Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “I can go over to Narvik’s.”

  “It’s late. Bad ice after midnight.”

  “It isn’t that dark tonight, Grandmother. Won’t take me long.”

  There were usually boatmen down at the shore, who would bring passengers over after the regular ferries had docked for the night—they could count on a steady, if not brisk, all-night traffic, as if over on the mainland were a darkly glamorous resort known only to the discerning few. With winter in the offing, leads of open water were harder to find. The sleek little steam craft throbbed to and fro in the accents of frustrated hunting dogs, and the pilots called to each other over the drifting floes. Something phosphorescent in the ice kept the night well illuminated.

  But tonight the town was a melancholy place. Not much going on. The impending departure of the Malus seemed to have put everyone at loose ends. Lights burned everywhere, as if invisible receptions of some kind were in progress. Insomnia wrapped the town like a sweaty blanket. Gangs of petty criminals swept by from time to time, committing no offense more serious than staring. Like temporary innkeepers, the unsleeping residents brought the newly arrived in to their own parlors, sitting without speaking, seldom offering alcohol because of its exorbitant price, paid in the dark and in banknotes only, as the noise of specie traveled too far, undiminished, in the vast silences.

  The only eating place open this time of night was Narvik’s Mush-It-Away Northern Cuisine, crowded at all hours, usually with a queue out the door. Hunter foresaw a long wait. Not only was the line intolerably slow—often it did not move, for fifteen minutes—but when it did move, it ratcheted ahead only a fraction of the space a single body would occupy. As if some of those waiting were, somehow, only fractionally present.

  Alongside the creeping queue, in the opposite direction, an ingenious steam-driven train of pot-size wheeled conveyances passed continuously, to remind those waiting of today’s menu, the braised blubber with cloudberries, skua eggs any style, walrus chops, and snow parfaits, not to mention the widely praised Meat Olaf, which was This Week’s—in fact Every Week’s—Special, all cranking along behind the display glass, inches away from the drooling clientele, though, given the absence of impulse-control locals were notorious for, not securely protected. Along with episodes of snack theft, the waiting was enlivened as well by queue-jumping, food-throwing, mother defamation, and unpremeditated excursions off the end of Narvik’s pier.

  Narvik himself, rumored never to sleep, continued to fidget to and fro as he had all through the night, greeting customers, bringing out orders from the kitchen, taking money, in general attempting with Arctic humor to cheer those too long in line. “Canadian walks into a bar—goes, ‘Ouch, eh?’ Two Italians prospecting in the Yukon, one comes running into camp. ‘I found gold!’—the other one says, ‘Eh, a fangool-a you and-a you mother, too.’ What’s the favorite pickup line in Alaska? ‘Woof, woof.’”

  “Couple of those Meat Olafs, I guess,” Hunter said at last, “some root slaw, too, with that, oh and can I get the Mystery Sauce on the side?”

  He returned to the island through the middle of a night now cold and unpopulated as a promise of the winter to come, in perilous transit through icefields which sought as if with conscious malevolence to take the unwary down like quicksand, without warning.

  And in the ceaseless drift of the ice, the uncountable translations and rotations, meltings and freezings, there would come a moment, maybe two, when the shapes and sizes of the masses here at this “Venice of the Arctic” would be exactly the same as those of secular Venice and its own outlying islands. Not all of these shapes would be dry land, of course, some would be ice, but, considered as multiply-connected spaces, the two would be the same, Murano, Burano, San Michele, the Grand Canal, each small waterway in painstaking detail, and for that brief instant it would be possible to move from one version to the other. All through his boyhood, Hunter Penhallow had watched for the fateful moment, prayed for its thunderous assault on his sensorium, for immediate translation miles and years away from here, to the City of Silence and Queen of the Adriatic herself. He would “wake,” though it was more like having arrived after an unsensed journey, in a room in the Bauer-Grünewald with a tenor in full heartbreaking cry accompanied by a concertina just beneath the window, and the sun going down behind Mestre.

  But ice always crept back into his nighttime dreaming. The frozen canals. The security of the ice. To return each night to the ice, as to home. To recline, horizontal as ice, beneath the surface, to enter the lockless, the unbreachable, the long-sought sleep. . . . Down in the other world of childhood and dreams, where polar bears no longer lumber and kill but once in the water and swimming beneath the ice become great amphibious white sea-creatures, graceful as any dolphin.

