunn in the East. I met her in
Gimli last fall, she lives on a farm near Egilsstadir. Ulfur says I could fly
there in a couple of hours."

"Why fly? You won't see anything that way. Let me drive you. I've got a
tour starting in Akureyri, in the north, next week. We'll drive up the East
Coast, I'll show you the sights, I'll drop you off at Thorunn's."

"That's a generous offer. But I think I'll take the plane."

"You'll never see anything that way," Saemundur repeated. I could see he
was offended, but I had good reason for wanting to fly: the way to Thorunn's was the same route Birdie and I had taken in the stolen jeep. I had no
desire to retrace that madcap ride.

That night as I lay sleepless in my turret room I remembered the marvelous sights Birdie had promised to show me. Except that once we were on
the Ring Road, there was no time for that. Our tourist days were over. The
Wolf was on our trail. Damn Birdie. She'd ruined so many things for me. I
imagined drifting in a tiny boat amid a pool of glistening icebergs. Why not
see the glacial lagoon now?

Why not indeed?

I haven't been honest with you. Looking back on these pages, I see I've left
some things out. And made myself sound entirely more sensible than I actually was. It's a whitewash. Sure, I dropped plenty of hints. And maybe
you figured it out, maybe you're smarter than I was at the time: during
those three weeks in Reykjavik, I had no idea that anything was wrong with
me. On the contrary, it felt like everything was right. I viewed the changes occurring in me not as symptoms but as transformation. Hadn't I felt a similar
blossoming on my first trip to Iceland? And I was free from my job, for the
first time in years, I was out of grimy crowded Manhattan and on an island of
endless light. I was on the verge of finding Birdie's child. I was reunited,
however briefly, with the long-lost love of my youth. Life seemed expansive,
full of possibilities. Looking back, I can see I was ascending into mania. At
the time, I simply felt happier than I ever had in my life.

Yes, mania. Or, to be more precise, hypomania. A milder form of Birdie's
curse. Luckily I suffered no religious delusions, although I did briefly consider the possibility that Birdie's child had been abducted by elves. But my
behavior met enough of the remaining criteria to garner the hypomanic diagnosis: a distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated mood.
Decreased need for sleep. More talkative than usual. Flights of ideas, racing thoughts. Increase in goal-directed activity. Spending sprees.

That's what I mean about the whitewash. True, I mentioned the expensive camera. What I forgot to mention is how I spent the rest of the $3,450
in Reykjavik. Much of it went to gifts: I was feeling highly magnanimous. I
bought gifts for each of the men on Ulfur's list, to thank them for their
time; new tires for Johanna's bicycle; lobsters for dinner on more than one
occasion; chocolates and toys for Ulfur's grandchildren; boxes of smoked
salmon that I shipped back to New York for Frank and Klaus; a large order
of hangikjot (smoked lamb) for Stefan; Freyja Dinpur, licorice dipped in
chocolate, for Sigga; a coffee-table book of color photographs of Iceland, for
Sigga; a woven blanket, for Sigga.

Nor was I any less generous when it came to myself: a supposedly magical, sterling silver rune-charm necklace; a hand-knitted sweater from Icelandic wool just like Mama used to knit, which cost over a hundred dollars;
a state-of-the-art raincoat and hat and pants, so I could cycle in Reykjavik
in any kind of torrent; a first edition of Olafur's poetry; a set of advanced
Icelandic language instruction tapes that I listened to in the wee hours; expensive skin lotions extracted from the Blue Lagoon; a pair of knee-high
black boots with fashionably square toes. I shudder to think what they cost.
And other things I'm too embarrassed to mention.

You thought I had no money? I didn't, but I had the manic's best pal, a
credit card. Thank God Birdie never got her hands on one of those.

And another symptom: hypergraphia. In the height of my mania I filled
a notebook a day. Notebook after notebook, page after scribbled page that I
can't bring myself to transcribe. It is said that certain geniuses create their
most inspired work during manic episodes. I guess we nongeniuses spew a
lot of eagle crap.

The doctors have gifted me with the diagnosis of cyclothyinia. It's considered a milder form of bipolar disorder, which may or may not progress to
the real thing. What caused it, you wonder, to spring out of nowhere? First
of all, it didn't. Some cyclothymiacs are primarily depressive. Remember
my lost years in the Sub? Hypomania is the flip side, and needs only a trigger. A trigger the Icelandic summer eagerly provides: light.

Light is a zeitgeber, German for time-giver. Zeitgebers are any environmental signals that are capable of resetting the internal brain clocks that are ticking away in our hypothalamuses. They're how we adapt to life on this
spinning planet, some of us better than others. People with affective disorders are especially vulnerable to circadian disruption; it's no accident that
Birdie suffered her worst manic episodes under Iceland's midnight sun, or
that it was under the same sun that I succumbed to my first.

Some people overdose on drugs, I OD'd on light. Which is not to say I
never slept, but even with my windows covered in black plastic I managed
only three or four hours each night. I didn't go to bed until one or two, then
woke at five each morning to the sun burning an orange hole through the
plastic. Strangely, after several days of this I felt not exhausted but energized. It seemed logical to me then: with less darkness, you need less sleep.
Indeed, sleep seemed a waste of time. I saw a rainbow at ten p.m., kids
kicking soccer balls at eleven, drunken teens spilling from after-hours clubs
onto sunlit streets. A child's heaven of perpetual summer twilight. If it's not
dark, then it can't be night. And if it's not night, why sleep?

I was gleeful, light-giddy. Can elation really be a symptom? Can enthusiasm be pathological? I have yet to find the line that delineates personality
from disease. Whether you call it sickness or not, there is no doubt a
change overtook me. I became something other, something faster and freer
than myself. And I liked it. Oh how I liked it.

On the road.

On the Ring Road with Saemundur.

Three magnificent mania-fueled days.

This is where it gets indecipherable: my notes, my mind. When I think
back to it I get that dream-remembering look on my face, but at the timeat the time!-everything was crystal prism sharp refracting infinitely and
precisely and exquisitely.

My brain is an octopus, I wrote. Extruding tentacles of thought.

My heart is filled with helium.

I've never felt it again.

I want to, I don't want to. Ever.

Our departure from Reykjavik dragged on like one of those excruciating
group photos where you're longing for the shutter to click but so-and-so
isn't in the frame or isn't smiling or sneezed or forgot to brush her hair.

Saemundur had driven up early that morning in a slick blue van with
DEEP NATURE painted on the side. The van seated twelve, with oversize
wheels that raised it off the ground like an old-fashioned coach.