Love and Hydrogen

by Jim Shepard

  He opened a tin and made sure of his breakfast. While he ate he observed how the snow around his campsite organized itself into little crescents, as though its lee sides had been scooped out with tablespoons.

  How he’d liked life, he wanted to think—every bit of it, the colored and the plain, the highlights and the low! He wondered whether the mere feel of things—common things, all sorts of things—gave anyone else the intensities of contentment that they provided him.

  He thought he would start with the windward side before the breeze picked up. When he set off, a petrel winged past overhead, in a leisurely manner: the first sign of life. A half an hour later he noted, out to sea, the steampuff fountains blown into the air by the exhalations of whales.

  Again he circled the entire island without finding anything. This time he repeated the circle even closer to the shore, however, his kayak often bumping and scraping on rocks. In a protected hollow, he found another arrow, this one hastily carved into the rock. It pointed the way into an unpromisingly narrow backwater, which, when he maneuvered it, opened a bit into an odd kind of anteroom. The water below him seemed to drop off into infinity. The wavelet sounds were excessively magnified in the enclosed space. Way below, he could make out thick schools of dull green fish, two to four feet long, which he assumed to be rock cod.

  Before him was a wall of ice thirty feet high. He bumped and nudged his kayak back and forth. The wind played tricks down the natural chimney. He could see no opening, and he sat.

  But in the late morning, when the sun cleared the opposite wall above him, it illuminated, through the ice, a ridge about ten feet high, in the middle of which a six-foot-wide fissure had opened. The ice in frozen cascade over the fissure turned a pearl blue.

  He hacked at it and it came away in slabs which dunked themselves and swirled off in eddies. He kept low, poled his way in with his oar, and the mouth of a great blue cavern opened on his right hand.

  When he passed clear of the cavern it was as though his vision was drowned in light. The sun rebounded everywhere off snow and ice. It took him minutes, shading his eyes, to get his bearings.

  He was in an ice-walled bay, square in shape, perhaps four hundred yards across. The water seemed even deeper than it had before, and suffused with a strange cerulean light. There was no beach, no ledge. At their apex, the walls looked to be seventy feet high.

  The atmosphere above them seemed to have achieved a state of perfect visibility. Away from the sun, in a deep purple sky, a single star was shining. The taste of the air was exhilarating.

  He waited. He circled the bay. He felt a silent and growing desire for lunch. Schools of big fish roiled and turned everywhere he looked in the depths.

  He’d wait all day, if necessary. He’d wait all night. His kayak drifted to and fro, his paddle shipped and dripping from the blade, while he double-checked his rifle and his lantern. He removed his camera from its case.

  The fish-schools continued to circle and chase themselves about, every so often breaking the surface. He waited. Halfway through the afternoon the detonations of an ice fall boomed off to the west. The sun started to dip. The shadows in the little bay seemed to grow cooler. He suppered on some hardtack and a sip of water.

  There was a great upwelling that he rode, like a liquid dome, and then calm. He put a hand on his camera and then his rifle’s stock, as well. His pulse eventually steadied. A pale moon rose, not very high above the ice wall. While he watched, it acquired a halo. The temperature was dropping. His breath was pluming out before him.

  He judged he’d been in the bay, floating, for six hours. His legs were stiff and his bum sore. When he rotated his foot, his ankle lanced and radiated with pain.

  He’d been lucky with the weather, he knew. The South Pole was the Southern Hemisphere’s brew vat of storms.

  The darkness was now more complete. He switched on his lantern. As he swung it around, shadows became stones, or shards of ice. The water was as motionless as indigo glass, until he lifted his paddle and began to stroke with it, and every stroke sent more and more ripples across the shining surface.

  As he paddled, he reiterated for himself what Tate had taught him regarding the cardinal features of Life: the will to live, the power to live, the intelligence to live, and the adaptiveness to overcome minor dangers. Life carried itself forward by its own momentum, while its mode was carved and shaped by its battle with its environment.

