And then Åmodt—really, I should have seen it coming—Åmodt starts going on and on about Norway. Not in the way you’d like him to, though. No. Åmodt doesn’t say a word about Norway’s glorious Viking past, about its endlessly breathtaking natural beauty or its benign political makeup, an enviable combination of soft socialism, progressive democracy and enlightened monarchy. There is not so much as a peep about the nationalization of key economic sectors and natural resources, nothing on the reinvestment of petroleum profits in infrastructure and the social safety net, no mention of the fact that Norway has the second highest GDP per-capita in Europe, after Luxembourg, which of course doesn’t really count, there are not even a million people in Luxembourg, not even close, so when you take into account only grown-up nations, then it’s quite clearly Norway with the highest GDP per-capita in Europe. Åmodt makes no mention of Norwegian roads, easily the best roads in Europe and therefore the world, despite the long hard winters the roads are kept in perfect condition, they’re smooth as glass, if you chance upon a road in Norway in less than perfect condition you can bet it is slated to be repaved in the next month, if not the next week. To hear Åmodt tell it, Norway, with its ninety-nine percent literacy rate and its two distinct written languages, is nevertheless a nation of illiterates and Philistines, a cultural wasteland in which there is no music, no painting, no written word. Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun and Sigrid Undset never existed, there was never any such person as Edvard Grieg, no Johan Halvorsen or Arne Nordheim, no Edvard Munch or Odd Nerdrum. And of course Åmodt has absolutely nothing to say about Norway’s prowess in winter sports, especially cross-country skiing and biathlon. Despite it being universally acknowledged that nobody skis uphill and downhill, nobody shoots rifles at little targets while standing on the snow in their skis or lying down on the snow in their skis like the Norwegians, Åmodt pretends he’s never heard of Bjørn Dæhlie or Johannes Høsflot Klæbo or Therese Johaug or Marit Bjørgen, or even Ole Einar Bjørndalen, which of course is not possible, Bjørndalen is a living legend, anyone with the slightest knowledge of winter sports is well acquainted with his exploits.

Instead, Åmodt rants and raves about endemic alcoholism and gypsies, about neo-paganism and black metal, about the prevalence of the “Anders Breivik type.” Fingers and thumbs are employed to list instances of xenophobia, provincialism and political double-dealing. And Åmodt all but goes blue in the face holding forth on the Sámi question, on the brutal suppression of the Sámi Uprising of 1852, on the appropriation of Sámi lands, on the forced Norwegification of Sámi culture, on Sámi this and Sámi that.

Åmodt, in short, does not rest until he has all but ruined Norway for me, ruined it so completely that I have no choice but to remove Norway from the list of places where I’m able to imagine myself being happy, a list on which Norway was, naturally, at the very top. How many times have I pulled myself out of some pit of despair or other by picturing myself spending the weekend with a dear Norwegian friend and his extended family, singing folk songs and Lutheran hymns, eating lutefisk and fingerling potatoes and drinking spiced wine and aquavit, before bidding them a fond farewell and skiing, through deep drifts of snow covering hill and dale, back to my own humble but sturdy dwelling on the edge of a distant fjord? Farewell to all that. Thanks to Åmodt, I will never again enjoy such temporary transports from the otherwise ceaseless crush of reality. From now on I will have to make do with taking refuge in an idealized Sweden, or an imaginary Netherlands, or Switzerland, or, if worst comes to worst, Denmark.

I’m sitting (in my mind) in a quiet café on the outskirts of Zurich, nursing a Turkish coffee and reading my Neue Zürcher Zeitung, when I realize that Åmodt has moved on to enumerating all the things he loves about America. Good Lord! As if utterly destroying Norway for me weren’t enough. Dismissing Åmodt with an internal wave of my hand, I turn and walk away, leaving him standing there on the busy sidewalk, singing the praises of corn syrup and air-conditioning and freedom from thought.

It is not until he is some two-hundred meters in my past that it occurs to me: perhaps Åmodt, too, was born in the wrong place; perhaps he, like me, found himself, from day one, adrift and unheimlich in the place of his birth. It’s certainly possible. To be honest, if it wasn’t for his name you would never guess Åmodt was Norwegian. He looks, in fact, like a typical American, sort of like a giant steamed dumpling with arms and legs and a baseball cap and three face holes arranged in an expression of perpetual bewilderment. If only I had been born in America, I imagine little Åmodt thinking. Anywhere but here, I picture him saying to himself, again and again, as he sits alone on his little pine bed in his childhood room. Anywhere but this Norway. Most likely, as a child, Åmodt wanted nothing more than to have a name like mine (Gary), just as I would have given anything to be called Åmodt.

Åmodt has ruined Norway for me, and I will always hold that against him. But when I think about the degree of mental disquiet required to idealize America, of all places, to imagine it as a site of happiness, a sanctuary against alienation and suffering, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for him.

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Will Lupens lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. He is the author of the novel Cares of a Wandering Boy, and the story collections Neighbor and The Institute of Solace.