Phase Six

by Jim Shepard

  This Thing of Darkness

  They visited the camp the next three nights, and on that fourth night, back on the dirt pile, Aleq showed Malik a rock he’d unearthed with some digging that was glassy smooth on one side from the polish Ice Age glaciers had given it eleven thousand years earlier. But what had also caught Aleq’s attention was a cavity where the surface had been spalled off, a scar of fractured crystals of feldspar and hornblende and ancient ice. Aleq had been taken with the contrasting textures and had brought his friend’s palm over to experience the difference between polish and edge. Two days earlier, the drill bit’s relentless pounding on the rock had finally broken the chemical bonds holding it to its ledge, and when that seam had cracked and the stress boundaries had separated, a cluster of molecules that had previously thrived in the respiratory tract of an early variant of the Bering goose and that had been trapped with some throat tissue in the crystalline framework during the Holocene glaciation had been reintroduced to the air and the warming sun. Even lying there in the darkness and dirt, Aleq could smell them, like heated metal. He had Malik smell, too, those molecules that were now released to become a part of something new.

  Buttonholes

  The next day they both had sore throats and made fun of how much their noses were running. It rained so much you could hear the runoff on the road from inside the house. It was the weekend, so Aleq headed over to Malik’s without waiting for breakfast. When he got there the rain had let up and Malik’s mother was out front plucking ptarmigan, and the wind was so strong the feathers she released just disappeared. Malik’s father was replacing some rotten duckboards leading up to the house. When you stood on them they teetered on the cottongrass that was humped from the snowmelt. The ones leading into the house were more of a mess than most.

  They lived out by the rubbish dump for everything that wouldn’t burn, and their chimney didn’t draw very well no matter how many times Malik’s father cleaned it, and the smoke always blew in your face. Inside Malik was watching a movie with his brothers and didn’t look up. Even with his boots off Aleq didn’t know where to step. The parents slept on a mattress on the floor with the baby, and the boys were in bunk beds in the bedroom three to a bunk, but everyone’s stuff was everywhere. The clothes box was on its side and pants and mittens and sealskin gloves had been kicked all around. The baby was playing in a pile of old clothes. She had knitted booties and wet black bangs and tipped over and pawed the air.

  Malik’s older brother came out of the bedroom and left. He worked the shit truck emptying house buckets and liked the job because it was good money and finished early so he could go hunting. Something weird was happening in the movie so Aleq crossed the mattresses and sat down and Malik’s little brothers looked him over. One was short and easy to scare and the other was mean with sharp little teeth. Malik was wearing the short one’s favorite hat. A while ago he’d started what he called doing business with them, and always ended up with most of their things. Aleq said hello, and Malik said hello back after his dad came in singing. He sang songs about summer arriving or people doing themselves in. He finished one song and asked Malik what he was doing, and Malik said that to make his shirt fit better he was cutting new buttonholes with his knife. His father asked if he wanted help, and when Malik didn’t answer he said in an old-fashioned way that he didn’t appreciate Malik’s attitude. Malik said that he didn’t like the sounds his father and mother had made the night before, and his father explained that those were the sounds of an expert at work. Malik just kept watching the movie, and his father finally added that it was only when you were really depressed that you learned how to be a Greenlander.

  “That kid from the cemetery ran into me on his bike,” Aleq told Malik.

  “You never use people’s names,” Malik complained. “You’re the only person in the settlement that doesn’t. You just say ‘that guy,’ or ‘that kid.’ It’s weird.”

  “I’m weird,” Aleq reminded him. Malik gave him a look.

  When Malik’s father finished what he was doing, he went back outside, and Malik’s brothers got bored and followed, so then it was just the two of them, and the baby in the clothes. “You’re the best friend I ever had,” Aleq said, surprising himself, and Malik smiled at him with his runny nose, like he knew everyone was sad, or had been, or soon would be, and that that had made him grateful that Aleq was around. Later that night his look came back to Aleq when Aleq was helping haul the outboard motor out of storage. “What’re you smiling at?” his grandfather asked.

  International Relations

  Sunday morning they went down to the water near the old halibut factory and sat in their favorite spot on one of the cement wharves built into the rock. Near where the cable for the hand winch for dragging boats or whales up onto the ramp ran into the water, a dead dog floated under the ice. Aleq wiped his nose with his sleeve and then wiped Malik’s. Around lunchtime they walked back to the supermarket in the middle of the settlement and sat on the big flat rocks where the brook became a waterfall into the harbor, and some of the mine workers showed up and sat next to them and started eating and drinking.

  Other kids had followed the mine workers there, but kept their distance. Visitors usually had one or two kids behind them, since if you hung out near them they sometimes gave you their weird candy or food.

