by Cai Emmons
The sun emerges from a cloud and pulsates in its descent like an exposed beating heart. Her own heart thunders in her chest as if bent on breaking out. She collapses to her knees, then to her belly. Her bare cheek hits the earth. Fire, ice. Fire, ice.
Her heart and brain fuse and thud in unison, a rhythm that pushes out past her skin, past the sable pelt. Before her eyes is a strand of copper moss, coiled like pubic hair. It whispers, joining the rhythm. A star bursts into existence, another dies. A snapped mast on a ship in the Tiksi harbor. Lubov’s brown trousers. Someone’s husky laugh. The amber eyes of the Snowy Owl. Everything oscillates, a harmonious symphony, one voice then hundreds, thousands, an intricate polyphony. The vole, the Snowy Owl, the Great Horned Owl from the Squamscott River. A congress around her, her mother, Lanny, Earl and Archie, Matt and Diane, Lubov and Pavel. The girl with the green eyes. Her heart is ruled by the heart of the Earth which heaves and cracks and teaches her its cadences. She isn’t fighting the land, she has become part of it. The fire inside her begins to build.
She disperses herself, becomes another thing, unbound by derma, somewhere between the coming and going. Ice and fire, love and hate, prey and predator, owl and vole, the thing measured and the thing known instinctively. Sun, moon, rock, water, mountain, abyss.
All her atoms were once assembled from atoms that might have been part of Byzantine rats, or Medieval monks, or Egyptian slaves, or Himalayan chickens. They might have been drawn from Congolese chimps and Brazilian samba dancers, from mavericks and scribes, farmers and statesmen, hookers and truckers. Now those conjoined atoms explode and, sundered from one another, are sent off without certainty of return to the entity that has been Bronwyn.
A tone fills her ears, singular but layered with many notes like the invisible waves that compose white light. Her head seems to explode, her self vaporizes. The fiery burst of her intention sinks energy downward and works over the molecules of peat, the icy clathrates and cryotic soil. The energy is white hot, prodigious, glowing, all the energy a human being can possibly hold and more. It spreads beneath the tundra in mammoth rolling waves, mile after mile. At the risk of losing her toes, her life, of never returning to the self she’s been, she bolsters and fortifies the subterranean freeze.
65
Sifting through these documents, Matt finally understands his purpose in being here. It isn’t only to keep Bronwyn and Diane from eating each other alive, he’s here because he is the only neutral party, the one person who can see things objectively. Here at the converging vortex of battling passions and points of view, he may be the only one who can say what is happening—or what has happened.
He isn’t afraid anymore, he likes being here in this strange and different place, so sparsely inhabited and yet so central to the fate of the entire world. For over two hours he has been working alongside Diane, sifting through the files methodically and copying them onto flash drives. And now his watchful, wait-and-see patience may be paying off. He has just, by accident, opened a folder labeled in Russian. A short document, dated May 15th of the current year, six months ago. He reads in English. FINAL REPORT: The Arctic Cloud Project (USA) has been terminated after collecting the last of its data. It will be closed down by the end of the month.
He taps the monitor, corralling and directing Diane’s attention. She reads to herself, hissing quietly. “Christ almighty,” she says. “That bastard.”
“I thought—?” he says. “Why would they—?” But he already knows, without knowing anything specific. The worst fear has proved to be true. This is the dreaded possibility that has been floating in the air all along, the thing that has been preoccupying Diane since before they left, the possibility that the data blackout was considerably more than a technical slip-up.
66
She returns in twilight, lying on her back. The light that remains is that of an Impressionist pastel, pink cirrus on pale blue. She blinks and the blue becomes gray. She lies like a mummy, arms cinched at her sides, unsure if she’s alive, her brain lobes knocking against one another, the light a shimmying gauze curtain.
She sits up, panicked. Cold has dumbed her, fear is dumbing her further. She would call out if it meant anything, but no one can hear. She claps her blockish hands together. Frostbite, she thinks, trying to wiggle her reticent toes. She applies her mouth to one mitten opening and blows inside. The breath is hot, wet, but her hand does not respond. She needs hands that function. She needs to move and think clearly. She needs rescue. Shouldn’t Pavel have come back by now? Has she missed him?
