Arctic Smoke

by Randy Nikkel Schroeder

  “Oh, Serendipity!” The figure started awake. He rubbed his head and leaned forward to pluck the disc from the ground.

  “Dear God,” he whispered. “The watchmaker himself has awakened me. This is the first sign.” He crept into a hollow of bright air. “Friend,” voice cold with wonder, “do you see this one true thing?”

  Lor peered. The man was wild-bearded as Moses, light hair patched with dark. A pocket watch glimmered in his fingers.

  The man peered back. “What is your name?”

  “I told you.”

  “He that has eyes.” The man fumbled with his shirt pocket, drew a spidery pair of reading glasses. With difficulty, he set them on his nose, wrapped the arms around his ears. “My old friend!” His exhausted features twisted with hunger, and he began to tremble. Then he chuckled, as if infected with long-dormant humour. “My dear old friend. What a strange reunion. The years have been much kinder to you than I.”

  Lor wondered. He didn’t remember either of his brothers being this crazy.

  “What name do you go by now?” the man said.

  Lor couldn’t think of anything. He looked up; snow flittered down through the latticed boughs. He picked a flake from his shoulder, found it smooth and dry. Not snow. Paper shreds, printed with spidery script.

  The man plucked another from a branch. “Joshua,” he read. “Of course! You are Joshua, and these words are the second sign.”

  So the man was a stranger after all. One completely mad. If anything, these were signs that Lor had been tricked yet again. He clawed the snow, felt his fingernails bend on the frozen dirt beneath.

  The man leaned forward eagerly. “If you are Joshua, then this is not the promised land, not far enough after all. You will enter, where I may never go.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. I’m finished.” Damn that snowman.

  The stream darkened. A cloud of bubbles floated by, followed by a school of silver threads. The stranger crept forward and pulled one from the water.

  “But you must go. Do you see?” He smiled. “This is one of his hairs, from his hat. The third sign.”

  Screw the signs, they were all hallucinations. Listen for the signs, the snowman had said: well, Lor had listened to that demented voice from Underwood to Inuvik, and where had it gotten him? Lor slumped further against the tree, gritting his teeth.

  “Tell me, tell me,” the man insisted. “Where is my apprentice? Where is his hat?” At the word apprentice his face lit with an almost sacred light, as if his blood ran with fire and could never freeze. Whether it looked angelic or demonic Lor could not decide.

  “I don’t know.” He pitied this lonely apparition. But the thought of spending his final hours like this made his heat rise. To run this far, to the very heart of solitude, only to end up with unexpected company, snared in deranged conversation.

  “Tell me, tell me,” the man said.

  Jesus. Just shut up.

  “My apprentice.”

  Lor inched a quarter way around the tree, looked the other way.

  “Joshua?”

  Lor clenched his fists, ragged nails slicing palms. He was going to have to cross the river and strangle this stranger, just to get some final peace. He began to rise. A snip of paper fluttered to his lap.

  He picked it up and read: I shall never be shaken.

  Was that old English folk magic? Bible verse? More snowmanic aphorism?

  A flush bloomed up his neck, as everything polarized. His attention had lapsed. He had closed his eyes. Here were the snowman’s signs after all, three of them, almost missed—

  One. A slip of paper, exhorting hope and persistence. Why would he journey this far, only to be shaken from his path? What kind of madness was that?

  Two. Hair floating north, to where his brothers were. They would press on, to the North Pole if possible, in keeping with their natures. It was the cunning conclusion to Franklin’s original plan: a convergence at the top of the world, where new bonds could be frozen together in a landscape sheared of doubt and despair.

  Three. Watch ticking, time flowing. He had wasted too many precious minutes in this sick forest. With a jitter, he noticed that the mist cloud had moved further north, already leaving him behind. His guts pinched. He stood and turned to the man. “I do have to go.”

  The stranger dropped the pocket watch to the snow and began to furiously twist the hair around his fingers. “Yes, yes. To the promised land.” His voice quickened. He pulled nail clippers from a pocket and snipped the blackened skin on his palm. “You cannot remain here. Here is the fruit of our disobedience. Here are the seeds we have planted. We have let our demons run wild. We have thinned ourselves. We are Philistines. We are diminished. We see our mistakes only now, at the final hour. How fitting that it is Christmas Eve.” He held more heat than seemed possible in a frozen body. “Where is my apprentice?”

