Far Afield (28 page)

Many hours later, full of eggs (Jonathan) and
rœst
meat (Wooley), tea, and talk, heavy-headed from the hot, moist air of the Dahls’ kitchen, and quite a number of kroner poorer from playing a whistlike card game whose rules Heðin had barely explained, assuring them that they’d “figure it out,” they stood on the dark road watching the wind blow the white storm clouds south toward the Continent. Stars blinked in the sky above the harbor, and a Turkish crescent of a moon pointed its horns west.

“You were right,” said Jonathan. “The storm’s over.”

Wooley kicked a stone back and forth. “Home to Fugloy,” he said. He kicked the stone to Jonathan, who let it lie. “Maybe I’ll stop in Klaksvík.”

“For your girl?”

Wooley nodded. “How about yours?”

Jonathan shivered. “It’s cold,” he said, turning back to the house.

“Hey, Jonathan,” Wooley said.

Jonathan turned around. But Wooley didn’t say anything. “Yes?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Thanks for the visit.”

“You’re welcome.” Jonathan waited; Wooley seemed to have more to say.

“I know you’re not going to come up to Fugloy, but if you’re ever in Berkeley—”

“Sure,” said Jonathan.

“We could drive up the coast—sort of looks like this. It’s beautiful.” Wooley stopped for a minute. “Well, it was a weird couple of days.” He laughed dryly.

“Come on,” Jonathan said, walking back to Wooley. “It’s late.” He regretted, suddenly, all the bad things he’d thought about Wooley. He touched Wooley’s arm. “Maybe I will come see you in Berkeley.”

“Shake?” Wooley put out his hand.

Jonathan shook hands with him, unsure exactly what deal he was confirming: something less specific than a visit to Berkeley, he guessed.

“So, I’ll be on that morning boat.” Wooley nudged Jonathan.

“I owe you a bottle of aquavit, then.” Jonathan started back to the house a second time.

“Oh, don’t worry about that.” Wooley followed him into the kitchen, which was as dark and cold as the road. “What’s a bottle of aquavit between friends?”

That was what the handshake signified: Wooley wanted to be friends. Could they be? Jonathan reconsidered his classification of Wooley as not-a-friend. Though the competitiveness that had skewed their relations had abated somewhat, Jonathan still found Wooley brash, slick, unfamiliar in an irritating way. Added to that was the burden of all the nasty comments Jonathan had made to him; he couldn’t understand how Wooley had been able to disregard them. The blitheness that didn’t register Jonathan’s dislike was the fundamental reason they couldn’t be friends.

But they didn’t have to be enemies. Jonathan made a stab at a peace offering. “Maybe I’ll bring you a bottle of Jack Daniel’s a year from now in Berkeley,” he said. “Who knows?”

“Right,” said Wooley. He turned to go upstairs.

Resignation and anger were in his voice—Jonathan heard them clearly. Wooley knew his overture had been rejected. Jonathan flushed with shame in the darkness: maybe Wooley was aware of every little dig he’d endured these last three days. If that was true, Jonathan, not Wooley, was the blithe one, eager to take affability at face value, to construe tolerance as insensitivity. He thought of Wooley saying, I know you won’t come to Fugloy, and cringed; Wooley knew plenty. It was only because he hadn’t responded in kind that Jonathan assumed he was unaware.

“Jim,” he said, taking a step toward Wooley.

“It’s late,” said Wooley, pausing at the door to the hall. “See you tomorrow.”

Jonathan listened to Wooley walking up the stairs. He had a light: tread for a big fellow. And how lightly he’d trod with Jonathan! He’d had countless opportunities to pay back scorn and intimidation in the same coin, and the worst he’d done was to be a bore.

Jonathan put his hands to his face and wished he were a better person. And it struck him that he could actually become one. Unlike a higher IQ, which he’d wished for thousands of times and which no amount of wishing could give him, tolerance and forbearance were available, if he wanted them enough. How much did he want them? Wasn’t there in every fairy tale a moment when the genie said, Choose carefully, for your wishes will be granted?

The Herald

Three rings band this tipped earth, and the Faroes lie just below the first. Latitude and light are its coordinates: the northernmost reach of daylight in December, and in June the southernmost reach of the midnight sun. Perched on the rim of the Arctic Circle with a view into perpetual night,
the islands at midwinter seem to be drifting north, loosed from their basalt moorings and drawn by every shard of iron buried in the hills toward the magnetic pole.

