Viator

Ten

He woke to the absence of wind, of all sound, the port enclosing a circle of pewter morning light, and, sitting up, rubbing his eyes, he registered the absence of Aralyn. The cabin door stood ajar. He felt a pang in his chest, knowing that he had frightened her away, but immediately thereafter felt relieved and hoped she had gone. He splashed water on his face, changed into fresh underwear, a clean shirt, a little worried that there was no sound, no groaning metal—not that the sound was continuous, it was intermittent, Viator forging ahead, then storing up more energy, forging ahead again, shattering the barrier in stages, but lately, more often than not, he woke to the groaning and he worried that Viator might have run out of energy, that they would be stuck and how much would that suck?, fuck, fuck, fuck…He straightened out his thoughts from the skid they’d been in and saluted his image in the mirror, Bon soir, mon capitan!, and went briskly along the passageway to the mess. Which was a mess, coincidentally. His maps strewn about the floor and the outer door wide open, doubtless left so by Aralyn in her haste, letting in the wind. He bent a knee, prepared to start picking them up, but an animal chill touched the back of his neck and he straightened, suspecting that something was wrong. He stepped out onto the deck. The air was warmer, the icicles were beading at their tips, the snow underfoot was mushy, melting, and it was difficult to read the tracks, but there looked to be two sets of footprints leading to the stern. A soft grunting came to his ears. Perhaps some other animal wandered away from the Iron Shore. Wilander grew cautious in his approach, edging along the bulkhead. The grunting stopped. He paused, listening, and when it did not resume, he eased forward again, more of the stern coming into view, more yet, still more, and finally he spotted a gray-haired man standing facing the aft rail some thirty feet away, buckling his belt. Nygaard? Aralyn was there as well, creeping away along the rail until Nygaard barked at her, slapped her, raised his hand, threatening another slap, and she cowered. Wilander took in her chastened attitude and Nygaard’s masterful pose. He gave a cry, a feeble thing, it sounded as if he’d been shot in the lung, and charged, tripped, went sprawling on the icy deck. Aralyn broke for the starboard, passing from view, and Nygaard made a scuttling run forward, his face registering a comical degree of panic; then he retreated and flung himself over the rail.

By the time Wilander regained his feet and staggered to the rail, Nygaard was down the rope and off into the forest. After the briefest of hesitations, he followed, furious at the little man for his transgression, for having befouled his woman, and he debated the truth of that as he went; he wondered if Nygaard might only be convicted of abusing a pet, but no, Wilander thought, catching sight of him heading over a rise (there you are, weaselly little shit), then passing out of sight…No, these were frontier circumstances, frontier laws must therefore apply. They hung horsethieves, sheepstealers, why not whistler-fuckers? He envisioned himself calling Nygaard to judgment—Nygaard would back away, stumble in the snow, put out his hands in defense, say something pitiable, and Wilander, looming above him, would say, I pronounce…I pronounce…Well, he would say something appropriate, something that would terrify Nygaard, that by its grandeur would infect him with dread, and then he would be on him with his fists flying, with kicks, goal-scoring kicks, delving in under the ribs, digging out his bones. As he floundered up the rise behind which Nygaard had vanished, a burst of light and noise, there came a shrieking and an accompanying flare of brightness that held and held, and he sank to his knees in the snow, stoppering his ears and squeezing his eyes shut. After an interminable time, the sound and light abated. He struggled to his feet and trudged to the top of the rise. Nygaard’s trail gave out in a patch of disturbed snow. Another burst of light and noise, farther away, off to his right, caused Wilander to grit his teeth. With Viator so near to leaving, the forest was full of stress points and Nygaard must have stumbled directly into one. He would have to be very careful; he did not want to pass through the barrier without the ship. Without her iron keel, the great stress-bearer to surround him, he had little chance of survival. Yet Aralyn, the qwazil and the wiccara, they had slipped through safely. He struggled with the idea, considering the notion of two-way travel, pro-and-conning, trying out the idea that passage one way was easier than passage the other, and, giving it up as too problematic, he began hiking back to the ship. It was tough going in the snow, the air turning to ice in his lungs, and as he paused to catch his breath, he was transfixed by the sight of Viator. The overcast had deepened, big snowflakes swirling down, and the ship, trapped between the two confining hills, looked to be straining forward, shouldering its burden of ice and snow, battered and indefatigable, every splotch, every dent, every evidence of its long labor, visible in that neutral light. He felt a unity with her, a shared principle, an inelegant workers’ purpose; they persevered, they hung in, they did their job. Tears came to his eyes on seeing his sister so resolute and undaunted. He glanced heavenward, less an emotional response than an involuntary attempt to clear his airway, and there, making a great soundless sweep across the lower sky was the creature of his dreams, the ropy wormlike thing, thrillingly vast, skimming the fir tops, clear for a split-second, a mile of gristle given definition by a central nub, leaving stillness in its wake. Wilander did not know what to do, dismasted by the sight. The firs had not bent beneath it, he had felt no great wind, so perhaps he had not seen it, perhaps he had fallen asleep in the snow and was dreaming. But the passage of the creature seemed a statement of finality. There was nothing left to do or say. He waited to be gathered, to wink out of existence, for some momentous event to occur. When it became clear that he was not to be taken, that this was not his time, only then did he collect the litter of self, the human stupidities, cram them back into his head, abandoning what would not fit, and went stumping through the snow toward Viator, not a thought in his head apart from that passage, that godlike passage, replaying it until the dark brown shadow it had cast became a dark brown cast of mind.

