Viator

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, when 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.