HE MUST HAVE FALLEN ASLEEP. His arms were numb and prickling and his mouth felt as if it had been packed with wool. Then he remembered: the sailors coming out of the golf bag, the birthmarks, Jill with her pants off. His explanation for her as he tried to fill her in and make her see the men: Like a reverse hallucination, I think, because apparently the ice on the shoreline, the pack ice and bergs and all the other formations everywhere would sometimes look so freakishly much like an exact replica of a city, with streets and houses and cathedrals, the whole deal, the sailors would think they were going bonkers. But they’ d all see it together, too. These empty ice cities exactly like England. They’ d be sailing along and one of them would say, “Look, it’s Westminster Abbey, right there!” Probably only because they wanted so badly to believe. Or maybe it was real. Anyway, instead of that, I’m seeing them! Like the hallucinations are getting jammed up in the space-time continuum and reversed somehow? Trouble was, as much as he narrated for her what Work and Hoar were doing—Hoar prying his teeth from the golf ball, trying to reinsert them in his bloody gums, Work stealing the ball back and attempting to swallow it whole, spitting it out—he never got the sense she was actually seeing anything. She’d sigh, laugh, and a few times between yawns say things like Sucks to be him, and Really? and Which one’s which again? At some point, she’d definitely drifted off and fallen asleep. Now she was sitting beside him, shaking his shoulder, hissing his name. Time had skipped backward or ahead somehow. What had happened? Had anything happened? She was fully clothed, hair combed out and shirt buttoned.
“Wake up now, Thomas. My parents are totally going to be home any minute.”
“I was asleep.”
“I know. We’ll have to sneak you out the back or something.”
“But how”—he yawned—“how long have we been down here?”
She shrugged. “Like an hour at least.”
“I thought it was longer.”
“You ate those pills, duh. No wonder.”
“You did, too.”
“I had, like, half a one. You ate all the rest.”
“True not. There’s two left.” He rattled the vial for her. “So . . . are they home?”
She tilted her head, listening. “I don’t think so.” She prodded him with a foot. “Come on, let’s get you out of here.”
He stood, thumped for a moment at his leg, which also had gone mostly numb, and extended his good hand to pull her up. Held her at arm’s length and looked at her straight on. There should be something said about what had happened today. He was sure of it, some kind of pact or acknowledgment, and he was just as sure that he was the one who needed to say it, yet he had no clue what the thing might be—the absolutely right thing. The wrong thing would be so terribly wrong, and yet saying nothing at all might be even more fatal than that.
“Got you a good one there,” she said, pointing at his neck. “Sorry.”
“What?”
“Hickey.”
“Oh.” He made a show of trying to see it, and laughed. “The thing is, Jill, I think . . . no, I have to say, I’m totally in love with you.” His eyes fizzed and stung as he finished this, unexpectedly, both because of the feelings awakened in him by saying it, whether or not he truly loved her, and because of the risk of devastating embarrassment he’d so casually wandered into. There must be some connection between this and the way he’d felt last night staring in the mirror, wanting to stab or crush his reflection out of existence, but he couldn’t quite see what it was. Then he wasn’t sure she’d heard him anyway, she’d gone so completely still, and in the interim he became convinced that he needed to undercut his words a little, go back, give things a jokier, easier spin. “For reals, Jills. You’re like . . .”
She swatted his shoulder. “You’re not in love with me.”
“Serious! I’m trying to be serious here. Come on!”
She leaned into him, planted herself with arms circling his ribs so fiercely, he thought he’d never escape. He watched his hands slide up and down her back and move aside her hair, stroke and spin together strands. In the shadow where the waist of her jeans gapped slightly he could just make out the top fringe of her underwear and above that the beginning of the blue-purple stain. Blue butt. Lots of Korean girls, she’d said. So he hadn’t dreamed it. Or at least not all of it. It had happened.
“Maybe I should, like, camp out here. Spend the night.”
“Maybe you want my dad to kill you first.”
“Hmm.” He pretended to think about it. “On second thought . . . forget about Camelot. Rather a silly place, really . . .” They might not have all the movies in the world in common, but they could riff on The Holy Grail together pretty well. Sticking her with a scene ending as he had just done left her free to go anywhere in the script—probably the bit with the castle full of young nuns. One of her favorites. “The peril is much too perilous,” he said to prompt her, but she was already on another tack, singing “The Ballad of Brave Sir Robin,” and skipping ahead to the best, goriest details—smashed head, nostrils ripped, bowels unplugged, bottom burnt off—Thomas joining with her for the final lines of the song and Robin’s dismissal of his minstrels:
“Eh—enough music for now, lads.”
