I walk over to the radio, Voley still running around with the excitement of my cheers, and sit down. I pick up the receiver and hit the button. Still here, I say. Then I click back. She’s still talking. Talking to me at the same time. I wait until she’s done. Static rolls through the night. Then I hit the receiver again. Still here, I repeat. What can I do? As soon as I click off, she’s back.
“You’re on the ice, you said?” she goes on. I click back to tell her yes and wait. She doesn’t say anything for five seconds, and I think it’s over. Being on the ice has suddenly become a deal breaker for her. She asks if I see any mountain ranges, and I tell her no, not for days.
“Ice starts to the east of the Rockies. You’re anywhere between there and the edge of Kansas,” she says. It goes through my head but it means nothing. I conjure up images of the vast spaces on the maps I’ve seen, the unfamiliar and endless stretches of nothing out in the West, so unlike the clustered places of the East. Her voice has faded from its initial enthusiasm, as if she’s now talked it over with the others on her end, and come to realize there’s no way in hell that I can find them or do anything at all for them. Everything is too spaced out and empty and hopeless.
“I’ll take the raft,” I tell her, hoping she hasn’t given up hope for some reason. But I know it’s meaningless now. Her voice confirms it for me. She says there’s hardly any chance I’ll reach them. That it’s more likely I’m too far east now, too close to the edge of Kansas, and if that’s the case, waterspout alley will take me. I ask her about the Great Plains, and I tell her what I’ve heard. That the suction takes you. She tells me it’s true. That the graybeards take you all the way to Tennessee, and if I drift in too much, there’s no getting out. And nobody makes it to the other end alive anyway, she says. I want to curse her. For raising my hopes. For existing somewhere that’s safe and telling me that I can help her, promising me a steep reward when there’s nothing I can do to come through on it. But I click on and tell her I’ll do it anyway.
“We can send a gas-powered boat out for you if you see a landmark—a mountain range on the Rockies. If you do, we’ll try to locate you by it. We have drawings of most of the horizons for two hundred miles outside of Visitor’s City. If not, you’ve gone through the ice pack and you’re too far east,” she says. And then I have to ask, because I realize that maybe, just maybe—even though my gut tells me for sure I’m at the edge of Kansas now—that there is a chance I can drift through the rain sea, just far enough to describe a mountain range to her. Something that she’ll recognize. That the people from her invisible Visitor’s City will know, and they’ll come rescue us. And that all of this will happen before the radio dies.
Before I ask her all the questions I need to ask—where she is, what it’s like there, if there’s blue sky there too—I ask her what it is. What’s the equipment? Before she even answers me, her voice changes again. The tone of apprehension from before. She asks me something very slowly. Like it’s the most important question of all.
“Did you see the metal case in the cockpit?” she asks. And right away I know. The static rolls over me, telling me I have to respond, but I can’t. I turn around and look at the cockpit. But there’s nothing there. It’s been pounded feet down into the snow. Impossible to reach. Buried until the sea claims it. And then, all at once, the tension slips away, as simply as it began, and I tell her yes, I saw it.
“That’s what we need,” she says. And then, as if the battery could die at any minute, she tells me the plan. How I have to get the raft free, and get the metal case tucked into the corner where no water will hit it, under the raft canopy. That’s the most important thing, she says. It will help them finally get the link they need to the global satellites. A way to reconnect to the rest of the living world. To connect with other continents. I do my best to hide the fact that I’ll never see the metal case. Because if she knows it’s gone, they’ll never send me a boat. It goes through my head—I’ll bring the other cases. And tell them I brought the wrong ones. How did you confuse red and black plastic with metal, I can hear them ask me. And I’ll tell them I was dying of hunger. Half-delirious. But then, if they press me further, I’ll kill them. And that will be the end of it. Take their secret place, secluded somewhere in the frozen waste. Safe voices calling out into the void.
Once she’s done telling me the plan, and everything that’s riding on me, and how it all depends on the current, and if I can drift by a mountain range, and not get caught in the pack again, and not hit bad weather, and if the battery doesn’t die, and I can provide them with a good description of the mountain tops, and they can get the gas-powered boat out to me through open water, I ask my questions. What’s it like where you are? I ask. And she gives me a quick rundown of Visitor’s City. The old visitor center of Pike’s Peak turned into a safe haven on top of the mountain. Running power. Even water. And then I tell her to stop, because it hurts me. It hurts me too much. Is it raining there? I ask her. No, she says. Sometimes, she corrects herself. The weather changes though. It’s not constant here. Never constant in the pack. We’ll know more if we get that equipment. And that fast she’s done telling me the painful truths about her refuge. The conversation is back to me, the precious cargo I won’t be carrying. But I can’t let her change the conversation too fast.
“Where were you before?” I ask. I click off, waiting. Static, and then she responds with her own question.
“What do you mean?” she says. I wait until it’s white noise again and then press in.
“Before Pike’s Peak,” I say. And it’s enough for her to know what I’m asking.
“Leadville,” she says. “We migrated a decade ago from Leadville.”
“New Leadville?” I say, trying to conceal the tremble in my voice.