From the shingle, Viator’s hull was a brutish thing, black and blunt and patchy with ice, given a strangely delicate accent by the two crumpled screws with their defining crusts of snow, like two sugar flowers popping out from the belly of an unsodded grave; and there was an odd thing, as well, on the shore, a length of seaweed, iron in color, bulky, roughly man-sized, uncovered by the snow. Wilander’s path led away from it, but he let his feet stray him near and found that it was not seaweed as it had appeared, but rust; a man made of rust. On peering closer, he recognized that man to be Arnsparger. Fright drove him back a step. He had a second look. The body was fully clothed, the clothes cunningly fashioned of rust; arranged lying on its stomach, its arms held close, face to the side, gaping—it might have fallen from the stern. Arnsparger must have put it there to be found, a grisly piece of art, but artful nonetheless. Wilander knelt by the body. The detail was exquisite. All of ozim. Here was Arnsparger’s pen protruding from his trouser pocket; here the bulge of his wallet, the buttons on his shirt collar. He had not believed him capable of such. Beery, bluff Arnsparger, born in tavern light to a crowbar and keg of beer…he had done this? This miracle? How had he managed to fix the surface? Or did he, like the purest of artists, intend his work to be sacrificed, victimized by wind and weather? Wilander positioned his finger over Arnsparger’s jowly, stupefied face, then thought, no, not the face, he wouldn’t be the one to spoil the face, and, choosing an area near the belt, where the damage would not be so noticeable, he pushed in his finger. To his dismay, it went in easily. Ah, well. He withdrew it. Sheathed in rust, tipped in blood. He stared. Delicate flakes of red and black coated the finger from the knuckle to the first joint, giving way to glistening red. The fact of it sank in, as did the fact of a red leakage from the hole he had made. Something inside the figure settled, some imbalance registered, and its cheek caved in, rust leaked from an eyesocket. He jumped up and ran, nearly running up the rope, a mad scramble, flung himself over the rail, and made for the cabins, calling to Mortensen, to Halmus, wanting to alert them to a danger, but what was the danger? You couldn’t yell, Arnsparger’s turned into rust! and expect the same reaction you got by yelling, Fire! You would leave yourself open to ridicule, and rightly so. Mortensen wasn’t in his cabin; he must be down in the hold and he could rot there, because Wilander wasn’t poking his nose in the hold, no sir, not on his life, and he burst into Halmus’ cabin, noticing the glass had been knocked out of the port just as his feet skidded out from under him—he squawked, flailed, slammed down, knocking the back of his head painfully, not losing consciousness, squeezing his eyes against the pain. After the pain subsided he saw that the port glass was littering the floor and one of the crumbs, a chunk the size of a marble, held part of a brown eye. He thought it was reflecting his eye until he remembered his eyes were blue. Groggily, he sat up, bracing against the bottom of Halmus’ bunk. Turned the piece over in his hand. It showed the same from every angle, as if the eye were turning with it, interested in him. Wilander was too exhausted to register much of a reaction. Another chunk held the corner of a sneering mouth, and another a section of neatly trimmed beard. He had gone a ways toward assembling Halmus’ face before deciding he did not want to see the expression he had worn at the moment of death. Scattering the death mask on the floor, crunching the pieces underfoot, he walked along the passageway to his cabin and lay down on his bunk. Something dug into his back. The cell phone. He switched the thing on. Lots of messages, but he didn’t have a lot to say, just he wished this trip was over, Sayonara, and like that. He was tired, too full of angles for which there were no…The thought tailed off, uncompleted. He couldn’t count, he couldn’t think. His phone rang. Watching the little dingus vibrating on his chest made for a fun few seconds, but soon grew tiresome. It stopped. Seconds later it rang again. He picked it up, said, Hello.

