Virgil Wander

by Leif Enger

  “Is it so terrible, Bjorn, having him around? He’s strange but he’s generous, and he’s interested in you. You’re his grandson.”

  Bjorn looked weary. “I barely remember Dad. He’s been gone since I was seven. I was just starting to think about what’s next. Get out of Greenstone, find some work. Drive someplace. Then this old guy pops up. Goes to the lookout every day, flying his weirdass kites. No one can walk past him without saying hi—you know the way he is. So now Dad’s on everyone’s mind again, and what Dad did—or didn’t do, depending how wishful you feel.”

  He spoke with grown forbearance.

  “How does your mom see it?” I asked.

  “Not like me,” he replied. He almost said more—you could see the currents moving behind his eyes—but thought better of it and opened the fridge. “Could I have some milk, Mr. Wander?”

  “Help yourself.”

  He filled a glass, drank half of it, and topped it off before putting the gallon back in the fridge. Watching him drain the milk, all elbows and limbs and skinny neck, I had the melancholy thought that what Bjorn needed in managing the loss of his dad was, in fact, a dad—not a kite-flying stranger, and certainly not an underachieving film projectionist. Yet it was me he’d approached with this business on his mind. I felt a responsibility to convey some wisdom. No doubt the previous tenant would’ve reached down and found a little Gregory Peck, yet I seemed unable to do so.

  “You asked what it cost,” Bjorn reminded me.

  I said, “You understand Rune means nothing but well.”

  “Right, but so what?”

  I looked at Bjorn’s abraded face, the scarlet patch fading as new skin formed beneath it. His eyes were gray-green and reserved as the sea. He shrugged into his jacket by the door. “Mom thinks I ought to go stand on the hillside with him, fly the kite, whatever. But what for? I’ve been decent to him. Told him everything I could remember. Say I do it—hold the string, let him pat my shoulder. Will he go away then?”

  He started down the stairs. Halfway to the bottom he turned and said, “I’m heading out to the break, see if there’s a swell. Thanks for the bread.”

  I held up the driftwood quarterstaff. Already I felt more stable on my feet. I touched my forehead with it in salute. “Thanks yourself, Bjorn. Stay upright out there.”

  “Stay upright yourself,” he replied.

  Rune dropped me off at Dr. Koskinen’s. He had some business in Duluth and said he’d come back in an hour.

  A nurse weighed me on a scale, then pointed to an exam room where I avoided the usual stack of happy-oldster magazines and sat playing with a model knee joint. It was pretty convincing, the yellowish bone with gummy pink menisci, ropy ligaments, and a fragile patella which kept sliding off and spinning across the floor. For comparison I took hold of my own left knee and checked its motion. It seemed less gritty—maybe all my walking was smoothing down the edges. Presently the door opened and in came the neurologist. He was older than I remembered. His eye bags and heavy white mustache made him look beaten down. He shook my hand and asked about my dizziness.

  “Getting better.”

  “From your weight I’d say you’re doing some walking,” he said. “Nice lumber,” noting the driftwood. It had drawn stares in the waiting room—a cane or walker is fine but a quarterstaff in confined spaces makes people nervous. When I mentioned this later to Orry she said, “Nobody trusts a junior wizard.”

  I told the doctor a surfer friend had found it on the shore.

  “Where’s he surfing?”

  “Greenstone.”

  “That’s brash. I admire these cold-water guys.” Koskinen’s eyes drifted and he rubbed his beefy cheek. “When I was young and not as you see me now, I went to California and surfed for five months. A friend let me sleep under his van. I’ve made three good decisions in life and that was the first. Marrying Celeste was another.”

  “What was the third?”

  “Paying off the house early.”

  “What about becoming a doctor?”

  “It’s all right, but would I do it again? Not sure. Whereas the surfing I would repeat tomorrow. The fever was upon me. There was a guy named Soc, a great surfer and epigram king. We all loved him. Soc went around saying things like Life is more than the next sandwich, but what did I go and do?” The doctor glanced fondly at his stomach. “Are you getting stray memories back?”

