The Effort

by Claire Holroyde

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Weber turned and got down to business. The Arctic gear locker stored all equipment and supplies for Healy’s short-range missions and surveys. Drinking water wouldn’t be a problem with all the snow and rain. Everything else…would be a problem. Weber grabbed a duffel bag and started packing.

  “Storms have gotten worse these last few years,” he said, reaching for two folded Gumby suits in small and large sizes. “And with a warmer ocean, there’s a lot less ice as a barrier. I’m hoping you’ll find a good structure on the island. One with a strong foundation.”

  He crossed to the other side of the locker and announced each item before placing it in the bag: flashlight, utility knife, first aid kit, fire lighter with a refill can of butane, and weatherproof tarp. Jack laughed. Weber had heard that the photojournalist was quick with a joke or a story of high adventure. He was popular with the Coasties, despite being an outsider.

  “Reminds me of those logic puzzles,” Jack explained. “You know, ‘You are crossing to the dark side of the moon.’”

  You are crossing the dark side of the moon. Choose only fifteen items to take on the journey and list them in order of importance to your survival…

  “One kid always listed the oxygen tank at number five,” Jack said. “Tops.”

  “Not on my watch,” Weber muttered.

  He showed them how to use the flare gun before packing it.

  “I can’t supply you with a real gun,” the captain insisted, more to himself.

  There weren’t enough weapons to spare; arming these two would leave someone else empty-handed when they reached mainland.

  “Sir?”

  The three of them jumped at the sound of a man’s shout. The ship had grown so quiet.

  “Lieutenant Colson reporting, sir.”

  The lieutenant was under the supply officer’s command. He had keys to the locked pantry and orders to pack enough proteins and carbohydrates to last two people one month.

  “I ordered takeout,” the captain said, wanting to show his own sense of humor.

  He led the way back into the corridor and found Lieutenant Colson standing by a duffel bag. Colson’s mouth was tight at the corners. Food hoarding was becoming problematic. The more it continued, the less food they would have to divvy up before they anchored.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. That will be all.”

  Weber stepped forward and lifted the duffel bag of food in his spare hand. Something ugly manifested in the lieutenant’s face as he stared at the supplies being gifted to a pair of civilians, but Weber turned his back and nodded to Maya and Jack, who scrambled to gather up his fishing gear with their own bags and suitcases.

  Balancing a duffel in each hand, Weber led the couple down a series of narrow corridors connected by watertight doors with levers designed to stop the spread of flooding water, smoke, and fire—but not the threat of a cosmic impact, apparently.

  They stepped lightly and tried to ignore noises coming from behind closed stateroom doors. Weber preferred the noises (weeping, praying, shouting, and so on) to silence. Silence was a bad indicator. There wasn’t much Healy’s overwhelmed medical staff could do for the comatose, aside from arranging an IV drip of fluids.

  Midway along Healy’s length, they stopped for Maya to catch her breath.

  “What’s this island called?” she asked. “Our way station before we reach the Aleutians?”

  “Depends who you ask, like most things,” Weber replied. “On the ship, we call it by its coordinates. On a map, it’s labeled Taylor Island, if it’s labeled at all. The Iñupiat who lived there must have had a good name for it, back in the day, but I can’t remember. No one remembers the good names. Just the bad.”

  He gave a small smile of apology.

  “Then what’s the bad name?” Maya asked.

  Her eyes were so dark that the pupils and irises merged into solid spheres. She reloaded her tiny frame with bags, grabbed the handle of a rolling suitcase, and held the captain’s tackle box close to her chest.

  “I can’t pronounce it in their language, but it means swallowed whole,” Weber said. “Gulp. Like a fish.”

  The three proceeded to Healy’s stern and emerged from a hatch. Temperatures on deck hovered at the freshwater freezing point. Flurries partially melted in the air and fell as a white drizzle. A twenty-three-foot rigid hull inflatable boat was already secured at the top of the ship’s stern ramp. Weber strode quickly and climbed in first. Maya struggled to step over the hull with her short legs, but Jack was quick to help her after unloading his bags. They sat quietly behind the steering console as Weber pointed and explained each of the controls.

