Reluctant Dead

by John Moss

  When Miranda looked back into the light, the five men were in exactly the same position, no one had moved. The ominous stillness was suddenly shattered by the staccato burst of sustained gunfire. Instinctively, Miranda ducked her head low against the ground and her body went rigid. She heard shouts and looked up again. The walls of the house were peppered with bullet holes. Silent wisps of dust drifted away from each hole as threads of debris dribbled down. Matteo was walking toward the house, past Te Ave Teao. One of the armed men in uniform was waving his weapon to indicate direction or to ensure compliance. Te Ave Teao glanced in her direction or past her, at the quarry.

  Matteo stepped into the dappled shadows of the portico and a moment later Miranda heard breaking glass, then plumes of smoke pushed at him from behind as he walked back out of the shadows and into the clear, with rising cascades of flame shimmering behind him that built quickly into a raging smokeless inferno.

  One of the inscriptions in the book, taken from Wilfred Owen’s vision of Hell, burned through her mind: I am the enemy you killed, my friend. Or vice versa.

  She was meant to be inside.

  6

  The Dying Light

  Gazing down from a cloudless sky as the sprawling Toronto cityscape gave way to settled landscape striated by road-lines that gathered here and there into town grids and then petered out into endless wilderness, Morgan was restless. They talked very little. Gloria Simmons seemed to feel her partner was in need of assistance, as she put it. He was missing, for goodness’ sake, in the Arctic, a long way from the office towers that seemed to define her. And Morgan was playing a hunch: despite the coroner’s report, he was certain he was dealing with murder and D’Arcy had virtually chosen to be a suspect, he wanted Morgan to come after him.

  And Morgan had. He settled back and tried to make himself comfortable in the plush leather seat. He thumbed through a magazine and a couple of brochures. He asked how long it would be until they got there.

  “It’s about the same as flying from Toronto to Dublin,” Gloria Simmons explained. “We’re a big country.”

  She was sitting opposite, her long legs folded one over the other so that he self-consciously closed his eyes. She had the alluring qualities of an ice sculpture, but none of the transparency. More like the stillness of a flame caught in a photograph, shaped like a woman by an accident of light. He drifted into reverie about women, about love, about making love. Miranda was on Easter Island, he thought about her. He thought about Easter Island. He thought about his affair there that had seemed, until now, an isolated episode in his life.

  Why did he think of it as an affair, he wondered? There was no guilt involved. He had violated no commitment. When he had been with her, with the other woman, there was something about their relationship that made him think of Miranda, but when he returned home, Miranda, his partner and friend, mirrored only herself. Why the other woman? They had met, they spent a few days together, they fell briefly in love. And, oddly enough, they were never actually lovers.

  Iqaluit loomed through the overcast sky as the Hawker 800 banked steeply and sliced down toward the runway, straightening at the last moment so the earth seemed to pitch upwards before levelling off. Good landing, Morgan thought. He had never flown in a corporate jet before. He had been astonished at the burled walnut woodwork and the plushness of the leather seats. He was irritated by his pleasure in the opulence. Through the entire flight he had felt comfortable, but not relaxed, not the way the immaculate Ms. Simmons was, from the moment she stepped inside. This was her world. He was an outsider.

  He gazed through a window as the jet taxied across the asphalt. There was more activity than he had expected for Baffin Island, even though this was the territorial capital. Helicopters and Twin Otters flanked the access pavement. Another executive jet painted with a sinister black sheen, no doubt to intimidate competitors and clients, was tucked in beside the green and grey storage sheds that blocked his view of the townsite. What had seemed from the air like a children’s toy, a clump of brilliant yellow plastic rectangles, turned out to be a brilliant yellow plastic modular airport terminal. Seldom had he seen a work of architecture so fully unsympathetic to its environment, which, from his limited vantage, looked austere and monochromatic. Perhaps that is the point, he thought. It’s comical, a cheering edifice in the bleakness of the North.

