Viator

Nine

Had he given it the least thought, Wilander might have anticipated the reactions of his shipmates on hearing Lunde’s story. Arnsparger wanted to know if they would continue to be paid, and Halmus scoffed, saying, Why should I believe you? Or Lunde, for that matter? If that’s really the story he told, what proof can you give me that it’s the truth? I don’t know what you’re up to, either one of you, but I’m not buying it. Nygaard barely listened, sitting on the chair in Wilander’s cabin, his attention commanded by a faucet handle he was holding, admiring it as if it were a chrome daisy with four petals, and as for Mortensen…After giving up on finding him, Wilander was at the table in the officers’ mess, idly working on his maps, feeling listless each time he engaged the idea of walking into Kaliaska, worrying that Arlene might turn him away, when Mortensen appeared in the door that opened onto the passageway, gaunt and ghastly looking, his shoulder-length hair matted, his beard begrimed, yet uncustomarily cheerful—he smiled as Wilander retold Lunde’s story, ruining his image of revenant saintliness with a display of crooked brown teeth, looking instead as if he were the spiritual relic of an especially noisome odor or the astral guardian of a landfill, and once the story was complete, rather than responding to it, he poked at the maps with a bony, whitish-gray forefinger, like a parsnip in color, and praised Wilander for having devised so intriguing a destination (he had taken the liberty of studying the maps while Wilander was otherwise occupied), saying also that while he had doubted Wilander’s suitability for the captain’s cabin, he doubted it no longer. And when Wilander asked why he had used the word devised, Mortensen said, Didn’t you listen to Lunde? It should be clear what’s happened. The life force of Lunde and his officers fused with Viator during the storm. They were wedded to the instincts of the ship, her instinct to survive, to travel, just as the ship’s life was ultimately wedded to the life of the forest. Since Lunde proved to be most in accord with her instincts, the ship chose him to plot the course of her survival. Now that you’ve taken Lunde’s place, in union both with Viator and the forest, you’re creating not only maps of the land to which we’re traveling, but also the land itself, the (here he shuffled the maps about, peering at their legends)…the Iron Shore.

This astonishing recitation, so glibly delivered that it seemed practiced, left Wilander speechless.

—Arnsparger and Halmus view things somewhat differently, Mortensen went on. And yet I wouldn’t call their views contrary. They’re more complimentary, I’d say. Variant.

Still astonished, Wilander asked, You knew about the storm? And about Lunde?

—Not in so many words, but it was obvious something like that had happened. It’s happened to us, after all. Maybe you’ve been so wrapped up in your mapmaking, you haven’t had the opportunity to step back and view the situation, but…

—You believe the maps, my maps, are making this place real?

Mortensen gave a sweeping gesture, like one a preacher might employ when enthusing about promised glories, and said, There are worlds of possibility out there. Real as mist. Your mind, in alliance with Viator and the forest, with their power, their steadfastness, is influencing one of those worlds to harden into physical form. The signs of its three creators are present in your maps. The forest, the sea, the city. Surely you can see it? Even Nygaard sees it in his simple-minded way. Every reality is given form by means of a similar consensus.