  The wind off the water helped with the mosquitoes. Three of the mine workers were white and one was dark skinned. The foreman recognized Aleq and nodded at him and Aleq and Malik were close enough to hear their talk. Some were speaking Danish and some something else. Aleq’s Danish was better than his grandparents’, since they figured that only teachers and midwives and young people needed to make themselves understood in that language, and maybe mechanics, since they were always ordering parts. The foreman seemed interested in teasing them and kept running his hands through his own hair, so Malik pretended to be thrilled and told him, “You’re so tall and handsome,” and then was happy when the foreman and two of the men laughed. Then the dark-skinned worker showed them a funny video he’d taken of one of his drunk white friends falling down a flight of stairs, and the mine workers talked about getting to go home the next day. They were happy about it. Then the dark-skinned worker and Malik showed each other their phones. And the mine workers shared some Danish bread they had bought at the supermarket and some snow crab they had gotten at the tourist restaurant. Everyone loved the snow crab and there was a lot of it so it was passed around. And in that way their shared fork became a fomite, from the Latin fomites, for tinder, or fire starter: an object that when contaminated with an infectious agent will transfer that agent to the new host.

  Nobody Feels Very Good Today

  In the morning, all of the dogs were howling but there was nothing out on the water and Aleq couldn’t see anything up in the hills. No one was awake except some smaller kids who were jumping on a discarded oil tank by the lake and trying to get it to rock. He walked over to Malik’s and everyone there was up though no one was outside. Malik’s mother was making something on the stove and told Aleq that Malik couldn’t see anybody today and that he’d been shaking so much his brothers had let him have the bed. Malik shouted from the bedroom to let Aleq in, and his mother shrugged, and went back to the stove.

  The bedroom had the shades down and had a different smell and one of Malik’s little brothers looked sick, too. “You okay?” Aleq asked, and sat near Malik’s head. The little brother was lying on the floor and Malik was so sweaty his hair was soaked. He was scrolling through his phone without really looking at it: some selfies, a skate park. He gave Aleq a look like they had nothing to worry about. There was white stuff around his mouth. His other little brother was out in the kitchen, and they heard his mother tell him that if he did that again she would bite him to death. On the wall under the bunk Malik had pasted up photos from magazines: basketball players and swimsuit models.

  He was shaking lik
e something cold was coming from inside him. “I’m glad I didn’t make you sick,” he said, looking at Aleq. His father heard him and stuck his head in the room. “You need the bucket?” he asked. He looked terrible himself. He saw Aleq notice, and said, “It’s like what the starving seal says after the hunter misses him: ‘Well, nobody feels very good today.’ ”

  Malik’s mother said from the kitchen that his father should try some of the medicine she was making, and he called, “How about I go my way and you go yours?” and that shut her up.

  Aleq found a T-shirt and helped Malik wipe his face and stayed with him until it was clear that his friend felt bad enough that he was better off at least trying to sleep. Malik tried to get him to stay, and wanted to tell him something, but he ended up coughing so much that he finally couldn’t. Aleq told him he’d come back after lunch. By the time Aleq was telling him that, Malik couldn’t even hold his phone, and his little brother was off playing with it. When Aleq waved from the doorway, Malik gave him a thumbs-up, but had his lower lip stuck out the way it did when something had him confused.

  Big Boy Sickness

  When Aleq got back home, his grandfather was bent over outside on the road with a jar of mustard in one hand and a can of motor oil in the other. When he saw Aleq, he complained that the store was out of potatoes and margarine but you could always buy a CD player. In the kitchen he bent over again, and said that this was no weakling sickness that was going from house to house. This was a big boy sickness. His grandmother went straight to their bed and pulled out the trunk from underneath and handed him her mother’s big red scarf that she said was guaranteed to get rid of sickness. Her family was hardier than his and they knew what was what, she reminded him. He said that his family was as hardy as anybody’s and she reminded him that her people came from so far north that their word for winter was also the word for a year. She sat him down and tied the scarf around his neck, and then after a while he said he felt worse, so she went back to the supermarket herself to get some stuff for soup. While she was gone he climbed into bed. Aleq asked if his grandfather wanted him to hang around, and his grandfather said, “Who am I, your father? Have I ever told you how to spend your time?” His grandmother came back with beer, canned meat, and teabags, and by the time Aleq was leaving she was starting a stock with the canned meat.

  Miss Paarma in over Her Head

  It rained so hard three days later the puddles looked like they were boiling. Aleq stood under an overhang and watched the Hansenips’ dogs burrow under each other for shelter. When the rain let up and he went back to Malik’s, only Malik’s mother was there, worrying about the baby. She said that Malik and his father and brothers were at Miss Paarma’s.

