Viator

by Lucius Shepard

  —I may have some work for you. Arlene dusted a slice with red peppers, using her forefinger to tap flakes of pepper from the jar, taking great pains to distribute them evenly. The afternoon boat brought me a shipment. A lot of it’s heavy stuff. Generators and TVs. I could manage myself, but I’ve got calls I’d like to make as soon as business opens on the East Coast and the boat’ll be pulling out around seven. You’d have to start before first light.

  —That sounds possible, Wilander said. I could probably…

  —I can put you up. Be easier than walking into town at three in the morning.

  She glanced up from her plate and engaged his eyes long enough to convey that this was both a functional invitation and a personal one.

  —Okay. Yeah, sure, he said. I’ll be happy to help you out.

  Arlene smiled. I can’t pay much, but at least it’s not a career.

  Three

  “…an awful dream, terrible, not like a dream at all…”

  Wilander’s days lapsed into a pleasant routine. In the mornings he would sit on deck beneath the linden tree, encaged by boughs that overhung the rail, leaves trailing across his neck and shoulders, bathed in greeny light, hidden from all but the most penetrating eyes, and he would write in his journal and doze and dream, often of Arlene, with whom he spent his nights, walking into Kaliaska in late afternoon, and helping out with the stock until closing and then retiring to her upstairs apartment, which proved to be a place of rustic and eclectic disorder such as he had imagined the trading post might be, the rooms carpeted with Turkish kilims and throw rugs from Samarkand and prayer rugs from Isfahan, one overlying the other, and the furniture—secondhand sofas and chairs—draped with silk prints and faded tapestries, and on the walls were oil paintings in antique gilt or brass frames, the images gone so dark with age, they seemed paintings of chaos, of imperiled golden-white glows, gods reduced to formlessness, foundering in black fires deep beneath the foundations of the world, and only by peering at them from inches away could one determine that they were stormy seascapes and pastoral landscapes and portraits of aristocratic men and women in comic opera uniforms and gowns, all wearing the constipated expression that during the nineteenth century served as standard dress for the ruling class, and upon the end tables and dressers and nightstands were innumerable lamps, lamps of every description, bases of cut glass, ceramic, brass, malacca, polished teak, and onyx matched to shades of parchment, eggshell-thin jade, carved ivory, lace-edged silk, blown glass, and tin, yet no more than a few were ever lit at one time, and thus the apartment was usually engulfed in a mysterious gloom from which glints and colors and lusters of these objects (all gotten at barter from sailors, travelers, adventurers) would emerge, creating a perfect setting for Arlene, the rich clutter of a pirate’s trove wherein she looked to be the most significant prize. These dreams were sometimes prurient, sometimes funny, sometimes sweet, and this heartened Wilander—the fact that his subconscious displayed a range of feeling toward her nourished his hope that the relationship would grow and become more than two lonely people having sex.

  Shortly after he began spending his nights with Arlene, one morning as he lay on the deck of Viator, Wilander was visited by a dream that was to return to him again and again in variant forms. He had no presence in the dream, no sense of intimate involvement, being merely an observer without attitude or disposition, bodiless in a black place. Superimposed on the blackness was a tan circle, like the view through a telescope of a pale brown sky and what appeared to be five dark birds (always five) flying at so great a distance, they manifested as simple shapes, shapes such as a child might render when asked to draw a bird, two identical curved lines set side by side and meeting at the point between them. Something about the dream, which lasted only for a few seconds prior to waking and seemed less a dream than an optical incident that may have been provoked by the sun penetrating his lids, unsettled Wilander, yet he failed to identify the unsettling element until the third recurrence of the dream, when he recognized that the winglike lines comprising the individual birds were not beating, but rippling, causing them to resemble flagella wriggling in a drop of water under the lens of a microscope. The bird things flew ever closer to the viewing plane and he came to suspect that their bodies might not conform to avian anatomy at all, but they were still so far away, they remained rudimentary figures without the slightest visible detail.

