Luntmakargatan

The man was in a private room at the Sakura Karaoke Bar on Luntmakargatan. “Hotel California” was next on the list. The man watched the title blink on the small television screen. Behind the title, cherry blossoms bloomed in time-lapse. The man had promised his colleagues, who had taken him to the Sakura Karaoke Bar to celebrate his retirement, that he would sing “Hotel California” before the end of the night. That time had come. The man was the only one at the office who had been to California, where the company they all worked for had its headquarters. He was there for a managerial training course a year before.

When the course was over, the man stayed for two weeks. It was his first time in the United States. He rented a car and drove, alone, from Los Angeles to San Francisco on Highway 1, which is a highway that everyone he met at the course told him he should drive. It was very beautiful, but the driving was slow. In San Luis Obispo, the man met a younger man (a boy, really, not more than twenty) with whom he spent the night. The man knew the younger man would ask for money eventually. He told himself, with every sip of his drink or look at the younger man, that he was on vacation and deserved this. The man had difficulty understanding what the younger man was saying in the loud bar. The bar was on Chorro Street, not far from Mission San Luis Obispo. The man remembers the broad white walls of the Mission, yellow in the streetlights as he and the younger man walked past it to a motel. They did not hold hands. From the window of the room, there was a view of Highway 1. The younger man undressed and the man watched this and also the headlights that flashed in through the gap between the wall and the thick floral-patterned curtains he had drawn immediately after entering the room.

When it was over, the man lay awake and listened to the younger man snore beside him. The man looked at the way the soft skin of the younger man’s chest rose and fell, and he thought of retirement. The man had only a year left at his job. His summer cottage needed a coat of paint. That winter a water pipe froze and burst. The man would need to fix this before he could comfortably spend as much time at the cottage as he planned. There was also the question of the window frame in the back room that had swelled and shrunk with the seasons so many times that there was now a sizable gap between the frame and the sill. The man suspected this was costing him a lot of money in wasted heat. The next morning, he woke up to an empty bed. He had expected this, but it did not please him. A piece of yellow paper had been ripped out of a brochure for wine tasting on the central coast (the man disliked wine), and was on top of the man’s wallet, two of the ripped edges beginning to curl up in the heat. On the piece of paper, the younger man had written: “I took 200. Thanks.” Under these words, the young man had drawn a small heart. The man counted the cash in his wallet and found that the young man was telling the truth. It was just before nine. Though the man understood this was part of the fantasy the younger man had been selling, the man was disappointed that the younger man was lying when he promised to take the man to two necessary sites in San Francisco. That is what the young man had called them, necessary. He listed them in this order: the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz. These both seemed to the man to be obvious choices. The more he thought of it, and the further he drove from the younger man, he suspected that the younger man was not as familiar with San Francisco as he claimed. If the man had said he was going to Los Angeles or Sacramento, no doubt the younger man would have promised to show him the sites in these cities, too. The man showered and dressed and then made the bed, pulling the top sheet tight across the yellowed bottom sheet and tucking the comforter in between the bed and the wall. The pillows were uneven lumps. He looked at the bed and knew that the housekeeper would have to undo his work, but making the bed was a habit the man could not break. He checked out early.

Over a cup of coffee from a McDonald’s, the man watched two pigeons fight over a hamburger wrapper in the parking lot. Then he drove north. This time he took 101. He passed through cities with names like Atascadero and Paso Robles. He pronounced the name of each city aloud as he passed. The man did not know if he was saying the words correctly. By that afternoon, he was in San Francisco. He checked into the Holiday Inn on Van Ness, and requested a room on the top floor. From his room, the man could see the Bay and the blinking red lights on the towers of the Bay Bridge, which he mistakenly assumed was the Golden Gate. He ate dinner at the restaurant bar. The halibut was dry. The bartender claimed it was caught that afternoon, but the man did not believe this. He avoided looking at the other guests.

In the morning, he took a ferry to Alcatraz for the tour. He saw the barracks and admired a dilapidated water tower. Ivy grew up its trellis and over the rusted supports and into the rotting wooden base of the tank. The man thought this was beautiful. Wind blew. There was a whole city on Alcatraz, abandoned to disuse and decay. The man walked past foundations and former garden plots and two rusting kitchen chairs resting on their backs at the foot of a thick bush. Inside the prison, the man volunteered to demonstrate captivity for the group. He was joined in the cell by a nervous woman from Salinas named Melanie, whose daughter had pushed her forward when the tour guide asked for volunteers. The two of them entered the cell and turned to face the group. The tour guide asked the man where he was from. The man said, “Stockholm.” And then added, “In Sweden.” The cell door rolled into place. The tour guide told the group to imagine what life would have been like for the prisoners. “This is no Salinas,” the guide said. “No Stockholm.” The man held a cell bar in each of his hands. They were cold and rough. On the back wall of the cell were two small holes through which two prisoners had once escaped. The man wondered why the prisoners had not concentrated on a single hole, halved their time. He did not ask, but wishes now he had. The tour guide recited a brief explanation of how the prisoners dug the holes and concealed them from the prison guards. When this part of the tour was over, the tour guide made a big show of setting the man and the woman free from jail. “Melanie,” he said, and smiled at the group. “You served your time.” The tour guide then turned to the man. “Stockholm,” he said. “You are rehabilitated.” The tour guide then pulled a lever at the end of the block of cells and the door opened. When the man stepped free from the cell, the tour guide leaned forward and whispered, “I’m sorry. I forgot your name.”

On the ferry back to Pier 33, Melanie approached the man. Her daughter was behind her, nodding her head in an encouraging way. “Hello,” Melanie said to the man. She took a seat beside the man and held out her hand for him to shake. The man took her hand, shook it and said his first and last names with an Anglicized pronunciation. He thought this would make it easier for Melanie to understand him. She said the man’s name back to him. “We were locked up together,” she said.