And like that, released from each other, they turned and headed up the stairs—Jill first, so she was first to see: outside the front picture window, the northern sky torn aside with blue-green smoke and wavering, snaky columns of light.
“Northern Lights!” she said, and crossed quickly to the window.
He went to stand behind her and to one side. Said, “A sailor’s reminder there’s sunlight still in distant lands . . .”
She glanced at him. “What’s that from?”
“The movie. A scene I just finished, actually. Hoar says it when—”
“I love you, too, Thomas. Just so you know. I don’t know if you meant it before, but you know . . . I don’t care.”
He nodded. Waited a moment to be certain of whatever he said next, but before he could think of what it should be, headlights flooded the wall beside them and she pushed him down. “Quick. This way,” she said. “Here.”
He grabbed up boots, coat, knapsack from the far side of the couch and followed her to the kitchen and out the sliding glass door.
Love and obey: that paradoxical edict from the wedding vows that he and Jane had so ostentatiously (in his parents’ view anyway) decided to delete, and had later joked about, semiregularly over the years of their marriage, always meaning, he supposed, to point out to each other just how much they really didn’t, either one of them, control, obey, or answer to the other—so progressive, so evolved. Later, reflected through the children, it took on other layers of meaning: their unconditional love for the boys never diminished by any disobedient act, yet requiring constant monitoring and rearticulation of all rules, terms, and consequences, so very nearly the exact inverse of the love between Jane and him. When Jane had finalized her plan to leave them, go north, it acquired yet another significance and an accompanying emotional/visual analogue that had felt to him like a giant screw unwinding from his chest, leaving a gaping, raw channel. She’d never obeyed. Not him or anyone. Maybe she’d never loved, either. So was he wrong not to have insisted that they obey each other? What was obedience, after all—after nineteen, twenty years of marriage, what could it possibly mean? How did a marriage survive without it? But how obey and still love? Her own grandmother had, notoriously, given her grandfather a letter a few weeks prior to their wedding ceremony in which she asked him, please, to remember to keep control over her. Franklin had never seen the letter but had heard Jane paraphrase it often enough that he felt as if he’d viewed the thing firsthand: the plea to her husband to keep her in control, remember the vows they’d soon take, and manage the untamable wildness in her. Save this letter for such time as you need to invoke the authority I hereby freely grant you in it. I fear you’ll need it all too often. Yet, Jane insisted, her grandmother was always the one in
control, managing the family finances, working, running the shop. Free-thinking and well ahead of her time. And, of course, to her knowledge, her grandfather had never had cause to use the so-called authority given him in that letter.
It needed a container—that was all he’d ever been able to conclude on the matter. Marriage, love, affection of any kind, it needed some thing in which to be contained, reflected, and given form, in the same way people themselves needed some form or structure, however fictitious. Once upon a time, some people had agreed to draw a line around that and call it obedience. Politicized, polarizing or not, he still thought it was probably the wrong word, but he had a different perspective now than he’d had twenty years ago on what might have been meant by it. More like a vessel or a seedpod, he supposed. A car. Watch case? Mirror. Anyway, a container. And speeding home to Thomas, he felt contained as he hadn’t in some time. Held in Moira’s attention and given direction by the urge to shape her name over and over in his mind, and to say it out aloud to himself. Also restless and aware that the filaments attaching him to any other human were as tenuous as ever and stretched to the max through the icy dark. Jane would never return from the Arctic. He believed that more fully tonight than he had for some time. Moira might or might not show up at his door. Better to hope that she would; better yet not to expect it.
One of the last times he and Jane had spoken, six, seven months ago now, before they’d agreed to quit their semiregular “talks” and phone updates, she’d told him something he’d often revisited: It’s good you’re losing some of your control, John. Your composure, whatever you want to call it, even if it scares the boys sometimes. Good for your soul. I always said.... It’s like some kind of false veneer or false protective coating with you, isn’t it? The way you keep such close wraps on everything you feel and say and do, such command over how you’ll choose to react. You think that was ever fun to be around? I mean, there’s nothing really wrong with it, I guess . . . just kind of distancing, isn’t it?
Distancing? He’d tried to keep the incredulity in his voice down. Wow. Did you really say distancing?