  Miss Paarma was the health service nurse who had a few beds and a medicine box in her back room and was supposed to phone the hospital to figure out what to do for sick people who weren’t going to be moved to Ilulissat, or sometimes even to decide when to call for the helicopter. When Aleq got to her house she didn’t answer the door, but the key was always on a hook in the shed so he let himself in. People were piled on the blue sofas in her waiting room and filled the rooms next door as well. The back room was packed beside the beds and he had to step over three kids and an old person lying in the entryway. Miss Paarma stuck her head out of the room in the way back to see what was going on. She usually had her hair in the traditional style though she also wore lipstick and Ray-Bans even in the house, but it looked like someone had gotten her up in the middle of the night. She was on the phone and wasn’t happy about it. She told him he should leave and then seemed to forget when he didn’t listen. Everyone there was shaking and soaked and coughing and having trouble breathing, except one woman who, when he looked at her, said that she’d been bitten in the face by her husband. She had a herder’s smell—smoke, meat, and mildew—but everyone else smelled of something else. It was stronger than the seaweed and boiled meat broth on the stove.

  Miss Paarma was talking to herself about a number she couldn’t find and stuck her face next to her computer screen and then dumped out her purse on her desk, and he noticed how worn her wallet was at the corners while she fished through a roll of mints and some pens. In the back room Malik was shoulder to shoulder against the wall with his father and one of his little brothers. His other little brother was flat on the floor on his face.

  “What do they have?” Aleq asked her. “Is this like that thing from China?” He’d been little when that thing had gone around the world, but he’d been told about it.

  She said it seemed different. She knelt next to Malik’s little brother on the floor and felt his neck with two fingers and told Aleq if he wanted to help he should get out of here because it was probably catching, and he could take her cell phone and keep trying to get through to the hospital in Ilulissat because her Wi-Fi was coming and going. She pointed to the phone on the desk. She said she’d keep trying on email and when he did get through he should tell them she had thirteen cases too serious to deal with here that had to go to Ilulissat if not Nuuk or Copenhagen. He asked if Malik was okay and she told him that none of them were okay, and then when he stayed near her she yelled at him to go.

  He climbed to higher ground and stood out in the wind calling but he didn’t get through. While he called he watched people come and go outside the nurse’s house, most of them in a panic about their friends and relatives.

  So That Was No Help at All

  By the time he got cold enough to get tired of calling and brought the phone back and made his way through the people waiting outside the nurse’s house, one of Malik’s little brothers had stopped breathing and so had his father and so had two of the kids on the floor of the entryway. The nurse had one of them on his back on her lap and was crying and breathing into his mouth and thumping his chest. Aleq worked his way through the rooms to Malik, who still seemed the same as before. The people outside were alarmed and upset and some were ducking inside in pairs and hoisting up their relatives and carrying them out and home.

  Because Microbes Run the World

  What health professionals label as pathogens are just microbes exploiting a new resource but otherwise doing what they’ve been doing for three billion years: feeding, growing, and spreading. Under optimal conditions they can double their numbers every half hour. They don’t die until something kills them, and they thrive everywhere and have been brought up alive from the bottom of the Marianas Trench, from beneath ice a mile thick in Antarctica, and from strata 140 million years old in a drill core two miles deep. Left to their own devices, most reside unnoticed in biological balance with their ecosystems. But what location on earth remains left to its own devices? In an estuary, Vibrio cholerae is a blandly productive member of its community, but scooped up into the body in a drink of water, it can empty a human being of thirty liters of fluid a day.

  The Worst Thing Ever

  Aleq’s grandparents blamed themselves for getting sick and argued about having chosen the wrong medicines to keep the sickness away. They were shaking and sweating and wrapped together in their biggest blanket, his grandmother holding it closed with her fist. Aleq asked if he could get them anything and his grandmother coughed so much she couldn’t answer but his grandfather asked for one of his little beers. He liked them because he could finish them before they got warm. Before Aleq left he put a video on for them, and his grandmother remembered the way movies used to be shown in the community hall without subtitles and someone would just explain what was going on.

  When he got back to Miss Paarma’s, Malik’s mother and older brother had taken Malik home. Miss Paarma was still on the computer, and it looked like a lot of the people on the floor in the back room had been dragged together and covered with sheets and blankets. Back at Malik’s he let himself in and the older brother was gone and it was just Malik’s mother going back and forth trying to help Malik.

  Aleq sat with him, but Malik didn’t see
m to see him. Food appeared on his lap and then was taken away. Aleq reminded him of the way, on bad-weather days, they used to tell each other that if they closed their eyes and opened them again, the sun would be back out.

  Finally Malik moved his arms and opened his eyes. His head swayed like they were on a boat.

  “How’re you feeling?” Aleq asked.

  Malik smiled a little. He nodded, and then seemed to realize that that wasn’t an answer. “Better,” he whispered. “Better already.”

  He seemed to want to lie back, and Aleq helped him. There wasn’t a good enough place for his head. Aleq asked if he wanted water and Malik blinked like he did when he was surprised by something. The bedroom floor was wet, and Aleq could feel it seeping into his pants. He found Malik’s phone and they looked at animal pictures while his mother came and went, crying.

  “Fix your face,” Malik whispered to him. “It’s all scrunched up.” He was shaking so hard Aleq didn’t know where he got the strength. He put his face against Malik’s cheek. It was so hot that he could feel the heat before he even got close.