by Keith Rosson
“Here we go,” Orvar said, and then spoke Icelandic into his headset, clearing something with whatever passed for traffic control at the Kjálkabein airport. The plane dipped down.
2
The airport consisted of a single stunted runway with a pair of open-ended hangars tacked on the end. There were a few other scattered outbuildings beyond, equipment or storage sheds, that appeared so dilapidated that cardboard had been taped over a number of windowpanes. Salt hung in the air like brine. The terminal itself was the size of a decent fast food restaurant and smelled, once they entered, like a machine shop. Fluorescents buzzed overhead and broken-down cardboard boxes lay stacked behind an empty information desk. Somewhere between “business casual” and “abandoned due to zombie outbreak,” Brian thought. In the middle of the room were two long rows of pastel bucket chairs lined against each other, populated by only a few people staring down at their phones or into open paperbacks. One woman was knitting. Two men in dark uniforms stood laughing in a doorway marked Employees Only in English and Icelandic.
“Not exactly a hub of commerce,” Sandoval noted.
Orvar helped them bring their gear inside and Sandoval tipped him, a sheaf of US bills passing from one palm to the other. Orvar bowed and thanked him, called him “my good bro.” There seemed absolutely no trace of irony to it.
“Hey, Orvar,” Sandoval said. He gestured at the two men in the doorway. “Before you go, do we talk to those guys about renting a car? Or getting a taxi?”
Orvar squinted one eye. “You want a taxi?”
He walked over, clapped one of the two men on the shoulder, slapped palms with the other one. Brian and Sandoval stood there, bags of gear hanging off their frames, gathered around their feet like boulders. When Orvar sauntered back, he clucked his tongue and said, “No good, bro.”
“What’s no good?”
“Well, we have no rental place here at the airport, yeah?”
“What? Do you have one in town? In, uh, Kjálkabein?” Brian felt like he mangled the word.
Orvar shrugged. “Not really. I mean, people don’t really come here, man.”
Sandoval turned and looked at Brian, the look on his face obvious enough—you were in charge of this.
Orvar clucked. “And the other bummer is this: our taxi guy is sick. Strep throat.”
Sandoval turned back to him. “Wait. Thirty thousand people live on this island. And you have one taxi in the entire country.”
“Yeah.”
“And the driver’s sick?”
“With strep throat, yeah. But look! I don’t have to fly back for another few hours. I’ll give you a ride.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“It’s cool, man. No problem. Where are you guys staying?”
This, at least, Brian had had the wherewithal to take care of before they left. He retrieved the printed reservation from his bag and shook it open. “It’s uh, the Natura Haf Hotel?” Again he felt like he brutalized the accent.
Orvar winced, sucked air through this teeth. “Ah, that shithole? That’s too bad. That place got shut down last year for bedbugs. They just opened up again.”
“Yeah, right. It was four hundred dollars a night, per person. Bedbugs.”
“I’m telling you, man. They were shut down for four months last year. But listen, I’ll take you to the best place in Hvíldarland. One hundred percent. My uncle runs it. Right down the road. Cheaper, too, and you won’t get eaten alive.”
Part of Brian was relieved—at least Orvar had become transparent. At least his grift was obvious. He cast a glance at Sandoval, who shrugged and adjusted one of the bags on his shoulder. “I don’t give a shit,” he said. “Wherever it is, let’s get going.” Beads of sweat dotted the man’s forehead. Brian figured he was sobering up and unhappy about it.
Orvar shot the devil horns at the uniformed men as they walked out into the nearly empty parking lot. The minivan he stopped beside had once been red but was now faded to the jolly pink of a reasonably healthy lung. Great washes of rust crept down toward the wheel wells. Like weeping tumors, Brian thought, and something chilled and knife-edged wormed down his spine—things like that just kept coming now, unbidden and haunting. He got in the back with their bags and the minivan began bouncing along a series of potholes as they made their way toward town. Orvar put in a cassette of Paul Simon’s Graceland, cranking it to a volume that nearly hummed in Brian’s ribcage, and the airport shrank and disappeared in the back window.
3
If you knew a little pop culture, you knew Mark Sandoval’s story.
You’d at least heard of him, or one of his books, even if you hadn’t actually read one. (But chances were that if you hadn’t read one, and you were in, say, an average-sized sedan, someone you were with probably had.) His was a name that came up as an answer during somewhat nerdy subsections of trivia night. Sandoval rested in the back part of the mind, a celebrity tumbled earthward, Icarus-style: famous, but with nowhere near the fervor of his earlier fame.
The story went:
When he was in his late twenties, Sandoval was assistant anthropology professor at a small but respected liberal arts university in Seattle. (He never named names in his book, hence the shock when Brian discovered that Don Whitmer had been involved). One morning he didn’t show up for a class he was scheduled to teach. Just skipped it. The head of the department (again, Don Whitmer, played by an earnest and affable Morgan Freeman in the film) was understandably frustrated. Pissed, even. This was not, after all, a new occurrence, Sandoval dipping out on his responsibilities. After multiple offers of a sympathetic ear from the school’s dean and more than one warning from Whitmer as to his tenuous footing regarding his employment, Sandoval and Whitmer had a meeting and Sandoval was removed from his position. It was something that probably could have been contested if he’d been of mind to do it. But long story short: he’d lost his job. He was fucking up big time.
