by Keith Rosson
Pulling his laptop from his bag, he connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi and fired off a message to Ellis:
Ellllllis,
I got the job! Holy shit. Mark Sandoval and I are off gallivanting around at the edge of the Arctic (for real!) It’s crazy. I’m gonna be out of town for the next few weeks, so the house is yours. I lost my phone (it’s a long story), but you can get in touch with me here. Mark Sandoval’s a trip. But the guy’s giving me a nice stipend (I’ll put my rent in PayPal this month if that’s cool), and there’s gonna be a serious commission at the end of it all, so hey. Think I should ask for price points on the book?
Anyway, I signed a nondisclosure agreement, so I can’t get too specific, but, dude. This is some wild shit.
—B
He scrolled through news and social media and waited for his boss. It was all repetitive, brutal, sharp as a stab wound: Neo-Nazi recruiting posters had been found wheatpasted around a number of college campuses in Idaho in what looked like a coordinated effort. In Portland, information on an as-yet unnamed suspect was being sought by police in a hit-and-run beneath the Morrison Bridge, which explained the chalk-and-candle vigil he’d seen. The owner of the cat-rescuing dog in Idaho turned out to owe over twenty thousand dollars in child support, and now some people were conflicted about liking the dog and others were mad about people being conflicted.
His fingers hovered over the keys. The words astrocytoma, edema, stages of brain tumor just sat there at his fingertips. It was a decision, to begin mapping out the thing sharing this interior space within him. He just had to type the words to begin the process of discovery. He just had to start.
Instead he logged in to his university account—he still had it, after all—and scoured articles about unicorns in various databases. Historical, mythological. It was a quick refresher on a notedly limited amount of information: Ctesias returned to Greece from Persia in the fourth century and wrote of a blue-eyed unicorn with a tricolored horn. Caesar claimed in The Conquest of Gaul that they lived in the Hercynian Forest of Germany, and that the top of the horn was branched out like a tree limb. There was the story of Risharinga, the unicorn man from The Mahabharata. The sixteenth-century, multi-panel Franco-Flemish tapestry, The Hunt of the Unicorn, artist unknown. But by 1580, physicians like Ambroise Paré were mostly calling bullshit on the idea of unicorns as a whole, and attributing previously sacred, magic-laden horns—that royalty had once paid big bucks for—to those of narwhals and rhinos.
All told, it was slim pickings from a historical perspective.
Sandoval eventually came down, hungover and bleary-eyed but still sharp enough in his sport coat and gray jeans. He poured himself a cup of coffee and gazed down at the pastries. “These any good?”
“I mean, yeah,” Brian said. “Doughnuts.”
Sandoval picked one up with a napkin. He sat down next to Brian and chewed for a while. Brian closed his laptop.
“Well, I feel like shit,” Sandoval announced.
“You celebrated on the plane, for sure.”
“That’s one way of phrasing it.” Sandoval crossed his legs, leaned back.
“Hey,” Brian said, “can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“Why did we even get a hotel room? If we’re going to spend a month out at this farm? Why bother?”
Sandoval balled up his napkin and held up a finger while he chewed. “More than once,” he said, “I’ve flown out to a site only to find that it’s a scam, right? Or just some easily explained phenomena. Like, okay . . . it didn’t make it in the book, but when I was working on Night Roads, I flew out to Georgia, this stretch of back road a few hours outside of Augusta. Looking for a specter that drivers said was haunting the area.” He sipped his coffee and winced. “Turned out that it was actually two brothers with a pair of flashlights and a garbage bag on a string. Just kids screwing around. We might get to this farm and have to turn right back.”
“Makes sense.”
“I mean, I hope we don’t.”
“And I had an idea about our little horned friend in the pumpkin patch.”
“Shoot.”
“Horn buds,” Brian said.
Sandoval leaned back again, his tongue working a molar as he thought. “I’ve heard this before. Refresh me.”
