Viator

by Lucius Shepard

  The homogenous quality of the delusions that gripped the crew of Viator intrigued Wilander—although he had previously observed a sameness of mental defect among the men, not until his conversation with Arnsparger did he recognize how deep that sameness ran, and this gave him to recognize, in turn, that their presence onboard Viator, something he had theretofore thought of as a peculiar circumstance, might be a mystery of profound proportions. During his daily tours through the ship, in hopes of shedding light upon the mystery, he made concerted attempts to connect with Halmus and Nygaard and Mortensen—and with Arnsparger, who apologized for his flare-up, though he offered no excuse for it; but despite all Wilander’s efforts, only twice did his contact with the men result in anything approaching an illumination, the first instance occurring one morning when he entered the galley, a room with stratifications of petrified grease darkening the ceiling and whose contents had been ransacked (whether by vandals or a rebellion against shipboard cuisine, no one could say), the shelves knocked down, a sink ripped away from the wall, the top of the stove—a black iron monstrosity blotched with rust (icthilio), but still functional—cracked, one of the oven doors missing, and there he discovered Nygaard cuddling a corroded saucepan in his arms, talking in a tender tone of voice, a hushed, consoling tone, as if the pan were a sick kitten that he was encouraging to suck milk from an eyedropper. Wilander asked him about the pan—what was its attraction, its point of interest?—and, receiving no response, pried it from his grasp, whereupon the gray little man fell back toward the door, gazing morosely at the prize that had been stolen from him. The inside bottom of the pan bore a whitish discoloration that resembled a ship ploughing through heavy seas, a similarity that seemed unremarkable until Wilander noticed that the overall shape of the ship was identical to the shape of Viator and a ragged dark line along the bow corresponded exactly to the placement of the breach in Viator’s bow. He suspected that the questions he wanted to ask were beyond Nygaard’s ability to answer, but nonetheless he pointed to the discoloration and said, This looks like a ship, right? What do you think it signifies?

  Anxious as a mouse, eyes darting this way and that, Nygaard retreated into the passageway. Wilander offered him the saucepan. Here, he said. I only wanted a look. But when Nygaard came forward to take the pan, Wilander hid it behind his back. First answer my question. What do you think it means? The picture of the ship.

  Nygaard stared at a spot on Wilander’s stomach, as if he were employing x-ray vision to peer through flesh and bone and see the pan. Viator, he said.

  —This is a picture of Viator? That’s what you’re telling me?

  Nygaard gave a tight little nod.

  —Why do you think so?

  —Because it’s traveling.

  —What’s that got to do with anything?

  —Viator means traveler.

  —The name, Viator? Who told you that?

  Nygaard’s stare never wavered.

  —Did someone tell you that’s what it meant? Wilander asked. Who was it?

  —Halmus. Nygaard stuck out his hand. Give it to me.

  Wilander extended the pan, but kept hold of the handle when Nygaard tried to snatch it. What else did Halmus tell you? Did he talk to you about the ship?

  —Viator means traveler.

  —That’s all he said? You’re sure?

  Using both hands, Nygaard wrenched the pan from Wilander’s grip, but instead of running, as Wilander expected, he stood hugging the pan and said, I need some metal polish.

  —What else did Halmus tell you?

  —Metal polish, Nygaard said stubbornly.

  —All right. I’ll bring it tomorrow. Now what else did Halmus say?

  —Promise you’ll bring the polish?

  —Yes, I promise. Now what did he tell you?

  With the pan cradled in his arms, a crafty smile playing over his lips, Nygaard had the look of a husband who had been caught just as he was about to cook up his murdered wife’s liver and thus no longer had any reason to hide the beautiful glare of his insanity beneath a humble exterior. He told me to fuck off, he said.

  * * *

  Several days later, as Wilander descended the stairs toward the engine room, he encountered Halmus, who was climbing the stairs, going with his head down, carrying a toolbox, and asked him what he had told Nygaard about Viator. Scowling, Halmus pushed past him, and Wilander, who—albeit taller and stronger—had previously been quailed by Halmus’ temper, felt a burst of heat and hatred so all-consuming, it seemed to have been produced by a chemical reaction, the ignition of some volatile agent in his blood, a childish response buried beneath years of socialization, muffled by the practiced constraints of a business life, and—eventually—suffocated by reflexes born of poverty and failure and dissolution, by an appreciation of your own unworthiness that leads you to avert your eyes whenever an insult is hurled your way, and yet had never been extinguished, hiding like an ember beneath a board, waiting to be rekindled. He caught Halmus’ elbow and slung him into the railing, which broke free with a shriek and went spinning down to clang against the floor thirty feet below, and Halmus, arms windmilling, teetered on the brink of a fatal drop until Wilander hauled him back and pushed him against the opposite railing and asked his question a second time.

  —I don’t know what you’re talking about! Halmus struggled against Wilander’s hold.

  Goaded by the man’s foppish beard and the contemptuous set of his mouth, Wilander knuckled his Adam’s apple and said, You told him Viator means traveler.

  —That’s what it means, you ass! It’s Latin! Didn’t you go to school?

