Viator

Six

During August, it appeared that Viator was being transformed into an enormous museum devoted to the works of a single artist, one possessed of an obsessively monocular vision, a fabricator of duotone vistas, pale green and dark iron, featuring a shoreline city and a forest. Every viable wall aboard ship was producing such an image and Wilander was initially disposed to believe this was a consequence of a perceptual bias that—as with the paranoia he felt while walking into town—stemmed from a chemical imbalance; but as the flaking walls of the passageways and cabins yielded their variant perspectives on the scene displayed upon the wall of the officers’ mess, he found himself less interested in why they had manifested than in what they might represent, and undertook to create a composite map of the region portrayed, treating the forest and the city as if they were real. He thought to ask the other men to verify that the images were there, but August was not the best of months for relationships amongst the crew: Mortensen was rarely to be found; Nygaard, as had been his habit since their set-to in the galley, scurried away whenever Wilander approached; Arnsparger grew uncommunicative and truculent; Halmus stalked about the ship, his customary arrogance swollen to the proportions of hauteur, and responded to Wilander’s conversational openings with imperious stares, refusing to speak, as if he were rehearsing for a role as a pharaoh or a headwaiter. For his own part, Wilander felt no great urge to communicate; he was absorbed by his new passion, snapping photographs of the walls with throwaway cameras he bought from Arlene, assembling the prints into a montage on the dining table in the mess, and painstakingly sketching from these materials maps of a nameless country (he attempted to name it, but the names he chose—North Calambay, Skiivancia, Vidoria, Alta Marone—failed to resonate with his nebulous conception of the place) that was very like Viator s forest, just larger, hillier, and with more prominent landmarks. Not that he possessed comprehensive knowledge of his surroundings; he was only familiar with the trail leading into town, yet he perceived these distinctions in the same way you intrinsically understand the conformation of a room in which you’re sitting, and that sense, that effortless apprehension of two environments, one immediate, one imminent (that was how he thought of the nameless country, as imminent, something on the horizon, a landfall not yet sighted) led him to surmise that Viator’s mystery was emblematized by its name, Traveler, and that the ship had been frozen mid-voyage, like the Viator-shaped stain on the bottom of the pot Nygaard had exhumed from the vandalized galley, and was straining to continue on its journey. That conjecture steered him once again toward the idea that his fixation upon the walls was akin to the dementias that afflicted the other men, that he would soon, if he had not already, equal them in madness, and yet, if he were to accept that prognosis, did it not suggest that Halmus, Arnsparger and Nygaard were seeing comparable vistas in their collections of glass and rust and scrap metal, and that Mortensen’s ability—as Arnsparger phrased it—to interpret Viator through its many surfaces also allowed him to envision a forest and a city. And what did that suggest? At one point Wilander went in search of Halmus and Arnsparger, determined to learn what they saw, what they knew, what they felt; but when they rebuffed him, he did not chase after them. He was beginning to understand the reason behind their unwillingness to talk: though compelled by the mystery of Viator, they were not altogether eager to solve it; they were afraid that what they had gleaned concerning the ship’s murky potentials might be true and thus did not care to validate as fact what was for the moment merely a suspicion.

