Mothership Read online

  Once there I paid a little over two hundred dollars for a one-way bus ticket around the island. Get off in any town you want, explore, be both gawked at and ignored, then get on the next bus the next day to the next place.

  Not long before coming to Iceland I’d stopped wanting marriage. Not only with the woman I lived with, the woman I loved, but with the rest of them, too. I saw marriage in my lane and I swerved. While it’s true each family is unhappy in its own way, it seems like every married person’s complaints are the god-damn same. I had married friends, read novels and articles about the subject, and from what I could tell, that wedding band made you a member of one great, dull, secret society. I also hated the men my friends turned into once they married. Relentlessly horny for any woman besides their wives, seeming angry at their wives for having just one pussy that they’d be stuck fucking for the rest of their lives. I decided I’d rather be alone than so unhappy. Despite that change of mind, and all my bluster, it was me feeling sad and longing in Iceland. How many times had I called my ex before taking this trip? Too many to count. But she never picked up.

  I felt so sexy over there. I felt sexy everywhere, actually. My signature had carnal appeal. Also, the way I wore my wool hat, with the earflaps tied under my chin? Sexy. I’m not being self-deprecating in the slightest. Despite this feeling, I hadn’t been to bed with a woman since my breakup, so I felt like a light socket hidden behind the bookshelf.

  That was probably best though. Nothing worse than meeting a new woman and you’re still nurturing your heartache about the last one. What I hate are those people who can’t stand to be alone. They seem so weak. But of course that’s exactly the kind of guy I turned out to be, so the only way to get isolated was to run far, far away. Like Iceland.

  The problem with a trip like mine, and the reason I didn’t full-nelson the troll on the first day he started following me, was that I kept seeing the same people in different towns. There was a stumpy Italian couple that I must have greeted eighteen times in four days. There was a woman from who-can-say-where who became as uncomfortable around me as I eventually did around the troll. She and I just kept picking the same lifeless churches to visit, the same damn coffeehouses, until I must have seemed to own a map of her future engagements. I was constantly accidentally trailing her. Having gone through that made me sympathetic, so the troll got an untold number of rides sitting in a seat near me because I wanted to be fair, to be fair.

  At Lake Myvatn I camped in a long-cooled lava pool under a constant drizzle and occasional downpours. Inside my tent I read the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Egil’s Saga, an ancient Icelandic tale. To me both seemed like the myths of long-lost civilizations. I forgot the troll while I was there. Four days at Lake Myvatn and I never saw him.

  On a day when it was only lightly drizzling I rented a bike to get around the lake and, at one point, found a field of lava that had cooled into grotesque stacks. Enormous columns of petrified ash two stories high. There were little holes dug into them up near the top that resembled shelves. That’s where goblins slept, according to the old stories. When I walked into these endless fields they seemed to twist behind me. I imagined wandering forward until I found the Liege of the Goblins reclining on a throne made of sheep skulls. Would I run from him? I didn’t know, but part of me wanted to find out.

  I liked Iceland because they still had myths on their minds. Not that you’d find any younger people who’d admit to believing in goblins or dwarves or little people of any kind. They were too cosmopolitan, too modern, for that. And yet even the most skeptical refused to state their disbelief too loudly in a public place.

  After the camping trip was over and I climbed on the next bus to the next town, yeah, the troll was there. It was like he’d been sleeping in the hood of my jacket this whole time. I boarded the bus and he was already in a seat.

  When I passed him I tried to remember that woman I kept seeing from town to town. The troll was probably only doing his own gamboling through the country. Why be paranoid? It had nothing to do with me. But then he turned in his seat, looked directly at me, and didn’t turn away. It was me who flinched. I looked out my window, watched the bus driver tossing all our bags into the luggage bay.

  I wrote a postcard to the woman I’d almost married. The woman I hurt so much when I pulled away. In my note I described the guy who was following me, but then I decided I couldn’t mail the card. I’d been so sure I wanted to be alone, hadn’t I? Well, here I was, alone, and immediately I reached for her.

