Viator

Day by day, fear became increasingly dominant in Wilander’s life. His recurring dream unsettled him and the act of walking through the forest into town demanded that he steel his nerves, for everywhere he turned, he spotted evidence of movement in the undergrowth, stirring ferns, disturbed leaves, and he believed these signs were not due to wind or the scuttlings of ordinary animals, but to the passage of creatures similar to the one he had watched from the stern while talking to Lunde, sluggish translucent beasts native to another forest, another coast, to a metropolitan Kaliaska encircling a lagoon and separated from the town he knew by an imperceptible and indefinable barrier. The bird with the metal throat kept up its keening; indeed, Wilander became convinced that more than a single bird was responsible, since those declining, dolorous cries now sounded throughout the forest, and he thought that the original bird had, upon finding a suitable roost, summoned its fellows and they had proved to be a reclusive species who nested one to a tree and whose solitary calls were designed to provoke no answer, like a sentry’s announcement of all clear. Unnerved by these thoughts, by his almost casual embrace of their patent irrationality, he debated whether he should give up his job; scarcely a day passed when he did not entertain the idea—it had served him for a time, but now Viator had begun to unhinge him, to terrify him. During a mild yet persistent anxiety attack, one that lasted for several hours, he decided to visit Arlene, but was unable to bring himself to endure the suffocating grip of the hold, the hold where Mortensen muttered to himself and scribbled things, lending the darkness there a Cabalistic weight, and so he was forced to lash a length of rope to the railing near the stern, a spot beneath which the crest of a massive boulder lay fifteen feet below, and to descend to solid ground in that fashion. Each time he went into Kaliaska, he would decide that he’d had enough, he would send Terry out to collect his clothes, his books; yet his fascination with the ship drew him back. It was not just the walls, the half-glimpsed animals, and the birds that compelled him. Gazing at a fitting or a corroded hinge, at any portion of the ship, although he could measure no appreciable difference from how these things looked one day to the next, he understood that a deeper change was taking place in Viator, and, on one particularly stifling afternoon, as he paused to wipe his brow beside a bulkhead door, a bulging oval with a bar handle, studded with bolts, its green paint scarred and incised with initials, like a hideous iron blister, something that might have developed upon the hindquarters of a mechanical beast, it occurred to him—a thought that seemed a direct result of his study of the door, as if he were tuning in its vibrations—that Viator was not, as might be intimated, experiencing an awakening or an enlivening (the ship, to his mind, had always been alive, its vitality evident at first sight, its energy spilling out to nourish the improbable forest that formed its nest), but that it was moving; that, though engineless, Viator, by means of some imponderable process and through some unfathomable medium, was shifting closer to that other forest, the natural habitat of the metal-throated birds, close enough so their cries could be heard, and yet they remained invisible because the ship had not succeeded in physically penetrating their habitat. Informed by this insight, this hallucination, this fantastic narrative skeleton that could only have been constructed by an ex-drunk, ex-addict whose mind, after years of abuse, the penultimate symptom of which was the narrative itself, was so diminished that he might be persuaded of the reality of even the most laughable rumor; and it was fortunate, he told himself, that the priests of his mission-dwelling days, men for whom charity was more drug than virtue, weren’t around, or else he would be down on his knees, howling to Jesus, while one of them, maybe the Jesuit with the hair plugs in Seattle, Father Brad, what an asshole!, clasped his hands and beamed at him fatuously…Informed by all this, then, Wilander returned to his maps, attacking his cartographer’s problem with fresh inspiration and renewed zeal, making corrections, refining his vision of a nameless country populated by transparent badgers and invisible birds and gigantic flying worms, adding detail to a map of the city encircling the lagoon (the buildings inland low and undistinguished, like housing developments; those nearer the water arranged in complexes that radiated outward from the palatial structure on the peninsula), and also detailing the well-notched coastline beyond the city and a grouping of six islands that bore signs of habitation, laboring long into the night, damping his fears with work, quelling his rational concerns, forgetting everything.

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