But the work suited him, the tediousness of it, the challenge. The way it pushed other thoughts and desires to the edges. The thrill of seeing a magnified crystal, slowly wilting beneath his attention, did not abate. When he woke the day was his, with all its attendant minutes. He and Naaliyah lived simply: they collected the pot of stew from the roof where she’d stowed it and thawed it on the stove. If it wasn’t snowing, or hadn’t recently, he lost himself in the rhythm of chopping wood or shook snow from tree limbs hoping to dislodge and collect individual snow crystals.
Despite Naaliyah’s protests, he continued to sleep in the shed, out of propriety, or obstinacy, perhaps, but also because he had genuinely grown to prefer it. There was something about the cold he liked—it felt purifying, sliding through the dwindling stacks of wood. It was the same thing, he realized, that Naaliyah loved about her insects: the essences of things were clearer with them, the violences and loves of life. Cold demanded a sharper, simpler view of things: in those temperatures death hovered at the margins, offering clarity, providing precision.
But it blurred things, too: the border between dreams and wakefulness, the way it pulled life from fingers and toes, and released them reluctantly, temporarily. The way the wind came, like news from another, more tenuous world, and stirred the trees.
Naaliyah did not mention Christmas again except to ask, each Friday, before she went to town, “Any letters you want to mail?”
In the bitterest parts of January freezing air drained through the woodshed as if it were made of cheesecloth. He rose every hour or so to hurry across the meadow beneath the brilliant, awful sky (the whole arm of the galaxy seeming to drape over the meadow, as if he could reach up and pluck out some blue and frozen sun as he passed beneath it) into the cabin to shove wood into the stove, to try to kick his feet warm.
Naaliyah would be asleep on the cot, and the heat lamps would click off and on, and the stove would groan as its metal stretched. Outside all the water was going to ice and inside steam formed on the windows and frosted over, as though the cabin had become a body itself, jacketed in ice, with the small, insatiable stomach of its stove burning on and on.
Near the end of January it became truly cold. The ranger on the CB told them it was twenty degrees below zero, but to Winkler cold was cold and he was angry that it prevented him from staying outside for more than two or three minutes. The film stuck; the focus knob locked up—work was impossible. It took an hour by the fire to undo what thirty seconds of exposure could do to his fingers. His toes were pebbles, glued together. If he took a cup of boiling water outside and threw it up in the air, it crystallized before it hit the ground.
On most days now the sky was the same color as the trees and the trees were the same color as the snow. Ice fog, they called it. To move through a landscape like this was to find yourself moving through a dream. His own hand loomed before his face, huge and out of proportion. Winkler could see the fear growing in Naaliyah’s face, in the scarlet splotches on her throat, in the way she did not get out of bed until the daylight was nearly gone. You could walk in circles out here; you could almost feel yourself entering the old pioneer tales, the survival stories, trappers eating shoe leather, miners frozen into creeks.
Naaliyah had been right to ask: Were they prepared for this? She listened for the generator above the wind as if her life depended on its rumble. Which, in a single, clarifying sense, it did—as did the lives of her insects, all of them attuned to the tenuous orange glow of the heat lamps.
He brought in wood, brought in snow to melt for water. All around them ice touched at the walls of the cabin and the tip of the chimney like a hundred thousand tiny fragments of glass, tinkling softly. At night he tried to sit it out in the shed, the cold coming from everywhere now, like a deep, patient submersion, but he could not make it—it was too cold, too impossible, and he’d have to push himself to his feet and drag his body and the furs across the meadow, back into the cabin. He’d sit by the fire, the cold refusing to leave him, and stare into the coals.
Naaliyah would have her eyes open in the cot, her sleeping bag at her chin, two wool hats on her head, one over the other. The insects were silent.
On the twenty-eighth of January the generator quit. Naaliyah spent almost an hour outside over the wooden housing, examining the points, the fuel filter, and another hour pulling relentlessly on the starter cord, but couldn’t get it to turn over. They had plenty of fuel, and their batteries were charged, but the heat lamps would suck them dry in twenty or so hours, and then the CB would go down, and they would have to leave.
They did not talk. Winkler went out to the meadow and stood over her for a moment and watched her shiver and the wind turn the pages of the generator manual. “Let’s eat something, Naaliyah,” he said. “C’mon. Keep our strength up.”
She relented. He put some larch into the stove—the good, hot-burning larch, a piece of two-hundred-year-old tree that had drifted down the river and been trailered up there to save their lives. Naaliyah clambered up on the log pile to retrieve a pot of frozen stew. Together they sat in front of the fire and watched the broth thaw, and the fat begin to rise to the top. When it was ready Naaliyah—who was still shaking awfully—stood to transfer it from the stove to the table, but she was wearing mittens, and lost her grip, and it spilled. A brown, steaming pool spread across the floor, chunks of carrots and beef surfing out at its edges. Within a minute, the broth closest to the walls began to freeze.
Neither said anything. Wind roared across the meadow. The roof sounded as if it was going to tear off. Winkler could hear their food—pounds of it in heavy bins—slide toward the edge. What was left of the stew soon glazed the floorboards and he forced himself to his feet and began to chip it free.
