Beautiful Wreck Read online

  But even in such a dramatic household, someone must have spun the thread. Someone fed the children, stoked the fire, strung up the fish.

  I dug around in the database and found her. The farm wife. Among a bunch of ancient scientific papers about the devastation of Iceland’s forests, behind long lists of extinct animals, lumbering auks and leaping salmon, there sat her diary.

  Her words laid captured in a wooden, iron-hinged box. The scan said it was no bigger than my two palms. The front of the box swung open like two doors, an entrance to a fairytale world. Guarded by an iron dragon’s-head clasp.

  The image of the box hovered next to the rough pages, all cracked and stained. The first few contained simply dates and trades, numbers of cows and days. After the last entry, words appeared that caught the breath like a flash of light—a lullaby! It was the first entry among the wife’s quotidian moments.

  Her words went on for a dozen more pages, filling up all but the last few centimeters of space. There, on the last wisp of birch-bark, sat a love poem. The kind of poem that was not believed to be written down until a hundred years later. The dangerous kind, that could get a Viking man killed.

  … of yellow birch leaves spattering light

  across lattices of bright white bones

  where kisses

  come without question or consequence;

  where my hand would rest on your belly

  and move only with your breath.

  These words were crafted by a hand unused to writing, the letters shaky and uneven. They traveled to the edge of the page and stopped, as if the poem might continue somewhere else.

  The pages must have been delicate to scan, and in places they were lost altogether. Just twelve remained, in various states of crumbling decay. Three for animals and weeks and silver, and then the diary, filling up everything else.

  The woman who wrote it was concerned with cod and fleeces and butter, not spirits. I pictured a niece of the scary chieftain maybe. A young woman who wrote surreptitiously in the dark, binding her words in a leather book, lovingly made by a normal husband. A farmer with grass and animals and axes on his mind, not a quest for fearsome power over settlers and spirits.

  I cherished the well-kept secret of this book, which would have been some of the earliest colloquial writing. Her language was strange and wonderful—a poetic and unexpected mix of Norse and Icelandic and something unknown, in between worlds. The words of a completely foreign territory—a rugged wilderness on the cusp of becoming a governed country. A language slowly turning from what was left behind in Norway to a new set of sounds, a new voice in the air.

  Mostly, I loved her everyday moments. In a time of vivid imagination and people who were larger than life, this diary was intimate, life sized.

  I read it as easily as drinking water. Word choice, order, rhythm, came freely like waves. A flash of raven hair against cool linen, the smell of birch tar and herbal bite of a root called snowbloom, a winter-sparked landscape seen from the threshold of the farm wife’s house at bluest dawn.

  Other translators might have called them “dark hair against a shirt,” or “a snowy morning,” but I saw them fully detailed as though the memories and words were alive on my tongue and in my hands. Eyelashes on cheeks, the beloved shape of an ear. Crushed juniper on my hands and throat, for heat, she recorded. For scent.

  Sometimes I threw the words up on a wall screen, huge. Skating the stream. The sky was big today, all ice and violet. I could tunnel deeper and deeper into the strokes of ink. Each year, each night, each word gone by. I looked harder and harder, as though I could climb inside.

  I tried not to read it too much, on lonely nights. It was pitiful to huddle in my blankets surrounded by her trees and buzzing flies, her grass and horsies and enormous sky. Her family and husband.

  There was someone real for me somewhere. Someone I could really know, could really love, and some part of me admitted I would never find him here in my room, my eyes shuttered, heart in the past.

  The boundaries became indistinct. The coffee, the pillows and covers, the way I thought real fur might smell, the green wet grass and pungent scent of stripped bark. The presence of people seemed real. The farmer himself, her husband, so clear I could touch him. He’d been her bones and blood and home—her house itself—in a way that I hadn’t ever known. The words intoxicated me. Full dusk, orange light on fourteen good fleeces. Rinsing his hands, he is sweet to my eye.

