Wilander was a realist, an espouser of statistical truth, a believer in coincidence when no better theory arose to explain the inexplicable, but his rationalism did not completely immunize him against fear, and the idea that the ship was showing him pictures, that it possessed the unreasonable power to do this, frightened him. He did not believe in ghosts, in the symbolic weight of hallucination, in magic, in extrasensory perception, in oracles (though once his Yahoo horoscope, pointed out by a girlfriend, an ex-Goth with lacy black tattoos columning her spine, a vine-like structure made of spiderwebs in which tiny women were trapped that evolved into a curious evil blossom spreading across her shoulders, had proved uncannily accurate, predicting that he would receive good news from a banking institution about a private venture on the day his business loan was approved); nor was he credulous about miracles or people who communicated with the spirits of the dead or those who had dreams that allowed them to divine the locations of the victims of kidnappers and serial killers—he was impervious to such claims, he resisted them with adversarial fervor, and while he found it difficult to sustain this denial of the supernatural in the face of Halmus’ mirror and the pictures emerging from the walls, he managed after a prolonged study of the wall in the officers’ mess to control his uneasiness, countering speculations as to what the pictures might be—views of another world, another dimension, the work of a poltergeist—with the notion that it didn’t matter what they were; so what if a ghost was sending signals or the ship was coming alive or some more equivocal madness was involved, because nothing had happened, nothing bad, in all the weeks, the months now, that he had lived aboard Viator; and what was there apart from these piddling anomalies, anomalies that could well be supported by a logical explanation, one he hadn’t fathomed yet, to suggest that anything bad would happen? If a scrap of ectoplasm was acting unruly, an imp or spirit making sport, it didn’t change the fact that he was healthier and more psychologically sound than he had been in years, that he had a woman who cared for him and hopes for the future. He set about tidying his mental processes, trying to sweep aside anxiety, but his cell phone rang, seeming to leap against his chest from the breast pocket of his shirt, and the superficial calm he had established was demolished. He switched the phone on and said, Hello, assuming it would be Arlene, but half expecting to hear a grinding tonality, the voice of the ship announcing itself for some grim purpose.
—Where are you? Arlene asked.
—Viator, he said.
—I know! I meant, why aren’t you here? Did you forget? You were going to help me this afternoon.
—Not until two.
—It’s after three.
—I’ve been waiting for the rain to let up.
—It stopped raining hours ago.
Wilander glanced at the open door. The rain had, indeed, stopped; the wind had subsided and the sun was out. I’m sorry, he said. I’ll come right now.
—You sound funny. Are you all right?
—I’m just distracted. I’ve been…I was looking at something weird.
—Something weird aboard Viator? Who would have thought?
The detail of the forest and the city on the wall seemed sharper than before, as if the image were setting, like a print in a bath of developer.
—So, she said. Are you going to tell me what’s weird?
—I don’t know how to explain it. I…I’m not sure what I’m seeing anymore.
Wind swayed the linden boughs; the clustered leaves rustled and appeared to be spinning; clever, shiny green paddles registering the flow of light and air; the hidden metal-throated bird gave its long, declining cry. Wilander had an eerie feeling of dislocation, as if—were he to turn around—he would discover that the walls and the body of the ship had dissolved and he would see, instead, a forest, and, below, a lagoon and a city.
—Should I be worried about you? Arlene asked.
—I don’t suppose it could hurt, he said.
Five
“…betwixt and between…”
When he called in his reports to Jochanan Lunde, as he did one sullen, gusty July afternoon not long after this conversation with Arlene, Wilander would usually take himself to Viator’s stern, where reception was the clearest. Approximately forty feet of the stern protruded from the forest, the ruined screws hanging like two huge crumpled iron blossoms above a shingle littered with weathered shards of trees that had been crushed and knocked aside by the ship’s disastrous passage, and strewn with mounds of dark brown seaweed that Wilander, though he knew better, often mistook on first sight for the bodies of drowned men. Standing by the rail that day, he felt exposed, vulnerable to the open sky and the leaden sea, its surface tented by innumerable wavelets close to land, but heaving sluggishly farther out, making it appear that a submerged monster was shouldering its way toward the wreck, and he had to repress an urge to duck back under the canopy of boughs, because the view from the stern was menacing in its bleakness—it seemed that the treeline marked a division between a lush green security teeming with life and a cold, winded purgatory populated by crabs and shadows. He gazed down at the shingle as he delivered to Lunde a litany of partial estimates and hastily conceived plans, responding to the old man’s terse questions, yet only half-involved in these exchanges; and so, when Lunde asked if he had noticed anything out of the ordinary aboard the ship, instead of offering his usual pro forma answer, distracted by a movement on the shore below and to the right of the hull (an animal, he thought; one whose coloration blended so perfectly with that of the motley pebbles and the shattered, silvery gray wood, he could not discern its shape), he asked, What kind of thing are you talking about?
Following a pause, Lunde said angrily, How can I answer that? I’m not there. I don’t know what’s ordinary for you.
—It’s all out of the ordinary, isn’t it? Living on a wreck’s not what I’d call normal.
—It bothers you? It’s becoming stressful?
—No, I’m not saying that. I…
—Is the job wearing on you, then? The solitude? If so, I can look for a replacement.
Wilander retreated from a confrontation. It’s just that given the context, I’m not sure how to answer your question.
—Well, let me ask it another way. Lunde’s voice held a distinct touch of condescension. In context of your experiences aboard Viator, using them as a standard for normalcy, has anything occurred that you’d consider abnormal? Anything unexpected? Anything startling?
Wilander would have liked to ask why Lunde wanted to know, what possible interest could such information hold for him, but he felt he had pushed the old man as far as he dared. Nothing startling, he said.
—Unexpected, then?
—Not really. There’s been some…odd behavior.
—Which is it? Not really, or there’s been some odd behavior.
The animal below cleared a cluster of wooden debris and crept across open ground, but its camouflage prevented Wilander from identifying it—it looked as if a portion of the shingle had become ambulatory. The other men, he said. They’ve developed hobbies. They don’t interfere with the job, of course, but…