Jukka walked across the foggy soccer field, taking his time. This was in Finland. There were a string of white lights illuminating the field. They were attached with a thin electrical wire that stretched far back to human civilization. This was somewhere else. There was no one here. No one had ever taken a picture of the place. The soccer goals were made of rotting wood. There were no neighborhood kids. This wasn’t a neighborhood. It was a field enclosed by a thick forest of symmetrical trees, standing straight and proper, never having been disturbed by hunter or woodsman. One summer Jukka, many years earlier, had come here with his friends and his sister for a game. It was for pirate camp, a summer activity they’d created for themselves. There was no summer camp, so they made one up themselves, where everyone was a pirate. There weren’t any counselors. Jukka was the assistant captain of the red team. They sailed the high seas and became beached in a long-forgotten soccer field covered in mist. The black team was five miles away, pursuing lofty goals of silver and gold in a cave on the western ridge. “We’ll set up here for the night,” said Tomi, the captain. They slept in piles of leaves.

Jukka remembered Tomi’s soft skin. Tomi was the big boy. He had jet black hair, he was pudgy and a few inches taller than Jukka. They’d made love in tenth grade in the truckbed of Jukka’s Ford. It was under a chilly September sky. They had sleeping bags circa the 1980s that time, much better than a pile of leaves. Tomi had a thick beard then. He was 6′5″. His mouth tasted like butterscotch drops. That was when they’d driven two days together to see Belle & Sebastian in Oslo. They held hands at the show. Afterwards they’d parked in a field and spent the night, done the deed. They were both virgins until that moment. They lost their oral virginities, their anal virginities, and their penile virginities. Two brief words to describe it are rough and tender.

They dated for a few months. Jukka worked in the mail room at the town newspaper, bored to tears. Tomi pilfered from tip jars and gambled. They went for bike rides together in the afternoon. Their town was a seaport. The architecture was Victorian. It was summer and the breeze was sympathetic. After their bike rides they’d have picnics in quiet parks at the tops of hills. Jukka would spread out the checkered blanket and Tomi’d lay out the sandwiches he’d prepared out of meat left over from his father’s butcher shop. They ate under giant willow trees and kissed for hours, at least until sunset. One Saturday they went fishing in the bay. Nothing came up. It was just a little sailboat, and they jerked each other off under the midday sky, floating out to sea. Afterwards they lay there, in the pit of the boat, eyes closed, unmoving, letting the sun send them to sleep, and to dreams of snowfall and geishas.

When they woke up the land was gone, and they were alone together. Setting sail, they landed four days later on the coast of Iceland. It was an endless, rocky coast that fed into a flatland that stretched for miles. No one was there. Two miles past the shore there was a road. They sat down and waited for someone to come by, and eventually, someone did. The sky never changed while they were waiting. It was a light gray carpet of clouds stretching from the sea to the tiny mountains on the opposite horizon. “What are your names?” asked Hannes, the man who’d picked them up in a Volvo station wagon. “Tomi and Jukka,” they told him. He took them to his cabin, where he’d once lived with his wife and two daughters. His daughters, they learned, had gone off to America, their heads full of big ideas. One of them was a video artist and the other girl operated a quiet bed and breakfast outside of Portland. Hannes’s loving wife had for some time been convinced she was not a lady but a wolf, and spent most of her time scouring for rodents in the foothills. She’d come back home every week or two but refused to walk upright or speak any language Hannes could understand. A deeply religious man, Hannes believed that she had entered a state of near godlike transcendence and was trapped in a living purgatory between this life and the next, speaking in tongues and devoted to unflinching worship. The daughters had known better and feared for their own inevitable demise in the colorless tundra where they’d grown up.

Jukka and Tomi expressed their deepest thanks for Hannes’s knit sweaters and hot cocoa, and spent the night in the queen bed of Hannes’s long-since departed video artist daughter, Margét. Her bookshelf was still lined with dusty preteen novels patterned with pastel colors, relics from the 1990s. The canopy on her bed was a reddish brown. The blankets were a patchwork of blue and gray. This was the pinnacle of the tented house. It was an attic room. The two small windows on either side of the long room shook under the weight of a tremendous wind all night, in that desolate valley. Jukka was glad they had curtains. A few candles lit the room all night while the lovers held each other for added warmth after the bone-chilling winds of their endless ocean journey.

