Everything was bolted to the ceiling, floor, or walls. A black-iron rod secured the Holophane light to the ceiling, flutes on the clear shade bending light to form a white asterisk on the flat red ceiling, rays widening to the corners like a Japanese war flag. Four hex bolts anchored each foot of his trundle bed, built for shorter times, into the floor of his hold. The flip-down chrome sink, his thin mattress, and his pillow were the only objects that he could move.
Owen read volume 2 on the squeaking bed and was quite sure he would never be Odysseus, the man of many turns. Faced with a Penelope, he’d chosen to run away instead of fighting to get home. He was also coming to terms with the reality that he would never be a poet—a consolation version of Artist he had been kicking around for the past week. The same inclination that had driven him to this cloister of the world was crippling him. It was a nasty paradox: he had developed an aesthetic that drew him to significant art, but that same sensibility made him realize he could never do anything remotely significant. He would have to float on the periphery of those doing truly great things. He would float. He would disappear. Stevie offered harbor, and he had chosen drift. And now he was floating farther from her every day, with no plan for making himself good, let alone good enough for her.
Unlike the river barge, every inch of this was sea-primed brine-battling ship. Owen’s great hope was to stow away, to be left alone in a box, to sleep the entirety of his eight-week passage to Iceland. Instead, the sun was up twenty-plus hours per day. He played chess over Wu-Tang records with Isaak, the first mate, and picked up a smoking habit.
The team was in Athens now. They had a good shot at a medal. He wondered if he was still officially on the roster, and then he laughed at himself. That was a sport, and this was a life—albeit an extremely fucked-up one. But sure, who doesn’t want a medal?
On Sunday, August 29, 2004, after a week of river cruising, a week in port at Rotterdam, two months of skips at Cuxhaven, Germany, Aarhus, Denmark, Varberg, Sweden, and the Faroe Islands, Owen finally made landfall in Iceland and breathed the free blue air. The only lines were horizontal, stretching the sky until it whitened like bent plastic or pulled taffy. Isaak closed his eyes, threw back his head, and took a deep breath.
—It’s like having a third lung, right?
—It’s almost prehistorically clean.
—They’re about to fuck the whole thing up with smelters.
Isaak pointed to a mountain fifty miles away. Owen didn’t process the words. He was too astonished that in this country he could see to the horizon.
The port security in Reyðarfjörður was as informal as Isaak had promised. Owen walked the aluminum track while Isaak described the previous customs officer.
—A real asshole. First time I came here he took me to his portable office, made me strip down so he could photograph all my tattoos. Said they were worried about a gang problem. And then, as if that’s not humiliating enough, he does these third-grade sketches of every single one of my tats. Why? “Because you’re black, and they might not show up that well against your skin.” Fucking asshole. They transferred him, or who knows. New man’s all right.
The clipboard-holding guy had been in earshot the entire time, but pretended not to hear Isaak’s grievance. They shook hands heartily.
—Hey, Tómas, good to see you again. We’re gonna stretch our legs and bend our elbows. Want to join? New guy here needs to get a stamp.
Tómas declined to shake Owen’s hand.
—What’s in the bag?
—Few clothes.
—You have money? You’re not going to be begging on the streets a week from now?
—My father’s arranging for my return ticket.
The officer pointed at Owen’s bag.
—You’re American? Headed back to America from here?
—Aye.
—Aye?
—Yes sir. I’ll just be here for a few days, then to Reykjavik, then back to California.
—How old are you?
Owen realized he had missed a birthday.
—Twenty-two.
—Let me see your passport.
Owen handed him the edge-worn broken thing.
The officer grabbed a stamp from a holster, thumbed the dial, and asked Owen to turn around. Owen reluctantly spun, thinking he might have mistaken a stamp for a Taser, and slowly brought both hands back, just past his hips. He was envisioning how he and Isaak would respond when he felt a punch in his shoulder and heard the smack of the stamp wheel spinning.