  “You’ll follow these coordinates and reach the island by afternoon,” Weber said, plugging numbers into the console’s digital interface. “Tomorrow morning, you’ll need to refuel.”

  He lifted his chin to three canisters already secured in the front of the boat.

  “Then head southeast and keep an eye on the compass needle.”

  He pointed to the horizon. In the wet glare, the Bering Sea was a dull-metal gray. The couple looked to one another with doubt mirrored in their eyes. Fear of rape and vicious deaths had driven this decision. Now fear of freezing in winter slowed their step. They might escape the mainland, but not fear.

  Weber asked if Jack or Maya had any questions. When they both shook their heads, he pulled a key from his cargo pocket. Maya hesitated. Wait! her black eyes said. Weber knew he would have to move quickly before they lost their nerve. He flipped the boat’s ignition himself.

  “Godspeed,” he blessed them, and shook each of their hands.

  Maya and Jack looked equally terrified and grateful.

  Hurry…

  Weber removed the boat’s safety straps. After Healy’s stern door lifted, the speedboat jolted and lowered backward to a white, frothy wake. Sounds of roaring water swelled as the retrieval line hooks released. The boat launched at speed with Jack at the wheel. The man turned for a final glance back at Healy’s bright red flank. Captain Weber stood at a railing, his tall stature dwarfed by the colossal ship, his hand lifted against the shadows of fog.

  * * *

  ALL THROUGH THE day’s voyage, Maya kept looking back to the distance where they had left their mother ship. They had runny eyes and noses in the wet cold, but Maya’s sniffing could have been more than that. Jack only looked ahead to their destination. He had also formed strong bonds while in the mental trenches of possible extinction, world calamity, suicide, and news reportage that literally made him vomit. Yet when the time came, it was easier for him to detach from both Healy and his former life. Jack was always good at running away.

  “I see the island!” he called above the wind.

  Jack maneuvered with the boat’s pump-jets and angled south toward Gulp Island’s soot-colored beaches. Fog thinned in time to reveal a seawall of rocks capping the island’s northern shore, a measure by former inhabitants to buy time against storms. The wall ended midway along the island’s two-mile expanse. Jack steered farther south and turned inland.

  “How do I stop this thing?”

  Maya reached over and shut off the engine to reduce their speed. The boat coasted and rode in the waves along with bobbing pieces of trash. Jack hopped out when the hull bumped up onto the beach. He grabbed a nylon towline and worked with the surf to pull the boat’s nose clear from the water. Maya took his hand and stepped onto the beach. Both were wet and shivering. Jack’s jeans were soaked.

  “We need to stay dry,” he said.

  Maya nodded in a daze. Jack unpacked the neoprene Gumby suits for them to pull on. Even with the hoods down and collars unzipped, Jack and Maya looked ridiculous.

  “We’re going to freeze to death looking like Muppets,” Jack joked.

  And they laughed about it. Laughing was essential; to be taken on the journey to the dark side of the moon.

  Jack took Maya’s hand and led her across a narrow beach to the base of a ten
-foot cliff. They dug the floppy feet of their suits into eroding silt and clambered up. Jack’s camera swung on its strap and bounced against his chest. With three-fingered mitts, they made fists around the long, wild grasses poking out of melting slush and pulled at the earth by its hair.

  At the top, Jack and Maya could see the full, treeless expanse of the island. Many objects were hidden under lumps of snow. Whatever they were, they weren’t worth the effort of relocation. Neither were the leaning, single-story houses made from wood planks and corrugated metal. Some tilted by only a few degrees, while others’ whole foundations were buckled and warped. If Maya and Jack were afraid of this odd-angled ghost town, they didn’t speak of it. Wind folded around them in the silence, feeling their shapes.

