Greenland
by Faith Shuker-Haines
(unspellchecked. Sorry)
To Maria, Emily and Io
What if this once happened to us?
And to Stephen King
I’m just trying to be you, man
A mirror reflects a different picture depending on where in the room you’re standing. What does a mirror reflect when there’s nobody in the room to see it?
I remember exactly what drew me to that place that day. I was visiting Tuscany because I was in the area, and of course, wanted to stop by and see all the old places. Needless to say, the town had lost a lot of glamour since my boyhood. What had once been majestic hideaways full of potential and passwords had become simply vacant lots that, quite frankly, smelled really bad. The movie theater had added seven screens and lost any semblance of charm, and Tiny’s Ice Cream was gone. It was, to be blunt, disappointing.
What was funny, though, was how much I had forgotten. I felt as though I hadn’t thought about my childhood in years, and this was not so far from the truth. It was as though the place I had spent so many impressionable years had made absolutely no mark on my mind. This struck me as rather odd. Isn’t a person’s childhood supposed to determine everything about them? Aren’t all of a man’s phobias, psychoses, and needs for medication supposed to be attributable to some problem he faced as a boy? If Tuscany had done anything at all to me, I had no awareness of it.
I stopped at the coffee place, noticing that the name had changed from “Mindy’s Coffee” (How long had it been since I’d thought about Mindy’s?) to “Tuscany Roasters Inc.” I wondered how any business in this tiny town saw fit to call itself “Inc.” The interior was slightly familiar, and the iced cookies brought a wave of nostalgia, though I was the only adult in the place who seemed to be eating one. I looked around for familiar faces, than wondered who exactly I was looking for. I couldn’t remember the names or faces of any of my teachers, and my neighbors had faded into a similar haze of forgotten and irrelevant details. I didn’t think to look around for any of my childhood friends until I’d left the place. I guess I assumed, subconsciously, that either they’d moved away from this nowhere town, or were too changed for me to recognize their adult faces. Not that I remembered their childhood faces either. It was so spooky to me that I couldn’t bring to mind a single person from the first sixteen years of my life, except my family. And nobody recognized me, either. You’d expect that, when a man journeyed back to his boyhood town, his old librarian, or the guy who had once saved him from drowning at the pool or something, would come up and say, “Hey, John, is it? I haven’t seen you in ages!” But no such luck. It was as if this town and I had split off from each other long ago, and no part of me belonged here.
Even the places I was driving past seemed familiar when I saw them, but I knew, somehow, that two days before I would have had no recollection of this playground, that bookstore, this warehouse-turned-artsy-resturant. It wasn’t as though these things were unfamiliar, it was that I hadn’t even tried to recall any of it for my entire adult life. No wonder these things fade. If you never think about something you. . .you lose practice. Memories get buried, impossible to unearth until these things are shoved in your face again. At least that was how I justified it to myself as I was bombarded with things once-forgotten.
Frightening, though, that I hadn’t thought about this place. Why had I blocked it from myself? Was it intentional? Did I have some psychological trauma here that I had convinced myself had never happened? Was my childhood so goddamn boring that I found no need to think about it? I didn’t know.
I drove by the post office, remembering, through a haze, the skateboard tricks I pulled off on those railings, and all the injuries I sustained in the process. But who was I with?
Kit.
Dan.
It was if a bomb had exploded in my brain. Kit and Dan. Who were they? They were the most important people I had ever met. They were everything to me. Had there been any waking hours in my life without them? But, as suddenly as I remembered these pillars of my boyhood, I was filled with an uneasy fear. How could I have forgotten them? The force with which those names had thrust themselves into my consciousness reminded me that I had not even thought about them in. . .how long? And nothing. No Christmas cards, no emails, no photos of newborn babies. They had simply disappeared. How is it possible for a person to go almost thirty years without so much as thinking about his childhood friends? Where had they gone? It was spooky.
But as I drove down these strange, familiar streets, I caught little snippets of things I had forgotten I’d forgotten. Fried dough. Stevie Wonder. Scrabble. These things burst like bubbles in my mind, devoid of any meaning at all. I knew, however, that they were memories I had shared with those people. Barnum and Bailey. Pickle. The Marx Brothers. That one held a little more for me. I remember being the only one willing to be Zeppo. Zeppo. Which ones were the others? Groucho? Chico? Harpo? Wait. I was the fourth. Who was the fourth? Me, Kit, Dan, and. . . I think there was a fourth. Who was he? She?
Earth, air, fire, water.
Yes. There were four.
Who was it? Why couldn’t I remember? Why couldn’t I remember Dan’s face? Kit’s voice? My best friend’s names? How had I gone so long without even giving a passing thought to the first sixteen years of my life? Latin. Bruce Springsteen. Phantom of the Opera. Arthenfeld. What did these memories mean? These movie-flashback frames of consciousness with nothing but fear attached? The Shining. Six Flags. Arthenfeld. What was Arthenfeld? A place. A place in the woods. Athena. Artemis. Arthenfeld.
I remembered it. It was a clearing one of us had found. Who? I didn’t know. But I did recall some of the things we did there. Marx Brothers and Monty Python skits. We wrote stories and had sword fights. We played hide and seek and backgammon. I vaguely remembered carrying a backgammon set through the woods. We hung a tire over a river, once. We told jokes there. Arthenfeld was the place I had grown up. It was a realm of four. Four. Who was he?
