20

The snow had diminished to freezing mist. Einar handed me the wooden bowl, hacked the driver’s door free of ice, and retrieved the jumper cables.

“I hope I won’t need them. But it’s a long way if we have any car problems.” He tossed the cables into the backseat, took the askur, put it into the storage area at the rear of the car, and covered it with the mat. “Phew! That stinks.”

He slid into the driver’s seat. I kept the shovel, braced to bash him if he looked at me cross-eyed, but Einar was too busy cursing to notice.

“Piece of shit. The defroster never works. And the wipers. And the heat.”

He started to drive, sticking his head out the side window until the defroster thawed a fist-size spot on the glass. There wasn’t much traffic, and no cops. I found myself compulsively counting headlights, something else crank is good for. When we got beyond the city limits, I counted streetlights, then houses, and finally lava formations. After a while I counted just formations that resembled human beings. A lot of these had extra heads or too many limbs or not enough. When it came to hallucinating, this country met you more than halfway.

Away from the city, the night sky cleared. The car’s heat finally kicked in, and I relaxed somewhat. Einar wasn’t much for small talk, which was fine by me. He stared fixedly out the window, his jaw set and expression grim.

“I should have called the police,” he said once. “The askur—I should have taken it to them right away. If I did that…”

“Forget about it.”

A glow appeared on the horizon—another city. Then the glow burgeoned into a silver dome and finally into a disk so brilliant it was like a hole punched in the sky: If you put your eye to it, you’d see through to a place that would blind you. I stared at it, amazed. “I’ve never seen a full moon like that.”

“Yeah, it’s beautiful,” said Einar. “Morsugur—that’s what they call it in old Icelandic. The moon that sucks the fat from your bones.”

We drove for hours. I felt exhilarated, invincible, more intensely awake than I’d been in my entire life. In the moonlight I could see for miles, all the way to the ocean if I tried, though we were headed away from the coast, toward the highlands. All the bad shit that had come down since I left New York sloughed away. Anton, Ilkka, Suri, Baldur were just names in a newspaper, and who reads newspapers anymore? I pushed away the memory of what was in the carved bowl behind me, glimpsed Ilkka’s white face in the moon, and looked past it to the mountains, leviathans breeching a silver sea. I shut my eyes and saw Ilkka’s phantom novas blooming in the darkness, dead faces more beautiful than they ever had been in life.

It is easier for me to let them go, knowing that you have seen them.

I thought of Quinn, of how his presence had irradiated the city for me thirty years before, imbuing it with a dark glamour that still clung long after Quinn had gone, long after the city itself had become a husk inhabited by the hip and the dead.

Now I gazed at an otherworldly landscape that Quinn had come to haunt as well, his scarred face gazing at me from the sky overhead and the scarified landscape below. Paved roads had long ago surrendered to gravel tracks that disappeared into a desert of snow-covered lava. Black spires like a forest of charred trees blotted out the stars near the horizon. I craved light, staring at the moon until my eyes ached, and finally sank into my seat with the shovel between my knees. I took a swig of vodka and held the bottle out to Einar. He shook his head.

“Takk, nei.”

I swallowed another mouthful. “So were you into black metal, too? That’s what you were listening to back there, right?”

“Yeah, sure. Mostly I listened when I was young. Sometimes, like tonight, I like to hear it. I have to be in the mood.”

“And that mood would be…?”

“It’s very cathartic. But black metal—its day has passed. The bands now are posers, just trying it on. Some bands I can still listen to. Enslaved. Emperor is always good. And Christ Beheaded. But that’s all just nostalgia for when I was young.”

I contemplated nostalgia for a band called Christ Beheaded. As someone who recalled the Exploding Mountbattens, I decided not to comment. I reached into my bag to grab one of the cassettes I’d nicked from Ilkka’s place.

“Here, play this. It’s … I dunno…” I tried to make out the handwriting in the moonlight. “Nuclear Holocausto. Do you know them?”

“Yeah, sure. Beherit, a Finnish band. He’s their guitarist and singer.”

He inserted the tape and cranked the volume. As a surge of feedback and growls shook the car, Einar pounded the dashboard with excitement.

“I saw them do this with the pigs’ heads on the stage. It was amazing! Nuclear Holocausto drank blood!” He glanced at me. “Most women don’t like this. Gilda, she hates it.”

“It’s okay.” I cracked my window, hoping the din might disperse, like smoke. “Do you know a band called Viðar?”

“Of course. That’s my brother’s band.”

I sat up, stunned. “You’re kidding.”

“No, it’s true. They were never a real band; they never toured. They were the house band at a club in Oslo. Forsvar. Jonas and two of his friends who were over there for a while—they did that one album together. Then they split up. A guy named Hallmar, he still lives in Reykjavík. I forget the other guy. The owner gave them money to go into a studio.” He frowned. “That album’s very rare—only a few hundred copies. I don’t even have one. Jonas played it for me when I visited him that first time; they’d just recorded it, and he was so excited. How did you hear of them?”

