Viator

by Lucius Shepard

  That evening, the town still awake, music from the Kali Bar (so named not due to any devotion rendered unto the Hindu deity, but because the owner and a hired sign painter had squabbled mid-job, a slight disagreement escalating into a feud as yet unresolved) squealing in the distance, he sat in bed and tried to sound out the melody of the wallpaper, whistling it under his breath—it was as chaotic as the room itself, a tune such as a child might produce while banging on opposite ends of a keyboard. Arlene, lying beside him, asked, What are you doing?, and, when he explained, she said forlornly, as if the oversight were a sorry judgment on her, It’s never occurred to me to do that.

  —You’d think the manufacturer would have used a famous piece of music, Wilander said.

  —Maybe it is famous. The wallpaper’s Chinese. Some Chinese music sounds all fractured. Atonal.

  He shifted so he could lie propped on an elbow, looking down at her body, her belly and breasts pale and unblemished, but the rest of her, even the insides of her thighs, patterned with freckles, a patterning so heavy and distinctly stated in places, it made him think of a leopard’s spots.

  —What sort of music do you like? she asked.

  —I’m not much of a music lover.

  —You must like something.

  —I don’t mind music, I just can’t relate to it the way other people do. He pointed out the window, indicating the faint music from the bar. But I like hearing it from far away. Even if it’s just a bar band, it seems to promise something good.

  After an interval she said, But when you get close, it’s not so good?

  Alerted by a fretful hesitance in her voice, he said, That’s right. What I said…it’s a metaphor for how I relate to everything, not just music. Places, people. At a distance they’re fine, but up close—he made a sour face—eventually they become intolerable.

  —Don’t tease me!

  —Weren’t you trying to read that into what I was saying?

  Another pause, and then she said, I know so little about you. Most of what I know doesn’t apply anymore. You don’t drink, you don’t work in finance.

  —The last months haven’t counted for anything?

  —Of course they have. But ever since I’ve known you, you’ve always been going through some change or another. I’ve never seen you solid.

  —I’m not sure anybody’s ever solid.

  —Solid’s your term. When you said you wanted to stay aboard Viator awhile longer, you said you weren’t feeling solid yet…or something like that.

  —I was speaking about relative solidity.

  —Okay. I haven’t seen you relatively solid.

  He laid his head on her belly, looking past her pubic tuft toward the freckles that spread across her the tops of her thighs, tiny brown splotches like, he thought, the remnants of an island continent flooded by a milky sea. He felt the heat of her sex on his cheeks. He studied the freckles, wondering whether—if he were to stare at them long enough—an image might emerge, as from the splotchy walls of the ship.

  —Thomas?

  —Yes.

  —What do you want after you leave Viator?

  The prospect of leaving the ship seemed silly for an instant, like the idea of unscrewing one’s arm or building a house out of cheese, and he thought he must feel this way because his time aboard Viator had permitted him to gather sufficient strength and confidence to look beyond himself once again, to be here, now, with this woman, and to recognize her needs and his responsibilities toward her—it was daunting to (consider) doing without the perspective Viator had afforded.

  —Is this something you have to think about? she asked.

  He moved up beside her and threw an arm across her chest. Not the way you mean.

  She angled her eyes toward him, waiting for him to go on.

  —Nothing’s changed, he said. I want to be with you. If things were different, I might choose to live somewhere less desolate. But that’s not a real issue.

  —You haven’t spent enough time in Kaliaska to know it. You only know the post, the pizza place, the bar.

  —There’s more? He chuckled, gave her a squeeze. Kaliaska has a secret life? A hidden culture?

  —There’s the people, for one thing.

  —Oh, yeah. The people. I talked to a couple of the people this afternoon.

  —You can’t judge everyone by Roogie and Cat, especially when they’re on a drunk.

  —They’re not the only drunks in Kaliaska.

  —Certainly not. People drink, they do drugs, they fight. When the fishermen come back after the season, it gets worse.

  Seduced by the smell of her hair, Wilander inched closer, sinking back into a heady post-coital torpor; he rubbed the nipple of her left breast between his thumb and forefinger. She stirred at his touch and he wondered what she was feeling—she was ashamed of her breasts, thought them too large and pendant, insufficiently firm, incompatible with the slimness of her body, and was at times discomforted by his attention to them, but he loved their soft, crepey skin, their heft, how they dangled when she was astride him.