The conversation evolved into a lecture, a dissertation upon the topic of Viator, Whence, Whither, and Wherefore, Mortensen pointing out the resonances between Lunde’s story and their experiences, and pointing out distinctions as well. He declared that the storm’s fury and the power of the sea had served as a battery that enabled the forging of a bond between Viator and its previous crew, essentially the same that had been forged between Viator and themselves, yet it had taken longer to complete that second bond because there had been no crucible moment of wind and enormous waves, only the battery of slow time, and the union produced by this gradual process was stronger than the original, and necessarily so, for it was no simple passage that lay ahead, no few days of wind and sea, and great strength and endurance would be demanded of them. But the primary focus of his disquisition was upon the link between Lunde’s charts and Wilander’s maps, those acts of the imagination that had created and were creating an appropriate landfall for Viator. In response to Wilander’s comment that, as far as he knew, the forest adjoining Kaliaska was not Lunde’s creation, it had existed for centuries prior to Lunde’s birth, Mortensen said, Yes, yet not in its current form; Lunde had authored a change that prepared the forest for Viator s advent, a small thing when compared to Wilander’s creation, to be sure, but Lunde’s forest was the precursor of the Iron Shore, a stage in the journey, perhaps the first of many stages, and wasn’t Wilander aware of the innumerable theories deployed about a single fundamental idea, that the observer creates reality?, my God, it was a basic tenet of philosophy, implicit in every philosophical paradigm, every religion, even Christianity, at least it had been part of the Christian belief system before the Council of Nicaea scrubbed the doctrine clean of its Asiatic influences; and both the most primitive conceptions of universal order (sympathetic magic, for instance, the notion that a voodoo priest could heal a sick man by feeding a bull meal in which a drop or two of the patient’s blood was mixed, forming a bond between animal and man that would permit the bull’s vigor to subdue the disease) and the most sophisticated insights of physics (fractals, the behaviors of subatomic particles, etc.) gave evidence of the interconnectivity of all matter, and it was this interconnection that had permitted Lunde and Wilander to channel their energies with such efficacy; then Mortensen, with a triumphant expression, his point having been firmly established (to his own mind, at any rate), proceeded to embellish his theory, his estimation of the event that surrounded them, that had closed them in, by linking the concept of an observer-created reality with the phenomenon of crop circles, with the casting of spells, and thence with the summoning of demons, exorcisms, séances, the hierarchies of the angels, astrological conjunctions, with top-secret scientific breakthroughs known to nine anonymous men in the government and the Satanic strategies codified by the webs of certain South American spiders, with the entire catalogue of lunacy from which middle-class neurotics the world over selected the crutches that allowed them to walk the earth without crumbling beneath the merciless stare and brutal radiations of a god who was nothing like the images in the catalogue variously depicting him to be a gentle dreamy shepherd, a mighty bearded apparition, an architect of fate (God’s Blueprint For YOUR Heavenly Mansion by Dr. Carter P. Zaslow, $22.95 plus shipping), a universe-sized vessel of love; and after Mortensen ended his discourse and returned to the shadowy places of Viator, Wilander, who had been halfway convinced by the initial portion of his remarks, realized that Mortensen’s mad-prophet pose masked a pitiful, ordinary madness, the madness that had doubtless afflicted him while abusing himself with fortified wine on the streets of several Alaskan cities; and, recognizing that he could trust not a word that had been said by either Mortensen or Lunde, he made a rashly considered call to Arlene, told Lunde’s story yet again, and asked her to check out the details on the Internet. She replied frostily that she would if she could find the time (she called back a day later, at an hour when he typically shut off his phone, and left a message saying that she had substantiated the basics of the story—the survival of the crew, Lunde’s dismissal, and so on—and that she had asked a hacker friend in the Forty-Eight to do a more thorough search) and said she didn’t believe this qualified as an emergency, she did not want him calling whenever he got nervous, did he understand?, okay then, goodbye. And Wilander, feeling isolated to an unparalleled degree—even sleeping alone beneath a cardboard sheet in an alley, he had heard voices, traffic, and known himself to be still part of the human sphere, but here there was only the silence and inhuman vibration of the ship—stepped out onto the deck and discovered that an inch of snow had fallen and more was coming down, big wet flakes that promised a heavy accumulation, yet vanished when they touched his palm, and he was so affected by this consolation of nature, by the whiteness of the deck, by the soft hiss of the snowfall, by the smell of heaven it brought, he stood with his face turned to the sky, watching with childish fascination as the flakes came spinning out of the incomprehensible dark, letting them melt and trickle down his cheeks like the tears of a vast immaterial entity who—eyeless and full of sorrows—had seen fit to use a lesser being to manifest its weeping.