I found myself on a familiar dirt road. My throat choked up. I was home. I had driven to the place I had lived as a boy. I didn’t know I even knew how to get there by car. I had never given it a passing thought. I hadn’t even noticed where I was going. Apparently, my subconscious held more than I gave it credit for. There were the sunflowers. They still grew. There was the lighting-struck tree. It was still dead. But its arm pointed into the woods at an odd, crooked, angle. To Arthenfeld. I remembered, now. I parked the car, in a haze. When I opened the door, I staggered backwards. They say that smell is the most powerful of all senses for inducing memories and emotions. I grew up here. I belonged here. I had lived with my wife for almost ten years now, and I had never so much as mentioned Tuscany, Kit, Dan, Arthenfeld. And now I could hardly think of anything else in my life that had mattered so much. I still did not understand why they had run away from me, why some subconscious power had refused to let me remember their existence. And still, this persistent, tugging, vague, memory of a fourth. I had lost my faith in my sanity. I started thinking desperately about my family, wondering if I had had brothers I’d forgotten about. That didn’t seem unlikely to me at this point.
I needed to go back to see Arthenfeld. Maybe it would make me remember the fourth.
North, south, east, west.
The path was almost gone. I knew nobody had been here in years. Then they never found the secret. What secret? I stopped. What was my mind doing to me? What secret? I was being guided through the forest by a ghost of a memory. It was a long walk to the place, but I knew it was there. I never once considered that I was in grave danger of losing myself in the woods. Never imagined that a grown man could lose his way while wandering a route he hadn’t thought about in years, to a place he had named as a boy. I walked on, slacks stabbed by nettles, and then I saw it. A small clearing, grass and dandelions, a patch of treeless sky. I was suddenly flooded with adrenaline. I was terrified, excited, anticipating something. What it was I had no idea, but I needed and wanted to run away from this place, and, of course, I did not. This was it. This was the place. I recognized the stumps and rocks that were our chairs and tables, the roots that had held a million “gnome homes.” But this is not it, some part of my mind kept saying. This is only the beginning of the place. There is so much more here. This is a place of memory, but not a place of power. What was going on? But my instincts had gotten me this far, and I trusted them to know when there was something more to be remembered, something more to be found. Then I saw it. An oak tree, with a rusted string of barbed wire near the base. My heart was beating double-time, and I was tingling with an unexplainable nervous energy. I still tasted the coffee-shop cookie in my mouth. Whatever I was looking for, this tree held the key. I walked closer to the oak, my fear increasing, and I squinted at the trunk, not knowing what I was looking for. There, carved with a Boy Scout knife, were four faint letters, grown around and bark-bulging until they were a part of the tree.
D.
R.
J.
K.
The R. That was the fourth. Who was it? Who was the R? Why couldn’t I remember? What was wrong with me? If I were a different sort of person I would have cried, but all I did was stare at the letters carved by four children who thought they would be together forever, and who were forgotten completely.
I stared at the barbed wire, clashing with my mud-stained loafers. I smiled when I thought of what a horribly pretentious CD cover the image would have made. Something in the deep recesses of my memory, that black hole from which Kit and Dan had so recently emerged, told me that if I stepped over that barbed wire I would die. That that barbed wire was a border between reality and eternity. It was a concept too great for my mind to handle. On the other side of the wire, there was simply another clearing, smaller, and not as grassy. There were pine trees surrounding it, the only pine trees I had seen yet in the forest, and this struck me as rather odd. But there was nothing else unusual I could see in this place my mind told me was evil. Something was going on here. I had forgotten people that made me who I am, and here I was being spoken to by a voice in my head that told me that a grove of pines would kill me. I didn’t believe in any of that supernatural shit, but I couldn’t help but have a little respect for the power that was so obviously present in my memories and in this place. And I was curious. That was what made it all happen in the first place. I was curious. So, before I had time to intellectually accept what I was doing, I stepped over the barbed wire.
The instant I did so, my consciousness seemed to split into two halves. It was as if my heart and my mind changed courses and split. You know how often, when you’re trying to make a decision, your conscience and logic point in two opposite directions? That was how it felt.
Intellectually, I felt a sweeping sense of relief. I understood everything now. I understood why I had forgotten Kit and Dan, why I had thought about Tuscany so little, why I was here, why the past hour or so had been so goddamn confusing. I pieced it all together and smiled, understanding why I had been so stupid. None of it was my fault. I felt reborn.
Meanwhile, however, my emotions were running rampant. Robin. Robin. Where was she? God, she was the fourth. And she was my best friend I had ever had. Closer than the other two and closer to me than. . .anyone. Closer than my wife and my parents and my children-yet-to-be-born. Robin. And she was dead. She was dead and I told myself I’d forget about her.
I smiled with understanding at the same time as my heart was torn apart with grief. I sat down, got the better of myself, and thought. I thought for a very long time.
I was back in Greenland. Memories were reappearing again, very different from the ones that had flooded me as I was driving. Fights. Heroin. Kiss. Laws.
Of course.
I wondered if Kit and Dan and. . .
I wondered if Kit and Dan had had this experience. I wondered if they had come back to Tuscany and been drawn back here, back to Greenland. Greenland.
How did it get its name? Arthenfeld was a planned-out word, a tribute to our creativity and intelligence. Greenland is a large island in the Atlantic. I think Kit just called this place “Greenland” once and it stuck. That seemed rather stupid now. I wonder if she would regret her poor naming choice if she ever came back.