“Every horned animal’s born with these horn buds on the sides of its skull, right? So this doctor, this guy named Franklin Dove, he just transplanted the horn buds of this bull calf from the sides of the skull over to the center. This was in the 1930s. Just to check it out. And he was right, the buds fused together, and boom. Bull’s got a single horn in the center of his head. He’d use it to push up fence wire and stuff. Easy as that.” Brian flipped open his laptop, showed Sandoval the grainy black-and-white photo, that horn dark as a witch’s claw rising out of the bull’s head.
“Dr. Dove’s bull, right. Did that video look like a bull to you?”
“No,” Brian admitted. “But it might’ve been a reindeer.”
Sandoval slowly reared back and frowned at him. “Interesting. Like someone went amateur scientist on a reindeer? Fused its rack into a singular horn?”
He reminded Sandoval about Julius Caesar’s take on the unicorn, the horn fanned out like a tree branch. “Or it’s just an anomaly,” he said. “Just a poor, fucked up reindeer.”
“Interesting,” Sandoval said again.
And then Viktor appeared from behind his office door like some balding, mustachioed wraith. “Good afternoon, friends!”
While Viktor booted up his ancient computer, they walked to the counter and Sandoval asked him how far it would be to the Hauksdóttir farm.
“Oh, far,” said Viktor without looking up from the computer.
“Like ten miles?” asked Brian. “Twenty?”
“Eh, miles,” Viktor said. He put his hand out, dipped it back and forth. “I’m not sure.”
Brian exhaled. “How far in kilometers?”
“Far,” Viktor said again.
Sandoval turned to grin at Brian. “Jesus, this guy.”
Brian said, “Can we walk it?”
“You could. But it would be not fun. It would not be a good time.”
“And you have one taxi.”
Finally Viktor looked up from his keyboard. “Daniel Danielson, yes. It’s a minivan, his wife’s. But he has—”
“Strep throat,” Brian and Sandoval said together.
“Já. Yes.”
Sandoval turned to Brian. “We’ll just hit a café or something, offer someone cash to drive us out there. This is ridiculous.”
“You’re the boss,” Brian said. He pushed off from the counter.
Viktor ran a hand over his skull and then held up a cadaverous finger. “There is an alternative to this, you know. Absolutely! You know about borrow and return, yeah? Like a, ah, a leasing arrangement?”
Sandoval looked him over. “Like a car, you mean? Like us renting a car from you?”
Viktor held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “A little bit like that, yes. Mostly. But not quite.”
5
They gathered enough gear to set up a meager perimeter around the site that night, should it prove to be worth their while, and consolidated the rest of the stuff, clothes and instruments, into Sandoval’s room. If the trip wasn’t a bust, Brian would come back to the Hotel Magnificence and get the rest of it tomorrow.
“It’s a beautiful way to travel the country, really,” said Viktor, the three of them once more standing at the front desk. Through the lobby windows, the afternoon sun was a brindled, hazy coin through the clouds. Brian had to admire Viktor’s hard sell, his willingness to brazenly toss the truth aside: the mist outside was so heavy he could hardly see beyond the parking lot.
“It’s a fucking insult, is what it is,” said Sandoval.
There was another exchange of cash (“I think this will be a great experience for you, traveling like this, seeing this place like hardly even any Hvíldarlander does!” said Viktor, slipping Sandoval’s dollars somewhere beneath the counter) and they took leave with his hand-drawn map in Brian’s pocket.
“Fucking scam artists,” Sandoval muttered.
Each man wheeled a child’s bicycle through the lobby doors.
They rode down Kjálkabein’s dew-damp, misted streets and quickly found the main road, Vegurrin Sjö, Road Seven, that bisected the island. Brian waved at the pedestrians they passed. The mist painted everything metallic and ghostly. Sandoval rode up ahead in his four-hundred-dollar jeans, his sport coat, astride a ten-year-old’s rainbow-colored bicycle. Pedaling furiously with his elbows jutting straight out. Something seemed to open up inside Brian at the sight of it, some joy. In spite of everything, look at where he was! What he was doing! On a tiny island in the Nordic Sea, riding a child’s bicycle alongside his woefully hungover boss as they prepared to hunt down a unicorn. It was insane! Didn’t the fact that he was here seem as unlikely as the thing coiled and multiplying inside his head? As impossible? Couldn’t the wonderment of one cancel out the other? He decided in that moment that the entire world was salvageable. That somehow everything would be fine. If he could stay moored in this moment exactly, he would be safe.
