June 27
On the last day of the residency, there’s a public presentation where the artists talk about what we’ve been working on for the last month. Just before things kick off, it starts pouring rain, so no one shows up except a few soggy staff members and an old guy who was actually looking for the Toy Museum.
Marko from Croatia screens an animated movie he made with old postcards he found at one of the flea markets in town. Tomasz from Poland shows slides of his re-creation of a prison cell at Guantanamo. Since S has already skipped town, it’s up to me to demonstrate the Public Address Protest Amplifier (PAPA). I position a megaphone on one side of the room and my laptop on the other. Then I ask if anyone wants to give it a try. Marko volunteers.
“Putin is an asshole,” he types on the laptop.
“Putin is an asshole,” the megaphone croaks a few seconds later.
Everyone claps.
An hour later, I’m on the high speed train to Turku. It’s the first part of my complicated land/sea journey to France: Helsinki to Turku to Stockholm to Hamburg to Paris. An LED monitor at the end of the car indicates our speed. 140 km/h, last I looked. I’ve come across these speedometers on European trains before. I don’t know if they’re there for the benefit of the passengers, or if they’re just a way for the train companies to show off how speedy their trains are. You don’t find speedometers on most passenger trains in the U.S. The speed of the train isn’t something Amtrak is generally eager to advertise. Like a herpes sore on your lip or snot hanging out of your nose, the glacial speed of an Amtrak train is something everyone is painfully aware of but pretends not to notice.
I spend the night in a hostel in Turku. I share the room with an American kid from Minnesota who has relatives in Finland. He tells me his great grandparents moved to the U.S. during the “Great Migration” in the early 20th century when tens of thousands of Finns emigrated to the New World: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, mostly. Back then, Duluth was known as the Helsinki of America, he tells me.
My roommate has taken the ferry to Sweden before. He says the Silja ferries are known for luxury, while the big red Viking ferries have a rep as party boats. It turns out the kid doesn’t know what he’s talking about. My ferry, the Silja Galaxy, has all the luxury of a dive bar on a Sunday morning: sticky floors, ashtrays full of butts, and the lingering bouquet of stale cigarette smoke and beer barf. Apparently, the night crossing from Stockholm to Turku is a real booze cruise.
It’s a ten hour haul to Sweden. I spend my time walking laps around the ferry, drifting through the buffet restaurants and the bars, loitering in front of the Galaga machine in the game room. Physicists insist that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. But I wonder if there’s a theory about how slow things can travel, like: nothing can travel slower than the ferry from Finland to Sweden.
When we finally dock in Stockholm, I make my way to the train station. The place is packed. People speaking Swedish elbow past people speaking Danish. German speakers cut in front of me in the ticket line, and a Norwegian speaker runs over my foot with her roller bag. A dozen different languages bump and jostle on the platform. I find my place in a six-person sleeper. Then the six of us stack ourselves horizontally like lumber on a flatcar.
Things go okay till Hamburg. My train arrives late. I didn’t think German trains ran late. I feel shaken. I mean, if the punctuality of German trains is a myth, what other lies is my sense of reality based on?
Because the train is late, I miss my connection, which consigns me to an all-night hell of slow local trains to Paris. I spend the night slipping in and out of dreams and railroad stations. There’s a transfer in Köln at 2AM. It’s Friday night, and the station is full of drunk kids roaming the corridors in noisy packs. I drag my roller bag through the station, racking up more miles on the thing. It occurs to me that a roller bag should have an odometer. Something to keep track of how many miles you’ve gone since you packed your bag and rolled out into the world.
The train to Frankfurt is empty because who takes a train to Frankfurt at 3AM on a Saturday morning? I try to stay awake, but it’s no use. My eyes snap open just as we pull into the station. The train shed arches overhead, so vast and high that it’s like the sky up there, ribbed with steel beams and pieced together with panes of glass. Behind that sky is another sky, higher up and full of stars.