  When his grandmother was a girl, she told him once, the sisters announced in school one day that the topic of study would be Living Creatures. “I suggested ice. They threw me out of class.”

  ABOUT MID-MORNING, Constance went to the ridgetop, looked down the long declivity, down the shorn hills, and saw that the miniature ship that had once lain waiting there, secured only by the lightest of kedgework to the Harbor bed, seeming sometimes to tremble with its desire to be away, had gone at last, bound for seas more emerald, aromatic winds, hammocks out on deck. Up here the view of the sea continued as gray as ever, the wind no colder than usual, perhaps a minimum austerity of growth, all in shades of white, buff, and gray, pale grasses, failing by a visible margin to be green, bending to the wind together, a million stalks all held to the same exact angle, which no scientific instrument would measure. She looked to every horizon, taking her time, saving south for last. Not a wisp of smoke, not the last, wind-muted cry of a steam siren, only the good-bye letter waiting this morning on her work-table, held now like a crushed handkerchief in her pocket, in which he had given her his heart—but which she could not open again and read for fear that through some terrible magic she had never learned to undo, it might have become, after all, a blank sheet.

  From the Journals of Mr. Fleetwood Vibe—

  It wasn’t any Rapture of the North. Ask anybody who was there. They landed. They conversed. They shared their picnic baskets. Jellied pâté de foie gras, truffled pheasant, Nesselrode pudding, a ‘96 Champagne which they had frappéd in local ice . . .

  It was the singing we became aware of first. In such cases the first thing that has to be ruled out is collective dementia, though none in the party could agree even on what was being sung. Only after prolonged sweeps with field-glasses in the direction of that shrill and unfamiliar music did any of us detect a dark dot, poised low in a frozen sky, which slowly grew in size, even as the witless chorale, paradoxically yet mercifully, seemed to abate, though not before the song was engraved upon every brain. Dating from about 1897, it commemorated the reappearance on the north coast of Norway of Fridtjof Nansen and Frederik Hjalmar Johansen, back after three years’ journey into the Polar silence, within weeks of the ship they’d set off in, the doughty Fram. If only for the sake of scientific objectivity, I feel obliged to include it here.

  The world’s gone crazy,

  Romancin’

  Over Nansen and Johansen,

  Those sturdy young Pals of the Po-o-o-le!

  Oh, my, there’s legions

  Besiegin’

  These darin’ Norwegians,

  Where’er in the region they ro-o-o-ll!

  Three years ago

  They sailed off in the Fram,

  Now that they’re back,

  Life’s just muffins and jam!

  They’ve all got ants in

  Their pants, ‘n’

  For Nansen and Johansen

  They’re dancin’ right out of contro-o-ol!

  We were stunned at the immensity of the vehicle which finally came to stand above us. There were scarcely enough of us to handle the lines they threw down. We must have looked to them like interchangeable insects, scurrying beneath.

  “We are neither
in danger,” we assured them repeatedly, “nor, in fact, in need of any assistance.”

  “You are in mortal danger,” declared their Scientific Officer, Dr. Counterfly, a scholarly sort, bearded and bundled like the rest of them, his eyes concealed by a pair of ingenious goggles, whose lenses proved to be matched pairs of Nicol prisms which could be rotated so as to control precisely the amount of light admitted to each eye. “Maybe you’ve been too close to see it. . . . We, on the other hand, have seen little else, since clearing the Eightieth Parallel. A Zone of Emergency has been declared for hundreds of miles’ radius. The peak in whose lee you have chosen to set up your command post is far too regular in shape to be the nunatak you imagine it. Did none of you suspect an artificial structure? In fact it was not situated here by accident, and you could have chosen no site more perilous.”

  “Ah,” twinkled Dr. Vormance, “and you can see right down through the snow at the base of it, I suppose.”

  “Nowadays, as you know, sir, there are Rays, and there are Rays, and it can be readily contrived for wave-lengths other than those of light to travel all the way through even the most obstinate of media.”