—Thomas? I’ve been trying to reach you. Where’ve you been?

Around the world and back again.

—Hey…Arlene! He was genuinely happy to hear her voice.

—Listen, she said. That friend of mine, the hacker? I sent him what you told me…

—How are you? Are you okay?

—Thomas! You have to get off the ship! There’s a chance…

—I’ve really missed you.

She spoke to someone, her conversation muted, then said, The Fat Allie out of Mayorkiq. You remember? The fishing boat that Lunde told you about. There is no Mayorkiq, not anymore. The…

—Do you miss me?

—Yes. Yes, I miss you. The people in Mayorkiq, they went crazy, they all died except for two or three. They sent a…

—I love you.

That gave her pause, but then not for long. A science team went in and found these crates, she said. Nobody knew where they came from…

—Arlene?

—It’s obvious now they came from Viator. They contained an engineered virus.

—I want to fuck you, he said gleefully.

—This is serious, Thomas! That thing you’re always drawing? That thing in your dreams? That’s it!

—The…what?

—The virus! That thing you’ve been dreaming about. There’s a picture of it the web page he sent me. The crates must have cracked open. You’ve got to get off the ship! We’re on our way out, Terry and me…

Sternly, he said, I thought we’d settled that.

—What?

—I’m not leaving.

—Haven’t you been listening? You’re at risk!

—You can’t expect me to leave now…now we’re so close.

—God, Thomas! Don’t you understand! Everything that’s happened is the fault of that fucking ship!

He sat up, swung his legs off the bunk. Not everything…not everything’s the fault of that fucking ship! You turned into an animal! You didn’t have to do that! An animal! That wasn’t the ship’s fault, that wasn’t the ship’s fault!!

—Thomas, please. I’m just…

—You keep telling me to leave! You keep telling me! Well, why don’t you try it, huh? Why don’t you try! Ahhh…fuck!

He threw the phone at the wall, satisfied to watch it splinter into little plastic bones, and sank back on the bed, emptied by rage, empty of hope, of vitality, of delirium—he could make a long list of the things he was empty of; and for a while he checked off this item and that, yes, yes, no, almost, and it got to be like counting sheep, he tried to sleep, but the sound and light were almost constant, and he just lay there, listening to the groaning, watching the flashes of light, so vivid, so pure a white he could see every color in them, see anything he wanted, and he wanted to see Arlene, she wasn’t really angry at him, she was sad he was leaving, and it saddened him to be leaving. He had a long, cool thought of her, an eyes-closed thought of how she’d drag her pendulant breasts over his chest, and when he opened his eyes she was sitting astride him, her red hair undone, in all her full, sweet, hot life, but as for him, his chest was bones, just a ribcage and shriveled heart and lungs within, and he wasn’t shocked, the image tired him, but he wasn’t shocked, because he was leaving, she was staying; it was the voice of hallucinatory reason warning him away from things he could not have. He replaced her with the whistler. The queen of Kaliaska replaced by a kitten with vacant eyes who made lustful cooing noises; but at least his chest had been restored. The weight of his thoughts dragged him under the ground of sleep and into a dream; he was back in school, something about acorns, Bliss put in an appearance, as did Arlene and a giant, and then he woke to a prolonged grating shudder, to the signal long awaited, of Viator getting under way.