  Lor took a step, foot crunching ancient snow. “Really. I don’t know.”

  “Where is your brother?”

  “My brother?”

  “Where is he? It is not too late.”

  Watch ticking.

  Lor considered. There was little reason not to tell. “They’re both north. I’m going to meet them.”

  “Yes, Yes.” The madman began to rock. “In the promised land. You will bring him to me.”

  Lor paused. This was a scene for which he was ill-practised. What did this stranger want? If only Lor had paid more attention to Franklin’s social ingenuities, back in the day.

  Watch ticking, third sign.

  The mist cloud had crossed the river, where it danced among far trees. The madman dropped his chin. Then he snapped up. “Bring him to me!” he barked. “Before midnight strikes to end this Christmas Eve.”

  He was clearly dying. Lor felt a crumple of sadness. Not like at a funeral. More like watching people eat alone in cafeterias, elderly folk riding the bus alone—faraway stories from the daylight world.

  “I have a gift for him.” The man’s voice hoarsened further. “I have waited for this night.”

  Watch ticking.

  Lor massaged his stomach. Surely a small lie did no harm here. He had to get moving. And a lie might even ease the man’s rest. It was not too late to start practicing charity, to start acknowledging the chaos of community, if only with one stranger.

  The pocket watch ticked in the snow. The rushing stream grew louder, deeper, colder. The frozen stones chattered. Louder, deeper—

  “Okay.” Lor dispelled the crescendo. “I will bring him to you. Yes.”

  “My dear!” The stranger began to scrape snow from the ground. “We will look into the heart of things, the very pith of life. And gather our powder, and renew our journey.” His head nodded suddenly, and he dropped into slumber. His hand continued to tap, chattering the nail clippers.

  Lor stood, gripping the hat tightly, and padded over the stream. He stopped at the hollow, where black water seeped outward to stain the snow. He squatted to check on the man, who shivered in spite of the hot flush on his cheeks. Lor felt a ripple of loneliness. He had an idea. But he drew back his hands.

  No. This was his, his brother’s. It could not be given to a stranger.

  Still, he loosened his fingers on the brim. Charity, Lor. One act at a time. He could yet transform from snowman to angel—from car stealer to hat giver.

  With a light pause he reached forward and placed Alistair’s hat on the stranger’s head.

  When their skin touched, it sparked a cascade of memories. Lor’s entire journey unspooled—his long flight from America to the Arctic—not a neat chronology, but a prismatic burst of images. Fatty. Alistair. Dawn Cherry. The strippers. Darcilee Shimozowa. No connections. No points at which he could splice his remembered actions in a chain of consequences. His story had frayed, like this hair still twined around the stranger’s finger—thinned, looped, knotted.

  The tale would begin again, soon. This time with hope.

  Watch ticking.

  He t
ightened Al’s hat on the stranger’s head, so it would hold fast against the cold. He rose. Smiling for the first time in recent memory, he stepped into the misty curtain, then floated north to the moon’s bright country, where both his brothers waited for him, a family at last. He did not look back, to where breezes loosed the hat and sailed it past the treetops.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Reunion

  Seri always believed that Rooke was still alive, too shrewd and vaporous to let himself freeze somewhere in the Arctic. But there were no footprints in the snow. No one in the service had any memory of T.F. Rooke, not even Pierre Anselm Kanashiro, who had grown distant, and not a little vaporous himself since moving to southern Alberta.

  One spring night in Vancouver, lost among government documents deep in the library basement, where the pound of coastal rain diminished to a distant whisper, Seri discovered an old newspaper article on the McDonald Commission. She ran into an obscure reference to an A. Rooke, who may have worked in the late sixties for the RCMP Security Service, I section, the so-called Watcher service, long since dismantled by the Canadian government for abuses of power.

