—Look, I know this has been tough, and I wish things were different. I wish we’d met at a more propitious time. He took her hand, applied a light pressure, and though she did not return his pressure, she allowed his fingers to mingle with hers. But all this…all coming at once. You, the job, Viator. It’s been…
—I don’t want to hear about your problems anymore! She stepped around him and went to stand in the doorway. I worry about what’s happening to you. I worry all the time! But I’ve lived long enough, I’ve learned I can’t save anybody by hovering over them while they work out their problems. They take it for license; they convince themselves that on some level I must enjoy watching and waiting, or that I can tolerate it…or something! I’m going to worry about myself from now on. And you have to worry about yourself. Or not. That’s up to you. Do you understand?
Wilander couldn’t think what to say. Words occurred to him, too many words, words attached to feelings that, if not contrary to one another, seemed unrelated, as if he were feeling everything at once—anger, regret, love, several varieties of fear, even a perverse satisfaction at having so splendidly and so relentlessly mishandled the relationship. She asked again if he understood, demanding an answer, and he said, I think I’ve got it. Yeah.
She looked to be gathering herself, preparing, he thought, a goodbye; then, suddenly alert, she said, Oh! I have some news. It’s really the reason I came. I wasn’t going to, but I learned something you should know, and my phone was acting up. I did a search on the Internet for your employer.
—Lunde?
—There wasn’t much information. He’s spoken at a few conferences on unemployment. Things like that. But here’s the part that’ll interest you. Guess who Viator s captain was when she ran aground?
Wilander gawked at her.
—Jochanan Lunde. Your benefactor. Her eyes flashed to his face, then away, as if she were assessing the effect of this revelation, yet didn’t want him to catch the malicious expression that briefly surfaced, a malice he had sparked in her, that had remade an intended kindness into an intent to wound and confuse him, as she had been wounded and confused. What do you make of that? she asked, her tone too bright to communicate concern. Maybe he doesn’t have your welfare at heart after all.
Once she had gone, Wilander tried to balance the implications of Lunde’s duplicity with his own appreciation of Viator, and, finding no logic to diminish the sinister light in which Arlene’s news cast Lunde’s motives, he hurried to his cabin, threw on some clothes and headed for the stern, hoping to beg a ride into town with Terry. Given what he now knew, to spend another night on board would be foolhardy. Whatever Lunde had in mind, it had nothing to do with salvage (apparent from the start) and still less to do with charity (something now apparent), and Wilander could only believe that he and the others were being manipulated along some extraordinary and, almost assuredly, perilous course, like lab rats in a run. Upon reaching the stern, he called out to Arlene, unable to locate her in the fog, and, receiving no response, he shinnied down the rope that he had tied to the railing. As he hung above the shingle, he heard a motor cough, stutter, and catch. Arlene! he shouted, and quickened his descent. Trotting along the margin of the shore, he shouted again. He slipped on the wet pebbles, his right foot raising a splash, and spotted a dark shape gliding off, barely identifiable as two figures in a boat, there for an instant, then not there, the trebly grind of the motor growing muffled, dwindling and dwindling, soon outvoiced by the lapping tide. He dropped into a squat, oppressed, rendered energy-less by a feeling of loss and isolation. As soon as the weather eased, he told himself, he would walk into town. Not at night, though. He didn’t trust the forest at night. A damp west wind gusted, thickening the briny smell, giving things a stir, the boughs, wavelets, seaweed, and stirring as well the becalmed waters of his thoughts. He wished he had made himself clearer to Arlene from the inception of the affair; instead of simply saying that he wasn’t solid, leading her to think that his recovery was the main issue, a matter of getting settled, getting straight in his head, he should have said that he wasn’t strong enough to take on her entire life. That’s what she was looking for, someone who would embrace her hopes and dreams, her beliefs, someone who would cherish those things even if he couldn’t share them, who would consider them in every situation. He should have emphasized the fact that he wanted to be that person, but she had to be patient, because—as he’d told her—it was disorienting to have so much life after years of having none, and it was going to take some time before he understood how much was left of him. How much strength. How much capacity for love. How much honesty. He should have done all that and more. The wind gusted harder, the fog eddied, and the shapes of the firs at the south end of the shingle sharpened into the dark green ghosts of trees. No sound came, except for wind and the slurp of the tide. Limbo, he thought. Purgatory. Neither heaven nor hell, yet judged closer to hell for the absence of heaven. At his feet, black water edged with a lacy froth filmed among the pebbles, creeping to his toes, floating up twigs and dried needles. He clenched a pebble in his fist; its cold solidity steadied him and he imagined that if he continued to hold it, it would infect his flesh, turning him to stone, and years hence he would be found squatting on the shore, a small boulder weathered by magical storms (so it would be said) into a rude approximation of a man worshipped by the elder Inupiats, those who had not yet learned to discredit the miraculous nature of existence—they would drape him with kelp necklaces, they would paint images of the sea upon his eyes, they would dress him in bark and feathers, leave him food and drink, give him names, and when the last of them were dead, then he, too, would die, a negligible transition, since even prior to his transformation, his life had been a flicker of self-awareness, nothing more. Unaccountably weary, his joints cracking, he stood and sidearmed the pebble across the water, listening for the plop, and then started back to the ship. The hull loomed overhead. It appeared larger than he recalled, as if some gross internal disorder had caused it to bloat while he was distracted. With its abraded belly, listing a few degrees to port, centering the ragged frame of the forest, veiled in drifts of mystic gray, the convulsed screws and the bolt-stitched plates adding a brutal Frankensteinian touch, Viator no longer posed a vast metal incongruity, a surreal element of the landscape, but had acquired the monstrous, mythical aspect of a mighty life stranded, like an old whale confounded by pollution and driven to beach itself, yet still vital, generating by its restive vitality the pulse of the silence that engulfed the place; and, though Wilander approached the ship fearfully, his fear was not a shriveling fear, a fear of the unknown, but the anxiety of someone who had happened upon a moribund giant and was worried it might lash out in its pain and desperation, and inadvertently crush him. Four figures materialized at the rail above, occulted by the fog, and he halted his approach. He couldn’t tell one from the other, but when three of them withdrew, he assumed that the sole remaining figure, its outlines blurring and sharpening with the alternations of the fog, was Mortensen. Not a word passed between them, but some unspoken message may have been exchanged, some frail accord summoned, for Wilander, inspirited by a sympathy more poignant than the sympathetic reaction naturally incurred by two strangers sharing a solitude, lifted his hand in salute. The fog looked to be weaving a cocoon about Mortensen, returning him to the cloudy dimension where he hermited. Within seconds, he was hidden from view. Wilander waited for a reply, his neck craned, but the figure never reemerged.
Seven