And then Sandoval spat over his shoulder, “Where did he even get these things?”
“The bikes? Maybe some guest’s kids forgot them or something.”
“Shit, they’re probably Viktor’s kids’.”
“Guy’s sketchy,” Brian said.
“Hell yes, he is.”
Kjálkabein soon gave way to the outskirts, rows of single-story buildings, and further still to scattered industrial outbuildings heavy with the look of disuse. Fields followed beyond that, dotted with a few farmsteads of sheep and horses, the occasional animal lifting its head to eye them as they passed, and then there was just the coal-black pavement of Road Seven and the quiet wonders that lay on each side of it. The mist had burned off a little by then, and beside the road were moss-furred lava beds, and glacial-hued lakes, and rising, stone-scattered escarpments that led to the mountains beyond. If it wasn’t freezing, it was close to it, everything ice-rimed, the color of the grass muted with frost. Brian’s elbows clacked against his knees as he pedaled. He saw a trio of reindeer up on a hillside—reindeer!—and was about to point them out when Sandoval slowed so they could pedal side by side. Sweat dripped off the man’s chin, darkened his shirt collar.
He said, “Things like the rental car? I really need you to step up, Brian. This bullshit should not have happened.”
“I just—I figured they’d have taxis. You know? Car rental places. They didn’t have any online options through the airline, but I just figured.”
“Yeah, well. You should have looked into it. You should have made sure.”
How to be recalcitrant on a purple bicycle, your knees practically knocking against your own throat? “You’re totally right, Mark. Sorry.”
Sandoval nodded grimly. His point made, he once more pedaled ahead.
Rippled, lichen-covered lava beds now spanned in both directions, a vibrant green upon the black. They could occasionally see puffing tendrils of steam ghosting from the ground. “Those are the geothermals,” Brian called out. “That’s probably how it’s warm enough to grow the pumpkins.”
Grasslands, green fields studded with boulders. Fields dotted with wild horses, goats. Occasionally they passed one of the offshoots from the main road and could see the little villages tucked into the hillsides beyond, brightly painted and snug. Traffic was sparse but steady; there were few houses directly situated on Road Seven. An occasional porch-bound dog barked in their wake and at one point a mottled gray and white mutt launched itself from the yard where it lay and Sandoval swerved, rode into the ditch and fell. The dog was chained and loosed volleys of high, hoarse barks, the chain pulled wire-taut as the animal rose on its rear legs. Sandoval staggered up from the ditch, cursing, and stood on the shoulder, his hands on his knees.
“You okay?”
Sandoval waved him off and launched a thin gruel of vomit onto the buckled shoulder. A woman came out onto the porch and put her hand above her eyes as a visor. Sandoval spit and wiped his mouth and got on his bicycle again. The woman called to the dog, and it barked twice more and trotted back to the porch, the chain hissing in its wake.
•
On his map, Viktor had drawn what looked like a pair of testicles next to the road, and Brian immediately spotted their real-life equivalent as they crested a rise—two shoulder-high boulders, painted white and resting beside a rutted driveway. Even if they’d missed them, he could see in the distance the two rows of greenhouses and, further back, the farmhouse itself. It stood out strikingly against all the flatness, this leveled land among the encroaching forest and the crags of mountains beyond. Brian followed Sandoval down the driveway, smelling churned earth, manure, ocean. Sandoval’s tires kicked up little globs of ice-choked mud as they pedaled along.
The house was a white clapboard thing two stories tall, with a turreted roof. A porch spanned the entire ground floor. The house was incongruous with any architecture in Hvíldarland he’d seen up to then, and he realized with dismay that it was going to be a pure screaming pain in the ass to catch anything substantial on film there. The property was big, much bigger than the video had implied, and they just didn’t have enough gear. Even with the stuff back at the hotel, they’d need a half-dozen more cameras, easily, and with an equally large expanse of flatland at the back of the house, it just wasn’t going to work. A nightmare.
