I Hate Everyone, Except You(44)
But as much as I would like to hang ten with a bunch of tanned, six-packed Aussies, we couldn’t move to Sydney because of Mary. “The dog, Damon, the dog,” I said. “Australia requires a six-month pet quarantine. Didn’t you even hear what happened to Johnny Depp?” (I was certain he had not.) “Over my dead body will Mary spend half a year in a kennel without me. I’ll sleep in the goddamn kennel before I let that happen. I’ve already looked it up: we can get a dog passport for Sweden. She just needs a few shots.”
We played this game for a solid hour, and I call it a game because neither of us really had any intention of leaving our family, friends, and careers in the United States. It’s just nice to consider one’s options.
Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport is large and bright, with many windows overlooking the verdant landscape nearby. The polished dark hardwood floors, very similar to the ones we have in our house, shine in the natural light. “Look at the sheen on these,” I remarked. “As you well know, these floors aren’t as low-maintenance as they look. They seem like an unwise choice for a high-traffic area if you ask me.” But Damon pointed out the near-complete absence of foot traffic. The people exiting our flight were the only people in the whole airport. Suddenly I was struck by the feeling of what it might be like to survive a zombie apocalypse.
I imagined a sequel to The Walking Dead: It’s been ten years since the last zombie kicked the bucket, for the second time. A small group of Swedes and a highly sophisticated, well-dressed, middle-aged American man, played by me, of course, must reestablish civilization and procreate to repopulate the world. (My character and an adorable twentysomething lesbian, played by Jennifer Lawrence, reproduce via IVF.) Their first task is to clean shit up. They break out the Windex and the Pine Sol and just go to town for, like, the first three episodes, scrubbing, polishing, disinfecting . . .
“Look, ABBA,” Damon said, interrupting my creative flow. He pointed to a life-sized cardboard cutout of the most famous singing group in Scandinavian history. I assumed it was an enlarged album cover from the 1970s, or maybe they still dressed in clingy bell-bottoms. I’m not so up-to-date on my ABBA news. “The one on the left’s got quite the ABBAconda,” I said.
Within one hour of settling into Stockholm—taking a taxi from the airport, checking in to our hotel, unpacking—we realized we were going to be bored to death for a week. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fine city, pretty enough with lots of old, square buildings. And the food was surprisingly good. We discovered a love of skagen, basically a shrimp salad on toast, and found a place that served the most amazing Swedish meatballs, which I consumed greedily, despite the fact that they contained veal. (I co-organized The Anti-Veal-Eaters Revolt in the eighth grade and never really looked back.) And the fine citizens of Stockholm are excruciatingly civilized, if slightly depressed and—I got the impression—slightly insecure about their city. Practically every local we met asked our opinion of the place.
“How do you like it here?” a salesman in a clothing store asked Damon while I was trying on a sweater.
“The sun is up for a really long time,” Damon replied, and the salesman nodded in resigned agreement.
We took a ferry ride and a nice old man asked us how long we were staying in town. A week, we said.
“Too long,” he responded. “I was born here, but forty years ago I moved to Sydney.”
“We have a dog,” I said. “We can’t do that.” The old guy looked at me as though something had been lost in translation. It hadn’t. I’m just incapable of rational thought around the subject of my dog.
We mostly just walked around quoting Trading Places, one of our favorite movies.
“I am Inga from Sveden.”
“But you’re wearing lederhosen.”
“Ya, for sure, from Sveden. Please to help me with my rucksack?”
On the third day, we decided to visit the Vasa Museum, the main attraction of which is an elaborately decorated seventeenth-century warship, the Vasa, that was so poorly engineered that it went ass over tea kettle and sank on its maiden voyage, right in the center of Stockholm Harbor. Three hundred years later, it was salvaged, reconstructed, and preserved in the museum, a feat Swedes seem very proud of. The museum, or museet, is actually a pretty enjoyable way to spend an hour and a half out of nineteen excruciatingly long hours of daylight.
Exhibitions throughout the museet have been designed to give you a taste of what life aboard the ship might have been like. For example, for 450 passengers, the vast majority being soldiers and sailors, there was one dentist, who was responsible for everything from tooth extractions to limb amputations. If a sailor was disrespectful to the admiral, he could be keelhauled. That’s when they tie you to a rope, throw you off one side of the ship and pull you out the other side, dragging you under the keel of the boat. In the middle of the ocean. For being disrespectful.
“Hey, Admiral, your father’s meatballs are huge and salty.”
“Under the boat with you, Sven!”
“What? I grew up next door to you. He’s a really good cook!”
And maybe even more incomprehensible: two toilets. For 450 men spending their days drinking beer and eating nonrefrigerated meat! Can you even imagine the line for those things after a meal of half-rotten caribou kebabs? I can’t. I’m the kind of guy who gags on an airplane when someone two rows ahead of me farts in his sleep.