by Josh Weil
We’ve walked right into a compression zone. Mountains of ice as far as the eye can see.
“A compression zone,” Claire tried to explain, “is where the shifting of the ice”—she could feel the woman’s stare—“it causes these huge mounds, like fifty feet.”
“What in the world?” Reaching over, Todd took the card from the woman’s hand.
Claire reached out and took the woman’s hand in hers. “I’m Claire,” she said. Shaking her hand seemed wrong. Just holding it seemed wrong, too.
“Suvi,” the woman said. “We were just leaving.”
“Oh.” Claire let go. She was with a man. He stood a little apart. “So were we.”
“But.” The woman flicked her eyes at the card.
“I know,” Claire said. “I’m kind of obsessed.” That sounded as wrong as holding her hand had felt. “I mean with the Arctic, with … Do you want to sit?”
Up close, Claire thought she must be part Inuit, maybe forty-five. Her tapering eyes, her wide cheeks: just sitting on the bench with her made Claire feel beautiful. “So,” she heard, and out of the corner of her eye saw the man extend a hand towards her staring husband, wiggle his fingers. “Did you intend to give me this?” She couldn’t place his accent—Russian? Swedish?—but watching Todd turn over the card, there was no mistaking the man’s grin. Taste me, Claire thought, but she was already telling the woman about the expedition. “It’s the first time anyone’s ever even tried to do it. But that’s not why. They’ve both done harder things.”
“Really?” the woman said.
It didn’t mean tell me more, Claire knew that, but the woman’s eyes stayed locked on her, and she couldn’t help going on. “You know the Arctic Circle?”
The woman smiled. “I’m from Karelia,” she said. “Near Finland.”
“One of them circumnavigated—”
“I’m from Long Island.” The man had reappeared with a pouf in his arms. “One hour and a half from here.” He set down the ottoman. “At least that’s where we’re from now. Belle Terre.” Squatting next to it, he raised his eyes to Todd, gave the leather top two pats. “Actually, a little over an hour, this time of night, the way I drive.” He made a fist, jerked his arm like he was shifting gears. There was so much muscle on him that his smile seemed a pushup for his jaw. “My name’s Oleg,” he told them, nose flexing. He must have been sixty. At least six feet tall. He said he used to work in astronomy, and Claire pictured him retiring to learn ice climbing, trading days in the office for days at the gym. His head looked waxed, his shoulders huge.
Watching Claire, Suvi smiled too. “So, if why is not that they’re the first …”
“It’s everything,” Claire told her. “The bears, the cracks in the ice, the endless night—”
“You have beautiful lips,” Suvi said.
“Thank you.”
“She does,” Oleg told Todd.
“I know,” Todd said.
Claire reached up, took his hand. “He’s been kissing them for almost ten years,” she said and, gently, led him to sit on the ottoman. It huffed beneath him. Beneath her hand she could feel their rings, the tension in his fingers. “You must know how it is,” she said to Suvi. “Finland, in the middle of winter. But they’re so far north there’s no sun at all, ever, for months. That was one of the two things that scared them most.”
“What was the other?” Oleg asked. He was still squatting, his legs so big they might as well have been a chair, and before she could answer he sprang a grin. “So many months without their wives!”
From nearby in the crowd there came the sound of a woman ramping up to shrieking.
“Or”—Oleg swung his grin to Todd, shot out a little elbow jab—“maybe not.”
When Todd spoke, he had to shout over the ecstatic noise. “The fact that they’re together,” he said. “That’s the other thing.” Maybe he said it louder than he had to. All three looked at him. “The Amazon, the Arctic Circle, they’ve always done it solo. But now they’re going together. Just the two of them. For months.”
Claire squeezed his hand.
“And you know what?” Todd said. “They’re doing okay.” He glanced at Claire. “What was it they wrote?”
“Todd—”
“A pretty good team,” he prompted.
What, Claire thought, were they doing to that woman?
“They wrote: ‘We make a pretty good team.’”
Nobody, she thought, needs to make that kind of noise. That kind of noise was never real. Suvi’s eyes found hers as if to show she was thinking the same thing.