I wondered if they had remembered, had forgotten. And what should I do with myself now? I remembered making this decision hundreds of thousands of times. If your past is part of who you are, is it possible to forget anything, or is that killing yourself? I remember bursting into tears when Dan had said that to me. Obviously, though, I’d chosen happiness. Obviously, that’s what my decision was, that was how the story was supposed to end. Only now, I was back, and I could change the course of my lives, their lives, change history. I could change humanity. I could take back that decision, and began considering that maybe I should.
I had forgotten the power of this place. I had forgotten what it feels like to know that you, somewhere, are on top of the world, that you hold a secret that is greater than the world.
But what should I do about it? I was still racing inside myself. Everything made sense now, but it was heart-wrenching, and strangely intoxicating, to accept. How had we done it? How had we made it work? Book. Bike. Bedroom wall. I remembered so much now. But there was still too much here. It would take me hours of reminiscing to remember it all. But I remembered the story, and Robin, and Greenland, and with that straightened out, the details became insignificant. Despite what I was going through, it was so reassuring to understand what was going on. I thought of myself five minutes ago, questioning my own sanity, and almost laughed. What if we all were insane? Would that make sense?
I’ve been through this, I’ve been through this. I believe in magic, that’s all. I have to.
The book. I knew I needed to read this book. And then. . .maybe make a decision.
I walked to the center of this clearing, the most familiar and strangely nostalgic thing I’ve ever done, and lifted the giant rock. “Dig here” was still painted on it. Amazing how visible that remained, a tiny piece of Robin’s handwriting in a world that had forgotten she ever existed. It’s funny how I remembered it as a “giant rock,” and still thought of it that way, because it was actually pretty small. Everything seems bigger when you’re young.
Except this place. As a grown man with perspective and knowledge, Greenland seemed huge to me. It seemed so much bigger, so much more powerful than an ignorant teenager can even begin to comprehend.
I dug through only about an inch of dirt, then there was the box. It was a beautiful wooden box. Dan had gotten it as a birthday present once, to hold baseball cards or something silly. It was nice, though. Shame to have let it sit here, in the ground, all these years. But I opened it, greedily, and pulled out what I had known was there. It was crinkled, tea-colored, ripped and fading, but every word was legible. It was like a parody of the past.
THE STORY OF GREENLAND
by Kit Sharp
with help from
Dan Jarvis
John America
and
Robin White
Somehow, seeing Robin’s name reminded me anew about her story, and how it ended. I couldn’t let myself cry now. I had to be strong. I needed to read this story. I needed to remember. I needed to remember the story and then bring the knowledge to the world, because I didn’t want my dearest, best friend Robin White to have died needlessly.
I opened the book, seeing Kit’s perfectly messy handwriting scrawled in straight lines across the page. How many notes had been passed to me in that writing? I smiled at how much I had loved that girl, how much I still did. I wondered, for the hundredth time, what became of her. Where was she now? Had she come back here and chosen differently than I? Because I knew now I was not going to forget again. That would be suicide. That would be killing Robin anew. With this resolution fixed even more firmly in my mind, I began to read the story that Kit had written, that we had all written, so many years ago, in another universe.
This story is set down by Kit Sharp to chronicle the adventures of four best friends in a place called Greenland.
Greenland is a place with no consequences. The things that happen there have no effect on the rest of the world. Someone long before our time ringed the boundaries of Greenland with barbed wire, and we don’t know who they were. Obviously, though, they understood the magical properties of this place. It seems silly for kids our age to say “magical,” but we can think of no better word. We discovered Greenland ten or twenty times. The first time, we must have stepped over from Arthenfeld, out secret woodland base (horrible childhood cliché, I know) and not noticed a thing. When we came back, all the things that happened there didn’t matter. Like memories we formed.
Every second of your existence, things are happening to you, happening around you. These things are perceived by your sensory organs, your eyes and ears and skin, and interpreted by your brain. They then get stored in your memory - first short-term, then long-term. These actions are actually just neurons firing, electrical currents across millions of synapses, but it is going on as you read this notebook. It is what keeps you from finishing a sentence and getting confused because you’ve forgotten how it began. These things happened to us in Greenland, of course, as normal. But they had no effect on the rest of the world. When we stepped back over the wire, any connections our brain had made, any memories we had formed, ceased to exist.
When we went back into Greenland, we immediately remembered the last time. Because things in Greenland affect other things in Greenland. It is simply separate from the rest of the world. The first few times we returned, the effect was nothing more than a very intense, “Hey, I’d forgotten about this place, but I’ve been here before. I remember that now. Funny how I haven’t thought about it” sort of feeling. What made us realize something was seriously wrong with this place was Dan’s pants.
We’re in Arthenfeld, setting up backgammon for Dan and John to play, when Dan notices Greenland.
“Hey, there’s a cool clearing. Why have we never hung out there before?”
Now, when Dan gets an idea, there’s no stopping him, so we troop into Greenland, and Dan rips those ugly sweatpants he insists on wearing as he crosses the barbed wire. We enter the clearing, and of course remember playing here a couple times before. We all have the usual initial “Wow, how come we always forget about this awesome place” conversation, and the boys play backgammon.
Needless to say, when we leave, the rip in Dan’s pants seals itself and we forget about the game. But the next day, Dan’s wearing the same ugly sweatpants. This time it’s Robin who notices the clearing.
“Hey guys, let’s go over there. It looks shadier than Arthenfeld.”
When we enter, Dan, for some reason, is less impulsive than before and steps carefully over the barbed wire. His pants rip by themselves. He freaks out and tells everyone else how “they just ripped randomly! I didn’t even touch them!”
“It’s true,” I say, “I didn’t hear a ripping noise, and I know they didn’t have that big hole this morning. Wait.”