  Hearing a commotion behind him, Morgan turned to locate Ms. Simmons amid the white leather, stainless steel, and dark wood, but she was apparently behind closed doors in the back cabin. The doors to the back cabin opened with just a touch of drama and an entirely different woman walked out. Gone were the heels, replaced by heavy leather Vasques, and the skirt had given way to coarse twill kakis, the pristine blouse to a plaid work shirt with a stylish touch of leather at the collar tabs, and the impenetrable look on her face now seemed neither sullen nor superior but, rather, an expression of grace and forbearance.

  Striding across the tarmac and up the steel steps into the terminal, Morgan kept pace, but there was no question about who was in charge. This was fine with him. Gloria Simmons spoke to a man who looked like he’d rather be out hunting than hanging about in an airport, presumably about her bags — Morgan was travelling exceedingly light — and then they passed through the yellow cubist building, down another set of metal stairs, and slid into one of two waiting taxis.

  “The Frobisher Inn,” Gloria Simmons said to the driver, and as he started up he chortled and said something to her in a brief rhapsody of breathy and meaningless sounds, to which she answered in an equal flurry of noises from deep in her mouth, without moving her lips except to shape a smile of unutterable beauty. Morgan was stunned.

  She glanced at him. “Inuktitut, the Inuit language. I am an Eskimo, Mr. Morgan. An Inuk. If there were two of me, I’d be Inuuk.”

  Morgan followed her into the small lobby of the hotel apartment complex on the hill overlooking Iqaluit. There was apparently a suite set aside for D’Arcy Enterprises. She seemed entirely at home here, among casually dressed business travellers and over-dressed visiting civil servants and roughly dressed men passing through, hunters, perhaps, and anthropologists, almost all of them male. But she had seemed equally at home in an office tower at King and Bay. Morgan watched as she arranged for their rooms adjoining the suite which was technically still occupied by Harrington D’Arcy.

  Later, after he had picked up toiletries and a few clothes and some boots in the store off the lobby, they met for dinner in the hotel dining room. Sitting by a window with Frobisher Bay spread out below them, still brilliant with daylight although by now night would have enclosed Toronto in its turgid grip, Morgan took the initiative.

  “I take it your boss hasn’t turned up,” he said, wondering if Miranda had. Baffin seemed like a parallel universe, just out of reach. He glanced at the candle flickering between them, a concession to convention during a high summer evening in the land of the midnight sun.

  “No, he seems to have disappeared.”

  “Which is not a good sign.”

  “Not if he wants to be found.”

  “Where do you think he is?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “And?”

  “It’s a good question.”

  “Are you from …” It seemed absurd to say, from around here.

  “From here. Yes, born in Apex.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Down the road. It’s a suburb of Iqaluit.”

  “Really, Iqaluit has suburbs?”

  “Suburb — singular. It’s called Apex.”

  Morgan was determined he wasn’t going to say, you don’t look Inuit.

  “My father was Norwegian,” she said, anticipating the question he wouldn’t ask. “Or so I’ve been told.”

  “An anthropologist? Using Baffin as a base camp for a run at the Pole? Movie star?”

  “Laplander, here to advise on making caribou behave like reindeer.”

  “And to make Inuit behave lik
e Laps? I take it he failed.”

  “He fathered several children. By different women. I never met him.”

  “Would you want to?”

  “Why?”

  Morgan shrugged. Her personal history was beyond his imagination. She was a white Inuit, beautiful beyond words, a highly successful lawyer. She was the child of a brief liaison, brought up between cultures at odds with one another.

  Reading his thoughts once again, she said, “I was born into benevolent poverty, surrounded by love and squalor. My mother froze to death walking home after a binge when I was seven. My aunts and grannies and sisters and cousins brought me up and pushed me out when I was old enough to look after myself. Shipped south with tuberculosis, finished high school in Ottawa. University, honours chemistry, an ideal prelude for law school. Articled for D’Arcy. This is my first time back without an executive entourage. It’s just you and me, Morgan, and the Great White North.”

