by Jim Shepard
Blue Sky, All the Way Out
There had been one morning, well before Danice must have become infected, and a few days before Jeannine had accompanied Aleq back to the U.S., when Aleq had begged for some time outside, and they had arranged for his entire bed and isolation module to be wheeled next to a window, and she and Danice had arranged some folding chairs where he could see them and together they had sat watching the ferries come and go for a full hour while he had occasionally put his hand up near the plastic beside the window glass as if to feel the air. The ferries had still been running, though the crews weren’t being allowed off at the other ports, and just supplies and medical personnel were allowed on.
She remembered that it had been cool and drizzly but warm enough for short sleeves in the sun at the back of the hospital. A disheveled man in a puffy coat and flip-flops with no pants had stood defiantly on the porch of the house over by the church and had watched them. Some ivory gulls pecking at something beat their wings on the frozen dirt in front of him. Down below in the harbor, a hunter must have had a big night the night before, because all sorts of people were making their way to his boat carrying plastic buckets or bags.
A few fishermen near him were starting their outboards, and even from where she sat she could see Aleq watching them. He seemed pleased by each plume of blue smoke that followed when an engine sputtered and turned over. He smiled and called to Jeannine loudly enough that she could faintly hear his Danish, and she smiled back at him.
“He seems pretty attached to you,” Danice told her.
Jeannine answered that at this point she was happy to see him enjoy anything. He made a circle with his hand and held it to his eye like an eyepiece.
The plastic folding chairs that Danice had carried out had had metal legs that screeched on the stone when they shifted their weight.
They had just admitted a pair of women, one of whom was inconsolable because of the way her friend had been infected. Her friend was pregnant but had refused to stay away when the first woman had gotten sick, and had instead continued to bring her warm meals and had made herself a bed on the floor beside the first woman’s bed. And now here they both were, spiking fevers.
Jeannine had told the first woman through a nurse that they were both going to get well, but the first woman clearly hadn’t believed her. What had finally calmed her down was being assigned the bed next to her friend, and being able to find her friend’s hand across the space.
“It is so beautiful today,” Danice remarked, staring out over the water.
“Blue sky, all the way out,” Jeannine agreed. She could see Aleq sitting up with his back to the plastic and his eyes closed to the sun, like a sunbather.
“It is kind of amazing that we’ve been able to see all of this,” Danice said. “I mean: Greenland. I never thought I’d see Greenland.”
“Is that a beer?” Jeannine asked her. “At ten in the morning?”
“Hammekin says that beer opens the mind,” Danice told her. “I’m inclined to agree.”
“Bottoms up,” Jeannine told her, and Danice took a swig.
“One of the things I’ve been really, really grateful for, over the years,” Danice said, “is that when I have gotten really drunk, I’ve always been alone.”
“Because you get sick, or because you get embarrassing?” Jeannine asked.
“Both,” Danice admitted.
They were distracted by some howling dogs up the hill to their left who’d gotten tangled where they’d been tied next to the sled they’d be pulling that winter. Aleq called out something that seemed to be about that, and Jeannine gave him a smile and a shrug.
“Did you see that email from Bustamonte in Atlanta?” she asked Danice.
“I don’t know about you, but for me the problem with being an overachiever is always having to watch underachievers come up with shit that’s so casually brilliant,” Danice said.
“I guess he just made really good use of the time he was left alone with his thoughts,” Jeannine told her.
Danice laughed. They’d first really bonded when waiting in Reykjavík’s tiny domestic airport for their flight to Ililussat, when it had felt like every four feet they’d been confronted by an Air Iceland luggage stand demonstrating the acceptable size for carry-ons and labeled in English “Did You Leave Room for Memories?” and Danice had found even more inexplicably hilarious a hideous abstract mural overwritten in English in flowery script “That Time I Was Left Alone with My Thoughts.” “Yep, that’s about what my thoughts would look like,” she had snorted.
Jeannine found herself wishing she had her own beer, and Danice took another slug of hers. “Can I just say here and now what a relief it’s been to be with someone with a functioning sense of humor?” she asked after she swallowed. In the distance some whale flukes rose and slipped back under, and they pointed at them together.
“Can I just say you’re one of the funniest people I’ve ever met?” Jeannine told her.
Danice seemed to be working something through while she gazed out at everything before her. She tried a number of times to begin another comment, and kept shutting herself down. Jeannine held her palm up facing Aleq, and Aleq, uncomprehending, waved uncertainly.
“Back before Christmas,” Danice finally said, “I had a crush on my Pilates instructor, and the day I was going to say something this six-foot Millennial showed up with dark red lipstick and a pageboy haircut and Prada spike heels, and that was the end of that. I think he was in love by the time Prada Girl had changed into her Nikes.”
“Well, that wasn’t about you,” Jeannine told her.
Danice snorted. “My mother used to say that my scuzzy little secret was that as far as I was concerned, everything was about me.”
Jeannine laughed. “Thanks, Mom,” she said.
“Exactly,” Danice said. And she tilted her head toward Jeannine, who did the same. She could smell Danice’s shampoo. On the other side of the window Aleq leaned forward as well, so that his forehead was straining against the plastic.
“So what’d you bring us for lunch?” Danice wanted to know.
“Wait till you see,” Jeannine told her.
Tear Up Your Houses from Their Foundations
The woman had told him that she wasn’t going anywhere and then he hadn’t seen her for two days, but then she had come back, and she had told him that she wasn’t going anywhere after that. Other people did things to him when they came in and didn’t ask if he wanted his earpiece in. One nurse told him to put it on, but just to ask how he was feeling. He could see more fear in their faces, but he couldn’t locate what had changed.
