All month the ice muttered and howled and whistled. The trees echoed back and forth among themselves. Taken collectively, the sound was of deep wounding, of winter inexorably taking the life out of things. That night Winkler stood in the meadow listening as if in a trance—the cold, the answering sounds of grief—until he couldn’t bear it. He hurried toward the shed, to bury himself under his furs, to sleep among Naaliyah’s thousand slumbering insects.
The night outside, the night within. This was a place where dreams and reality could intersect; where night would be the dominant feature of the landscape.
He could feel snow coming. He could taste it. The mountains were already covered with a half meter.
His right foot had healed as much as it was going to. Probably he would always limp. When he walked it would be as if one foot was permanently a step behind, as if that part of him remained in Boise, Idaho, stepping into a stranger’s house, pawing at her photographs. Why couldn’t he see the path in front of him? Why couldn’t he dream of something to come, some reunion, or at least an answer, some glimpse of who Grace might have been?
There was the Datsun at the bottom of its canyon; the ocean sucking and sucking at Nanton’s glass floor; the quiet breathing—in, out, in, out, in, out—of Naaliyah sleeping on her cot. He thought: I should have given Brent Royster all my money. I should have tucked a hundred-dollar bill into every one of his records.
On the twenty-third of November snow finally reached the camp. It battered the cabin window all day. Naaliyah came in and stoked the stove and stood at the glass beside him looking out. “You know,” she eventually said, “I see what you meant. How each crystal can be a prism. How it’s full of light.” ’
Winkler did not turn away for several hours. All day—indeed, ever since he’d arrived at Camp Nowhere—a sensitivity had been building within him: the slightest shift in light or air touched the backs of his eyes, reached membranes inside his nose. It was as if, like a human divining rod, he had been attuning to vapor as it gathered in the atmosphere, sensing it—water rising in the xylem of trees, leaching out of stones, even the last unfrozen volumes, gargling deep beneath the forest in tangled, rocky aquifers—all these waters rising through the air, accumulating in the clouds, stretching and binding, condensing and precipitating—falling.
He ate his dinner standing up, forehead at the window.
The flurries didn’t stop until well into the night. He tried lying in bed, but his blood was surging, and the pale light of the snow was pouring through the shed walls, touching a place very near the center of him. He pulled on his snowsuit and boots and mittens and went out. Maybe six inches had fallen. His feet passed soundlessly through it—the ice skeleton, one of his professors had called it, that loose scaffolding of new-fallen snow, individual crystals re-forming into lattice; with a vise the professor had compressed a loaf of Wonder Bread into a two-inch cube to demonstrate how much air was trapped within.
Winkler’s breath plumed up onto his glasses. The entire valley was enveloped in a huge, illuminated stillness. Above him the clouds had pulled away and the sky burned with stars. The meadow smoldered with light, and the spruce had become illuminated kingdoms, snow sifting from branch to branch. He thought: This has been here every winter all my life.
He tramped along the creek until nearly dawn, his hands and feet stinging with cold, his heart high in his throat. The sky was going a dim olive in the east, and Naaliyah was still asleep in the cot when he returned to the cabin and kicked the ice from his boots. On back shelves, where Naaliyah kept her instruments, he knew, there was a microscope: an inclined Bausch & Lomb Stratalab, probably forty years old, monocular, with a brass arm and revolving nosepiece.
He brought it outside to Naaliyah’s desk. He swept snow from the tabletop, switched on the microscope’s light source (a battery-powered six-volt bulb beneath the stage) and, trembling, pressed one lens of his eyeglasses to the eyepiece.
It worked. There was a disc of white light, a few specks of debris in it like tiny black commas.
He started with a spruce needle, something big, something easy. He closed the aperture on the light source, turned the focus knob. And there it was: long and green, diamond-shaped, paler on the bottom two planes.
He could not contain himself: he extracted the glass slide, wiped it, and sifted the clumped aggregates of a few snowflakes onto it. Then he slid them onto the stage.