Feeling creaky in his joints, Wilander stumbled along the passage and came out into light which, though gray, absent all but a tin-colored smear of sun, hurt his eyes, out into blustery weather, snow flurries driven by gusts of wind, and just ahead of the prow, no more than a few feet, a dazzling corona twice the height of the ship, flaring and dwindling, every few seconds opening to reveal a view of another coast, a different view each time, as if Viator were choosing the perfect point of entry onto the Iron Shore, and they were edging forward, inch by painful inch—he could feel the living skin of her tormented by the pressure of rock, accompanied by groans, shrieks, shrill sounds of metal swelling and constricting, pushed through a narrows like no other, and he staggered, caught the rail, peering out into the coronal depths, at Cape Lorraine, at the sweep of the virgin forest, at all the wonders of that new world, and felt life pour through him, Viator’s life and his, they shared a heart, or rather his heart was Viator’s laboring engine, embarked upon a journey to end all journeys. He’d been wrong to picture his life ending in ignominy, wrong in his conjuring of days and nights spent in the forest with the whistlers; he would stay aboard Viator, remain her captain and sail the seas (more than seven by his reckoning), traverse the globe, going from port to port, and once they’d done the tour, once they’d gone from Cape Lorraine to Port Satine—the name came unbidden to his tongue, with a promise attached of wild tropics, talking statues, golden birds, distinguished gentlemen with exotic secrets to convey, enchanted prisoners with whispered tales of worse than life, blind wizards, black princesses, back-stair madonnas who would drain the poisons from a sailor’s flesh with their perfect lips and work their spittle into white beads they sold as remedies—why not another world, another escape, why not go on and on? Ceaselessly, tirelessly. A glorious future was to be theirs, Columbus’ dream of heaven, the voyage of endless discovery. And then Mortensen, Saint Mortensen, a ragged figure, his beard wider than his chest, ran into the bow just as the image of the coast of Mutikelio appeared in the corona, just as fire began to chew iridescent sparks from the prow. He shouted something, but there was too much din too hear, and he smiled, a fiercely enjoining smile, and, turning to the prow, to the light of his salvation, addressing the fire as he might his deliverer, with his arms outspread, he let it wash over him.

The fire continued eating the ship inch by inch, the groaning and shrieking grew louder, and Wilander, aghast at this act of self-immolation, made less certain of his fate, backed away, backed until he could back no more, and sat down heavily in the stern. He thought he should do something, but could think of nothing and so began to weep, to sob as Viator, shuddering violently, launched into an unfathomed sea. As the fire devoured the collapsed winch and reached the verge of the superstructure, he hid his face in his hands and wept. He did not know why he wept—it seemed a matter of convenience that he not know and so he wept for the sadness of not knowing. Then hands were laid on him, soft hands, Arlene’s hands; Arlene and Terry, cluttering his thoughts with their daft fumbling, their clumsy touches. What could they want? He had nothing for them. He doubted their existence, they were ghosts, demons come to tempt him. He pulled away, clambered to his feet, and stood unsteadily, his legs miles long and swaying. They tried to encircle him, to pen him in, and he fended them off with wild swings of his fists, weeping all the while. They spoke words he could not hear, yet knew were entreaties. He glanced at the fire. Forty feet away. He started for it, heard Arlene shout his name, and saw her standing with arms outstretched, face broken with fear. He took a step toward her, intending to console, to remedy, and it seemed in that step were all the steps he had ever taken, all the mis-steps, all the firm first steps, all the steps leading to good and evil, only this one had no ending, no landfall, and he pitched downward, falling into a pool of blackness like a sailor who had mistaken a puddle of rain for the sea.

Over the fifty-nine days of his confinement in a military hospital, Wilander pieced together a story that, like any story, had its flaws, its holes, but sufficed to encompass more or less the facts of which it was made. Viator’s cargo, unlisted on the manifest, consisted of two containers of a virus as yet unnamed (It’s a lentivirus, actually. Maybe we’ll name it for you, huh?), a Russian bioweapon, one of which had cracked open in Lunde’s storm and polluted the hold. Perhaps it had been intended to be destroyed with the ship, but this was thought unlikely; more likely, it had been meant for terrorist hands. The lentivirus bonded with DNA in brain neurons, gradually driving the host mad (You’re going to have to put up with this bad boy for a while, but we’ll keep him calm with drugs). Halmus and Arnsparger had been dead for weeks and days respectively when he happened upon them. Everything he had seen and experienced on the ship was, after a certain point, fantasy. The gigantic lentivirus of his dreams, his madness? They mumbled some business about impingement on the optic nerve and told him not to worry about it.

—But what about Mortensen? he asked. And Nygaard…what about him?

—Who knows? I guess they ran off in the woods somewhere, was the answer.

