Dustin Long - Icelander

Roger patted him on the back and whispered something in his ear before taking a quick bow and hopping from the stage.

“Hello,” the man mumbled in a strange accent; his voice was hardly audible though he bobbed his head toward the microphone as he spoke. “Er… Well, I suppose you can start the music now.”

After a moment of quiet static crackle, a 2/4 drumbeat began to pulse from hidden speakers while the synthetic approximation of a plucked string instrument arpeggiated over it, back and forth between the dominant and tonic of some minor key. A faint trace of bass lingered thumping in the background, too, and—following a few introductory bars—the man joined his voice to it all in a startlingly strong tenor. Thus was Liutbold the Kind launched on his long journey through a day of strange synchronicities and personal revelations. Not the standard set of heroic deeds, but eccentricity was probably the ballad’s greatest strength. Angus sat listening with cocked head and hanging jaw.

“It’s wonderful,” he whispered after a few reverent seconds.

“See, I thought you’d like it.”

“Ah truly dae,” he replied, reaching over the table as if to clap me on the shoulder, though I shied away enough that he couldn’t quite reach me—I didn’t feel like a shoulder clap just then. My unexpected movement threw him a bit off balance, and he almost knocked my beer over as his hand came down on the table. “Ah’m sorry ah doubted ye even fir an instant.”

I saw that my glass was cold, still full, and wet with condensation, so I grabbed a handkerchief from my jacket behind me to wipe it down before I took a long draught.

“Back tae the subject ay Shirley’s Hamlet , though,” Angus said suddenly, though his eyes were still upon the stage. “Ah interrupted ye earlier; ye were saying aboot hoo she wis nearly done with it… Trying tae get it published, ah believe ye mentioned. But tell me everything. Did she ivir show ye her drafts? An were they actually any guid?”

He wasn’t going to let this go, I realized, and it was then that I began to believe my paranoid suspicions must indeed be correct. After a pause I answered him.

“All right, then,” I said. “If you want to get right into it…” I suddenly noticed that I was really starting to feel a bit drunk, even though I’d only had four beers, which normally wouldn’t have been nearly enough to buzz me.

“Is this a sore subject fir some reason? We are here tae discuss Shirley, are we nae?”

I sighed. He looked exactly the same as when I’d first seen him.

“All right,” I answered, finally resigning myself. “I see you’re ready, so let’s just do this.” I wanted to get this over with while I was still a little sober. “I never saw Shirley’s version of Kyd’s Hamlet ,” I told him.

The only complete piece of Shirley’s work that I’d ever read, in fact, was an epic poem that she’d written in miniscule longhand across the sides of the stalls in the Hrothgar’s ladies’ room. It was called “The Hysteriad: A poem written by a woman, about women, and in a womanly space,” and—according to Shirley—it was a reaction to the “oppressively masculine space” of Hrothgar’s main dining hall, dominated as it was by the phallic central pillar and where not a single heroine could be found among the myriad heroes of the karaoke song-list.

She’d written the poem about four years earlier, which was impressive if only for the fact that Roger remained ignorant of its existence. Because he most definitely would have had it painted over if he’d heard even vague rumors of what it contained. But apparently no one had blabbed, since the poem was still there. It had grown, even, as four years worth of women had added their commentary between Shirley’s widely spaced lines. Some of the comments were complimentary and others were critical, but I suspect that Shirley had been happy just to have started a dialogue.

It would be a betrayal of the poem to summarize its content outside of its context, but to say the least I was amazed. I hadn’t expected to like it, but I did. I marveled at the musicality of it, as well as its humor and the depth of thought that it displayed. Somehow, before reading it, I’d always written Shirley off as untalented, solely on the basis of her self-admitted pretension. But the poem was actually good. The pretense was justified.

I, however, had come to the point where I couldn’t justify my own pretense any longer.

“I never saw Shirley’s version of Kyd’s Hamlet ,” I told him. “She did, however, tell me a fair amount about the other one…”

“Other ane? Other whit? Other Hamlet ?” he asked. “Ah cannae say ah’m at aw certain whit ye mean.”

“You know exactly what I mean.” Onstage, the singer had slipped out of his jacket and draped it over the song machine. He was just coming to the funeral sequence. “I really thought you were dead, you know, and so I figured that it couldn’t be you. That you couldn’t be him, and that it was safe to like you again… But what should I call you, now, anyway? I’m definitely not going to keep calling you Angus.”

His face was contorted in an admirable display of confusion.

“Jist whit are ye driving at, poppet?” He said it softly, through the corner of his mouth. “Mist ye ay speak in riddles? But we’ll have nae more ay this ‘Mr. O’Malvins’ malarkey, if thah’s whit yir suggesting; ah tellt ye earlier thah yir tae caw me Angus an nowt besides.”

“No. I’m not going to give you the honor of that name anymore. I’m sorry, but I just never wanted to believe it was you.”

“Ye nivir—” he began, turning his eyes to the stage.

“I mean, I guess some part of me has always known, sort of,” I interrupted. “But I’ve always liked you when you called yourself Angus… What happened between you and Shirley in Denmark, though… I guess that’s what finally made me—” I broke off midsentence and tried to focus on him through my bleary eyes. “I can’t believe you could be so hideous!” I spat. “I can’t believe that you could do that to her and then be so vain as to—”

His eyes remained on the stage.

“So I’m not going to call you Angus,” I said, decisive. “The person I called Angus would never have done that. And he wouldn’t have killed her just because… Why, because she confronted you about it and shattered your illusions that it was anything other than what it was?”

My eyes were already bleary from drunkenness, but now I was beginning to cry.

“You’ve given me a wide array of other names to choose from, though, haven’t you?” I said. “Leshio and Lorenz, those were both you… And oh yeah—just who’s this ‘Mutt’ Sanders, anyway?”

“You’re starting to slur, my dear. Perhaps you had best—”

“Fine,” I interrupted. “I suppose Surt will have to do, then.”

He sighed. “Do you even appreciate the fact that I did this all for you?” he muttered, not looking at me. “Admittedly, I also benefited; I haven’t had a worthy adversary since your mother died. But you’ve been floundering, my dear. And I have given you meaning.”

He watched the stage in silence for a few seconds longer, his jaw slack in the semblance of awe; when he turned to me, though, it was with his most malicious grin. His teeth were as white as snow, and he was just staring at me; it seemed like forever.

For a second, then, in his silence and the strangeness of everything, I forgot what we’d just been talking about. The singer had come to the tavern scene, now, and in order to describe the burly bartender he dipped into an implausibly resonant baritone. I was astounded at the transformation, and I turned to him, my blunted senses focused almost exclusively on the pleasurable vibration of my eardrums for the rest of that second. For the first time, I was really beginning to understand the appeal of this song. And then, in the next second, I was somewhere else entirely.