It was like stepping back in time. A thousand frozen bonds, stunted ice structures, even the severed branch of an individual dendrite, all leapt large and backlit to his eye like a memory, like a smell—crushed mint, or his mother’s skin lotion. It was as if time was pliable and he was able, for a moment, to become a graduate student once more, standing in the cafeteria freezer, all the succeeding years fallen off him like an old coat. As if the snow had been waiting all this time for him to come back.
It took Winkler the rest of the remaining daylight—only four and a half hours, by then—to locate an individual snow crystal. The snow was already aging, settling in, and he was cold, clumsy with his fingers and breath, and his eyes quickly tired. But he managed to find one, sifting down from a tree—star-shaped, the classic six-branched sectored plate—and spear it with the spruce needle and transfer it, mostly undamaged, onto the glass slide.
When he focused it in the viewfinder, the crystal wavering, then sharpening, he felt the old spark flare: six dendrites jutting off a central hexagonal core, scored with ridges. Adrenaline fired down the length of his body. His breath melted it; he stooped and began searching for another. When Naaliyah finally came out, tramping toward him with a steaming tin can, he was shivering so much he sloshed the tea onto his sleeves.
She persuaded him to go inside. Beneath his furs he saw snow crystals on the undersides of his eyelids. Like birds stirred from a rookery, memories flew into his consciousness: the sound of the fan in the cafeteria freezer, rattling as if ice were caught in its blades; Sandy’s frozen bootprint that he’d excavated and preserved in his freezer; the cool, washed-cotton smell of his mother. He saw Sandy’s thin form fold itself into a theater seat; he saw his mother take her nurse’s uniform from a hanger and spread it across the ironing board, heard her steam iron suck and sigh as she brought it across the fabric.
He thought of Wilson Bentley, whose book of snowflakes his mother used to keep beneath the coffee table, an old farmer peering through the bellows of his camera, and the sound of Bentley’s pages turning in her hands.
Thirty-six hours after the first snow, a second arrived, falling like stars, filling the trees. He stood in the clearing and caught flakes in a black plastic tub Naaliyah used to sort ants. When he snared a flake he thought might be an undamaged crystal, he coaxed it onto the glass slide with another of Naaliyah’s tools: tiny forceps, intended for a watchmaker.
Hollow bullets, sectored plates, prismatic columns, dozens of elaborate stellar dendrites—soon he was seeing all the patterns of his youth, all melting fast beneath his attention and the heat of the microscope’s lamp.
With each shift in temperature or humidity, the crystals’ shapes varied slightly, like finely tuned thermometers. He imagined them growing in the clouds, the initial molecules precipitating, the wind blowing them through slight gradations in temperature, each prismatic arm growing—the invisible made visible. He could not, it seemed, grow tired of them—watching light travel their arms, whole spectrums of blues and greens and whites, the edges softening already, wilting toward water.
After dark he went into the cabin and sat with Naaliyah over a bowl of noodles. “You know,” she said, “that microscope has a photomicrography kit somewhere in here. I haven’t used it, but I’d bet you could get it to work. All you’d need is film.”
Winkler stopped chewing. “To take photos?”
“Of course.”
He stood. “Can I do that? Do you know how to operate it? Will you order the film? Next time you’re in town?”
“Of course.” She laughed.
“Of course.”
She radioed in her request and nine days later brought it back from the post office in Eagle with their laundry and perishables: four-by-five-inch color print Polaroid film in packs of twenty. His hands shook tearing open the package. The pieces were big, and went brittle in the cold, and he creased two of them before he could even load the sheet film holder properly.
These were not the only obstacles. He needed more light—he was afraid to increase the wattage of the tiny bulb in the microscope’s base for fear it would melt the crystals even more quickly. He needed steadier hands; he needed better eyesight. He needed more daylight—there was hardly any left. And his breath proved a substantial obstacle: if he breathed in the direction of the crystal, he blew it away, or softened its edges; if he breathed while he tried to hold the camera steady, it shifted and spoiled the image.
