Welcome to the Greenhouse

by Gordon Van Gelder

  Night is upon the sea, a red aurora spilling in a curtain of light so thick it appears viscous. Though science insists the northern lights are silent, there are groanings and screechings, the sound of a metal door being pushed shut.

  “The mind,” her mother, the Woman from Ambler, once said as she sat on the girl’s bed and told her stories of the way life is supposed to be, “is not in the brain,” touching her temple and then the girl’s, the girl giggling. “The brain is merely a conduit, like a DVD player showing us signals that are created elsewhere.” She would then draw the life’s lesson on the big pad with its spiral binding along the top. The woman was artistic: baking, beading, sketching, scrimshaw. She drew a picture for the girl with an effortlessness that, the girl sensed, belied the pain that her mother kept bottled up. “The mind,” her mother continued to draw, “is in the aura, the halo of electromagnetism that surrounds all living things. It’s like the aurora for the earth, what for us northern peoples is the singing of the spiritual. That’s where the mind is, in the aura. A glow that, it’s said, some people can see.”

  “You mean,” the girl sat up and cocked her head in disbelief, “other people can’t see it?”

  I could not see the glow after Daddy died. We buried him on the North Side, a stranger beside people that, he said, he could not teach or reach no matter how much he loved his students.

  Buried him aboveground, because as the Woman from Ambler often said, the earth in the North is too frozen to accept the body and too sullen to want the soul. After the others left, Gwimaq and I piled rocks around and upon the coffin. People used to do that to keep bears from devouring the dead, but the bears are gone now, so now the rocks are for decoration.

  Gwimaq was holding a rock and looking down toward the village. Below us the bridge came out of light slitted at the east, the mainland twenty-five miles away. Then at our island it doglegged, as Gwimaq liked to say, and went northwest to Big Diomede, where we weren’t allowed. I felt we were at the bottom of forever, like rocks dropped into a deep, dark sea.

  “Just you and me now,” I heard Gwimaq say. He set the rock atop the coffin and wandered down toward the village without another word.

  And then the birds came.

  They rose into the dawn from beneath the bridge, where they nested by the thousands. They came from off the cliffs where Gwimaq hunted them despite being a poor shot compared to the other boys. The birds were like a black aurora spiraling up from the earth. Not here to celebrate the soul, but to gorge themselves on the wealth of insects the warmer winters have brought.

  I wanted to go with them. I wanted them to stop haunting me. When they reached the darkness they winked out like the numbers that spiral out of my math book and from out of my watches, numbers that flit in my aura like flies I cannot kill. Sometimes I have to sit with my head in my hands, whimpering, other kids peeking at me and then away, pretending I don’t exist. I am not retarded, only slow, I tell myself; I am not retarded, only slow. Because of the numbers.

  If only I could shut them out, go back before I hung upside-down from the monkey bars Daddy had bought and set up amid the rocks we have for a playground. He bolted the ends of the monkey bar dome into boulders. He spent hours drilling, no one there to help except Gwimaq, always whining and asking to go home, and me rocking back and forth, watching and worrying that Daddy would hurt himself.

  When he finished he spread gravel he hauled up to school in a backpack, over three dozen trips, each rock about the size of your thumb. He spread the gravel smooth with the rake he ordered from Home Depot. When he was done, there were just the two of us. He stood holding the rake, his eyes full of pride. He put an arm around my shoulders and kissed my hair. “They’ll think I did it for the school,” he whispered. “But I did it for you. I built it only for you.”

  And I ruined it.

  A year later, I was hanging upside-down from a lower bar, rocking, the numbers going away whenever I did that. The world is at peace, or should be, when you see it that way.

  Then someone pinned my legs. When my eyes jerked open I was looking at a belt buckle, a hand, massive in my sight, clawing at it. Preston Robert, I knew it without peering up. Though only a ninth grader, he had a man’s body, a thick, cruel body, the type once useful to row after whales and now here to hurt me. With his free hand he pulled down my kuspuk, tore at my jeans, and ripped at my panties, trying to make me naked up to my knees. He let me drop.