Wilander came in time to believe the story, to have faith in it as much as he had faith in anything; not much, but he felt he should have faith because so many people told him it was true, and thus he yielded to it, he rejected fantasy and let it soothe him. Still frail and uncertain, he was discharged into Arlene’s care and together they returned to Kaliaska. Thanks to the madness of the late Jochanan Lunde, he did not need to work, but he helped out at the trading post as he felt able and things fell into a routine. One afternoon in the dead of winter, straight past the turn of the year, he borrowed Terry’s launch and motored out to Viator, anchoring just offshore. Under gray skies; sheeted with ice; steeped in the gloomy shadow of the firs; she no longer seemed haunted, merely abandoned, and this effect was amplified by the lifelessness of the sea, the listless wash of black water against the sides of the launch, and by the great stillness of the scene, not a breath of wind to stir the needles and dump fresh snow on the decks, to snap the icicles, to breed a ghostly moan. The screws did not resemble crumpled flowers, but twisted metal, and the hull, which had once struck him as bloated, now was dented, derelict, empty. Biohazard teams had cut the heart from her, hosing down the hold with chemicals, and left her flensed and gutted. She looked like a place where men had gone mad. Wilander had seen enough, but was reluctant to leave, and he sat for the better part of an hour, lulled to a dreamy self-regard by the rocking of the launch, thinking about fate, how it was deemed capricious and yet was clearly insane—it went beyond randomness in its insanity, devising complicated skeins that almost meant something, that might mean something if you were short one brain chemical or took a blow to the head or fell victim to systemic shock, and he thought there must somewhere be a race of people who knew that this was true and kept themselves addled, stunned, and shocked so as to know the many-chambered world and avoid fate’s simplest snare, a reality shared by billions. He thought, too, of Arlene. Now he had gone such a curious distance from himself, could he come all the way back? Did he want to? That was the question. Did he have heart enough left in him, blood enough to tie such a simple knot? He made ready to haul up the anchor and heard a cry, a plaintive cry that planed away to a whisper, the issue of a tiny body and a metal throat. He felt a thrill run across the muscles of his chest. The qwazil. The ones who had slipped through, they must have been stranded here, and what else had been stranded, whistlers and wiccara and things he had not named and had not seen? Excitement shot through him, a familiar excitement, the excitement he had known aboard Viator, and he imagined the lentivirus flexing its ropy length, taking tentative flights across his brain. Several bizarre business opportunities occurred to him, not the least of which was the exploitation of the whistlers; they’d keep the place free of pests and be a true companion for a lonely hour. It astounded him he could be so easily persuaded to madness. Christ, this place was wrong forever. He weighed anchor, started up the launch, and recalled Mortensen reaching out to the engulfing fire, the image that had haunted him in the hospital. Saint Mortensen. Was he with the whistlers, preaching the gospel of Viator on the streets of Cape Lorraine, suffering the little children? No matter. You’re either dead or in heaven, he said, his voice startling in the silence. Whichever, you’re no good to me now. He did not look back until he was well out to sea and by then Viator had become anonymous, a black dot of solidity on a spectral shore.

At Arlene’s TP, the wood-stove was going, Terry was listening to headphones, sitting in a lawn chair, feet propped on the counter, reading a magazine, and Arlene, wearing plaid jacket over her dress, was dealing a hand of solitaire. She glanced up when Wilander entered, but kept playing. With her hair pulled back, her lips firmed in an I-am-not-going-to-say-a-thing expression, she looked pretty. Pretty and a piece more, his father used to say. Terry flicked an eye toward him, making a sour show of dismissal. Wilander ignored him. He stripped off his coat and leggings, studying Arlene, staring at her for such a long time and so intensely, it seemed he was warming himself at a fire, and she could feel him staring at her, he could tell by the way she held herself, he could see the injury he had done her in the rigidity of her pose, the wounded pride, and he thought it was time he made things right, not because he owed it, but because it was what he wanted, it was all he wanted—though that certainty didn’t guarantee success, not having it guaranteed failure, and he supposed that was why he had fucked up with such unflagging consistency over the years.

At last she said, noncommittally, Been out to the ship?

—I took a look. I’m back.

She slapped down a card.

He stepped around the counter and put an arm around her. Don’t worry. I’m over it.

—You say don’t worry, but…

He turned her to face him and said, I swear to God, I am over it. I love you.

Startled, she looked up at him and he kissed her on the mouth. She tasted of candy mints and coffee. Terry scowled at him, muttered something under his breath, went back to his magazine.

Hearing the words gave him a platform from which to say them more assuredly. I love you, he repeated. You’ve been taking care of me long enough.

He kissed her again, bearing her back against the counter, and felt his whole life rise up, heart to heart, with hers, in truth and in folly.

—Get a room, said Terry.