  The story caught her interest, because of the name, yes, but also because of its strangeness. Whoever A. Rooke was—and the name was obviously coincidental—he was rumoured to be a special constable involved in a highly unusual request from D Section, countersubversion, to engage in physical surveillance of a suspected violent pornography ring that recruited and filmed under the guise of a travelling circus. This Rooke may have worked with the FBI in the northwestern states, using a vast infrastructure of informants, most of them hotel staff. No one knew for sure. The Watchers had never officially existed.

  Seri always wished she had made a copy of that story. Years later, travelling alone, talking to no one, she would visit strange libraries to hunt for the clipping. But she could never find it again. Then she would sit, and stroke a finger through her angel dust, until it was long past supper, the traditional time for family fellowship, and she would think of forking paths, and remember a grandmother she had once loved, and a security guard would come to shoo her home. But where was home?

  Theodore Franklin Rooke’s body was never found.

  No one ever looked.

  † † †

  Soon after returning from the north, Seri had begun to hate Vancouver’s misty lullabies. Everywhere she went, a magpie followed.

  “Fly,” she said. “Go home.”

  It never did.

  She squeezed her dust and dreamed of skies. She wanted to run back to the prairies, maybe the Arctic, renew herself amid thirsty rivers or icy barrens. First she needed to strip her life’s old layers: it was becoming increasingly clear that family and friends got in the way. But where to get the fire? She would never pray again.

  What she needed was some benediction for the old life. Something to mark the time and start her off. An Old Testament totem, a Rookean ritual. That was it. A ceremony.

  Her birthday.

  † † †

  On her twenty-fifth she sat locked in her room slicing off her hair, fully and evenly this time, with the Arctic knife. The pouch of dust sat on her old toy chest, some of it spilled. Outside was spring—butterflies on the window, bees biting tulips, the familiar magpie. And, impossibly, apples on the tree at the end of the Giant’s Bridge. Some were already dropped, as if impatient for summer’s end.

  She put down the knife, looked out the window. After all these years, the Giant’s Bridge still maintained its straightness, north to the porch, south to the bushes. Two directions, a beggar’s meal of choices. It was always the same in the Old Testament: Egypt or Canaan, Sodom or the wilderness.

  The doorknob clicked. Then a knock. Her mother.

  “Seri. Gran’s back from Europe. She’s hitchhiking home, just phoned from the trucker’s cellphone. She’s bringing gifts. She sounds so young. Mr. Scott’s got a head cold he picked up in the Black Forest.”

  Seri sat motionless. This was not the time. Her fingers twitched. She grimaced and tried to stay completely still.

  “Seri. You’re in there, right? By the way, that nasty man from the collection agency called again. Something about your credit cards?”

  After many minutes Seri’s ribs began to ache. She heard clomping on the stairs, then a sharp rap on the door.

  “Pumpkin! Let me in. Wait till you see what I smuggled home for you from this weird hotel in Moravia: a gigantic opus on puppetry called Casey and Finnegan’s Wake: A Tale on How Divers Angels from Heav’n Fell. Oh, what an intriguing boy’s tale. Happy birthday! Let me in. How was the Arctic?”

  Another rap. Whiff of lemon perfume.

  Oh, Gran. Seri just about rose. The old love flared inside. But then she touched the dust on the toy chest and a deep jealousy surged through her. North or south: a clean Augustine choice. Seri made it. She held her breath, until Gran clomped back down the stairs and whispered with Mum, and then more footfalls and the door slamming.

  Seri looked out the window. Down below, Mr. Scott was sneezing into a bright hanky. Mum emerged first, moving to start the minivan. Then Gran, dressed in some weird old-world outfit trimmed with scarves and sashes. She turned to look up at Seri’s darkened window, raising the Moravian book. Then crouched to pluck a fallen apple. “We know you’re in there, pumpkin-hide! We’ll steal you a diet Coke from the pub.”

  She pitched the apple at the window. It splatted on the glass, scattering bees and butterflies.

  “See you soon, Seri.”

  Seri felt a prick of loneliness, but she chased it with one touch of dust. Her family drove away, while she followed the Giant’s Bridge with her eye, all the way to the bushes.

  “Not see you soon,” she whispered. “Goodbye.”