  I said yes, but admitted it was disconcerting. It was enormous fun to hear a Blondie song for the very first time, only to realize I knew every word. On the other hand, utter strangers kept greeting me on the street as though we’d known each other forever. Sometimes it turned out we had.

  “But your friends, colleagues, your everyday lineup—these you remember?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Mistaken anyone for a hat?”

  “Not yet.”

  His eyes sharpened slightly. “Are you tempted by speeding trains and open windows?”

  “Not yet.”

  He asked whether language was returning, and I said yes but slowly. Seeing my frustration, he said if a person were to lose any grammar then let it be adjectives. You could get by minus adjectives. In fact you appeared more decisive without them. He asked politely after my nouns, which were mostly intact, then declared with sudden intensity it was verbs you must truly not lose. Without verbs nothing got done. He peered at my eyes with a penlight. He tested my reflexes with a tap under my own patella. My bones were more prominent, he remarked. I had new hollows and ridges. I had “picked up a smidgen of vagabond.”

  This was true. Except when shaving, an autopilot maneuver, I forgot to look into mirrors. My clothes hung weirdly around my joints and my hair was long and snarly. Rune cooked most nights and I didn’t eat much else. After Beeman observed that Guinness tastes like burnt toast with cream, I resolved to try it for breakfast. Rune joined me and agreed it was bready and likable, if not ultimately sustaining.

  “Anything else? Emotional potholes?”

  At this stage the previous tenant would’ve nailed a polite off-ramp and been out the door with a blessing. Instead I said I had lost an old friend who drowned while fishing. It didn’t occur to me to weep at his grave, yet a driftwood gift turned me into a swamp. I didn’t miss driving. My houseguest was an Arctic kite flyer who called up the wind like a take-out pizza. On and on I went. I talked like a man waiting for sunrise. It was unpardonable. There was a woman I loved and never told, a contraband hoard in my north closet, a man of bedlam standing on the water.

  Up went Koskinen’s eyebrows. “Tell me about himself on the water.”

  I said he was my height or slightly taller, dressed in a suit of conservative cut. His face was dark or mottled and his hands were white like boiled eggs. He seemed at ease out on the surface, even in reasonably high winds. He wasn’t the usual hooded reaper but if he knocked you’d leave the chain on.

  “This isn’t your surfing friend, by any chance.”

  “It’s not Bjorn, and he’s not on a board—he’s standing on his feet on the water.” I thought a moment, calmed myself, and added, “Probably other people can’t see him.”

  He considered this while I wondered if I’d said too much. Physicians are busy people. Empathy is a lot to assume. Imagine my relief when Dr. Koskinen, wheezing lightly, face patchy with rosacea, said, “For now I think you shouldn’t worry. You are less dizzy, your words are coming back. Don’t fear occasional ghosts. Every day my mind suggests two or three impossible things. Tell me if the man comes back, though. Will you do that?”

  “I will.”

  He leaned in. “Tell me if he gets close.”

  This seemed so unexpectedly sensible I bounded up and seized his hand in both of mine, and he laughed with surprise.

  I left the office happy and went down to the coffee shop adjacent to the lobby. It’s an unassuming place, tan walls, nondescript really, though the woman behind the counter was bright-eyed and inked from neck to elbows. The ink told a seafaring
tale of ships and mermaids, and she’d knotted a vivid Mexican scarf around her middle. She made two or three jokes I didn’t understand while conjuring the best cappuccino in my experience. Duluth is a world port. The drink was a storm cloud with coffee thundering around inside it. It made me laugh at first sip. I was already glad from my visit with Koskinen and became immeasurably gladder from the espresso and the cheerful barista. It’s taken me a while to understand tattoos but now I think I do.

  From my booth I could watch people going into and out of businesses across the street: a brewery, a record store, an AT&T, the woolly Army-Navy with its rows of backpacks and rubber Mickey boots. Next door a pawnshop had a window full of Gibson and Strat knockoffs plus assorted taxidermy, and a counter where you could sell your gold and silver if it came to that. I wanted to go see the guitars. I don’t play, but the sight of those lustrous instruments always lifts my spirits. Beeman used to play his Telecaster in a North Shore country band called Angus Beef, he said to meet women but also for an excuse to say humbucker all the time.

