Stephen Markley - Tales of Iceland -or- Running with the Huldufólk in the Permanent Daylight

Map of Iceland

Illustration SiggaRn, 2013

One

Why Iceland

Why anywhere? Its unclear how the places we wish to travel get stuck in our heads as destinations on a kind of epic, global to-do listmost of which will never get done before worms are sucking out our eyeballs. I know that stored in my imagination I have a panoply of countries, cities, vistas, monuments, spider holes, canteens, hallowed grounds, and myriad other Planet Earth destinations Im always telling myself Ill get to eventually. God help us if interstellar travel ever works out and suddenly we add multiple planets and solar systems to that to-do list in our to-be memory.

With Iceland, however, I remember the exact moment I decided I had to get there. I was in college and Quentin Tarantino was on Late Night with Conan OBrien raving about his New Years Eve experience in Iceland. Supermodels working at McDonalds, was the phrase that understandably stuck with me. Previously, I knew basically nothing about the country except that its capital city was Reykjavk and it wasnt as cold as Greenland.

[This is the one piece of knowledge-that-shouldnt-count-as-knowledge everyone retains about Iceland: that the Vikings switched the names of Greenland and Iceland in hopes of tricking everybody as to which place to call home. Historically, this is probably kinda-sorta accurate in the superficial, elementary school-level wayas roughly accurate as, The founding fathers were all great men.]

Tarantinospastic, emphatic, and on Conan to promote the release of a film hed produced that served the sole purpose of allowing viewers to watch young people get sadistically tortured to deathplanted a bug in my brain that never wormed its way out. I was a college kid who enjoyed getting drunk and attempting to sleep with beautiful women, so how could his endorsement not stick?

[Sooo much has changed since those days. For instance: Now I have this weird patch of hair that grows out of an otherwise hairless quadrant of my abdomen and Im terrified to shave or pluck it for fear it will expand or coarsen. Its a totally different world.]

That movie he was promoting was called Hostel . I remember sitting in the theater watching this film where outlandishly beautiful women lured young kids into torture chambers to get their thumbs cut off and their thighs drilled full of holes and their eyeballs pulled out of their sockets. As they screamed, I kept thinking to myself in icy-cool-blue lettering with mist rising around the edges: Icccccee-Laaaaaand .

After that, a whole bunch of shit happened.

I graduated from college, I traveled the country, I moved to Chicago, I got a job, I published my first book, I quit the job, I traveled some more, I wrote more books, I saw Hostel II . Through it all, I never really considered traveling to Iceland; it just sat in the back of my mind, unrealized. Its strange the way that opportunity arises in life, the way forces can coincide and align. Here is the unremarkable story of how I ended up actually going to Iceland, but first you have to know about a couple of friends of mine, who will both go by bastardized versions of their last names.

[Although Im about to do a really terrible job of protecting their identities, and by the end of this you should easily be able to Facebook both and follow them on Twitter.]

Youre not leaving us in suspense are you, you sonofabitch?

Trin, to Bojo when Bojo said aloud that he wasnt sure if he would take a shower in the morning.

To understand my friend Trin, its really best if youve seen the two NBC sitcoms 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation . Trin is kind of a hybrid of Rob Lowes Chris Traeger, and Jon Hamm as Liz Lemons two-episode boyfriend: this incredibly handsome dude with black hair, bright blue-gray eyes, a concoction of dark Greek and Italian features, strong build, resplendent smile.

[Of course Im comfortable enough in my sexuality to call another guys smile resplendent. I also have a Sarah McLachlan song on my iTunesWorld on Fireso eat me.]

Like Jon Hamm on 30 Rock , hes this handsome guy who just does not understand that his handsomeness gives him great advantages in life. From women to work to socializing, the indefatigable aura of swoon produced by the red-giant star of his handsome carries him across the universe with rainbows trailing. He never seems to understand that its not normal for a guy to walk into a bar and have every attractive woman stumble over themselves to talk to him. He just cant comprehend that for the rest of normal-looking-guy humanity, smiling resplendently wont cause panties to dissolve in moisture across a 50-mile radius.