Viator

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.