“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.
r /> 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.
“East off Húsavík.” Sigurd was huffing. “A two-man boat saw them.” He sat briefly in the chair opposite Jonathan and popped up again, circling the linoleum in his heavy boots. “An hour ago—they saw them an hour ago!” He was as near to frantic as Jonathan had ever seen anyone in these islands.
“You’re sure you don’t want coffee?” He lifted the pot a second time.
“There’s no time for coffee.” Sigurd snatched the pot from Jonathan’s hands and clanked it in the sink. “Get your boots.”
“Can I just finish this cup?”
“I’ll get them.” Sigurd ducked into the hall closet and clattered around.
“They’re here,” Jonathan called. “They’re by the stove.” Trying to enter into the spirit of the moment, he gulped his coffee and grabbed his boots. “I’ve got them,” he reported to Sigurd, who was still tangled up in the closet. “They’re on,” he added. Getting no response, he stepped into the hall; no sign of Sigurd. He opened the front door in time to see Sigurd bounding up Petur’s steps. He took the coffeepot out of the sink and poured himself another cup.
He hadn’t drunk half of it before Sigurd blasted back into the kitchen with Heðin behind him.
“Hah,” said Heðin. “No time for coffee. Let’s go.”
Jonathan stood up.
“Bring your slicker,” said Heðin. And to Sigurd, “Have you got the knives?”
Sigurd nodded and made a last circle around the kitchen while Jonathan tugged the slicker over his heaviest sweater. “Are we ready?” Sigurd asked. Heðin, scuffing the floor like a horse pawing the dirt, watched Jonathan fumble with his snaps. “Leave it, leave it,” he said. He flung the door open and led them out.
They piled into a rusted-out Dodge Dart that sat idling a few feet from Petur’s door: Sigurd in the driver’s seat, Jonathan squeezed in the middle, knocking into the gearshift, Heðin holding on to the roof through the open window.
“Can you shut that window?” Jonathan asked. It was early still, about nine-thirty, and dark and cold.
“Can’t,” Sigurd said. “Door opens.”
“What?”
“I’ve got to hold the door shut like this,” said Heðin.
Jonathan sighed and finished snapping his slicker.
They were heading out the eastern road that crossed the mountain separating Skopun and Húsavík. As they neared the crest of the hill, the car slowed to a heaving, whining pace. Up at this height, the land was barren; it lay in gray, frost-edged slabs around them, drained of even the brown that tinged the turf around the village. And then they drove into a cloud, so dense Sigurd turned on the wipers. Heðin began to sing, “Noregis menn, dansið vœl.”
Norsemen, dance well, Jonathan translated to himself, then asked, “What’s that song?”
“Sigmund’s Kvœði. We sing it after the grind.”
“Don’t sing it yet,” s
aid Sigurd. “Ah, look.” He stopped the car.
They had cleared the cloud and reached the top, and below stretched the long finger of Húsavík Fjord. Staining the sky all around the horizon, the sun rose tomato red out of the ocean. All three men smiled. It was the time of year when the mountain obscured the sun till nearly noon in Skopun, and for weeks they had seen only an exhausted star already on the wane.
“Good, a red sun,” said Sigurd.
“Why is that good?” Jonathan asked.
“Much blood,” said Sigurd.
Jonathan gulped. He had so far put out of his mind what was awaiting them in Húsavík. He decided to change the topic. “We have a saying in America: Red sky at night, sailor’s delight, red sky at morning, sailors take warning.”
“We have it too,” said Heðin. “It’s about fish, though, not whales.”
“Fish? I thought it was about weather.”
“Fish, weather, what’s the difference?” Sigurd snapped the car on again, popped into neutral, and began coasting down the hairpin turns.
Sigurd was a remarkably bad driver, jamming the brakes on in the middle of curves, grabbing at the wheel and wrenching the car dangerously close to the boulders and cliffs that edged the road. He seemed, though, to be having fun, smiling and drumming his hand on the dashboard in time with Heðin, who was still humming the dirge-like tune of the kvœði. Jonathan was cold, getting hungry, and nagged by a sense of having forgotten something important. As they reached the outskirts of Húsavík, he realized what it was: his notebook.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Yah, we’re going to have a good Christmas this year,” Sigurd said. “A Christmas grind—that’s very nice. Whale and spik on Christmas eve.”
“I forgot my notebook,” Jonathan couldn’t believe he’d done this.
“There’s no time to write at a grind,” said Heðin.
“You write too much anyhow,” Sigurd put in. “You’re always walking around writing. You could make the Encyclopedia Britannica of the Faroes by now.”