  Nunatak, in the Eskimo tongue literally “land connected,” refers to a mountain peak tall enough to rise above the wastes of ice and snow that otherwise cover the terrain. Each, believed to have its own guardian spirit, is alive, an ark sheltering whatever lichens, mosses, flowers, insects, or even birds may be borne to it by the winds of the Region. During the last Ice Age, many of our own mountains in the U.S., familiar and even famous now, were nunataks then, rising in the same way above that ancient frozen expanse, keeping the flames of species aglow till such time as the ice should recede and life resume its dominion.

  At their invitation we crowded into the spacious control cabin of the great airship, where scientific gear occupied every available cubic—perhaps hypercubic—inch. Among the fantastical glass envelopes and knottings of gold wire as unreadable to us as the ebonite control panels scrupulously polished and reflecting the Arctic sky, we were able here and there to recognize more mundane items—here Manganin resistance-boxes and Tesla coils, there Leclanché cells and solenoidal magnets, with electrical cables sheathed in commercial-grade Gutta Percha running everywhere.

  Inside, the overhead was much higher than expected, and the bulkheads could scarcely be made out in the muted light through three hanging Fresnel lenses, the mantle behind each glowing a different primary color, from sensitive-flames which hissed at different frequencies. Strange sounds, complex harmonies and dissonances, resonant, sibilant, and percussive at once, being monitored from someplace far Exterior to this, issued from a large brass speaking-trumpet, with brass tubing and valvework elaborate as any to be found in an American marching band running back from it and into an extensive control panel on which various metering gauges were ranked, their pointers, with exquisite Breguet-style arrowheads, trembling in their rise and fall along the arcs of italic numerals. The glow of electrical coils seeped beyond the glass cylinders which enclosed them, and anyone’s hands that came near seemed dipped in blue chalk-dust. A Poulsen’s Telegraphone, recording the data being received, moved constantly to and fro along a length of shining steel wire which periodically was removed and replaced.

  “Ætheric impulses,” Dr. Counterfly was explaining. “For vortex stabilization we need a membrane sensitive enough to respond to the slightest eddies. We use a human caul—a ‘veil,’ as some say.”

  “Isn’t a child born with a veil believed to have powers of second sight?” Dr. Vormance inquired.

  “Correct. And a ship with a veil aboard it will never sink—or, in our case, crash.”

  “Things have been done to obtain a veil,” darkly added a junior officer, Mr. Suckling, “that may not even be talked about.”

  “Interesting. How’d you come by yours?”

  “A long history, of some complexity.” At this point Science Officer Counterfly advised us that the Special Ray Generator had come up to speed, enabling us to view the “nunatak” in a different light, so to speak. He led us into an adjoining compartment, where translucent screens glowed at various colors and intensities, and over to a panel, before which he seated himself.

  “Now, let’s adjust the gain here. . . . Good. Can you see it? Look on the reflecting-sheet, there, just below the quartz-work.”

  It took some moments to interpret what the curious camera lucida was revealing. At first all was a blurry confusion of strange yellowish green, in which areas of light and dark moved in a squirming restlessness, seeming in their slow boil to penetrate, while at the same time to envelop, one another. But once taken into that serpentine hypnosis, we became aware that the frame of visibility was moving ever downward, even as the glaucous turmoil began, here and there, to coalesce into a series of inscriptions, rushing by, that is, upward, too fast to read, even had the language been familiar.

  “We believe them to be warnings,” remarked the airship Commander, Professor St. Cosmo, “perhaps regarding the site of some sacred burial . . . a tomb of some sort. . . .”

  “Uneasy reference,” chuckled Dr. Vormance, “I take it, to the recent misfortunes of certain Egyptologists imprudent enough to have penetrated those realms of eternal rest?”

  “More like due diligence,” replied Dr. Counterfly, “and a respect for probabilities.” He gestured toward the image transmitted by the prisms of the instrument, which had been growing steadily clearer, like a fateful dawn none await with any eagerness. Too soon we discovered that we could not look away. Though details were still difficult to make out, the Figure appeared to recline on its side, an odalisque of the snows—though to what pleasures given posed a question far too dangerous—with as little agreement among us as to its “facial” features, some describing them as “Mongoloid,” others as “serpent-like.” Its eyes, for the most part, if eyes be what they were, remained open, its gaze as yet undirected—though we were bound in a common terror of that moment at which it might become aware of our interest and smoothly pivot its awful head to stare us full in the face.