  He wondered how many stories her story concealed? It was eloquent in its simplicity and fairly humming with what she’d left out. Her eyes were deep brown, but in the flickering candlelight they seemed hazel, like Miranda’s. Her blond hair, pale with amber highlights, like sunlight through honey, was nothing at all like his partner’s. He felt strangely drawn to this woman, in part because he knew her so little — he had never met anyone who seemed to exist so completely in the moment, her personality revealing nothing, concealing nothing. She simply was who she was.

  “Are Laplanders blonde?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, smiling. This was the first time she had smiled at him directly, although he had seen her smile occasionally for the benefit of others. “Herders on one side, hunters on the other. Sounds like a lawyer with political ambitions, doesn’t it?”

  “Do you have political ambitions?”

  “Political? No.”

  “Are you a hunter?”

  “Not at all. But I’m sure if I had wanted to learn I would have been very good.” She didn’t seem to be joking. This struck Morgan as quite endearing.

  They lapsed into comfortable silence and focused on the thick, rare slabs of peppered caribou that had been served to them surrounded by garden vegetables sautéed in butter. It was more than Morgan could eat, but his slender companion devoured hers and eyed the blood-red portion that remained on his plate.

  “No,” she answered to his unasked question. “I’ll need room for dessert.”

  Over coffee, the quality of silence between them thickened so that Morgan became aware there were things that needed to be said. He wasn’t sure, though, which of them was suppressing the need to speak. She was gazing outside and he followed her gaze. Frobisher Bay had taken on the patina of burnished pewter, while the rugged land reaching away on either side had lapsed into shadow. Where the water met the sky a shimmering band of yellow tracked the hidden sun’s movement as it swooped low on the horizon behind them. Above, a massive grey cumulous cluster pressing down promised rain.

  What he had seen as monochromatic when he arrived, he now saw as the expression of “God’s grandeur” — a phrase from a poem that filled him with pleasure because the right words trumped his habitual denial of supernatural powers. Morgan’s favourite poet at school had been Gerard Manley Hopkins, not for his irrepressible devotion, but for the passion infused in his language that caught the reader’s innermost yearning to transcend. Transcend what? Whatever. He couldn’t remember.

  Morgan caught in the window the reflection of a tall lean man approaching the table and turned at the same time as Gloria Simmons to face him. Even before registering that the man was in uniform, Morgan recognized by the casual precision of his movement that he was a Mountie. No one else carries authority with that disconcerting mixture of humility and self-assurance, he thought. He could still see the residual effect in Miranda’s confident demeanour of her three years with the corps.

  The constable nodded to Morgan, but leaned down and spoke privately to his companion. She turned away so that their conversation was nothing more than a buzz. Several times, Gloria Simmons flinched, but her voice never rose to an audible level.

  After what seemed an interminable lapse, the Mountie straightened to his full height, nodded again in Morgan’s direction, and moved away. Other diners glanced up as he passed their tables.

  Morgan waited patiently for her to speak.

  “They have found him. Or at least they have found where he isn’t.”

  “D’Arcy?” he asked, but he had no doubt.

  “They found one survivor.”

  “Where?”

  “Between Aberdeen Island and Baffin Island. He was wearing a survival suit. The Inuk guide. The RCMP say the boat was smashed by a pod of whales.”

  “What kind of whales?”

  “What difference does it make? Bowhead, I imagine. Three others are presumed dead.”

  “Did they recover the bodies?”

  “Life jackets, no bodies. One survival suit and it was on the hunter. It was his boat. He was floating near the wreckage. He managed to call in before they went down.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we head north as fast as we can.”

  “Do you think he’s alive?”

  She stared at him as if she were trying to fathom how much he understood from what she had said, how much didn’t add up. As they rose from the table, the pallid fringe of light across the outer edge of Frobisher Bay faded to black. Morning would not show for an hour or two, depending on the weather. Morning farther north of Iqaluit had already begun.

