Without pausing to think, Augustine swung the rifle down from his back. The thick canvas of the strap buzzed against the windproof material of his parka, and he froze. The wolf swung its head toward him and growled, the scant light bouncing off its eyes, making them shine like marbles. The wolf took a step closer to the hangar. Augustine held his breath and waited. Iris was creeping closer and closer along the length of the staircase, reaching out her hand to stroke its fur. The wolf sat down in the snow and watched her, pawing the ground and pricking its rounded ears at the sound of her voice. Augie slipped off his mittens and flexed his fingers in anticipation. He hadn’t fired a gun since he was a teenager, hunting with his father in the woods near their house in Michigan. The two of them would wait in silence, father and son, and when the moment was right and something found its way into their crosshairs, they would aim their guns and squeeze. Augustine hated every minute of those trips.
He lifted the rifle and rested the butt of it against his shoulder. He found the wolf in the scope and trained the crosshairs on its shaggy head. Iris was still creeping closer and closer, shedding her mittens and outstretching her hands, making soft, sweet noises. Just as his finger found the trigger, the wolf moved. It threw back its head and howled, a mournful, lonely sound, then took another step closer to Iris. Augustine corrected his aim, the wolf stood up on its hind legs, raising its snout toward Iris’s tiny palm, and he pulled the trigger.
THE SOUND OF the shot must have echoed over the mountain range, bouncing from peak to peak, reverberating in the valleys, but Augie didn’t hear it. Everything was silent as he watched the wolf’s head snap back, the fine mist of red that fell on the snow as its body hung in midair, then collapsed onto the ground in a crumpled heap. When it was over, all he could hear was Iris screaming.
He loped toward her, the glowing flashlight forgotten on the seat of the stalled snowmobile. Iris had tumbled down from where she had been balancing on the stairs and landed face-first on the snowy runway. White powder clung to her hair and eyelashes, her nose and cheeks red from the cold, and she was still screaming. She threw herself on the body of the wolf, burying her tiny hands in its white fur. Augie struggled to move fast enough. He didn’t have the breath to call to her, the weight of the rifle slapping the leftover air from his lungs with each awkward stride. When he finally reached her he saw that the wolf was still alive, but just barely. He had caught it in the neck. As the blood soaked into the snow, the shallow heave of its belly slowed. Augie reached out to pull Iris away from the dying creature and he saw that it was washing the tears and the snow from her face with its lolling pink tongue, as a mother might do to her cubs.
The wolf’s blood was on Iris’s face, in her hair, and on her hands, but she didn’t seem to notice. The animal drew a few more ragged breaths, then expired, its hot tongue collapsing in its mouth, the gleam of its eyes clouding into darkness. The wind stirred the snow around them and sent the shards of ice sideways like a million tiny razors. Augie put his hand on Iris’s tiny, shuddering back. She let him keep it there, but she wouldn’t release the dead wolf’s fur, nor would she stop her low, keening moan. She kept her fingers knotted in its warm, shaggy coat as the snow stung their exposed skin.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought—” but he couldn’t finish. He tried again. “I thought—”
But he hadn’t thought. He had identified a target before thinking anything at all. And he knew, with a sinking burn in his gut, that he would do it again. He told himself it was to protect Iris. To keep her safe from the danger that lurked all around them. And perhaps that was true—wolves are not harmless creatures, after all—but there was something else. A primal taste, sour, like fear, rising in the back of his throat, or maybe loneliness. He looked up to the stars, waiting for them to dwarf the immensity of emotion welling inside of him, as they had so many times before. But it didn’t work this time. He felt everything, and the stars winked down on him: cold, bright, distant, unfeeling. He was filled with an urge to pack his suitcase and move on. But of course there was nowhere else to go. He stayed where he was, still looking up, still with his hand on Iris’s back, and he felt—for the first time in so many years, he felt: helpless, lonely, afraid. If the tears hadn’t frozen in the corners of his eyes, he might have cried.