  I fell on my head, only the jacket I earlier left on the ground cushioning my fall. I lay there on my stomach, dazed, gripping Daddy’s gravel while Preston Robert ripped off my jeans, let his own pants fall to his ankles, took a moment while he did something to himself and then collapsed on top of me.

  The numbers came in waves, like hands slapping skin, like insects stinging me before moving on and the next wave of insects coming like a cloud. Between them, except for his grunting, there only was silence and the whispering of wind. I clenched my eyes shut. I would not cry out or cry, I never cried, not even that night when the Woman from Ambler walked out on us, telling Daddy he was boring because he refused to party with her, he with tears in his eyes and Gwimaq bawling, clinging to her legs, and me sitting in the corner like a stone.

  When Preston Robert was done he stood, pulled up his pants and, zippering, said, “If you tell, my friends and I will kill your father.”

  “If I tell, the troopers will come. They’ll haul you away in handcuffs.”

  I said it into my jacket, just loud enough for him to hear.

  Because suddenly I knew what the bridge was for. The bridge few used anymore. “Finally an Alaskan Bridge to Somewhere,” the news clipping that Daddy kept called it, but then things had fallen apart, he said, so now it went from there to here, and from here to nowhere.

  But now I saw its usefulness.

  “They’ll take you to Nome,” I said. “They’ll lock you up and leave you there.”

  “No one will believe you. I’m not eighteen—not even close to it. I’ll say you wanted it.”

  I looked up at him, and for a moment, between the swirling numbers, I thought I saw the Woman from Ambler standing behind him. Not there to help me or to kill him. Just watching. And for that maybe I hated her. Or maybe I felt nothing at all.

  “They’ll have to believe me,” I said. “It’s the law. Because I’m the crazy girl.”

  Despite his dark skin, I could see the blood leave his face, and I saw his aura whiten. Not white the color of a white man, but white like the bellies of dead salmon that used to wash ashore when the sea still had fish.

  But I never told. Maybe I was afraid. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. I never told the troopers, I never told Daddy, I only told myself—that it never happened. Once Preston Robert left and I had pulled on my jeans and stuffed my torn-apart panties in my jacket, I set my watches to stopwatch, time ticking until I had courage to turn him in, but I never did. When the telescope arrived that day I started time all over again, setting the watches to zero.

  Now Daddy was dead because of me.

  I should have told someone. Preston Robert would have gone to jail or wherever they put people his age, and maybe Daddy would still be alive and he would understand why I never used the monkey bars again. All my fault. All. My. Fault.

  The dawn was growing as I stood over the coffin. Light came flooding up the mountain. I could not hold anything back any longer, not the numbers, not the pain. I collapsed to my knees and, crying “Daddy, Daddy,” beat on the coffin with my rock, demanding that he come back to me, forgive me, hold me, and tell me he understood. The tears came then, I could not control them, and somewhere beyond the dawn, there in Anchorage, the Woman from Ambler became a blurry memory I wanted to forget.

  You are descended from Maniilaq, our greatest shaman, she said. He lived two hundred years ago and predicted the coming of the whites. He said that boats would fly in the air or be propelled by fire. He also said that Ambler would become an enormous city, but I have seen
his vision a thousand times, and it is not a city on the tundra, it is a city in the sky. So sleep, my precious, because a city of stars is watching over you.

  Despite understanding even more than what your father and brother tried to teach you, you only now feel affinity toward the girl on the bridge. You’ve been watching without emotion, but now you’re leaned closer, increasingly intrigued, as if you’re in a theater balcony.

  She has climbed down from the ledge and walked farther from the village, not hurried, sauntering, running a mittened hand along the wall as though for emotional support.

  Emergency stations are set exactly every two miles from the island’s station house. For aesthetics each is shaped like a tower perhaps eight feet in diameter, with a conical top, the effect so squat it appears comical. She looks back toward the village. Lit only by bridge lights that punctuate the darkness, the headland is so imposing that the village’s few lighted windows seem like tiny hatches to a netherworld.