—Have fun, Hollywood. Watch out for this guy.
—I’ll keep my eye on him.
Tómas found the bad joke inordinately funny.
Isaak knew a plank-floored bar that became a country-western dance hall after dark. Owen bought the first round as thanks and the second round as “No really, thanks.” They shared strong beer and watched the closing ceremony of the Olympics.
—About five minutes’ walk in any direction, and nobody’s ever going to see you again—if that’s what you want. Stay in the north. The north is warmer than the south.
—Why?
—Gulf Stream. You can get all your camping shit in Egilsstadir. It’s twenty miles up that road.
—How big is it?
—It’s the biggest city in the eastern half of the country, and there are only like two thousand people. Every Icelander would fit in that Olympic stadium. And once you packed them in, everybody with a seat would live in Reykjavik.
—Been there?
—It’s like you’d picture the capital of Greenland or something. It’s amazing, but feels small, which you’ll need when winter hits. I’m telling you. If you want to get lost forever, just walk. The whole country’s like an upside-down bowl. The people who aren’t in Reykjavik are in Akureyri. The rest, all twenty thousand of them, speckle the lip of the bowl with these little farms and only want to be left the fuck alone.
Isaak saw Owen smile and positioned his chair away from the fireworks and dancing on the television feed.
—What exactly did you do?
—I murdered a guy.
—Only one?
—I’m serious.
—The fuck you did. I’m 5th Ward, motherfucker!
He showed Owen his forearm tattoo of a 5 with “T-H” spelled out in twisted blunts. He explained it was a Houston thing.
—I’ve heard that line before, and you can bet your ass none of the guys who said it were J.Crew–wearing motherfuckers. You fucking up is a D in History or some shit. Get serious, man.
—I should have been up there.
Owen showed his tattoo.
—Instead this happened. And I murdered a handicapped artist at an art fair in Basel.
—Oh, you’re that Owen.
Owen couldn’t tell if Isaak was kidding.
Isaak slapped him in the arm, spilling Owen’s glass of beer on the wooden floor.
—Fucking History. I hated that shit. And look at me now: international maritime engineer.
They let History be the final word on Owen’s plight. They traded sports stories, played one last game of chess, and parted the best of friends.
Security met Burr as soon as the plane landed. He had taken hundreds of international flights and never disembarked to a security screen. The X-ray machine couldn’t have been brought here specifically for him. Two automated doors stood between him and the freedom of the baggage claim. Six men in hats, all communicating through lapel radios, earpieces, and walkie-talkies, looked directly at him. He had carried on nothing but a leather portfolio and put it in a grey plastic bin that passed from the brushed metal rods to the conveyer belt. He waited in line for his turn to walk through the metal detector. He beeped. A guard pantomimed for him to remove his belt and pass through again. He passed.
He joined the very short line of non-EU passport holders. When his turn came, the guard asked him why he was in Iceland. He panicked and explained that he was a visiting professor lecturing with John Hollander on scansion o
f rune poems vis-à-vis Ionic meter. The officer didn’t seem to care. He told him to get some sleep.
Burr assumed customs would be a formality, given that he had no possessions he could possibly declare. He pressed the Immigration button with brio and was stunned to see that rather than a green light, his hand had created a dreadful red X.
A guard stepped from the one-way-mirrored booth and led him to an office very clearly on the wrong side of freedom. The man waiting in the office didn’t shift in his scoop-backed upholstered chair. The escorting guard had seized Burr’s passport and now handed it to his supervisor. The tired, massive man was looking at the screen of his off-white monitor, which was nothing but bad. Before making eye contact, he spoke.
—Your itinerary and return ticket, please.
—Well, you see, I’m not sure how long I’m going to be in Iceland, exactly. There are several contingencies that have not yet . . .
Now the supervisor made eye contact.
—What is the purpose of your visit?
—I’m lecturing, or rather I hope to lecture, with John Hollander.