I’m just . . . yes. I don’t know. Sometimes I think if you’ d maybe let go a little more once in a while, loosened up . . .
Like the time I dislocated Devon’s shoulder? You liked that a lot.
Point taken.
Scared the crap out of you. Or with Thomas, that time with the catsup in the hair?
Yes, but I think what I’m talking about here is a little different.
How so? You’ve never been a fan of the big emotional displays, Jane. Period. Mine or anyone’s. Really, you can’t deny . . . twenty years or whatever without ever actually fighting. How else do you think we managed that?
I’m not saying it makes sense, John. I never said that. It’s more of a feeling thing. I just . . . I suspect this time apart is as good for you as it is for me. I have to believe. And maybe there’s a way you can let back in some of that more immoderate energy of yours, more of that . . . I don’t know what you call it. Let it back into your life more anyway, now I’m gone? It’d be good, I think.
Maybe so, he’d said.
That’s my hope.
Then it’s mine, as well.
Only later, he’d realized she hadn’t been talking about hope in the sense of suggesting a reconciliation or way forward for them. She’d been describing for him what she wished he’d become, without her. And in doing so, asking him to relinquish the single personality trait of his that had probably done most to keep them together.
Meanwhile, time seemed to have dilated or slipped sideways and backward. Still only 6:42, which made no sense, given how long he thought he and Moira must have sat at Pearle’s. Was his car clock frozen? Stalled because of a cold battery? Possibly. He tried to check it against the time on his watch but couldn’t manage to push aside his coat and shirtsleeve at exactly the right moment to see. Too, the upper-right corner of his windshield seemed to have been lit with a glow like the sunrise, only paler, more like some kind of neon condensation stuck on the glass. Like aliens had landed. “What the fuck?” he said, swiping a hand at the windshield. Was it somehow 6:42 A.M. and he had managed to lose an entire night? No, wrong part of the sky. He bent lower to see, and realized, Of course. Northern Lights. The crazy elastic ribbons of supercharged particles caught in the Earth’s Van Allen belt and streaming along the horizon. Always put him in mind, however incongruously, of sea anemones and underwater currents lit by phosphorescent algae, the chorus to Ringo’s “Octopus’s Garden” starting up reflexively in his head: I’d like to be under the sea. . . . Also some of his earlier, mushroom-enhanced concert experiences watching the troupes of young aerial dancers spinning and twisting from vertical ribbons of colored cloth, doing crazy airborne yoga. The lights tonight were paler but somehow more radiant than usual. Not for the first time he wondered just how different they’d look closer to the source, how much more intense and colorful from Jane’s perspective, up there in the true north. This was the cheap, bargain version, he was sure—the one that came with at least some hours of winter sunlight. He pictured the point he’d jogged to that night, at the edge of town in Inuvik. Threw in Northern Lights, snow, wind, cold . . . no sun. Decided, no, if he were in Inuvik now, he’d probably venture no farther than the edge of the driveway.
Turning off the main road and under the overpass, headed north toward home and past the open field that eventually ran into lots abutting their backyard, he thought he saw a solitary figure, almost like a rock cairn, arms upraised to the spires of electronic static, as if summoning them. Thomas, he thought instantly, and just as instantly dismissed the thought. Couldn’t be. Anyway, looking a second and third time, he was pretty sure it was two people. That, or one large man pulling something larger behind him; or maybe it was a rock cairn after all. One he’d never noticed before? Unlikely. What was the Inuit word for it? He tapped his leg, trying to remember. Inukshuk. Stones placed to resemble a human form, marking the place. Sig-nifiying, Someone was here; You are on the right path. Or, Here is meat and fish; here lies the body of so-and-so. And wasn’t that where Thomas had said Sir John Franklin’s remains must be interred, somewhere undiscovered on King William Island, in a concrete cairn? No one knew for sure. The light continued seeping its weird designs up the horizon. What a show, he thought, turning into their block, and realizing then that, if he’d wanted to know what time it was, he could always just check his phone. Of course. Flipped it open and saw not the clock numbers in the top corner of the phone screen, but the red square message in the middle alerting him again, as it had the night before, “New Text Message! View Now?” He bumped to the side of the road and up the driveway. Didn’t even put the car in park or turn the key in the ignition. Clicked Yes and waited, eye nerves straining through darkness to make out the pixilated, blocky sans-serif script: Maybe Tonight lover not sure but do lv door unlocked . . . in case. He snapped the phone shut. Slotted the gearshift to PARK, stood out of the car, and leaned back inside for his bag, her white hat. The cold outside air smelled of exhaust and hot new metal, sweet as the taste of adrenaline at the back of his throat as he started up the walk, wondering giddily, Tonight, tonight?