  —Why do you like it here? he asked.

  —Because I know where I am. When I lived in Detroit, I was always confused about what was happening around me. Anxious all the time. Now I’ve been here for a while, I understand the same things go on in Kaliaska that went on back in the States. Detroit’s just a big Kaliaska. People coming in from all over. The difference is, in Detroit I’d never think to talk to those people. I wouldn’t want to, I’d be afraid of them. There were too many people. I couldn’t get a feeling for them, and so I didn’t trust them. Here the ships drop anchor, ships from everywhere. Japan, Russia, Norway. The crews come ashore for a day or two, maybe a week if the weather’s bad, and they tell me about themselves. It’s a richer life. And it’s less confusing, less fearful. Everyone’s so frightened down in the forty-eight. Maybe they’re right to be frightened. Life is frightening. But here…Okay. She turned onto her side, facing him, earnest, one hand touching his chest. Sometimes when they wheel out the big TV at the Kali and show a movie, I’ll be sitting there surrounded by thirty or forty people. Some don’t like me, because we’ve had business problems or whatever; some of the guys like me a little too much. But I know what to expect. I’m not worried. Knowing where I am, having that clear a view…It gives me a freedom I never felt in the States. It allows me to appreciate the people around me in a way I couldn’t before. And they’re not all like Roogie and Cat.

  —No, some are like Terry.

  —Terry’s a good kid. You have to get past the attitude. Look, I’ll admit the range of people here isn’t what you get in a city, but some of them are remarkable. It just takes time to see it.

  —You’re very persuasive, he said.

  —Apparently not. I can’t persuade you to come live in town.

  She tried to make a joke of it, but there was an undercurrent of tension in her voice, and Wilander, recalling what Roogie had said about Arlene needing a commitment, found it strange that he was unable to give that commitment, because when he looked at her, he felt something that wanted to commit, something that once declared would bind them more tightly, and he saw the clean particularity of her spirit, her soul, whatever you preferred to call the light that flashed from her whenever the incidental clutter of her mind cleared sufficiently to let it shine through, the bright flash of her being, and he knew that despite the superficially facile nature of their connection, lonely man, lonely woman, there was something between them that seemed ordained, something he had encountered only once previously and then with a college girl named Bliss, Bliss Giddings, a tall, slender, quiet brunette who was studying to be an astronomer and was devoted to the poetry of Cavafy; poems that, when he read them to himself, communicated a haughty, defeatist sensibility, but when she read them aloud rang with a lovely sad romanticism, and everything was going splendidly for them, they were inseparable, intoxicated with each other, until one day she vanished without a warning, dropped out of the uni
versity and returned home, leaving him shocked, deranged, in agony—she refused to take his calls, refused every effort at contact, and he soon learned that she had married a wealthy businessman, a wine importer twelve years her senior, so no astronomy for her, no meteors, no pulsars, no distant suns, no erudite speculation upon whether the shape of the universe, as recently opined, was similar to that of the Eiffel Tower, shattering the reality of those who had based their faith on the theory that it resembled a football, and there would be no hazy unfathomable astronomical objects named Gidding, no prestigious international conferences in Lucerne, no moments of transcendent solitude at the lens of Palomar, the cosmos spread out before her as if she were a spy for God, just lots of expensive grape juice; unless, to humor her, the importer, one Adam Zouski (the cacophonous sibilance of Bliss Zouski an abomination by contrast to the liquid asymmetry of Bliss Wilander), bought a telescope and placed it on the penthouse roof of the New York City castle where she was kept, allowing her to revisit her quaint, childish ambition; and years afterward, many years afterward, she began to email Wilander, gloomy, self-absorbed emails that professed love for him and dissatisfaction with her life, with her husband, a correspondence that grew over the months in intensity and frequency—they talked on the phone, spoke of getting together, made plans, shared sexual fantasies, yet nothing ever came of it, their plans evaporated, their fantasies remained unreal, the emails and phone calls stopped, and he still could not understand why she had left him; the reasons she gave were so flimsy, as if she herself did not understand, and though it wasn’t until he met Arlene that he was able to put that episode in a drawer and lock it away, though he recognized how rare it was to feel this close to someone, the only way he could think to explain his reticence about moving into town, an explanation that would have a tired ring to Arlene’s ears, was that he was not yet secure in himself, not yet solid. Finally, without attempting explanation, he told her that however the job was going, he would come to her after a month or so, when the first snow fell, early September at the latest. She said, All right, but she wasn’t pleased; he could tell as much from the compression of her lips, the deepening of a frown line, and recognized that his indecisiveness (that, he knew, was how she perceived it) bordered on rejection, and might be more painful for her than rejection. He started to offer an apology, but knew it would sound inadequate.