In the end what this amounted to was rushing through the snow trying to grasp at seconds. He had to wait for it to snow, then locate a whole crystal among the billions of flying aggregates. Then—if he found one—he had to transfer it undamaged onto a slide, position the slide under the microscope, focus it, ensure the crystal did not touch the lens, screw on the camera, align the film, and speculate a proper length for the exposure.
His first day he made four exposures. His second he made six. None of them came out: each a field of black with a tidy white border.
He was far from discouraged; indeed, Winkler felt he was at the cusp of something, a discovery, a lesson he profoundly needed to learn. Inside him things were unlocking, thawing, or clarifying—something like the sharpening image of a crystal as it came into focus in the eyepiece of the microscope.
Long underwear, two pairs of wool socks, two wool shirts, jeans, a down vest, a balaclava, gloves, and the snowsuit—second, third, fourth skins. Naaliyah had thermometers in several of the shed’s insectaries but Winkler decided it would be better if he did not look at them. It sank to perhaps a dozen degrees below zero. The snow that fell was thin and fine as flour.
Cold and darkness became the normal state of things. Marmot tracks written in the snow around the cabin; crows standing in trees; the stovepipe groaning and creaking as the morning fire heated it. Sometimes the sound of the Yukon shifting under its burden of ice—the last water in the valley to freeze—would repeat up and down the valley, a great, internal buckling, as if dwarves were at work, detonating things inside the earth.
In the cabin the insects were as ravenous as ever, some even confused by Naaliyah’s artificial lights into singing. But in the shed nearly all of the insects had disappeared. Some of the cages she packed with snow, to insulate them. “They’re in there,” Naaliyah told him, tapping the side of a Mason jar, her breath fogging, then freezing on the glass. “They’re in diapause now.”
She spent much of her energy worrying over the generator, paging carefully through its owners’ manual, her finger tracing the sentences. Each morning she checked the extension cords, the generator’s plugs, put her ear to the alternator casing and listened.
Outside the hills were battered by ice. He remembered how his first hydrology professor had begun a lecture: If water had its way, if geology stopped, the seas would chew up the continents, and rain would wear down the mountains. Water would eventually scour the entire planet into a smooth, definitionless sphere. We’d be left with a single ocean, waist-deep, all over the globe. Then, with nothing left to throw itself at, all the divisions and obstacles eroded—no unworn pebbles, no beaches to crash onto, every water molecule touching another—water would disclose, finally, what was in its molecular heart. Would it stand calm and unruffled? Or would it turn on itself—would it throw itself up into storms?
Winkler turned beneath his blankets and watched stars pass slowly in and out of the gaps in the shed walls: there for a few seconds, shining in the breach, then gone. His dreams were of snow crystals, sifting through trees.
6
For Christmas, Naaliyah thawed a chicken (they stowed uncooked food on the roof inside locked plastic bins) and baked it, and afterward they sat in the cabin watching coals in the stove bank and glow while her insects ate their own meals around them.
“I have something,” Naaliyah said, and pulled a box from beneath the cot.
Winkler shook his head. “You didn’t.”
“It’s from my mother.”
Inside was a plastic bag of flour mix, and a letter for each of them. The mix had a note in it, a recipe from Felix: they were to beat it with eggs, milk, sugar, and bananas, and bake it. Happy Christmas, Americans! Felix had scribbled across the bottom. Winkler and Naaliyah exchanged a smile: they had no bananas or eggs, and only powdered milk. But they stirred it together as well as they could, and set it on top of the stove in a pan. As it cooked it smelled to them like the Caribbean, like Felix, and when it was done they cut the flat, cinnamon-laced loaf in half and ate their portions quietly, with a kind of reverence.
Then they took their respective letters and read them in the firelight. His said:
Dear David—
Sorry to hear your search went so poorly. But have heart. Hope is something that can be very dangerous but without it life would be horribly dry. Impossible, even. Take it from me.
