Viator

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.