Swings

Eugene Navakas

I zipped the tent shut and fell asleep.

Which was prohibited, which I didn’t realize.

Which was unfortunate, because, according to Google’s translation of the website, “there may be a slight gas seepage from the underground in the area.”

Not sure how I missed that.

When you move to Denmark, there’s a list of eternally recurring Themes: trust, taxes, d’s that sound like l’s at Mardi Gras. Sometimes, though, it’s the smaller things.

* * *

The troll who shook me awake spoke Danish, rumbling and frank like a cannonade. 

Har du det godt?

His eyes were wide and black as plums, their expression cautious. His boxy, weathered-wood head was the size of a state-fair hog and a foot away.

“Jesus!” I shot backwards, smack into a tree trunk.

Har du det godt? Jeg skal på arbejde.

My own mediocre Danish spluttered to life. 

“I, uh⎯ Engelsk? Taler du engelsk?”

The wide, black plums gazed back at me. A breeze curled past his ear, filling the cramped space with the scent of shipwreck, wet weeds.   

Ja, du har det okay. Vi ses, amerikansk. Jeg skal på arbejde.

“Arbejde? Work? You’re going to work? What work? No, hey⎯ Wait!”

But by the time I scrambled to my feet and out of the tent, the troll was gone. Cavernous muddy footprints tracked up the hill into the woods.

* * *

I strapped my pack to my shoulders and blinked, taking stock. 

Body, stiff but functional, as expected after a night outdoors. Brain, same, though increasingly uneasy as it recalled the weight of the burden it fell asleep to ignore. Old home, loved, ruinously fractured. New home, lush, yet barbed with compromise, let alone the ache of having left behind, of feeling like a fugitive. Clearly that should be my focus. My wife, back at the hotel, similarly stuck. This troll business should be crunched into a weathered-wood ball and stuffed back in the shadows where it belonged. 

I looked downhill toward the water. Slate and clouded, doubling the sky. A hundred yards out, a salting of swans. Sea swans, bobbing in a flock. I’d never seen such a thing. The cemetery we used to walk on weekends, back in Ohio, had three floating around a fountained, mausoleum-girt pond. My parents’ condo, near Chicago, actually paid a service to ship swans in, like homesick retirees, from Florida each spring. This felt different.

Everything felt different. Our friends, our families, mercilessly reduced to calendar appointments, wan faces on lagging laptops. The world at large, drunk on its own collapse, poisoned by fumes of greed and stupid self-regard. And yet what were we doing about it? What was I even trying to do? Camping on a trash island, alone. 

Alone?

I turned back toward the hill, looking up over wavy grass toward a ridge of trees. The troll’s muddy prints were still there⎯still huge, still flouting my best effort to compartmentalize.

Something fluttered at the edge of my vision. Riffling, bright.

At the base of the tree where I’d camped, two swans now preened. Enormous. Regal.

Much more terrifying, up close, than a reasonable person would prefer.

The taller one unfurled its wings, craned its neck, and stared me dead in the eye. Then, sternly, pretty clearly running out of patience, it pointed.

* * *

The swans trailed behind as I followed the troll’s tracks up the hill through the tall, stringy grass. Not too far behind, though. My pulse thumped with the incline, and whenever I paused to catch my wind, it wasn’t more than a second before the smaller bird started nipping at my jacket, jostling the backs of my knees, hustling me forward.

I wasn’t exactly at my best, and it was annoying.

“Hey,” I said, thrusting out an arm in half-protest, half-defense, despite the fact that I was already folding over, sucking air, hands on thighs.

The swans stood side by side, silent, gazing back like the troll.

“Hey. Please, just a minute.”

Unlike the troll, they didn’t speak. Good thing, because my heart and lungs were still in furious rebellion at the rest of my body’s attempt to straighten up.  

The smaller one stretched out its neck and started padding toward me.

“Okay, okay. I am trying.”

Truth be told, it was a relief not to have a choice. I’d had enough of choice. Do we move? Do we stay? Are we cowards? Refugees? Opportunists? What good is choice, when it isn’t clear what the answer to any of these questions is actually accomplishing?

* * *

As we approached the edge of the woods, the path wound over a sturdy stone bridge. No water, no toll collector, just a rent in the flank of the hill.

I thought of Denmark’s other bridges. The Little Belts. The Great Belt. The Øresund. It’s a country of islands, and the Danes were rightfully proud of the ways they’d employed modern engineering, if not to harness, at least to strike a wary peace with nature. This island was a perfect example. What began in the late-eighteenth century as an isthmus overflow from the excavation of Odense Canal, in 1967 bloomed into the present garbage mountain as the modern city enthusiastically accelerated the dumping of its waste straight into the fjord. Sixty years and a thick layer of topsoil later, that same city had virtuously repurposed this garbage mountain as a recreational park and wildlife refuge. Nature said no, the Danes said, maybe?, but then, to their genuine credit, they mended their error and mooted a compromise solution. Just, “there may be a slight gas seepage from the underground in the area.”