I think it was in that moment that it was most obvious that we were one person. Recognition and memory hit us all at the same time.
“You ripped them yesterday, in the same place.”
“Why didn’t we remember that?”
“They were fine this morning. I wouldn’t have put them on otherwise.”
“Yeah, you would have.”
“Shut up.”
“Shut up, you guys, this is fucking weird.”
“You just said the f-word!”
“Um, we have a magically ripping pair of pants and a place we’ve been to a million times and can’t seem to remember. I think we have more to worry about than John’s choice of language.”
“Wait, you guys, let’s think about this.”
It was then that I proposed my theory about nothing in Greenland having consequences. What I proposed then was pretty much what I said at the beginning of the book. The others agreed that it made sense, but were having trouble accepting it. I have to say, I felt the same way. So we sat down in the middle of the pine grove to discuss this “fucked-up phenomenon” as John dubbed it.
“We should do some experiments on this fucked-up phenomenon” he said.
So we spent hours sending one person out of the clearing and every time, without fail, they said, “Hey guys, what’re you doing in there?” The feeling of re-entering Greenland is one of the most bizarre things ever. Its like when you’re sitting somewhere and suddenly something triggers a memory of some “crazy-complex” dream (a Dan-ism) only a million times more intense. You learn to look on your non-Greenland self with this strange feeling of pity. There’s no other way to describe it. You look at the ignorant you as you would look on some kid who asked you why the sky was blue.
It’s amazing how important memories are. You think of them as an aspect of you, one part of a person, but they are the most important thing a person has. If you didn’t have memories, you wouldn’t know who your parents are. You would try foods you hated because you wouldn’t know you hated them. Any experience that has shaped you would simply disappear, and then who would you be? I remember that I used to say to the guys, “You know, technically, in the past five minutes we could all have been kidnapped by aliens, had lots of adventures and then had our memories erased.” Inevitably, Robin would say something stupid like, “Yeah, what if they taught me how to tap dance? I’d be really angry because I’ve always wanted to tap dance. What if I knew how all along, but didn’t know I knew.” Then my seemingly intelligent observation would dissolve into silliness, as everything else does when you propose it to friends.
In Greenland, though, my alien theory finely gained some respect and even probability. We would rip articles of clothing, put smudges of dirt on our skin and watch them come and go as we stepped back and forth over the line. This last one only worked when we used dirt from Greenland, though. Dirt you put on your face outside simply stays there. We have yet to figure out why. Every time though, we had to tell the person doing the experiment to come join us, because they’d forget what they were doing. Of course, it was John who suggested someone stand with one foot in Greenland and one in Arthenfeld. Dan volunteered, and all he did was stand there with a look of intense confusion on his face. We had to pull him over into Greenland, because he didn’t respond when we yelled at him.
We all tried it, and the feeling was beyond description. It was as if all memory were gone, as if I had just been born. I didn’t know who I was, where I was, what a tree or a bird or a flower was. I simply existed. I heard sounds bombarded at me but didn’t understand. Turns out it was my friends yelling at me, but I didn’t know English, didn’t even understand the basic concept of speech. The hardest part was describing the feeling later.
Whenever you experience something in your life - a stomachache, disappointment, fatigue, a paper cut - you have in your possession, in your memory, the vocabulary to describe it. It is impossibly bizarre to experience something and have no words in your mind to help yourself understand it. And then to gain words again only when the feeling is gone makes it rather difficult to put down on paper. Suffice it to say, though, that none of us tried standing half-in again.
Surprisingly, it was Robin who had the next brainwave about the place.
“Well, it’s weird that it only works one way,” she said, absentmindedly breaking sticks, throwing them away and watching the parts fuse together in the air. (it only worked with some sticks.) “I mean, you go into Arthenfeld and forget about Greenland, but when we’re here, we remember both places. I mean, we all know everything about our lives now, right?”
It is terrifying, I think, to imagine what would have happened had this not been true. We would have journeyed into Greenland and forgotten how to walk, how to eat, how to speak or move our muscles. We would have fallen on the ground, monstrous clothed fetuses with no awareness that the world existed. I think we would have died. It was too spooky for me to express, and most of the things I say fall flat on this group of people anyway. So I said something stupid and effeminate,
“Well, I guess this would be a good place to tell secrets.”
We paused, realizing we were too unpopular to have any secrets. At least, that’s what I think the unspoken consensus was, but I didn’t want to say it. I think John would have gotten defensive. He thinks he has other friends. Well, if he does, he likes us better. I can’t tell if he’s embarrassed by that. I think he sometimes is. After all, we’re not exactly the cool kids on the block.
At this point, Dan said something that prompted a massive conversation:
“What if there are other places like this?”
We discussed the physical and metaphysical implications of such a place, thinking there could be a square-foot of this magic in like, a school hallway or something. People would simply forget and remember this place pretty frequently, but it wouldn’t matter, because the place would be of no consequence. (No pun intended.) But then John pointed out that if someone walked through that space having a conversation, they would forget everything they’d said in those few seconds and get confused. But then I realized that they would both forget, and just repeat a few lines of conversation. Of course, Robin had to point out that that wouldn’t work if one person walked through the space and one person didn’t, and then I got a mental image of an outside observer watching two people repeat themselves word-for-word, or watching them break a pencil and seeing it fuse together, and having them not even notice. We decided it was unlikely that any relatively public place had any of these properties.
Something about this conversation was rather depressing, because we had come to all these intelligent and intellectual conclusions, and we wouldn’t remember one bit of it. We tried to figure out how to make that work.