  He sang a song his father had sung to him, while he paddled:

  Over his head were the maple buds

  And over the tree was the moon,

  And over the moon were the starry studs

  That dropped from the Angels’ shoon.

  He stopped and drifted once again, turning his bow so he could gaze at his wake. Freddy had always referred to him as Old Moony because of his daydreaming. Tedford carried in his almanac, back at his campsite, his membership card in the Melbourne Scientific Society and his only photograph of his brother: a murky rendering of a tall, sweet-looking boy with pale hair.

  Above him the southern lights bloomed as green and pink curtains of a soap-bubble tenuousness. He could see the stars through them. The entire eastern sky was massed with auroral light. Draperies shimmered across it.

  There in his bay, uplifted on the swell of the round earth, he could see how men had come to dream of Gardens of Eden and Ages of Gold. He wondered more things about Carcharodon Megalodon than he could have found out in a lifetime of observation; more than he had tools to measure. All that he could attend to now was a kind of dream noise, huge and muted, that the bay seemed to be generating, resonant on the very lowest frequencies. That, and a kind of emotional mirage of himself as the dying man taking his leave. He considered the picture as if from high on the ramparts of ice and found it to be oddly affecting. The cold was insistent and he felt his every fiber absorbed in it, his consciousness taken up in some sort of ecstasy of endeavor. The air felt alive with its innumerable infinitesimal crystallizations. His ankle throbbed.

  He fancied he heard submarine sounds. Then, more distinctly, the stroke of something on the surface. His lantern revealed only the after-turbulence.

  He paddled over. In the moonlight, splashes made silvery rings. He would have said he was moving through a pool of quicksilver.

  The moon disappeared and left him in darkness. He glided through it, close enough to whatever had surfaced to taste a mephitic odor upon the air.

  For the first time he was frightened. He kept his lantern between his legs and shipped his paddle and pulled his Bland’s to him by the stock. This thing was the very figure of the terrifying world around him, of the awfulness of Nature.

  The surface of the bay began to undulate. His little craft rocked and bobbed accordingly, in the darkness. He was very near the end but he had not, and would not, lose good cheer. Things had come out against him, but he had no cause for complaint.

  Why had his brother refused to see him? Why had his brother refused to see him? Tears sprang to his eyes, making what little light there was sparkle.

  The moonlight reemerged like a curtain raised upon the bay. Above it, the stars appeared to rise and fall on a canopy inflated by wind. But there was no wind, and everything was perfectly still. Everything was silent. His heart started beating in his ears.

  The water alone dipped and swirled. Just below the surface, shoals of fish panicked, scattering like handfuls of thrown darts.

  He caught sight of a faint illumination in the depths. As it rose, it took the shape of a fish. The illumination was like phosphorescence, and the glimmer gave it obscure, wavering outlines.

  There was a turbulence where the moon’s reflection was concentrated and then a rush of water like a breaking wave as the shark surged forward and up. The body towered over Tedford’s head. He lost sight of the ice wall behind it in the spray.

  It was as if the bottom itself had heaved surfaceward. The run-up of its splash as it dove sent his kayak six or seven feet up the opposite wal
l, and he was barely able to keep his seat. He lost both his rifle and his lantern.

  The backwash carried him to the middle of the bay. He was soaked, and shaking. Seawater and ice slurried around his legs. He experienced electric spikes of panic. His camera bobbed and tipped nearby in its oilskin pouch, and then sank.

  A wake, a movement started circling him. The dorsal emerged, its little collar of foam at its base, and flexed and dripped, itself as tall as a man. The entire animal went by like a horrible parade. He estimated its length at fifty feet. Its thickness at twelve. It was a trolley car with fins.

  It turned on its side, regarding him as well, its eye remarkable for its size and its blackness against the whiteness of the head, hobgoblin-like. It sank, dwindling away to darkness, and then, deep below, reemerged as a vast and gaping circle of teeth coming up out of the gloom.