Thing was, after that meeting? Sandoval just disappeared.
He was gone for thirty-four days.
Just vanished. Puff-of-smoke kind of shit. In The Long Walk Home, he wrote that his wife, who had admittedly left him just days before, grew frantic at his disappearance. His friends and colleagues were mystified. He was not, they say, depressed or in debt. He partied, sure, but not to excess. His position on campus, had he been able to keep it together, seemed almost assuredly tenure-track. (Again, this was via The Long Walk Home, and all of it strained through the colander of Sandoval’s heavy-handed and admittedly one-sided prose.) The police briefly talked to the wife but ultimately came to believe it was probably a kidnapping that, as the days continued to pass with no ransom demand issued, had possibly turned fatal. There were simply no leads to follow.
And then, thirty-four days after his disappearance from Seattle, Sandoval was discovered by an off-duty policeman in a phone booth in Middleton, Delaware, nearly three thousand miles away. Wearing only a pair of soiled boxer shorts, Sandoval sat curled and sobbing on the booth’s metal floor, rocking himself like a child. He was emaciated and dehydrated and initially appeared to have difficulty regaining speech. Not a heavy man to begin with, he’d lost over forty pounds since his disappearance.
Most notably, nearly the entirety of his body was now covered in a series of raised scars (circles, squares, trapezoids, octagons sutured together by an interconnected series of lines.) Only his face, hands and feet were spared. Though his language capabilities eventually returned, he purported to have no memory of the previous weeks. The scars, how he got them, and what they may or may not represent were, he claimed, a mystery.
Sandoval returned to Seattle as a strange dichotomy: both pariah and minor celebrity. Eventually he seemed to recover entirely. He was not evasive about what happened, but said he simply didn’t know. Claims by his wife that he had issues with drugs were fervently rebuffed. He did not return
to his position at the university.
Within a year of his return to Seattle he’d written a memoir. It was sold to a major New York publisher after an extensive bidding war (rumors at the time placed his advance in the mid-seven-figure range). The bulk of the material was purportedly penned from memories unearthed after claiming to have undergone months of regressive hypnotherapy, though repeated media requests to name the therapist (titled only “Dr. X” in the book) were never answered.
And Mark Sandoval became famous. His memoir, The Long Way Home, became hugely popular. It became one of those books that was purchased by people that don’t often like to read, a book that stayed for years on supermarket shelves. A book that was gifted to people who were impossible to shop for.
And it was in this book that Sandoval claimed, as evidenced through his scars and his numerous regressive-hypnosis sessions, to have been abducted by aliens.
Brian remembered being a kid and watching the unending Saturday Night Live skits at that time, in which an alien was always bugging one of the cast members—arms and legs done up in pink makeup suspiciously like Sandoval’s scarring—about inconsistencies in that “dumb story you wrote about me.” (His mother had found these skits hilarious.) Sandoval cowrote the screenplay for the film adaptation. Brad Pitt nabbed an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a frightened, weeping Mark Sandoval, wandering Middleton streets with a brutal, unknown lexicon strung along his body.
Five books followed over the next couple decades, “nonfiction exposés.” All of them farting around between memoir and monster hunt. They were all well received, at least in terms of sales, though none were ever as successful as The Long Way Home. He remembered seeing Sandoval on Oprah: Sandoval had worn a leather jacket and a terrible goatee-mustache combo that was woefully, painfully indicative of the times. He’d looked like the sleazy older guy who’d try to pick up girls in a head shop.
Oprah, holding up a hardcover copy of the book, had touched Sandoval’s knee with her other hand and said, “Now really, Mark. Aliens? We’re supposed to believe that aliens came down and took you onto their ship? Did these things to you? These strange and confusing and sometimes hurtful things? I think some part of us wants to believe that there’s more than just us out there, but the things you write here . . . I mean, really?”
And Sandoval, without missing a beat, tucked his thumb under his chin and put his finger against his nose. Thinker in repose. (It was a gesture Brian would become intimately familiar with years later; it seemed one of the few natural, uncultivated things about the man.) Sandoval had nodded sagely, waited a beat and said, “You know, Oprah, sometimes? In matters of faith—and you know this better than most—just because we don’t understand it, doesn’t mean we can’t handle it. Or that it shouldn’t happen.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I believe . . . Well, I’m of the opinion that there’s a grand plan. Okay? And it’s one that we’re not always privy to. We can’t always encapsulate it into our understanding. But we still do our part, our tiny part, even if we can’t see the big picture at the time.”
“So things happen for a reason.”
“Exactly. Even if we don’t know what that reason is at the time.”
Oprah had seemed grudgingly accepting of that answer, if not exactly satisfied. She’d eyed him almost suspiciously. “That’s certainly a gracious way of looking at what happened to you, Mark.”
And Sandoval had smiled, a smile that disintegrated the foolishness of that goatee, the gelled hair. A smile that dissipated that huckster sheen of his. He leaned back, and viewers could see the scars peeking out of his sleeves.