Naaliyah stood in the center of the cabin and put her hands over her eyes.
The wind died around midnight and a thick raft of ice fog settled into the meadow. Winkler went out to the generator and peered into it with a flashlight and touched various parts and screws and cleaned frost off the hour meter with his mittened thumb but could not have told the difference between the alternator and a circuit breaker. After ten or so minutes he went in and stood over Naaliyah where she lay, eyes closed on the cot.
“Can you fix it?”
She turned her head. “No.”
“It’s totally ruined? A loss?”
She shrugged.
“I think you can fix it. One more try. Give it a half hour. If you still can’t do it, then we’ll get out of here; we’ll go to town and take showers. But I think if maybe you try one more time, you’ll get it. I’ll keep the fire high. I’ll bring you hot tea.”
“David,” she started, but did not say more. He went to sit by the stove. A half hour passed and he thought she might be sleeping when she got up and pulled on her snowsuit and boots and took the little tackle box full of tools and went out.
All day she worked. He brought her mugs of hot water; he brought her canned soup. Every twenty minutes she came inside to shake the blood back into her hands. Around 3 P.M., with the daylight failing, Winkler heard the generator rumble to life, then die, then start back up again. She came and pushed open the door and looked at him, grease on her face, both mittens black.
Winkler had thawed a package of frozen peas and turned to Naaliyah and winked. “I’ll make dinner tonight,” he said, and she set her tools down on the table, and after a moment, began to laugh.
8
The generator hung on. Some nights they’d stop whatever they were doing and listen to it as if listening to a beloved tenor. The insects pressed onward, still eating, some even mating, metamorphosing.
Their lives moved deeper and cleaner, as if they were shedding weight. Conversations would lapse for whole hours or even days, and then one of them would pick up the thread again, as though their tongues had frozen midconversation and could only temporarily break free.
“Why not write him, David?”
“What’s the use?”
<
br /> “Why not try?”
He groaned. “She’s dead. They’re all dead. I’m trying to move on.”
“But you can’t! You don’t want to leave these woods, you don’t want to do anything but peer into that microscope. This winter is going to end eventually. And I’m going back to school, back to Anchorage.”
He shook his head. The cold was difficult but for some reason the idea that this winter would end was not something he could allow himself to consider. He’d retreat outside to work with his microscope, scanning flakes, maybe—if he was lucky and it was snowing—making a single exposure. In the deep cold the only crystals that fell were columns, or pyramids, devoid of innovation. An hour or two later he was back in, rubbing his hands in front of the stove, feeling the cold slowly—so reluctantly—leave his clothes.
Naaliyah didn’t look up from where she was dissecting a mantid. “Don’t you at least want to know what happened? Even if they are gone?”
He watched the embers in the stove.
“My mother is right,” she said.
“No.”
“You write him, David. I’ll mail it. Just one letter.”
“You don’t understand. I’m the last person he’d help.”
“Try it.”
Naaliyah made her Friday trips into town, wrapping herself head to toe in furs, ski goggles over her eyes. Sometimes it seemed like he could hear the chewing, droning engine of the Skidoo all the way to Eagle, the buzz of it in the high, frozen air, among the glitter suspended there. It would cease for an hour or so, then begin again, growing louder, as she made her way back up the valley. She brought film, vinegar, tomato paste, powdered eggs, five-pound cans of peanut butter, once a bottle of Chianti that froze and cracked on the way back up, so that they had to thaw it in a pot and strain out the glass and drink it hot.
The snow did not accumulate in enormous quantities there—maybe six feet all winter—but it snowed often, nearly every day in February, tiny flakes sifting through the pall of fog, landing in his basin.
On the fifth of February he made his first successful print of a snow crystal, a classic, cold weather hexagonal plate. It was unfocused around the edges, and slightly lopsided, but well centered in the exposure, and a formation very like the shape of a pilot’s wheel was braced inside.
Looking at that tiny hexagon of ice—a crystal now lost to the world—he felt his heart stall; it was like watching an image from one of his dreams appear again in the air and light, right in front of his eyes.
Naaliyah held it to the window. “Lovely.”
“It’s a start,” he said.
Watch the snow fly through the air. Watch the wind come up, and the flakes rise, and swim—each, it seems, travels in a separate direction. The flakes grow bigger; they blow in ghostly waves; they become flowers, raging through the boughs. In the arctic, Winkler had heard, explorers became hypnotized watching snow fall, so entranced they had frozen to death. And what, indeed, he thought, standing at the desk in the outrageous cold, could be more important than watching snow fly into the meadow, and settle on the hills, and gradually conceal the trees?
“Mango,” he’d say.
“Passion fruit,” she’d say.
“Pizza.”
“Oreo cookies.”
“Pineapple juice.”
“Oh, pineapple juice. How about draft beer? How about curried whelk?”
“Your father’s curried whelk. With banana bread.”
“With banana bread and fresh butter. And baked grapefruit with honey and cinnamon.” On the stove their oats bubbled and murmured as they thickened.