THE FLASHLIGHT WAS lost, burned out and left in the dark hangar somewhere, so they made their way back toward the observatory in the dark, following the hulking black shadow of its dome set in relief against a starlit sky. Augustine had lost his ski pole as well, and he moved slowly without its support, his joints exploding in pain with each step. He shifted the rifle to the other shoulder. He wished he had left it on the runway. Wished he hadn’t thought to bring it at all. His spine and shoulder were bruised from where the heavy barrel had been knocking against him and his chest ached from the recoil.
Iris was solemn but dry-eyed. As they walked she took up her usual song, low and desolate; Augustine was grateful for it. Anything to drown out the echo of her screams. They had covered the wolf’s body with snow and packed the bulging grave down as best they could, a glowing white mound streaked pink with blood. Iris had made a plow with her mittens and pushed the powder up over the corpse with vigorous thrusts. If it weren’t for the hollowed half moons beneath her eyes and the inconsolable quivering of her chin, he might have mistaken her for a child at play in her own backyard. He tried to imagine that this was the case, but there was no snowman when they were finished, only a swollen grave.
At the observatory, Iris went straight to their home on the third floor. Augustine stowed the gun in the armory cabinet in one of the outbuildings. The rifles were stored in an unheated building to keep the mechanisms from reacting to abrupt changes in temperature when they were used outside. He remembered learning when he first came to the outpost about the special Arctic lubricant used on the guns to keep the pieces fluid, and how little he cared at the time. The man who had showed him the guns had been a Marine before becoming a scientist, and the loving way he handled the firearms reminded Augustine of his father. Augie had told the man abruptly that he wouldn’t be using the armory while he was there.
When he reached the observatory and pushed open the door, his legs finally failed him. He fell into a chair on the first floor and waited for his muscles to respond to his brain’s commands. It took the better part of an hour for the cramps to fade. The warmth was just out of his reach, at the top of three flights of stairs. Augustine finally found the strength to haul himself up by the railing. When he burst into the heated control room, his chest heaving, he collapsed onto the nest of mattresses and sleeping bags on the floor. Piece by piece, and with great effort, he removed his boots, his parka, his hat and mittens. As he lay there he wondered why he hadn’t just chased it away, why he couldn’t have aimed high and let the crack of a warning shot send the wolf running back into the wilderness. A few minutes later he was asleep.
WHEN HE FINALLY woke, the sun was beginning to show, sending faint fingers of light in through the thick windows of the control room. The clock said it was noon. Augustine let himself lie there for a long time before he got up. The sun had already reached the zenith of its shortened day before he dragged himself to the window. He could see Iris sitting down the mountain a fair distance, past the outbuildings, watching the horizon. At first he was annoyed and wanted to tell her not to wander so far without him, but he realized he had no right to disturb her, nor to limit her movements. She understood the tundra better than he did. She was more at home here than he would ever be. And yet—it was his job to keep her safe, wasn’t it? There was no one else to do it. No one to help, no one to intervene if he was doing it wrong. No Internet, even, to ask for advice. Again, he was afraid, and again he pushed the emotion away, a feeling too strange, too unpleasant to sit with for long. He stared at his own reflection in the window, his skin crinkling around his features like a sheet of notebook paper balled up and then smoothed out again. He looked even older than he remembered, and
more tired.
Augustine took a granola bar from their food stores and sat at the table Iris liked best while he ate it. The field guide he had given her was open and lay facedown, its spine cracked in a dozen different places. He picked it up and found himself looking at a photo of the Arctic wolf. He read and reread the section on the white wolf’s forty-two teeth and didn’t let his eyes wander to the picture of their pups. The Arctic wolf is generally unafraid of humans, as their habitat is so desolate they rarely come into contact with them. Augie snapped the book shut. Forty-two teeth.