With the snow came bitter cold, and by week’s end Viator was resplendent in a glittering drag of ice and snow, an old battered queen overdressed for a ball, wearing every bit of gaud in her closet, ice sheathing the rails, plating the decks, icicles descending from the toppled winch, from every protruding edge, and the forest, too, was shrouded in white—although during even the worst of the weather, a blizzard lasting for almost two days, the fir trunks and sprays of blackish green needles showed amid the whiteness like splotches of dark metal on a wall from which the paint was flaking—and as the snow continued, Wilander would glimpse flashes of corruscant light emitted by an indeterminate source in the middle distance and hear the complaint of tortured metal, a display he associated not with Viator’s penetration of the Kaliaskan shore twenty years previously, but with a new penetration, one just begun, made by a ghostly prow. Though he alternated between fear and disbelief in regard to what appeared be happening to Viator, he had given up the thought of abandoning the ship. For one thing, Arlene’s manner made it plain there was nothing for him in town, and for another, the forest was alive with surreptitious movement, with the cries of the qwazil, with other, unfamiliar cries, and something large had taken up residence in the linden tree (against logic, it had retained its leaves, although they had gone brown and papery and were now beginning to fall), shaking down snow showers whenever it moved, and he had on several occasions spotted what appeared to be multiple tracks on the shingle. But the most telling reason behind his reluctance to leave was a vacant, unstudied disaffection with the idea, a non-reason that eventually translated into a sense that he was better off where he was, that life in a fantasy of his design, albeit one whose existence he did not wholly credit, was preferable to anything he might encounter elsewhere. And once he embraced this passive choice, a spark of certainty was kindled by his every smaller choice, as if by staying he had come to terms with all life’s problems; and perhaps Halmus and Arnsparger and Nygaard had achieved a similar peace of mind, for the atmosphere aboard ship was cordial by contrast to what had gone before, with pleasantries and nods and brief, cheerful dialogues exchanged in passing; and, after the storm blew off, the diamond weather that followed seemed an additional validation that a sea change had taken place—long perfect days of white sunbursts in pale blue skies; hushed, enduring twilights that washed the snow lavender; blue nights with haloed moons and hard bright stars when Wilander, alone with his maps, felt like a magus imprisoned in a crystal, laboring over a casting that would set him free, detailing the coastlines of the Six Tears, adding a notch to the tip of the peninsula that bordered the lagoon, putting the finishing touches on the city of Cape Lorraine, adding marginalia beside portions of the forests, noting a concentration of whistlers or some other imaginary creature, not quite believing the fantasy, playing with it, obsessive in the way of a hobbyist or a gamer, and yet telling himself maybe, perhaps, what if, supposing it were real, tempted to belief. Sometimes he would walk out into the forest (not far; he remained uneasy with the environment) in order to gain a perspective on the ship, to think whatever thoughts the sight of it would generate, contemplating it as might a connoisseur in a gallery, the moonstruck superstructure, so pristine looking, a clean light spilling from ports and doors, here and there a refracted crystalline glint, and the sharp black prow lifting from between hills and boulders as if cleaving a swell, a far cry from the brooding image it had once presented, resembling a stranded luxury craft wherein a party of minor dukes and their be-gemmed ladies, confident of rescue, quietly celebrated the moment with the roast flesh of mythical beasts and wine fermented centuries before by eunuch saints in a Serbian castle; and one night, returning from a walk, as he clambered over the aft rail, having shinnied up the frozen rope from the shingle, he saw a shadow drop to the deck from the linden tree. At that distance, he could determine only that the shadow was human. He crept closer, keeping low to the rail, more intrigued than frightened, imagining that it must be someone from town. The shadow flattened against the outer wall of the officers’ mess and had a peek in through the port. Wilander would not have sworn to it, but the face that flared for an instant in the light from the port appeared to be that of a woman with extremely long hair. Then, as he crept closer yet, placing his feet carefully so as not to crunch patches of ice, she opened the door of the mess and stepped into the light, proving to be a slender young girl, dirty blonde hair falling over her shoulders and down her back; utterly naked, her skin onion pale, small-breasted, her crotch all but hairless; and then she darted inside, leaving the door ajar. Easing forward again, Wilander found an angle that allowed him to peer into the mess. The girl moved with furtive quickness about the table, and perhaps, he thought, she was no girl—although her body exhibited the immature development of a fourteen-year-old, her face was exotic, womanly, a beautiful, sensual face with high cheekbones and a mouth that was a little too wide and full for her narrow jaw. She pawed at the maps, stopped and tipped back her head as if catching a scent on the air; she picked up a colored pencil, bit it, tossed it aside, sniffed the air again, and then sped through the door leading to interior of the ship. Dumbfounded, Wilander held his position. Rather than pursuing her through the darkened maze of the ship, he thought it would be easier to intercept her when she returned to the mess; but as he debated whether it would be more effective to wait inside the mess, she sprinted back onto the deck, carrying a loaf of bread, leaped to the rail without breaking stride and vaulted up into the linden, bringing down a shower of snow and dead leaves. An air of unreality settled over Wilander. That a beautiful woman might be inhabiting the linden tree, existing in freezing temperatures without the benefit of clothing, failed to meet even his lowered standards of what was credible. Unless she were a whistler, in which case the very concept of judgment would take a hit. Shy; slender; physically alluring. Driven to steal food when winter made game scarce. She fit the description. He started for the larder, curious as to how she had negotiated the lock, and then recalled that he had bread, peanut butter, and tinned sardines in his cabin. The sardines and peanut butter, he discovered, were still on the shelf above his bunk. The bread, however, was gone.