“We could write it on our hands.”
“The writing would disappear.”
Usually, when faced with a problem like this, John would say, “OK, let’s all just think about it, and by tomorrow someone will come up with something brilliant.” But that couldn’t work this time. This time, none of us would be able to think about this, because, for all practical purposes, this afternoon never existed, only a black hole where we did nothing at all.
Dan came to the conclusion that this would simply be the final test.
“Sooner or later, one of us will notice this place, and we’ll come back here and remember. I mean, it’s right near Arthenfeld, and we’re there all the time. It won’t be long before we come back, and we may have more time to think of something.”
I thought this was rather intelligent. Because Dan can be such a jerk, I never give him enough credit for being smart and logical, but he is. I really can’t help but love that boy.
So we left, killing a small part of ourselves in the process. Going home was the weirdest feeling. My parents gave the perfunctory, “What did you do today?” And I simply didn’t remember. But I didn’t find it odd that I didn’t remember. I didn’t mentally beat myself up about it. I simply assumed that nothing at all interesting had happened. I said “not much” and left it at that. My mind just slid away from the question, like nothing was wrong. It reminded me of that strange phenomenon when you try to touch the positive sides of two magnets, and they smoothly trace this perfect arc as they refuse to meet. My everyday mind simply refused to touch Greenland, and thus, refused to think of Arthenfeld, too.
That is one of the weirder effects of the place, one that doesn’t fit simply into our simple explanation of Greenland. As we forgot it, we began to forget Arthenfeld as well. It was as if the power in Greenland, whatever it is, made an association, decided that thoughts of Arthenfeld might lead to Greenland, and that that would be dangerous or something. The whole thing made me a lot more likely to believe that there was somehow magic involved. I never took myself to be the kind of person who believes in magic, but Greenland made me do it.
Of course, I didn’t believe in magic again, until the next time we entered the place.
We were there to practice a Marx brothers skit we had learned. We had no reason to rehearse, no venue to perform, but we liked the idea of having this secret repertoire of comedy up our sleeves, easily dispensable in any situation. Of course, the right situation never arose, but we continued to learn lines and scenes, because the whole point of childhood is doing unnecessary and impractical things.
It was Robin who entered Greenland accidentally. She immediately cracked up.
“What’s up, Robin?”
“Oh my god, you guys, we are so stupid. I mean, we’re fucking geniuses. I mean, I can’t believe we forgot, I mean I can, it’s just. . .”
But at this point we were all on the other side, having run over to see what was making Robin have such an unexpected outburst. We were used to Robin exploding like this, but usually there was some articulacy involved, so we wanted to see what was going on. When we crossed the wire, we immediately cracked up, too as it all came flooding back to us.
“It’s that place!”
“Oh my god, we’ve gone, like three days.”
“It’s weird how we never suspected a thing.”
“See, my alien theory is legit!”
“Shut up, Kitty.”
For some reason, the fact that we had had no recollection of Greenland in the past few days, although entirely predictable, struck us as hilarious. Perhaps we were simply marveling in the genius of our now-proven theory, or maybe we resorted to hysteria because we were inwardly terrified of the power of this place. I don’t know. I’m no good at the psychoanalysis shit. That’s Dan’s area of expertise.
None of us had any more bright ideas. We brainstormed for a really long time, but nothing we came up with could work. Eventually we realized, through extensive experimentation, that you could, in fact, communicate across the line. So we decided that we would simply tell each other about the place.
Of course, Dan wanted to be first, but John thought Robin would be the most responsible about it. I agreed, though I’m not quite sure why. Something in me implicitly trusts that girl unnecessarily.
She stepped across the line, and asked what we were doing. She looked as if she were about to cross the wire to join us, but we told her to stop. John told her to sit down, it that tone he gets that makes her listen. He said, “I don’t think you’ll believe me, but I want to tell you a story.”
He proceeded to tell it all, everything I’ve just written down, ripped pants and backgammon and everything. He emphasized Robin’s epiphanies and realizations, and she stared at him in disbelief, not buying a word of it, but obviously impressed by the genius and complexity of the supposedly invented story. Every time she tried to cross the line, John made sure she stayed back. When he was done, having told to the point of him standing there telling this story across the boarder of a universe, they stared at each other for a moment.
“I’m not sure what this is going to mean. This is all an experiment anyway. Now come join us in here.”
Having Robin come back “into the light,” as it were, was bizarre. She said, “OK, I’ve just wasted a good chunk of time hearing a story I was part of and knew all along. But what’s it gonna do? I mean, tonight I’m gonna go to bed simply having heard a good story from the wild imagination of John. I’m not gonna believe it.”
“Well, if we all try it, we will all have heard the same story. That’ll be weird enough that we might begin to believe it.”
“We know it works both ways, right? I mean, once we’ve told someone we’ve told them for good?”
“I think so. I just don’t know how any of us are going to take it psychologically.”
“Well, it’d be unfair for Robin to be the only one to know. Someone tell me now!”
And Dan bounded over the line and was swept with the now-familiar confusion of forgetting.
I told Dan the story. I wanted to, because I liked the idea of imparting wisdom unto him, because he always seemed to think he was smarter than I am, so I wanted to have at least one point in my life when I was all-knowing and he had to listen to me. He took it remarkably well, better than Robin, seeming almost to believe an entirely implausible story.