  My empty mug cooled between my palms, the apartment’s heat winding down for the night. I slid into the couch cushions, eyes heavy under their contact glaze, and I let my cup drop softly to the floor, burrowing deep in blankets, sleep coming. Inside my closed eyes, the words still hovered. Hot from haying. Exhausted and hungry, backs thrown into feeding us for the winter. Mine sleeps, reckless as a child.

  My irises opened on my room with a jolt, the farm diary thrown open, daylight screeching in. I shaded my eyes and turned away from the window, and blinked hard.

  I thought I’d left my walls on a farm scene, but now they showed an eerie, dark green blue. I sat inside a liquid ocean, and a crystal ice-colored sun reached from above the surface. My ceiling glowed with an icy, sun-sparkling blue.

  A dark hump moved, just a shadow, a place of even deeper blue against the thick water. A familiar beast I’d seen and heard in arc videos.

  “Gone in the dark to the whale road,” I whispered, then thought the rest of those words I’d memorized. I dream them at the camp, all spears and fire. Four nights now, alone in our bed. My hand closes on this white fur, his on black sand. The whale’s haunting voice, just like it sounded in the arcs, swelled to fill my room.

  I woke again to the apartment blaring at me, shouting the time. I was late.

  I dressed in a stumbling daze, dribbling drops in my eyes and muttering for the alarm to stop. I pulled on clothes—linen shift, overdress, apron, beads and tools. I wrapped my signature bead-and-needle-case necklace twice around my neck. My braided leather belt kept slipping through my fingers, tangling in itself. I was going to hold up today’s tests of the tank. We were warned about lateness, given an image of the minutes running freely like blood when the tank was online and no one was in it.

  I shouted “the usual” at my apartment. It would lock after me, get warmer near 19:00, lights at 25 percent. I grabbed my little knife from the hall table and slipped it into the leatherette sheath at my waist. At the last second, I grabbed a beaded necklace I’d been making for Morgan. I was out in ten minutes flat.

  COFFEE SPLASHED ONTO MY DRESS, A FINE SPRAY MISTING MY cheeks and eyes. I stood still and dumb in the door of the cafe, staring down at the stain spreading across rare, handspun flax.

  “Gods, I’m sorry.”

  A big Viking took me by the arm. I looked down at his huge wrist where he gripped me. It was covered in a tattered leatherette bracer with iron buckles. Both hand and gauntlet were scarred, bit by dozens of weapons. My heart raced. Was it real, from a cow? Was he a fanatic realist?

  Chain mail clinked as he drew me aside to the edge of the doorway. I looked up to his eyes, and they were amiable and sky blue. I watched them light up as he noticed my hair and clothes—the long braids, simple fillet across my forehead. The glass beads and pewter needle case that hung at my chest.

  He switched to Old Norse. “May I help you, Maid?” He sounded practiced with the language, almost perfect. His voice was deep, and for a second I imagined he was a little dreamy. But I had to go.

  “Neinn,” I answered in the old tongue, almost a sigh. “It is nothing. I’m near my place of work.”

  An impatient Ninja pushed past us, iced latte sloshing.

  The Viking and I looked at each other for a moment more, and then his eyes softened and lost focus. He was reading something. My height, maybe, or a weather alert. The smile faded absently from within his bushy beard.

  “Fare well, Viking,” I told him and ducked away.

  He didn’t say anything. I left him lost in his
own eyes, not a fanatic realist after all. He’d looked so alive in an unusual way. But he seemed too sweet to sacrifice real animals, to wholeheartedly plunder or hurt a maid such as me. Besides, he was holding a tiny espresso.

  Clear and sunny, my contacts told me it was 65.2 F, 18.4 c. Cool for an August morning, but the rays were warm enough to make the coffee on my chest start to dry and smell bitter. Fine then. I’d have something real to smell in the tank all day.

  A clutch of men came toward me, laughing, wearing the cornflower jackets of Confederate soldiers, one with a faux musket casually resting on his shoulder. Words came up before my eyes, appearing to float alongside the soldiers.