  —I don’t get it. I don’t get any part of it. This Lunde gives you a meaningless job, and you…She made a fuming noise and turned her back to him. What do you know about this guy? Nothing! You don’t have the slightest idea what he’s up to!

  —It’s only a month, he said, pressing himself against her from behind. A month! That’s no time at all.

  He continued to reassure her, kissing the nape of her neck, touching her breasts; and, his erection restored, he started to push inside her, but she restrained him, twisted her head about so she could see his face, and said, I don’t want this to be an affair! Don’t move in unless you love me! And that was the perfect moment for a declaration. She was inviting him to declare himself, making such a declaration easy, an informality, and he felt the words and the will to say them taking shape; but then she opened her legs and, as he glided into her—that’s how it felt, a glide, like the splashless slipping of a diver into a medium wherein his weight was taken away, his thoughts stripped by the purity of entry, not only his flesh but also his mind immersed, drenched in her—all he managed to say, more an expulsion of breath than a commitment, was, I won’t.

  Six

  “…a fifth season…”

  During August, it appeared that Viator was being transformed into an enormous museum devoted to the works of a single artist, one possessed of an obsessively monocular vision, a fabricator of duotone vistas, pale green and dark iron, featuring a shoreline city and a forest. Every viable wall aboard ship was producing such an image and Wilander was initially disposed to believe this was a consequence of a perceptual bias that—as with the paranoia he felt while walking into town—stemmed from a chemical imbalance; but as the flaking walls of the passageways and cabins yielded their variant perspectives on the scene displayed upon the wall of the officers’ mess, he found himself less interested in why they had manifested than in what they might represent, and undertook to create a composite map of the region portrayed, treating the forest and the city as if they were real. He thought to ask the other men to verify that the images were there, but August was not the best of months for relationships amongst the crew: Mortensen was rarely to be found; Nygaard, as had been his habit since their set-to in the galley, scurried away whenever Wilander approached; Arnsparger grew uncommunicative and truculent; Halmus stalked about the ship, his customary arrogance swollen to the proportions of hauteur, and responded to Wilander’s conversational openings with imperious stares, refusing to speak, as if he were rehearsing for a role as a pharaoh or a headwaiter. For his own part, Wilander felt no great urge to communicate; he was absorbed by his new passion, snapping photographs of the walls with throwaway cameras he bought from Arlene, assembling the prints into a montage on the dining table in the mess, and painstakingly sketching from these materials maps of a nameless country (he attempted to name it, but the names he chose—North Calambay, Skiivancia, Vidoria, Alta Marone—failed to resonate with his nebulous conception of the place) that was very like Viator s forest, just larger, hillier, and with more prominent landmarks. Not that he possessed comprehensive knowledge of his surroundings; he was only familiar with the trail leading into town, yet he perceived these distinctions in the same way you intrinsically understand the conformation of a room in which you’re sitting, and that sense, that effortless apprehension of two environments, one immediate, one imminent (that was how he thought of the nameless country, as imminent, something on the horizon, a landfall not yet sighted) led him to surmise that Viator’s mystery was emblematized by its name, Traveler, and that the ship had been frozen mid-voyage, like the Viator-shaped stain on the bottom of the pot Nygaard had exhumed from the vandalized galley, and was straining to continue on its journey. That conjecture steered him once again toward the idea that his fixation upon the walls was akin to the dementias that afflicted the other men, that he would soon, if he had not already, equal them in madness, and yet, if he were to accept that prognosis, did it not suggest that Halmus, Arnsparger and Nygaard were seeing comparable vistas in their collections of glass and rust and scrap metal, and that Mortensen’s ability—as Arnsparger phrased it—to interpret Viator through its many surfaces also allowed him to envision a forest and a city. And what did that suggest? At one point Wilander went in search of Halmus and Arnsparger, determined to learn what they saw, what they knew, what they felt; but when they rebuffed him, he did not chase after them. He was beginning to understand the reason behind their unwillingness to talk: though compelled by the mystery of Viator, they were not altogether eager to solve it; they were afraid that what they had gleaned concerning the ship’s murky potentials might be true and thus did not care to validate as fact what was for the moment merely a suspicion.

