—I don’t get it. I don’t get any part of it. This Lunde gives you a meaningless job, and you…She made a fuming noise and turned her back to him. What do you know about this guy? Nothing! You don’t have the slightest idea what he’s up to!
—It’s only a month, he said, pressing himself against her from behind. A month! That’s no time at all.
He continued to reassure her, kissing the nape of her neck, touching her breasts; and, his erection restored, he started to push inside her, but she restrained him, twisted her head about so she could see his face, and said, I don’t want this to be an affair! Don’t move in unless you love me! And that was the perfect moment for a declaration. She was inviting him to declare himself, making such a declaration easy, an informality, and he felt the words and the will to say them taking shape; but then she opened her legs and, as he glided into her—that’s how it felt, a glide, like the splashless slipping of a diver into a medium wherein his weight was taken away, his thoughts stripped by the purity of entry, not only his flesh but also his mind immersed, drenched in her—all he managed to say, more an expulsion of breath than a commitment, was, I won’t.
Six
“…a fifth season…”
During August, it appeared that Viator was being transformed into an enormous museum devoted to the works of a single artist, one possessed of an obsessively monocular vision, a fabricator of duotone vistas, pale green and dark iron, featuring a shoreline city and a forest. Every viable wall aboard ship was producing such an image and Wilander was initially disposed to believe this was a consequence of a perceptual bias that—as with the paranoia he felt while walking into town—stemmed from a chemical imbalance; but as the flaking walls of the passageways and cabins yielded their variant perspectives on the scene displayed upon the wall of the officers’ mess, he found himself less interested in why they had manifested than in what they might represent, and undertook to create a composite map of the region portrayed, treating the forest and the city as if they were real. He thought to ask the other men to verify that the images were there, but August was not the best of months for relationships amongst the crew: Mortensen was rarely to be found; Nygaard, as had been his habit since their set-to in the galley, scurried away whenever Wilander approached; Arnsparger grew uncommunicative and truculent; Halmus stalked about the ship, his customary arrogance swollen to the proportions of hauteur, and responded to Wilander’s conversational openings with imperious stares, refusing to speak, as if he were rehearsing for a role as a pharaoh or a headwaiter. For his own part, Wilander felt no great urge to communicate; he was absorbed by his new passion, snapping photographs of the walls with throwaway cameras he bought from Arlene, assembling the prints into a montage on the dining table in the mess, and painstakingly sketching from these materials maps of a nameless country (he attempted to name it, but the names he chose—North Calambay, Skiivancia, Vidoria, Alta Marone—failed to resonate with his nebulous conception of the place) that was very like Viator s forest, just larger, hillier, and with more prominent landmarks. Not that he possessed comprehensive knowledge of his surroundings; he was only familiar with the trail leading into town, yet he perceived these distinctions in the same way you intrinsically understand the conformation of a room in which you’re sitting, and that sense, that effortless apprehension of two environments, one immediate, one imminent (that was how he thought of the nameless country, as imminent, something on the horizon, a landfall not yet sighted) led him to surmise that Viator’s mystery was emblematized by its name, Traveler, and that the ship had been frozen mid-voyage, like the Viator-shaped stain on the bottom of the pot Nygaard had exhumed from the vandalized galley, and was straining to continue on its journey. That conjecture steered him once again toward the idea that his fixation upon the walls was akin to the dementias that afflicted the other men, that he would soon, if he had not already, equal them in madness, and yet, if he were to accept that prognosis, did it not suggest that Halmus, Arnsparger and Nygaard were seeing comparable vistas in their collections of glass and rust and scrap metal, and that Mortensen’s ability—as Arnsparger phrased it—to interpret Viator through its many surfaces also allowed him to envision a forest and a city. And what did that suggest? At one point Wilander went in search of Halmus and Arnsparger, determined to learn what they saw, what they knew, what they felt; but when they rebuffed him, he did not chase after them. He was beginning to understand the reason behind their unwillingness to talk: though compelled by the mystery of Viator, they were not altogether eager to solve it; they were afraid that what they had gleaned concerning the ship’s murky potentials might be true and thus did not care to validate as fact what was for the moment merely a suspicion.
