Though tempted to push harder yet, Wilander shoved Halmus down onto a step and loomed over him. From now on, when I ask you a question, drop the attitude and give me a straight answer.
As was typical, Halmus glared in response, but the wattage of his glare seemed reduced. You’re crazy, he said.
—That’s your diagnosis? I better get myself checked out, then. Someone who goes around all day picking up little pieces of glass, you need to listen to someone like that when they talk about mental health issues.
Wilander noticed the toolbox, which Halmus had let fall, and picked it up.
—Be careful with that! said Halmus.
—Is there something breakable in here? Wilander gave the toolbox a shake.
—Don’t…okay? Please! Halmus had lost all hint of arrogance.
Inside the toolbox was a dagger-shaped shard of glass wrapped in an oil-stained rag.
—Put it back, Halmus said.
—Did you find another prize for your collection? Wilander unwrapped the shard, nothing remarkable, a piece of clouded mirror glass that gave back a partial reflection of his face, but as he made to toss it aside, catching sight of it at an angle that no longer reflected his face, he noticed movement on the surface and, upon peering more closely, realized that the apparent movement—it had to be apparent, he thought, caused by his hand trembling, a shadow misapprehended, something of the sort—looked to be occurring beneath the surface, as if the glass were not a mirror fragment, but a dagger-shaped aperture opening onto an overcast sky clotted with real clouds, storm clouds, grayish black and tumbled by the wind, and it seemed he was diving down through them; they went rushing past, blinding him for long moments, then intermittently affording a view of the ground far below through frays in their gauzy substance, an indistinct landscape of forested hills ranging a seacoast and, as his angle of descent lessened, like that of a flying creature flattening out over the hilltops, he glimpsed something ahead, an interruption in the flow of the forest over the hills, along the shore—buildings, perhaps—and then the mirror was ripped from his grasp and he was looking at Halmus, stunned and shaken, trying to reconnect with the feeling of triumph that had gripped him the instant before the mirror was snatched away.
—You saw something, didn’t you? Halmus said, tucking the mirror into his toolbox. What was it? What did you see?
Wilander had half a mind to wrestle the toolbox from him, to look into the mirror once more and identify what he had seen, yet he was unsettled by the triumphant feeling that attached to the sight; not a sense of accomplishment, of having overcome travail or succeeded at some difficult task, but an exultant relief such as might be felt by a gladiator who, having beaten down his opponent, was prepared to deliver a killing stroke; and yet that was an inadequate comparative; there was nothing in his experience or imagination to inspire this particular feeling, nothing that could have provoked anything approximating so unadulterated and fierce a joy, and he thought he must have been possessed by the feeling, or that he had taken possession of an entity whose emotions had no commonality with human emotion, with either the fleeting passions of an ordinary day or the desponds into which a man might sink, as with grief and unrequited love, but were symphonic in their scope, wider, deeper, and infinitely grander than his own. Halmus demanded again to know what he had seen, and Wilander, hearing frustration in his voice, frustration and, he thought, an undertone of envy, suggesting that Halmus himself had seen nothing in the mirror, or had hoped to see more than he had, decided not to respond lest by doing so he negate an advantage he had won, an advantage whose value he had yet to comprehend. Ignoring Halmus’ protestations, he continued down the stairs toward the engine room, toward the completion of an errand, the exact nature of which he could now no longer recall.
The things he had seen in the mirror troubled Wilander over the ensuing days, but thanks to their singular character, he was able to dismiss them as aberrant, a symptom of nerves or some related complaint. He was less successful, however, in explaining away the powerful emotion that had attended his vision; it seemed to have stained his soul, adding a new, unwholesome color. He subjected himself to analysis, thinking he might unearth something from his psyche that, amplified by stress, could have produced such a sweep of feeling; but in examining the passages of his life, his unruffled childhood, his curiously blank adolescence, a period during which he had become, for no perceptible cause, alienated from everyone, friendless and unhappy (though not monumentally unhappy as were several of his more gregarious peers, like Miranda Alley, a brainy girl with whom Wilander had sex on one flurried, forlorn occasion, yet had been unable to persuade her to remove her brassiere, because—it turned out—she habitually slashed her breasts with razor blades; or Jake Callebs, a popular kid who swallowed an overdose of Xanax while sitting at the edge of the athletic field and died watching a pick-up soccer game, the green expanse blurring, his being curving up with the cries of the players and fading along the air; at least this was Wilander’s overly romantic view of the occurrence) and given to long solitary walks, his mind not focused on any particular subject, merely idling, and thereafter the renewal of college, a vital rebirth, a burst of social interactions and diverse pursuits that continued on for a couple of years after graduation…in contemplating this, he felt he was pulling at a loose thread and unraveling the garment of self in which he had been cloaked until there was nothing left except blankness. That, he thought, was the dominant pattern in his life, cycles of hyperactivity and blankness, as if he were prone to unravel after having acquired a certain amount of experience, and he thought perhaps that same pattern could be discerned to some degree in every life, and what made you unique was no more than a handful of easily unraveled threads woven across a blank template.
The canopy of the linden tree was so dense that the leaves shielded Wilander from rain whenever he lay beneath them, but one Sunday morning a stiff west wind blew in off the sea, driving the rain sideways along the deck, and he was forced to retreat into the officers’ mess, where he sat at a long table, drinking coffee, feeling submerged beneath the noise of the storm, staring out the open door at the lashings of the crown and gazing at the walls, hoping for a let-up so he wouldn’t get drenched when he walked into Kaliaska later that day. Like the majority of Viator’s walls, those of the mess were painted green and the paint had flaked away in spots, hundreds of spots, creating a design of pale lime and brownish black from which, as Wilander’s eyes moved across it, there emerged an astonishingly detailed image rather like one that might be obtained from the Xerox of a photograph done on a copier whose toner was running low, a landscape contrived of darkly etched shapes and blank spaces: it seemed he was looking from a great height between the tops of two firs, down across a forested slope and lower hills toward a circular lagoon at the edge of the sea; surrounding the lagoon was a considerable city. It might have been, he told himself, a variant perspective of the image he had noticed some weeks previously on the passageway wall outside the mess. The impact of this casual observation did not strike him at once, but when, after the span of half a minute, it did, he stepped out into the passageway to determine if the similarity was actual or imagined. He went back and forth from the mess to the passageway, comparing details, and it became clear that, although the image on the wall of the mess offered a more distant view of the lagoon than did the one in the passageway, there were too many correspondences between them to ignore. Each portrayed a large building with a humped roof, like a sports arena or a convention center, on the inland margin of the lagoon; and on the thin strip of land separating the waters of the lagoon from the sea stood a palatial structure, its uppermost floor a third the size of the floor below, atop which was mounted some sort of array; and there were also correspondences, he believed, between the two images and the forest he had seen in Halmus’ mirror: not only were they were aerial views of the same landscape viewed from different angles, that landscape was in its hilly conformation, in the shape of its coastline, very like the forest that enclosed Viator, albeit more extensive and having a city at its heart.