  Finally, Maya slid back down the cliff, leaving deep skids with her heels. They returned to their boat on the trash-strewn southern shore. Jack kicked at a crushed water bottle, then toed a tampon applicator.

  “Shame we can’t eat plastic,” he sighed.

  Maya found the captain’s tackle box and clumsily popped the clasp with mitted fingers. Lifting its lid, she saw wooden trays filled with fishing hooks and lures in shiny candy colors.

  “There are large concentrations of schooling fish in these waters,” she assured the both of them. “Walleye pollock, Pacific cod, herring, sablefish. If we can feed ourselves, and maybe a few others through winter, we won’t be too much trouble to take in, right?”

  “What if one of us dies before the other?” Jack blurted out.

  Maya set the box back down and nuzzled her lover’s ginger-gold beard.

  “One of us will die before the other,” she reminded him. “That’s the way of it. Before UD3 and after.”

  “After?” he asked with eyebrows lifted. “You mean the international defense effort that was in the news? You think they have a shot?”

  Maya waved the question aside. She asked if Jack had ever seen a horseshoe crab. The species was nearly half a million years old. Its ancient self had survived all previous mass extinctions, even the great Permian extinction that had killed up to 96 percent of all marine species.

  “So there’s hope?” Jack asked. “Either way?”

  Maya looked to the ocean. Primitive life once slithered out and evolved, for better or worse. It could happen again.

  “There’s always hope,” she said.

  Maya was wiser and stronger than all of Jack’s other lovers, with a rare mix of sweetness and grit. She and Jack were an unlikely match. Only a polar ice cutter and a comet could deliver them into each other’s arms. Jack loved her so much it rendered him speechless.

  So he snapped a picture with his camera.

  “Pictures?” Maya laughed. “Still?”

  “Yes. Still.”

  The stories Jack captured with his Nikon made his own life’s story as well. They mattered, still. There was meaning in the making.

  “You’ve probably had a lot of survival training, right?” Maya asked.

  Jack nodded, frowning. Maya was smart and sensible, but only he could keep them alive. He felt the sweaty fear of being in grave danger beside someone precious; it was a new feeling.

  “Have you ever been starving?” Jack asked.

  “I’ve been hungry.”

  He shook his head: not the same. Something inside Jack cracked. It wasn’t real, but psychosomatic; his scarred body telling him this woman had finally made him fragile.

  “We need to find shelter and set up camp,” Jack said. “I know what to do. There’s hope for the two of us as well.”

  He stepped back and took a wide-angle shot of Gulp Island, their lodgings for the night. He would continue to capture the human experience for as long as they, and their batteries, could last.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  True Soldier of the Wayãpi

  Brasília

  May 24, 2011

  National Congress of Brazil

  The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

  —G. K. Chesterton

  HAVE YOU EVER been surrounded by such a brilliant blue?” Father St. John mused.

  The floors and leather upholstery in the Senate chamber were ultramarine, the same blue on the Brazilian flag hanging limp on the stage. The priest looked up from his seat in the upper gallery’s front row to the domed ceiling, which shimmered like fish scales. Father St. John blinked away tears from either too much sunlight or too much beauty in a man-made structure that housed such corrupt men and women. Two out of every three members of Congress faced criminal accusations, ranging from bribery to murder.

  “Niemeyer architecture,” the priest whispered in Gustavo’s ear. “One of our own.”

  “Our own?”

  “Sorry, Brazilian. Niemeyer was born in Rio de Janeiro.”

  Gustavo ignored this. The priest was Canadian and Gustavo was a Wayãpi Indian—or an Indigenous person, or whatever name Brazilians were using these days. Both men had lived in the forest and on its dangerous frontier for the majority of their lives. At sixty-eight, Father St. John’s hair and beard were still full but completely gray. He was no longer thin, but that common fat-thin of elderly men with a paunch on which he rested his folded arms. His long, skinny legs were knock-kneed like a curassow bird. Gustavo was in his late forties and had long hair that was still black but without luster.

  “Is the list ready?” Gustavo prodded.