Day by day, fear became increasingly dominant in Wilander’s life. His recurring dream unsettled him and the act of walking through the forest into town demanded that he steel his nerves, for everywhere he turned, he spotted evidence of movement in the undergrowth, stirring ferns, disturbed leaves, and he believed these signs were not due to wind or the scuttlings of ordinary animals, but to the passage of creatures similar to the one he had watched from the stern while talking to Lunde, sluggish translucent beasts native to another forest, another coast, to a metropolitan Kaliaska encircling a lagoon and separated from the town he knew by an imperceptible and indefinable barrier. The bird with the metal throat kept up its keening; indeed, Wilander became convinced that more than a single bird was responsible, since those declining, dolorous cries now sounded throughout the forest, and he thought that the original bird had, upon finding a suitable roost, summoned its fellows and they had proved to be a reclusive species who nested one to a tree and whose solitary calls were designed to provoke no answer, like a sentry’s announcement of all clear. Unnerved by these thoughts, by his almost casual embrace of their patent irrationality, he debated whether he should give up his job; scarcely a day passed when he did not entertain the idea—it had served him for a time, but now Viator had begun to unhinge him, to terrify him. During a mild yet persistent anxiety attack, one that lasted for several hours, he decided to visit Arlene, but was unable to bring himself to endure the suffocating grip of the hold, the hold where Mortensen muttered to himself and scribbled things, lending the darkness there a Cabalistic weight, and so he was forced to lash a length of rope to the railing near the stern, a spot beneath which the crest of a massive boulder lay fifteen feet below, and to descend to solid ground in that fashion. Each time he went into Kaliaska, he would decide that he’d had enough, he would send Terry out to collect his clothes, his books; yet his fascination with the ship drew him back. It was not just the walls, the half-glimpsed animals, and the birds that compelled him. Gazing at a fitting or a corroded hinge, at any portion of the ship, although he could measure no appreciable difference from how these things looked one day to the next, he understood that a deeper change was taking place in Viator, and, on one particularly stifling afternoon, as he paused to wipe his brow beside a bulkhead door, a bulging oval with a bar handle, studded with bolts, its green paint scarred and incised with initials, like a hideous iron blister, something that might have developed upon the hindquarters of a mechanical beast, it occurred to him—a thought that seemed a direct result of his study of the door, as if he were tuning in its vibrations—that Viator was not, as might be intimated, experiencing an awakening or an enlivening (the ship, to his mind, had always been alive, its vitality evident at first sight, its energy spilling out to nourish the improbable forest that formed its nest), but that it was moving; that, though engineless, Viator, by means of some imponderable process and through some unfathomable medium, was shifting closer to that other forest, the natural habitat of the metal-throated birds, close enough so their cries could be heard, and yet they remained invisible because the ship had not succeeded in physically penetrating their habitat. Informed by this insight, this hallucination, this fantastic narrative skeleton that could only have been constructed by an ex-drunk, ex-addict whose mind, after years of abuse, the penultimate symptom of which was the narrative itself, was so diminished that he might be persuaded of the reality of even the most laughable rumor; and it was fortunate, he told himself, that the priests of his mission-dwelling days, men for whom charity was more drug than virtue, weren’t around, or else he would be down on his knees, howling to Jesus, while one of them, maybe the Jesuit with the hair plugs in Seattle, Father Brad, what an asshole!, clasped his hands and beamed at him fatuously…Informed by all this, then, Wilander returned to his maps, attacking his cartographer’s problem with fresh inspiration and renewed zeal, making corrections, refining his vision of a nameless country populated by transparent badgers and invisible birds and gigantic flying worms, adding detail to a map of the city encircling the lagoon (the buildings inland low and undistinguished, like housing developments; those nearer the water arranged in complexes that radiated outward from the palatial structure on the peninsula), and also detailing the well-notched coastline beyond the city and a grouping of six islands that bore signs of habitation, laboring long into the night, damping his fears with work, quelling his rational concerns, forgetting everything.