Day by day, fear became increasingly dominant in Wilander’s life. His recurring dream unsettled him and the act of walking through the forest into town demanded that he steel his nerves, for everywhere he turned, he spotted evidence of movement in the undergrowth, stirring ferns, disturbed leaves, and he believed these signs were not due to wind or the scuttlings of ordinary animals, but to the passage of creatures similar to the one he had watched from the stern while talking to Lunde, sluggish translucent beasts native to another forest, another coast, to a metropolitan Kaliaska encircling a lagoon and separated from the town he knew by an imperceptible and indefinable barrier. The bird with the metal throat kept up its keening; indeed, Wilander became convinced that more than a single bird was responsible, since those declining, dolorous cries now sounded throughout the forest, and he thought that the original bird had, upon finding a suitable roost, summoned its fellows and they had proved to be a reclusive species who nested one to a tree and whose solitary calls were designed to provoke no answer, like a sentry’s announcement of all clear. Unnerved by these thoughts, by his almost casual embrace of their patent irrationality, he debated whether he should give up his job; scarcely a day passed when he did not entertain the idea—it had served him for a time, but now Viator had begun to unhinge him, to terrify him. During a mild yet persistent anxiety attack, one that lasted for several hours, he decided to visit Arlene, but was unable to bring himself to endure the suffocating grip of the hold, the hold where Mortensen muttered to himself and scribbled things, lending the darkness there a Cabalistic weight, and so he was forced to lash a length of rope to the railing near the stern, a spot beneath which the crest of a massive boulder lay fifteen feet below, and to descend to solid ground in that fashion. Each time he went into Kaliaska, he would decide that he’d had enough, he would send Terry out to collect his clothes, his books; yet his fascination with the ship drew him back. It was not just the walls, the half-glimpsed animals, and the birds that compelled him. Gazing at a fitting or a corroded hinge, at any portion of the ship, although he could measure no appreciable difference from how these things looked one day to the next, he understood that a deeper change was taking place in Viator, and, on one particularly stifling afternoon, as he paused to wipe his brow beside a bulkhead door, a bulging oval with a bar handle, studded with bolts, its green paint scarred and incised with initials, like a hideous iron blister, something that might have developed upon the hindquarters of a mechanical beast, it occurred to him—a thought that seemed a direct result of his study of the door, as if he were tuning in its vibrations—that Viator was not, as might be intimated, experiencing an awakening or an enlivening (the ship, to his mind, had always been alive, its vitality evident at first sight, its energy spilling out to nourish the improbable forest that formed its nest), but that it was moving; that, though engineless, Viator, by means of some imponderable process and through some unfathomable medium, was shifting closer to that other forest, the natural habitat of the metal-throated birds, close enough so their cries could be heard, and yet they remained invisible because the ship had not succeeded in physically penetrating their habitat. Informed by this insight, this hallucination, this fantastic narrative skeleton that could only have been constructed by an ex-drunk, ex-addict whose mind, after years of abuse, the penultimate symptom of which was the narrative itself, was so diminished that he might be persuaded of the reality of even the most laughable rumor; and it was fortunate, he told himself, that the priests of his mission-dwelling days, men for whom charity was more drug than virtue, weren’t around, or else he would be down on his knees, howling to Jesus, while one of them, maybe the Jesuit with the hair plugs in Seattle, Father Brad, what an asshole!, clasped his hands and beamed at him fatuously…Informed by all this, then, Wilander returned to his maps, attacking his cartographer’s problem with fresh inspiration and renewed zeal, making corrections, refining his vision of a nameless country populated by transparent badgers and invisible birds and gigantic flying worms, adding detail to a map of the city encircling the lagoon (the buildings inland low and undistinguished, like housing developments; those nearer the water arranged in complexes that radiated outward from the palatial structure on the peninsula), and also detailing the well-notched coastline beyond the city and a grouping of six islands that bore signs of habitation, laboring long into the night, damping his fears with work, quelling his rational concerns, forgetting everything.

A chilly morning in late August when frost sheathed the railings and mist clothed the firs in ghostly rags at dawn, thickening to a dense fog as the day wore on, hiding the world, the sun growing no brighter than a weak pewter glare, and Wilander lay beneath the linden tree, drowsing, clad in T-shirt and boxers, wrapped in a blanket, now and again opening an eye to squint at the grayish-white grainy stuff into which the deck disappeared, then falling back asleep, having a trifling dream or two; and, when he woke to see a dark shape in the mist, a phantom shape, he refused to believe in it and shut his eyes, but when he looked in that same direction a minute later, it was still there, closer, darker, more fearsome, undeniably real, and he sat up, clutching his blanket, shouted, Hey! Hey! and stumbled to his feet, overbalanced, caught himself on the railing, and so was standing in a half-crouch among the linden boughs, gaping, his heart slamming, as Terry Alpin hove into view wearing his official uniform, black leather jacket, jeans, T-shirt, holding a cigarette that released a thread of smoke, making it seem as if that slim white tube had once contained all the mist and was down to its last trickle.