  Reaching into her ski pants, she takes a wallet from a hip pocket, removes an ID card and after a contemptuous glance sends it sailing into the night. Next she lifts out bills and lets each flutter away. All ones except a five. In a gesture that would seem posed had she an audience, she extends an arm over the wall, opens her hand, and lets the wallet fall. Removing a beaded barrette, she shakes her hair free. It is long and luxurious, the product of a hundred strokes with a hairbrush each night. She drops the barrette over the side.

  She enters the emergency station and comes out cradling a telescope. It is white, with silver bands at each end and in the middle. She opens its tripod and, after making sure the telescope is secure, points it toward the northeast, where Ambler is. She looks into the eyepiece and expertly adjusts the knobs.

  She reenters the emergency station and emerges with three small padlocks, a length of chain, a collar, and three keys. After padlocking the door, she sets its key on the wall and tests the chain for strength. It is thin, but will do. She threads it between the hasp and the door, locks it to itself and places the second key on the wall, beside the first.

  She walks several feet away and, after looking into the darkness as though summoning resolve, removes her parka and mukluks and places them on the wall. Then she takes off the rest of her clothing, folds the pieces neatly and puts them on the wall as well. She stands naked beneath the light, belly protruding, arms folded over her breasts, chin down: a look of shame.

  She exhales and lifts her head. Seemingly unmindful of the cold concrete under her feet, she pads back to the telescope and takes the collar she left looped around the eyepiece. It is studded with spikes, sparkling with false diamonds. She places it around her neck, locks it to the chain with the last padlock, puts its key beside the others, walks to the end of the chain and reaches out. Her clothing, as she apparently planned, is a foot too far. She returns to the keys.

  With middle finger and thumb she flicks each key into the darkness and steps behind the telescope. Adjusting the knobs, she looks past the stars above Ambler, searching for her galaxy. She wonders if Maniilaq, were he alive, would forgive her for her death.

  There were things Daddy witnessed when he was young, he said, that drove him to the end of the earth. His father had been a biologist, and Daddy often had accompanied him on trips. Three grizzlies killed outside Yakutat and left to rot, only the gall bladders taken so rich men in Asia could dine upon them with chopsticks of jade and think themselves virile. A wolf near Tok left to suffer for two days in a trap and his father not allowed to shoot it, so environmentalists could capture its agony on film. Bering Sea Eskimos slaughtering walrus only for the ivory. Killer whales coming into coves so shallow an orca seemingly could never swim there, to devour sea otters because the sea lions were gone, victims of the overharvesting of pollack. The only polar bear he ever saw outside a zoo, drowned in the Beaufort Sea because it was swimming futilely in search of ice broad enough to force seals to seek breathing holes. His father, Daddy said, brought the plane in close, recorded the dead animal’s location, then flew away without a word.

  The day after he received his college diploma and teaching certificate, Daddy left for Siberia, only to be forced back. Environmental disasters had dried up U.S.-Russian relations. The bridge linking the continents had closed. He settled in Little Diomede to be as far away from the rest of Alaska as possible. The village was dysfunctional, loss of wildlife and rising oil prices having forced those people with any skills to Anchorage or Outside. He loved his students—most of them—but kept his focus on the stars.

  Six months after his death we learned how little attention he had paid to this world.

  Gwimaq and I were in the living room, he cleaning his.22 and me cooking dinner. He had gotten a cormorant. As usual I’d had to clean it, boys even these days not expected to do such things. He sat on the floor, the rifle pointed up, while he held a letter with his free hand, the opened envelope in his lap.

  “We’re fucked,” he said. “That bitch isn’t sending us a dime.”

  The letter was from an Anchorage attorney. Daddy had forgotten to change the beneficiary of the life insurance policy Bering Strait School District gave its teachers. We had tried to fight, but the Woman from Ambler had gotten it all.

