“Well, that’s your face.”
Over breakfast, I relayed what I saw, and Damon asked me how I knew what a prolapsed anus looked like. And so I had to explain how I had stumbled upon some photos of them a year or so ago during an innocent Google search. Well, maybe not completely innocent. I had been looking for images of Jon Hamm in tight pants.
“Wait,” Damon said. “Why were you searching for pictures of Jon Hamm in tight pants?”
“I was curious about the Hammaconda, obvi. But will you please let me finish?” You see, I continued, Jon Hamm stars in Mad Men, which is about an ad agency in the sixties, and Darren from Bewitched also worked at an ad agency in the sixties, and Darren was constantly derided by his mother-in-law, Endora, played by Agnes Moorehead, who made her on-camera acting debut in Citizen Kane as the mother of Charles Foster Kane, who died thinking about his childhood sled named Rosebud. And if you type “Rosebud” into the search bar, you’ll quickly learn it’s the slang term for an inside-out anal sphincter. And if you’re even slightly curious to see what one of those looks like, you will stumble upon images you can never fully expunge from your brain. Could happen to anyone, really.
The Ted Cruz visions continued and intensified as primary season approached, whipping me into a state of emotional distress. Every time I would turn on the news or engage in social media, there it was: the Satanic Rosebud, throbbing, pulsating, taunting and mocking me, threatening to swallow this great nation down its thorny gullet into a stinking pit of venomous bile. God was obviously speaking directly to me, but I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was a sign, I figured, a sign to get as far away as possible. So I booked us a weeklong trip to Stockholm, reasoning that if Cruz were elected president of the United States, we could move there for four or—heaven forbid—eight years. No big deal. On paper Sweden seemed like the perfect place for us. Its people, for the most part, speak English, are immaculately clean, and appreciate a cute outfit from H&M. That’s pretty much me in a nutshell. We would go in mid-June for the summer solstice, I decided. Nineteen hours of sunlight!
On the flight over, Damon flipped through a Stockholm guidebook he had ordered online, pausing occasionally to ask me to remind him again why we might be moving to Sweden.
“Because Ted Cruz is the devil,” I said.
“You’ve mentioned that a few dozen times,” he replied. It was true. “But why can’t we live in Paris? We love Paris. And you’ve been wanting to brush up on your French.”
He was right. My French was very rusty, and I had been talking about enrolling in a two-week French immersion course in the south of France. But to be honest, the thought of actually going through with it gave me a migraine. “I’m getting too old to be fluent,” I said. “The best time to learn a language is during your formative years. I’ve been fully formed for a while now. At this point I’m well into the decay phase.”
“Okay,” Damon said. “How about Sydney? We love Sydney and you’ve been talking about surfing more.”
He was also right about that. The first time I tried surfing, in Hawaii, I turned out to be a little bit of a natural. I stood up on the board on my first attempt, rode a decent-sized wave, and impressed the hell out of my instructor. But to tell you the truth, I wasn’t too surprised. I had been passively training for twenty years on mass transit. If I can’t get a seat on the New York City subway, I stand, like everyone else. But I don’t like touching the pole with my bare hands because, well, cooties. So, I’ll just sort of stand there with my legs bent and my core engaged, and occasionally flail around like one of those inflatable air dancer things they have outside car washes.
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.