  None of these dreams were of considerable duration, and though they disturbed Wilander, the disturbance was not so onerous as to distract him overmuch—far more disturbing was the demeanor of the men aboard Viator now that he had hooked up with (this being Halmus’ appreciation of the relationship) the Queen of Kaliaska. Had it been asserted that he could be more isolated than he already was, that his shipmates might treat him with greater indifference, he would have pronounced the statement laughable and replied that the increment of indifference involved would be infinitesimal; yet he discovered that the atmosphere aboard ship underwent a marked chill, that Nygaard averted his eyes whenever Wilander came near, and Halmus no longer extended even a cursory greeting, and Mortensen ignored him completely, and Arnsparger’s smiles were reduced to formalities, his chatter to ten-second assessments of the weather. Wilander classified their shunning of him as adolescent, the kind of wounded reaction that eventuates when a woman begins to dominate a young man’s time and thus earns the resentment of his friends, of a group whose center he has been; but since the men of Viator were not young, not friends, acquaintances only in the strictest sense of the word, Wilander could not fathom the reason for their hostile reaction, nor could he understand the depth of his reaction to their coolness.

  —To hell with them, he told Arlene. They act like I’ve betrayed them. Like we’re fraternity brothers and I’ve broken the sacred bond. It’s ridiculous.

  Yet once back onboard the ship, he felt injured by their treatment and, while he had no intention of apologizing or placating them in any way, he sought them out, hoping that a meeting in a passageway or the hold or the galley would provide an opportunity for them to vent their displeasure and permit them to work past this problem and reinstitute the old, slightly less indifferent order. He made no discernible progress toward a rapprochement, but he came to anticipate the time he spent searching through the ship, because on each and every occasion he would stumble upon some fascinating object—for instance, a pale green section of the passageway wall outside the officer’s mess where the paint had flaked away in hundreds of spots, small and large, creating of the surface a mineral abstract like those found on picture stone, from which (if one studied the wall, letting one’s eyes build an image from the paintless spots, from scratches, dents and scuffs) there emerged an intricate landscape, an aerial view of forested hills—firs for the most part—declining toward water, and a large modern city beneath the hills that encircled a lagoon and spread along the coast, with iron-colored islands in the offing; or he might achieve a fresh perspective on some portion of the ship, much as happened when, standing in the engine room one night, he glanced at the relics of the engine and the many-leveled stairway ascending through the tiers and realized that this towering space and its contents had the appearance of a mechanistic church that had been violated and abandoned, its altar wrecked, its symbol of spiritual ascendancy rusted, littered with twenty-year-old trash: oil-stained cloths, bolts, shattered bottle glass, some of the railings loose, some fallen—and as a result of these dalliances, he found himself growing more intrigued by the ship, not curious as to its history, but fixated upon the beauty of its decay, the monument to dissolution it was in process of becoming.

  Three weeks after he and Arlene had initiated their affair, while sleeping on Viator s deck beneath the low-hanging linden boughs, Wilander experienced a recurrence of the dream that was unlike any of its previous visitations. At the outset, all was as usual. He lay disembodied, in blackness, staring at the pale brown circle wherein the four birdlike creatures flew, still mysterious with distance, wh
en one separated from the rest and approached with apparent purposefulness, as if it had noticed something of interest and were coming for a better look. It must have begun its approach from a good ways off—for what seemed two or three minutes, he could detect no change in its aspect, except that it proved to be a dark earthy brown in color, not black as it had appeared at a greater remove, and then suddenly it rushed upon him, or upon whatever dream-object it had noticed, and that simple shape of two identical curved lines resolved into two glistening, ropy segments of flesh, united by a ridged structure…and yet it swooped past so swiftly, he could not be certain he had seen anything of the sort, he might have supplied the details from his imagination to give form to what had been, essentially, a blur. Nor was he certain of its size, though he had an apprehension of enormity and tremendous power. Viewed at a distance, the bird things posed a far more unnerving image than had this fleeting close-up—their rippling stasis conveyed an air of horrid patience, the patience of carrion birds waiting for something to finish with death—but when he woke with his heart racing, he knew with a paranoid certainty that their waiting was done and that the creature had flown out of the dream and into the sky overhead and was wheeling about, preparing to make a second pass.

