Dustin Long - Icelander

“Now, I’ll be right back,” I told them, and I headed down the hall.

“So, you discovered Vanaheim…” I heard Dr. Lorenz say as I closed the study door behind myself. Without a moment’s hesitation, then, I proceeded to the passage, up the spiral staircase, finally toward whatever secret Our Heroine had to hide.

“So…” I said, trying to hide just how uncomfortable I was sitting in a steampool with this woman I didn’t know.

“Thus,” the woman replied. Her voice was quiet, like she was content to just sit there in silence, but she looked me in the eyes when she spoke. Inquiringly.

I glanced around us at the lichen growing on the walls and beneath the water. It was sparser and dimmer than the stuff that had covered the ceiling outside the Temple, and I wondered if it might be some other species that just imitated the ormolu.

Her bra and panties were black. I figured this meant that they wouldn’t be too transparent—and there wasn’t much light to shine through anything, anyway—but I was trying not to look. She was still looking at me, though, pupils wide, when I turned my eyes back toward hers.

“This feels pretty good,” I said, finally. “I hadn’t realized just how cold I was.”

She didn’t answer but just leaned back in the natural seat formed by the rocks around her and closed her eyes. I tried closing mine, too, but the heat just made me feel dizzy, so I immediately opened them up again.

“Whoa.” I yawned then, but I wasn’t feeling tired. It just felt good to breathe deeply. So I yawned again. I realized I probably wasn’t getting enough oxygen, keeping my gut sucked in.

The air was heavy with steam, too, and I let my head nod. Rolled it around on my neck, trying to loosen up. It was hard to make out the shape of the cave around me as my eyes moved over it; it was hard to tell how far away the walls were. When I looked back down at my belly, though, I noticed that the green glow from the lichen was playing on my skin from all different angles, and it made these weird patterns as it refracted through the water… Reverse shadow puppets, and I could kind of control them by tapping my fingers on the steam-pool’s surface like it was a typewriter. I started in home row and tried spelling out some words. “Reyklaug.” “Spectral.” “Kaleidoscopic.”

“Is there supposed to be some buried meaning in that pattern of words?” the woman asked. “Because I’m afraid I fail to find any surface meaning in it whatsoever.”

I looked up at her. She was staring me in the eyes again, and I realized that I must have been speaking the words aloud.

“No. I was just babbling,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

She was scrutinizing me pretty closely, I realized.

“Are you feeling completely well?” she asked.

“Hmm. Yeah, you know. Just dandy. I guess I am feeling a little light-headed, though, now that you mention it. But is that necessarily a bad thing?” I laughed.

I noticed suddenly that I could make out the shapes around me a lot more clearly than I’d been able to only a few moments before. Apparently my eyes were adjusting.

“So, are you quite positive that you didn’t follow me here from Denmark?” she asked, distracting me.

“What? No, I already told you that. Why would I follow you?”

“For what purpose, then, did you come here?” Her pupils were really large and black, and she was sitting up again, leaning toward me… Almost hovering above me, even. I might have cowered a little.

“Um… I just wanted to visit, I guess.” I took a deep breath and blew it out. I was feeling really alert all of a sudden. I could feel the steam loosening up the phlegm in my lungs, and I breathed forcefully in and out a few more times. “Man, I don’t even want a cigarette,” I said, and I coughed emphatically.

“Well, that’s fortuitous, I suppose, as I don’t have any to offer. Yet you still haven’t really answered my question, have you? What impetus set you upon your path? Why did you come here? Concentrate, now.”

“Geez, I don’t know… No, wait. I do. Part of the reason that I wanted to come here, I guess, was that—while I was in Denmark—I started reading a lot of Magnus Valison novels. And he talks about this place quite a bit. No. He writes about this place quite a bit. I don’t know what he talks about. I’ve never even talked to him.”

“Hmm… Well, you should give it a try; he’s a skilled conversationalist. I can’t truthfully say that I care much for any of his novels—at least not since Dora, or Dara [35] Dora, or Dara: A Family Romance , published in 1970, was one of the Master’s greatest novels prior to the Memoirs . —but he is an entertaining person with whom to speak.”

“You don’t dig the Memoirs ? Why not? I thought they were great. Like Tony the Tiger. Grrreat!”

“That’s irrelevant to the conversation at hand. Besides which, I don’t believe it would be very fruitful for us to argue tastes…”

“Mmm. I like that. The taste of fruit. Peaches.”

She gave me a funny look. “So that’s really the only reason you came here, then? Because you read some Valison novels?”

“Yeah, I swear. I thought they were amazing. All deep and shit. So why don’t you like them? I don’t want to argue tastes, I just really want to know. Because you’re crazy for not liking them. Or maybe dumb. But, no, you don’t seem dumb.”

“Well, fine. If you really need some way to rationalize opinions that you find unfathomable, I’ll give you one; Emily Bean was a staunch feminist.”

I didn’t follow, and the look on my face must have conveyed this.

She sighed before continuing. “So. Based on this fact, I don’t believe that she would have been very pleased with the utterly masculine structure of Magnus Valison’s novels. At least the ones that he wrote about her. They’re all built around the traditional Western narrative paradigm of the male sexual experience… The slow build up to an orgasmic climax… I suspect Emily would have preferred him to render her story in a more concave, feminine manner.”

“Okay, but what would that be? I mean, how is the female sexual experience so different from the male one?”

“Well, I presume that you have had sex?”

“Well, sure, yeah… And, I mean, I know it’s different but… Well, please go on. I have nothing productive to add.”

“Well, in order to put it in concrete terms, let me describe to you the choices that I would have made, had I been the one to adapt her diaries.”

“Shoot.”

“Okay, first of all, I would have shaped the stories such that they culminated climactically, but I would not have allowed that climax to be the sole focus of the book. I’d concentrate more on the full process of the act of love—figuratively speaking, of course—and less on the orgasm itself. With less of an ejaculatory, post-coital let down, as well… Ideally, then, I would leave the reader turned on with a few unresolved strands that might lead to further climax upon intense reflection of the experience. More negative space. What is not said placed on a level of equal importance with what is said. The suggestive… And perhaps some form of narrative cuddling afterward.”

“Huh. Interesting… But, oh yeah. The other reason is that I got into a fight.”

“Pardon?”

“I’m sorry. But you were asking me earlier about why I came here. And that’s the other reason. I read some Magnus Valison novels, and I got into a fight. An argument, actually. But I was totally right, and she was totally wrong.”

“I see.” It came out sounding like a sigh.

“I was stupid, and I just took off without settling things with the person I fought with, though. So I should probably go back, you know? I think she’s still there. But, yeah, that’s part of why I came here. I’m sorry, though. You were saying something… Why did you come here?” I stretched my arms out and accidentally let my stomach expand, but I quickly sucked it back in. It felt really good to stretch, though, and I yawned again.