  Oddly, questions of its being “alive” or “conscious” never figured in our decision to recover it. How deep did it lie? we wanted to know. Was there snow all the way down there, or would we run into rock of some kind? Practical matters. A muscular approach. Not a dreamer in the lot of us, to be honest, much less any dreamer of nightmares—the presence of at least one of whom, on any expedition of this sort, ought in future to be required by statute. Whatever we thought we had seen upon the viewing instrument, we had already, in mute fear, dismissed.

  Scholars of the Eddas, recently having perused them in original form in the Library of Iceland, were to suggest later—too late—comparison to Buri, grandfather of Odin and the first gods, frozen in the ice of Niflheim for uncounted ages, till being licked awake by the tongue of the mythic cow Audumla. Which of us then, mindlessly as children at a fairground, had not performed the analogous service for our own frozen Visitant? What gods, what races, what worlds were about to be born?

  Alpinists among us were to describe the recovery as no more arduous than a descent into a crevasse. The crew of the great airship, having warned us as much as they felt they could, now held aloof. Their charge appeared to go no further than warning—they shook their heads ruefully, they gazed down at us from the rail of their gondola, but they neither interfered nor lifted a finger to help. And we, intrepid innocents, we climbed down into those shadows, leaving abruptly the wind, as the scentless snow walls rose about us, and we followed the all-too-regular slope of what we foolishly continued to call the “nunatak,” down to meet our destiny. The Eskimos had seemed eager, at times unnaturally so, to speed our work. But whenever we happened upon a group of them conversing, they fell silent and did not resume till we had passed from earshot. Soon, one by one, on some private schedule we could not decipher, they departed, muttering, gliding away over the ice and into the yellowed glare forever.

  We entered a period o
f uncritical buoyancy, borne along by submission to a common fate of celebrity and ease. We exchanged formulaic sentiments—“Even the weather is cooperating.” “Glad we’ve all got contracts.” “Vibes will sell it, whatever it is, the minute they see it.” We labored in the polar darkness, our faces beaten at by the terrible orange flame-light of the Aurora. From time to time, the dogs went crazy—rigid, staring in fear, they ran away and tried to hide or to bite anything that got close. Sometimes there were real-life explanations—some polar bear or walrus scented from miles away. But sometimes no explanation could be found. Whatever it was, it was invisible.

  And on occasion they did not bark when they should have. One day there came walking to us over the white plain a figure in bearskins not of the region, strangely, unsettlingly, approaching from the north. Mr. Dodge Flannelette was impulsively reaching for his rifle, when Mr. Hastings Throyle, I believe it was, called out in Tungus, adding, “Damned if it isn’t old Magyakan. Knew him in Siberia.”

  “He can’t have come all this way on foot,” said Dr. Vormance skeptically.

  “Actually, most likely he flew here, and not only is he here visiting with us but also and simultaneously, I’ve no doubt, back in the Yenisei watershed with his people as well.”

  “You are beginning to worry me, Throyle.”

  Throyle explained about the mysterious shamanic power known as bilocation, which enables those with the gift literally to be in two or more places, often widely separated, at the same time. “He says he has a message for us.”

  “He seems afraid of something.”

  “Arctic hysteria,” said Dr. Ghloix, the Expedition’s psychomedical officer. “A sort of Northern melancholia, all too often a foreshadowing of suicide.”

  Magyakan declined food but took a cup of tea and a Havana cigar, sat, half-closed his eyes, and began to speak, with Throyle translating.

  “They may not wish to harm us. They may even in some way love us. But they have no more choice than your own sled dogs, in the terrible, to them empty, land upon which they have chosen to trespass, where humans are the only source of food. We are allowed to live and work until we fall from exhaustion. But they are suffering as much as we. Their voices will be gentle, they will administer the pain only when they must, and when they bring out the weapons, objects we’ve never seen before, we stare, wordless as dogs, we don’t recognize them, perhaps we think they are toys or something else to amuse us. . . .” He fell silent, sat and smoked and presently slept. Sometime after midnight he woke, rose, and walked away into the Arctic emptiness.