“It would have to be. Old Leadville’s been washed into the sea for almost twenty years. Hey—how old are you, you sound young?”
And I drop the receiver. A rush of shock flows through me. One last chance to drift, aimlessly over the rain sea. We’ve finally reached it, I say to the stars, to Russell. Right on the doorstep. But we can’t go in, can we? I ask him. My hands find the warmth of Voley and I stroke his fur, gently working down to his shoulder blades and massaging them until he rolls onto his side. Content like he hasn’t been in a long time. And the dead silence is occasionally broken by the voice of the woman. Hello? she keeps saying, trying to confirm that I’m still here. That her precious cargo has a one-in-a-million shot still. Better than nothing, so she hangs on, trying to get me back on the line. Finally I click on again. Going to work on getting the raft out, I say, And turning off the radio to save the battery. I’ll be back on before the morning. I wait for her reply, just to be sure she won’t disappear forever. And she doesn’t. She says good idea, and that they’ll be waiting, doing a work-up on the elevation maps and the ice drift. And with that, I reach down and push in the knob to turn off the radio. The yellow light dims and fades and then darkens to gray black.
It’ll be like flipping a coin, won’t it? I ask Voley. But he’s too comfortable with the pilot stove and a full stomach, and no sign of the rain or wind or snow. It’s too much for me to take in—that I’m so close and I’ll never get there. That somehow it’s harder now that I know I’m camping on a floe with a plane that crashed on its way to Leadville. That Leadville is still real. Some unknown number of miles to the south and west of us. I start to think of the pack, and if I’ll get stuck in it again as I drift out to sea, or if the swells will start up again with another storm. She had said the weather changes, after all. Anything could sink me before I hit waterspout alley or see another mountain top. But there are just so many things I have to work through, and my mind can’t seem to handle it all at once. It’s the task of cutting up the rest of the body and putting it into the bags with ice that starts up in my head right before I hear the rumble. I wait, making sure I really heard something. Sky or ice? Then it comes again, this time with an echoing tremor. And I know, the
ice is starting to crack apart.
Chapter 20
I freeze in my tracks, expecting the next rumble, the sign that the split has clawed all the way through the water-belly of this decaying monster. But the next sound never comes. I lift the stove and carry it with me into the darkened stomach of the plane. Something comes through the stale air—the smell of the body, I think at first, and it comes into my mind that I need to figure out what to do now. Cut the body up or move him enough to get access to the raft. Voley follows me, not wanting to stay out on the chilly floe by himself in the gloom. Slow waves slap against the distant shelf of the floe, and my mind wanders to the ice bridge. I wonder if it’s fallen into the sea yet. No, I would have heard the splash. And it’s cooler at night. Tonight might be my last chance to work. Tomorrow, everything will go into the sea. Sleep means death.
I set the stove down on one of the seats and look back at the crushed cockpit. Just poking through the shaded black are the fingers of a hand. Still visible. One of the pilots. Maybe they thought they’d really land this thing. But they had to crash her too steep so they wouldn’t slide off the edge of Plane Floe and land in the sea. And their corpses and the metal corpse of the plane is all that’s left of that last desperate attempt. For a moment, as my eyes return to the clean square of flesh I’ve carved out, I think of who these men were. The husbands and brothers of the woman on the radio. And it comes into me that I’m glad they didn’t ask for something—a wallet, a piece of clothing, something to remember them by. It’s enough to have the raft and no memories. I squat down and without another moment of thinking, and feeling as if the food has already worked through my body, restoring some new energy to me, I stab the knife in. I push everything human out of my mind. There is nothing to the cuts that’s any different than the march through the snow. It’s just a rhythm. And I work, up and down, noticing with a solid thrust that digs in a few inches that my side hasn’t been hurting at all over the last few hours. And my leg seems to have scabbed over enough that there’s no more bare nerves exposed to the air. I almost want to go to the first aid kit, piled on the ice just twenty feet away, and find out if one of the bottles was antibiotics. But I’m too nervous about the next rumbling sound, and instead, fall into the motion of cutting, wiggling, and pulling. I talk to Voley as I carve my way through the next hunk of meat.
“What do you think, boy?” I say. He gets as close as he can until my elbow smacks him as I bring down the knife. “Sorry.” He backs up and finds a spot to nestle in, just against the back of my leg.
“I think we have one hell of a shot,” I say, hoping he’s still with me. But I don’t need him to move or make a noise. I know he’s with me all the way. Just us. An unstoppable team against the wild expanse of the canvas sea. And without a doubt in my mind that we’ll see the woman and her Visitor’s City and her gas-powered boat, I place the clean piece of meat on the seat opposite from the stove and start cutting all over again.
By the time I get three more pieces, I feel like I’m completely out of energy. Still, my mind feels like it won’t shut up. Going through the questions I still need to ask the woman. The frustrations that Russell doesn’t know what’s happening to me. And finally, I get up and leave the plane.
The night air feels like the perfect temperature when it pushes across my face. I walk over the ice, eyes glued to the ground, finding the fracture line in the dark at the nose of the plane. I tell Voley to stay back, and from the twisted door of the plane he listens. He just stops and sits and stares at me. And then, before I go on, he turns and heads back into the plane. I don’t bother to stop him. It’s better he keeps eating the body than follows me out where I’m going.