Over the next few weeks, Wilander devoted considerable thought and energy toward the woman in the linden tree, putting aside his maps (they were more or less complete) and his concerns relating to the white lights and the noises and the increasingly active, albeit still-invisible population of the forest. Since a normal woman could never withstand such cold, and since her behavior suggested an animal intelligence, he was persuaded that she must be a whistler, and he set himself to capture her, leaving food out to lure her down from the tree, hoping to habituate her to the process and eventually trap her in the mess; but the next night, watching from hiding as she secured the block of cheese he had provided, he became aroused by the play of muscles in her thighs and abdomen, by facial features whose delicacy seemed evidence of a sensitivity belied by her primitive actions. It troubled him that he could feel desire for anyone other than Arlene, whom he loved despite the breach between them. The whistler was unquestionably a beautiful creature, but first and foremost she was a creature; it dismayed him to suspect that he might be engaged in so prurient a self-deception, but what purpose apart from the sexual would trapping her serve? The phrase with which Halmus had insulted him, the husband of the linden tree: It returned to Wilander now and he wondered if—given Mortensen’s theories—he had summoned the whistler from the uncreate to fulfill the odd promise of that phrase. He decided that he would befriend her, not attempt a capture, and he placed food at the end of the table nearest the outer door and sat at the opposite end, waiting to see what would happen. For three successive nights, he heard her tread on the deck, yet she declined to enter. On the fourth night, however, she slipped into the mess, snatched the food and, as she darted away, in a panic, she smacked into the edge of the door, causing it to slam shut, trapping her. She whirled about, pursed her lips; he felt a pinprick of pain behind his forehead, but it faded, amounting to nothing. He made soothing noises, urging her to calm, and stood, intending to close the interior door (he didn’t want her loose in the ship) and then open the outer door, allowing her to escape; but as he moved to accomplish this, she dropped to her hands and knees, presenting him her hindquarters, plainly a sexual offering. A second later, he smelled a sweetly complex scent, reminiscent of the sachets his mother had strewn about their home, seeking to mask odors that only she detected (the taint of a failing marriage, the residue of his father’s affairs) with tiny cloth bundles containing dried flowers, and he was struck by the thought that although he and his parents had never gotten along, though they had not even liked each other, it was weird how infrequently they sprang to mind…The scent, more cloying than those remembered scents, dizzied him. He gazed at the whistler’s pale buttocks. What would be wrong, he asked himself, if he were to fuck this consenting animal childwoman, this fantasy figure who he had dialed up from his subconscious? What possible significance could morality and conscience have when everything he imagined was coming true? Sufficient, it seemed, to restrain him. Still dizzy, he sat down again. The whistler got to one knee, staring at him, her torso partly concealed beneath tangles of hair. Wilander gestured at the door. You opened it before, he said. Go. She came slowly into a half-crouch, reached behind her, groping for the door, keeping her eyes on him. He told her once more to go, his tone peremptory, and, with a lunge, shouldering the door as she wrestled with the bar, she flung herself out onto the deck and, judging by the furious rustling that ensued, scrambled high into the linden tree.

