A child running by kicked Farrell’s ankle and anointed him with something greenish and wettish. Stopping to wipe his pants leg, he asked, trying to keep his voice gruffly neutral, “What happens? How do you call him, reach him, whatever it is you do? Can you control it?” Ben did not answer or look at him. Farrell let it go until they had nearly reached the Cape hunting dogs’ yard; then he burst out, “You don’t control him. He comes by himself, am I right? I’m right. Seizures. More like late-period Dr. Jekyll, that’s what it’s goddamn like.” He had not realized how angry he was, nor how profoundly shaken, until he heard his own voice.
Ben turned to face him at last, arms wrapped around his body as if against some dismembering cold beyond even Egil Eyvindsson’s understanding. Nicholas would know. Nicholas Bonner knows about cold.
“It’s not that simple.” Farrell could barely hear him, but the dogs broke their endless trotting round and ran close to stare, blotchy tongues dripping out of bat faces. Ben said, “He can’t control it, either. He doesn’t come because he wants to come.”
“A civil liberties issue,” Farrell said. His ribs were beginning to feel badly bruised, and his head ached. He said, “Tell me what happens.”
The answer was quiet and clear, curiously formal. “I love him, Joe. What happens between us is an exchange, like love. He’s alive in his world, exactly as I am in mine. We found a way to trade times, for ten seconds, five minutes, half a day, two days. It’s just gotten a bit out of hand, that’s all. Like love.”
A keeper whom Farrell liked passed by, calling to him what the vet had decided about the rhinoceros’s arthritic hind leg. Ben laughed suddenly, the shuddering whine of a saw seized up in damp wood. “Or maybe it’s like the Groucho Marx line, how he’s got Bright’s disease and Bright’s got his.” He seemed to want to touch Farrell, but could not let go of himself for more than a moment. “Joe, nobody knows anything about being a ninth-century Viking, nobody but me. I mean, how could they? They know the damn verse forms, they know dates, kings, funeral rituals, all the people the Danes or the Jutes beat up on. But there is nobody else, nobody in the world, who can tell you a Viking joke. Just me, do you realize that? You want to hear one now?”
“If it’s about the two Swedes, I’ve already heard it,” Farrell said wearily. “I want you to tell me where you go, how you get there, what it feels like when you’re there.” He glanced at his watch and added, “And I think you should do it fairly quickly, because I have to go drive my little green train.” Even my armpits hurt. I am too old for this, too old for everything.
Ben said, “Bright’s disease.” He laughed again, in the old way this time, struggling not to. “Joe, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m swarming with memories that aren’t mine. Those peanuts you gave me, I ate them here, but I tasted them in another time. Somebody tasted them.” Farrell actually felt his jaw drop, which was a new experience. “Things taste so different there, Joe; the light’s all different, the constellations, the facial expressions—even whistling sounds different, for God’s sake. Feelings. People don’t dream the way we do, nothing like us, nothing.” His voice was level enough, but his teeth were chattering. He said, “I have his dreams sometimes. I can’t wake up from those by myself. If Sia weren’t there, I’d never wake up. Nobody would know.”
“Is anybody there for Egil? When he dreams you?” Ben blinked and frowned as if he had not heard the question. Farrell said, “Technique, that’s what I want. Procedure. Do you say Shazam, do you drink something really vile, do you just stand still by yourself and think about Egil in a special way? Tell me, Ben.”
The Cape dogs danced hotly against the bars, whining with grim urgency. They smelled to Farrell of blood and horse dung and chocolate, and he wondered whether they could sense Egil, if only as a wrongness, a constant disquieting shiver in their wild logic. Ben stared back at them silently. Farrell saw his supervisor tacking shyly toward them by way of trash-can inspections. “The League. Is that the way it started, being Egil in the League? Is that the connection?”
Ben lowered his arms slowly, watching them all the way down, like the newly oiled Tin Woodman. “The League made it easier. Sort of like a singles bar.” It was Farrell’s turn to blink, and Ben smiled raggedly. “Common understandings. A sympathetic atmosphere. The luxury of knowing that only certain questions will be asked. But you’ve got it backwards, Joe. I had to invent Egil for them, as a character, an impression, just to be sure that whatever he did, people would always assume it was still me in my Viking hat. The League gave us a place to meet, you see, a place where nobody could ever think I was crazy. Whatever Egil did.”
Farrell stepped back to let a heavy woman with a walking frame pass between them, looking sideways at the dogs and wrinkling her nose. “Give them a bath sometimes, why don’t you?” she said to Farrell. “Nobody likes to stink, people like you never think about that.”
She was followed by two enlaced adolescents, trailing musk and saliva, and then by Farrell’s supervisor, who pointedly looked at his watch, bent slightly at the knees and inquired, “Woo-woo? Chugga-chugga? Ding-ding?”
“Ding-ding right away,” Farrell agreed seriously. “I just have to see my friend to his car.” When the supervisor seemed disposed to debate, Farrell explained, “He’s having dizzy spells—I think it might be something he ate at the Elephants’ Graveyard,” and left him staring anxiously after them, already settling out of court. The supervisor had worked in better zoos than Barton Park, and the strain had been showing for some time.
“You did drive here?” Farrell asked. Ben hesitated, then nodded. Farrell linked arms with him and started him moving toward the parking lot. “I mean, it’s okay for you to drive? Egil’s not likely to take over in the middle of an intersection, is he?” Trying to make a joke of it, he added, “You know how California is about expired licenses.”
“He doesn’t take me over. I told you, it’s more like an exchange.”
The patient instructor tone made Farrell flush so hotly that the skin of his face felt full of splinters. “Rubberlips, I don’t give a shit what you told me. I’ve seen him three times now, and each time you were long gone, you were busy taking him over in the ninth century.” Ben halted and opened his mouth to protest, but Farrell hurried him on. “I still don’t know what you’re really doing, or how you’re doing it, any more than that poor sucker Egil does, but I know fear, do you understand me? And I am truly ashamed of you, for the first time in my life, because I’ve never seen anybody as frightened as that man.” Except one other, the yellow-eyed man who came to Sia’s house. “You ought to be ashamed.”
“You asshole, you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about!” They might have been squabbling over the rules of boxball on a Manhattan side street. Ben said, “I’m not hurting him. I could never hurt him. I love him.”
“He was not consulted. Did he ever ask to be loved out of his own life?” Farrell was trembling himself, shaking Ben’s shoulder, peering into his eyes to find Egil’s incomprehensible torment. “He doesn’t know what’s happening to him—he must think he’s dying, going crazy, and he is going crazy, a thousand years ago. That’s an exchange? That’s love? That’s bloody fucking robbery, Ben.”
“Don’t spit. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” They had reached the parking lot, and Ben was rocking on his heels as he gazed vaguely along the fish-spine rows of stalls.
Farrell asked, “Why were you looking for me?”
“I don’t remember.” Ben set off down the nearest row with the confidently off-balance air of a man lunging after a divining rod.