“I’m not your grandmother. I hear stuff.” I punched the eject button and removed the cassette, found another, and squinted at the label. “This looks like it says Impaled Nazarene.”

“Ah, they’re great!” Einar grabbed the tape and shoved it into the player. “More Finns. The Finns are demented, you know.”

I tried to pretend the noise pouring from the stereo was something more pleasant, like maybe a plane crash. Outside stretched an expanse of rock flensed of any vegetation, even moss or lichen. Wind-carved snow formed waves beneath craggy overhangs; ice bridges spanned crevasses and slabs of stone smooth and sheer as though planed by infernal machinery. Frozen waterfalls cascaded from spars of rock the color of a scorched rose.

For as far as I could see, in every direction, we were the only living things. Nothing moved except for eddies of snow and the black grit thrown up by the Land Rover’s wheels. It was inconceivable to me that people would ever have chosen to set foot on a landscape that looked as though it had been tortured, set aflame, and burned till nothing remained but cinders and slivers of bone. The moon seemed a more likely habitation. I hadn’t seen another car in hours. I turned to Einar.

“Where are we?”

“Hvergi. ‘Nowhere.’” He tapped the wheel in time with the staccato drumming. “Hundreds of years ago a few homesteads were here beside the rivers. The ruins are still here. Outlaws lived here; you can read about them in the sagas. If you could survive in this wilderness for twenty years, you could return to your farm. Now hikers come in the summer, sometimes; it’s only a few weeks, and there can be snow in August. But no one lives here except my brother.”

A sign loomed out of the night, marking a gulley between ridges of snow on a rising plain between two vast plateaus, ghostly blue and lunar white.

OFÆR! IMPASSABLE!

“That’s if you don’t have a four-by-four,” said Einar as the Range Rover dove into the gulley. “We go everywhere.”

“What are those mountains?”

“The big one’s Langjökull.” He pointed to the one on the left. “And that’s Hofsjökull. They’re glaciers.”

“No shit. I never saw a glacier.”

Wind-carved hollows in the snow revealed scabbed turf and funnels of ice. In the distance, plumes of white smoke streamed toward the horizon. The Range Rover slowed to a crawl and turned onto a plain where two frozen ruts stretched into the moonlit night. Once I thought I glimpsed a light shining within the white smoke, but it disappeared before I could determine if it was a house or vehicle or falling star.

“Are we close?”

“Nei. Not for a while.”

I let both sides of Impaled Nazarene play out. I was afraid of silence, even more afraid that the radio would find nothing but static. When the cassette clicked back to side one, I ejected it and stuck in the remaining tape.

“This band’s called Blot.”

I hoped the monosyllabic name meant they’d represent Ilkka’s progressive metal side—Can, Gong, Tool, Blot. Instead there was about a minute of hiss, followed by the indistinct drone of conversation, bottles clinking, heavy metal on the stereo—Metallica’s “The Thing That Should Not Be.” A party.

“Shit. Someone taped over it.” I hit fast-forward. Metallica had now been turned off. I could hear the voices more clearly but couldn’t understand them. A party. “What are they saying?”

Einar shook his head. “I don’t know. Listen.”

Men’s voices. An argument. Shouting. A woman laughed. There was a cacophony of breaking glass, furniture being overturned, curses.

Then a man’s voice rose above the others, angry at first, then wheedling, as though he argued with someone who refused to respond. His tone grew increasingly desperate and abruptly gave way to an anguished scream.

“What the hell is that?” I looked at Einar. He didn’t return my gaze but stopped the Range Rover and sat listening while the engine idled. The taped screams became so frantic that I found myself clutching the door handle. “Jesus Christ, it sounds like they’re killing him.”

“Shut up.”

Einar turned the volume as high as it would go. His face grew taut. I knotted my hands in my lap, straining to hear a second man’s voice, guttural, reciting a monotonous refrain. Not chanting; more like he was talking in his sleep. As the screams grew fainter I heard a muffled cry and the sound of someone vomiting, then a raspy, panting breath that went on, unbearably, for several minutes.

Then silence.

My mouth was too dry to speak. I reached for the eject button, but Einar knocked my hand away. He snatched the tape from the deck, turned on the overhead light, and stared at the label.

“What was that?” I tried to grab the tape from him. “Blot—whose fucking band is that?”

“Shut up!” He jabbed the cassette at my face. “Where did you get this?”

“I found it—”

“Where?” He grabbed my hair. “Where did you find this?”

“Helsinki! Someone’s house.”

He stared at me, his pupils shrunken to pinpricks by the overhead light.

“You stupid cunt,” he said, and slammed my head against the windshield.