FSF, January 2009

by Spilogale Authors

  * * * *

  Eric woke up.

  For a few minutes he lay still, regretting the invention of daylight. Then the door opened, and for the first time in weeks Chris poked her head into the den.

  "I thought you might care to know,” she said in tones that could have etched glass, “that I've got my old job back, and tomorrow morning I'm moving out."

  She took a deep breath preparatory to delivering her standard speech about his deficiencies as a husband, man, mammal, and vertebrate, when involuntarily Eric did what he often did upon awaking. The sound was almost explosive.

  "Oh, you ... PIG!!” she cried, and slammed the door.

  He lolled around on the futon for a while, thinking about how truly rotten their lives had become. But he'd pretty well lost interest in that topic, and anyway she'd soon be gone. So he pulled the foul sheet up to his bristly chin and thought instead about something important—the battle between the Viking and the Huns.

  Who'd won? Who'd lost? Had the castle been given up to fire/slaughter/mayhem/rape and all the other customary incidents of warfare, ancient and modern? Or had the Huns taken a beating and gone riding off to plunder somebody else?

  His life had suddenly acquired a point of interest, and his feelings of despair lessened. He sang “Stout-Hearted Men” in the shower, and down on Fell's Point whistled while he worked until Mr. Pocatelli made him stop. When evening came, he dined at a quiet bistro, drank two quiet glasses of Merlot, and went quietly home, intending to bed down early and catch the next chapter of his ongoing serial.

  In the front hall he brushed by a woman who looked vaguely familiar. When she averted her eyes and said nothing, he realized she must be Chris. Feeling he ought to make up for his faux pas of the morning, he asked, “You need some cab fare for when you scram tomorrow?"

  She responded with a look that would have squashed a toad. Anger returning, he snapped, “Well then, don't let the frigging door hit you in the frigging ass when you frigging go."

  A banal remark, he reflected while undressing. But satisfying. Relaxed and smiling, he drifted toward sleep, while overhead she was telling her girlfriend about the disgusting and ill-bred comments he'd made that day from both ends of his anatomy. He smiled more broadly—after all, she was caught in this crappy life, like a mouse in a glue trap. But he wasn't.

  He began to recall the places he'd been, the things he'd seen. He had no idea where some of them were. That deserted palace, for instance—the one with the long marble hallway where pale geckos flickered up and down the walls and dead leaves littered the gorgeous mosaic pavement. Or that ancient-looking clock tower where life-sized mechanical men banged out the hour on a big iron bell.

  As a child he'd thought he could ask adults questions about his visions and get answers. He soon found out different. When he tried to talk to Mama, she gave him a scornful “Kids!” if she was busy, or a patient “That's nice, Honey,” if she wasn't. The man who finally helped him understand his gift did so only by accident. As a teenager Eric served a lengthy sentence at Dolorosa High, where his religion teacher, Father Dedman—a beady-eyed, blue-chinned cassocked tyrant—one day, while denouncing pagan superstitions, used and defined the word shaman.

  Christ, what an epiphany that had been. So there were other people like himself, visionary adventurers in the land of Nod!

  He pictured his soul slipping into a sort of Platonic realm where distance was abolished, where time's arrow could fly in any direction. The idea enthralled and seduced him. He developed a sudden passionate interest in history and dead languages, and his grades soared, though at a heavy price, for he was more than ever separated from the interests of the other boys at Dolorosa. As for girls, he didn't help himself in that department by adding to the doubtful attractions of his gauche manners and weedy frame the round-shouldered look of a scholar. Too arrogant to ask for help, and convinced nobody would believe him anyway, Eric comforted himself by making frequent love to his own right hand, and went his isolated way.

