Patrik
Why was I leaving England?
It had been a wild misadventure, the whole foreign grad school thing. It was 2004, and I had borrowed $20,000 to finance my expenses while getting a one-year masters in visual anthropology. What no one had told me was that the famous professor who started the program was on sabbatical that year, and the program itself wasn’t accredited, which would matter if I ever wanted to pursue a Ph.D. in the states.
They also never told me that England sucks.
I had secured a room in a house with three British girls through some intricate word of mouth effort – someone I went to women’s college with knew some other girl who had a friend who was living in the UK, and she had lesbian friends who had a room available. Something like that. I was so thrilled when I first showed up; the house was beautiful, in a posh part of town, and the other girls were painfully hip and very nice to me. The furnished room they promised wasn’t exactly furnished, with only a small pull-out couch and a desk. But they said the landlord was supposed to deliver a real bed for me soon, so I thought I could make it work.
Until the spiders came.
Apparently it’s very normal in the British Isles to have what they lovingly call “house spiders”, which sound like some adorable arachnid mascot that appears with pom poms and cheers for you as you sleep. These house spiders were the size of my fist, black as death, hairy, and yes, they were there when I slept. A benevolent Scottish classmate helped me obtain a plug-in device that sends a frequency to keep away spiders, at least the Scottish spiders, but that didn’t scare these fuckers. After duct-taping the gap between the baseboard and the wood floors where I suspected the spiders were getting in, I realized that they were merely a sign. An almost Biblical one.
The British housemates (the Europeans call them housemates) found my spider horror quite funny, and did little to help me. This was around the time I realized no furniture would be arriving from the landlord, because the housemates had never actually told the landlord that I was living there. Their collective rejection began passive aggressively: watching TV shows together without inviting me; going to the pub without inviting me; leaving the kitchen as a group after I’d walk in. Real Mean Girl shit, and for no reason at all. At 26 and only a few weeks into this poorly directed British drama, I was having none of it. But I also felt trapped.
One minute I was eating BBQ ribs with Gil in the late summer sunshine and biking to my job where everyone liked me, the next I was in a city where the sun literally only shined on Thursdays for about 3 hours, surrounded by giant spiders and bitches who hated me. How cold and sad my life had become! Then there came a day I took over teaching our video production course when the other students saw I knew how to edit, and someone jokingly asked why I was even in the grad program if I could already make documentaries. This was a good question. And it compounded every other question that had been building in my mind.
“You have to get the fuck out of that apartment,” said Katie, the one other American in the program. Her mother had just been diagnosed with cancer, and she had started to unravel and seriously reconsider her decision to study abroad. We had bonded over the mediocre quality of the grad program, and now were bonding over regret. Desperate, I poured through room listings on various listservs and websites, but as the semester had already begun, the pickings were extremely slim. After visiting the flat of a dangerously predatory man who set off every internal alarm bell I had and probably would have done me in if someone hadn't been sleeping on his couch when we arrived, I hot tailed it back to my spiders.
Only to find that I had, as the British say, been “burgled”.
In broad daylight, a man had smashed through my first-floor bedroom window, grabbed my video camera, and tried to take my giant laptop but couldn’t because I had locked it to my desk – and also because one of the housemates walked in and saw him before he fled. I was angry about the theft but relieved that now I had an obvious excuse to move out immediately. But to where? In tears, I took the bus back to the city center and, hiding in a red phone booth in the rain, called the mobile number of one last listing.
A friendly French-Canadian guy answered.
“Hello. I’m, um, calling about the room available? Is it…is it still available?”
“Hi, yes!” he said. “I’m Mica. We are all international students here, there are six of us and the house is still kind of under construction but we all just moved in. There’s one room left, and I can show it to you tomorrow if you want. Does three o’clock work?”
“Actually,” I breathed, trying extremely hard not to begin sobbing, “Is there any way you could show it to me tonight? I’m near campus right now.” It was after 10 p.m., but Mica could sense through the phone that I really needed to see that fucking apartment. Tonight.
