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Article Excerpt
THE FIRST TIME THEY MET, the Viking--ice-blue eyes, tangled red beard, arms like hairy cables--strode out of a wintry dusk and right through Eric Mumford, shattering the globe of silence that enclosed him.
For an instant Eric felt penetrating cold, inhaled a smell like an elephant house, heard the ka-thump of a single heartbeat and the crunch of a heavy footfall in a pile of dirty snow. Then the Viking was gone, his broad leather-clad back vanishing down a battlemented wall, across a wooden footbridge, and through a narrow doorway into a massive stone tower.
But that's impossible, Eric thought. Not seeing a Viking--he'd been doing things like that since he was seven. But in all his visions he'd never heard a sound or sniffed an odor. He felt like a moviegoer of the Twenties, accustomed to the gesticulating phantoms of the silent screen, suddenly awakening to the fact of sound. But even that moviegoer wouldn't have inhaled Theda Bara's scent or felt Valentino's hot breath.
In the small, musty den of the row house Eric shared with Chris, he lay still for a while, puzzling over his experience. Then his alarm clock beeped, and he heard Chris in the kitchen down the hall, rattling plates--making breakfast for herself, but of course not for him.
The world that is sometimes called real engulfed him. Same old wife, he thought wearily. Same old life. Yawning, grunting, scratching his scalp and backside, Eric disentangled himself from his unwashed sheets and stumbled out of bed to confront another lousy day.
At Pocatelli's Pasta Garden on Fell's Point the lunchtime crowd turned the place to bedlam. Yet even when he was hustling trays, reciting the specials, appeasing obnoxious customers, getting yelled at by the chef and yelling back, Eric's mind kept going over last night's experience. What exactly had happened, and above all, why?
That evening he brushed his teeth in the little blue-painted downstairs bath he shared with a lively community of small roaches and went to bed as usual on the futon in the den. In the bedroom over his head, Chris was phoning one of her girlfriends, telling her loudly what a rat he was and how unlike Lord Vyvyan Gyles in a romance novel she was reading called The Mistress of Hardcastle. And, thought Eric, probably showering her sheets with cookie crumbs and drops of spilled gin, her usual bedmates ever since he ceased to be.
Then his eyes closed, and without any sense of transition he was back on the castle wall.
Alas, the Viking wasn't. Eric hovered inside his usual bubble, hearing and feeling nothing. His immaterial state allowed some crisp snowflakes to pass through him, drifting and spinning. Thirty feet or so away, bearded men-at-arms wearing clumsy wool mittens and ratty-looking cloaks shivered and rubbed their hands over a smoky fire in a black iron bucket. In the fields beyond the castle, dun-colored peasants gleaned the last stalks from the dun-colored earth.
God, how boring the Dark Ages were. Almost as bad as Baltimore.
He awoke in a gelid predawn. Chris was rattling dishes in the kitchen. He stumbled out of bed and went to work. He came home in the wintry twilight, watched the Ravens lose a game on TV, and returned to bed. A week passed, the days falling one by one with the sullen iteration of a dripping faucet. He and Chris had two more fights. He accused her of entertaining other men while he was at work and called her a sleazy slut; she denied the charge and called him a fool, a failure, and a faggot. He threw a lamp at her. She threw a plate at him. Neither connected.
Every night he went back to the wall, where absolutely nothing happened either. It rained or didn't rain, snowed or didn't snow. He might as well have tuned into a ninth-century weather channel.
Then, one otherwise forgettable Tuesday morning, Eric lurched off the futon as usual, only to discover a painful bruise on his right knee. Where'd I get that? he wondered. It hadn't been there the night before. His telephone lay on the floor, mournfully beeping. The familiar, battered furniture of the den had been randomly pushed around, and the ratty pale carpet bore damp footprints. When he stepped on one, his foot covered the print precisely.
Shaking his head, Eric staggered loowards, only to find the shower curtain pulled loose and water still trickling in the stall. Baffled, he washed sketchily, dressed, and was heading for the front door when he encountered Chris in the foyer. As a rule, they said as little as possible to each other, especially in the morning. But today she stated--in a screechy voice that was particularly hard on his nerves--that she intended to report his vandalism to Barton U. Scheisster, the lawyer who was handling her divorce.
Eric naturally inquired what vandalism she was referring to.
"You knocked over that antique table in the upstairs hall, the one Aunt Mae gave me. Two legs are broken."
"I never went upstairs last night."
"Oh, can it. After the crash woke me up, I was lying there in the dark listening, pretty scared if you want to know the truth, and I heard you running into things. Drunk again, I suppose. Then you started talking out loud--babbling like an idiot. I ran to the bedroom door and opened it and switched on the light just in time to see that ratty old Dortmunder Beer T-shirt you sleep in disappearing down the stairs."
"You were so soused on gin last night you probably broke that crappy little table yourself."
"Lying jerk."
"Boozy bitch."
On that affectionate note, they parted.
Eric's journey to Fell's Point, always dreary, became drearier as he admitted to himself that he'd turned into a sleepwalker. Worse, his stressed-out personality had fractured into components that knew nothing of each other's doings--which sounded like a formula for lunacy. He was no longer merely an unhappy schmuck, he was now an unhappy nutcase as well. Brooding thus, he arrived at Pocatelli's, where another workday began.
That evening he pub-crawled home through the sleaze of Greenmount Avenue, pausing now and then to down a few Dortmunders and reject the advances of a couple of fat old whores.
In the last bar on his itinerary, a dreggy hole that smelled vaguely like puke, companioned only by three other isolated men and a bartender perusing a racing form, he succumbed to meditation. Usually Eric avoided thinking about the toilet his life had fallen into. But there were times, like now, with some brews in his belly and absolutely nothing to do, when he found himself asking that most depressing of all questions, Where did Igo wrong?
Maybe, he thought, with his very first vision, back when he was a child. That was when his inner life began the long, slow task of transforming him into a...
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