Wilander straightened and adjusted his blanket, striving for dignity, and pushed aside one of the boughs to give himself a more complete view of Terry. Where the hell did you come from?

—Boat. Terry glanced off along the deck. Damn! It must be eight, nine years since I been out here.

—Boat, said Wilander dully.

—My dad’s launch. Terry gestured at the door of the officers’ mess. I can get down to the engine room that way, right?

—What do you want down there?

—I’m gonna see if I can find my Uncle Frank’s initials. It’s where he used to sleep.

—Your uncle was part of the crew?

—Naw, man. When Viator ran aground, when people were coming out to rip shit off, Frank, he thought it was pretty cool, this big-ass ship in the middle of the trees. Then him and his wife had problems, so he says, Fuck, I’m moving to Viator. He didn’t stay long. Maybe a month. He said it was making him sick.

—Sick…like how?

—Sick in the head, dude. He was having fucked-up dreams and shit. Hey, your bathroom work? That’s one thing really messed up Frank. Having to walk through the hold, so he could go outside and piss. It was so dark down there, it freaked him out.

—Everything works, Wilander said, muzzily trying to frame a follow-up question.

Terry tore off one of the linden leaves and examined it. Weird. These should’ve started to turn. Couple, three weeks, we’ll be into winter pretty much.

—Yeah, well. We’re having kind of a fifth season out here. Lots of weird stuff. Feeling a chill, Wilander caught the blanket more tightly about his throat. What do you want?

—What do I want? Not to be here, man. I got shit to take care of. Arlene wanted to find you, so I rode her out.

—Arlene’s here?

—Yep. Terry flipped his cigarette over the railing.

The idea that Arlene had boarded the ship both dismayed and pleased Wilander, and for a second or two he was unable to react. Where is she? he asked.

—Trying to find you, dude. You might want to clean up before she sees you. You look like you been sleeping with the dogs.

Wilander hesitated, uncertain in which direction to move—his cabin, for a clean-up, or should he try to find her now? The latter, he decided; otherwise she might encounter one of the crew and he did not trust their reactions.

—’Course, said Terry, I guess she’s seen you looking funky before. So what the hell.

—Is she below decks?

—I think, yeah.

Wilander started away, paused and said, If you run into anyone else, tell them you have my permission to be on board.

—Why? You think your buddies are gonna throw me over the side? Terry removed a second cigarette, previously hidden by his long hair, from behind his ear. I been coming here since I was a kid. I don’t need nobody’s permission.

One of the metal-throated birds took that moment to cry out and Terry, with a puzzled expression, turned to look for the source of the sound.

—The place may have changed, Wilander said. You never know what you might need.

He hurried along the passageway of the officer’s deck, thinking Arlene might be down at the opposite end, by the galley and the stairs leading to the engine room, but as he passed the mess he saw her standing beside the dining table. She was wearing a red-and-black plaid wool jacket and jeans, her hair tied back, and she was peering at his maps, which were scattered about on table, chairs, and floor. The light from the ports seemed ancient light, the light of centuries past, the pearly gray glow that Vermeer used to cast a glum benediction upon the subjects of certain portraits—it limned her figure and lent her skin a low polish, as of marble. ’Morning, he said, and she flicked a glance his way, the sort of look you’d give an incompetent waiter before turning your eyes away and asking for the check in a surly voice. She indicated the maps and asked, This is why you needed the sketchpads?

—It’s just something to pass the time.

—You felt a need to pass the time? The tedium was that great? Being with me is so boring, you prefer…what? She swatted at the maps, knocking several to the floor, anger breaking through her neutral pose. What’s this all about?