  Day by day, fear became increasingly dominant in Wilander’s life. His recurring dream unsettled him and the act of walking through the forest into town demanded that he steel his nerves, for everywhere he turned, he spotted evidence of movement in the undergrowth, stirring ferns, disturbed leaves, and he believed these signs were not due to wind or the scuttlings of ordinary animals, but to the passage of creatures similar to the one he had watched from the stern while talking to Lunde, sluggish translucent beasts native to another forest, another coast, to a metropolitan Kaliaska encircling a lagoon and separated from the town he knew by an imperceptible and indefinable barrier. The bird with the metal throat kept up its keening; indeed, Wilander became convinced that more than a single bird was responsible, since those declining, dolorous cries now sounded throughout the forest, and he thought that the original bird had, upon finding a suitable roost, summoned its fellows and they had proved to be a reclusi
ve species who nested one to a tree and whose solitary calls were designed to provoke no answer, like a sentry’s announcement of all clear. Unnerved by these thoughts, by his almost casual embrace of their patent irrationality, he debated whether he should give up his job; scarcely a day passed when he did not entertain the idea—it had served him for a time, but now Viator had begun to unhinge him, to terrify him. During a mild yet persistent anxiety attack, one that lasted for several hours, he decided to visit Arlene, but was unable to bring himself to endure the suffocating grip of the hold, the hold where Mortensen muttered to himself and scribbled things, lending the darkness there a Cabalistic weight, and so he was forced to lash a length of rope to the railing near the stern, a spot beneath which the crest of a massive boulder lay fifteen feet below, and to descend to solid ground in that fashion. Each time he went into Kaliaska, he would decide that he’d had enough, he would send Terry out to collect his clothes, his books; yet his fascination with the ship drew him back. It was not just the walls, the half-glimpsed animals, and the birds that compelled him. Gazing at a fitting or a corroded hinge, at any portion of the ship, although he could measure no appreciable difference from how these things looked one day to the next, he understood that a deeper change was taking place in Viator, and, on one particularly stifling afternoon, as he paused to wipe his brow beside a bulkhead door, a bulging oval with a bar handle, studded with bolts, its green paint scarred and incised with initials, like a hideous iron blister, something that might have developed upon the hindquarters of a mechanical beast, it occurred to him—a thought that seemed a direct result of his study of the door, as if he were tuning in its vibrations—that Viator was not, as might be intimated, experiencing an awakening or an enlivening (the ship, to his mind, had always been alive, its vitality evident at first sight, its energy spilling out to nourish the improbable forest that formed its nest), but that it was moving; that, though engineless, Viator, by means of some imponderable process and through some unfathomable medium, was shifting closer to that other forest, the natural habitat of the metal-throated birds, close enough so their cries could be heard, and yet they remained invisible because the ship had not succeeded in physically penetrating their habitat. Informed by this insight, this hallucination, this fantastic narrative skeleton that could only have been constructed by an ex-drunk, ex-addict whose mind, after years of abuse, the penultimate symptom of which was the narrative itself, was so diminished that he might be persuaded of the reality of even the most laughable rumor; and it was fortunate, he told himself, that the priests of his mission-dwelling days, men for whom charity was more drug than virtue, weren’t around, or else he would be down on his knees, howling to Jesus, while one of them, maybe the Jesuit with the hair plugs in Seattle, Father Brad, what an asshole!, clasped his hands and beamed at him fatuously…Informed by all this, then, Wilander returned to his maps, attacking his cartographer’s problem with fresh inspiration and renewed zeal, making corrections, refining his vision of a nameless country populated by transparent badgers and invisible birds and gigantic flying worms, adding detail to a map of the city encircling the lagoon (the buildings inland low and undistinguished, like housing developments; those nearer the water arranged in complexes that radiated outward from the palatial structure on the peninsula), and also detailing the well-notched coastline beyond the city and a grouping of six islands that bore signs of habitation, laboring long into the night, damping his fears with work, quelling his rational concerns, forgetting everything.