They read original ghost stories to each other form a journal Margrét had kept in her sixteenth year. Tucked within its lavender pages was a long-forgotten pamphlet for an Augustinian monastery. Tomi read it thoroughly, and it made him inexplicably sad. A surprisingly striking picture of an empty stone bedroom filled with light made his heart turn inside-out. The light was pouring over the linen sheets of a neatly made bed, freezing corpuscles of dust in the yellow air, capturing their unpredictable and inimitable positions forever. It produced within him an emotion best described as intrinsic and inevitable sorrow– a deep feeling of solitude somehow related to time and fate, locked away in the core of his genetic code. He didn’t mention it to Jukka. The pamphlet was quietly placed back inside the book and the book placed back on the shelf. No one ever laid eyes upon that pamphlet again, and the painstakingly scripted ghost stories of Margét’s adolescence would never be read by another human being.

The bed was comfortable, the pillows stuffed with goose feathers and their sweaters keeping them warm. They fell asleep in each other’s arms. The next day they hitchhiked to the Finnish embassy and found a ride home onboard an old fishing boat. The captain, Ólafur, regaled them with tales of white whales, bar fights and sea storms; talking skeletons, and buried treasure. Tomi was particularly taken. After returning home, he decided to devote his life to the sea. “After all we’ve been through?” asked Jukka. “Yes,” said Tomi, “There’s just something out there, some mystery I need to solve, that I can’t leave alone. I love you, but I’m married to the sea,” he said. They kissed goodbye. That was the last time Jukka saw Tomi. He was upset, but understanding. Tomi’s mother had been swallowed in a monsoon when they were both children. Jukka believed that Tomi was tragically projecting his missing sense of maternal love onto the endless body of water that imbued on him such an extraordinary sense of romance. He had faith that Tomi would one day return, having come to terms with that long-ago loss, and understand that their bond was more tangible than any illusory abstraction the sea could offer up.

He received yellowed letters from time to time, from the Maldives and Mandalay and Nicaragua. They always arrived many months after they’d been sent, in so that Jukka felt as though he was not living in the same time as the world from Tomi’s letters, but merely reading an account from a fictional world rooted in the facets of a recent past. His nostalgia-drenched replies were never received. They were always left waiting at a post office which Tomi had long since abandoned (in Tuvalu, or Nordvik, or Punta Arenas), and to which he would never return.

Meanwhile, Jukka finished his secondary education, making failed bids at admittance to nearby art schools. His portfolio was comprised of photographic representations of his locally infamous documentary dioramas. They’d caused a sensation amongst his neighbors when he’d filled his yard with a makeshift museum of scenes depicting dramatic images from Tomi’s travelogues. An uprising in Zanzibar, the red light district of Taipei, the spectre of a holy man in the Mongolian mountains. Each of these moments were lovingly constructed out of wire and papier-mâché and life-size wax figures to recreate with surreal accuracy the most haunting instants from Tomi’s adventures. Jukka’s sister– his only living relative– praised the work, but everyone else kept quiet or stared with anger, or worse, indifference. Jukka gave up on the dioramas after no one was willing to bring them up in a conversation. He got a job at a record store and whispered to his co-workers about the secret habits of their regular customers, and they’d construct stories back and forth about the private lives of those lonesome aficionados.

He took walks late at night, inevitably finding himself deep in the forest, in the illuminated vacant soccer field. It was several miles away. He never saw anybody there, but the lights were always on. He only went there at night, after the end of his midnight shift. He’d walk down cobblestone streets past no one, past bars full of frivolous trappings and salacious collegiates, past the outskirts of town and its tire pits, on into the vast forest. He had no idea how to get to the soccer field, but it’s always where he ended up. He never paid attention to his surroundings on that journey, because his mind was occupied only with thoughts of Tomi and the sea and that insular night in an unfamiliar attic. The forest was filled with unnamed threats; conscious beings that exuded an unspeakable evil. They were invisible to Jukka. To anyone else, these creatures may have spelled a quick demise many times over, but because of Jukka’s fixed frame of mind and solipsistic devotion, he was able to render them impotent, to effectively undo their existence from his nighttime pilgrimage. He walked through their territory unharmed, to arrive at that foggy field and wait for a sign.

