Viator

The conversation evolved into a lecture, a dissertation upon the topic of Viator, Whence, Whither, and Wherefore, Mortensen pointing out the resonances between Lunde’s story and their experiences, and pointing out distinctions as well. He declared that the storm’s fury and the power of the sea had served as a battery that enabled the forging of a bond between Viator and its previous crew, essentially the same that had been forged between Viator and themselves, yet it had taken longer to complete that second bond because there had been no crucible moment of wind and enormous waves, only the battery of slow time, and the union produced by this gradual process was stronger than the original, and necessarily so, for it was no simple passage that lay ahead, no few days of wind and sea, and great strength and endurance would be demanded of them. But the primary focus of his disquisition was upon the link between Lunde’s charts and Wilander’s maps, those acts of the imagination that had created and were creating an appropriate landfall for Viator. In response to Wilander’s comment that, as far as he knew, the forest adjoining Kaliaska was not Lunde’s creation, it had existed for centuries prior to Lunde’s birth, Mortensen said, Yes, yet not in its current form; Lunde had authored a change that prepared the forest for Viator s advent, a small thing when compared to Wilander’s creation, to be sure, but Lunde’s forest was the precursor of the Iron Shore, a stage in the journey, perhaps the first of many stages, and wasn’t Wilander aware of the innumerable theories deployed about a single fundamental idea, that the observer creates reality?, my God, it was a basic tenet of philosophy, implicit in every philosophical paradigm, every religion, even Christianity, at least it had been part of the Christian belief system before the Council of Nicaea scrubbed the doctrine clean of its Asiatic influences; and both the most primitive conceptions of universal order (sympathetic magic, for instance, the notion that a voodoo priest could heal a sick man by feeding a bull meal in which a drop or two of the patient’s blood was mixed, forming a bond between animal and man that would permit the bull’s vigor to subdue the disease) and the most sophisticated insights of physics (fractals, the behaviors of subatomic particles, etc.) gave evidence of the interconnectivity of all matter, and it was this interconnection that had permitted Lunde and Wilander to channel their energies with such efficacy; then Mortensen, with a triumphant expression, his point having been firmly established (to his own mind, at any rate), proceeded to embellish his theory, his estimation of the event that surrounded them, that had closed them in, by linking the concept of an observer-created reality with the phenomenon of crop circles, with the casting of spells, and thence with the summoning of demons, exorcisms, séances, the hierarchies of the angels, astrological conjunctions, with top-secret scientific breakthroughs known to nine anonymous men in the government and the Satanic strategies codified by the webs of certain South American spiders, with the entire catalogue of lunacy from which middle-class neurotics the world over selected the crutches that allowed them to walk the earth without crumbling beneath the merciless stare and brutal radiations of a god who was nothing like the images in the catalogue variously depicting him to be a gentle dreamy shepherd, a mighty bearded apparition, an architect of fate (God’s Blueprint For YOUR Heavenly Mansion by Dr. Carter P. Zaslow, $22.95 plus shipping), a universe-sized vessel of love; and after Mortensen ended his discourse and returned to the shadowy places of Viator, Wilander, who had been halfway convinced by the initial portion of his remarks, realized that Mortensen’s mad-prophet pose masked a pitiful, ordinary madness, the madness that had doubtless afflicted him while abusing himself with fortified wine on the streets of several Alaskan cities; and, recognizing that he could trust not a word that had been said by either Mortensen or Lunde, he made a rashly considered call to Arlene, told Lunde’s story yet again, and asked her to check out the details on the Internet. She replied frostily that she would if she could find the time (she called back a day later, at an hour when he typically shut off his phone, and left a message saying that she had substantiated the basics of the story—the survival of the crew, Lunde’s dismissal, and so on—and that she had asked a hacker friend in the Forty-Eight to do a more thorough search) and said she didn’t believe this qualified as an emergency, she did not want him calling whenever he got nervous, did he understand?, okay then, goodbye. And Wilander, feeling isolated to an unparalleled degree—even sleeping alone beneath a cardboard sheet in an alley, he had heard voices, traffic, and known himself to be still part of the human sphere, but here there was only the silence and inhuman vibration of the ship—stepped out onto the deck and discovered that an inch of snow had fallen and more was coming down, big wet flakes that promised a heavy accumulation, yet vanished when they touched his palm, and he was so affected by this consolation of nature, by the whiteness of the deck, by the soft hiss of the snowfall, by the smell of heaven it brought, he stood with his face turned to the sky, watching with childish fascination as the flakes came spinning out of the incomprehensible dark, letting them melt and trickle down his cheeks like the tears of a vast immaterial entity who—eyeless and full of sorrows—had seen fit to use a lesser being to manifest its weeping.