  Reflections in the priest’s pale irises vanished as he looked back down at Gustavo with something close to pity.

  “If I didn’t know you better,” he said, reaching for the leather satchel propped against his sandaled feet, “I’d tell you to enjoy beauty wherever you can find it. But I do know you better.”

  Gustavo had met Father St. John, and all the books the priest kept locked away from the forest’s cockroaches, when he was eight years old. An evangelical missionary had sent the boy to find a priest living in a cabin beside a settlement of miners. The missionary wanted Gustavo to be baptized, but Father St. John had no interest in converting a child who didn’t understand the meaning of it. He was not a missionary, but he did have a mission. I heard the cry of my people, he always repeated. The statement was both complicated, for all its many references, and simple. “I Have Heard the Cry of My People” was a letter signed and released by northeastern Brazil’s bishops in 1973, denouncing systemic violations of human rights. It was also a statement attributed to God in the Book of Exodus as he spoke of the oppressed Israelites. Once more, it was Father St. John’s own sentiment since he had left the land of his birth to answer this cry.

  “Body count is nine hundred thirteen.” The priest sighed, pulling a stack of papers out of his satchel. “We can’t count missing persons, unfortunately. Only corpses.”

  The Walking Dead List supposedly tallied up all the names of activists who pressed for labor rights, Indigenous rights, sustainable farming, and environmental justice—until they were murdered for it. The number was a gross underestimation; the forest had a bad habit of drowning out screams and swallowing up evidence. But the names of those who undoubtedly lost their lives to greed and violence were something that couldn’t be denied.

  Gustavo dropped the papers on his lap without a glance. Large numbers still confused him, and he already knew the names of all the brave people reduced to ink on paper. The Walking Dead List existed for those who didn’t know. Gustavo swiveled his head to survey the busy gallery with full seats and bodies packed into the standing room behind them. He had wanted to approach a reporter about publishing the list and wasn’t expecting so many.

  “I’ve never seen so many reporters turn out for the forest,” Gustavo remarked.

  “They’re here for you,” the priest insisted.

  Father St. John had tried and failed to instill the significance of a Nobel Prize in Literature. Gustavo wasn’t going to attend the award ceremony in Stockholm and chided his friend for being so characteristically optimistic about th
e stated prize. No one has that much money, Sinjin, he would reply, calling his friend by his family name.

  “If the reporters are here for me, then they’re not here for the forest code vote?” Gustavo said.

  “Perhaps a few?”

  The priest was an optimist, not a liar. Weakening the laws that had governed the forest since 1965 was historic. But the media served the public, and the same public that generally supported the environment in opinion polls also elected the corrupt politicians who fought to exploit and destroy it.

  There was a double flash of a camera at the back of the gallery. When Gustavo turned around, another flash blinded him. Father St. John laughed at his puzzled expression.

  “Get used to it,” he added.

  Teasing Gustavo while teaching him and nudging him toward love, in every Christian sense of the word, were Father St. John’s favorite pastimes.

  A senator made his way to the podium at the front of the chamber. Father St. John sat up straight and frowned.

  “I know I must love all God’s children,” he said, “but this one’s a real bastard.”

  The federal senator was a rich cattle baron turned politician, a powerful member of the rural bloc. At the podium, he wore an expensive suit with a Brazilian flag pin on his lapel. Before the man became a senator, he was local governor of the frontier state of Rondônia, where he wore simple clothes and a brimmed straw hat. He wanted to appear as a man of the people—more specifically, rich cattle ranchers like himself.

  “Meus amigos,” he said, with arms outstretched, and continued to address his fellow senators in Portuguese.

  When his eyes scanned the gallery and caught sight of Gustavo, he smirked. Gustavo wasn’t used to being seen, especially not by men like that. He felt his pulse quicken as they regarded each other with calculated hate.

  “I see more white faces judging from above,” the senator said, growling the syllables.

  He pointed an accusatory finger up at Father St. John, a pale Canadian Jesuit working with the social justice wing of the Church.