Something rustles behind her. She forces herself to stand, whirls, eyes shredding the twilight. Nothing. Only the shadowy silhouettes of the grassy hillocks. It could be a vole, but it could be something much bigger too. A caribou. A wolf.
She feels like a half-wit, incapable of thinking things through, seeing consequences. It will be dark soon. The tundra snickers around her, a cauldron of inchoate sounds and fuzzy apparitions.
She remembers Pavel’s flashlight, still in her pocket, but she cannot coil her hand to grip it. She bends at the waist, wags her hips, nudges the base of the pocket. The flashlight falls to the ground. She kneels, jamming her mittened hand against the switch. It doesn’t budge. She tries again. Nothing happens. Her hands are crude instruments, no more effective than stiff sticks. She stares at the flashlight with irrational hatred. On sudden impulse, she yanks off her mitten. Her digits are white and bloodless, immobile. She jams her thumb into the switch, once, twice. No go. Her cracked skin bleeds. She struggles the mitten on again, feeling her blood crawl at such a glacial pace she can almost picture it stopping. Leaning down, she brings her teeth to the switch. The flashlight’s cold metal attaches to her upper lip and steals a slab of skin. With the full force of her ire she bites and pulls and pushes, until pain shoots through her gums, her lips and chin bleed, the light goes on.
She recoils. The beam is nuclear in its brightness and it places her center stage, alone and blinded to everything around her. Hands like tongs, she clamps the light between them and begins to walk, gripped in the calipers of night.
She lusts for sleep. Above all, she mustn’t sleep.
One foot the other continuous motion filmy night a single star the moon’s sharp tip pricking a cloud an arabesque voices hushed legato lullaby the Earth’s long aria she a single note blinking blinking
The white fox smiles out of the darkness, taking her in. What does the fox say? She regards him. He is not large, but he is commanding, with magnificent fur, thick and pure white, his tail a plume in the air. Such sentient stillness. What does the fox say? He speaks through prescient eyes in the plain-spoken way of animals. Where are your people? You shouldn’t be alone. His tail swishes back and forth, a semaphore. What does he know? Speak, please. Tell me what you know. He blinks, she blinks. The night percusses around them.
The fox is gone, vaporized.
No, please, don’t go.
His shape lingers, an aura etched on the night, engraved in her brain. She tries to see what he said—feel it. She waits, trembling, her legs giving way, no longer capable of doing the supportive work of legs. But Matt is beside her. Oh thank you for coming. She lets him take her weight, lower her to safety. Oh, Matt. She isn’t alone. See, fox, I am not alone.
Sleep lumbers in noisily, an insistent mother.
67
In the cab on the way back to Lubov’s Diane cannot stop shaking. What shocks her is not that people are doing underhanded things. She has always realized that criminal activity and all its more minor corollaries—lying and cheating—were commonly practiced by many human beings. She herself has just now done something that could be called illegal. It will certainly be considered illegal if Retivov finds out, and it is quite likely he will find out, though hopefully not until she’s safely back in the U.S. No, what truly shocks her is that people like Retivov and all his ilk—profit-seeking oil moguls, coal producers, high-rolling car company CEOs, and so many others—appear not to care at all w
hat happens to Earth.
Doesn’t Retivov get it? He’s a geologist for god’s sake. Doesn’t he understand how soon the Earth’s surface will be a free-for-all, plagued by severe weather beyond the control or predictive skill of human beings? Parched beyond recognition, huge land masses will become playgrounds for fires and dust storms. The warmed atmosphere will be so oversaturated with moisture that the rainfalls will be voluminous and violent enough to kill. Frequent winds will reach stunning gale-force speeds and will agitate themselves into surface tornadoes. Glaciers will become a distant memory, and the ice caps on both poles will disappear, subjecting coastlines to such severe flooding they will no longer be habitable. No, she’s wrong—there is no future tense here, it is happening already.
