by Keith Rosson
“Mr. Schutt, can you tell me,” said Dr. Bajeer, pen wedded to his clipboard again, “how long you’ve been having headaches?”
•
So it was a doughnut, and you went through the hole. That was the CT scan.
They had taken his neck brace off. He felt very tired: the jagged edge of adrenaline had given way to a bone-deep fatigue as the circular apparatus hummed around his head. His headache throbbed. His ear throbbed. His face hummed with pain. He felt like a blood bag jammed through with bone shards and brought resentfully to life. The purpose of the CT scan, a nurse had informed him, was to take quadrilateral scans of his brain. A schematic of his brain in four sections. To note any issues, any possible swelling, trauma. He was steeping in a slow broth of unease even as he felt his eyes drooping.
“Oh, we don’t want you to sleep, sir, that won’t help us,” he was gently admonished.
He thought briefly of the paltry insurance he got as a contracted employee at the university, and the ungodly amount of debt he was racking up for all of this. Dear Christ, he’d accepted a ride in the ambulance! He was getting a CT scan! His headache pulsed in its old familiar housing, its old familiar way: this was one of the precise ones, with that single isolated spot radiating an ache that throbbed darkly all throughout the rest of his skull. He thought about rising up, could picture it happening. He would rise like some embattled Hollywood film star, pulling the electrodes from his skin in a brazen rebuttal of death. But he, like the old man who may or may not have started mooing like a cow earlier, was now in an open-backed hospital gown, his clothes lying in a stack on the chair in the corner.
“A noun is a person, place or thing,” he said as the white tube slowly began enveloping him. “A verb indicates an action or occurrence.”
“Sir,” the nurse said, “please just sit still, okay? This won’t take long.”
•
And then he was back in his little curtained slot, leaning against his gurney and thumbing through a magazine article about breast pump dos and don’ts. The old cow-man was gone, or sleeping, or perhaps had died, having mooed his last moo. Then Dr. Bajeer walked in with his clipboard.
“Mr. Schutt,” he said, and walked up to him, close enough that Brian could see the pores on the man’s nose. This close, Dr. Bajeer was a riot of scents: wintergreen chewing gum, cologne, something antiseptic. “Why don’t you have a seat, please.”
Brian looked around their little open-ended stall. Their little intimate stretch of space. “Here?” he said, pointing at his gurney, blood-dotted and wrinkled. “Or the chair?”
“Uh, actually,” said Dr. Bajeer, turning on the computer in the corner of the room, gazing up at the wall-mounted screen as it flashed to life, and then walking over and shutting the curtain, “on the gurney’s fine. So you can see the pictures here.”
The doctor spent a minute logging into the system, clicking buttons, opened files.
Eventually, images unfolded, bloomed to dark life on the screen.
“So I have news,” said Dr. Bajeer. “It’s not good, unfortunately. All told, Mr. Schutt, I’m sorry but it’s not good at all.”
•
He was riven then with medical terms. The doctor clicked his pen against various points of the overhead screen, an image of Brian’s brain. Looking him in the eye, Dr. Bajeer spoke clearly, emphatically, and a litany of half-understood words dropped like stones from his mouth. Ice crept from the floor, up Brian’s legs, rooting him to the ground.
Shards of sentences drifted through the maelstrom. Hung in the air like arrows in midflight: Astrocytoma. Stage III, possibly Stage IV. We won’t know for sure until we perform a biopsy. But it’s severe.
How was this man so calm? Delivering this news?
What, Brian asked, or someone with Brian’s voice asked for him, was the difference between Stage III and Stage IV.
That was something that Brian should discuss with his neuro team. But Dr. Bajeer could provide him with literature in the meantime.
Again, Dr. Bajeer circled the whitened area of his brain—his brain!—that denoted the location of the tumor, this collusion of traitorous cells inside his skull. Brian heard his own voice again, a voice murky and distant, asking if it was terminal. A brain tumor like this, if it was terminal or not.
The doctor paused. “I can’t give you a prognosis until we get a biopsy. But as I said, it’s very serious.”