  He heaved to his feet and stood with his head and torso pushing up among the boughs of the linden tree, feeling more secure surrounded by greenery; but as he steadied his breath and tried to put the dream and his relation to it into a reasonable frame, through an aperture in the leaves, roughly oval, a lovely Edenesque frame itself, he saw a gaunt, bearded face like those portrayed by the ikons in his late Aunt Rigmor’s collection, enshrined in a china closet at her home in Portland, a stately old house that he had hated as a child for its apparent fragility (he had been forbidden to touch anything), yet now recalled with inexplicable nostalgia—inexplicable, unless it were the ikons themselves that inspired nostalgia, for he had been quite taken with them and, curious as to their worth, their meaning, he had often stood on tiptoes and peered at them, as now he peered at the elongated, hollow-cheeked face of a suffering Swedish saint shrouded by matted shoulder-length gray hair, the waxy skin webbed with broken capillaries, and having a bladed nose and brown eyes as beautiful and profoundly sad as the eyes of a young woman disappointed in love, eyes that had registered everything essential about the world of men and had forgiven them their lustful natures, and a mouth all but obscured by a ragged beard that still showed here and there a few blond hairs: Mortensen. The shock of seeing him close at hand was nearly as disabling as the shock Wilander had absorbed from the dream, and he could think of nothing to say.

  —Good morning, Mortensen said. Or is it afternoon? I often lose track. His voice was unexpectedly high-pitched and adenoidal, ill-matched to his appearance; its resonance made him sound a little like a boy trying to force his pitch lower in imitation of a man.

  —Morning, I think. Wilander glanced up into the crown of the tree, trying to find the sun. Yes, it’s getting near noon.

  —Ah! I should have thought to look at the sky. I’ve been inside so long, my instincts have eroded.

  Wilander became aware that Mortensen must be seeing him the same way he saw Mortensen, in a leafy frame, and the image this conjured, two men communicating by means of a weird organic technology, magical forest mirrors, made him chuckle.

  —I’m not a social man, Mortensen said sternly. We won’t have very many opportunities to talk. Perhaps we should make the most of this one and try to be serious.

  —You have something to say to me? Say it.

  —Only that we need you to be responsible.

  —And what would you have me be responsible for?

  —You spend most of the afternoons and all of your evenings with that woman. You sleep the mornings away and then you’re gone again. How is that responsible?

  —What should I be doing? Collecting scrap metal like Nygaard and Arnsparger? Pondering over broken mirrors like Halmus? Or would you have me haunt the ship like you?

  —You’re quartered in the captain’s cabin. Surely that’s an indicator of what you should be doing?

  —So I’m the captain? Captain of a ship that will never travel another inch? I suppose I should be studying charts, plotting a course.

  Mortensen made a diffident gesture. You’re the one in charge, aren’t you? You can hardly do other than determine our course. And then you have your reports to make. How can you make them when you know nothing of what’s going on?

  —I make the reports in a timely fashion.

  —But what do you say?

  —I tell Lunde the work goes well. Occasionally I throw a few numbers at him.

  —In other words, you lie to him.

  —It’s what Arnsparger told me to do.

  —Arnsparger! When Arnsparger made the reports, there was nothing to report. It’s your job now and you need to redefine it. It’s you who were meant to have the job when things reached this stage. To do the job correctly, you must observe what’s going on.

  —You’re suggesting that I tell Lunde what we’re doing? He’ll fire us. If I tell him Halmus stands around examining bits of glass like a jeweler inspecting diamonds, or that Arnsparger and Nygaard cut little holes in the hull, in pots, in bulkhead doors…he’ll have them committed.

  —Those are the very things he wants to hear.

  —How the hell would you know?

  Mortensen’s eyelids drooped and he seemed to be gathering strength through prayer. I was the first to come, he said. Therefore I’m the first to know things.