  The door of the pawnshop swung open and a man stepped out shielding his eyes. It was Adam Leer. He’d bought something, a picture frame which he held under his arm while looking up-street and down. Right away he spotted me through the window and crossed over and came in, settling opposite me as if we’d planned this all along.

  “Hello Virgil—what’s brought you to Duluth?”

  “Doctor’s appointment. My ride will be here in a moment.”

  “The old kite flyer,” he said, amused. Turning toward the counter he held up a hand to the barista who nodded and busied herself.

  “Yes.”

  “Excellent. I won’t keep you but it’s good we bumped into each other. I see the Empress is for sale.”

  “Yes,” I said carefully, wondering how he found out. Most of Greenstone didn’t know. I’d advertised in the trade press both in print and online, but never locally, nor in Duluth nor the Twin Cities. This discretion sometimes prompted Beeman to suggest I didn’t really want to sell. In fact I didn’t want to sell to anyone who didn’t read the trades. In a business plodding toward extinction you’d better know the landscape.

  “I’d like to make an offer,” Leer said. He appeared entirely serious.

  “You want the theater.”

  “I do.”

  I took my time with this confounding news. He said, “I can’t promise how long I’d continue to show actual movies. But it’s a very decent location, you know. Center of everything.”

  “Such as it is. You wouldn’t show movies?”

  “Virgil. You’re getting eight people a night.”

  “What would you do with it, then?” I attempted to sound curious instead of defensive. Small-town theaters have been transformed into every sort of establishment—cafés and bookstores, bars, museums.

  Leer said, “Do I need a plan this moment? It’s potential that intrigues me. What a thing might become.”

  He leaned toward me across the table. I remember him talking about the nature of risk, the cost of inspiration. I looked away—not that his voice was unpleasant or sinister; if anything it was nearly smug and savored the tidy phrase. Yet it set me on edge, that voice of his. It seemed deftly persistent, as if it carried not only words but a sub-frequency, an inaudible current describing unspeakable things. Despite my resistance I felt something give. I heard him as if through a layer of water. The coffee shop dimmed at the edges.

  “My point is,” he said from far away, “you need the vacancy and then something can fill it. My offer is genuine, and cash.” And he named a figure—I don’t remember how much.

  “Speculators make me nervous,” I managed to say in a slow soggy tone.

  “What needless suspicion,” he said. “To speculate is to imagine. To wonder.”

  At least I think that’s what he said, before a shape sank past in my murky sight—a watery shape, a descending turtle—and then I knew where I seemed to be, in my honest old Pontiac, ninety feet deep. There sure enough was the ovoid speedometer, there my drifting blue hand. A bit of my brain believed I was dead, believed in the peace, knew the wavery coffee shop was only the weak invention it turns out a corpse can summon. Relief rinsed through me, followed by a chiding phrase from the past—fight the good fight. Someone important had said that. Had I fought well? I didn’t know, but what did it matter? The fight appeared to be over.

  Then a merry laugh punctured the shadows. Yellow and orange got in and peeled the dark away: the barista arriving with Leer’s coffee and a large cinnamon roll. She was laughing hard, and Leer laughed too. He leaned back in his chair; his attention slid off me. I was weak and spooked and grateful, watching Leer take the barista’s hand and coax her down and whisper in her ear. She laughed again, a sunlit sound, and went on her way.

  He tore into the roll and swallowed a chunk, licking icing off his fingers. “You’ve done magnificently in your turn at the Empress,” he said, resuming our talk as though nothing had passed. “That wild man Poe had some fun there, but let it go downhill. And the previous guy ran off to the Moonies! You’re easily the best of the bunch, Virgil. But the wheel spins. You know it does. What if your next work awaits?”

  “My ride,” I said with infinite relief, for Rune was parking the camper van on the street, feeding the meter, and looking at the sky. I gathered myself and stood.

  “Off with you, then,” said Leer, in an upbeat careless voice. “Think over my proposal. Or brood on it, if you’d rather,” he added pleasantly. “I suspect that’s more your style.”