—Who?
—Professor John Hollander of Yale. I’m Professor Joseph Burr, of Mission University.
—And I’m Professor Admiral Haldor Grimsson. What’s in the folder?
—Just documents.
—May I see? And do you object to a witness?
He spoke into his intercom in Icelandic. A new guard, with the thickest neck Burr had ever seen, entered the room, gasping the blinds to a tremble and then slamming the door behind him so they jumped in panic and settled misaligned.
Burr opened the portfolio. The yellow legal pad on the verso had a numbered list of shamefully opportunistic projects:
1. The Liminalist Cookbook
2. The Science of Liminalism: We are all Gauge Bosons (look up what those actually are)
3. Liminalism and Seinfeld
The recto held his crossed-out itinerary for Athens, his fantasy itinerary for talks in Madrid, London, Dubai, Tokyo, and Kyoto, a single-sided twenty-page printout of an entry on Jean Baudrillard, several torn-out reviews of Art 35 Basel with fierce highlighting and numerous exclamations in the margins, and the Vice magazine cover story on Kurt Wagener.
—Are you an artist?
—No. I’m a professor of classics.
—Are you a troublemaker?
—I came here to hike.
—You don’t look like you’re in shape for hiking.
—I’m hiking to get in shape.
—Where’s all your equipment?
—I hoped to buy it here.
—Why?
—I figured it would be more suited to the climate.
—Where are you going to hike? The Westfjords?
—I’m really trying to arrange my lecture with the university first, then worry about the hiking.
Burr had no idea what “the university” was called, but he figured there had to be one university more prestigious than the others.
—Where are you staying?
—I haven’t made a reservation yet. This entire trip was on the spur of the moment.
The thick-neck guard now addressed him.
—We don’t see many Americans arrive without a hotel, without a plan, and without luggage.
Three decades of teaching had taught Burr that the greatest weapon in an uncertain conversation was an awkward silence. He made the silence his.
The two guards spoke in Icelandic.
—Enjoy your stay in Iceland. I hope your lecture is a success.
Burr took his passport from the desk and angled past the guard. The automated doors opened onto the yellow and green signs of car rental companies. He needed a car, but both rental companies required a credit card. He wasn’t going to chance tripping any invisible wires. At least not here.
Looking out the window of his taxi into Reykjavik, Burr was sure that the land had been lifted and they were now so close to the edge of the firmament that instead of appearing curved, the dome of the sky was one blue line.
Ólafur Sigurðsson kept a thousand sheep on his home pasture twenty kilometers from Hofsos. His wife’s father had managed the farmstead, like his father before him.
Ólafur met Stina at art college in Akureyri. He studied painting. She studied poetry. At twenty-one they married and moved back to the farmstead. At twenty-four Stina gave birth to their only child, a rosy-cheeked girl called Ástríður. At twenty-seven, Stina left to study poetry in New York City. She said it would be three years abroad. Nearly a decade had passed, and she had yet to return.
Ólafur thinned the flock from four thousand to one thousand sheep. His desperate prices drew the ire of every landowner in the district. The council meeting of October 2000 was the last time he’d spoken to a neighbor. His former flock had been left to roam the interior during summer months. He kept his new, smaller flock in the field and the paddock, with the cliffs to the sea acting as his western fence. The flock was too large to name individual sheep, which was the world he wanted for his daughter, but small enough to keep on his land. He missed the horseback rambling of the summer months, when he would bring every lime-green-eared sheep back to his fold. There was no way to wrangle sheep on horseback with a kid. He had tried the first year and he had tried to mow himself, to keep others from his land, but the first year was a year of death and snarls and shivering that he hoped never to repeat.