DESPITE HIS AWESOME NEW IMPERVIOUSNESS to the cold, he didn’t want to stay outside. Something at home drew him—food, his notebooks, the possibility of his dad waiting, wondering where in the world he was. He stayed just long enough to see Jill’s parents enter the kitchen, first her father, mostly bald, freckled as she was, pudgy, with a fringe of reddish hair. He stood with hands on his hips, and then with the back of a wrist raised to his forehead—classic woe stance, face absolutely stilled by some emotion, puzzlement or horror—eyes narrowing, mouth tightening. Oh, Thomas thought. The hot chocolate. Shoot. They’d forgotten and never cleaned that up. Then her father was gone. A male voice, higher than he’d anticipated, given his seeming bulk, echoed from inside. Scottish accent? Couldn’t be sure—couldn’t actually make out any words. Next Jill’s mother,
exactly in the spot where he and Jill had stood kissing, opening mail. She was slender and pretty—prettier or perkier, anyway, than Jill. Like she was the original, full-color version, the genuine article, Jill the carbon-copy reduction. This was a disturbing-enough comparison on its own—Jill’s own mother—and led immediately to a full-on recognition of how bad it must be for Jill, always feeling less than and overshadowed, maybe especially because of the birthmark. Birthmarks. Kind of explained all her crying. Tough luck, he thought. Sucks to be you. But then minutes later when Jill stomped in, sheepish, tragically red-faced, father right behind her, he had to reassess. Actually, facial stain or not, she was the dazzling one. Radiant. He caught her in glimpses coming in and out of the window and once he was sure she was staring right out at him here by the apple tree. Even thought he saw her wink and nod her head. But that was impossible. If she was winking and nodding, it would be at her own reflection. Must be the pills, making him not just impervious to the cold but allowing dream thought to seep up through the optical nerves and seem real. And that was when he knew, in the same way he’d known earlier that day at school, the clock ticking ahead during second period, that his time here was up. He’d been released.
He turned and headed into the empty field bordering their yards, up the incline, breaking through the undergrowth and scrambling over frozen, rocky soil, then turned again and continued along the ridge toward home. He wished he could always be this numb. It was really pretty terrific. Not just the cold but the branches whipping his legs and bare wrists, the ground prodding his sore feet—all of it was dialed down to about one or zero. Barely there at all. Just amazing. He could go anywhere, do anything in this condition. The Northern Lights, wheeling around on his right like the old Spirograph-set designs he’d sometimes drawn as a kid at his grandparent’s house—one of his dad’s old childhood toys kept there in California and never brought back to Calgary—seemed to be converging in the corners of his eye and coalescing back into the shape of the men, Hoar and Work. He searched the ground for their shadows alongside his own but didn’t dare look right at them. That would cause them to vanish for sure. “Guys!” he said. “Can you hear me?” No response. Of course not. What would they want from him anyway, and what could he possibly provide? He reconstructed their likeness in his imagination and matched their shadows with how he would draw them as soon as he was inside again, warm and fed, their actions and facial expressions. He had to remember not to make Hoar anything like Malloy. Darken the edges, imagine a heavy green underpainting, enlarge the nose, angularize everything. The twenty years between the two men would have been almost erased by their time in the Arctic and the ravages of scurvy. Only the color in Hoar’s beard might give away his relative youth. What do you want first? Food or a hot bath? Just to stand over a hot air vent, thawing out awhile? Their bathwater would blacken with dirt and blood and shit, all the places where blood had congealed and scabs formed around missing toes, reopened old wounds and new suppurating sores probably oozing freely. Little eddies of pinkish red making tornado clouds in the water. A bath would do them no good, really. Yet he had no doubt they’d each want one first. Probably with a jigger of rum and plate of fresh fruit and meat right there on the side of the tub. He’d set Hoar up in the upstairs tub and Work in the downstairs half bath. Work would have to settle for a hot shower for starters, or else wait his turn. And in lieu of new clothes for them: blankets. The thick new felted blankets from the hall closet, one apiece. Then a stew of fresh meat and carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, fresh gallon of milk for them to split. Lemon juice over everything. Side of C supplements. They would love him so much, he’d never be alone again in his life.
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