  By sheer hard work he won a fellowship to Johns Hopkins, and as soon as possible selected a major in World Literature and Classics. Mama correctly pointed out that such studies formed an eight-lane highway to oblivion. But he paid no attention to her, for by then a chill had crept into their once warm relationship. What had happened was this:

  One day when she was at work and he was home, he started going through drawers and cabinets, looking for stamps or loose change or something. In a little desk in her bedroom he came across a faded brown envelope bearing a cancelled stamp that said Norsk and the postmark Ålesund. For a few seconds he stood paralyzed, wondering if he could possibly be holding a long-ago message from his Papa. He shook the envelope, and out fell a faded color shot, not of the well-attired businessman Mama had described to him, but of a young guy with a merchant seaman's cap perched on his mane of yellow hair, hands jammed into the pockets of a pea jacket and an arrogant grin splitting his horsy face. Eric turned the picture over and found on the back, written with a blue ballpoint pen in a semiliterate's careful, clumsy script, From Your Frogg-Prinz, 1973.

  What did it mean? Eric had never seen anybody who looked less like a frog. Or less like a prince, for that matter. The date, on the other hand, spoke only too clearly—he'd been born in 1974. Norwegian businessman, hell. Clearly, he owed his earthly existence to nothing whatever but the fact that his Mama had hooked up with a transient sea rover who, in the way of his kind, had screwed her and sailed away.

  Adolescent Eric was profoundly shocked. How could she have dared to be as young and inexperienced and dumb and lustful then as he was now? Did she lack common decency?

  So he was in no mood to listen to The Old Bitch, as he now thought of the woman who had borne, loved, and supported him for eighteen years. Anyway, he'd won the scholarship by his own efforts, and was supplementing it by working as a busboy at Pocatelli's. For once he was paying his own way, and his hereditary Nordic pig-headedness increased exponentially. He went for the classics in the hope that soaking up the languages and lit of bygone times might stimulate his shamanism—the only part of his life that really felt real.

  And it worked. His visions became more frequent, also more varied. He watched soldiers on the Western Front in World War I slog through a pelting rainstorm, their tin hats lowered like the heads of cattle enduring a storm. He saw ladies in bustles twirl and giggle at a gas-lit Victorian ball. One night he fell asleep over Boswell's London Journal and found himself in a murky, low-ceilinged tavern crowded with red-faced periwigged men drinking coffee—one of them sufficiently big, pockmarked, ugly, lumpy, jerky, and all-around peculiar to be Dr. Samuel Johnson himself! Alas, it was still a mime show, so he couldn't hear the Great Bear lay a crushing retort on anybody, including Boswell (who might have been the fat young man standing just behind him).

  Otherwise his life continued drab. For months after he started working, he came home after midnight so exhausted, his flimsy scholar's muscles so racked by hefting big trays of dirty dishes, that he thought of nothing but Tylenol and sleep. Then his muscles hardened up, his frame lost flab and gained heft, and he began to look—well, more than a little like his Papa.

  His newly broadened shoulders won him the attention of a plump and smiling young woman named Chris Malone, whose freckles and impish grin had already caught his eye in the bursar's office where he went to collect his stipend once a month.

  Soon he and Chris were wandering hand in hand through Druid Hill Park. Or sharing lunch beside the Inner Harbor. Or downing steamy bowls of frutti di mare at Pocatelli's. Like a pedestrian stepping into a manhole, Eric fell headlong into that most agonizing and delusive of states, long overdue first love. Chris was the only featherless female biped he'd ever met who wanted him in her bed, and that was enough. After a courtship marked by naïve lust on her part and premature ejaculation on his, they decided to marry.

  When he told his Mama, she snapped, “You're quitting school to marry that lazy nitwit? For God's sake, w
hy?"

  "Well, uh, she, uh, wants to."

  "You,” said his loving mother, “are without doubt the second biggest fool I've ever known in my life."

  Eric wondered who was the first. Maybe, in view of the Frogg-Prinz, herself.

  * * * *

  The memories faded. Sleep came on little cat feet. Eric was back on the wall again, only to find—Goddamn it!—that he'd missed everything important.

  From his familiar, silent bubble, he viewed the aftermath of a hard-won victory. Again the time was dusk. A slow, cold rain was washing the once bloody stones. Under a hastily constructed lean-to the fire bucket glowed dully, lighting in silhouette a single sentry leaning on his spear. Below the wall the tents of the Huns had vanished, leaving burned-out campfires, piles of dung, remnants of slaughtered animals, and the sodden embers of what might have been a funeral pyre.

