My guides were father and son. The son looked about my age, and I hit it off with him well enough. Told him stories about Hollywood, actors and actresses that I’d worked with—he mostly wanted to hear about the actresses. I just told him random shit about America, like how people hand you your change instead of setting it on the counter. But I felt that his father resented me somehow. Maybe it was just that he spoke no English, but he laid this silence on me like I’d done something so horrible he couldn’t even yell at me about it. He hardly said anything to his son, either. Just a few sporadic barks, like “keep up,” or “this way.” Some sort of orders, I was sure.
“Don’t worry about him,” the son told me. “For three hundred dollars he likes you fine.” Even so, the only acknowledgment he showed me at all was when I began to lag behind with my aching legs and he slackened his pace to brisk. I said thanks, but he just mumbled something to his son.
“What’d he say?” I asked.
“He says hurry up, tired legs are better than frozen ones. He says we’d have more energy to walk if we didn’t talk so much.”
A long silence followed. I started to feel like quiet was appropriate, though; the landscape looked quiet, the cold air smelled quiet. It almost made me forget how miserable I was with my moustache stuck to my face in frozen snot and my hands slipping into frostbit senselessness. I didn’t think it was supposed to get this cold here, at least at this time of year. I was contemplating living the rest of my life without any fingers when the son tapped me on the shoulder and said, “This is it. We’re there.”
I looked around but couldn’t see anything particularly notable.
“I was born here,” the son told me. I ignored him and looked over at his father, who was lighting up a Marlboro that I could smell even through the snot-glacier in my nose. My last pack was still sitting on my bedside table in Reykjavik. I’d left it there out of some perverse idea I had about making my little pilgrimage in purity. It smelled like post-coital bliss, but I didn’t want to bum one from him. At least I didn’t want to ask. I coughed emphatically a few times, and he just looked at me and took a drag, holding the cigarette with both hands between fingers laced together in front of his mouth. I’d never seen anyone smoke that way before. It reminded me somehow of a documentary I’d seen about this sad old gorilla who’d never gotten used to life in the zoo. After a few quiet minutes while he finished his cigarette, I followed the two of them down the crater’s steep incline.
God. I’d lost my only pair of contacts in a drunken stumble down the Strøget in Copenhagen—the less said about which the better—so maybe it was just my eyes. Or maybe it was the blood freezing in my brain, or just a trick of the steam rising up from the earth to tumble like a lover with the condensation in the frigid air… But the sky seemed suddenly to bend and shimmer around me as we approached the archway at the crater’s bottom. Like in a movie when the hero passes through some invisible barrier into another dimension. The stink of sulphur got stronger. We were there. Beneath me I could feel the vulcanopneumatic power thrumming like Brando’s Triumph Thunderbird in The Wild Ones. I stared hard into the depths of the cave, standing still for a moment and trying to take it all in, and I swear I could already make out the vague green glow of the ormolu lichen within. The son’s words no longer seemed so absurd to me. This was it. I was about to enter Vanaheim.
“This is not the way to Vanaheim,” my father said as we made our way in the direction of Garm’s howls.
“We’ll be there soon, Pa. First we just have to make one little stop to pick up Garm.”
“Hmph,” he snorted. “This is nonsense. I have never shared your mother’s fondness for hounds. We should leave for Vanaheim immediately.”
Once he had parted from Our Heroine outside Hubert Jorgen’s storefront, we proceeded to follow the actor for what seemed like minutes. The snow was useful in obscuring us from his sight, but perhaps we were not as obscure as we might have been; it is possible that he was attempting to shake us from his trail. His path followed no pattern that we could perceive. Meanderings that crossed each other and doubled back upon themselves, like the aimless explorations of a man without a map in a city that he does not know. He seemed to be tracing out some indecipherable hieroglyph in the rough lines of the city streets. A rune of protection? From whom? We overtook him before he could achieve its terrible completion.
“Pardon us,” we said as we caught him up. “May we speak with you for a moment?”
“Oh, hey…” Impassive. “Yeah, it’s really me. So, do you guys want an autograph or something?” He patted at his pockets, presumably for a pen.
“There is no need for that; we are aware of your name. You are an actor as well as an author, are you not?”
With mute nod and sheepish smile, he affirmed our assertion.
“Hmm. It is a bit of an anomaly to find a celebrity of your caliber in a town as small as New Crúiskeen.”
“Yeah, I’m just here for Bean Day, actually… I’m speaking at the Valison panel. And, if you guys don’t want autographs, I should probably get a move on, because it starts pretty soon…”
“Of course. We do not mean to delay you… But my partner and I were just—quite coincidentally—discussing your superlative interpretation of the role of Hamlet, and we were hoping that, perhaps, you could spare just a moment to discuss it with us.”
He was taken in by our subterfuge.
“You guys saw that? Yeah, I’m really proud of that movie. I mean, I realize I’m no Olivier, but I do feel that it was one of my finer portrayals.”
“Indeed. It was an astounding mimesis, and you must have studied the character in some depth to render it with such verisimilitude.”
He mock-waved away our flattery.
“Yeah, well, I did take it pretty seriously,” he said. “I’d never really done much Shakespeare before, so I spent a lot of time just reading the play—over and over—until I was sure I understood every single word… I even went to Denmark for a while, just to get a feel for the atmosphere in which it takes place, you know.”
“Hmm…” we said, genuinely pensive, for this resonated unexpectedly well with other entries in our casebook. “During what period of time were you there, exactly?”
“Oh, that was back in the summer of ’98. It took a couple years for the film to hit the States, and even then it didn’t get a wide release… It was a good experience all around, though; I really learned a lot. I mean, for instance, did you know that Shakespeare wasn’t even the first guy to write a story about the character? The early versions were more action-adventure than tragedy, apparently. But I was able to work a lot of that into my portrayal. If you ever watch the movie again, you should pay attention to how the way I develop as a character parallels way that the character evolved. From Saxo Grammaticus straight through to Thomas Kyd. And then Shakespeare, of course… I mean, it’s pretty subtle, yeah, but it’s all in there.”
All of the fears that we had harbored till now—that the object of our search was but an ignis fatuus; that no true illumination awaited us at the end of our path; that we had been led on, thus far, by mere coincidence—had dissolved in the moment that the actor said the name. Thomas Kyd. Until our involvement with Ms. MacGuffin, we had been incognizant of this name, just as we had been incognizant of his purported Hamlet. Further, from what we knew of the actor, it did not seem likely to us that such information would ordinarily be found in the domain of his knowledge, either. We were excited, then, at the prospect of what seemed to be both confirmation of our fundamental hypotheses and an undeniable lead in new directions. We did not, however, allow this excitement to influence our tone of voice.
25
Though Our Heroine otherwise seems to be the narrative focalizer of the novel as a whole, her first-person narration, here, seems relatively sparse in comparison to the more fully developed sections devoted to Nathan, Wible & Pacheco, and Blaise Duplain. While Part One (Prelude) appears to be perhaps an attempt to evoke the Valisonian voice while simultaneously resisting submission to the standard tropes of his more “mystery” oriented narratives, Part Two (Ludo) seems to set the reader adrift in a sea of narrators while Our Heroine struggles simply to find a voice that she can call her own.