Aha! Right. There it was. My runaway translation, buried under two centuries’ waste. A footnote to a footnote. No wonder I’d missed it.

The smaller swan nipped at my elbow again, testy, and I lurched forward, stumbling a little now through the muddy tracks over the bridge’s rough rock.

There was even a small bridge onto the trash island itself, I remembered. The one I’d crossed after my long walk from our hotel downtown to reach the island in the first place. I’d learned somewhere, speaking of the fumes of greed and stupid self-regard, that it had actually been the site of a famous act of Danish resistance during the Nazi occupation of World War II. Three groups of Danish resisters, twelve machine guns among them, set explosives there to obstruct a meeting between a group of Danish collaborators and their German counterparts. When the collaborators were in fact found in the presence of nearly a hundred heavily armed SS troops, each possessed of his own ready machine gun, the resisters’ plan promptly shifted from attack to flight. I didn’t know what to make of this episode’s denouement, which involved lots of shooting, more panicked diving into Odense Canal, and the eventual loss of fifteen bicycles, but I was pretty well disposed, given the current state of the world, to judge it a massive victory. Fuck those Nazis and their informants. It was a war, for god’s sake, not a single, vacuum-sealed battle. They had to start somewhere. Do something.

Goddammit, something really was off with my breathing. I flailed blindly at the bird again chewing on my elbow, only to get checked⎯oof⎯to my knees by its burlier companion. I tried and thoroughly failed to focus on my surroundings. 

Nip, nip, flail. Check, again. Oof. Their silence was starting to feel like a provocation. 

“Come on. Can you just⎯? I need a rest.”

I’d lost sense of time, so deep in the woods. The trees were tall and thick and interwoven, their canopies knit blankets, Faroese fishermen’s sweaters.

Jostle, jostle. Again I struggled back to my feet, this time with the swans’ aid, alarmingly unsteady. Rubbed my nose and came away spinning, with a smear. Sticky, wet.

Were those sparks up ahead? A campfire, maybe? The giant birds were fully carrying me now, stretchered, snow-white wings stiff and splayed.

* * *

The swans deposited me beside what was in fact a campfire. I was having a hard time raising my head, but I could tell we’d reached a clearing. Not, to be sure, that I understood quite what that meant. If anything, the light congealed more viscously there.

The birds retreated, discreet, and were replaced by a looming pair of human faces. Fifties-ish, male and female. Recent homemade haircuts.

“Oh! Har du det godt?” said the woman. “Jeg tror, du har det ikke så godt.”

Christ. I didn’t know how much more of this I could take. 

“Engelsk? Tak?” I pleaded, though I could barely hear my own voice.

“To sekunder.”

The heads disappeared, I felt an abrupt, vertiginous wobble, and then suddenly I was propped up, seated against a log, one swan on each side, solicitous.

“Here,” the man said, offering a thermos. “Drink. English is fine.”

It was toasty and spiced, alcoholic enough to judder me to attention. 

“Whoa.”

“Mayhap just a toot to start,” the man said, reclaiming the bottle. “You know what they say about going dram for dram with Scandinavians.”

I wondered, hazily, if I was at risk of reaching some sort of Nordic-cliché event horizon. Trolls, swans, drunk jokes. Honestly, what in the.

The man rejoined the woman atop a log a few feet from my own. Their rain shells and hiking shoes were on-trend, mid-cost, and assiduously maintained.

Event horizon, hell. I let the swell carry me, torpedoes be damned.

“So,” said the man. “You look like a reader.”

“What?” I said, already faltering.

“Hans Christian Andersen, history, the local hits.”

“I bet you’ve watched all our nice murder dramas, too,” said the woman.

I sat up straighter. Shifted in place to take a quick, stabilizing look at the swans.

“Sometimes what happens,” the woman continued equably, “is that all that reading and watching can do the opposite of what it’s meant.” She smiled at the man.

“Instead of helping us understand,” he continued seamlessly, as if this were a topic they revisited every day, “all that second-hand info can really paralyze.” He glanced over at each of the swans himself, and I swear to god they fucking looked like they agreed. “Literally paralyze, I mean. Muck up the works. Prevent from doing.”

“Mm-hmm,” I said, now fully adrift.

