—Maybe it won’t be necessary.
—No, probably not, she said and laughed, two bright notes that reminded Wilander of the stairstep notes a soprano might hit before essaying high C.
—What’s so funny?
—I was thinking how economical a little scene that was we just played.
He thought he grasped her meaning, but not being altogether familiar with her ways, he chose not to comment.
One of the two teenage Inupiat girls behind the counter, framed by a white arch on which a mural of polar bears romping across pack ice had been amateurishly attempted, sat on her stool and gazed glumly out at the tables, at two elderly women in blond wigs and anoraks and jeans sitting close to the door, speaking in whispers as they ate (a lesbian couple originally from Portland, Arlene said), and the other employee, a slightly younger girl, possibly the sister of the first, was leaning on the counter beside her and aiming a remote at a television set mounted on the wall above the tables, channel surfing—she settled on MTV, brought up the volume, and a faint music was heard. Arlene swallowed a bite and said, I can’t picture you as an investment counselor.
—I wasn’t a very good investment counselor, Wilander said. I probably shouldn’t have majored in business. But at the time there wasn’t anything I was passionate about. Might have worked out if I hadn’t followed my own advice.
—That’s what I don’t understand—why you chose such a career in the first place.
—I thought it’d be easy money. What sort of career should I have had?
She tipped her head to one side, studying him. A landscape architect, she said firmly, and had another bite.
Wilander laughed, and when she asked what was funny, he said, I wasn’t expecting a specific answer.
She shrugged, chewed. What will you do after you leave the ship?
—For work, you mean?
—Work. Yes.
—I’m not sure. I know I don’t want another career. Nothing that’ll make me crazy, take all my time. Just honest work. Simple work. Physical labor, maybe. I wouldn’t mind getting back in shape.
The Inupiat girls burst into giggles behind the counter and Wilander, suspecting that he and Arlene might be the object of their amusement, glanced at them over his shoulder—they were turning the pages of a magazine with brightly colored pictures.
—You should eat, Arlene said. It’ll get cold.
Though not particularly hungry, Wilander devoured a slice in three bites, leaving the crust. Duty done, he gazed out the window at twilit houses and the dirt street and mountains in the distance with exposed ridges of black stone and snowy slopes, pyramids of white meat larded with black fat, and tried to think of something to say, something casual that would nudge the conversation toward a plateau from which they could gracefully ascend to the central topic of the evening, the topic he considered central, at any rate. His instincts with women, once sure, had long since been stripped from him and, his confidence beginning to erode, he worried that he was rushing things, that he had misjudged the moment. Everything he thought to say seemed overly subtle or childishly manipulative, and soon he began to worry that instead of rushing things, he might be letting the moment slip away.
—I may have some work for you. Arlene dusted a slice with red peppers, using her forefinger to tap flakes of pepper from the jar, taking great pains to distribute them evenly. The afternoon boat brought me a shipment. A lot of it’s heavy stuff. Generators and TVs. I could manage myself, but I’ve got calls I’d like to make as soon as business opens on the East Coast and the boat’ll be pulling out around seven. You’d have to start before first light.
—That sounds possible, Wilander said. I could probably…
—I can put you up. Be easier than walking into town at three in the morning.
She glanced up from her plate and engaged his eyes long enough to convey that this was both a functional invitation and a personal one.
—Okay. Yeah, sure, he said. I’ll be happy to help you out.
Arlene smiled. I can’t pay much, but at least it’s not a career.
Three
“…an awful dream, terrible, not like a dream at all…”
Wilander’s days lapsed into a pleasant routine. In the mornings he would sit on deck beneath the linden tree, encaged by boughs that overhung the rail, leaves trailing across his neck and shoulders, bathed in greeny light, hidden from all but the most penetrating eyes, and he would write in his journal and doze and dream, often of Arlene, with whom he spent his nights, walking into Kaliaska in late afternoon, and helping out with the stock until closing and then retiring to her upstairs apartment, which proved to be a place of rustic and eclectic disorder such as he had imagined the trading post might be, the rooms carpeted with Turkish kilims and throw rugs from Samarkand and prayer rugs from Isfahan, one overlying the other, and the furniture—secondhand sofas and chairs—draped with silk prints and faded tapestries, and on the walls were oil paintings in antique gilt or brass frames, the images gone so dark with age, they seemed paintings of chaos, of imperiled golden-white glows, gods reduced to formlessness, foundering in black fires deep beneath the foundations of the world, and only by peering at them from inches away could one determine that they were stormy seascapes and pastoral landscapes and portraits of aristocratic men and women in comic opera uniforms and gowns, all wearing the constipated expression that during the nineteenth century served as standard dress for the ruling class, and upon the end tables and dressers and nightstands were innumerable lamps, lamps of every description, bases of cut glass, ceramic, brass, malacca, polished teak, and onyx matched to shades of parchment, eggshell-thin jade, carved ivory, lace-edged silk, blown glass, and tin, yet no more than a few were ever lit at one time, and thus the apartment was usually engulfed in a mysterious gloom from which glints and colors and lusters of these objects (all gotten at barter from sailors, travelers, adventurers) would emerge, creating a perfect setting for Arlene, the rich clutter of a pirate’s trove wherein she looked to be the most significant prize. These dreams were sometimes prurient, sometimes funny, sometimes sweet, and this heartened Wilander—the fact that his subconscious displayed a range of feeling toward her nourished his hope that the relationship would grow and become more than two lonely people having sex.
Shortly after he began spending his nights with Arlene, one morning as he lay on the deck of Viator, Wilander was visited by a dream that was to return to him again and again in variant forms. He had no presence in the dream, no sense of intimate involvement, being merely an observer without attitude or disposition, bodiless in a black place. Superimposed on the blackness was a tan circle, like the view through a telescope of a pale brown sky and what appeared to be five dark birds (always five) flying at so great a distance, they manifested as simple shapes, shapes such as a child might render when asked to draw a bird, two identical curved lines set side by side and meeting at the point between them. Something about the dream, which lasted only for a few seconds prior to waking and seemed less a dream than an optical incident that may have been provoked by the sun penetrating his lids, unsettled Wilander, yet he failed to identify the unsettling element until the third recurrence of the dream, when he recognized that the winglike lines comprising the individual birds were not beating, but rippling, causing them to resemble flagella wriggling in a drop of water under the lens of a microscope. The bird things flew ever closer to the viewing plane and he came to suspect that their bodies might not conform to avian anatomy at all, but they were still so far away, they remained rudimentary figures without the slightest visible detail.