“Still seems crazy to me,” Oleg said.
“But,” Suvi said, “beautiful, too.”
“Sometimes,” Claire told her, “the ice is like a mosaic. They have to jump from floe to floe.” She could feel both men looking at her, but she kept her eyes on Suvi’s. “Sometimes in the compression zones they can hear the sound of it under their feet, crushing and grinding.”
“Well”—Oleg stood up—“I can hardly hear anything in here. But it’s quiet at home. And I can get us there in an hour.” He buttoned his blazer. “It’s a Cayenne,” he said, talking now to Todd. “Twin turbocharged. Five hundred horses. Tell you what, in the morning, or the afternoon, or whenever we take you back, I’m going to let you drive.”
When Suvi stood, Claire stood too. On Todd’s face, she could see This, this is not okay, and she tried to show him It will be, but he was putting it all in his eyes in a way that would have made that director proud: Sit down and Don’t do this and Please. That was when Suvi leaned down and kissed him.
At last they are moving. The wind has died down, the helicopter motors have been heated, they have left their lodgings at Golomiyanniy, the ice at Cape Artichesky has frozen firm enough to land, and, after so much waiting, they are on their way. What a relief to take the first step, put words into action. There is nothing but possibility ahead!
Turning left onto Atlantic, they head west towards the ramp, and by the time they are on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway it is midnight. The light is fantastic from here! It’s orangish brown with a trace of ochre near the city’s horizon. The bulbs on the bridge cables could almost be stars; the headlights of oncoming cars, comets; the hand on Claire’s thigh so unlike her husband’s. Oleg is driving fast: beneath her, the thump, thump, thump of the expansion joints in the road. Her whole body clenches in expectation of the potholes. In the visor mirror, Todd is sitting next to the most beautiful woman Claire has ever seen. Certainly, the most beautiful woman she has ever seen beside her husband in the backseat of a Porsche SUV. Without a doubt, the most beautiful woman she has ever seen snorting coke.
“Eight point six miles,” Oleg says as they complete their leg of the BQE and begin the Long Island Expressway. “Seven minutes, fifty-four seconds.” He has set the trip odometer on the GPS. “But,” he assures them, his hand slipping farther into her lap, “now we are going to see real road.”
In the mirror: Suvi’s long fingers handing Todd a tight-rolled bill, an eye shadow case, white stripe across its top. They must be at mile nine by the time Claire hears her husband say, “Sure.”
At 9.7 Oleg snorts his line. Claire knows this because he asks her to hold the wheel. Leaning over, she can see the map of where they are, the blue dot moving away from where they were; then he is bent beneath her arm, his head ducked close to her lap, and she wonders if he can smell her nervousness, feel her heat. When it’s her turn, she doesn’t look at the miles. She watches the little blue dot sucked along the yellow line and feels it slip straight up between her eyes into her brain.
“Hey,” she says to Oleg, “how fast are we going?”
As if in response, he turns on music. Frenetic techno stuff, like road trip music made not for them but for the blue dot, for its adventure on the GPS screen, music so bad she has to look back at Todd to see the expression on his face. But he is staring fiercely out the window at the night blowing by. Suvi stares the same way into Cl
aire’s eyes. And Claire thinks, No, the music is for them. It is the soundtrack for the trip they are on. The theme for this. And she likes it. She knows she shouldn’t, but her body is bouncing just a little in her seat. That’s when she realizes she hasn’t felt the potholes at all. “This is a nice car,” she says.
“Wait till you see the house,” Oleg tells her.
Suvi nods. About the car, the house, or just to the music?
“We must be making good time,” Todd says, still staring out the window.
The look on his face is a picture of the hardening in his voice, and watching her husband Claire tries to soften it. “Rapid progress,” she says. “A new record!” There, at last, is his smile. “An impressive distance covered today!”
Todd puffs a laugh out of his nose like a snort in reverse.
“Your husband,” Suvi says, smiling too, “is afraid to look at me.”
“Eighty-five,” Oleg tells them. “Ninety. Ninety-five.”