By the time they made their way to the house itself, a woman was standing on the porch with her hands on her hips. A child poked out shyly from behind each leg. Sandoval, gasping, staggered off of his bicycle with an apologetic wave of his hand. Brian, more than a little winded himself, at least managed to use his bike’s kickstand before unwrapping himself from the origami of their bags. The air had a bite, even with the sun out.
Brian walked up onto the porch, his hand held out. Behind him, he heard Sandoval retch in the yard, just once. The woman’s eyes passed over his face—there were clearly a number of questions she wanted to ask—but finally looked over Brian’s shoulder, frowning. “Is Mr. Sandoval okay?”
“Oh,” Brian said, “yeah. He ate something bad on the plane. He’s fine. I’m Brian, Mr. Sandoval’s research assistant.” This all came easily, smoothly.
“Karla Hauksdóttir.” Her umber hair was threaded with gray, pulled back in a ponytail. She had a deep notch in her chin, smart as a tap from an ax. A narrow, worn face, a face marked with time and labor. Blue eyes like the deep starburst of cold inside an iceberg, eyes fanned in crow’s-feet. She wore jeans and a long-sleeved, embroidered blouse at least a generation out of fashion and pale from washing. Her work-roughened handshake reminded him of Don Whitmer all over again. She peered over Brian’s shoulder again.
“Mr. Sandoval, do you need some water?” She looked at Brian. “And do you need anything? I mean, for your face.”
“I’m good, thank you,” Brian said, and after another moment Sandoval walked up the steps. He let out a chalky little laugh and said, “I knew I should’ve gone with the vegetarian dish. Goodness.”
“Ah, I’m sorry.”
Sandoval held out his palms. “No, I’m sorry. Mortified is more the appropriate term. So embarrassing.”
They all stood there, the moment painfully drawn out—Hey, we’re just here for the unicorn, lady—until Karla said, “Well. Ah, these are my children, Gunnar and Liza.”
“Hey,” Brian said. He waved, awkwardly, something a magician would do during a card trick, his insecurity suddenly blooming fiercely. When judged by adults, Brian had long tucked himself away amid his meager armament—sarcasm, contempt, mocking se
lf-aggrandizement, the relative breadth of his academic accomplishments—it all worked well enough. But when it came to the mercilessness of kids, their frank judgment, their perceptiveness, all that stuff suddenly found itself packed away. Kids made him nervous.
But Gunnar peeked out from behind Karla’s leg and lifted a dirty little hand in response while Liza’s gaze—both of the children had the chilled blue eyes of their mother—kept ricocheting between the two men. They were maybe ten and seven years old, the boy older, both with hair blond as corn silk. They stood on the porch in faded shorts and T-shirts, bedecked in the day’s filth. Liza in particular looked like she had earlier in the day, perhaps, sipped from a trough of chocolate milk. It had to be in the forties, but there they were, seemingly impervious to the cold.
Liza said in English, “Why did that man throw up in the grass, mamma?”
Karla dipped her head down to quash her smile and tucked a lock of hair behind Liza’s ear. “He ate some bad food, Li-li.”
Gunnar pointed and said to Brian, “Why are you riding a girl bike?”
“Hush,” Karla said. She hid her smile behind knit brows and wrapped her arm around the boy.
Brian tried not to laugh. “That’s a really good question,” he said, and Gunnar beamed. “It’s kind of a long story.”
“I’m so sorry we’re late,” said Sandoval, pushing ahead. “As your son’s pointed out, we’ve, uh, had some transportation issues.”
“It’s okay. At least you made it, right?” Karla tilted her head and offered a smile, dreamy and wistful, in a way that made Brian wonder if she might have partaken in a bit of a joint or something before their arrival.
But whatever. They’d made it.
They’d arrived.
They were in Hvíldarland, looking for a unicorn.
•