That minimal landscape—wave crests echoing the rise and fall of rocky earth—recedes to nothingness under the winter sky, whose vast and glittering territory is full of wonders. At these latitudes almost every star of the northern hemisphere is circumpolar, from Arcturus to Mintaka, the smallest piece of Orion’s belt. Each night the entire zodiac wheels round the horizon: Aries gives way to Taurus, Taurus to Gemini, Gemini to Cancer—a year’s worth of phases compressed into twenty-four hours.

And stars—such density, such numerosity rainbowed from translucent shadow-glow to heavy carmine, the pearl-spill of the Milky Way, implacable blue Polaris pointing north, though there is no farther north to go. These are the heavens as a child draws them: full-bodied planets, coronaed moon, the jet trails of meteors, and all the known constellations visible at once.

But a great silence and a great sorrow suffuse the night. The sky is a graveyard incalculably wide, dense with dead who never rest. Cold burnt-out husks still trace their sad trajectories above our heads, with endless movement but no vitality.

This clockwork universe has been for centuries a cause of wonder that tends to shift to gloom: too big to comprehend, immutable as nothing else in life, dazzling, distant, charted but unexplored, it is our only portion of eternity, and who can bear to contemplate eternity?

A boom and crackle woke Jonathan from a deep sleep one mid-December night. At first he thought he’d dreamed it. He got out of bed and opened the window. The night was clear black, cloudless, arched over the dark, sleeping village; the stars winked their unbreakable codes across the sky. He shut the window. A dream. But as he turned to get back
into bed, a movement flashed past his eye and the sound came again.

It was an enormous thunder that encompassed the night in a surround of rumbling, followed by a shredding noise—as though a piece of fabric miles long were being torn by giant hands. Above the village a patch of sky lightened briefly, pulsed yellow, then faded into dark.

Jonathan shivered, not only from cold. He felt queasy. Once in Italy he’d sat in a café while the earth quivered beneath his chair and his coffee cup rattled gently against its saucer; a similar uneasiness had gripped him then. It wasn’t fear exactly, more a sense of inconsequentiality, the nausea of having one’s limits so brutally pointed out.

Another boom, and this time the shredding took place within the booming. Jonathan got dressed and pulled a chair up to the window. Ringside seat at the great light show: he might as well be comfortable.

For the next ten minutes—which seemed a long time in his queasy, sleepy state—nothing happened. He sat there growing cold and disheartened, wondering if those three booms had signaled the end rather than the beginning of the performance. One pale glimmer: not an impressive display for a phenomenon whose very name had an aura of magic.

Jonathan had never seen the northern lights. The over-illuminated urban sky of Boston, the winter cloud cover of New England, the warm air of Mount Desert in August—all these had blocked his view or impeded their occurrence. He wanted to see them, and his desire had been fed by the fact that nobody who’d seen them could offer a good description. Not only that, the descriptions, lame as they were, contradicted each other. From a skier in his high-school class:
Real bright flat lightning;
from a skier in his Harvard class:
Orange lines up and down, with white dots in between;
from his father, who’d seen them from a troopship heading to England during the war:
Flashes, like flares, red, all over the sky
. Only his father had mentioned noise, and the noise he’d heard had been more like cannon shot than thunder. Each report concluded with the reporter shaking his head and saying,
I can’t describe them
.

So Jonathan perched on his chair, scanning the night for flashes, orange lines, and flat lightning. The night continued to be starry, silent, and immobile. And the longer he stared out, the flatter the sky seemed, until the stars were mere dabs of bright on an endless bolt of black cloth stretched taut, like a screen placed there to hide a living mystery that danced behind.

Without warning the sky moved—
shrugged
was the word that occurred to him, as though a person shook a heavy garment off his shoulders. What had been flat now buckled and rippled, and waves of noise cascaded across these movements: an anunciatory drumroll. The hair on his arms stood to attention. He put his head out the window; the air had a strange charge to it, a tang and sizzle that made him queasy again but also woke him thoroughly.

