Sleepless in Helsinki
Sometimes seven hours ahead feels twenty years behind
It’s 3:02 am in Helsinki. I’ve discovered this fact on my laptop, which is still displaying New York time. I add seven hours and I’m as shocked as I was yesterday, when I did the same simple mathematics and found out we had slept until well past noon, making us late for our boat trip to that island fortress in the harbor. You know the one, the UNESCO World Heritage site.
We did make it to the island before the rain yesterday, and I’m pretty sure we’ll arrive well in time for today’s fast ferry to Tallinn. The alarm isn’t set to go off for hours, and I’ll still be awake when Wayne fumbles for the snooze button once, twice, or maybe even three times.
Sleep is my one and only superpower; once I’m out there’s not much that can wake me up. Light is my only Kryptonite, and I suspect that the glow from the taxi rank along the triangular park beneath our window was all it took to convince my already screwed-up internal clock that it was morning. There are at least six taxis lined up, their headlights angled toward our hotel room window. After one leaves with a fare (someone who stumbled out of the kebab place down the block), the rest pull forward in unison. Queuing up is a virtue in Scandinavia.
Now that I’m wide-awake, I know that there’s no point in going back to bed. Even if I pull shut the blackout shades (I’m kicking myself for not doing that before), I’ll have to contend with the outboard-motor sounds coming from my husband.
I don’t dare poke him, or even gently shake his shoulder. He doesn’t sleep easily, he takes hours to nod off and then wakes up at odd intervals because the room is too stuffy, or the heating system is too loud, or — a more recent development — he has to get up to pee. I almost always sleep blissfully through the night, but he almost never does. To disturb someone who tosses and turns seems cruel somehow.
Actually, there’s something soothing about his snoring. A couple of longtime New Yorkers, we’ve never lived together in the twenty-four years we’ve known each other — he’s ensconced in the West Village, I live a whole neighborhood away in Chelsea — and seldom even share a bed. In fact, traveling is one of the only times when we’re in such close proximity at night.
When he’s facing away from me, as he usually did when we were first dating, his breathing is slow and steady. There’s a roughness when he inhales, but when he exhales it’s barely more than a puff. I’m struck by how familiar it seems. In the darkness, when I can’t see his beard (which he didn’t have when we met) or the gray liberally sprinkled through his hair, I could almost mistake him for the Wayne I knew two decades ago. We’d fall asleep after discussing all the places we wanted to visit. Finland wasn’t yet on the list, because there were others we had to get out of the way first: Spain, Italy, Argentina. Some we checked off the list quickly, other languished for years.
The red and green neon of the kebab shop just flickered out. Two taxis drove off, maybe to wait for fares somewhere more promising. Wayne just rolled over onto his back, and the real snoring begins. It starts out as the traditional sawing-logs sound, but then gets more erratic. He opens his mouth, and the sound is just as loud coming in as going out. He sounds like somebody’s father — more specifically, he sounds like his father. For the first time in years, we’re traveling abroad without him because he and his wife have gotten too frail. I know Wayne worries about this and lots of other things. He sleeps like a man with things on his mind.
Wayne has always loved travel, first and foremost for the sheer joy of the experience. Nothing delights him more than buying a type of cheese we didn’t know existed and then eating it on the steps of the shop, or discovering a likely looking restaurant hidden down an alley. He’ll walk us miles out of our way to see something unusual, like the conical church seemingly hewn out of solid rock that was his last must-see sight here in Helsinki.
In the past few years, I’ve sensed that he also travels for different reasons. He can step out of his life for a week or two — or, rarely, a little longer. When he travels, he isn’t a man who has a job that often keeps him working until midnight, or who has to worry about aging parents. He’s just a man with a backpack slung over one shoulder who has to catch a plane or a bus or a boat.
So I don’t disturb him. In a few hours we’ll take one of those taxis to the port. He’ll crack a joke or two about how cranky I am on the fast ferry to Tallinn. In the meantime, I’ll just listen to him sleep.
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