“You know what? Sure,” he said. “But don’t walk here. It’s not safe for girls to walk alone here at night. Tell me where you are, and I’ll ride my bike over and meet you.”
Thus began my salvation in the brief adventure that was Manchester, England.
True to his word, Mica showed up minutes later and escorted me to the house. It was a 3-floor rowhome with seven bedrooms, still very much under renovation. The young landlord had been in a hurry to rent it (furnished – actually furnished!) in time for the school year, but was still working on the place. He happened to be there hammering the stairs when we arrived, so I met him along with most of the housemates, and he gave me his verbal approval.
Everyone was lovely. It was such a damn relief. In addition to Mica, the housemates included a goofy French guy, a younger Persian-American girl from New York, an exuberant Irish woman who studied gorillas, a shifty young Irish man who wasn’t home much, and Patrik, a tall, curly-haired tech guy from Germany. At 31, Patrik was the oldest resident, and like most of us, he’d come for a one-year master’s program. He was a serious, grumpy chain-smoker who spoke toddler-level English, and my potential room would be right next to his on the third floor. I told the housemates all about the spiders, the lies, the burglary, the bitchy Brits. And they told me to go get my things, because I lived with them now.
It took a week or two for Patrik to warm up to me, but I wore him down. He admitted rather immediately that he was hoping for a Spanish-speaking housemate, because his girlfriend was Peruvian and he wanted to maintain fluency in her language so he could join her in Peru after graduation. He lit up when I explained that I’d lived in Mexico as a child and studied enough Spanish to converse, but upon chatting, realized how badly my grammar had atrophied and switched back to English.
Having already lived in the Netherlands and traveled a bit in Germany, I had a soft spot for the German people and German cities. And I knew that most Germans operate with zero filters, speaking directly and maintaining a poker face at all times – basically the opposite of the British. Patrik fit this stereotype perfectly, but he was also hilarious, deadpanning one-liners in broken English like it was his job. The third floor became our own apartment of sorts, and we’d stay up late in the night while a German radio station streamed EDM, talking about our plans for the future and editing (me editing) written assignments (his assignments) through plumes of cigarette smoke.
Patrik’s plan was immaculate: finish his one-year master’s in IT management, return to his long-term girlfriend in Peru (who called him for an hour every evening), get married in Germany, go back to Peru to reprise employment at a company he’d already worked for, and have children. He had it all planned out. My plan was a little less clear: finish my one-year master’s in visual anthropology, move to Holland or Germany to secure any job I could possibly get, then never return to the U.S.
Which is why, when I came up against the November deadline for dropping out of grad school and was offered my job back in Boston, I was so angry at myself for being such a failure. Patrik tried to encourage me, teasing that at least I could get back together with what’s-his-name and he could finally get a Spanish-speaking replacement for me.
We threw a huge house party the weekend I was scheduled to leave England. Saturday was the party, and a friend from college was coming from London with her boyfriend to see me before I left on Sunday morning. I knew it would be a grand but bittersweet all-nighter. Our house parties were like drunken U.N. Assemblies – everyone was from a different country and came to make friends. Or find someone to hook up with. Patrik was often the target of women’s advances, but he put on his German poker face and refused to engage beyond friendly interactions, although my other housemates were not convinced that he was as committed to his long-distance girlfriend as she was to him. But I knew he had children to father in Peru.
The day before the party, Patrik told me to be sure I was home for dinner, because the house was going to have a goodbye dinner for me, and he was going to make me Peruvian ceviché. Always a picky eater, I informed him that while his intentions were very kind, he would do no such thing because I would not be able to try raw fish.
“You will eat the ceviché,” he commanded in his heavy German accent. “And you will like it.”
Patrik woke up at 5 a.m. and went down to the fresh fish market to secure the most appropriate white fish for the job. He soaked it in lemon juice and salt half the day, and boiled sweet potatoes with onion and cilantro. Then he gathered all the housemates around the table at dinnertime and presented me with a plate, staring intently at my face. “You will eat the ceviché.”