Death, Dmitry Retivov, will become a frequent visitor in most people’s lives. Need I enumerate the ways you and your dear ones might die? If violent weather isn’t your preferred avenue to death, perhaps you’d choose to perish more slowly from famine. Crops become peevish on a parched, too-warm Earth, forget livestock. Food supplies will dwindle quickly and eventually become so scarce even the wealthy will struggle. And need I remind you how badly human beings get along in conditions of extreme scarcity? Opportunistic viruses will thrive under these conditions, replicating and mutating too quickly for humans to develop vaccines. Ebola is just the beginning. Viruses always trump humans—you should know that, Dmitry Retivov, you’re a scientist. It is a sad future out there, unless we act. Can’t you see?
But of course he does see. This is what angers her so much. While some people are simply ignorant, or victims of impoverished imagination, Dmitry Retivov is not one of those people. If he’s any kind of a scientist at all he sees the data clearly, he understands its import, and he wants to suppress it for that very reason. No, she is quite sure Dmitry Retivov does not suffer from a failure of knowledge, or understanding, or even imagination. His deficit is a failure of empathy. He doesn’t care that the human race is facing extinction. This is what galls her.
She must contain herself for the time being. She and Matt and Tim Thom must not breathe a word of what they know. Except to Bronwyn, of course. She hopes these new revelations will reconnect Bronwyn to the world of science. It doesn’t surprise her that Bronwyn, prickly as she was last night, didn’t join them today, but she will certainly share Diane’s shock. Now that they’ve secured the data it’s time for an intervention from Bronwyn. As soon as possible. Diane will rebook the helicopter immediately. This is all-out war and the time has come for action.
After so much time in the windowless room, they’ve lost track of time, and when they return to Lubov’s it is past 3:15 p.m. The sun is all but gone. The apartment feels hollow, empty, the windows smeared useless with condensation. The radiator rattles as if it’s on its last legs. Matt checks the bedroom. No Bronwyn. No note beyond the one from this morning. Diane collapses into a chair in the living room. Bronwyn’s absence disappoints her and makes her feel bereft—she has so much to say to Bronwyn she can barely contain herself. She takes off her coat, suddenly hungry. Another day with no lunch. Maybe Bronwyn is downstairs having something to eat with Lubov.
“Let’s ask Lubov where she is.”
Matt stands by the table, strangely still. He still wears his coat and seems to have shrunk and blanched beneath it. “Shit,” he says. “Shit, shit, shit. I should have known.”
Downstairs in the kitchen he listens to Lubov and Diane hashing things out. Though he only understands the occasional word, they are confirming what he already knows. Of course she has gone out on her own. He should have realized she wasn’t ever going to allow him to accompany her. She only agreed to that in order to appease him and Diane. But has she no sense of self-preservation? Having seen her at the fire he seriously doubts she does. She didn’t die then, but she so easily could have. Now it’s almost dark for fuck’s sake, and who knows where she is. She could be anywhere out there. It could be night before they find her. She’s gone to the airport, Lubov is saying.
He lets out an involuntary sound, the beginning of a wail, then cuts it short, embarrassed in front of these women. How the hell did he end up falling in love with such a determined loner?
They sit in the cab, bundled and stiff. Diane, incapable of small talk, doesn’t bother to chat with the cabbie, or with Matt. She has a very bad feeling. This is the land of Murphy’s Law. She is coming to hate these Russians. What can go wrong already has gone wrong, there is no future tense about it.
Matt is hyperkinetic, drumming his knee with his mitten, lightly but audibly clamping his teeth. She wishes he’d stop—the sounds are blades on her nerves—but she’s not going to tell him to stop. He’s probably blaming himself as much as she’s blaming herself. They should have thought to wonder why Bronwyn didn’t join them at the weather station.
The sun’s battery is long dead when the cab drops them at the terminal and they make their way to the desk of the helicopter outfit. As she feared, there is not a soul in evidence. She knew this was a small operation, but it is also the only game in town. A double helix of desperation and rage twirls inside her, and she suppresses an urge to yell. Instead she pounds the desk uselessly. Matt is poking around, peering through the glass to the runway where a helicopter stands in darkness on its bird-like feet.