When Claire turns back, the road is coming faster than she has ever seen it come before.
“Aaand,” Oleg says, the word like a ramp for the volume of his voice, “Et hundre!”
The blue dot is a pinball struck.
“Et hundre og ti! Et hundre og tuje! Et hundre og tretti!”
Is a BB bursting down the barrel of a gun.
“Et hundre og femti!”
Is them.
On the GPS screen something is flashing. A turn approaching, a new route found, a course on the map waiting to be blazed, a signal sent from her into space and back down to her again, and maybe the satellite that catches it is the same that catches the voices of the men—Life is short! Each minute is important!—maybe the wavelengths simply get mixed up, but, for a moment, feeling the night roar at her, rocketing towards that beautiful land—Live while you can!—she can hear them.
But which one was inside her? For a moment, she couldn’t tell. It was so dark she couldn’t even see the wall her palms were pressed against. They had gone down to a room in the basement and sat on a carpet of some animal’s fur, around a glass-top table, watched Suvi cut the lines. But why now? Oleg had wondered, aloud, without warning, his pale eyes on Claire. And she had started with global warming, the world’s attention—but Oleg shook his head. No, he said, it’s because of the global brightening. And holding her eyes with his, he had leaned in, told her in a voice low and hushed as the start of a bedtime story how, far to the north, beside the Bering Sea, there glowed a circle of light illumined on the tundra all day, all night. This, he opened his hands, is only the start. Which was when Todd had broken in. Okay, her husband had said, all right already. They had all looked at him, and Claire could see on his face that he had glimpsed what had been growing on hers. But we turn off the lights, he said. All of them, understand? He held the rolled bill so tight his fingers dented it. I don’t want to see anything.
But she could feel it. Either Oleg was the kind of older man whose entire body balded as it aged, or he had waxed, his hairless thighs so unlike her husband’s, the muscles stiff with the same strain that in Todd’s legs always showed as shaking. In her ear, the astronomer was whispering how good she felt. In the minutes after the coke was gone and the lights were off and she had discovered the softness of a woman’s lips brushing her belly, she had felt good, had wanted, then, to believe what Oleg said: that circle of ceaseless glow, that nighttime sun reflected onto that patch of earth. In the darkness, she had wondered if the caromed light would look a little different, if it might feel somehow strange against her skin. And, for a moment, beneath the strangers’ touches, in the newness of Suvi’s search and find, the woman learning her down there, she had felt it, she had believed in it, for a moment had not wondered where her husband was.
Where was he now? She tried to hear, but Oleg, behind her, was grunting the way he must at the gym when doing squats, gripping her breasts like climbing-wall holds, and, imagining him—neck bulged, jaw clenched, face red—she saw, for a second, the two men instead, hauling their heavy sledges through true dark, pushing their bodies with real need, and it suddenly seemed so foolish. Staring hard into the blackness, she tried to listen harder: Oleg’s wife moaning, Claire’s husband breathing. Reaching back, she pushed herself free, heard her name, heard it again, but she was walking away from the sound of it then, hands held out before her sightless eyes.
Soon, the men would reach the Pole, take one last step, and be standing on it. And then? Any step they took from there could only take them back. To the south there would be the sun, slowly circling the horizon. No mere experiment, no mirrored wings, but a natural never-ending light. All day, all night, they would watch its circumnavigation, knowing it wasn’t really moving at all, that it was them, the earth beneath them, making another turn. They would stand there until the sun was back where it had started. Then they would do the only thing there was to do: begin walking again.
Crouching down, she felt the cold, hard floor. How many other women had Oleg pressed down on it? How many other men had Suvi let shove her spine against these boards? And how long would they keep doing it? Till his legs could no longer hold him? Till her back grew too weak? The only difference night after night the change that time would have worked in them anyway. And when the men on the Pole came home again, their skin windburned away, their lungs scraped clean by Arctic air, the life in them spent and replaced, would even they be truly different from when they’d left? To a lover? A wife? Crawling through the darkness, Claire felt for the curve of her husband’s calf, his forearm’s hair, the hand that she would know anywhere.