I went next, but I forewarned them that I wouldn’t buy it at all, so I suggested they present it to me in an entirely hypothetical manner. It was funny, because I’m so used to seeing people discuss how to deal with other people, imparting advice on their idiosyncrasies. “She’s real sensitive, so be nice.” “He hates it when people are too calm” “No, if you say that, she’ll get suspicious” and whatnot. It felt odd to be doing that about myself, deciding how best to manipulate and relate to my own mind, a mind that would not recall said decision.
I heard the story from Dan. Did he want to get back at me for being the all-knowing one? Did he have motives similar to mine? Or did he simply want to tell me the story? I thought it was a brilliant concept, and I brought up the alien abduction again. I was wierded out by why they wouldn’t let me cross the wire, but my birthday was coming up and I figured maybe they had a present hidden. I actually thought this, and I do find that rather amusing. I listened avidly to the story, throwing in my own thoughts and observations on such a nonexistent place. I said, I think, exactly the same things I had said in Greenland, in pretty much the same manner. I guess my mind is just predictable.
Since the “listen to this great idea I just had” approach had worked for me, we decided to use it on John as well. I think we saved him for last, because we had a hard time believing that he would ever buy such a load of unrealistic crap.
Robin told him the story, because we forced her to, because we like things to be even between the four of us, you know? She said, “Hey, John, I’ve got this really great idea. What if there was this place where nothing mattered?”
She told the story the most beautifully. She explained not only the technicalities, but the subtleties and the emotions. She managed to stay in the subjunctive the whole time, so she never once revealed that this was anything more than a product of her imagination. It was fascinating, how beautiful she made it all sound. I had never heard Robin really talk, uninterrupted, that way before. I have this theory she’s secretly a genius.
John, too, seemed as enraptured by the story as Dan, and he looked like a little kid hearing about Santa Claus for the first time. Something in the way she spoke about what she called “the magic” was so enthralling that we all listened, as if hearing it for the first time. Funny, though. For John it was. Anyway, I always knew that Robin was a girl that was more than she appeared. When she told this story, I knew, without a doubt, that it was true.
When it was finished, we called John back inside. Like the rest of us, he pointed out how weird it was to hear a totally new story, and then found out he’d known it all along. We didn’t have much more to do, at this point, and it was getting dark, so we decided to call it a day.
We all felt strangely light-headed, for some reason. So much confusion and thought was too much for one afternoon, it seemed. We were partway home, having forgotten almost everything about the afternoon, and we were talking about our favorite teacher-fooling strategies, when Dan started the pivotal conversation.
“Hey, Kitty, did you really make up that story? It was fucking awesome. It keeps bending my mind.”
“What story?”
“The one about the place with no consequences.”
“Wait. Woah.”
We all four stopped dead in our tracks. So much was racing through our heads. I stared at Dan.
“No, you told me that story. About the land you can’t remember.”
“Wait,” said Robin, “are you talking about the Greenland story, because John just told it to me. He didn’t tell me that it was actually Kit’s creation. Way to steal credit, jerk.”
“Wait, I didn’t make it up. Robin told it to me.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? No, I didn’t.”
“Yeah, when we were in Arthenfeld.”
“No. Dan definitely told the story.”
“Wait. Stop. You guys need to stop fucking with my head. This is not funny.”
“Woah. John. Calm down. Let’s sit down and discuss this.”
Dan sat down on in the middle of the path, and Robin quickly followed suit. I stood, and took my usual place as the voice of reason and rules.
“You guys, it’s really dark. All our parents are probably waiting for us to come have dinner. If we come back late again, they’ll never let us come back to Arthenfeld.”
“Kitty, I love you, and you are usually right, but this is more important than dinner. Don’t you realize that we all have different memories of this afternoon? Or is this just a practical joke? Because if it is, ya’ll should fess up so we can all go home.”
I was practically crying by this point, out of sheer desperation. “I’m not joking, Dan. I’m seriously freaked out.”
“Me too.” John actually was crying, and Robin was holding his hand. She pulled him to the ground, and I was the only one left standing. Dan looked at all of us, and, as always, became the leader somehow, like we had silently voted him to some position unanimously.
“Let’s take this one at a time. Kit, what do you remember?”
“Well, I was standing in Arthenfeld. I was near this oak tree. Near some barbed wire. And the rest of you were standing on the other side. And you told me to stay where I wa-”
“That’s exactly what happened to me! Oh my god, what the hell is going on? I am so scared. Robin, I am so scared.”
“Shut up and let her talk man,” said Dan, perhaps a little more harshly than he needed to. Robin was being uncharacteristically caring as she tried to give John a hug. He was trying to curl up in her arms, but he was twice as big. If it weren’t pathetic, it would have been rather funny.
“You told me not to come to the other side, and so I sat down. And then Dan told me this story about this place called Greenland. He said anything you did there didn’t matter. If you wrote something on your hand, the writing would disappear when you left. If you cut your hair there, it would be restored as soon as you crossed the border. Even memories had no bearing, so every time you left Greenland, you forgot about all the time you’d had there immediately. So you could never know to go back. Dan told me this story. I thought it was really interesting, and I was thinking a lot about the implications of such a place. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s real.”
“How could it be real?” Robin had this half-scared, half-incredulous look on her face.
“Well, Robin, what do you remember?” Dan gave me a half-smile in silence. We both understood what was going on. I liked that fleeting second of power we had right there, a connection between the two of us. For that moment, we had knowledge.
“I remember pretty much what Kit just said, only I was the one listening to the story and John was the one telling it. But like she said, you guys were telling the story over the barbed wire and you made me sit down and wouldn’t let me cross. I guess for some reason she’s just gotten mixed-up in her memories, you know? Like, she remembers it wrong. Because I know for a fact it was John’s story. And I was the one sitting on the ground, not Kit.”