IRIS WAS STILL out there, unmoving. When the sun had sunk behind the mountains for the day, Augie abandoned the old astrophysics journal he had been trying to distract himself with. By then, he’d read and reread every journal, every magazine, every book left in the control tower. He felt strange, as if his own mind was unfamiliar to him, stricken with a deep wave of emotions he couldn’t name, didn’t recognize, and was unwilling to look at head-on. Augustine closed his eyes and did what he always did: he imagined the blue dome of the planet as seen from the other side of the atmosphere, and the emptiness beyond it. He pictured the rest of the solar system, planet by planet, then the Milky Way, and on and on, waiting for the awestruck relief to wash over him—but it didn’t come. All he could see was his own haggard reflection in the window, the bright rim of his white hair and wiry beard, and the empty holes where his eyes should be. The dead wolf, and the little girl stretching out her bare hand to a snout bristling with teeth. Was it remorse, he wondered, or cowardice? Perhaps he was ill. He touched the back of his hand to his forehead and found it very warm. That was it. He was ill. He could feel a fever building beneath his skin, heating his blood to a simmer. A buzz filled his ears and a pressure began to throb behind his eyes, beating against the inside of his skull like timpani. Was this it, then? The end? He thought of the first aid kit, down in the director’s office on the first floor. Should he get it? Was it worth it? He thought of all the medicines that weren’t in it, all the anatomical knowledge he didn’t possess, all the diagnostic equipment he didn’t have and wouldn’t know how to use anyway. Augustine went back to bed and imagined that it was his deathbed. Just before he drifted off, he thought of Iris, still out there, all alone on the tundra. Sleep overtook him slowly, like a wave rolling up the length of his body, and just before it reached his brain he wondered if this was what it would feel like. He wondered what would become of Iris if he never woke up.
FOUR
AETHER’S CREW STRUGGLED with time. There was so much of it—the hours in each day and the hours in each night, again and again. Weeks, then months to fill. Without knowing what was waiting for them on Earth the prescribed tasks and routines became empty. Pointless. If they would never feel Earth’s gravity again, then why bother with all the medication and exercise to remind their bodies of its weight? If they would never share their discoveries from the Galilean moon survey, then why continue the research? If their planet and everyone they had ever known was burnt or frozen or vaporized or diseased or some other equally unpleasant version of extinction, then what did it matter if they became careless and depressed? Who were they trying to make it home for? What did it matter if they overslept and overate, or underslept and underate—wasn’t despair appropriate? Didn’t it fit their situation?
Everything seemed to move more slowly. A tense apprehension settled over the crew: the weight of the unknown, of creeping futility. Sully found herself typing more slowly, writing more slowly, moving less, thinking less. At first the crew’s collective curiosity burned brightly, as they struggled to understand what had happened, but soon it gave way to a hopeless surrender. There was no way to know, no data to study except the lack of data. Their silent Earth was still ten months away, a long journey to an uncertain home. Nostalgia crept up on her—on all of them. They missed the people, the places, the objects they’d left behind—things they were beginning to think they would never see again. Sully thought of her daughter, Lucy, exuberant and high-pitched, a little blond-haired, brown-eyed cyclone that spun through Sully’s memory the same way she’d spun through their small house. She wished that she had brought more pictures, that she had had a whole thumb drive full of them—more than just the one, which was out of date even when they left. What kind of mother wouldn’t have brought at least a dozen, she thought. And on a two-year trip, when her daughter was turning into a young woman? Sully hadn’t received video uplinks from anyone except work colleagues the entire time she’d been on Aether. She would have treasured them, replayed them over and over, but there was nothing from Lucy, and definitely nothing from Jack. The estrangement of her family hadn’t broken her heart until she left the atmosphere—then all of a sudden it felt like a tragedy that had just recently befallen her, even though it had been that way for years. She tried to re-create the missing photos in her mind, the Christmases and birthdays and that time Lucy and Jack and Sully went whitewater rafting in Colorado, before the divorce. The scenery was easy to fill in—a lopsided blue spruce tree hung with silver tinsel, that green plaid sofa from their old apartment, chili pepper lights in the kitchen, the row of potted plants behind the sink, the red Land Rover packed for a road trip—but it was their faces that were hard to recall.
