They passed a grey wooden church and came to the big house that Mark had noticed. It was indeed a hotel, the Hotel Fjaerland. A fresh-faced young woman sat at a desk downstairs. She wore her brown hair in a bun, her eyes were ice blue.
“I’m Ola,” she told them in a lightly accented voice. Somehow her lilting English managed to remind Mark of otters at play. “I can give you the room just up those stairs.” She handed them a large skeleton key with the number 3 on a tag. “We have a wine and orientation session at six. I’ll be giving a little talk about the house’s history. You’ll be taking your supper here?”
“Sure,” said Mark.
“But I wonder if we could get some breakfast right now?” asked Laura. “We had to leave so early this morning to catch the ferry.”
“I’m bringing you something on the porch,” said Ola pleasantly. “I’m the manager, the receptionist, the waitress and more. The hotel’s been in my family for quite some time.”
It was lovely on the gazebo-like back porch, with a green lawn rolling down to the final finger of the fjord. Ola served them tea, coffee, berries and bread with butter.
“Life’s rich panoply,” said Laura to Mark. “I’m grateful that we made it this far.”
They strolled the hotel grounds. The month was July, and the northern days were twenty hours long. The plants were making the most of it, burgeoning with petals and leaves. Set among some five-pointed pink flowers was a vertical stone plinth, like a gravestone higher than a man, covered not with writing, but with irregular spots of moss or lichen. Nature had built a monument to her own subtle variety.
“They look like the pictures in my God Bøk,” remarked Laura.
“Let’s go up to the room and study,” suggested Mark.
“High time,” said Laura. “Page one.”
The pair of lumpy Norwegian mattresses favoured by the Hotel Fjaerland contorted themselves under their shifting weights into non-intuitive topologies, and the two-mattress iron bedstead creaked. But they got the job done—their first carnal encounter in weeks. They dropped off into a blissful couple of hours of sleep.
When Mark awoke, he saw Laura leaning on one elbow, studying him across the bed’s expanse. The linen-sheeted comforter had slumped to reveal her shapely breasts, unquenched by nearly forty years of living.
“That was tender and intense,” she said, planting a gentle kiss on his forehead.
Feeling cautious, Mark kept his face blank.
“Don’t tell me you’re still holding a grudge!” exclaimed Laura. “We’re here to erase the bad times while we can, right? To taste those good old vibes that we had before the work burnout and—and before that horrible night. And before we had to flee the law.”
Uneasily Mark made a joke. “Tender and intense, yeah. Is that like jalapeno-flavoured Cool Whip? Or more like a Brillo pad massage?”
Laura’s face assumed a fixed and frozen expression. Slowly but deliberately, she got out of the bed and began to dress.
“Hey, where are you going?”
She said nothing for a drawn-out few seconds, as if mastering her temper, and then replied, “Mark, I don’t know if you want to waste the time you’ve got left on wallowing in bitterness and defeat and sarcasm. Okay, the feds have stolen our semiotic analyzer and we’re up to our asses in debt and we’re charged with some serious crimes. We can still bounce back—but not if you keep nursing your sulk. It’s spoiling everything—especially our marriage.”
Mark huffed. “Our marriage. You laid that wide open when you caught me with my chief exec—”
“With Beryl,” spat Laura. “We can say her name.”
“With Beryl, yes,” continued Mark. “We were just having a little party to celebrate the final beta tests for the Yotsa 7. I wasn’t trying to sneak around on you or I wouldn’t have invited you. I was drunk and happy. All I did was kiss her. But nothing I said was a good enough excuse. And then you had to take your petty revenge with Lester Lo—my chief tech! In the office right next door! So thanks to you I had to fire Lester. He went rogue, the feds came down on us, and we missed the chance to market our new product.”
Laura’s voice began to rise, despite her best efforts. “It’s just like you to turn things around and put me in the wrong. We both made mistakes, yes. But I’m trying to make the best of things, and you’re not! You’re clutching your misery to yourself like you’ve fathered some inhuman changeling baby. It’s sucking the lifeblood out of you—and out of me too!”
Mark made no reply, and Laura continued. “Listen to me, dear. I’m here in a strange and beautiful land. I’ve come here at no little cost and effort, to relax and enjoy myself and to take stock of my life—with or without you! If you can drag your mind out of despond, and notice where we are, and contemplate a shared future—well, if you can do all that, you’ll find me on the lawn, ready for a stroll. And if not—”
Laura didn’t bang the door to their room on the way out, but Mark could tell she wanted to. And he wouldn’t have blamed her if she had.
He knew he was being a jerk. He knew he should consign the past miserable year of overwork and ambition and failure to his personal dustbin of history, cut his losses, pick himself up, shine his shoes, wear a smile, look on the bright side, retool, get a good lawyer—all that optimistic, self-help, go-getter shit. But something deep inside him rebelled.
Their semiotic analyzer should be making them millions! And thanks to Lester Lo, the feds had grabbed it and made it top-secret and charged Mark and Laura with a bunch of trumped-up bullshit libel and sedition counts. When Mark had caught wind of the feds’ plans for devastating black-ops reprisals, he and Laura had gone undercover and headed for the ass-end of the civilized world. Norway.
Mark heaved his hairy naked form from the bed. Though forty-five, he was still more muscle and sinew than flab. The view out the windows drew his eyes. It was heart-breakingly lovely here, with yellow flowers around the window frames, a cozy little barn perched just so in the swooping field, and the backdrop of elegantly asymmetrical mountains. The fjord wobbled with liquid reflections that cycled through ever-lovelier forms of universal beauty. Mark’s new life with Laura could be paradise—and he was making it hell.
Everything had begun so well. Mark and Laura had met in grad school at Columbia, both of them studying linguistics. They’d fallen in love and married. Laura had become a professional interpreter for the U.N., and Mark had drifted into multimedia advertising, eventually founding his little ferret of a company: Bloviation. The sense of wonder that Mark and Laura shared over the deep structures of language had proved an abiding source of inspiration.
Mark smiled ruefully as his eye fell upon the God Bøk beside their bed. It was so typical of Laura to buy something like that. In past days, the loving couple might have spent hours poring over the artefact, forming hypotheses and spinning tales. With a sigh, Mark lifted the book, and began leafing through it. Geometric mandalas alternated with splattered shapes that resembled stilled explosions. A slow tingle oozed from the book into Mark’s fingertips. Perhaps there was something here of special importance.
“I can decrypt this!” exclaimed Mark to himself. “I have my magic spectacles.” He opened his suitcase, unzipped a hidden inner pocket, and removed what appeared to be a lorgnette—a pair of glasses that unfolded from a delicately tooled stick.
The elegant device was a Yotsa 7, the last of the prototype semiotic analyzers that Mark possessed. All the other units had been commandeered by the feds the day after the big melt-down at Bloviation. Laura might have given Mark a tongue-lashing if she’d known he’d brought this one along, this bad seed offspring that lay at the heart of their troubles. But, in a way, the invention had been Laura’s idea.