Over the fifty-nine days of his confinement in a military hospital, Wilander pieced together a story that, like any story, had its flaws, its holes, but sufficed to encompass more or less the facts of which it was made. Viator’s cargo, unlisted on the manifest, consisted of two containers of a virus as yet unnamed (It’s a lentivirus, actually. Maybe we’ll name it for you, huh?), a Russian bioweapon, one of which had cracked open in Lunde’s storm and polluted the hold. Perhaps it had been intended to be destroyed with the ship, but this was thought unlikely; more likely, it had been meant for terrorist hands. The lentivirus bonded with DNA in brain neurons, gradually driving the host mad (You’re going to have to put up with this bad boy for a while, but we’ll keep him calm with drugs). Halmus and Arnsparger had been dead for weeks and days respectively when he happened upon them. Everything he had seen and experienced on the ship was, after a certain point, fantasy. The gigantic lentivirus of his dreams, his madness? They mumbled some business about impingement on the optic nerve and told him not to worry about it.
—But what about Mortensen? he asked. And Nygaard…what about him?
—Who knows? I guess they ran off in the woods somewhere, was the answer.
Wilander came in time to believe the story, to have faith in it as much as he had faith in anything; not much, but he felt he should have faith because so many people told him it was true, and thus he yielded to it, he rejected fantasy and let it soothe him. Still frail and uncertain, he was discharged into Arlene’s care and together they returned to Kaliaska. Thanks to the madness of the late Jochanan Lunde, he did not need to work, but he helped out at the trading post as he felt able and things fell into a routine. One afternoon in the dead of winter, straight past the turn of the year, he borrowed Terry’s launch and motored out to Viator, anchoring just offshore. Under gray skies; sheeted with ice; steeped in the gloomy shadow of the firs; she no longer seemed haunted, merely abandoned, and this effect was amplified by the lifelessness of the sea, the listless wash of black water against the sides of the launch, and by the great stillness of the scene, not a breath of wind to stir the needles and dump fresh snow on the decks, to snap the icicles, to breed a ghostly moan. The screws did not resemble crumpled flowers, but twisted metal, and the hull, which had once struck him as bloated, now was dented, derelict, empty. Biohazard teams had cut the heart from her, hosing down the hold with chemicals, and left her flensed and gutted. She looked like a place where men had gone mad. Wilander had seen enough, but was reluctant to leave, and he sat for the better part of an hour, lulled to a dreamy self-regard by the rocking of the launch, thinking about fate, how it was deemed capricious and yet was clearly insane—it went beyond randomness in its insanity, devising complicated skeins that almost meant something, that might mean something if you were short one brain chemical or took a blow to the head or fell victim to systemic shock, and he thought there must somewhere be a race of people who knew that this was true and kept themselves addled, stunned, and shocked so as to know the many-chambered world and avoid fate’s simplest snare, a reality shared by billions. He thought, too, of Arlene. Now he had gone such a curious distance from himself, could he come all the way back? Did he want to? That was the question. Did he have heart enough left in him, blood enough to tie such a simple knot? He made ready to haul up the anchor and heard a cry, a plaintive cry that planed away to a whisper, the issue of a tiny body and a metal throat. He felt a thrill run across the muscles of his chest. The qwazil. The ones who had slipped through, they must have been stranded here, and what else had been stranded, whistlers and wiccara and things he had not named and had not seen? Excitement shot through him, a familiar excitement, the excitement he had known aboard Viator, and he imagined the lentivirus flexing its ropy length, taking tentative flights across his brain. Several bizarre business opportunities occurred to him, not the least of which was the exploitation of the whistlers; they’d keep the place free of pests and be a true companion for a lonely hour. It astounded him he could be so easily persuaded to madness. Christ, this place was wrong forever. He weighed anchor, started up the launch, and recalled Mortensen reaching out to the engulfing fire, the image that had haunted him in the hospital. Saint Mortensen. Was he with the whistlers, preaching the gospel of Viator on the streets of Cape Lorraine, suffering the little children? No matter. You’re either dead or in heaven, he said, his voice startling in the silence. Whichever, you’re no good to me now. He did not look back until he was well out to sea and by then Viator had become anonymous, a black dot of solidity on a spectral shore.
At Arlene’s TP, the wood-stove was going, Terry was listening to headphones, sitting in a lawn chair, feet propped on the counter, reading a magazine, and Arlene, wearing plaid jacket over her dress, was dealing a hand of solitaire. She glanced up when Wilander entered, but kept playing. With her hair pulled back, her lips firmed in an I-am-not-going-to-say-a-thing expression, she looked pretty. Pretty and a piece more, his father used to say. Terry flicked an eye toward him, making a sour show of dismissal. Wilander ignored him. He stripped off his coat and leggings, studying Arlene, staring at her for such a long time and so intensely, it seemed he was warming himself at a fire, and she could feel him staring at her, he could tell by the way she held herself, he could see the injury he had done her in the rigidity of her pose, the wounded pride, and he thought it was time he made things right, not because he owed it, but because it was what he wanted, it was all he wanted—though that certainty didn’t guarantee success, not having it guaranteed failure, and he supposed that was why he had fucked up with such unflagging consistency over the years.
At last she said, noncommittally, Been out to the ship?
—I took a look. I’m back.
She slapped down a card.
He stepped around the counter and put an arm around her. Don’t worry. I’m over it.
—You say don’t worry, but…
He turned her to face him and said, I swear to God, I am over it. I love you.
Startled, she looked up at him and he kissed her on the mouth. She tasted of candy mints and coffee. Terry scowled at him, muttered something under his breath, went back to his magazine.