  —The school I went to, we didn’t learn faggot shit like Latin! You know what I learned? While you were studying Latin and going to art movies and jabbering about political injustice in coffee bars, preparing yourself for a life of taking drugs? I learned statistics, cost accounting! I learned how to make a fucking living!

  —Yeah? And how’d that work out?

  Wilander forced Halmus harder against the railing. What else do you know about the ship? What did you tell Nygaard?

  —I didn’t tell him anything! I don’t know anything! Halmus twisted his head, trying to see behind him. Let me go! The railing’s loose!

  Though tempted to push harder yet, Wilander shoved Halmus down onto a step and loomed over him. From now on, when I ask you a question, drop the attitude and give me a straight answer.

  As was typical, Halmus glared in response, but the wattage of his glare seemed reduced. You’re crazy, he said.

  —That’s your diagnosis? I better get myself checked out, then. Someone who goes around all day picking up little pieces of glass, you need to listen to someone like that when they talk about mental health issues.

  Wilander noticed the toolbox, which Halmus had let fall, and picked it up.

  —Be careful with that! said Halmus.

  —Is there something breakable in here? Wilander gave the toolbox a shake.

  —Don’t…okay? Please! Halmus had lost all hint of arrogance.

  Inside the toolbox was a dagger-shaped shard of glass wrapped in an oil-stained rag.

  —Put it back, Halmus said.

  —Did you find another prize for your collection? Wilander unwrapped the shard, nothing remarkable, a piece of clouded mirror glass that gave back a partial reflection of his face, but as he made to toss it aside, catching sight of it at an angle that no longer reflected his face, he noticed movement on the surface and, upon peering more closely, realized that the apparent movement—it had to be apparent, he thought, caused by his hand trembling, a shadow misapprehended, something of the sort—looked to be occurring beneath the surface, as if the glass were not a mirror fragment, but a dagger-shaped aperture opening onto an overcast sky clotted with real clouds, storm clouds, grayish black and tumbled by the wind, and it seemed he was diving down through them; they went rushing past, blinding him for long moments, then intermittently affording a view of the ground far below through frays in th
eir gauzy substance, an indistinct landscape of forested hills ranging a seacoast and, as his angle of descent lessened, like that of a flying creature flattening out over the hilltops, he glimpsed something ahead, an interruption in the flow of the forest over the hills, along the shore—buildings, perhaps—and then the mirror was ripped from his grasp and he was looking at Halmus, stunned and shaken, trying to reconnect with the feeling of triumph that had gripped him the instant before the mirror was snatched away.

  —You saw something, didn’t you? Halmus said, tucking the mirror into his toolbox. What was it? What did you see?

  Wilander had half a mind to wrestle the toolbox from him, to look into the mirror once more and identify what he had seen, yet he was unsettled by the triumphant feeling that attached to the sight; not a sense of accomplishment, of having overcome travail or succeeded at some difficult task, but an exultant relief such as might be felt by a gladiator who, having beaten down his opponent, was prepared to deliver a killing stroke; and yet that was an inadequate comparative; there was nothing in his experience or imagination to inspire this particular feeling, nothing that could have provoked anything approximating so unadulterated and fierce a joy, and he thought he must have been possessed by the feeling, or that he had taken possession of an entity whose emotions had no commonality with human emotion, with either the fleeting passions of an ordinary day or the desponds into which a man might sink, as with grief and unrequited love, but were symphonic in their scope, wider, deeper, and infinitely grander than his own. Halmus demanded again to know what he had seen, and Wilander, hearing frustration in his voice, frustration and, he thought, an undertone of envy, suggesting that Halmus himself had seen nothing in the mirror, or had hoped to see more than he had, decided not to respond lest by doing so he negate an advantage he had won, an advantage whose value he had yet to comprehend. Ignoring Halmus’ protestations, he continued down the stairs toward the engine room, toward the completion of an errand, the exact nature of which he could now no longer recall.

  The things he had seen in the mirror troubled Wilander over the ensuing days, but thanks to their singular character, he was able to dismiss them as aberrant, a symptom of nerves or some related complaint. He was less successful, however, in explaining away the powerful emotion that had attended his vision; it seemed to have stained his soul, adding a new, unwholesome color. He subjected himself to analysis, thinking he might unearth something from his psyche that, amplified by stress, could have produced such a sweep of feeling; but in examining the passages of his life, his unruffled childhood, his curiously blank adolescence, a period during which he had become, for no perceptible cause, alienated from everyone, friendless and unhappy (though not monumentally unhappy as were several of his more gregarious peers, like Miranda Alley, a brainy girl with whom Wilander had sex on one flurried, forlorn occasion, yet had been unable to persuade her to remove her brassiere, because—it turned out—she habitually slashed her breasts with razor blades; or Jake Callebs, a popular kid who swallowed an overdose of Xanax while sitting at the edge of the athletic field and died watching a pick-up soccer game, the green expanse blurring, his being curving up with the cries of the players and fading along the air; at least this was Wilander’s overly romantic view of the occurrence) and given to long solitary walks, his mind not focused on any particular subject, merely idling, and thereafter the renewal of college, a vital rebirth, a burst of social interactions and diverse pursuits that continued on for a couple of years after graduation…in contemplating this, he felt he was pulling at a loose thread and unraveling the garment of self in which he had been cloaked until there was nothing left except blankness. That, he thought, was the dominant pattern in his life, cycles of hyperactivity and blankness, as if he were prone to unravel after having acquired a certain amount of experience, and he thought perhaps that same pattern could be discerned to some degree in every life, and what made you unique was no more than a handful of easily unraveled threads woven across a blank template.

