“…Cape Lorraine and environs…”
Wilander lost track of the fog’s duration (days, certainly) because he wanted to lose track, to muffle his fears, to blunt his every understanding, and, toward this end, channeled his energies into the creation of maps: terrain maps of the hills that built inland from the coastal city; a street map of the southernmost quarter of the city; maps of the island grouping, rudimentary except for that of the largest island, shaped like a tail-less stingray and supporting a town on its seaward end; maps of the coastline to the north, recently revealed by images emerged from the walls of the bridge; maps roughed out in pencil and, once he was sure of their accuracy, painstakingly redrawn in ink and shaded with pastels, as he once had done for extra credit in his fourth grade geography class, attempting to curry favor with Mrs. Louise Gatch—a gaunt, fiftyish, deathshead Marine colonel trapped in a teacher’s body, she still patrolled the halls of Wilander’s memory, ready to pounce at the slightest sign of smudged lines or bad penmanship. He strayed from his station in the officers’ mess to cook and piss and sleep, but for no other reason, pausing often to phone Arlene, who was probably screening her calls and refusing to pick up; however, he could not bring himself to phone Lunde—he dreaded what the old man might say and decided to wait until he was well away from Viator, when the information, whatever it might be, would have no power to menace him. Soon the desire to talk with Lunde left him and the maps came to occupy him to the exclusion of all else and he began to add details that were not shown on the walls, making these additions surehandedly, swiftly, as if he were remembering things about the city and the shore, and, as this apparent familiarity deepened, he took to naming portions of his imagined landscape. The names bubbled forth from the depths of his mind, solitary words and random syllables, sounds that aligned with other sounds: Sirkasso Beach, a sandy crescent along the inner edge of the lagoon; Cotaliri Bay, a notch in the coastline to the south; Mutikelio, one of the islands, and the islands themselves, the group he named the Six Tears, a reference to the legend that, millennia ago, tears had spilled from the eyes of a giant as he died and these were the seeds about which the islands had grown, whereas his bones had petrified and now constituted a section of the coast, the waters of the lagoon being enclosed by an orbital socket, and it was claimed that threads of protein from the giant’s humor still drifted at the bottom of the lagoon and swimmers there were thus prone to see things that he had seen in life, relic visions of the barbarous world in which he had thrived, and occasionally some feature of those visions would become real, a predatory fish or a moasaur or an undersea castle, an architectural fantasy of curving pink towers, dozens of towers, a veritable anemone among castles, to which an expedition had been dispatched, all of whose members vanished when the castle rippled and faded and washed from sight. Further scraps of lore attached themselves to every name Wilander applied to the maps, and before long he recognized that he was creating not merely a series of maps, but the traditions and natural history of the area mapped, a section of coast known as the Iron Shore due to the color of the rocks that guarded its length, its forests populated by wiccara (the sluggish, wonderfully camouflaged ground animals) and qwazil (the always hidden metal-throated birds); and, among other elusive creatures, the whistlers, a shy, slender, physically beautiful subhuman folk with whom it was forbidden to mate, although such liaisons were commonplace due to the pheromone-laced perfume they could release at will, and were especially common during the winters, when famine drove the whistlers into the outskirts of the city, searching for food (the remainder of the time they subsisted by hunting small animals, killing them with piercing whistles pitched too high for the human ear to detect); and from the skies the wormlike fliers of Wilander’s dreams would swoop down to terrify the city, yet never attacking, never damaging life or property, as if they had an intellectual interest in the place and were driven to check on it on a regular basis. Cape Lorraine was the city’s name, a name deriving from the fact that the original settlement had been established on the peninsula that formed the outer edge of the lagoon, and when Wilander arrived at that name, he was intrigued by its commonality in contrast to the rest and explored his memory, trying to recall if there might have been a significant Lorraine in his past, but the only Lorraine he could recall was Lorraine Scheib, a friend of a friend during his college years, an aggressively plain lesbian girl who wore overalls and wrote violent anti-male poetry, and it seemed this might be an indicator that he was not inventing the names, he was remembering them, that as Viator sailed closer to the Iron Shore, moving in its mysterious fashion, coursing along a metaphysical northwest passage, he—borne along with it—was receiving increasingly elaborate impressions of their destination, just as a sailor peering from the bow of a landward-bearing ship would receive impressions of the coast, its scents, its colors, its configuration. Though not a new thought, it was newly credible, and the possibility that he was somehow seeing what lay ahead for them made him afraid. He set aside the maps for a night and sat at the table wrestling with the problem of whether to call Lunde, but couldn’t keep his focus and began drowsily leafing through his memories of Arlene until one stuck in his head: watching her put on her bra, as she stood naked by the bathroom door, with lemony dawn light behind her, bending at the waist so as to let her breasts fall into a shape that would more readily conform to the cups, a pose an artist might choose for its intimacy, its graceful female specificity, the nearly perfect horizontal of her back, her legs positioned as if she were a ballerina bowing into a curtsey, responding to imagined applause, alone in an empty theater where she one day hoped to triumph. He couldn’t fathom why the memory seemed sad; he remembered that morning well, a good morning, a happy morning, and he supposed that remembrance itself was by nature sad, or perhaps women’s relation to their breasts was intrinsically sad, something about their simultaneous gift and limitation, how they served as emblems of both ripeness and inadequacy…Something. Lonely for her, he dug out his phone and called. To his surprise, she answered on the fourth ring.
—Please don’t hang up, he said.
—Thomas. Her voice was tired. What do you want?
—Just to talk.
—I don’t think that’s a good idea.
—If you didn’t want to talk, why’d you answer?
—I was falling asleep—I forgot to look at the caller ID.
—What time is it?
—After eleven sometime.
—Sorry.
She made a diffident noise and he said, You wouldn’t have answered if you saw it was me?
—Is this what you want to talk about? About whether or not I want to talk?
—No.
He would have liked to tell her about Cape Lorraine, the Iron Shore, but it wasn’t the kind of thing he could explain over the phone; he’d have to sit her down face-to-face and persuade her to listen to everything, to react unemotionally. He thought to ask how she was doing, canceled that because she would probably respond with irony, and finally said, I miss you, and added hurriedly, I realize that’s my fault, but it’s true nonetheless.
She was silent, then an indrawn breath, signaling that she had started to speak; then another brief silence. Would it make you happy if I said I missed you? she asked.
—No, it wouldn’t make me happy. Arlene, I…
—Why did you call? What do we have to talk about? Should I tell you the latest gossip? I got in the plasma TV Gary ordered for the bar. Is that what you’re after?
—If it works for you…Yeah. I’d settle for it.