Dan was tactful enough not to ask the cowering John to tell his side of the story. We both knew what it would be, and it was slowly dawning on Robin as Dan spoke his little soliloquy. I sat back and smiled, letting that boy enjoy his spotlight, because I know he loves to be the center of attention, and, for once, I respected that. I think I might have thought of it all first, been the one to really figure it out, but I let him talk about it. That’s the way we were.
“What if this place were real? Let’s say a group of people found it. Every time they re-entered, all the memories would come flooding back, right? Like when something reminds you of a dream, and you realize you’d forgotten this whole long epic from the night before.”
That was my metaphor. I tried to remember if I had used it when I had told Dan the story. Then I realized I simply didn’t care.
“They would try to find a way to make themselves remember it. Like maybe they’d leave the place one at a time, and the people who were there, the ones that remembered the story, would explain it to them.”
“And that’s why we remember different things. We all got told this story, and we were all told the first time.” John said all this with an air of relief, and he wiped his eyes on his sleeve. He looked embarrassed about his massive outburst, and was back to his normal, rather cold, self. I think John wasn’t scared of the place, he was scared of the uncertainty. At least Dan’s explanation made sense, gave him a reason and a logic. If there were ever a person who lived on logic, it was John America.
Dan’s explanation made sense to all of us. We are just young enough to believe in magic, or at least not not believe in it, and we aren’t stupid. We understood a legitimate explanation when we heard it. It made sense. It was improbable, almost impossible, but it explained everything, so we took it as truth. It was a strange feeling to intellectually understand that there is some whole part of you that’s been forgotten. That idea scared all of us, especially Dan.
“Look, I think that there’s been a lot of stuff that’s happened to us in this Greenland place, and there’s gonna be a lot more, I presume. If it weren’t important, we wouldn’t have found the need to tell each other about it. I think we need to record it.”
“But. . .”
“Yes, I know. The writing would disappear. But that’s why we need to have a record of our time in the place that would just stay there. We write it, we keep it there, we add to it. It won’t be there to like, tell us what Greenland is. That’s impossible. We need to just have our story written down, so that some future generation can understand what Greenland is, if it’s ever found again.”
So now I’m writing this story. I started it weeks ago, and I’ve been adding to it. I get a lot of writer’s cramp, but I guess that’s the price you pay for being the posterity-keeper. We never told anyone about Greenland. Robin didn’t tell her sister, and all of Dan’s siblings were too young to understand it. We had a few friends aside from each other, especially John, but they weren’t the kind of people we told secrets to. Our secrets stayed in a circle of four, and this was one of them.
It was funny, how we all intellectually believed, as we went home that night, that Greenland was real. It made sense. It was a plausible hypothesis, as Dan so succinctly put it. But it was a little hard to swallow. I brought a notebook to Arthenfeld, and Dan brought a box. The book goes in the box, so it doesn’t get wet. I can’t work on this anywhere but Greenland, because the writing would disappear. What you’ve just heard was written in installments over the past two and a half weeks. Of course, I couldn’t write it anywhere else but here, because most of my memories would disappear. It’s weird to have emotions you know no one else in the world has. To have the experience of losing a bit of yourself every day, and finding it again later. It’s unquestionably bizarre.
What’s also interesting is how easily we sunk into a rhythm with Greenland. It wasn’t long before we would leave, forget, and not care. It was easier than you’d expect to simply acknowledge that we had no idea what we’d done that afternoon. We understood why. After a week or so of going to Arthenfeld and Greenland every day, we had no doubt in our minds that the powers of Greenland were real. We had lost all memory of that afternoon, so didn’t it logically follow that we were in a magical land that erased our memory? Call us crazy, but we totally bought it. On our way home every day, we would make up matching stories in case our parents said, “so what did you do today?” Then we’d try to guess what it actually was. Too bad we couldn’t rehearse our skits there. We’d forget any work we did. We’d mostly just talk or bring the backgammon, or hang out in Arthenfeld. We’ve already kind of run out of things to do in Greenland. Or we don’t want to waste it or something. Anyway, it’s getting dark, and I’ve pretty much told all of the saga that there is so far. The others are calling me from across the wire, being like, “Kit, tell me what we did today.”
I’ll make them guess.
I was just re-reading what Kit has written in this book so far. I never knew she was such a beautiful writer. I guess I just sort of wanted to add my own piece, which is why I’m here, but I think Kit has sort of spoken for all of us. I don’t know what happens next in our story.
I, Daniel Jarvis, do hereby declare myself king of Greenland, and since nobody else has ever done it, I see no reason why I shouldn’t.
I, Robin White, do declare that Dan Jarvis sucks, and that I am the true ruler of Greenland.
I, Daniel Jarvis, bring into question my subject’s assertion that she wields power higher than the king, being myself.
I, Robin White, do hereby declare myself ultimate and supreme dictator, which is a higher rank than king.
I, John America, do declare myself God of heaven and earth, including Greenland, and I say you should stop writing in Kit’s book.
I, Robin White, declare that John Am
As the official historian of the tribe of Greenland, it is my legal duty to put down for posterity all events occurring in and around the place known as “Greenland.” I am proud to say that we, the citizens of Greenland, have drafted a constitution under president elect Daniel Jarvis. The constitution has the following points so far:
1. All motions to be passed concerning the government etc. of Greenland must be passed by a 3/4 majority. Debating is permissible in such voting decisions, but not physical violence.
