Viator

He continued to reassure her, kissing the nape of her neck, touching her breasts; and, his erection restored, he started to push inside her, but she restrained him, twisted her head about so she could see his face, and said, I don’t want this to be an affair! Don’t move in unless you love me! And that was the perfect moment for a declaration. She was inviting him to declare himself, making such a declaration easy, an informality, and he felt the words and the will to say them taking shape; but then she opened her legs and, as he glided into her—that’s how it felt, a glide, like the splashless slipping of a diver into a medium wherein his weight was taken away, his thoughts stripped by the purity of entry, not only his flesh but also his mind immersed, drenched in her—all he managed to say, more an expulsion of breath than a commitment, was, I won’t.

Six

“…a fifth season…”

During August, it appeared that Viator was being transformed into an enormous museum devoted to the works of a single artist, one possessed of an obsessively monocular vision, a fabricator of duotone vistas, pale green and dark iron, featuring a shoreline city and a forest. Every viable wall aboard ship was producing such an image and Wilander was initially disposed to believe this was a consequence of a perceptual bias that—as with the paranoia he felt while walking into town—stemmed from a chemical imbalance; but as the flaking walls of the passageways and cabins yielded their variant perspectives on the scene displayed upon the wall of the officers’ mess, he found himself less interested in why they had manifested than in what they might represent, and undertook to create a composite map of the region portrayed, treating the forest and the city as if they were real. He thought to ask the other men to verify that the images were there, but August was not the best of months for relationships amongst the crew: Mortensen was rarely to be found; Nygaard, as had been his habit since their set-to in the galley, scurried away whenever Wilander approached; Arnsparger grew uncommunicative and truculent; Halmus stalked about the ship, his customary arrogance swollen to the proportions of hauteur, and responded to Wilander’s conversational openings with imperious stares, refusing to speak, as if he were rehearsing for a role as a pharaoh or a headwaiter. For his own part, Wilander felt no great urge to communicate; he was absorbed by his new passion, snapping photographs of the walls with throwaway cameras he bought from Arlene, assembling the prints into a montage on the dining table in the mess, and painstakingly sketching from these materials maps of a nameless country (he attempted to name it, but the names he chose—North Calambay, Skiivancia, Vidoria, Alta Marone—failed to resonate with his nebulous conception of the place) that was very like Viator s forest, just larger, hillier, and with more prominent landmarks. Not that he possessed comprehensive knowledge of his surroundings; he was only familiar with the trail leading into town, yet he perceived these distinctions in the same way you intrinsically understand the conformation of a room in which you’re sitting, and that sense, that effortless apprehension of two environments, one immediate, one imminent (that was how he thought of the nameless country, as imminent, something on the horizon, a landfall not yet sighted) led him to surmise that Viator’s mystery was emblematized by its name, Traveler, and that the ship had been frozen mid-voyage, like the Viator-shaped stain on the bottom of the pot Nygaard had exhumed from the vandalized galley, and was straining to continue on its journey. That conjecture steered him once again toward the idea that his fixation upon the walls was akin to the dementias that afflicted the other men, that he would soon, if he had not already, equal them in madness, and yet, if he were to accept that prognosis, did it not suggest that Halmus, Arnsparger and Nygaard were seeing comparable vistas in their collections of glass and rust and scrap metal, and that Mortensen’s ability—as Arnsparger phrased it—to interpret Viator through its many surfaces also allowed him to envision a forest and a city. And what did that suggest? At one point Wilander went in search of Halmus and Arnsparger, determined to learn what they saw, what they knew, what they felt; but when they rebuffed him, he did not chase after them. He was beginning to understand the reason behind their unwillingness to talk: though compelled by the mystery of Viator, they were not altogether eager to solve it; they were afraid that what they had gleaned concerning the ship’s murky potentials might be true and thus did not care to validate as fact what was for the moment merely a suspicion.