  Then he felt a tug. A gentle pull. He drifted slowly along the wall, following some sort of shamanistic scent-trail, his motion random-seeming like a butterfly's. He bobbed and wove across the bridge to the tower, finding at the end a closed gate, a latticework of rusty iron strips. He was puzzling about how to proceed, when—very quietly, as if he'd done it a dozen times—he passed through the gate like a puff of wind.

  The tower was the castle keep. Just inside, a guard slept on a wooden stool, his gap-toothed mouth open and his long mustache quivering. Down a narrow corridor a heavy door stood half open, outlined by firelight. Eric drifted that way and a familiar bird's nest of red hair came into view. Exhausted by the battle, the Viking lay asleep on a wide, crude wooden platform under a heap of tanned animal pelts with the fur turned down.

  He slept profoundly, hardly breathing. Eric drifted closer, surprised by his youth. Not much more than a boy—twenty at most. But the product of a hard life. Scars seamed his face and gray nits like seed pearls peppered his shaggy eyebrows. His thick right hand lay exposed, deformed by a veinous pink membrane between index finger and thumb. Eric slipped briefly inside his head, found nothing happening there, and slipped out again.

  Curious, he drifted around the room. The firelight came from glowing coals in an iron brazier. A gray wolfhound the size of a small pony snoozed beside the bed, ignoring a restless army of mice scuttling through the moldy straw that served for a carpet. A battered shield and sword leaned against the wall. A narrow window looked out on the sea, where a longboat with a pale furled sail bobbed at anchor.

  Suddenly the dog jumped up, eyes blazing. Eric didn't need hearing to know he was barking madly. He galloped to the door, nosed it open wider, and disappeared. Eric was staring after him when a door hidden behind a piece of crude tapestry slammed open and either Brünnhilde or her twin sister erupted into the room.

  A huge blonde with swaying breasts that had never known the constriction of a bra. A swirl of red robe trimmed with greasy ermine. Madly blazing blue eyes, bee-stung lips, discolored teeth, bare powerful arms. She rushed through Eric, pulling him along in her slipstream, and he heard her shrieking like a berserk steam engine. She grabbed the Viking by his long hair and began to shake him, volleying over and over, Hrothgar! Hrothgar!—a word that began with a growl and ended with a throaty trill. When he didn't respond, she dropped him, seized the sword and shield and followed the wolfhound. Swept along in her wake, Eric followed, down the corridor to the iron gate—now standing open—across the bridge, and back onto the wall.

  Armed men were swarming over the battlements in a tsunami of leather and iron. The Huns had just been fooling: they'd galloped away only so they could return and stage a surprise attack under cover of darkness.

  Brünnhilde rushed them like all the Valkyries combined, smacked one in the face with the boss of the shield and knocked him over backward. Not pausing a beat, she swung the sword blade down on the neck of another Hun and he hit the stones in three pieces, the third being his helmet, which went bouncing and skittering away from its former contents. The dog, shedding flecks of foam, grabbed the leg of a third invader and Brünnhilde attacked the leg's owner, wielding the heavy sword like a flail.

  Yet things were looking bad. The Huns had outsmarted the defenders and kept expanding the area of the wall they controlled. They had a solid foothold, and it was growing. If this kept up Eric knew the castle was lost, and without bothering to think about the matter he joined the fray in the only way he could.

  He sped back into the room where Hrothgar lay, entered the Viking's head and tried to make him move. At first he felt like a quadriplegic occupying a body that would not respond. Come on, he thought, move, move, move, you big son of a bitch! And all at once Hrothgar did move. His muscles began to jerk like speared frogs. The whole huge body began thrashing around, entangled in the verminous skins that served as bedclothes and also in a long, itchy woolen nightshirt he turned out to be wearing.

  Eric felt like a kid who climbs aboard some idle piece of earth-moving equipment and—half scared, half delighted—finds it starting to shudder and move underneath him. Gradually he mastered the wiring of the right arm, then the left. The legs stopped their poisoned-roach kicking and began to coordinate. He got the Viking untangled and onto his feet—no, he fell down again. Three times in fact, on his face, on his back, and on his butt. The mice infesting the straw fled squeaking. On the fourth try, Hrothgar rose and began lurching like the Frankenstein monster toward the door.

