“Thomas Kyd?” we asked. “But Thomas Kyd’s version of the play is lost, is it not?”
“Yeah, wow… Well, you guys are way more up on your Hamlet than I ever was. I’d never even heard of his version before I took on the role… But yeah, I guess it’s lost, or it was never properly published or something. In Denmark, though, I met this woman who was trying to reconstruct it… Or at least she was trying to write her own verbally viable version of it or something. Like one that conformed to the syntactic patterns of Kyd’s other plays. It sounded like a pretty cool idea…”
“This is all… quite intriguing,” we said.
“Yeah… Well, anyway, it was nice talking to you guys…” he indicated his watch. “But I’ve really gotta be going.”
“Indeed you do,” we replied. “Indeed you do.”
Feeling oozed back into my hands before we reached the bottom of the cave. The stench of sulphur was pretty strong, but if that meant warmth, then I figured I could get to like the smell pretty easily. About fifty meters down the tunnel, right around the first bend, there was a little kiosk where an ancient park ranger was sleeping with this huge grin on his face. The son walked up and knocked on the glass, but I was kind of sorry to see the old guy roused, he’d looked so happy. I imagined he was dreaming of a long-dead wife. Or maybe his wife was alive and he was dreaming of some girl he’d known before he got married. After he’d rubbed his eyes awake, he just gave us a tired frown.
“I’d like to get a three-day pass,” I said.
The guy looked completely blank. Like he was blind from birth and I’d just asked him why the sky was blue. But there was no way he didn’t speak English. Sure, most tourists enter Vanaheim at Snaefellsjökull—and that’s exactly why I was entering here, to avoid the crowds—but I was pretty sure that even at this entrance they still got American tourists all the time. I considered trying my mediocre Danish out on him, but thought better of it when I remembered how well that had gone over in Denmark. The father stepped in to save me the embarrassment.
“Give my father your wallet,” the son told me. “He will return you a fair remainder.”
I handed it over—I had almost two hundred bucks in it, but what else was I gonna do—and the two older men began to yell at each other.
“It will be fine,” the son said. “You just have to wait a couple of moments while they niggle over the price. Do you want a Royal Crown? I will buy it.” He motioned toward a gift shop a couple decimeters beyond the kiosk.
“Yeah, okay.”
We walked over together. There was no one inside except a teenage shopgirl reading some Icelandic cine-mag. I don’t know how she managed to make out the words, because the only light came from the fluorescent green tubes lining the ceiling. An imitation of ormolu lichen, I guessed, though it felt more like a spaceship. I just hoped she didn’t recognize me and start screaming and everything. Knowing my luck, I half-expected to see myself on the magazine’s cover.
The son pulled two RC Colas from the refrigerator in the back.
“Do they have any Coke?” I asked.
“Royal Crown is the official soft drink of Vanaheim.” He was paying, so I figured I shouldn’t argue. Then I recalled the reason why he was paying.
“Listen,” I said, picking up some igneous rock that they were trying to sell as a souvenir. “Are you sure your dad and that old guy aren’t gonna just split all my money between themselves?”
“The old man is a topsider. My father and I have no compassion for him or his kind. It shall only cost you sixty dollars, because my father will take great enthusiasm in niggling for you such that the oppressive topsider will obtain no extra money for himself. Of course, my father may extract a small fee for his passionate niggling.”
“Of course.”
The whole Vanaheimic hatred of topside Iceland was just totally strange to me. It was like the old episode of Star Trek where the black-and-white aliens hate the white-and-black aliens. I mean, the language was basically the same, the people all looked pretty similar, and they all lived on the same island, so I just didn’t see what the problem was or why Vanaheim would even care about independence. Still, if it meant that the father would niggle extra hard on my behalf, I guessed I was all for it.
I was so determined in rushing along, myself, that I almost failed to catch my father’s hand when he stumbled stepping down from a curb. All of his books were burnt, I realized, like the neurons in his brain. When he straightened up and stretched himself to his full height, though, I saw him for a moment as he’d been before. Even with his waning mind, I could see him swell with the half-remembered ardor: his hatred of Surt, his love of my mother. His fury and pain when she died.
It is yesterday morning. I have just returned to my home, and I am receiving a call telling me that my wife is dead. What do I do?
How has it happened? Why has it happened? These are not the first thoughts that occur to me. I do not immediately become the investigator. First my face turns pink and bloated, and the red blood flows through the tendrils in my eyeballs. It is a time when I do not deny the water from my eyes.
I hear myself but I do not attend much to what I hear. I am trying to attract my attention, heaving and yelling, and hitting myself in the chest and head. There is more of this, and my hand is bleeding when I again take notice. I have broken the mirror at which my wife would fix her face, framed in tiny bulbs of light as if she were an actress. I turn on the bulbs and bandage my hand with gauze.
Still I do not begin to investigate. I lie on our bed with one of her fuzzy-collared coats upon my head and a large pillow between my legs and another in my arms to feel as if I am holding her. I desire to feel her move against me and to taste her bitter shampoo of which the pillow in my arms still smells. I wish to hear her making funny voices.
It is yesterday afternoon, and I am sitting on our bed with her journals around me and the few letters that she sent me from Denmark. Addressed: My little cabbage.
I am only eager for the shape of her words, and I think not of the meanings they enclose. If my ears cannot have her voice, then my eyes, though weeping, will have her writing. I feel my face contorted and try to hold it together between the covers of one of her journals, my nose pressed into the crack of spine. I do not smell anything. It is some time before I finally begin to read for meaning and, with great wretchedness, become the investigator.
After our encounter with the actor, we followed his trail backward to the source; for the second time that day, our investigation had led us to enter a private domain that was alien from our own. Now the librarian’s store; earlier the home of Our Heroine. One space male, the other female. Opening the shop door, we considered the symmetry of the situation.
Within the store, we were confronted with the meaningless void of darkness. Climbing through Our Heroine’s kitchen window, we had been confronted rather with a noise whose semiotic value was not so easily measured.