Viator

—No, I imagine not. Wilander reached up and fumbled about blindly on his overhead shelf for a candy bar, located two Paydays, and offered one to Arnsparger, who said that his teeth were bad enough, thank you. From outside the cabin there came a long, thin cry, metallic sounding, that planed away into a whispery frailty—Wilander pictured a tin bird with gem-cut glass orbs for eyes, perched high in the dark crown of the linden tree, mourning an incomprehensible loss. What about Mortensen? he asked. Does he have a hobby?

—It’s funny about Mortensen. There’s times I think the guy’s nuts, but he’s too damn smart to be nuts.

—Intelligence is scarcely proof against insanity. The fact is, intelligent people tend to be more prone to certain types of mental illness.

—You couldn’t prove it by me. I peaked in the fourth grade. Arnsparger chuckled. Mortensen, though…I tell you, crazy or not, he’s a smart son-of-a-bitch. But he’s not into collecting.

—Halmus told me he was doing something with the hold.

—Yeah. Usually he never stays with anything. He reads it and then he moves on to someplace else.

—Reads? What do you mean?

Arnsparger explained that Mortensen claimed the ability to interpret the ship through the signs manifest in its many surfaces. The rust and the glass, the raveled wiring, the accumulated dust, the powdery residues of chemicals—they were languages and Mortensen spent his time in mastering them, translating them. It sounds crazy, Arnsparger said. But when Mortensen talks about it, I get what he means. It’s like with my samples. When I come across a good one…they’re like these concise statements that pop up from the rusted surfaces. They come through clear, they seem to sum up what I’m seeing, what I’m thinking about what I’m seeing. Like with a slogan, you know. A decal or something.

—But the hold…You seem to be suggesting he has a special relationship with it.

—He spends a lot of time down there, writing stuff on the walls. But I don’t know. He’s liable to move on to something else.

Wilander pressed him on the subject of Mortensen, but Arnsparger, after answering a couple of questions, tucked his chin onto his chest, pushing his lips in and out as might a sullen child, his replies growing terse; finally he scooped up the cardboard box, surged to his feet and said he needed to get going, there were things he had to do, and when Wilander, bewildered by this shift in mood, asked if he had in some way offended, Arnsparger said, I’m fed up with you pretending to be my buddy so you can pick my brain. I’m not a fucking reference library! and stormed out, leaving Wilander to consider whether he had been insufficiently enthusiastic about Arnsparger’s samples, or if the man’s reaction was attributable to an irrational fit of temper, or if he, Wilander, had inadvertently crossed some impalpable boundary, one of many such boundaries for which Viator appeared to serve as a nexus.