“And this”, Brian said from that far away swampland, “would explain my headaches?”
Dr. Bajeer nodded. “Yes. We call this cerebral edema, brain-swelling. You’re experiencing a lot of intracranial pressure as the tumor grows. In a way, you’re fortunate that you came in this evening.” Brian managed to laugh at that, though it again was a dry, clicking sound, like he’d tried dining on a handful of sand.
“I don’t feel lucky.”
Again, Dr. Bajeer nodded, grave and unsmiling. “I understand. But there are things that can be done. I would like you to strongly consider, Mr. Schutt, allowing me to contact a neurologist. He or she would begin the process of assessing your options with you. I can contact one immediately, after I leave this room. We can begin arranging a biopsy, your pathology report. We could do this now. I would suggest it.”
His brain! This interloper in his brain! He pictured a fist knocking against the yellow bowl of his skull, finally punching its way out, like a zombie bursting through the soil of a grave. He nodded at the doctor.
“Very good. I’ll be back in a moment, Mr. Schutt. I’ll have the staff place some calls. Now’s the time to make some calls of your own. I’m not sure when you’ll be leaving, if a neuro team is available. They will want to perform a biopsy and possibly remove the tumor immediately. You should contact your family.” He gestured at Brian’s face. “Meanwhile, I’ll get someone in here to stitch up your lip, take a look at your ear.” Dr. Bajeer nodded grimly one more time, then clapped Brian’s shoulder, squeezing with surprising strength. He walked around the blue curtain and Brian heard the whish of the pneumatic door opening and closing. In moments, the doctor had both explained so much—the headaches, the missing words—and also utterly demolished the footholds and foundations of Brian’s life. Just like that.
A fucking brain tumor.
As if resurrected by the news, he heard the old man moo again. A zombie cow-man, woeful and lost, something resuscitated and drawn grudgingly back down mortality’s ugly hallway.
Brian looked at the screen where the CT results still glowed. That pale, asymmetrical blemish in the curved egg of his brain. The old man lowed again, anguished.
Brian scooped up his blood-spattered clothes and walked around the curtain, bare feet slapping on the floor. He found a bathroom less than a dozen feet away. He stormed inside and locked it, leaning against the door on a pair of legs now seemingly carved from ice. A toilet, a sink, a wastebasket. An empty steel cupboard for leaving piss specimens. He got dressed.
There was some surety that this was the wrong thing to do. That this was, truly, absolutely, the wrongest thing to do. But he did it: he bundled his gown in a ball and put it in the wastebasket by the toilet and walked out into the room of blue curtains. He strode past the old man on his gurney. He walked through the whooshing doors, out through the emergency room, and into the night.
He stepped out of the hospital unfixed, terrified, woefully damaged, and strangely exultant.
•
The house was silent, dark, Ellis’s snores audible as soon as Brian crept in the door. He felt like a stranger tiptoeing through the place. It felt like someone else’s home now. The dumb, naive Brian that had lived before this one.
In the bathroom he spilled a loose handful of aspirin into his palm without turning on the light, chewed them to pulp. Fuck his liver, right? Who cared? What was the point of worrying about that particular issue when his brain was steering the whole operation into an
early grave?
In his room, on his laptop, there was a message from Mark Sandoval.
Brian,
Appreciated the meeting today. Pardon the hackneyed seafaring lingo, but I liked the cut of your jib. I think you’d do well.
The position’s yours if you want it. Call me.
—M.
2
how in the hell do they grow pumpkins in hvíldarland?
“It was the same answer down every road we traveled. Every highway apparition, every back roads haint, every shimmering blacktop spirit seemed to signify the same thing: wherever you went, you took yourself along with you.”
—Mark Sandoval, Night Roads
1
They met at the airport, and Sandoval bought their tickets with cash.
It was a quick hop from Portland International to SeaTac, then an eight-hour flight to Reykjavík, Iceland. Sandoval, in the roughly forty-eight hours since Brian had officially accepted his offer of employment, had proven to be generous with credit card and money roll both. He’d also named a small weekly stipend as well as a commission to be issued at the end of the project that was so generous that Brian had actually stammered, “Sorry, what’s that?” after Sandoval had named it.