His hair grew long and he spent every night there waiting, his suits now shaggy and sprouting wildflowers and ryegrass. The moon passed through thirteen phases. Fresh leaves fell and crunched and died on the ground that was frozen by the unforgiving wrath of an endless winter. He was a widower waiting for his man’s ship to return. He was looking down on the sea from that Icelandic attic window. His beard had reached halfway down his chest when his sister, Vuokko, found him. It was a cold blue morning. She entered the field to find him sitting cross-legged, his gaze locked upon the misty sky. There were squirrels sleeping in his lap. “Come back to town,” she said. “It is possible to practice undying devotion without becoming an embarrassing invalid.” Jukka had lost his job, naturally, after spending so many months alone in that field. Vuokko gave him a hair-cut and a fresh change of clothes she’d found in their father’s forgotten wardrobe. He skulked about their sparsely decorated home for a few days, gradually emerging from the sustained spell he’d been under those innumerable months in the field. She gave him oatmeal for breakfast, a special stew for lunch, and dried venison for dinner. Eventually the ice in his eyes melted and he found a new job at an antique bookshop.

Vuokko had noticed the disappearance of her brother a week after he’d stopped coming home. She had been pre-occupied with her own problems. Their mother was in a convalescent home. She suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. Vuokko was in the second grade when her mother went missing. They all thought she had run out on them, but after three days she was discovered in a neighbor’s stable, embedded in the hay, muttering confused questions to herself. She had forgotten where she lived. That was the first of a long string of incidents that resulted in her institutionalization. Their father was perturbed. He expressed mainly annoyance, rather than sympathy. Vuokko would, much later, read in his journals that it was at that time he realized that he was irrevocably tied to his family, that he had lost his freedom. It hit him hard. He resented the shackles that tied him to his children, and to that small town, and to his convalescent of a wife. He wanted to leave then and there, but he had been raised by the stern hand of an intensely disciplinarian father with an unwavering belief in Christian morality. He began to live out of a sense of duty. Stifled by the mundane certainties of his domestic life, their father found a way to inadvertently dismiss his familial allegiances. He quit his job at the steel mill and devoted his time to flight school, with dreams of soon becoming a commercial airline pilot. When Vuokko and Jukka were in middle school, he did just that, escaping that forgotten Finnish town for days and weeks at a time, returning only when his guilt became palpable enough to send him home. Three years later, he flew off with only the clothes on his back and never returned.

With all these histories of irrational and inexplicable disappearances in her family, Vuokko realized now that she should have seen Jukka’s vanishing coming from a long way off. But she was too distracted in the early days of his absence to realize what was happening. She was spending volumes of time in the convalescent home with her amnesiac mother, trying to discern a realistic narrative from her indecipherable mutterings. She wanted to know their family history, something that had never been instilled in her before her mother grew ill. Her father rarely spoke about the past. He was laconic. All she knew was that her parents had moved to that small town in their early twenties, looking for some place quiet to raise their kids. She’d never met her grandparents and they were never a topic of conversation. Her classmates all had large families with long histories in the town. It was as if she’d come from nowhere at all– but she felt like there was a story she was missing out on, an explanation she was deserved. Her mother was no help and her father was nowhere to be found, so it was only her and her brother. When he disappeared, she didn’t worry, because she could feel he hadn’t gone far.

After two weeks, she set out looking for him. It was an interminable search, but she took it in stride. Every day she would wake up at a comfortable hour, eat a bowl of oatmeal and go to work. She was a lifeguard at an indoor swimming pool and her shifts usually stretched late into the night. After work, she wandered the same desolate streets Jukka had in his early days of transfixion, slowly observing each and every house as she passed it by, looking for signs that would help her along. Nothing came for a long time. Sometimes in her search she would enter abandoned buildings, lingering in empty rooms and absently kicking at the debris on the ground: a faded box of tampons, the broken leg of a missing chair, a melted video tape with illegible text scribbled on the side (cued, she saw through the plastic windows on its case, to the middle of an unknown program– a forgotten episode of a daily soap, a solemn trombone recital, or an awful documentary). She saw same bedroom lights turn off at the same times on her search each night, and formed a mental map of the town’s sleeping habits. After months, when she had scoured the town with no results, she branched out into the forest. It took her three weeks of wandering in heavy coats and tripping over roots and running into floral dead ends before she remembered the field where they’d spent the night as children. Once she remembered it, she knew that it had to be where he was waiting. She searched all night, until she found it at the crack of dawn, when her breath was a visible cloud of tiny magenta crystals. “Come home,” she told him, and he did.