2. The President Elect shall remain in power for life unless it is voted otherwise by the citizens.
3. If one citizen is absent from a meeting, the others shall not use this opportunity to do stuff he or she would disapprove of. It undermines the very principles of democracy.
4. What happens in Greenland, stays in Greenland. (See, this is a joke, because we have no alternative.)
5. When bored in Greenland, there is no complaining about it. You must find something to do. If everyone else wants to do something, and you’re bored, and you’re opposing it on principle, that’s too bad. Suck it up and have fun with your friends.
6. Communication over the Greenland border should be minimal. It’s fun to have a place we actually know very little about.
7. Greenland shall not be introduced to any other persons, unless it is deemed acceptable by the entire group for at least one week. There shall be no rash decisions.
Signed, the founding parents of assorted Gender,
Kit Sharp, historian
Dan Jarvis, President Elect
John America, Vice President
Robin White, court jester.
Our constitution has thus been written, and I am very proud of how official-sounding we made all of that. Most of the phrasing was actually John. Robin and Dan are responsible for the silly bits. The constitution has been read over the border, so our “otherselves” will know it. That is necessary, so that we remember the part about not telling anyone.
It’s funny, how we spend most of our time out of Greenland, but we all feel that our Greenland selves are the true ones. A whole language of colloquialism has developed to refer to the totally unique concepts brought on by association with Greenland. We are our “realselves” and the versions of us outside of this place are our “otherselves.” We have “hidden memories” which we don’t tell our otherselves, and “open memories,” which we do. This book is “the history.”
Our relationship with our otherselves is so complicated. I remember this Calvin and Hobbes strip, where Calvin writes a letter to himself that says something along the lines of “Dear Calvin, you have seen things I have never seen and known things I could never know. I am so envious of your experience, blah blah blah -Calvin” or whatever. And then he says, “I feel so sorry for myself yesterday.” That’s sort of how we feel. We are wise, because we know everything that’s happened in Greenland and we look on our otherselves with a sort of pity. We talk about them the way we would talk about our children, or some dumb animal. “Should we tell this to our otherselves?” We feel a sort of paternal protection instinct, and we don’t want to burden them with too much information, nor do we want to empower them. When we’re in Greenland, we feel almost like our otherselves are our enemies, that we can’t give them too much of what we have.
The weirdest part is that our otherselves don’t know it. They think, “Hey, I guess we did some stuff in Greenland. Too bad we can’t remember it.” If we wanted, we could tell them everything, taking turns over the line, the way we told the story to begin with. But we don’t. And our otherselves don’t seem to realize this is an option. They don’t really understand Greenland in the way our realselves do. They don’t know they’re called “otherselves.” They assume we just have no reason to tell things (which we don’t, really), or that we are faithful to the sixth amendment. The otherselves don’t even really understand the implications of the sixth amendment. They don’t give it a second thought. They don’t realize we are keeping deliberate secrets from ourselves.
John, who is reading over my shoulder, commented on my superfluous use of third person pronouns to describe people who are, in fact, us. It’s just, the otherselves don’t feel like us. They seem stupider somehow. And that means a lot. If there is anything that the four of us have in common, it’s massive intelligence, and the unpopularity implied therein.
Re-reading what I’ve written today, it all seems rather silly and melodramatic. Of course we don’t talk to our otherselves. We have nothing to say! You’d expect some dramatic turn of events in a place like this, but we’ve basically treated it like Arthenfeld with supernatural powers. In that we don’t do anything more than be silly and play backgammon or poker. There’s nothing more in this place than the sum of our parts.
Some part of me wishes there were. Some part of me desperately wants some threat from the outside world, some discovery, so that we have to fight to protect our homeland or something dramatic like that. There’s not much to do here.
I guess that’s OK, though. I should be careful what I wish for. I feel like there’s a lot of power here, and I need to respect that. I don’t want anything to go wrong. I don’t know what I’m scared of, but as I write, a little chill runs through me at the thought of some unknown thing this place has the potential to become.
I don’t know what to do about John. We were in Greenland, and we were climbing these trees, and he fell out. He broke his leg. It was twisted and bloody. He lay there on the ground shrieking in pain, his knee bent at an odd and unnatural angle. I was crying, and shrieking, too. Dan was the only one who stayed logical, and he picked John up in his arms and carried him across the barbed wire. I had no idea Dan was that strong. Or maybe his fear simply brought out some inner power in him, like how that sort of thing happens in unrealistic stories. But hey, if we’re gonna discount unrealistic stories, I might as well stop here.
Anyway, of course John’s leg was back to normal, and it untwisted itself as the tears in his pants fused together once more. And, of course, Dan and John try to cross the line, but Kit stops them.
“Stop. Don’t cross the line. John’s broken his leg here. If he comes back over, it’ll bring back the pain.”
So Kit and I cross over to join them, and they inform us of the problem. It’s amazing how quickly we’ve gotten used to accepting a statement like, “Hey, you just told me John broke his leg in there” and having it be new information.
“I told you what?”
We couldn’t do something in Greenland with just three of us, so we play “ultimate truth” in Arthenfeld. We go back home, but we don’t know what to do about John. The second he comes back, we’re stuck with him having a broken leg. But we can’t chill in Greenland without him. We never feel right excluding one of the four. I am here to record this for posterity. In fact, I’m alone in Greenland right now. I came by by myself, while the others are at various things they do. I hate how my friends have lives. Kit’s babysitting, John’s at baseball, and Dan’s in rehearsal. And I’m here in the woods writing, all alone. It’s rather depressing, when I think about it. As I just did.