  The Civs have roots in 1960s centennial reenactments of the American Civil War, when living history was a hobby practiced by few.

  Now in the 22nd century, everyone lived—to some degree—in a world that had happened before. We studied and debated and reanimated the words and fashions of a hundred yesterdays and adopted them as though we’d run out of original things to be. In the aughts and teens, being part of an anachronistic culture had been unusual. Now it was the norm. Everyone had a place and time they loved, and they lived in it every moment they could.

  I threaded my way through a crowd that had stuffed itself into a park for a picnic. The ones who were standing cast a canopy of parasols over my head. This little spot of green surrounded one of the few intact structures in the city, a charming, arched stone bridge maintained by those who wanted to pretend at riverside picnics. But water no longer flowed underneath it. Crows—the only birds we knew—lined its arching walls, waiting for bread and meat.

  Strewn with baskets and blankets, only a few square feet of grass poked through, muddied and weak. I sank to my knees, and combed my fingers through the blades, helping them to stand up straight. I petted the grass, like people used to do with dogs.

  A sharp heel came down on my hand and a woman stumbled and fell over my back.

  “What the fuck?” she barked at me. She sported the little white puff sleeves of Jane Austen’s summertime Bath. A man in a long-tailed jacket stood her upright and straightened her tiny umbrella. They huffed off.

  As I stood, words swam in my eyes. This stone bridge was built in 1928. I shook my head. Somehow I was stuck in tourist mode. An impatient flick of my eyelids turned off the contacts.

  I wiped dirt from my nose.

  In a world where fragile, intangible threads connected us, we should have been able to find each other in the physical mess of the past. Painful, joyful, disgusting, romantic. People spent their days and nights, to varying degrees of fanaticism, in authenticized settings. They were in lust for their worlds. They shared them with a fervor.

  But the truth always comforted them—that they were playing. They wanted ale feasts and spears and Valkyries, not the messy beauty of a real farm, the stink of animals and work of many hands. They wanted to sacrifice a barrel of mead, not a horse, and they wanted someone to clean up after.

  Into this reality, the company I worked for was going to drop “the tank.” An immersive environment that felt absolutely real.

  People would be insane for it. The chance to dive into a fully realized world, interacting with people who didn’t know they weren’t really Vikings—or Ninjas, lairds, courtesans and knights—would be a revelation. All they had to do was pay dearly and endure the sensation of entering the tank. Their feasts and fights would all disappear conveniently behind them when they were through. They could be home for dinner.

  The company had a team of us designing and testing it. Our expertise reflected the presumed mass desires of the world, especially those people who would pay dearly when the tank went public. Costume and linguistic artists, period smiths, fiber artists, leather workers. We specialized in the gallant armor and chivalrous utterings of Medieval knights, the long plaids of men who romantically roamed the Scottish highlands, the drapery and curlicued speech of Roman aristocrats, the rags and weapons of gladiators. Elegant Gatsby suits and the gloom of the eighties punk scene in London.

  I’d created the accents and dialect for the Viking heartstone scenario, a scene inside an authentic tenth century longhouse. I loved the sounds, the words and voices, but I didn’t want to immerse today. I would miss this air, this day, when I went into the scene, a house lit only by flames and a tiny square of sky. I wandered slower as I approached the company.

  A nondescript door said nothing, and the building itself seemed only two stories high. Most of the company’s vast corridors, its glinting clean offices and labs and spas were carved inside the stabilized glacier. They’d delved further into the ice than anyone knew—stories and stories below. When I entered, I would step through another set of glass doors, those three times my height, and into a sparkling blue cathedral.

  I felt especially reluctant.

  I said goodbye to the chaotic buildingscape around me. Goodbye to the puffy clouds endlessly reflected in planes and angles of glass. The buildings showed an airplane, its many selves moving in a hundred directions at once. It droned, and I felt a consuming laziness. For years, I hadn’t known they were singular machines. Not until I took the subterranean train out to the airport myself and flew to Norway to study.