Two nights passed before she entered the mess again, and two nights after that, a particularly cold night, with the temperature hovering near zero, a thousand glittering daggers of ice hung like trophies about Viator’s deck, a half moon whose light at meridian was so strong that a portion of the ice-sheathed railing at the stern looked to be a curve of gemmy fire suspended against the less focused brightness of the sea beyond, it was then that Aralyn—this the name Wilander had given the whistler, the name of a cousin in Goteborg whom he had never met—crouched in a corner of the mess while she ate the chicken breast he had set out for her; and the night after that she balked at returning to the linden tree. Not only was the cold affecting her (she had been trembling when she entered, making her seem even younger, frailer, like the little match girl), but the leaves of the linden had thinned out over the past days to such a degree, it no longer served as an effective hiding place, and this provided a clue to the size of the qwazil, who continued to call from the uppermost branches, secreted behind a smallish spray of leaves, marking itself as a tiny bird with a big voice…or else, like the wiccara, it was invisible. With both gesture and word, Wilander encouraged Aralyn to leave, but she curled up on the floor under the table as if she planned to sleep there; though it was unlikely that any of the crew would have reason to enter the mess during the night, it was nevertheless a possibility, and Wilander did not trust that they would have as protective an attitude toward her as he—she hadn’t filled the hole in his life that Arlene had left, nothing could, but her presence cut the loneliness to a more tolerable level, and he was coming to dote on her, to think of her as something of a cross between a niece and a pet; he made notes on her height and weight (a shade over five feet, slightly less than a hundred pounds) and physical condition (healthily sinewed; skin unmarred except for a pink two-inch-long scar shaped like a smile under her right breast; large eyes with dark irises and clear whites), and also noted how clean she was aside from her snarled hair and wondered if she washed herself like a cat or, as with certain breeds of dog, Samoyeds and Akitas, if she had a naturally pleasing odor. He indulged in a serial daydream in which, after reaching the Iron Shore, leaving Viator to sail unknown seas alone and un-captained, a living ship bent upon her own fulfillment, he became the great protector of the whistlers, a figure part Moses, part Che Guevara, part Martin Luther King, and pictured himself standing with Aralyn at the forefront of a host of whistlers, all dressed in homespun robes, freshly civilized, the forest ranked behind them, gazing with ennobled mien across a vista rife with promise. Okay, he told her. But you can’t stay here. And again with word and gesture, he urged her into the passageway and along it to his cabin, where, after displaying some signs of anxiety, she finally settled on the floor and slept. Wilander lay awake, listening to her breath, recognizing that he was establishing a dangerous precedent—she couldn’t stay in the cabin, or maybe she could, maybe it would be for the best; and if Viator was, indeed, on her way to the ultimate elsewhere, another plane of existence, a world he may have created, then she wouldn’t have to stay for long, no more than a week if the nearness of the lights and the increased volume of the groaning were indicators; and in the midst of these considerations, he fell asleep, a sleep undisturbed by dreams, unless waking to find himself enveloped in sweetness, a complex perfume, and Aralyn’s fingers stroking him, making him hard, unless all that were a dream, and he came up from the fog of sleep, meaning to push her away, but when he touched her, his disgust—a flicker—was subsumed by desire, his hands clamped to her flesh, and then she was rising above him, a shadow in the dark, fitting herself to him, just the way Arlene liked, only Arlene enjoyed sitting astride him and touching herself, whereas this one, Aralyn, was erratic in her movements, clawing at his chest, and that was his last clinical thought until after he had spilled into her and lay stiff with self-loathing, bothered by the weight of her head on his chest, her hand on his stomach, but unwilling now to push her away, to treat her roughly, because it wasn’t her fault, she had merely been trying to protect herself after having wandered into this unfamiliar place through a cosmic rip in the walls of her world made by Viator’s push to survive, acting on instinct…though it was possible, he realized, that he had assumed incorrectly, that he underestimated the whistlers and they were not sub-humans, not creatures of animal instinct, but fully human, a variant form of the species. In an effort to validate this thesis, he managed to teach Aralyn to say Tom and food, but since she banged on the floor with the candy bar he had used to illustrate food (mimicking the frustration he had displayed while teaching her) whenever she said the word, he couldn’t be sure she understood its meaning, nor was he sure—if she understood, if her intellect was more advanced than he had thought—whether this would put him in the clear ethically speaking. He doubted it would. Ethics had not been a strong point of his for many years.