February, late afternoon, hours after dark, and Winkler stood over his microscope studying the faint tracery of a snowflake in the wavering light of the microscope lamp (the opaline, almost translucent formation of the snow against the dirtier, more insistent white of the bulb) when Naaliyah appeared at his elbow. “David,” she said, and gestured with her chin. “Look up.”
A vast curtain flapped in the sky above the trees. It rippled, then became something like a scarf, then a green wedge, a wing, gliding solemnly in front of the Milky Way. He switched off the microscope and they stood in the meadow together, looking up, the vapor of their breath standing out in front of them, and freezing, and settling back onto their cheeks.
Shivering emeralds and blues, trimmed with red. Jades. Violets. An eerie green traveling the meadow, lighting their maze of frozen prints. In the nights to come the auroras appeared around the same time, as if scheduled, and stayed sometimes until after midnight. He’d lie under his blankets and old furs beside the cages of frozen, entombed insects, and the borealis would shuttle and crackle overhead, illuminating the shed through the ever-increasing gaps in the woodpiles, as though a dim and alien craft had landed in the meadow.
He closed his eyes. The light crept through his eyelids. Dreams came over him like tides, like glutinous liquids.
He dreamed of trees freezing, exploding in the night; he dreamed of wolves galloping a ridgeline, and of miniature labyrinths beneath the snow. Maybe, he considered later, they were the dreams of the insects themselves, traveling in the frigid air between them on invisible threads. Maybe they had always been there and he was only now tuning them in, as if he were still on the beach, roaming the frequencies with his shortwave. Their hibernal dreams: ice crystals beneath their exoskeletons, inside their minuscule organs, their blood suspended in filigrees and crowns and diadems. Each dreaming of that day when the thaw would come, when the sun would reach them in their stump or cocoon or tunnel and switch them on like a lamp.
Naaliyah had discovered an odd thing, and had been grappling with it since December. Despite heat, and extended periods of light, even despite the abundant food she placed in their cages, maybe a third of her insects had gone ahead and stowed themselves in their hibernacula anyway. As if they understood that their environments were contrived, artificial. Or as if they understood the changing of the season internally, some chemical turning calendar pages inside them. As if what they were was something inescapable, determined by evolution and independent of circumstance.
Two successful prints. Four. Seven. Ten. He pinned them to the walls of the shed with penny nails, little four-by-five-inch postcards of snow crystals, a hall of fame of departed snowflakes, some prints speckled with white or missing a corner, others blue and curled from the cold. But still, not even a dozen. Bentley had tens of thousands. How had he done it?
Past the middle of February he went out in the early dusk and tramped his way to the gap in the forest, a raven following him as he went, sailing above the trees, as if lonely for company in the silence. He was thinking of his father. Though he had read the newspaper cover to cover each evening, he had never once said: “Hey, David, listen to this,” never seemed to know anything at all about current events. Whenever somebody around his father spoke of things going on in the country, his father would say nothing, or worse, look down the street, into the distance, not listening. “Nixon,” a neighbor would say. “I said, Howard, what do you think of the vice president?” As if the newspaper were in a different language, or the words were not words at all, or else his father had lost the ability to process them.
The air was so cold that it burned his nostrils. He stood and watched the light seep out of the sky for as long as he could—maybe five minutes—the blue light failing, but another coming up on the hills, as though the snow itself was incandescing. The trees and bare willows below him, out on the floodplains, had become so heavily caked with ice that they’d become otherworldly things, big ice-caked cauliflower heads, and there was no wind, and far below him, like black specks, past the reach of his eyesight, a pair of ravens as big as eagles tore into something dead out on the frozen plains of the Yukon. Out there, beyond it all, in the place where distance merged everything into a swirling, depthless color like mercury, was Anchorage: where his father had lived his whole life, bringing people milk.
On his way back to the cabin, he steppe
d in and out of his boot prints, the snow squeaking beneath his weight. He was halfway across the meadow—Naaliyah’s cabin light glowing, leaking through the slats in the siding, the chimney blushing smoke, as if the place contained some secret and fortunate enchantment, something worth hiding from the world—when he saw the moose.
She stood at the cabin window, peering in. Her tail flicked back and forth like a milk cow’s. Her big eyes blinked. She was almost as big as Naaliyah’s F-250.
For a moment he was not afraid, only curious. What must she have thought, staring in there? The heat and moisture escaping through the walls, the smells and sounds of insects—as if summer had been trapped inside a little box and kept in the middle of the woods—it must have stretched her ability to comprehend.
She stood a while longer, huge and quiet. Cold crept up Winkler’s arms. Then she turned and contemplated him, entirely unsurprised. A moment later, she trotted off into the trees, light-footed as a fawn, disappearing into the snow.
A slow breeze pushed through the trees and snow unloaded from several boughs. He thought of those tiny deer he had seen on the roadside years ago, when he and Sandy were speeding toward Ohio—the deer that Sandy had not bothered to look up to see, deer like the ghosts of deer. He wondered if this moose, too, was a ghost, and he knew somehow that when he went in, Naaliyah would not have seen it.
But here were her tracks, right beneath his feet. High on the window glass, far above his head, were two intersecting discs of vapor, quickly fading. He went in and asked Naaliyah for a piece of paper and an envelope.
About Grace Page 27