  I’d looked down eagerly to find the fanatic realists, to find their houses in the open interior of Iceland, where they could feast and rage and breathe life into the kinds of festivals and battles real Vikings knew. Out beyond the glaciers, where the realists lived, my airplane would appear to fly by alone. I imagined it made a sound like a bee.

  But I didn’t see any farms, only the city stretching from the coast all the way up to where it met the glacier. I’d seen my own building, the very last one before the natural boundary, a frozen ocean lapping its walls.

  I dreaded the first moments in the tank. Jeff said the sensation of water was one of the first complex virtual triumphs made by long-ago pioneers in programming. Even now, the sensation of moving water was the best tool they had to jolt the senses and blank the mind. After what he called the “impression of a brief shower,” the mind was ready to enter anywhere, anytime. And so, I had to drown in order to emerge in Viking times.

  The company’s plain-looking door slid a soft, shushing welcome.

  Morgan’s auburn hair burned against a sea of gray. Her studio contained every expression of metal, from the whitish gleam of silver on her workbench to the iron smudge of smoke that ballooned in the air just before it got sucked into the filtration system. The only color as vivid as her hair was the flame of the real wood fire that jumped and burned in the corner. A massive hood loomed over it to take and process the smoke, but remnants of the smell lingered and mixed with the metallic bite of tools, filings, pewter, copper. All together, the scent of Morgan herself.

  The little necklace I made for her was nothing at all, just a few pretty beads I’d found. I wasn’t very good with my hands, and I bumbled with the little metal clasp, but I thought she might like it.

  She didn’t see me standing here yet. She made soft popping sounds with her lips, along with music in her earset. She was tapping a few hundred tiny dents in a mighty arm ring.

  The clarified air came back into the room cold, like I thought a woodland stream might feel. I held my fingers up to the vent and the air moved them like riffles of water. I imagined my hand submerged, shiny and distorted. Make me a stream, Jeff.

  I sent him my request, gently, as if he really could hear it. I could fall for a man who gave me a stream and a horse.

  Jeff couldn’t, I knew. No far-ranging outdoor scenes in the tank. Not yet.

  Morgan stopped her percussive humming, and I turned to find her watching me with her head cocked. I drew my hand out of the stream of clear air and said hello. She blinked off her music and said, “Look at you, Lady.”

  I picked up the skirts of my new, gorgeous dress and curtsied. “I spilled coffee on the other one.”

  “You did not.” She was horrified, and then bust out laughing. “Gods, I wis
h I could’ve seen Vera’s face.” Morgan puffed up her cheeks like the costume historian.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” I told her. “It was a man. At the cafe.”

  “The Linux Club?” Morgan asked about the coffee shop. It’s what we called Jeff’s period hang-out. Jeff was mid technical revolution, turn of the 21st century. He and his friends played at doing programming and design using only the old tools. They also spent a lot of time with the baristas.

  “Já. He was a raven feeder,” I sighed. “Done up in mail.” The man had been a warrior, yes, or at least a raider. “His ax knocked into me.”

  There was a kind of gauziness to my mood, leftover from looking into the big Viking’s eyes in that moment before they’d glazed over. “Mmmm. There was dirt too, from the park,” I told her.

  I lifted my arm and studied the lovely curve of my belled sleeves. The hand-dyed, cherry colored wool somehow glowed with an amber undertone. It was the only available replacement. Thanks to the big Viking and my sniffing in the park, I was no longer a farm maid but a Norse princess. I’d be the richest girl in tenth century Iceland. Not really authentic for the “heartstone” scenario I was testing, but it would have to do for today. And it made me feel pretty.

  “I’m late and not ready,” I continued. “And everyone’s going to kill me, but I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Já, I want you to wear a couple new things.” She came over and knelt in front of me, taking off my knife and replacing the sheath with a new one. I raised my hands up out of the way. The bones in my fingers looked stark in the artificial light. I flexed them, still dreaming of a cool brook. A bit of ecru linen showed at each wrist, peeking out from under the red wool.