  His heavy bare feet thumped hollowly across the footbridge. He started roaring, the only sound Eric knew how to make him make. He had no weapon, no armor, and in a flash of panic Eric realized that he'd probably killed the Viking by driving him into the fray unarmed and helpless.

  But then Hrothgar's reflex systems came to life. Combat was all he knew and it roused him, set him moving on his own. He began to dodge and weave. A Hun arrow flicked by him. He snatched an axe from a man-at-arms and whacked off another head. This time the victim stood absolutely still for an instant while bright arterial blood spurted ten or twelve feet into the air, then crumpled like a puppet whose strings had all broken at once. The men-at-arms gave a hoarse cheer and closed around their leader with shields raised. Brünnhilde and the wolfhound joined them, forming a solid wedge that drove the attackers back into their comrades still coming over the wall. The Huns got entangled, tripping over themselves and one another. The confusion was lovely to see.

  Eric was ecstatic. The weedy kid, the hump-backed scholar, the visionary dweeb, the tray-hustling waiter, the despised spouse—all his previous selves evaporated. He'd never felt this way before. No past, no future, hope and fear forgotten, everybody thrusting and hacking and roaring, metal squealing and crumpling, gobbets of spit and sweat and skin and blood flying through the air. When your life's on the line, he realized, that's when you really live.

  And the tide was turning. New men-at-arms came swarming out of the castle keep, jumping straight from bed to battle, barefoot and wearing only ragged shirts plus a helmet and a piece or two of armor they'd grabbed at random. In twenty minutes of mayhem, the Nightshirt Army threw the last of the Huns off the wall.

  It was time to caper and howl. But Eric had only a few seconds to enjoy the triumph. All at once Hrothgar began shouting unfamiliar words, then stringing the words together into sentences. The men at arms turned toward him gaping and grinning. They understood what he was yelling. Something hit Eric like a soundless explosion, and he popped out of the Viking's skull like a cork from a bottle of warm champagne.

  Suddenly he was seeing Hrothgar from outside. The big man was a mess—disheveled, a gash down one arm, a barbed arrow embedded just under his left clavicle where a scarlet bloodspot was soaking the gray wool of his shirt. He panted like some huge exhausted animal, sweat pouring off his glowing face and dripping from the tips of the coppery hairs of his beard. And then—

  * * * *

  Eric awoke.

  Only not on the futon. He woke upstairs, among the cookie crumbs and the romance novels, lying beside Chris's recumbent form.

  They wer
e both starkers. Her rosy flesh exhaled a kind of post-coital steam. She turned over slowly, smiling, giving little grunts of sowlike contentment. The bed looked like Bull Run the day after the battle. She, he, and it smelled like a rutting camel, or the way Eric imagined a rutting camel smells.

  Morning light poured through a dusty window. For a time he just lay there, inhaling marshland odors and feasting his eyes. He'd almost forgotten how good Chris looked when attired solely in her brown aureoles, fuzzy delta, and big bare bottom. Eric's whole midsection from navel to knees existed in a state of bliss it hadn't known for many months. The languor of the afterglow suffused his being. But dammit, he thought, I can't remember what we did to make the old prostate sing.

  Then he forgot about his prostate, seminal vesicles, and attached plumbing. He and Chris were together again, not fighting, and utterly at peace. A moment more and her eyelids fluttered open, and she murmured, “Well, you're full of surprises."

  How musical, after all, her voice could be when it sank below the hinge-like screech of anger to a husky, sexy contralto. Even her morning breath smelled kind of sweet, maybe from all the cookies she'd been eating. Husband and wife edged closer. “I ought to charge you with rape,” she murmured, but then drew the poison of that remark by planting a brief, damp kiss upon his bristly chin. Thus encouraged, he was soon able to resume lovemaking—and this time he was fully conscious throughout.

  Afterward both of them remembered that morning as the starting point of a new life. Only a starting point, of course, but enough to show that they were utterly weary of hating each other and wanted to get on with their lives. With their life—singular. Their life together.