Viator

He had felt only intermittently connected with her during the call, sparks and flickers, the sputtering of a faulty connection, but after switching off the phone, he felt that a protective envelope had dissipated, the cold moving in to fill the vacuum, and he shoved his hands into his pockets, hunched his shoulders, leaning against the rail at the very peak of the bow (was there a word for that precise spot, the last firm footing behind the prow, some Latinate term, the perigolum, the spitaline, or maybe a vulgar British term dating from the days of the lash?) amid the spicy smell of the firs, peering off into the night, unable to make out a trunk, a bough, a fern, and then seeing shapes melt up from the darkness, amoeboid blotches of a shinier black than the air, shiny like patches of worn velvet, gliding and jittering across his field of vision, a whole zoo of them slipping about, and he thought that here in this forward position, at the edge of Viator, aloft from the world, he should have a perfect angle on things, a true perspective in every direction, even inward, unless such an angle was impossible and no matter what promontory you scaled, hoping to penetrate the incidental distractions that blinded you to your life, to understand its central circumstance, you discovered that you had no central circumstance, no fundamental issue, no rational pivot by which to steer—it was all distraction, all a flowing (according to Heraclitus, at least), a flux impossible to navigate, and you were borne along on unknowable currents and tides until you, the mad captain of your soul, ran yourself aground on the reef of a heap of white powder, a homeless shelter, an abandoned ship, an abandoned relationship…and sometimes that tactic worked out for the best, as it may have for Lunde, as it might have for Wilander if he’d had the good sense to strand himself on the shoal of the trading post and cultivate the illusion of a central circumstance with Arlene. It could work out yet. He would have to surrender himself to the principles of the relationship, principles they’d establish, but a week or a month from now, perhaps longer, he could walk into town and, after a probationary period, after hurt feelings had been soothed, she would take him back. He hated the confidence that knowing this gave him; it tempted him to believe she loved him more than he loved her, and he refused to believe that. Despite mis-alignments, tentativeness, and ungainly steps (and how else could a dance like theirs have proceeded, two people so unused to each other, so variant in their experience, going from strangers to lovers in the space of a few weeks, a few walks, a few conversations, very similar to how things had developed between him and Bliss Zouski, except the situation had been reversed, she’d been the one drawn by some mysterious force to withdraw from the affair, money or security, some more reasonable incarnation of Viator, some powerful edifice or mass of philosophical iron that magnetized her will, pulling her toward a false north), he believed they were equal in their mutual attraction and, once past this blunder, once he ridded himself of his fixation with the ship, once he felt solid…This thought, a trial balloon floated, an attempt at bravado, didn’t have enough lift to complete itself, because he was no longer sure he had the will to take that walk. Viator’s hold had tightened on him; in that, he was no different from Arnsparger or Nygaard or Halmus. Mortensen, now…Perhaps Mortensen was different, or perhaps he was simply farther along the path. Wilander leaned forward over the prow, imagining himself to be the ship’s tiny figurehead, wishing that he felt as unassailable as a figurehead. As stoic. His vision had adjusted and he could see intimations of trees, of a limb half-snapped away from its trunk, drooping in front of Viator, and he had an apprehension of the great entanglement and complexity in which he lived, the vines and toadstools, the rotting logs and mattes of compressed, decaying branches, the beds of salvia carpeting the earth, the vivid productions of mold and moss, the chains of his life, verdant and virtual. Everything was still. Then a noise broke from the depths of the forest, a faint but distinct groaning. Not a sound generated by flesh and bone—it was unmistakably the groan of metal under stress. Simultaneously, in the distance, farther away than he had thought it possible to see in a straight line, given the obstructions of hills and trees, a corruscant white light flared and shrank, flared again, like the sputter of a welder’s torch. The groaning escalated into a shriek; the light fluctuated wildly, growing so bright, it threw into silhouette the shapes of tangled coils and loops that looked to be close by the radiant source. Vines? Wire? They were gone before Wilander could make a more informed guess. The light fizzled, winked out; the groaning lapsed; a breath of warm air touched his face, carrying a richly bitter scent and then something sweet, almost a chocolate smell, a smell such as might be released from a barista’s cart. The stillness of the forest had been abolished. Metal-throated qwazil lamented on high. From the hill to starboard came a concentrated rustling, as of small animals stampeding through the underbrush. Wilander squeezed the rail, all his muscles tight, intent upon these sounds and other, less familiar cries: a repeated passage of seven rapid, hollow notes, reminiscent of notes on a glockenspiel; a shrill attenuated quavering, like the whine of an open frequency; a soft mammalian chuffing. He did not seek to rationalize what he saw and smelled and heard, nor did he stand long at the rail. The cold began to bother him. He turned from the prow and walked toward the yellow glare chuting from the door of the officer’s mess and, as he stepped inside, the qwazil that haunted the linden gave its cry, louder than usual, its articulations plainer, as if it had roosted lower in the tree, and what had previously come to Wilander’s ear as sorrowful now seemed to illustrate a more complicated quality, a weary yet joyful relief like that expressed by a lookout, aloft for days, who—having sighted a dark green line on the horizon or a seagull riding a landward current—called down to his mates that their long voyage was nearly done.