But it was a woman’s that brushed her. Claire jerked her hip away. In the blackness, she could barely make them out: pale glint of teeth, dark ledge of back. Almost invisible, it rose and fell as if the air itself was undulating. For a moment, she could feel the movement just beneath her reached-out palm. Then she touched him. His shoulder stopped. From the darkness under him, the woman said something in a language Claire couldn’t understand. Nearer, Todd’s breathing gusted. Through his back she could feel his lungs fill, feel her own empty, hear the what and we and doing in their air.
And then he was rising, as if pushed by the darkness beneath him, and in the scuff of skin on floorboards, the space where the woman had been seemed to pull Todd down to it, to draw Claire over him, her hands reading the give of his skin, the bone she could feel beneath her palms when she lowered herself onto him. She pressed with all her weight to keep him still. And, her hands on his face, she traced him with her fingers—the ripples raised above his brow, the blink of a lash, the slightly open mouth—until she felt his fingers, his touch, his hands see her.
We wake together, the way our bodies after all this time have learned to do, and, silently, side by side, in the dark, we dress: long underwear, soft shell, overlayer, down layer, wind shell, neck gaiter, face mask. The rasping of our nylon mummy bags being stuffed into their sacks. The heavy, sour scent of our bodies. From somewhere deep beneath the tent floor: the groaning ice. Wind batters the sides, cold coming through. We breathe one last warm breath onto our frostbitten fingers, pull on our gloves, turn on our headlamps, reach for the zippered door.
Climbing the stairs, we leave behind the sounds of the others still sleeping, and with each step discern a little more: vague shadows in the hall, faint shapes in unfamiliar rooms, windows like giant frames of scenes unknown. The glass in them is aglow with dawn. By the time we are out in it, the sun is up, a splinter of red.
How hard to get from here to home?
A spark.
How long a walk?
A coal.
How far?
Blown brighter and brighter.
Data log.
Until.
Latest position.
It catches.
Distance to go.
And we watch it burn up the sky.
The spring equinox has arrived. We can see now that what we were seeing before was only a reflection. It wasn’t the sun at all. Now
we are looking at the real sun. And it is something different altogether.
THE FIRST
BAD THING
There was one rule: he didn’t ask what was in her past to make them hunt her so, and she didn’t ask what was in his, period. Lying on the sticky linoleum in what space was left beside the four burner they had overturned, they passed a filterless lips to lips and promised each other that.
Some hours ago she had shown up in the rear lot, announced by the gravel. He’d just begun his shift and was in the spray shed standing before the night’s first pane of glass, adjusting the nozzle, when he heard the truck. Through the open garage door he watched it roll to a stop. He didn’t like that the pickup had come around the back and his eyes flicked over the garage for what he might use if he had to. Then the engine quit and his eyes flicked back. She popped the door. The cab light flared. In its yellow glow she sat behind the wheel doing her makeup in a way he could tell was meant to show she knew someone was watching.
Between them the outside lot was aglow with an eerie luminescence barely distinguishable from the cab light glowing within it. Behind her truck, one of the glass carriers had been left stacked and on its back the panes reflected the sky, glimmering like day. But it was full into night. And what dim semblance of dusk hung over Rundgren’s lot was just the closest thing to darkness there was left. Most nights it was even brighter—the big sign out front readable from the far curve of the road, the garage’s clear ceiling letting in plenty of light to work by for all his night-spanning shift—but that night the garage was bulb lit, the sign turned on and flickering: RUNDGREN’S ILLUMINATION VARIATION. ADJUSTABLE OPACITY GLASS, REFLECTIVE RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY.
Hearkening, the locals called it, nights like this when clouds left the air thick with the closeness of rain, the hills swaddled in dimness for a few short hours. People would get wistful. They gathered on porches, talked of how night used to be: pitch black and couldn’t see your hand in front of your face and stars. They waited for the rain, and watched the sky. Up there, the pale lights of the space mirrors drifted. The coat of clouds was spotted with them: a thousand smothered moons glowing faintly through.