My steps are careful and measured, and before long, I feel the pain come back. Like it was an illusion that everything was healed and better. At first it starts in my calf, and then, it’s as if the pain there rides up my thigh and connects to my ribs. A quick, painful stab that hits whenever I press weight on the right leg. But I follow the fracture and watch it grow, trying to see down into the black depths. I stop for breath and glance up. The sky is a uniform coat of steel, except for the wide strip of beautiful stars overhead. And the air smells so clean and cools my sweat. Then I level my glance and stare off at the sea. In the night I can barely make out the tiny spikes of other icebergs, small and scattered across the quiet ocean. I wonder how far it is in the direction I’m going until I reach the edge of the floe. If it will jump up on me in the dark and I’ll slip right off. Still, for whatever reason, I feel like I need to make one last round. Like the whale is out there waiting for me, protecting me, and I have to say hi. Tell him about the perilous journey we’re about to embark on. It comes into my mind that we’ll have no oars, no sails. Nothing to steer by. And no reason to steer. Just drifting. To hoard as much as we can and make our last drift. The battered hope of finding something, anything. Of getting somewhere, anywhere.
For a moment my mind settles into a cloudy future where there’s no Russell and no anyone I’ll know. And how it will have to be enough, even if we make it somewhere, for it to be just Voley and me. For us to be the only ones in the world who know the stories of the lives that brought us this far. And it seems like I could never do it. I’ve left pieces of my heart here and there, and there won’t be enough left to survive. And it feels like it wouldn’t be worth it—it would be too hard. To go on and know that he’s forgotten and no one will ever know or care about him. Even if I told the story. Who would listen? Maybe they would smile and nod, like I deserve the respect of their attention. And probably they would give it to me. No one is untouched by the rain. The ice. We’re all in it together. So they’d listen. At least until I’m done talking.
But if we’re all in it together, then why is everyone so far apart? And before I can reach some answer, something to satisfy my gnawing need to make it so that everything makes sense somehow, I stumble on a pocket of ice. Just down to my knees, but it soaks my legs over again. I want to run back and put on the fresh clothes waiting for me, and crawl on top of the pilot stove, but I don’t. I just keep walking. By the time I look back again, the plane is tiny, and Voley is nowhere in sight. Fear seizes me and I want to go check on him. It’s the knee-jerk reaction, that there might be face eaters. That the seal might be stalking us. Back from the dead. But there is absolutely nothing out here. And as I come upon the shelf finally, and see the black sea rolling forever beyond it, I realize how truly alone we are. There are still a few dots of the small bergs, but nothing else. How long will it stay open for us? I ask. It’s directed to Poseidon. Keep it open, will you? And then I’m done asking favors for the night. I just get down again to catch my breath and wait for the pain to subside and scoop up some of the wettest ice I can find. Slowly I drink it and watch the dead night.
It’s so peaceful and quiet. For a second, it almost feels like leaving here will be like leaving Blue City all over again. Leaving Nuke Town. Leaving Philadelphia. Leaving every place where there’s a moment of safety and food and warmth and stillness. It’s come back to haunt me every time. Why would we ever leave somewhere that had those qualities? Yet we’ve done it over and over again. Looking for something permanent in a world that wants nothing to do with permanence. My eyes settle on the stars again. And it dawns on me that they must be permanent. Even if the mountains and the seas change, those things up there must be permanent. And just like Russell used to say, I hear him say again now in my head, that we are the stars. Just the same stuff. Only no one knows, no one really knows it. And because no one knows it, everything is so serious and urgent and important all the time.
When I feel like I could lie down and fall right to sleep, I know it’s time to get back to the plane. I turn around and keep my eyes glued to the ice, watching for sink holes and fracture lines. I hear the trickling of the water as it melts into the fissures. Slowly eating up the foundation of this temporary home. The small flicker of the stove light hits against the windows of the plane and I follow it all th
e way back without stopping once. When I get back inside the skeleton of the plane, Voley isn’t eating the body like I thought he would be. He’s just lying on the ground, looking up at me. And then, when I look to collect the pieces of the meat I left on the seats, they’re gone.
Everything in me wants to scream. I want to take it out on him, and for a moment, I slip. “Damn it boy!” I yell. And he lowers his head close against the floor of the plane. But I know it’s not his fault. I remind myself over and over again that it’s my fault—that I practically set him up to eat them. That it was all my fault for telling him to stay behind and then leaving it out. My own stupid fault. But I have no energy to open up the other leg. Because that’s the last thing I knew before I went for my walk—that the right leg was done. I hit the bone and the tough stuff I couldn’t cut through anymore, and I’d have to open up the pants on the other side. But there’s nothing in me that will get me to lift the blade again tonight. So praying that the ice holds for just one more sunrise, I tell Voley it’s time for bed. We’ll get the raft out in the morning. I can’t keep my eyes open boy, I say. And then I just grab the stove, letting my anger slide away, and head out to the wing.
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