  An image from Wilander’s dream, the pale brown circle and the birdlike creatures rippling in the distance, floated up before his mind’s eye. Unnerved by this, he was impatient to have done with Mortensen. It was early to be thinking of heading for Kaliaska, but he intended to do exactly that.

  —If you know things before I do, Wilander said, why don’t you tell me some of these things only you know?

  Once again Mortensen paused before responding. You’ll learn them soon enough.

  —But I’m not ready for such knowledge now? It’s too volatile, too alarming. I wouldn’t be able to understand?

  —Ridiculing me will benefit no one.

  Wilander might have argued the point. Should I report that to Lunde? he asked. That you have secret knowledge of the future?

  —I see no reason why you should not.

  —I’ve got a better idea. Since you’ve been here longest and know more than any of us, why don’t you make the reports?

  —I have my own responsibilities, Mortensen said. They require all my energy.

  —Yes, I can imagine.

  —Your duties are not so challenging as mine, but nonetheless they’re crucial and you can’t perform them in Kaliaska.

  Angry now, Wilander said, These responsibilities that require all your energy, that are so challenging—perhaps you could explain them to me.

  —There’s a passage in the Bible that states one must be born again…

  —I’ve had to pay for my dinner far too often by listening to that religious crap. I don’t have to listen to it here.

  —It states that one must be born again to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, Mortensen said patiently. I believe that’s true of every significant passage.

  —What are you talking about?

  Mortensen shook his head ruefully. Perhaps we’ll speak later. I have things to do.

  —What things? That’s all I’m asking you! What could be so pressing you can’t take a few seconds to tell me about it?

  —It would take much longer than a few seconds, Mortensen said. And it would serve no purpose…not so long as you maintain your current attitude.

  —Then convince me to change my attitude, Wilander said, but without another word, Mortensen stepped from view and did not answer when Wilander called to him.

  A bird chittered somewhere above, a patterned call that had the sound of a warning. Wilander glanced up through the leaves, trying to locate it, and was captiv
ated first by the architecture of the tree, the axle of the trunk and the irregular spokes of the limbs, making it seem as if the linden were a spindle designed to interact in some fashion with the ship, and then by the uppermost leaves, almost invisible against the glare of the sun, and those just below showing as half-sketched outlines and a hint of green, giving the impression that the tree had not sprouted from the soil but was materializing from the top down, spun into being from a formless golden-white dimension whose borders interpenetrated with the world of men.

  * * *

  Walking toward Kaliaska, Wilander’s frustration with Mortensen abated and he chided himself for having confronted the old fool. With every step, his mood was buoyed further by the prospect that in less than an hour he would be with Arlene, and by the beauty of the luxuriant growth, the sunlight filtering through the canopy to gild trembling leaves and nodding ferns, a feeling that peaked when, looking back, he saw Viator’s prow, black and made mysterious by ground fog, thrusting between two hills; but once he passed beyond sight of the ship, he was possessed by the feeling that the dream place into which he had gazed earlier that morning had a physical presence, a geography, and the ground whereon he walked was part of it, the firs, the mossy logs, and the carpeting of salvia and ferns, all of them were elements of an illusion that had taken root in the pale brown medium that enclosed the ship, growing there like fungus on a stump. The notion was, of course, irrational. He rejected it, he went at a measured pace, he fixed his thoughts on Arlene. But each step now seemed attached to mortal risk—at any second his foot might breach the apparent solidity of the trail and he would plunge into the pale brown void beneath and fall prey to the menacing undulant shapes that inhabited it. The certainty grew in him that a fatal step was imminent, that some dread trap he could neither anticipate nor characterize was about to be sprung. Before long, his uneasiness matured into panic, and, unable to restrain the impulse, he fled through the forest, soon forgetting what had so frightened him, afraid of everything now, of shadows and glints of light, of stillness and a surreptitious rustling among the bushes, stumbling, tripping over roots, scraping his hand on a stone, thorns pricking his arms, falling, scrambling up again, until he reached the rise overlooking Kaliaska and collapsed atop it.