“Yes! Especially today. The world is poisoned, you know. Greed. Stupid self-regard.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, beginning to sense the presence of a critical but worryingly elusive question. “What?” My memory was an echo, resonant, diffuse.    

“The very same world,” persisted the woman, “in which someone and his lady wife just moved to Denmark. Where everything feels, how shall we say, different.”

My head must have started to loll or something⎯I could definitely feel a trickle of drool inch toward my chin⎯because before I knew it I was taking another sip from their thermos. The man returned to their log and nodded to the woman to proceed.

“Well, anyway,” she said. “I think it’s time you heard about the cows, the spring, and the medium-security prison. What do you think, friend?”

* * *

Thinking wasn’t so easy as the four of them drew me forward, the man and woman fore and aft, the swans at my sides, their wings my yawing bed. The man rationed the last drops from the thermos. “Just a toot, now, just a toot. Don’t drink up the fjord.”

We were deeper in the woods than ever, the air so dense and lightless I almost thought I’d fallen asleep. Had I fallen asleep? The squelch of the man and woman’s mid-cost hiking shoes in the troll’s muddy wake swaddled me, rocked my brain back to spring.

Danish cows, the woman had said, have a difficult time in the winter. Their bedding is warm, but their pens dark, their activity constrained, for months over. It’s too cold, too frankly dangerous, for them to live their ordinary lives outdoors. I’d heard of this, actually, read it recently somewhere, but I hardly had the strength to say so. I tried to concentrate, woozy, freely bleeding from the nose, as she described how wonderful it was, once the season warmed, when the cows were reintroduced to their familiar fields. When the gates of their pens were unlatched, doors flung open to the sun, they would leap and prance, their joy so full that families gathered from across the whole island to laugh and share in it. 

But that wasn’t the point, she said. However hygge it may be to witness the glee of those freed animals, well, it was we, she reminded me, who had locked them up. For their own good, sure. Can’t have fields of frozen cattle! But how much credit, really, can a man take for pulling his own head out of the toilet after a fire alarm, no matter how pleasant it might feel? I wasn’t entirely certain about this analogy. But the next thing she said lingered⎯even now, squelching, prone and bleeding, through the undergrowth.

The part I hadn’t heard, hadn’t read before, was that the best place to watch the Danish cows frolic into spring was at a nearby medium-security prison. Here, quite contrary to brutal American expectation, the inmates devoted their precious winter labor-hours to caring for these cows. Here, when spring arrived, they would help them to the wide-swinging gates, and so their joy at the cows’ release would be nearly equal to the immeasurable joy of the cows themselves.

This was almost too much to bear. But who helped the prisoners? Weren’t their heads still unjustly in the toilet? My mind wheeled, magnetic, back toward collapse, greed, stupid self-regard. My wife, still stuck, still back at the hotel. Our move⎯escape? ⎯to this rich, stern island whose every treasure sparkled, wisp-like, beyond my reach.

With a jolt, I felt the bier, our weird procession, halt.

It took everything I had just to open my eyes.

We were no longer in the trees. The sky above blazed with pinks and oranges and yellows and searing purple-reds. A weathered-wood head the size of a state-fair hog gazed back at me, a foot away, from eyes wide and black as plums.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said.

Come. See, said the troll, now in Nordicly immaculate English. It’s golden hour. They’re shooting a nice murder drama over by the swings.

* * *

The troll leaned me up against a bench at the edge of a large, mown recreation area. We were at the peak of the trash mountain, facing out and down toward a pastel kaleidoscope of sea. There was a set of swings, also ahead, also facing the water.

Something unsettling was happening with my vision. A dark smoke kept creeping in from the corners, countermanding the sky’s virtuosic display.

The man somehow understood this and returned with his thermos, dropping lithely to one knee. After putting the thermos to my mouth, watching me swallow, he then turned it upside down and shook, demonstrating there would be no further healing drops to drink. Then he sat beside me, next to the woman, who had clearly been exchanging glances with the swans, on my other side, concerned, hoping I wouldn’t notice. The troll, behind us all, raised a hefty arm in the direction of the sunset-blistered swings.

A few yards to their left, a silent scene unfolded within half a fairy-circle of men and women holding cameras, radios, boom microphones. “Action!” we heard, quite loud, but then the rest occurred, distinct yet muted, as if in pantomime.

A man and woman in police uniform grappled, the man on top first, then the woman. The man escaped and fled, but the woman followed, her own steps tracked by the shifting fairy circle, until she reached him at the swings. Again they grappled, this time first the woman on top, and then the man. Crack! A gunshot? The man stayed on the ground, prone, then soon the woman rose, stumbling, distressed, until she steadied herself, sat, and swung, swung, swung, staring out at the sea. She moved no further, just swung and stared, out at the blazing water. I couldn’t tell from the distance, but I think she wore a fisherman’s sweater.