“Yes,” said the man. Melanie appeared not to have planned what to say after this. She sat and looked at her shoes. This made the man uncomfortable, so he asked her what her plans for the rest of the day were. Outside, the whitecaps stretched across the bay. There was a thick fog sitting beyond the bridge. He now understood which bridge this was. The man watched to see if he could see the fog move. He felt cold.

“Forbe’s Island,” Melanie said. “I saw a program about it and have always wanted to see it. Do you know what it is?”

The man said that he did not.

“It’s a house boat, or more of a barge, really,” Melanie said. “I don’t know. It’s a floating island. There’s a restaurant there.” Through a window on the port side of the ferry, the man watched a woman’s hair blow wildly in the wind.

The ferry landed. Melanie and her daughter disembarked before the man. They were waiting for him when he got off the boat. The wind was blowing. “My daughter is going back to our hotel to do some school work,” Melanie said. “I was thinking a glass of wine at Forbe’s sounded pretty good about now. Care to join me?”

After a brief goodbye to Melanie’s daughter, the man found himself walking slowly along the busy and wide sidewalk of The Embarcadero.

“There used to be sea lions here,” Melanie said. They had come to Pier 39. Even in the late afternoon it was busy with tourists and traffic. The man disliked crowds. “But they’re all gone now for some reason. The guide on our tour told us yesterday.”

At Forbe’s Island they ordered drinks and went to the edge of one of the sand patios. Behind them a palm tree rustled in the wind. They watched the fog. Ferryboats made their way back to the city from Angel Island and Alcatraz. In the far distance, the man counted at least a dozen sailboats near the mouth of Belvedere Cove. Melanie touched the man’s shoulder.

Because the man was too polite to come up with a reasonable excuse not to stretch a glass of wine into a meal, they ate together in the sub-aquatic dining room. The man watched the green water outside the window above their table and tried not to think about being submersed. Melanie was divorced and with her daughter had been visiting colleges in San Francisco, where her daughter wanted to go to school. This was their last day in the city. She wasn’t really from Salinas, but it was the first city that came to mind when the tour guide asked. Melanie asked if the bar at his hotel was nice. She asked what the view was like from his room. She leaned close to the man across the table, and she mirrored his arm movements. She told him she was lonely, which was more or less true. The man understood. To each of her questions, he answered honestly and briefly. He told her about his job, about his plans for retirement, about his trip to California so far, though he was careful to leave out San Luis Obispo altogether. He told her about how in middle school he lost the tip of his left index finger to frostbite. His class was orienteering and the man, who was a boy then, missed one of the control points near the end of the course and wandered into the thick forest until he reached a farm house about five kilometers from where he started, and was rescued. The man thought the story spoke to his carelessness, so he rarely told it. But at Forbes Island, he felt it might somehow dissuade Melanie from her pursuit. It did not. She asked to see his finger, and the man showed her. She took it between two of her fingers and squeezed. Then she turned her head side to side, examining the stub from every angle. The man watched her do this. There was really nothing remarkable about the missing finger. It looked like a normal finger, only a little shorter and lacking a fingernail.

“Do you have phantom limb syndrome?” Melanie asked. The man did not know what this was and said so. “It’s when,” she said, “you can feel a part of you that is not there.” The man said he had never felt anything like that, but he knew by the way she described the phenomenon what she meant. He pulled his hand from hers. The man paid the bill, although Melanie offered to help. “It’s unseasonably warm,” she told the man outside. “The weather report this morning on the news said so. ‘Unseasonably warm’ is a strange expression, don’t you think? It’s summer. It’s supposed to be warm.”

“Yes,” said the man. They crossed The Embarcadero and walked several blocks into North Beach, finally catching a cab on Columbus not far from Washington Square Park, which Melanie pointed out as they passed. “You know your way around,” the man said. This embarrassed Melanie a little, but the man did not know English well enough to know why. At the hotel, Melanie suggested they have a nightcap. “Something for the road,” she said. “Unless?”

The man led Melanie into the bar, where they found a table near the television. The Giants, she explained while turning the pages of the cocktail menu, were playing the Dodgers. “It’s a great rivalry.”

“I see,” said the man. When they had ordered something to drink, the man excused himself to use the restroom. He left the bar and entered the lobby, where he turned and looked back at Melanie in the bar. She sipped her drink through a straw and watched the baseball game. The man was suddenly very tired and wanted nothing more than to go home. He took the elevator back to his floor and entered his room and locked the door behind him. He did not answer the phone when it rang, and he did not come to the door when someone knocked on it. He lay on the bed in the dark room and waited, instead, until he fell asleep. In the morning, he again checked out early and drove back to Los Angeles, where he stayed, uneventfully, for the rest of his trip.

The waitress at the Sakura Karaoke Bar brought another round of sake and Chinese beer. She knocked before entering. The room they were in was warm, and when the thick glass door was opened, cold air rushed in and the man felt this on his face. He was holding the microphone, waiting for the song to start. The waitress set the bottles on the table, gave a shallow bow and backed out of the room. One of the man’s colleagues pressed the play button on the console below the television. “Hotel California” began to play over the tinny speakers. The man sang along for the first few bars. But soon, he found himself thinking of the younger man standing, naked, before the floral curtains in the motel in San Luis Obispo. He tried to remember if he had ever looked like that to anyone. Then he thought of Melanie, alone in the hotel bar, and wondered if he had ever looked like that to anyone. The song kept going and the man tried to follow, but he did not know what word would come next or how he would find it.