  ***

  Miranda gazed at the skull, into the empty sockets that had once held living eyes. It was curious there was only one intact skull other than her own in their shared grave. Fragments of at least one other that seemed relatively recent revealed themselves when she ran her hand through the rubble beneath her. She looked back at the whole skull. It was leaning toward the Heyerdahl book in a grim tableau that made of its emptiness a mockery of knowledge contained in books. She closed her eyes and the skull remained in her vision, a memento mori demanding she accept its dictum, remember, you too will die. The exact translation from Latin: have to die, must, will? Remember. Death is inescapable, mortality is a terminal condition.

  “No!” she said in a whisper. Think Descartes: I think, therefore I’m not dead yet. She took a deep breath and rolled onto her back. The ghastly roar of the fire was beginning to subside. She could hear the insistent rhythm of her blood beating against the inside her skull. Memento vivere. Remember to live.

  When she was sure that the red Land Rover had left, and the fiery pillar had died to a pulsing flicker, she edged out of her burial chamber. The police car was gone as well. It was dusk and night would fall suddenly. She wanted to think clearly and that meant getting out into the open, even if it made her vulnerable. She clambered over the wall and was almost at the smouldering ruins when she realized she was not alone. A man was standing perfectly still with his back to her, his head tilted, staring into the embers.

  He didn’t turn when she approached, but when she was almost beside him, he said: “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “You looking for me or your book?”

  T.E. Ross turned slowly and the sinking sun caught fleeting signs of concern on his face that softened immediately to a cheerful grin.

  “Both,” he said, glancing at the book clasped against her like an inadequate breastplate.

  She looked down. At this point, it was her only possession, it gave her security; she tightened her grip, pressing it into her chest.

  “That’s mine, of course,” he said, reaching out for it.

  “I know,” she said, and irrationally held it closer.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go. We’ll have to walk.”

  Miranda followed him as he led the way down the lane toward the coast and into the blackness that swallowed the sun.

  She clutched the book like some sort of talisman until they got to the main road and she co
uld hear the low surf shredding itself against the ragged volcanic shoreline and the stars suddenly appeared in the great southern firmament as if an invisible hand had turned on the lights. It was bright enough that she could see nuances in Ross’s face suggesting he was confident, wary, and concerned perhaps for her. She held the book out to him. Without saying anything, he took it and turned along the road, picking up a quicker pace, his body language an invitation for her to stay sociably close.

  Over the next two hours, only one car came by, a Jeep, its single intact headlight giving them plenty of warning. They crouched low behind a small bit of scrub brush while it passed, leaning into each other as if somehow as a tight clump they’d be less visible. They walked on, then cut down an overgrown side road, then another and another, traversing what seemed to Miranda an invisible maze.

  “We’re nearly there,” he said as they veered onto a ragged path toward the sea. When they got to the edge, Miranda marvelled at how the vast Pacific was brought into a more human perspective by the infinite canopy of dazzling stars, despite the roiling surge of water grinding against the rocks beneath them. She leaned forward. The rocks were far below. She realized they must have been climbing for much of their walk and were now poised at the edge of a precipice.

  Ross took her by the hand and eased forward. She hesitated, he drew her on, she pulled back.

  “Trust me,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “You really don’t have an alternative.”

  Well, she thought, I could push you over and walk away. Or be dragged to my death by your side. “No,” she said, “I suppose I don’t.”

  “Follow my footsteps precisely. Is there sufficient light?”

  “Sufficient,” she said. “Quite.” She was mocking his formality, his Oxford accent, his gallantry, and concern. Since he was shuffling an inch at a time, and since she was following so closely, holding one of his hands in an iron grip while sinking the fingers of her other hand deep into his opposite shoulder, keeping their bodies so near that her breasts repeatedly grazed his shoulder blades, apprehension about her overall predicament, her terror at plunging to her imminent death, seemed strangely amusing.