I turned back toward the troll, and he lowered his weathered-wood head.

“Is this your work?” I said. “Watching murder dramas?”

For the first time the wide, black plums gazed back at me pityingly, as if I suffered from some injury. Then he shook his head and nodded toward the swings.

Wait.

The actors had vanished, the fairy circle broken and dispersed. What little crew remained was efficiently loading gear into the backs of trucks. Golden hour dissolving, only a sliver of red glow remained, softening the sea like a sigh.

Another moment, and the trucks, too, left.

The troll stood, unfolding, creaking up to his full, colossal height.

Now.

It was a whisper, but also a secret, a secret everyone else already knew.

All around, from every nook and shadow in the spreading dark, emerged strange figures. Stout, four-legged rams taller than the man and woman. Metallic things, clinking and angular, like the bones of prodigious tents, the rescued masts of ships. Smaller trolls, still huge, hooting and silly, like children. The swans, too, even the man and woman themselves, looked back at me with kindness, then joined the giddy parade. All of these figures, all but me and the troll, rushed toward the swings as the red glow dimmed.

“Is this your work?” I said. “Watching them all play?”

A hay-bale of a creature, green like a gourd, reached the swingset first. It hopped uncertainly before it, as swiftly the light continued to fade.

Again the wide, black plums gazed back at me pityingly.

Then again the troll stood, again creaking up to his full, colossal height. One more glance back⎯a grin? ⎯and he too ran, the trash-earth echo-thundering beneath him, toward the swings.

That was when I knew the final drops from the man and woman’s thermos had lost their potency. I tried to rise, tried frantically to follow the troll toward our companions, but the dark smoke overpowered me, filled my vision completely. The universe itself began to shudder, itself to fill, like the eye of a storm, with harsh, disorientingly distant sound.

Hey! Hey you! 

The shudder grew into a quake, a bruising, nauseous crash upon crash upon crash.

Hey! Wake up!

I saw a face. A haggard face, unkempt, panicked. Inches away, inside my tent.

Yes. Yes! Good!  I’ve called emergency services, but I can’t stay. They’ll blame me, make problems for my asylum, my visa. Please. Please! Stay awake!

But then there I was again, confoundingly, flopped back against my bench, gazing over the mown grass toward the swings. Had the man and woman found more drink? No, they were still far away, with the swans, with all those other creatures. With the gourd-green hay-bale, now no longer hopping, uncertain, but actually on the swings. With the troll pushing, urging it higher and higher, laughing, booming, as the hay-bale, too, laughed.

No, please! Open your eyes. Please! Help me. You’re too heavy.

I was forgetting something again, I knew it. It was so close, so⎯ Was it Denmark? Home? Where even was that? Where was my wife?

The light had almost gone now, the spindliest blue glimmer at the rim of the fjord.

Even the troll was guiding the swings more gently, the joy of their occupants still glittering, palpable, but no less obviously diminishing.

The dark smoke drew in and out again, a drowning tide. The harsh, distant voice of the haggard face shook, straining with brutal clarity, sinking again into sludge.

What had I forgotten? What was it, so vital, that I needed to do?

For a sudden, gasping blink, the smoke-tide cleared, and again I glimpsed the troll across the grass, pushing the swing, pushing, pushing, as the others rejoiced.

His giant, weathered-wood head turned back in my direction, and I swear, I truly swear, below the wide, black plums, I saw that weathered-wood head smile.     

 But then he too was gone. The day was fading, and the black, the black kept falling. In the end, the only light left was a comet, a slashing grain of sea-swan salt.

And so finally⎯truly finally, sight clouded, breath thin; limbs leaden, red cells braking, clotting arteries and veins ⎯ finally, despite myself, I learned to fight. 

Alone, stretched flat on dew-sogged grass beside a crumpled, unzipped tent, the keen of sirens flushing shorebirds from the scrub, I fought for my life. I laid sod over stinking trash. Returned machine-gun fire, spilling off my bike, splashing into seawater. Flung open gates and howled with pleasure as wild-eyed cattle shimmied and pawed and mooed the sun. I shoved the darkness back, for once untroubled by the certainty of limitation. I pushed, ferocious, not only for myself, but for my wife, my family, my friends. For those I loved, but not just those I loved, either. I smiled back at the wide, black plums, the weathered-wood head, the careening, dizzy golden-hour swings, and pushed and pushed and pushed again, my rattling wheeze the only gift remaining to be given. I wish I knew it would be enough.