—Maps. Wilander went a few steps into the room. How can you say I’m bored with you?

She put a forefinger to her chin, making a show of pondering the question. Let’s see. Not hearing from you for three days, that was my first clue.

—It hasn’t been three days!

—Does time pass more slowly? How long do you think it’s been?

Wilander couldn’t come up with a number, but realized it might have been longer than he thought. It’s been three days? Really?

Arlene spat out a disgusted noise and stared down at the table once again. Maps of what? she asked.

—I’m sorry. I don’t understand how it happened. I must…I don’t know. Maybe…

—Maps of what? She slapped the table with her palm and shrilled at him. What? What is this?

Again, Wilander was so disconcerted, he could only offer a stammering reply. I told you, it’s nothing, just…just a…

—They have something to do with Viator, don’t they? She idled along the table, inspecting more of the maps. You’re crazy like the rest of them.

—It’s not crazy. I’m not sure how to explain it, but…

—But I’m dying to hear your explanation! Are they, like, your rust? Your broken glass?

—There’s no use getting angry.

—I’m not angry. Not anymore.

—Yeah, I can tell.

—Okay, I’m angry. Three days without a word, I was…

—We didn’t sign any papers, said Wilander resentfully.

In Arlene’s stare, in the configuration of fine lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, he saw scorn directed at him and also at herself, the self-ridicule of a woman who had committed an act of folly, one she had committed many times before and had sworn never to repeat.

—I was worried, she said. I thought you might be sick. I didn’t realize you had such important work to do. She took a less aggressive swat at the maps. You’re damn right, I’m angry. And I’m sad. She snatched up a sheet of sketch paper and thrust it at him. Go ahead. Explain it to me.

—So you can make fun of me? That’s what you want?

—So I can understand what’s wrong with you. Her voice broke and she struggled to control her features. I know there’s something wrong.

The tension between them softened and wavered, but when neither one moved to close the distance or to speak, Wilander sensed it hardening again, and their silence might have held if Terry hadn’t entered the mess, coming up behind Wilander and asking Arlene how much longer she intended to stay, then, on spotting the maps, brushing past him to have a look and saying, What’s all this shit? And Wilander, forced by Terry’s interruption to adopt some stance, to break the tension, called their attention to the wall and asked if they saw the landscape thereon. He pointed out firs, hills, the city, the lagoon, the coastline, the islands, feeling foolish as he did, certain that he was confirming Arlene’s characterization of his behavior, but at the same time feeling defiant, secure in what he believed, as if her challenge had confirmed something in him, the knowledge that he was not crazy, and given a reliable value to all the things he half-believed about Viator—they were true; perhaps not wholly accurate, but true. And they were significant. He was onto something here. Do you see it? he asked, and Arlene admitted, It’s there, yeah. Terry fiddled with his lighter, clicking it open and shut, appearing disinterested. That’s what the maps are of, Wilander said. You can see different views of the same place on the other walls.

Arlene said, They’re becoming visible…the pictures? They weren’t always there?

—That’s right.

She fingered the edge of one map, studying it. Let’s say that’s true…

—I can show you! Every wall—almost all of them—has an image of the same exact place. It can’t be coincidence.

—Fine. But I don’t have time for a tour, so let’s say it’s true. Arms folded, she came to stand facing him, a foot away. That’s the reason you’re staying here?

Wilander examined the question for traps, found none, and decided not to lie. Sometimes I don’t want to stay, but…yes.

—You’re staying so you can make maps of a place you claim the ship is showing you. Do you see anything wrong with that?

—I’m not crazy.

—I’m not saying you are! I’m accepting that what you say is true. It’s a supernatural event. Pictures are materializing on the walls of the ship and you’re going to stay on board and make maps from them. That doesn’t scare you? It doesn’t cause you to think the situation might be unhealthy? Dangerous? That you might be safer elsewhere? Somewhere the walls aren’t turning into pictures?