Here things are as usual. Felix is drinking as much as possible, and will sometimes stand on Nanton’s glass floor and shout down at the fish. He thinks this is very funny, despite my and Nanton’s assurances that it is not.
The boys are all well, running their various shops, and the island is jammed with tourists for the holidays. Knowing you, you haven’t been reading the papers so I’ll tell you that the Chilean judiciary suspended the charges against Pinochet and dropped the case. All that, and diabetes saves him.
Nonetheless, we are considering a trip back to Chile. Just a visit. Felix is ready, I know—he has been ready for fifteen years. But I’m still not sure. I would like to see Santiago. The parks, the haze on the mountains.
Merry Christmas, David. God bless you. I hope you will appreciate my gift—I am trying to give you your daughter back, as you once gave me mine.
Soma
Outside Naaliyah’s automatic timer clicked, and the generator rumbled to life. The heat lamps flickered, then glowed. Naaliyah had been watching him read his letter and when he folded it closed, she handed him another envelope.
“It’s from my mother, too.”
Inside was a square of paper with an address:
Herman Sheeler
124 Lilac Way
Anchorage, Alaska 99516
Inside the stove a log collapsed and went to embers with a metallic, hollow sound. Winkler felt his epiglottis open and close over his trachea, as if he were gulping phantom liquid.
“We thought you might want to have the address.”
He shook his head.
Naaliyah began to reach toward him, but withdrew her hand. “Are you okay, David?”
Now Winkler could feel anger rising through his chest. He had thought of Herman before, of course: Herman at his big First Federal desk calendar; Herman at hockey practice, crouched in front of a net; Herman at—he could hardly think of it—some event of Grace’s, a graduation, a science fair. Herman at Sandy’s bedside, Herman at Sandy’s funeral. But to see his name printed now in front of him was to somehow make him real again, as real as if Winkler were standing outside Herman’s front door, asking if Sandy the metal artist was home.
The address dissociated itself, the letters straying off, becoming cuneiform, meaningless.
Naaliyah watched him with her hands clamped to her knees.
“Soma did this?”
“She wanted to give you something.”
“It’s not her business.” He folded the square of paper and folded it over again.
“We just thought…” Naaliyah said, but stopped. The fire was only three feet away and he could have thrown the address in and watched it flare and go to ash. But what would be incinerated?
“Well.” She stood and col
lected the cake pan and began to wash it in the bucket. “Merry Christmas anyway.”
7
He set the folded square of paper high on a shelf, between two quart milk cartons stuffed with frozen peat. It was a place he trained himself not to look, a little black hole on a shelf, a location in space too perilous to get close to.
New Year’s came and went and he did not allow his mittens or even his eyes to pass over that corner of the shed. Their wood was disappearing quickly—already there was a bit more space in the woodshed, and most of the logs stacked around the cabin had been given up to heat, and smoke.
Someone had lived in that woodshed before. Lids of tin cans had been nailed over knotholes; strands of twine were stuffed into chinks between the boards. Small enough defenses against winter. But the breaches were too many, and cold air slipped easily through them. Indeed, cold passed through the walls themselves, as if the wood was saturated and could hold no more. Whoever had lived in here before, he decided, had not lasted.
Some mornings he could smell the cold, a smell like ammonia, a smell he could feel his bones tighten against. He had to shake his limbs to resurrect the blood in them. Even inside the shed, he breathed through a scarf, and in turn through a balaclava, until the moisture in his breath had frozen the fibers so badly he had to turn, and tramp back to the cabin, to thaw it all out.
Although he had still made no acceptable prints, he worked harder than ever, Naaliyah returning from town each week with package after package of film. After each exposure he turned from the big desk and ran the film into the cabin, dragging the cold in with him, waiting breathlessly to pull out the film leader and separate the positive and negative, only to find his print utterly black, or gray, or a smeary sheen of reflected glare.
About Grace Page 26