“Well,” Sandoval had said, “I have been around the block a few times, after all.”
Cue the audience’s gentle laughter.
4
Orvar shuttled them through Kjálkabein, past rows of stolid concrete buildings with their brightly-painted colors and slanted roofs. A downtown consisting of two- and three-story buildings that could have held families or shops or safety bunkers, if it weren’t for the occasional OPEN signs in various windows to delineate them. The “best hotel in the city,” it turned out, was named the Hotel Magnificence, and it was a boxy three-story affair with a white-tiled roof and a lime-colored facade, tucked behind a narrow strip of lawn and flanked by a parking lot. The name of the hotel had been done in white script on a black awning over the double doors.
“The clerk is my Uncle Viktor,” said Orvar as they pulled their bags out of his van. “He’ll hook you up.”
Sandoval tipped him again, and Brian cursed under his breath. “You better not be screwing us, Orvar.”
“I’m saving your ass from bedbugs, bro. That’s what I’m doing.” They watched, squinting against the wind, as the van pulled out of the parking lot. Orvar honked twice and rounded the corner.
The lobby of the hotel was large and dim. The wall sconces threw a buttery light up toward the ceiling, with little of it going elsewhere. The carpet at their feet was a woven pageantry of images: squadrons of dragons attacking castles, embattlements, a line of men pouring oil from a balustrade down upon an invading army, all the soldier’s faces drawn back in horror, every one of them, attacker and recipient both.
“Hey, check this out,” Sandoval murmured, toeing a trio of unicorns on the carpet, forelegs curling in toward their bellies as they reared back on hind legs, eyes wild and merciless, nearby soldiers cowering in fear, running away. Malevolent, vengeful things. “You believe in signs, Brian?”
If that’s a sign, he thought, we’re screwed. Before he could answer, a man opened the office door behind the counter and cried “Hello!” Brian and Sandoval both started.
“Orvar sent us,” Sandoval said.
The man rolled his eyes, his hands clutched in front of his chest. “Oh, that boy,” he said. “Such a good boy. My nephew.”
“You’re Viktor?” said Brian.
“Hello! Yes!” Viktor cried again as they walked up to the counter. Handshakes all around. Viktor expressed zero concern over the state of Brian’s face.
They were in luck, he informed them. There were vacancies. He typed two-fingered and assigned them their rooms via an ancient, chirring desktop. The only commonality shared in his and Orvar’s bloodline appeared to be their paleness and the stick-like thinness of their limbs. A few sad thatches of black hair made the joyless trek across Viktor’s mostly bare dome, and as if to counteract it, his mustache was a fierce, coal-black thing, something a cartoon villain would wear as a disguise. He looked like he’d slept in his suit, and he dropped their keys twice before managing to hand them over. Sandoval paid with his credit card again, seemingly unconcerned with their lost deposits at the other hotel.
Viktor informed them there was no elevator, so they trekked with their gear up three flights of stairs that smelled of mildew and carpet cleaner and then parted ways, their rooms next to each other.
Brian’s door opened reluctantly, as if it had at one time been swollen and water-logged. It was a small room, with a single window and enough space for nightstands to bracket the bed. A wardrobe stood against one wall, and a doorway led to a cramped, tiled bathroom. Rust stains around the bathroom faucet, a dryer-scorched comforter on the single bed. A chiaroscuro of dead insects darkened the bowl of the overhead light fixture. Brian’s loneliness flared; his first keen understanding at just how far he’d distanced himself from everyone who could help him, and he hurriedly shut the overhead light off, tears suddenly threatening to loose themselves and spill over into something significant and consequential.
Dropping his bags in the corner, peeling off his shoes and socks, he tucked himself in beneath fusty sheets and laid a forearm over his eyes. It was only afternoon, or at least felt that way, but he napped, falling into a weird, jet-lagged sleep populated by odd and frightening monster mash-ups: Bigfoot, red penis erect, gleefully rode old eight-legged Sle
ipner, who bellowed and hurled uprooted trees like javelins into the heart of a shadowed city. A kraken wielded its tentacles, stuffing dozens of bare-breasted sirens into its pink maw like they were screaming, red-haired fish sticks. A werewolf gripped the rear legs of a Pegasus and smashed it against the walls of a great banquet hall again and again until the body hanging from its paws was limp and broken, wings torn, great red freshets of blood slicking the floor.
He woke bathed in sweat and in his half-sleep swore he could hear Sandoval crying out in his own room next door. Heart thundering, he wondered if he’d imagined it. If it was just the last jagged remnants of his own dream, the final vestige of invented beasts echoing in his head.
•
He took a shower and headed to the lobby where he found a carafe of coffee at a side table and a half-dozen pastries on a tray, their glazes cracked as the vellum of a medieval manuscript. Brian helped himself to two. It was late afternoon in Kjálkabein, the light strange and watery in its dilution through the front windows. He sat in a leather-bound chair against the wall, his head still sleep-fuzzed. He ate his doughnuts and stared at the inherent violence of the unicorn tapestry at his feet.