—I think, Wilander said cautiously, I need to be here for now.

She put a hand to her brow and let out a breath. How long do you figure for now is?

—Arlene. Wilander reached out to touch her shoulder, but she pulled away. He glanced at Terry and said, Why don’t you give us some space?

—No, don’t! Arlene signaled Terry to keep still. I’m almost done.

—I’ll go back to town with you, Wilander said.

—Not tonight, you won’t! You need to stay here, you need to give careful thought to what you’re doing.

—What does that mean?

—It means I want you to decide! Take a few days if you want. Take a week. But decide. I can’t handle this anymore. I shouldn’t have to.

Terry sidled toward the passageway. I’ll be on deck.

—It’d be nice if you called, Arlene said to Wilander. You know, to tell me what you’ve decided? But either way, if I don’t hear soon, my door will be closed. I won’t live like this.

—Live like what? I told you I’d leave after the first snowfall. I thought we agreed to that.

—I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you believe it yourself. Whatever’s going on with you, with the ship, it’s not good. You’re not in control.

—Look, I know this has been tough, and I wish things were different. I wish we’d met at a more propitious time. He took her hand, applied a light pressure, and though she did not return his pressure, she allowed his fingers to mingle with hers. But all this…all coming at once. You, the job, Viator. It’s been…

—I don’t want to hear about your problems anymore! She stepped around him and went to stand in the doorway. I worry about what’s happening to you. I worry all the time! But I’ve lived long enough, I’ve learned I can’t save anybody by hovering over them while they work out their problems. They take it for license; they convince themselves that on some level I must enjoy watching and waiting, or that I can tolerate it…or something! I’m going to worry about myself from now on. And you have to worry about yourself. Or not. That’s up to you. Do you understand?

Wilander couldn’t think what to say. Words occurred to him, too many words, words attached to feelings that, if not contrary to one another, seemed unrelated, as if he were feeling everything at once—anger, regret, love, several varieties of fear, even a perverse satisfaction at having so splendidly and so relentlessly mishandled the relationship. She asked again if he understood, demanding an answer, and he said, I think I’ve got it. Yeah.

She looked to be gathering herself, preparing, he thought, a goodbye; then, suddenly alert, she said, Oh! I have some news. It’s really the reason I came. I wasn’t going to, but I learned something you should know, and my phone was acting up. I did a search on the Internet for your employer.

—Lunde?

—There wasn’t much information. He’s spoken at a few conferences on unemployment. Things like that. But here’s the part that’ll interest you. Guess who Viator s captain was when she ran aground?

Wilander gawked at her.

—Jochanan Lunde. Your benefactor. Her eyes flashed to his face, then away, as if she were assessing the effect of this revelation, yet didn’t want him to catch the malicious expression that briefly surfaced, a malice he had sparked in her, that had remade an intended kindness into an intent to wound and confuse him, as she had been wounded and confused. What do you make of that? she asked, her tone too bright to communicate concern. Maybe he doesn’t have your welfare at heart after all.