  Since the troll sat ahead of me, the driver reached him first to check tickets and ask for a destination so he could punch the card.

  “Breiddalsvik,” the troll croaked.

  His voice was even sleazier than his appearance. The way he whispered the name it sounded like he was about to crawl up the inside of the driver’s leg and bite him on the thigh. Ravenous and repellent, the rattling hiss of a crocodile. Good enough, though. The troll had a destination and it wasn’t mine. I was headed to Djupivogur and happily told the driver.

  But when we reached Breiddalsvik and the driver pulled over, the troll leaned his head into the aisle and said, “No, not here. Not yet.”

  The driver looked harassed but then kept on driving, both of us still on board.

  Our bus wove through sharp mountains. Big basalt cliffs with little plant life on them because winds eroded them too quickly to grow much. Sheep and cows grazed in meager fields.

  Finally we reached Djupivigor. Fishing village of four hundred. Four hundred and thirty-one once the bus parked.

  Couples disembarked. I took my pack from below the bus. The troll took his single hefty black bag. It was a good size but not enough to carry camping gear, sleeping bag, change of clothes, toiletries. Like mine. His was big enough to hold a human head, I thought. By now my thoughts were getting macabre.

  The only hotel in town was beside a tiny harbor. A small modern fleet of boats was moored in tidy rows at the other end of the harbor. Of the twelve vessels there, ten wouldn’t have fit more than four people. The last two were big, for tours to the island of Papey, famous for its puffins. The clumsy little birds with adorable faces and multicolored bills were the reason I’d stopped here. I wanted to eat one. Cooked, of course.

  I let the troll register first because I kept making the mistake of thinking that if I caught him in a lie it would be enough to stop his plans. I’d confront him, yell, You said you were getting off in Breiddalsvik, but you got off in Djupivigor! And he’d buckle under the weight of my keen observation. He’d screech then disappear back into the realm of haints and phantoms.

  “For one night,” he said to the young girl behind the desk. “Sleeping bag accommodations will do.”

  I was on the same plan. Iceland was expensive at this time, even here in the outer reaches. A single room was sixty dollars and wouldn’t be much better than a homeless shelter. Sleeping bag accommodations, a tiny cubicle with a cot and a shared bathroom, cost only twenty.

  My room was 8 and the troll’s was 9. When I went back later to try to switch to another, farther room, the clerk told me the rest had been reserved by a team of Norsemen off hulking around some unpronounceable mountain. Climbing it with their bare hands, probably. I was relieved. A hall of Vikings was enough company for me to feel safe, even if I was directly next door to the fiend. I waited all evening for them to come, as if they’d already agreed to have my back in case things went badly with the troll.

  But they never came. The next morning I asked the teenager at the desk, the same clerk as the night before, where the Norsemen had gone. She told my they’d slipped away. A tow rope gave out on their climb and they cascaded into a pyre of bones, flares, and ice axes. For a moment I imagined my troll scaling the heights of the mountain and snapping their secure lines just so no one would get between him and me.

  I went back to my room, feeling rattled. Afraid is more honest. I tried to sleep away the rest of the morning but really I just lay there li
stening for the sounds of the troll. From his room I heard throat clearing and much coughing. He’d hack so hard I swear I heard the wet tear of his trachea. Rolling around in his cubicle he bumped the wall more than once, and it felt like a taunt. I didn’t go out to the communal toilet and just peed in my room’s small sink. At some point I fell asleep.

  When I woke again I heard the troll in that communal bathroom. He was shaving at the sink. I was actually feeling terrible right then. Too lonely even for fear. I got out of my sleeping bag and soldiered into the bathroom, stood three feet away from the troll, and threw some bass into my voice.

  “Hey, look,” I began. “Are you following me?”

  “Yes.”

  What kind of boar’s hair was this guy growing? I heard the scratch of his razor running across his throat. It wasn’t some disposable either. An enormous contraption, it wasn’t electric. It looked like a settler-era plow. As it pulled across his pinkish skin the sound was a crackling fire.