  With his thumb he clicked the rifle off safety and, his face hard with anger, fired six shots into the ceiling, emptying the clip, so startling me that I dropped the cormorant into hot grease, burning my arm. What gives males the right, I wondered, digging into a cupboard for the salve, that brothers can shoot holes in the ceiling and fathers can burn holes in the human heart?

  The next day the terror started. We had no money. You cannot live only on cormorant, a few murre eggs gathered from the cliffs, an occasional brown-tipped gull shot far enough away that it had not feasted on village garbage. Was Jesus going to arrive and turn the rocks beneath the monkey bars into small, gray potatoes? Can you make gravy out of spit?

  Gwimaq went to work at the school, sharing his Eskimo soul, as the website proclaimed. Don’t do it, I begged him when we were at school the day he got his PayPal account. We can sell everything. Your gun, the couch, the beds, everything in the kitchen. We’ll have enough for two tickets to Anchorage, enough to live on for a month.

  “And then what? Become wards of the state? Or live with her? I’d rather be dead.”

  He put on the headphones, slapped my hands away when I tried to tear off the phones. I went to the far side of the room and sat facing the corner, my head on the wall, as Daddy used to make me do when I was a little girl and was bad.

  Soon I could hear him grunting. It was like the time Preston Robert was on top of me. I covered my ears but could not help seeing Gwimaq out of the corner of my eye. He was holding the headphones with both hands, rocking back and forth, his eyes closed and lips parted, sounds coming from deep in his throat.

  The door opened. We had locked it from the inside, but there was the rasping of a key, and then Preston Robert and his friends came in. He held up a key and grinned like an animal, then nodded toward Gwimaq. I tried to get to Gwimaq, protect him, but Cray, the largest boy, grabbed me. I clawed at his cheeks and screamed Gwimaq’s name, but he was beyond hearing—and then Preston Robert punched me in the face, and Cray let me fall to the floor.

  Mukta grabbed my brother’s arms, pinning them behind his back, he twisting his body but too far lost in computer dreams to put up a fight. Preston Robert wrapped Gwimaq’s head with duct tape, binding the headphones to his ears. Even Gwimaq’s eyes did not show. Then Mukta wrapped Gwimaq to the chair. Preston Robert dialed up the intensity on the computer, the bars on the screen dancing in the red zone. He put a foot on Gwimaq’s shoulder and toppled him to the floor. Gwimaq lay tremoring, each spasm more powerful than the last.

  I did not beg or cry out when Preston Robert pulled me back to my feet, by my hair. There was no use begging; there no one else in the building. His friends pulled off my jeans and forced me facedown over Daddy’s desk. They tied me spread-ea
gled, the duct tape like rope.

  “No condom this time,” Preston Robert said as he unbuckled his belt and moved behind me. “You’ll get welfare, you’ll get the Permanent Fund. We’ll leave you enough to live on. The rest you’ll turn over to us.”

  “Like your daddy told us in school,” Mukta said. “Develop a cottage industry.”

  “So we did,” Cray said. “Computers and cunt.”

  “Call the troopers,” Preston Robert said. “I won’t stop you, and I won’t hurt you. You’re too valuable a commodity. But your brother’s dead the minute they haul me away.”

  He had Cray turn off the lights, for what Preston Robert called ambiance but which, I knew, was so people walking by could not see in.

  Now that you understand more than your father and brother tried to teach you, you feel empathy for the death upon the bridge. You see her intent. A woman frozen to death by chaining herself so she cannot reach her clothes truly wants to die. The death will bring troopers and paternity tests, one for the fetus, the other that she left tightly bundled in a sleeping bag: two children by two men, one of who will know the financial rigors of fatherhood, or else will know lockup.

  Except, as you now realize, the troopers will not find her body. Only bones.

  Out of the last rays of sun, birds come by the hundreds. Except for the rushing of wings, there is no sound, no squawking as they land to tug out her hair and tear at the newly frozen skin, each bit of flesh aglow with her aura. A raven tears off a lip, its head pulled back and claws fighting for purchase on the asphalt. A tufted puffin pokes at an eye. A cormorant takes the other eye, its long throat lifted as it swallows.