  Where would Tedford have taken his find, had he been able to bring it back? Who understood such a creature’s importance? Who understood loss? Who understood separation? Who understood the terrors of inadequacy laid bare? The shark’s jaws erupted on either side of Tedford’s bow and stern, curtains of spray shattering outward, turning him topsy-turvy, spinning him to face the moon, leaving him with a flash of Jonah-thought, and arresting him an instant short of all for which he had hoped, and more.

  SPENDING THE NIGHT WITH THE POOR

  I was at the Plattsburgh Dance Studio for like thirty seconds before I realized it was a rip-off. I even went back outside like I’d dropped a mitten or something, but my mother was already gone. I could see her taillights two stoplights down. She was the only Isuzu in a pack of pickups with gun racks.

  The facilities were terrible. It was in a warehouse. The wooden floor ran out at one point and whoever was on that side was supposed to dance on cement. I was like, No thank you, and wherever they wanted to arrange me, I made sure I ended up back on the good side.

  The teacher was clearly unqualified. It was supposed to be a musical theater course, six weeks, and it turned out she hadn’t been in anything. “She probably just owns the records,” Crystal whispered while we stood there freezing. There was no heat. Ms. Adams—she stressed the “Ms.”—gave us her Opening Day speech. It had to do with getting to Broadway one step at a time. I was embarrassed for her. When she finished, she looked disappointed that we didn’t all cheer and carry her around the room on our shoulders. We just stood there warming our hands in our armpits.

  She asked if there were questions. “Do we have any heat ?” I asked, and Crystal gave me an elbow and I gave her one back. She loved it.

  At the back of the room a Threepenny Opera poster was taped to a sawhorse. Pathetic.

  “Is that a Cats sweatshirt?” I asked Ms. Adams. The way she said it was, you could see she didn’t get it.

  “You’re terrible,” Crystal said.

  Crystal was the reason I stayed at all. Nobody asked, but I told my mother that night that it was horrible, and told her why. She said what she always said—Well, Give It a Little Time. I didn’t argue. Not because I thought it would get better, but because of Crystal, and because what else did I have to do? Sit around staring at my brother?

  Crystal was so poor. I knew most of the kids would be pretty low class, but it was either this or voice lessons and I really wanted to do this. Crystal was poor like in the movies. She carried her stuff in a plastic bag. She brought a little Tupperware thing of Coke instead of buying her drink from the machine. She was clueless about her hair; she had it up with a butterfly clip, like Pebbles. She wore blue eye shadow. And she was pretty anyway. She had a good smile and a mouth like Courtney Love’s.

  She walked to the school, every day. We met twice a week, after regular school: Mondays and Fridays. It was like a mile and a half. Her parents had one car and her dad needed it. She had two pairs of socks total, one gray rag, one a pair of guys’ sweat socks with the stripes across the top. Her coat she got from a place called the Women’s Exchange. Her older brother was retarded.

  “So’s mine,” I told her.

  He isn’t, but he might as well be.

  She said her father worked in an office. I didn’t say anything.

  That Friday we were helping each other stretch and she said, “So are you a little rich or way rich?” I told her my family wasn’t exactly going bankrupt. It was a good way to put it. I told her what my dad did. I told her where we lived.

  “Good for you,” she said, like she meant it.

  I told her I was going to keep ragging on her socks until she got new ones.

  “Oh, that’s funny,” she said, meaning that they were rag socks.

  But that next Monday she had different ones, and we didn’t say anything about it. When we were getting ready to go I told her I was going to help her.

  “Oh, yeah?” she said, yawning. She yawned so wide her eyes teared up. “How?”

  I told her I’d been thinking about it all Sunday night.

  “That’s really great,” she said. You could see she thought I was going to give her a Mounds bar or something.