Shearing a thousand sheep was barely manageable for two hard workers and a dog. Like most farmers in his country, he preferred to keep things there, barely manageable. Ástríður rang the bell from the water’s edge on the southeastern corner of the pasture. Ólafur yelled and stomped in first-step stammers from the northeastern edge. Together they led the flock into the first holding pen, itself as big as most fields. Then Ástríður, in her favorite part of every June day, clanged her bell for an hour until every sheep passed through the narrow chute to the second, smaller pen. Ástríður latched the gate and left Ólafur in the middle of a fearful stubborn mass of wool. She straddled through a wooden crook and grabbed the electric shears attached to the wall with two cream-colored extension cords.
Ólafur held the horns of the recalcitrant sheep, twisting the neck until it became docile, while Ástríður clipped the knotted hair with her scissors and sheared away the first coat of wool. He straddled the neck of the sheep, dropping his weight and bringing it to the ground if it stirred enough to unsettle the metal blades or buzzing clippers in his daughter’s hands. Together, they could shear the entire flock in June and recover from the sixteen-hour days while the industrial mowers from Dalvík packaged the grass in white polyurethane marshmallows of hay.
By August, after the big mow, his home pasture was dotted with the bright white hay bales that Ástríður, in her bright blue windbreaker, could almost roll. This was the month they could return to the Sagas of Icelanders and read about the brave men seven storeys tall.
An outdoor supply store is a horrible place to be with no money. In Egilsstadir Outfitters, Owen browsed through tents and bags and packs and shells, all with waterproof laminates. He could add. The gear he needed cost more than a used car. Enter the used car salesman:
—What kind of a hike are you planning?
—A thru-hike.
—Dettifoss to Myvatn? It should be nice this week. But the midges are out. You’ll need a bug net.
—Can you show me Dettifoss on a map?
—Oh. So you don’t know what you’re doing.
—This isn’t going to be a traditional hike.
—Look. Just write down your name, phone number, and your parents’ contact information. It’ll save everyone from Search and Rescue a lot of time.
—I need the gear to make it until at least the first of winter.
—Oh. You mean two weeks from now. What do you have?
—Nothing. These clothes and a couple shirts and a sweater.
—What’s your budget?
Owen pulled out the crisp
thousand-krónur notes he had been given in exchange for his wadded euros. They seemed so powerful until he put them up against prices. The salesman tilted his head and laughed.
—You have a credit card, I’m assuming.
—No.
—Hired gear will cost you more than that. And without a credit card, I can’t rent you anything.
—I’m in your hands. That’s what I have. You can take it now.
—Let me see what’s in the lost-and-found box. Some gear gets left behind on trips.
Looking around the store, Owen made a mental inventory of essential purchases. The salesman returned with a cardboard box and a pole.
—One of your fellow Americans cracked a trekking pole a few months ago and left the partner behind. Should be tall enough for you as long as you don’t go downhill. Here. Try that on.
Owen put on an orange fleece. He kept his arms winged out so as not to split the back.
—That’s the only jacket I’ve got. Take this vest. You can wear it under your sweater. And let’s see. You can use this beanie. Ach. None of this other garbage is going to help. People never leave behind the essentials.
—I still need a tent, sleeping bag, water bottle . . .
The salesman reached into the garbage pail and pulled out a plastic Coke bottle.
—Lots more where that came from. What else?
—Water purification tablets.
—You’ll be fine as long as you get water from up high; go higher than wherever the sheep are.
—Jacket.
—You need something waterproof. It’ll be raining everywhere this time of year.
—Then I should grab some packliners for my gear.
—I’ve got your packliner too.
He pulled out two garbage bags and put them on the counter.
—I don’t think I have enough for a sleeping bag.
—Not even close. I’ve got a wool blanket in my trunk. Not the softest thing in the world, but it’ll keep you warm. I’ll sell it to you for a thousand krónur.
—I still need a tent.
—Buy a plastic tarp at the hardware store. And a roll of duct tape. I’ll give you some paracord. You can use the trekking pole to pitch it, but that won’t last in the wind. Am I scaring you off yet? Want to quit?
A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall Page 30