  “Why are you following me?” This time when I spoke my voice had all the man knocked out of it. I almost whispered.

  “I’m going to kill you,” he said. There was still shaving cream on the right side of his face. “Then I’m going to eat your flesh and put your bones in my soup. I’ve done it to others and I’m going to do it to you.”

  “You really are?”

  “I am.”

  He stopped shaving but hadn’t turned to me this whole time. He only looked at my reflection in the bathroom mirror.

  I stumbled into the toilet. It was where my feet directed me. My room would’ve been more sensible, but it’s hard to be sensible when you hear a threat like that, so I went to the shitter instead. It had a full door so that I was on the inside and, at least nominally, safe from him.

  He went on shaving that prickly neck for fifteen minutes longer. Out of fright I had to pee, but was too scared to pull down my pants. The sound of metal on skin went on for so long that I thought he must be regrowing the hair he’d just cut.

  My hirsute pursuer eventually ran water in the sink and after that he came to the toilet door. He knocked as if I was going to open up for him.

  “Hello,” he said. “Hello?”

  I pressed my hands against the cool, blue concrete walls on either side of me. If he bashed through the door I was going to press myself up and kick him straight in the teeth and then do a backflip out the tiny window behind me. Sure I was.

  “Why be so afraid?” he whispered. “I could tear down this door right now, but I don’t want to be boorish. My name is Gorroon. When I come for you, you will know it. But, oh my, I can smell your blood from here.”

  Because of Gorroon I never saw the puffins. He left the bathroom, chuckling to himself, and eventually I stepped out of the stall. I rolled up my sleeping bag and supplies then went to the front desk to turn in my key. The teenage girl at the desk—the same one who’d checked me in, the one who’d told me about the Norsemen—was sad when I told her I was leaving without hitting Papey.

  “Have you been?” I asked her.

  “I haven’t,” she admitted. “But I’ve seen many puffins.”

  She had a dimpled, wide face and couldn’t have been more than seventeen. As she talked I leaned with my back against the front desk just to be sure Gorroon wouldn’t rush the lobby with a hatchet and surprise me.

  The girl’s work schedule was seven days a week, eight hours each day. When I commiserated, assuming she must be working that much because she was broke, she laughed and corrected me. “I like to be here,” she said. “What else would I do today? My husband is at home without a job.”

  “You’re married?”

  There was gold on the ring finger of her right hand, but you’d be excused for missing it. The metal was whiter than her skin, thin as thread. She was already married at seventeen, and at thirty I was still as single as a child.

  “Does everyone here get married so young?”

  “No, no. A lot of women have children and raise them alone. The father might live nearby, but not in the same home.”

  “We’ve tried that in the U.S.,” I said.

  “And what did you find?”

  “The boys all grow up to be crybabies.”

  She laughed. “How boring that must be for the women!”

  The bus arrived out front. A few passengers disembarked. Still I stayed at the desk with the girl. I realized there was something I wanted from her. Not sex. Maybe corroboration. I wanted to tell her about the troll, but it seemed too silly to say out loud. And yet this was a magical land. That’s what all the tourists were told.

  “Do your people really believe in elves and all that?” I asked.

  I wondered if I sounded desperate. If she’d laugh, or scold me for being a gullible foreigner. Instead she only sighed.

  “If you ever see one then you will have faith. If you never do then you won’t. It is the same here like it is anywhere. And both sides will never accept each other.”

  A fine point, really. One I would’ve been willing to accept at any other time in my life, but right then I wanted a direct answer.

  “But what do you believe?” I said. “Have you ever seen one?”

  Just then the bus driver grumbled into the lobby. He asked if there were any passengers getting on the bus. The girl patted my hand lightly then nodded at the driver.

  “There are two,” she said.