Then it began. The first vision brought him to his feet with amazement. A huge pale green curtain appeared above the village, billowing out and shimmering with yellow threads. Then the curtain was pulled eastward, revealing another, greener curtain beneath—and this went on an uncountable number of times, faster and faster. Simultaneously, to the west, a lozenge of white light pulsed and disappeared and at each reappearance grew larger and more detailed, until it had taken the form of an outstretched palm the color of a moon. The sounds accompanying all this ranged from whistling to popping to outright banging—as if the palm were smashing its way through a wall.

As suddenly as these sights had materialized they were gone, but the atmosphere remained peculiarly energetic. Jonathan was sure there was more to come. And as he sat down again to wait for the next event, a milky band drifted
across the sky, a cloud of light that mimicked dawn and put out the stars.

The band widened as it moved, until it was a ghostly valance above the entire sky. Soundless winds fluttered it, creased and released its pleats, gathered it into thicker folds. The night vibrated with a hiss that Jonathan could feel but not hear; when he concentrated on the noise it vanished or seemed to translate itself into an airy trembling.

Then the whole sky moved again and burst into brightness. Molten ice-white light scattered and rebounded off inert roofs, stones, windowpanes. The world beneath this glare was rigid, as sometimes it will clench under a bolt of lightning, braced against so much energy. And in the air, what had been insubstantial took on volume and depth. The filmy pale fringe high aloft lengthened and shuddered into three dimensions. Seconds before it had been a transparency laid on the dense dark background. Now energy gathered what it had dispersed as light and collected it into a sky-wide swag of sculpted drapery as smooth as marble yet rushing like a river—and that became reality. The stars, the village, the bowl of ocean were shadows and wraiths.

Then this drapery parted, pulled from both east and west, and there were whiter, more luminous spills parting already beneath, sweeping back from a foaming white heart that roiled in the center.

Jonathan looking into this pale vortex felt himself looking into the heart of space—a white core that receded back and back and commanded his eyes to follow. And the longer he looked into that cauldron of light the more convinced he became that he was looking at something—the one thing in the universe, probably—that was freed from time.

How else explain its contradictions? How could it be both fixed and moving? How could it simultaneously span the sky and blast a hole in the sky’s center? How drift dreamy white and cool across the world while boiling so fiercely that it devoured night?

It came to him first as a wisp of thought, as the aurora had first come, this notion that he was witnessing a dissolution of time. And then a jumble of ideas crowded his head, their clamor mirroring what he suddenly understood was going on above him.

This billowing, parting, drifting, closing, glowing, shining, deepening, and widening was not only out of sequence, it was out of the realm of sequence. This drapery was at every moment in all the conditions it could be, had been, or would be at all points in time—and time was no longer a chain of discrete states, one following another. It was a medium, like water or air, in which past, present, and future existed together.

And with a shock he realized he was as good as gone from here: from his seat by the window, from his sojourn in the Faroes, from his time on earth. For he would be leaving, that was certain. As even the northern lights were leaving; he saw them bleaching out under the stiff glitter of starlight. Were they disbanded, or had they just moved behind the shield of night?

He leaned out the window, straining his eyes to see around or past the stars and catch one more glimpse of incandescence. Nothing; the sky arched away into forever. But back of that night was light, he knew it; back of that silence, shards of bang and boom. And back of this life, this body—Jonathan shuddered. He was not prepared to go further.

Red Sky at Morning

Solstice midnight, dawn still ten hours away, and the sea in cold unbroken swells left trails of rime along the shores of Sandoy, where everyone was sleeping. The twenty milch cows of Sandur snored in their stalls, Jens Símun’s rooster settled deeper in his hay, sheepdogs on the thresholds of
bedrooms in Húsavík curled their tails over their noses; even the island’s hundred cats had left off late-night wandering to nestle underneath the stoves. And in their beds, dug into sleep like bears, the villagers dreamed of light as of another country, not knowing they had just crossed its border.

Out beyond the Faroe Bank, past Bailey’s Bank and Lousy Bank, where the sea floor drops and the North Atlantic Drift draws the Gulf Stream up to warm the Faroes’ feet, the whales were gathering. They shot their sweet call through the deeps until they were forty strong, then fanned out like geese behind their leader, headed north to feed. At the arctic waters of the Norwegian Sea they turned west; by the time they reached the ridge the Faroes ride, their school had doubled. And when they broke through the waves at the mouth of Húsavík Fjord, a hundred whales were spouting in the air.