This was his first time flying business class. Something inside Sandoval seemed to loosen when they finally rose off the tarmac; he pressed his head against the seat and in his slow exhalation seemed to breathe some kind of silent thanks. He was sloughing something off. Yet Brian—Brian already had a mantra down, this tic he couldn’t get rid of; he’d been hijacked, down at the cellular level, after all. He couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Stage III, Stage IV.
I can’t believe I just bolted.
I ran. I ran away. Jesus.
Across the aisle, Sandoval immediately started packing the booze away. Brian was reminded of that sugary-sweet stink in Don Whitmer’s office, the fug of the man’s obvious hangover, the two Bloody Marys he’d put down in the airport bar before their flight. He leaned back in his own massive seat and watched Sandoval upend a pair of miniature vodka bottles into his plastic cup.
Midway over the Atlantic, the flight attendant simply left the cart next to Sandoval so he could withdraw drinks at will. The privileges of international business class. At some point, he brandished his cell phone and winked at Brian yet again. “You’ve seen the footage, right? That the woman sent in?” The obvious slur in his voice, the drooping lids. Brian had already seen the Hauksdóttir footage a number of times at Sandoval’s West Hills home the day before. Still, provided he didn’t fall down dead in the interim—oh, how easy it was to joke like that, as if it weren’t actually possible—he and Sandoval still had a month of traveling together to get through. Diplomacy mattered.
Brian said, “What the hell, let’s take a look,” and Sandoval handed him his phone.
•
The video: a jittering, pixilated shot of dusk wheeling toward night. Just a hint of steely blue behind the cragged mountains in the background. The camera quickly dropped to churned earth, then rose again to show rows of white tubes in the foreground, their skin milky and translucent, alien-looking.
“Greenhouses, right?”
“Yeah,” Sandoval said. “She’s growing fucking pumpkins out there, you believe it?”
“How in the hell are they growing pumpkins in Iceland? At all, much less in March?”
“It’s not Iceland, remember?” said Sandoval. “It’s Hvíldarland.”
Onscreen: for a moment, a long series of moments, nothing. A wavering facade of gray-to-black pixels, more soil, those long white tubes like miniature airplane hangars. The film quality, digital or not, sucked.
And then the form began to uncoil itself slowly out of a patchwork of those gray shifting pixels.
The bad quality, to Brian, made it more suspect than not. Easier to manipulate. But whoever was wielding the camera had stopped moving at least, and the shape continued to unspool slowly out of the stilled gloom, muted whites and grays that his eyes kept trying to decipher. Then, like a key fitting a lock, the image registered: a horse had walked around the corner of one of the greenhouses, its mane hanging in silken silver strands. The image wobbled, washed across the greenhouse and calmed again, the camera taking in the shape of the animal in its entirety: the head, the muscled neck, the rolling curve of the shoulders. There were the rippling haunches, the tail a silken silver as well. The camera jittered and zoomed in as the animal dipped its head to the ground and then rose once more.
There was the black eye, the lips, the square teeth.
And yes, there, okay: the horn above the eyes, atop the ridge of the skull.
It was a scalloped horn, the color of pale cream.
Suddenly the animal heard something, saw something, got spooked, and simply turned and trotted away with a quiet, supple strength into the surrounding darkness. Swallowed back into the gloom in seconds.
Okay, so.
Sure.
A unicorn.
A unicorn on a pumpkin farm.
A unicorn on a pumpkin farm in a small, beleaguered, mostly forgotten island in the Atlantic.
It was like a shitty Mad Lib.
Sandoval peered over at him, leaning across his armrest like a proud, expectant father.
“CGI?” Brain said. He handed the phone back.
Sandoval frowned. “Pshh. Please.”
“Or maybe they attached it somehow. Surgically,” Brian offered.
“The horn?”
“Yeah.”
