A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

I am one of those who stays late at the cafe.
I linger often at the overpriced and overstuffed cafes on the sidestreets off of St. Johannesgatan. They, like the world, close at ten and their underpaid but ruthlessly cheerful and attractive staff gets round to throwing me out, apologetic. I often spend time walking after that, enjoying the way the stippling of the rain through the yellow cones of the street lights.
I love the night culture. I always have. I loved it back East, where tired, broken people sat around splintering tables in their nicotine-stained work shirts and talked about television and each other. I loved working second shift, when my province of the back hallways and echoing ballrooms would be dark and empty but for those others who stayed late and wanted to talk about it. I loved the night culture even in Sacramento, where bums and scrawny guys in sleeveless jackets with silly hair and emaciated girlfriends wander around Cesar Chavez park, uncertain where to go now that the True Love cafe is closed.
There is no night culture here. I miss that sense of cameraderie I used to feel whenever I'd be out driving at four in the morning in the rain and I'd pass some other lonely pair of headlights going the opposite direction. It was the strongest sense of understanding I've ever felt. There is nothing like that here--nowhere for the rain dogs to congregate.
It is a difficult thing, being poor in Sweden. The country hasn't had a real underclass for fifty years, so there are none of the poor blue-collar areas you find in the United States, where Wal-Marts and convenience stores and other places with linoleum floors your feet stick to are open all the time, and you can always find a dive bar where desperate people sit around packing themselves full of depressants. There is nothing like that here--incomes are relatively high, so prices are high, and there is virtually no market for secondhand or used goods.
Should you ever find yourself in such a position, you can do no better than to seek out a Pole. The Poles know how to deal with poverty, and a Polish guy will be happy to teach you useful things, like how to layer newspaper between the lining of your coat to keep the wind from slicing you apart. You just have to remember to take it out and throw it away when you've been out in the rain.
Can you imagine this sort of life? Try.
Your biggest worry is your shoes. You only have the one pair, and replacing them would cost about two weeks worth of food. But you walk everywhere, since you are unwilling and unable to pay for the bus--and you're usually out later than the busses run anyway. You probably walk between six and eight miles a day, and since the snow a month ago, the world is covered in gravel which packs itself between the treads of your shoes and sets about tearing them apart. It is only a matter of time until the wet and the cold and the wear and the gravel tear your shoes to shreds--after all, you bought them three years ago in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. You're lucky you've gotten this far on them.
Your life consists of a stable routine. You eat when you wake up, because you wake up hungry. You slouch through the day, reading or sitting through classes, and get home in the early evening. By then your stomach sounds like the bassoon section of an orchestra tuning up, but you wait three more hours to cook your dinner because the kitchen will be full of Swedes skilling down the winding sentences of their slaaloming language, banging pots around and making noise, most of it directed at mocking you for the austerity of your meals. You eat slowly, trying to make it last, trying to fill your stomach at the last possible moment so that the full feeling will last until you go to sleep.
It never does, though, and it doesn't help that you've always been a bad sleeping person anyway. You've come to pride yourself on your self-discipline, though, the strength to make yourself stay in bed and continue reading when you get those grasping, growling hungers--this is how you sharpen yourself against the world.
You're tied to a cruel, damaged woman and your relationship is structured like the Cold War: two intractable opponents fighting bitter hidden skirmishes and staring each other down over an emotional wall of your own construction--your entire relationship is predicated on the principle of mutual assured destruction. You probably couldn't get out if you wanted to, but you feel that same strange loyalty to the misery it causes you that everyone feels to times of unhappiness: that it is where you truly belong.
Your thoughts and pleasures and company lie chiefly with dead men. You spend most of your time reading and thinking and writing about what they did and why; you come to know them like fixtures in your room or little landmarks you pass when you walk home.
In a certain manner, you collect them. You feel a strong affinity for those who tried and failed mainly through the intervention of forces far greater than they. After your walks, when you are tired of reading, you sit in front of the remorseless computer screen and write a story which you thought was breathtakingly original until you read Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things. You have populated it with these sad historical failures; you have breathed life back into them, into Kerensky and Cataline, into Kurt Eisner and Odovacer, even into Enver Pasha, brought them all back into a dying nighttime world to struggle and fail all over again. It is the way of things.
It is virtually impossible to go out socially--bus tickets (as people will think you unspeakably strange for walking home at 1:30 in the morning) and entry fees and alcohol tax means you cannot go out and have a couple beers on less than forty dollars. Still, though, there are some clean, well-lighted places you can go.


Johanna's is probably your best bet. They're open till three on weekends, and you can sit inside where its warm and full of unhappy old Asian women making hot dogs.




There are other pizza joints, and they are good, but they close at ten. Lilla Huset serves midget beer. For some reason, all Swedes must eat a small salad consisting entirely of sliced cabbage prior to eating any pizza.



This is the convenience store at the bottom of building 8. They're open till midnight and have a decent selection of decent things. The Turkish owner speaks English and will help you figure out the Swedish menus on your phone.



The Rosa Pantern is the only place in the city that's open twenty-four hours. It's all the way downtown, a good three miles from Flogsta, but it's your only option. I may be the only person in Sweden who knows about it, and I'm considering trying to get a job there from midnight till eight in the morning. Become the curator of my own clean, well-lighted place.


What I'm Reading
Charles Kupchan, The End of the American Era
Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations
Jonathan Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China
Mehrdad Haghayeghi, Islam and Politics in Central Asia