Viator

Wilander had half a mind to wrestle the toolbox from him, to look into the mirror once more and identify what he had seen, yet he was unsettled by the triumphant feeling that attached to the sight; not a sense of accomplishment, of having overcome travail or succeeded at some difficult task, but an exultant relief such as might be felt by a gladiator who, having beaten down his opponent, was prepared to deliver a killing stroke; and yet that was an inadequate comparative; there was nothing in his experience or imagination to inspire this particular feeling, nothing that could have provoked anything approximating so unadulterated and fierce a joy, and he thought he must have been possessed by the feeling, or that he had taken possession of an entity whose emotions had no commonality with human emotion, with either the fleeting passions of an ordinary day or the desponds into which a man might sink, as with grief and unrequited love, but were symphonic in their scope, wider, deeper, and infinitely grander than his own. Halmus demanded again to know what he had seen, and Wilander, hearing frustration in his voice, frustration and, he thought, an undertone of envy, suggesting that Halmus himself had seen nothing in the mirror, or had hoped to see more than he had, decided not to respond lest by doing so he negate an advantage he had won, an advantage whose value he had yet to comprehend. Ignoring Halmus’ protestations, he continued down the stairs toward the engine room, toward the completion of an errand, the exact nature of which he could now no longer recall.

The things he had seen in the mirror troubled Wilander over the ensuing days, but thanks to their singular character, he was able to dismiss them as aberrant, a symptom of nerves or some related complaint. He was less successful, however, in explaining away the powerful emotion that had attended his vision; it seemed to have stained his soul, adding a new, unwholesome color. He subjected himself to analysis, thinking he might unearth something from his psyche that, amplified by stress, could have produced such a sweep of feeling; but in examining the passages of his life, his unruffled childhood, his curiously blank adolescence, a period during which he had become, for no perceptible cause, alienated from everyone, friendless and unhappy (though not monumentally unhappy as were several of his more gregarious peers, like Miranda Alley, a brainy girl with whom Wilander had sex on one flurried, forlorn occasion, yet had been unable to persuade her to remove her brassiere, because—it turned out—she habitually slashed her breasts with razor blades; or Jake Callebs, a popular kid who swallowed an overdose of Xanax while sitting at the edge of the athletic field and died watching a pick-up soccer game, the green expanse blurring, his being curving up with the cries of the players and fading along the air; at least this was Wilander’s overly romantic view of the occurrence) and given to long solitary walks, his mind not focused on any particular subject, merely idling, and thereafter the renewal of college, a vital rebirth, a burst of social interactions and diverse pursuits that continued on for a couple of years after graduation…in contemplating this, he felt he was pulling at a loose thread and unraveling the garment of self in which he had been cloaked until there was nothing left except blankness. That, he thought, was the dominant pattern in his life, cycles of hyperactivity and blankness, as if he were prone to unravel after having acquired a certain amount of experience, and he thought perhaps that same pattern could be discerned to some degree in every life, and what made you unique was no more than a handful of easily unraveled threads woven across a blank template.