Jack, her husband for ten years, her ex for five. She started by picturing his hair, which he always kept shorter than she liked it, and then she tried to fill in the features one by one: eyes, green and fringed with thick lashes, shadowed by dark eyebrows; nose, a little bent, broken one too many times; mouth, dimples on either side, thin lips, good teeth. She thought about the day they met, the day she married him, the day she left him, trying to account for every minute, every word. She recreated the scenery of their life together: that tiny apartment in Toronto they shared when she was pregnant for the first time, while she was finishing her dissertation and he was teaching particle physics to undergrads, and then the brick loft with big windows they moved to after the miscarriage. He’d been so disappointed when she told him that the baby they’d only just learned about was lost—it was early, only six weeks in, and Sully’d barely had time to settle into the idea. When she felt the cramping she knew it was over, and when she saw the blood soaking through her underwear she was relieved. She cleaned it up, took four ibuprofen tablets, and wondered how to tell Jack. That afternoon she cradled his head in her lap and tried to feel the sadness she could see written on his face. But she couldn’t feel anything. The light had faded from the big windows in the living room, but still they sat, the curtains undrawn, the glass darkening to tall black eyes—looking in, or looking out, she couldn’t tell.
Their wedding a year later, at city hall, with the gray tiled corridors and the dark polished wood benches that lined them, other couples sitting and waiting their turn. The birth of Lucy, four years after that, in a minty green hospital room. The unquenchable joy on Jack’s face when he held her, the unmistakable fear in Sully’s chest when he handed the baby back to her. Lucy’s first steps, on the linoleum kitchen floor, first words, Daddy, no, when they tried to leave her with a babysitter. Sully thought of the day the space program invited her to join the new class of astronaut candidates, the day she left Jack and five-year-old Lucy behind and went to Houston. At first she remembered the milestone moments, the days that changed everything, but as time wore on she began to think more about the little things.
Lucy’s hair, how it looked like spun gold when she was small, then darkened as she grew. The veins pulsing beneath her translucent skin just after she was born. Jack’s broad torso, the way he left the top button undone and rolled up his sleeves, never wore a tie and rarely bothered with a jacket. The lines of his clavicle, the hint of chest hair, the inevitable smudge of blackboard chalk on his shirt. The copper saucepans that hung above the gas stove in the Vancouver house where they moved after Sully got her PhD; the color of the front door, raspberry red; the sheets Lucy liked best, midnight blue, scattered with yellow stars.
Everyone on Aether was los
t in a private past, each bunk like a bubble of memory. The absorption with things gone by was visible on all of their faces when they weren’t exchanging terse, necessary words with one another, struggling through the grim demands of the present. Sometimes Sully watched the others, imagining what they were thinking about. The crew had been training together in Houston for almost two years before the launch; they’d grown close, but the things you tell your colleagues when you’re practicing simulated disasters and the things you think about when the world ends while you’re far away are so very different.
IN HOUSTON, ABOUT a year before the mission launched, Sully recognized the Ivanov family having an early dinner at an outdoor café in the city. She was parking on the other side of the street and watched them while she slotted change into the meter. She thought about crossing to say hello but stayed where she was. They were all lit up and sun-gold, five heads of white-blond hair illuminated like dandelion puffs. She saw Ivanov lean over to cut up his youngest daughter’s dinner. His wife was animated, gesticulating wildly with silverware in her hands, her husband and children laughing with open, food-filled mouths.
A waiter stopped at their table with a ramekin, and when he set it down next to Ivanov’s elbow a chorus of thank-yous erupted from the children. Sully could hear it from across the street. Arms loaded down with half-empty plates, the waiter was beaming when he left the table. Sully’s gaze rested on Ivanov’s wife—now waving a salad-loaded fork while she talked. Sully wondered if she’d ever looked so joyful with her own family, or so present. Sully lingered at the meter until she felt that she was trespassing on a moment that didn’t belong to her, then moved off down the street to a small greengrocer’s where she bought her produce. Ivanov seemed chronically serious at work, but not tonight, not with his family. She selected peaches, and as she cupped the warm heaviness of the fruit and felt the delicate fuzz against her palm, she was reminded of the weight of her daughter’s head when she was born.
Good Morning, Midnight Page 5