Once she had gone, Wilander tried to balance the implications of Lunde’s duplicity with his own appreciation of Viator, and, finding no logic to diminish the sinister light in which Arlene’s news cast Lunde’s motives, he hurried to his cabin, threw on some clothes and headed for the stern, hoping to beg a ride into town with Terry. Given what he now knew, to spend another night on board would be foolhardy. Whatever Lunde had in mind, it had nothing to do with salvage (apparent from the start) and still less to do with charity (something now apparent), and Wilander could only believe that he and the others were being manipulated along some extraordinary and, almost assuredly, perilous course, like lab rats in a run. Upon reaching the stern, he called out to Arlene, unable to locate her in the fog, and, receiving no response, he shinnied down the rope that he had tied to the railing. As he hung above the shingle, he heard a motor cough, stutter, and catch. Arlene! he shouted, and quickened his descent. Trotting along the margin of the shore, he shouted again. He slipped on the wet pebbles, his right foot raising a splash, and spotted a dark shape gliding off, barely identifiable as two figures in a boat, there for an instant, then not there, the trebly grind of the motor growing muffled, dwindling and dwindling, soon outvoiced by the lapping tide. He dropped into a squat, oppressed, rendered energy-less by a feeling of loss and isolation. As soon as the weather eased, he told himself, he would walk into town. Not at night, though. He didn’t trust the forest at night. A damp west wind gusted, thickening the briny smell, giving things a stir, the boughs, wavelets, seaweed, and stirring as well the becalmed waters of his thoughts. He wished he had made himself clearer to Arlene from the inception of the affair; instead of simply saying that he wasn’t solid, leading her to think that his recovery was the main issue, a matter of getting settled, getting straight in his head, he should have said that he wasn’t strong enough to take on her entire life. That’s what she was looking for, someone who would embrace her hopes and dreams, her beliefs, someone who would cherish those things even if he couldn’t share them, who would consider them in every situation. He should have emphasized the fact that he wanted to be that person, but she had to be patient, because—as he’d told her—it was disorienting to have so much life after years of having none, and it was going to take some time before he understood how much was left of him. How much strength. How much capacity for love. How much honesty. He should have done all that and more. The wind gusted harder, the fog eddied, and the shapes of the firs at the south end of the shingle sharpened into the dark green ghosts of trees. No sound came, except for wind and the slurp of the tide. Limbo, he thought. Purgatory. Neither heaven nor hell, yet judged closer to hell for the absence of heaven. At his feet, black water edged with a lacy froth filmed among the pebbles, creeping to his toes, floating up twigs and dried needles. He clenched a pebble in his fist; its cold solidity steadied him and he imagined that if he continued to hold it, it would infect his flesh, turning him to stone, and years hence he would be found squatting on the shore, a small boulder weathered by magical storms (so it would be said) into a rude approximation of a man worshipped by the elder Inupiats, those who had not yet learned to discredit the miraculous nature of existence—they would drape him with kelp necklaces, they would paint images of the sea upon his eyes, they would dress him in bark and feathers, leave him food and drink, give him names, and when the last of them were dead, then he, too, would die, a negligible transition, since even prior to his transformation, his life had been a flicker of self-awareness, nothing more. Unaccountably weary, his joints cracking, he stood and sidearmed the pebble across the water, listening for the plop, and then started back to the ship. The hull loomed overhead. It appeared larger than he recalled, as if some gross internal disorder had caused it to bloat while he was distracted. With its abraded belly, listing a few degrees to port, centering the ragged frame of the forest, veiled in drifts of mystic gray, the convulsed screws and the bolt-stitched plates adding a brutal Frankensteinian touch, Viator no longer posed a vast metal incongruity, a surreal element of the landscape, but had acquired the monstrous, mythical aspect of a mighty life stranded, like an old whale confounded by pollution and driven to beach itself, yet still vital, generating by its restive vitality the pulse of the silence that engulfed the place; and, though Wilander approached the ship fearfully, his fear was not a shriveling fear, a fear of the unknown, but the anxiety of someone who had happened upon a moribund giant and was worried it might lash out in its pain and desperation, and inadvertently crush him. Four figures materialized at the rail above, occulted by the fog, and he halted his approach. He couldn’t tell one from the other, but when three of them withdrew, he assumed that the sole remaining figure, its outlines blurring and sharpening with the alternations of the fog, was Mortensen. Not a word passed between them, but some unspoken message may have been exchanged, some frail accord summoned, for Wilander, inspirited by a sympathy more poignant than the sympathetic reaction naturally incurred by two strangers sharing a solitude, lifted his hand in salute. The fog looked to be weaving a cocoon about Mortensen, returning him to the cloudy dimension where he hermited. Within seconds, he was hidden from view. Wilander waited for a reply, his neck craned, but the figure never reemerged.