The weather dirtied up, cluttered gray skies, snow flurries driven by offshore winds, dazzling explosions of light, like huge photic rips in the landscape, no more than fifteen or twenty yards ahead of the prow, and the din of metal under stress grew so articulated, Wilander could imagine the precise injuries being done, the iron plates gouged, dimpling, tearing. Wind howled about the ship; fir trees dumped loads of old snow onto the decks, and snow blew across the shingle, building drifts against the boulders. At night they would go into the mess for an hour or so and during that time Aralyn would run outside, probably to do her business—he hadn’t attempted to instruct her on the use of the toilet—while he leafed through his maps, adding a detail or two, wondering if they were accurate, and after she returned, they would return to the cabin. Lunde called on Friday morning to hear his report (Wilander having failed to call) and, recognizing the number on his caller ID, not wanting to talk, Wilander switched off the phone and left it off. If they were leaving the Alaskan Coast, and he could no longer harbor any reasonable doubt that they were, he did not wish to spend his last minutes on earth supplying Lunde with a blow-by-blow account of the passage, committed to routine like an astronaut. He sat brooding on his bunk, despairing of himself for having traded in a decent life with Arlene for a trip to nowhere with this womanly animal, who was playing with a candy wrapper on the floor. A pretty animal, an animal who appeared to be naturally housebroken, a relatively intelligent animal, yet not a terrific conversationalist. She had forgotten Tom, but every so often she would smile, a smile whose seductive quality was neutralized by the vacancy in her eyes, and say, Food. They had only engaged in sex the once, but that night Wilander, who had reminisced about Arlene much of the day, tormenting himself with the idea of abandoning Viator, knowing he would never do it, came to feel so desolate that he could no longer psychically afford to give weight to the question of whether or not he was debasing himself—he wanted to lose track, to forget Viator, forget Halmus, Arnsparger, Nygaard, Mortensen, to forget Arlene, and he beckoned to Aralyn and patted the blanket beside him. Either she did not understand or she chose not to comply.

—Come here, he said, patting the blanket harder.

Squatting on the floor, her bare arms and legs sticking out from what could have passed for a ratty shawl and a vest of dirty blond hair, she looked like a feral child, and, though he realized she could alter her expression by a shade and then seem much less the savage innocent, that didn’t soften the comprehension of what he was doing, and he felt a distant displeasure, angry that she was forcing him to control her. He shouted, slapped the blankets, and that confused her. At length he dragged her onto the bunk beside him and showed her how a zipper worked—not that she would retain the information—and pushed her head down, hoping that she knew what came next. She did. Clever girl. But as he lay back, shutting his eyes, he saw the photograph that was about to be mounted in his permanent scrapbook, the shot that would fix for all time the image of derelict ex-human living in the shell of a wrecked ship with other derelicts and getting sex from a creature who was a pedophile’s wet dream and had less than a room temperature IQ, a photograph so vivid, he could smell his own decaying spirit, the soul rotting in the rotten flesh, and he went limp, shoved her to the end of the bunk, where she sat a moment bewildered, spittle on her lips, then tried to crawl up beside him, and he shoved her back again, cursed at her until she scooted down onto the floor, huddling in a corner by the sink, staring fearfully at him. Tears started from Wilander’s eyes and he understood that the emotional sponsor of those tears was neither regret nor loss, but a febrile self-pity based on a knowledge of what he was becoming. That daydream of his, playing Moses to the whistlers’ Israelites, he envisioned it differently now; he pictured himself reclining on a mattress of boughs, surrounded by whistler women, using them whenever the mood struck, eating the berries and meat they brought him, the lord of a flyblown forest kingdom, purveyor of a petty colonialism, his hair lengthening to a moss-like robe from which his penis would occasionally protrude; growing older and weaker until he could do nothing more than digest a few berries and wait in dread for the whistlers, gone past innocence under his tutelage, to kill him with their teeth or the flint knives he’d taught them to make so they could be more efficient in the hunt. He flicked off the light and turned onto his side, facing the walls, wishing the world would hurry up and end. He thought he had been another kind of man once, basically good, not perfect, but he couldn’t remember how it had felt. The wind gnawed at the iron bones of the ship, its harsh voice falling silent for an instant as if it were choking, having to dislodge a fragment from its throat, maybe a chunk of chian or shaumere, and then began to feast again.