  The canopy of the linden tree was so dense that the leaves shielded Wilander from rain whenever he lay beneath them, but one Sunday morning a stiff west wind blew in off the sea, driving the rain sideways along the deck, and he was forced to retreat into the officers’ mess, where he sat at a long table, drinking coffee, feeling submerged beneath the noise of the storm, staring out the open door at the lashings of the crown and gazing at the walls, hoping for a let-up so he wouldn’t get drenched when he walked into Kaliaska later that day. Like the majority of Viator’s walls, those of the mess were painted green and the paint had flaked away in spots, hundreds of spots, creating a design of pale lime and brownish black from which, as Wilander’s eyes moved across it, there emerged an astonishingly detailed image rather like one that might be obtained from the Xerox of a photograph done on a copier whose toner was running low, a landscape contrived of darkly etched shapes and blank spaces: it seemed he was looking from a great height between the tops of two firs, down across a forested slope and lower hills toward a circular lagoon at the edge of the sea; surrounding the lagoon was a considerable city. It might have been, he told himself, a variant perspective of the image he had noticed some weeks previously on the passageway wall outside the mess. The impact of this casual observation did not strike him at once, but when, after the span of half a minute, it did, he stepped out into the passageway to determine if the similarity was actual or imagined. He went back and forth from the mess to the passageway, comparing details, and it became clear that, although the image on the wall of the mess offered a more distant view of the lagoon than did the one in the passageway, there were too many correspondences between them to ignore. Each portrayed a large building with a humped roof, like a sports arena or a convention center, on the inland margin of the lagoon; and on the thin strip of land separating the waters of the lagoon from the sea stood a palatial structure, its uppermost floor a third the size of the floor below, atop which was mounted some sort of array; and there were also correspondences, he believed, between the two images and the forest he had seen in Halmus’ mirror: not only were they were aerial views of the same landscape viewed from different angles, that landscape was in its hilly conformation, in the shape of its coastline, very like the forest that enclosed Viator, albeit more extensive and having a city at its heart.

  Wilander was a realist, an espouser of statistical truth, a believer in coincidence when no better theory arose to explain the inexplicable, but his rationalism did not completely immunize him against fear, and the idea that the ship was showing him pictures, that it possessed the unreasonable power to do this, frightened him. He did not believe in ghosts, in the symbolic weight of hallucination, in magic, in extrasensory perception, in oracles (though once his Yahoo horoscope, pointed out by a girlfriend, an ex-Goth with lacy black tattoos columning her spine, a vine-like structure made of spiderwebs in which tiny women were trapped that evolved into a curious evil blossom spreading across her shoulders, had proved uncannily accurate, predicting that he would receive good news from a banking institution about a private venture on the day his business loan was approved); nor was he credulous about miracles or people who communicated with the spirits of the dead or those who had dreams that allowed them to divine the locations of the victims of kidnappers and serial killers—he was impervious to such claims, he resisted them with adversarial fervor, and while he found it difficult to sustain this denial of the supernatural in the face of Halmus’ mirror and the pictures emerging from the walls, he managed after a prolonged study of the wall in the officers’ mess to control his uneasiness, countering speculations as to what the pictures might be—views of another world, another dimension, the work of a poltergeist—with the notion that it didn’t matter what they were; so what if a ghost was sending signals or the ship was coming alive or some more equivocal madness was involved, because nothing had happened, nothing bad, in all the weeks, the months now, that he had lived aboard Viator; and what was there apart from these piddling an
omalies, anomalies that could well be supported by a logical explanation, one he hadn’t fathomed yet, to suggest that anything bad would happen? If a scrap of ectoplasm was acting unruly, an imp or spirit making sport, it didn’t change the fact that he was healthier and more psychologically sound than he had been in years, that he had a woman who cared for him and hopes for the future. He set about tidying his mental processes, trying to sweep aside anxiety, but his cell phone rang, seeming to leap against his chest from the breast pocket of his shirt, and the superficial calm he had established was demolished. He switched the phone on and said, Hello, assuming it would be Arlene, but half expecting to hear a grinding tonality, the voice of the ship announcing itself for some grim purpose.

  —Where are you? Arlene asked.

  —Viator, he said.

  —I know! I meant, why aren’t you here? Did you forget? You were going to help me this afternoon.

  —Not until two.

  —It’s after three.

  —I’ve been waiting for the rain to let up.

  —It stopped raining hours ago.

  Wilander glanced at the open door. The rain had, indeed, stopped; the wind had subsided and the sun was out. I’m sorry, he said. I’ll come right now.