Painstaking screeching grouchy“Do what? Wander off to some unknown place to face God knows what to save men you have never met? You don’t know what to look for. You don’t even know their names.” Her voice was swollen with emotion. “Death Speaker is a playactor. You are not the Death Speaker, you are my . . .” she buried her head into her hands. I used to call your fjord SWALLOW FJORD because I was so fascinated by the poor foreign birds that came to Iceland by accident, having intended to go to a warmer place. How they dashed low and fast and turned so sharply over the tussocks, like fighter planes performing aerobatics, in their hunt for flies to eat. And could hardly stand on their feeble little legs. I found it nice to be able to tell this friend how I was doing every time he asked, though I had a hard time understanding how a twenty-three-year-old man could be so wise and such a good conversationalist. “This trip is voluntary,” Jackie Connolly said. “No one forced you to be here.” I pestered my parents to let me sail with you, but they didn’t listen. Everything I said was dispensed with as whining and nagging. It would have been so easy. We could have sailed together. I could have stopped for a week in Andey, and then gone back by myself. For me, being able to sail east seemed perfect, the epitome of prestige and bliss. I cried myself to sleep over never getting to go anywhere by ship except on that jog-trottingAkraborg over to Akranes. We were like lovers. We were holed up in that one room together for days on end like lovers, talking the long hours away. We shut the rest of the world out since the equilibrium we had chanced upon was so very fragile. At least, it was so very fragile to me. I was terrified of upsetting the balance, having spent my life upsetting the balance. But M. Deauville assured me that there was no such thing as a pattern that could not be broken. “Rangers are on the fringe of the army,” Murdo said, as if correcting him. “Shadow soldiers. What you see here,” he made a broad gesture that took in the room and the open door beyond, “is something else. Something just about the Conococheague Valley. Sometimes there must be more than words.” Your mo-hom has never stuck out her to-hongue at anyone, says Hei?ur in between bursts of laughter, distracted from steering the car out onto the highway. That friend of yours has had a little too much of something. I was singing in Bergen, he adds apologetically. I wouldn’t be worse off breaking my leg on the stairs. The other peons, too, now took off their hats, their tassels and straps touching the ground. Nothing. Then, just ahead, a dreamland for outdoor pee-ers. Sea stacks standing upright, only an outhouse-distance from the road. I can crouch behind one of them in a covert operation, make it an intricate bathroom wall. One night, Reggie decided to risk an argument. He said,“Forget about Keith for a minute. Think of the girl. She’d love it out here. She’d love Genie. You could show her how to ride.” I doubled back down the avenue and ducked around the old tower to Mrs Reid’s apartments. Through the gap in her curtains I saw her sitting at her kitchen table with a magazine, feeding chocolate digestives into the slot of her mouth like documents into a shredder. Larney had claimed her as a distant cousin, an allegation she denied, although everyone from the village was related to everyone else. You weren’t a real local unless your mother was from your father’s side of the family. I don’t know how to start.. |