If I could go back in time to that moment, I would rip through all the dimensions to yell at myself: Stop being such an obtuse child, you idiot! Look at what this man has done for you! Can’t you see he is SAD that you’re leaving? Don’t you know he needs to stay in your life forever? EAT HIS FUCKING CEVICHÉ!
Reluctantly, I ate a few bites of his fucking ceviché. It was delicious, but mentally I had a hard time getting over the fact that it was cured raw fish, and I did not finish it. The entire meal was a metaphor for my dealings with men who actually cared about me, but let’s leave that alone for now.
The party was a blast, as usual. By this phase of my adulthood, I was not drinking alcohol so I bone dry on a night where everyone around me was a soggy mess. We did not have much space to host guests at our 7-person townhouse, and our couch real estate got claimed rather quickly by those who passed out first. So as the evening wore on and we entered the depths of night, I offered my own bed to my visiting friend and her boyfriend, figuring I’d sleep with one of my female housemates or whoever’s bed happened to be empty. Patrik’s was empty, as he did not seem interested in sleeping, so he offered it to me to the great jealousy of my female housemates. I did not want to repeat the Noah cheating scenario, but I also didn’t have the same history with Patrik and I only had five hours before I had to head to the airport.
I remember being almost asleep when he laid down next to me, quite drunk and stinking of cigarettes. I was terribly sad that this would be the last time I saw him, and somewhat curious as to whether he wanted his friendship with me to stay in its lane. But when I shifted onto my side and put my hand on his arm, he turned away briskly. Ok, the lanes are definitely clear, I thought. Probably a relief.
But neither of us could sleep much. As dawn crept through the skylight above his bed, I knew we were both fully awake. “Everything is black and white at this time of morning,” Patrick said quietly. We were both staring up at the skylight, watching tiny raindrops smack the glass. “There is no color yet.”
“No, that can’t be true,” I said. “There’s always color.”
“It is true – look around. You only THINK you see color because you know what color the objects are. But you don’t really see color, you see only shades of grey.”
I looked around, and saw only shades of grey.
“Why are you going back?” he asked me, carefully. “Your visa is good until August – you don’t have to stay here, but you could move to Holland or Germany now if you wanted. I bet you could find a job in Munich or Hamburg.”
“But I don’t speak German,” I said, my guts starting to fall out a little.
“Ya, I know, but it doesn’t matter. You could go to Berlin – everyone in Berlin speaks English.”
I had never been to Berlin, but now I thought about it. I tried to imagine the cobblestone streets, the wienerschnitzel, the colorful houses, the sun shining on days that weren’t Thursday. “I don’t know anyone there,” I choked. “Everyone I know is in Boston or New York.”
“Then go to New York,” he said. “It’s not too late to change your life.”
My cab was scheduled for 8 a.m. We poked our heads out of his skylight and watched the silent street with its identical brick rowhomes until an old-fashioned black cab appeared in the distance. Patrik carried my bags down the stairs, where Mica and another housemate had managed to wake up long enough to say goodbye. I hugged them, promised to call often, and Patrik walked me out to the waiting cab in the rain.
I wouldn’t see him again for five years, but I would see him again. First in Peru, where I’d spend a summer living with him and his wife, and where Patrik would drive me across the country in his Jeep to film a documentary. Then I’d see him five years after that, in Germany, where I’d speak toddler-level Spanish with his young sons and bicycle with him to the bakery for fresh bread so Patrik could continue chain-smoking in secret. But I didn’t know any of this then, and our UK goodbye felt like the last time in my life I’d ever see him.
I gave him a hug and got in the cab, too sad to talk. He didn’t speak either, but once I was in the back seat, he shut the door and put his palm flat against my window, staring in at me. Raindrops flowed in circles around his hand and when the car finally started to move, I lost it. When I looked back, I saw Patrik standing in the same spot, still staring at me, the rain soaking his clothes.