“I’m going outside to find someone,” he says. He pushes through the door. God knows why he expects to find anyone out there.
Diane goes behind the desk to the closed door. It’s locked. She pounds. “Open up! Open up!” Have they really closed up for the day? She puts her ear to the door, hoping to hear voices. She can’t tell if she does or doesn’t. She stands still for a moment without any idea of what to do. Has she ever not known what to do? A problem solver, she always has a notion of what should be done next, but now—no plan of action comes to mind at all.
She pounds again, calling out in a register that is inadvertently hysterical, an ululation. Desperation has banished all traces of embarrassment. She hasn’t cried since she was seven years old, but now she cries.
As if the world was simply waiting for her breakdown, voices become audible behind the door. She pounds again, sobbing in a wet and helpless way that she will recall for years to come, sobs inflaming her nose and throat and chest, a weeping that infects her entire body so her circulatory system is amped and all her orifices exude moisture along with sorrow.
A woman opens the door so suddenly Diane almost falls against her. She wears a uniform and is shocked, or maybe disgusted, by the sight of Diane in this state. Diane tries to pull herself together. She begins to speak in Russian, but quickly reverts to English.
“We need a helicopter,” Diane says. “Now.”
Without a word the woman disappears.
It takes forever for the woman to reappear, but she finally emerges from behind the door accompanied by a towering man, burly and genial.
“Pavel will help you,” says the woman.
Pavel explodes through the door, shoving a final bite into his mouth. His face is slick with sweat. How can anyone sweat so profusely in this climate? Still chewing and swallowing, he glances at his watch and lays his heavy arm around Diane’s back in a gesture of reassurance. “It is time, yes,” he says. She smells the alcohol on his breath. “We find your friend.”
He lurches through the door to the runway, clearly drunk. Diane and Matt have no choice but to follow. It is truly dark now, but a light snaps on and its beam illuminates the helicopter which presides, beastlike, over the runway.
“Do you think he’s going to fly us?” Diane asks Matt.
“It looks that way.”
“But he’s drunk.”
“Do we have a choice? If she’s out there. In the dark. In this cold.”
Matt is keeping his cool so much better than she herself is, Diane thinks. Pavel guides them as if they are his flock, his arms wings. He unlocks the helicopter and they clamber aboard. Matt takes the front seat beside Pavel. Diane sits behind them, thin
king this expedition in this ancient aircraft, piloted by a drunk, is yet another example of her increasingly poor judgment. Is Pavel going to plummet them to their demise on the tundra? All her life she has taken calculated risks, assessing cost and benefit, downplaying her own fear of flying as well as she could. But Matt is right. They have no choice now. If they hope to find Bronwyn, they must take this risk. Diane bows her head as the helicopter scrapes into action. She has been in plenty of small planes before to gather data, but never a craft that rattled and shook and roared as much as this thing does. Matt makes conversation with Pavel. Thank god the man speaks English. The engine is too loud for her to hear what they’re saying. She pokes her head through the seats and taps Matt.
“What’s going on?”
“He says he knows exactly where he left her. Not far.”
Diane harrumphs. “I can’t believe this. His license should be revoked. Tell him that.”
Matt says something to Pavel, and Pavel guffaws and waves his hand. They sail through an absolute darkness. The helicopter might just as well be a space capsule, a place set apart, beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, no longer subject to the sun’s rising and setting. She remembers a Wellesley colleague of hers, Jack Finley, who was a heavy drinker and finally went into rehab. For months after he joined AA he would stop people on campus to apologize for this or that. At the time it was embarrassing, as he was apologizing for things no one had noticed or remembered, things they certainly didn’t feel hurt by. But she feels that same urge now, to make amends. I hope you know, Bronwyn, how much you mean to me, and how much I respect you.
“There!” Matt calls. “I see something—a light, I’m sure.”
Matt peers through the seats at Diane and offers a hopeful smile. The helicopter begins its descent.