  4

  THREE DAYS LATER RUNE AND I PUT THAT BICYCLE IN THE AIR, AND I reopened the Empress.

  Rune’s notion was, the best kites looked like things unlikely to fly—not that he had anything against the common designs based on birds, bats, airplanes, and so forth. He just felt there was extra delight in the rise of things typically earthbound. “Every day you see an airplane up there,” he explained. “Every day many birds.”

  Dogs on the other hand you didn’t. Or steamships, bass violins, grandfather clocks, men in bowler hats. For a short time there, you never knew what you would look up and see in the volatile Greenstone sky.

  The bicycle still looked as unlikely to fly as it had when Bjorn visited—spindly and distinctly terrestrial with its painted blue frame and upright handlebars fashioned from tagboard. A closer look showed it was backed with clear Mylar. Its spokes were angled paper blades which spun the wheels freely on their axles.

  Rune was proud of it and tutted importantly while rigging a complicated flight bridle consisting of at least eight different lines which attached to the kite and led back to a snap swivel tied to the main string. He wouldn’t let me near it.

  “Isn’t quite ready,” he said, not daring to take his eyes off it. The breeze was gusty. He made a slight flicking motion and the bike popped into the air, shivering and rattling on the climb. “Stand back a little, now. Be patient, Virgil!”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling anxious. I shouldn’t have been there at all—I had a problem to solve back at the Empress—but somehow this launch seemed like something I couldn’t miss. So far I hadn’t articulated even to myself the attraction these kites exerted; they were beautiful, but beauty is everywhere. They had some devious sentience. They seemed at play, and wanting company. When a new one went up I needed to be there.

  “Look now, it won’t answer,” Rune said. He had the bicycle on a short line, less than a hundred feet. It refused stability. It climbed and dived in spirals, screeching to and fro inverted as if ridden by poltergeists. Rune slacked and pulled without effect. The wind sizzled in the intricate bridle. Without warning the bike folded in two and shuddered to earth.

  “Fy,” said Rune in disgust.

  We were not at the overlook this time, but in a vacant lot downtown. Rune had a small tool kit with him and set about repairing the bicycle with needle-nose pliers and split bamboo. I wished he would hurry but not a chance. He had to examine the joints for s
trength. He had to spin both wheels, in both directions, and refer to implicit design challenges, and make miffed little vowel sounds about the kite’s spasmodic performance. Finally he said, pleasantly, “Am I annoying you? You seem rushed.”

  Well, I was rushed. I wanted to fly but needed to get back. Since I arrived in Greenstone, the Empress had never been closed. Among small operators there is the superstition, often true, that to shut your doors for even a single night is to invite the end. Therefore, on this first public showing since my accident, I wished to reopen with moderate panache. I’d ordered what the trades were calling a smart poignant comedy about an aging burglar with a robot accomplice: PG-13, the robot, for the kids; and Frank Langella for their grandparents. I had also spent two mornings repainting the lobby a vintage green—very stylish, but an overreach given my brain injury. The fumes put me on edge and the paint rippling off the roller sounded like bacon frying. When the burglar picture arrived I laced it up, dimmed the lights, and went down to experience the opening scene.

  This is a thing I always do. A movie can get all the high marks but that first two minutes is a trusty forecast.

  I stood in the left aisle two-thirds back. The screen brightened slowly, then bam—a swirling oval graphic appeared with the sound of a thunderclap. It was just a production credit, the shiny work of a studio nerd, but that noise! My sternum contracted. I curled like a shrimp, hugging my ears, but kept my eyes on the screen.

  I wasn’t entirely surprised. When showing Rune Butch Cassidy, I’d been careful to set the volume low. It worked well enough for the two of us in an empty house, but wouldn’t fly with paying customers. Cautiously I removed my hands from my ears, on-screen someone rang a doorbell, and the noise knocked me on my backside right there in the aisle. When dialogue ensued, the voices were bird screams in my head. I crabbed away and went flapping up the steps to halt the projector. Blinking back sweat, I checked the sound console. The slider was set per usual. Normal volume—if anything, a little on the low side.