  The ride from Djupivigor to Skaftafell was three hours. I tried to write one more postcard to my ex, but there was an unsteadiness to the roads that showed up in my penmanship. Earlier I wanted to write asking for help, tell her about Gorroon. This time I was trying to write an apology. But the pen wouldn’t stay steady on the card. If I’d mailed it to her she wouldn’t be able to understand a word.

  We moved from the mountainous surroundings that I’d taken for granted into these ongoing fields of long-cooled lava. Evidence, on either side of the national highway, of an eruption that took place 640 years earlier. Old things here. The fields weren’t barren, but grown bright green, mossy puffy tufts.

  We stopped at the lake called Jokulsarlon, where the farthest end of a great glacier crumbled into colored hunks of ice. Even these fragments were three and four stories tall. Some blue, others white. This glacier had been moving, incrementally, for centuries, dragging across the land. The ice was packed with brown and black earth in varied zigzag patterns. Our bus parked for pictures. I was one of the first shooting from the shoreline. There was so much I never imagined I’d see in my life. How lucky I felt, just then, to witness this.

  Meanwhile Gorroon stayed near the bus.

  I wondered if he was afraid of the cold or getting too close to the glacier. How do you defeat a troll? Sunlight was supposed to be one method, but there was Gorroon smoking a cigarette by the bus, standing in direct sunlight. Should I put salt on his tongue? Make him say his name backward? If I knew a trick, I would have used it.

  Instead I just watched him. Gorroon didn’t even stare back at me now. He didn’t have to. We were past threats. His aggression was a promise. I understood he was going to grab me. A free-floating dread. Women know the feeling I’m talking about.

  Back on the bus we rode for another forty minutes until we reached a tiny white sign welcoming us to Skaftafell National Park. There wasn’t much to it. One building, a parking lot, campgrounds, and a mountain. We parked, I disembarked, rented a tent, and made camp. There were lots of folks doing the same—more of those aging European couples, as well as some Icelandic families. Too crowded a place for Gorroon to get me. I could sit out my time down there and stay safe, or I could go up the mountain and see what came.

  With the sun up twenty hours a day there was still a lot of time to climb. I started moving at 4:00 p.m. Rain stopped, the daylight was vivid. Foreign languages, heard as I passed a handful of tents, sounded profound around me.

  At the far end of the campground there was a well-established path that slipped onto the mountain, and once I was on it t
he land, the people behind me, dissolved. Buses in the parking lot, children calling to parents. Instantly there was only me.

  This trail wasn’t steep, it just went on for so long. I took pictures of waterfalls until I was sick of waterfalls. Soon the ground lost most of its grass. Just dirt and stones. Mostly stones. Walking on them made my ankles hurt. Another forty minutes and the pain had reached my knees.

  When I turned back I could see, far below me—even beyond the campgrounds—a hundred little streams, runoff, faint melt from the glacier behind this mountain, bleeding out to sea. They crossed each other playfully. I was watching them so closely that it took a few moments before I noticed the troll walking up the path. He was using a cane.

  His beard had grown. Down to his collarbone. His red scarf was tied below it. He didn’t wear a hat. The stick was small, but store-bought, redwood. He waved to me. He didn’t hurry. I turned toward the peak and went up that way. If I could have run I would have run, but my legs were aching.

  I didn’t come to Iceland for anything. Iceland came to me in a dream.

  And not one of my paranoid racism dreams that, me being black, occur at least once every twenty-eight days.

  I dreamt I was in the future. It didn’t look all that different from now, I just knew it was a later date. I was in New York. By the Gowanus Canal. Around me thousands of other black people wore yellow rain slickers because the day was overcast. We had boats. Or rather, boats were docked. Catamarans. Those cruiser types used for whale-watching tours. A hundred of them taxied up against the docks in Red Hook.

  Black people climbed on the catamarans to capacity. Once full, the boats went out to New York Harbor and from there the sea. Those of us on the shore cheered, and those on the ships excitedly waved back. No one carried suitcases, but I knew we were leaving America. Not being deported. Forget that. Choosing to go.