  She packed a toothbrush, bank card, and the pouch of dust. Still unsure about travelling to the prairies or the Arctic, she decided to book into the Old Xanadu Hotel on Hastings, where no one would ever look, and she could wait for inspiration.

  She cut the last hank of hair, rubbed off all her makeup. Then hoisted the toy chest and dumped it out like a bag of seeds. All the toys tumbled from their childhood hierarchy—Barbie, Slinky, bouncing balls. Sooty ceramic Gabriel, whose head cracked off and rolled face up, trumpeting. Finally, The Silver Chair, pages flapping goodbye. She opened it to the ending, nailed it to the floor with the knife.

  Then she dropped the empty box and walked, out the door, down the stairs, into fog-wet morning and a journey’s birth. She was twenty-five years old.

  She looked like a sick boy, iridescent with joy and bitterness.

  † † †

  “Get you a drink, sir? Something to chase the heat?”

  The hotel bar was dark and empty, except for one bellboy striped with shadows. The smell of hot rain drifted in from windows.

  “Just a diet Coke,” Seri said.

  Ice cubes rattled in a glass. Brief sunlight dashed against them, then vanished.

  “Actually.” Seri twisted in the chair. “Make it a regular Coke.”

  A sniff behind the bar. “Sir?”

  “Oh, fuck it, make it a vodka with ice. Today’s a celebration.”

  From the shadows the man emerged, cloaked in baggy black uniform and brimmed hat. He bent over her table, eyes hidden beneath the brim, remaining features speckled with lamplight.

  “Sometimes a birthday is a dangerous thing,” he whispered.

  “Oh, for sure.”

  A day to remember all things lost, every hour and opportunity, every forked path. A pocket watch, a notebook, a calling. A family. Always the choice between two journeys—trust or doubt, damned or saved, broken or renewed, faithful or jaded. But why? Why was it always north or south?

  The magpie chattered outside. Seri noticed briefly the iridescent blues and greens among its black and white feathers, flickering in the fitful sunlight.

  She ignored it, stared further out the rainy window. “Is that a church across the street?”

  “
Saint Augustine’s.”

  “You’re kidding. You are fucking kidding me.” Surely, somewhere, there was a third path. A road travelling east, narrow but not necessarily straight.

  “I will read to you from Ecclesiastes, something to suit your mood.” The bellboy shifted in the half-light, cracked a heavy Bible.

  Seri secretly opened her pouch, poked in a finger. “First let me ask you a question. Do you know of any prophets who were neither faithful nor disobedient?”

  “Explain how this is possible.”

  She trolled a finger through the powder. “Any angels who were neither good nor fallen?”

  “I don’t recall any, sir. Let me read to you.”

  “No.” She looked out at the church again. “I’ve changed my mind.”

  The Bible thumped shut. Seri mashed her dust. Even the smallest choice was a forked path. Bible verse or no? Silence or conversation?

  “Okay. Just one,” Seri said.

  “Sir?”

  “Something from the New Testament.”

  “Ahh.”

  Seri slid her vodka forward, wiped the cool circle of condensation. She pulled her finger from from the powder. Then neatly folded the pouch and placed it in her pocket. “Yes. New Testament. Just for today. Then never again.”

  † † †

  Summer comes at last to that strange, vast land named Canada. Crows ride the warming west winds, high above towering clouds, eyeing with casual interest the map below.

  Far south, in Lethbridge, a magpie shreds the pages of a Bible on the walk. The words blow north.

  Far north, in the Arctic, a raven nips the strings of a smashed black guitar. The notes blow south.

  Far west, in Vancouver, the flies hatch early.

  No one on the map pays much notice. There are barbecues to light, beers to chill, phones to tap. The circus is in town again. The days are long and elegant. The sun blares. The children sing. Afternoons the knives fly.

  In each realm a hotel looms above, silent and watchful. Most of the rooms are booked—to families, to lovers, to friends on shared journeys. But some rooms remain locked and unlit until summer’s end. Behind their empty windows the fires dance like falling angels, waiting for the snowmen, and the moon’s return, and the long winter night.