American Twilight

Photograph by Oliver Farshi1In the autumn of 2008, just as the financial crisis was about to hit, C. was offered a job at Nokia. She called with the news while I was smoking a cigarette on the corner of Broad and Wall Street, watching drunk men in blue oxford shirts kick trash cans. Maybe you should take it, I said. Seems like something bad is going down. And I thought we’d get to move to Japan.But no, Nokia is a Finnish company that made paper in 1865, galoshes in the 1920s, cellphones in the 1990s, and now cellphones for drug deals and kidnappings in TV thrillers. So we moved to Helsinki, where I met Oliver Farshi. We found each other on Twitter in 2009, back when you could make good friends by typing things like Helsinki and techno into a box.Olly’s from Manchester, and it’s odd how much I defer to a British accent, even when it’s harassing me. Like when we took an eleven-hour train trip to a film festival on the North Pole and played backgammon the whole time. The score was…