  I told her that since I was a foot taller I had a lot of clothes I’d outgrown or I wasn’t using. Nothing was totally cheesy or worn out. Like this forest green top I completely loved but wouldn’t fit me anymore. Or this wool skirt that was Catholic school–looking but okay.

  “Please,” she said, and we rolled our eyes and laughed.

  There was more stuff, too. I named other things and even threw in some things I did want. I always do stuff like that and then regret it.

  We were standing around the lobby of the building. It was cold from everyone coming and going, but at least it was out of the wind. I was wearing a man’s wool overcoat I really loved and a fur-lined winter cap my mom called smart, but so what? When you got through all of that it was still just me.

  We were just standing around waiting, looking at different things.

  “Listen,” she said. “Doesn’t your mother want you to hang on to your stuff, or give it to a relative?”

  “My mother doesn’t care,” I said. That wasn’t really true. But I figured that later, when Crystal found out, she’d be even more grateful.

  I didn’t bring her anything on Friday, though. I had the stuff ready and I just left it in my room. While my mom drove me there, I thought, Why couldn’t you just bring it?

  “You are so stupid,” I thought. I realized I’d said it out loud.

  My mother turned to me. “What?” she said.

  I was embarrassed. I was sitting there turning colors, probably.

  “Why are you stupid?” she said.

  “How do you know I wasn’t talking about you?” I said.

  She smiled. “The way you said it,” she said.

  I had no answer for that.

  “Why are you stupid?” she asked again.

  “Why do you think?” I finally said.

  “Don’t snap at me,” she said. “All right? I don’t need it.”

  When we got there I got out of the car and slammed the door. I saw her face when she drove off and I thought this was what always happened; I made everyone feel bad for no reason.

  Crystal was waiting for me on the good end of the dance floor. She’d saved a space by spreading her stuff out. I was still mad. She saw how I looked, so she was all ears with Ms. Adams. She didn’t say anything and neither did I.

  We ended early because Ms. Adams had a dentist’s appointment. She told us about the periodontal work she needed to have done, like we wanted to hear. Then she left. I felt like I’d just gotten there. Everyone else called their rides. My mother, of course, was still out. She hadn’t even gotten home yet. I left a message on the machine. My brother was probably right there and didn’t bother to pick up.

  Crystal said she’d wait with me, which was nice of her, though all she had to look forward to was a walk home anyway. I told her we’d give her a ride when my mom came.

  We talked about how much we hated the class. The ad said we would do Sondheim and stuff.
So far we’d been working through the chorus of “Some Enchanted Evening.” According to Ms. Bad Gums, that was so we could get to know our voices.

  “I already know my voice,” Crystal always said, like she didn’t want to know it any better.

  She shared some Hershey’s Kisses, which looked pretty old. The foil was faded. She told me she liked my Danskin. I told her she had great calves. She said she worked out every night, watching TV. The conversation kind of hung there.

  “Have you thought about doing something with your hair?” I asked.

  “Have you thought about doing something with your mouth?” she said back, meaning I was a wiseass, which was what my mother and brother always said. “You bitch,” I said, and she said, “It takes one to know one,” which was true.

  She showed me how to look back behind the vending machines where the money rolled and people couldn’t get to it. We found fifty cents and got a Reese’s. I had money but I hung on to it.

  When my mother finally drove up it was totally dark. Two of the big lights were out in front of the building. She beeped the horn and we ran from the lobby to the car.

  “Where were you?” I said, and she gave me one of her I’m-not-going-to-dignify-that-with-a-response looks.

  “Who’s this?” she said.

  “Crystal,” I said.

  “Crystal?” my mother said. She let it go at that.

  “Can you take me to my dad’s office instead?” Crystal asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  She gave my mother directions. She made zero small talk. I couldn’t see her face.

  We dropped her off. The office was a factory that made brake linings. I waved through the window. My mother pulled back into traffic.

  “It’s not such a horrible name,” I said. I was sulking.

  “It’s a pretty horrible name,” my mother said. “But it’s only a name.”