It took a while for Sandoval to answer. He lifted his red cup and swirled it, gazing into its contents. He set it back down on his tray and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. Staring at the milky gray screen mounted in the seatback in front of him, he finally spoke. “It’s good you’re dubious.”
“Well, I mean . . . This is why we’re going, right? To investigate?”
“You’ve heard of Lazarus species, right?”
Brian nodded. “Sure. Species thought to be extinct that get—”
“Rediscovered. Right. Storm petrels, Omura’s whale. On and on. Creatures assumed gone forever, only to be found again. Happens more than you’d think. Even now, where the undocumented world has atrophied like hell.”
“So you’re saying the unicorn is a rediscovered species? Come on, Mark.”
Sandoval pulled back the curtain on the drinks cart again and selected another tiny bottle of vodka. “I’m saying it’s good that you’re doubtful. Especially when we find the thing and you have to eat those bitter, bitter words.” He winked, upending the bottle into his cup.
“Okay.” Brian smiled. “Sure thing.”
“Seriously though. Just make sure that your doubt doesn’t blind you to something that’s right in front of your face.”
•
Dawn broke like a dropped plate: impolite, quick, the day yanked from darkness and suddenly suffused with light. In the Reykjavík airport, they met the charter pilot their host had arranged to fly them to Hvíldarland. He introduced himself, with a heavy Icelandic accent, as Orvar. He stuck the cardboard sign he was holding—SANDOVAL in block letters—under his armpit and high-fived Brian after taking in the state of his face. “Someone parties hard, yeah? Shit, man.” Thin and pale, he wore a bleach-spotted Hammer Time T-shirt and a strap around his glasses, the lenses of which, Brian noted with more than a little unease, seemed significantly thick for a pilot. Encroaching on legally blind territory, actually. He also had a number of shitty stick-and-poke tattoos scattered on his arms. But Orvar walked through the airport with an offhanded confidence, his ID on a lanyard around his neck. All of their luggage had made it through, and Sandoval fussily inspected all the gear on the floor of Baggage Claim again before he allowed Brian and Orvar to load it onto a trolley.
They pushed everything out onto th
e tarmac where a small Cessna waited. A brisk wind came off the ocean—the airport was perched practically right next to it—and Brian stood with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched as Sandoval packed the plane, Orvar talking at his back the whole time. He was a big fan of Sandoval’s books, he said, and kept asking, in his heavily accented English, what Sandoval thought “getting the bone up with a vampire chick” would be like. Sandoval, even drunk as he was, managed to decline answering.
Seemingly moments later, the plane rose into the sky, the engines blatting like a lawnmower, the sea, gray and implacable, suddenly below them.
Hvíldarland, Sandoval had informed him earlier, was a sovereign island country just thirty miles across at its longest point. A population of less than thirty thousand people. The southern half housed the island’s capital and largest city, Kjálkabein, where over half of the country lived. Hvíldarlanders were a populace screwed over resoundingly by overfishing, and the country had yet to make the leap to tourism. As a result, they were struggling. Meanwhile, the majority of the island was uninhabitable and unpopulated. At its midrange was a valley flanked by a number of outlying hamlets and villages, all of them branching off from the main road that ran north to south through the majority of the country. The road itself was called, inexplicably, Vegurrin Sjö, or Road Seven. Beyond that valley lay expanses of moss-covered hills and volcanic ranges, small saltwater fjords, steppes, nearly the entire country ringed in those merciless mountains or rock-strewn spits of beach. The pictures he’d looked up had shown a beautiful patchwork from above: greens and grays, those tiny clusters of townships radiating from Road Seven like spokes from a broken wheel. He’d been surprised to see that he could even find the Hauksdóttir farm on Google Earth, its long driveway like a brachial offshoot from the main road, a long row of greenhouses on each side of the driveway, orderly as church pews. North of Road Seven and the farm lay a forest, impenetrable and dense from above, and then what had looked, at least online, like a blackened swath of burned woods. The northernmost tip of the island had featured a scattering of buildings that may have been hangars or warehouses, all of it ringed in a fence that lined the sea. Some kind of installation, but a small one, with the air of abandonment about it.