None of these dreams were of considerable duration, and though they disturbed Wilander, the disturbance was not so onerous as to distract him overmuch—far more disturbing was the demeanor of the men aboard Viator now that he had hooked up with (this being Halmus’ appreciation of the relationship) the Queen of Kaliaska. Had it been asserted that he could be more isolated than he already was, that his shipmates might treat him with greater indifference, he would have pronounced the statement laughable and replied that the increment of indifference involved would be infinitesimal; yet he discovered that the atmosphere aboard ship underwent a marked chill, that Nygaard averted his eyes whenever Wilander came near, and Halmus no longer extended even a cursory greeting, and Mortensen ignored him completely, and Arnsparger’s smiles were reduced to formalities, his chatter to ten-second assessments of the weather. Wilander classified their shunning of him as adolescent, the kind of wounded reaction that eventuates when a woman begins to dominate a young man’s time and thus earns the resentment of his friends, of a group whose center he has been; but since the men of Viator were not young, not friends, acquaintances only in the strictest sense of the word, Wilander could not fathom the reason for their hostile reaction, nor could he understand the depth of his reaction to their coolness.
—To hell with them, he told Arlene. They act like I’ve betrayed them. Like we’re fraternity brothers and I’ve broken the sacred bond. It’s ridiculous.
Yet once back onboard the ship, he felt injured by their treatment and, while he had no intention of apologizing or placating them in any way, he sought them out, hoping that a meeting in a passageway or the hold or the galley would provide an opportunity for them to vent their displeasure and permit them to work past this problem and reinstitute the old, slightly less indifferent order. He made no discernible progress toward a rapprochement, but he came to anticipate the time he spent searching through the ship, because on each and every occasion he would stumble upon some fascinating object—for instance, a pale green section of the passageway wall outside the officer’s mess where the paint had flaked away in hundreds of spots, small and large, creating of the surface a mineral abstract like those found on picture stone, from which (if one studied the wall, letting one’s eyes build an image from the paintless spots, from scratches, dents and scuffs) there emerged an intricate landscape, an aerial view of forested hills—firs for the most part—declining toward water, and a large modern city beneath the hills that encircled a lagoon and spread along the coast, with iron-colored islands in the offing; or he might achieve a fresh perspective on some portion of the ship, much as happened when, standing in the engine room one night, he glanced at the relics of the engine and the many-leveled stairway ascending through the tiers and realized that this towering space and its contents had the appearance of a mechanistic church that had been violated and abandoned, its altar wrecked, its symbol of spiritual ascendancy rusted, littered with twenty-year-old trash: oil-stained cloths, bolts, shattered bottle glass, some of the railings loose, some fallen—and as a result of these dalliances, he found himself growing more intrigued by the ship, not curious as to its history, but fixated upon the beauty of its decay, the monument to dissolution it was in process of becoming.
Three weeks after he and Arlene had initiated their affair, while sleeping on Viator s deck beneath the low-hanging linden boughs, Wilander experienced a recurrence of the dream that was unlike any of its previous visitations. At the outset, all was as usual. He lay disembodied, in blackness, staring at the pale brown circle wherein the four birdlike creatures flew, still mysterious with distance, when one separated from the rest and approached with apparent purposefulness, as if it had noticed something of interest and were coming for a better look. It must have begun its approach from a good ways off—for what seemed two or three minutes, he could detect no change in its aspect, except that it proved to be a dark earthy brown in color, not black as it had appeared at a greater remove, and then suddenly it rushed upon him, or upon whatever dream-object it had noticed, and that simple shape of two identical curved lines resolved into two glistening, ropy segments of flesh, united by a ridged structure…and yet it swooped past so swiftly, he could not be certain he had seen anything of the sort, he might have supplied the details from his imagination to give form to what had been, essentially, a blur. Nor was he certain of its size, though he had an apprehension of enormity and tremendous power. Viewed at a distance, the bird things posed a far more unnerving image than had this fleeting close-up—their rippling stasis conveyed an air of horrid patience, the patience of carrion birds waiting for something to finish with death—but when he woke with his heart racing, he knew with a paranoid certainty that their waiting was done and that the creature had flown out of the dream and into the sky overhead and was wheeling about, preparing to make a second pass.
He heaved to his feet and stood with his head and torso pushing up among the boughs of the linden tree, feeling more secure surrounded by greenery; but as he steadied his breath and tried to put the dream and his relation to it into a reasonable frame, through an aperture in the leaves, roughly oval, a lovely Edenesque frame itself, he saw a gaunt, bearded face like those portrayed by the ikons in his late Aunt Rigmor’s collection, enshrined in a china closet at her home in Portland, a stately old house that he had hated as a child for its apparent fragility (he had been forbidden to touch anything), yet now recalled with inexplicable nostalgia—inexplicable, unless it were the ikons themselves that inspired nostalgia, for he had been quite taken with them and, curious as to their worth, their meaning, he had often stood on tiptoes and peered at them, as now he peered at the elongated, hollow-cheeked face of a suffering Swedish saint shrouded by matted shoulder-length gray hair, the waxy skin webbed with broken capillaries, and having a bladed nose and brown eyes as beautiful and profoundly sad as the eyes of a young woman disappointed in love, eyes that had registered everything essential about the world of men and had forgiven them their lustful natures, and a mouth all but obscured by a ragged beard that still showed here and there a few blond hairs: Mortensen. The shock of seeing him close at hand was nearly as disabling as the shock Wilander had absorbed from the dream, and he could think of nothing to say.
—Good morning, Mortensen said. Or is it afternoon? I often lose track. His voice was unexpectedly high-pitched and adenoidal, ill-matched to his appearance; its resonance made him sound a little like a boy trying to force his pitch lower in imitation of a man.
—Morning, I think. Wilander glanced up into the crown of the tree, trying to find the sun. Yes, it’s getting near noon.
—Ah! I should have thought to look at the sky. I’ve been inside so long, my instincts have eroded.
Wilander became aware that Mortensen must be seeing him the same way he saw Mortensen, in a leafy frame, and the image this conjured, two men communicating by means of a weird organic technology, magical forest mirrors, made him chuckle.
—I’m not a social man, Mortensen said sternly. We won’t have very many opportunities to talk. Perhaps we should make the most of this one and try to be serious.
—You have something to say to me? Say it.
—Only that we need you to be responsible.
—And what would you have me be responsible for?
—You spend most of the afternoons and all of your evenings with that woman. You sleep the mornings away and then you’re gone again. How is that responsible?
—What should I be doing? Collecting scrap metal like Nygaard and Arnsparger? Pondering over broken mirrors like Halmus? Or would you have me haunt the ship like you?