The woman after she came back again sat with him for the whole morning, holding his hand. They were quiet. She caught him peeking at her and took his face in her gloved palms and got as close to it as she could in her suit. “She says you’re not going to be alone anymore,” the voice in his ear told him, and he took in what she said and put his hand up to her face shield. She kept talking, and the voice added that the man with the beard was going to call from wherever he was, so he and Aleq could see each other. And if they couldn’t figure out how, maybe he’d call on the woman’s phone when she was visiting Aleq.
Around lunchtime she stood up and put her hand to the side of her helmet like she wanted to concentrate on what they were telling her, and then she said something to him, and the voice told him that she had to go but she’d be back as soon as she could.
Nobody brought him lunch, or dinner. With so much time to himself, he remembered things he would have thought he wouldn’t have remembered. He remembered his hands in fish bones and in cold water and on rough stone. He remembered how Malik’s house was bordered on one side by ragged arctic willows one or two feet tall. The way in melting snow they liked to walk in the wet lines made by other people’s tires. The time in the flat area behind the church they wa
tched the soccer game between the Temperance Society and the drinkers. The time they’d scraped away some lichen to leave their names and the date under an overhanging rock. He remembered the other rock, and thought that if the woman came back he’d tell her about the smell.
He remembered mornings at the water’s edge down by their little beach when the surface was so still that the swell there didn’t stir a grain of sand. The settlement’s word for that bay meant “where the whales are” because farther out even during the winter it stayed ice-free, giving the whales a place to breathe. One time after Aleq had asked to go out with Malik’s family when the ammassat were running, Malik’s father had told him no, because the preferred form of cooperation on a boat was between a father and a son. To make it up to Aleq, a week or so later when Malik’s father and older brother were off on a hunting trip, Malik had brought the Zodiac around to their beach, and Aleq had jumped in, and they had gone all the way out toward Disko Island to the very edge of an iceberg at least as long as their settlement, which even Aleq knew was crazy dangerous. They had tried to see if they could tie onto it with a line and an ice pick, but the house-sized front part of the iceberg had kept starting to roll, petrifying them and nearly swamping the Zodiac, and they finally had had to just back away, and to let it float off.
And when on the ride back he had told Malik he was sorry he had asked Malik’s father to take him out, Malik had told him that if you didn’t make some noise, no one would ever do anything for you. And when he’d thanked Malik again, his friend had given him such a look that it had made him think that maybe Malik had been right to have been leery of the gift of himself that Aleq had always been so desperate to give.
He was glad the woman was coming back. He was glad she’d told him that she’d keep coming back. He was glad to think he might hear from the man with the beard again.
When they’d gotten home from their Zodiac trip, Malik’s mother had made them go to Sunday services. And the minister had been a new minister who they hadn’t seen before. And he had wanted to talk about the big storm that had wrecked some of the houses and washed the concrete steps from the wharf.
He said he wondered why they didn’t believe they’d been commanded by the shaking of the supposedly solid rock to heed the angry voice of God. He asked if they thought their God would tear up their houses from their foundations and bury them in the ruins for no reason. He asked if it had occurred to them that they might receive their summons to step into eternity without any warning. He said that some storms were so terrible that it was as if God had decided to punish the sins of many years in a single day. He warned that a storm like that was a challenge to their intelligence that they must accept. And he said that in a place called Lisbon, after one such storm, the king had cried out that he didn’t know what he should do next, and that one of his ministers had finally answered that before they could make whatever other changes they needed to make, they first had to bury the dead, and feed the living.
Acknowledgments
This novel could not have existed, or would have existed in a much more diminished form, without critically important contributions from the following sources: Douglas I. Johnson’s Bacterial Pathogens and Their Virulence Factors; John Booss and Marilyn J. August’s To Catch a Virus; Elizabeth W. Etheridge’s Sentinel for Health: A History of the Centers for Disease Control; Andrew T. Price-Smith’s Contagion and Chaos: Disease, Ecology, and National Security in the Era of Globalization; William H. Foege’s House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox and The Fears of the Rich, the Needs of the Poor: My Years at the CDC; Maryn McKenna’s Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service; Alan Sipress’s The Fatal Strain: On the Trail of Avian Flu and the Coming Pandemic; Joseph B. McCormick, M.D., and Susan Fisher-Hoch, M.D.’s Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC; David Quammen’s The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, and Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic; Sonia Shah’s Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond; Mary Guinan, M.D.’s Adventures of a Female Medical Detective: In Pursuit of Smallpox and AIDS; Peter Piot’s No Time to Lose: A Life in Pursuit of Deadly Viruses; Frank Ryan, M.D.’s Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plagues; Alan P. Zelicoff, M.D., and Michael Bellomo’s Microbe: Are We Ready for the Next Plague?; Disaster Epidemiology: Methods and Applications, Jennifer A. Horney, ed.; Emerging Infectious Diseases: Trends and Issues, Felissa R. Lashley and Jerry D. Durham, eds.; Emerging Viruses, Stephen S. Morse, ed.; The First Session of the 109th Congress’s Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Bioterrorism and Public Health Preparedness; Jens Dahl’s Saqqaq: An Inuit Hunting Community in the Modern World; Marc Nuttall’s Arctic Homeland: Kinship, Community and Development in Northwest Greenland; the Minority Rights Group’s Polar Peoples: Self-Determination and Development; Shelley Wright’s Our Ice Is Vanishing: A History of Inuit, Newcomers, and Climate Change; Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s An African in Greenland; William E. Glassley’s A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice; John D. Costello and Scott O. Rogers’s Life in Ancient Ice; and Gretel Ehrlich’s This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland.
I’m also hugely indebted to Ed Struzik’s “Is Warming Bringing a Wave of New Diseases to Arctic Wildlife?” in Yale Environment 360; Avrion Mitchison’s “Will We Survive?” in Scientific American; Lisa Monaco and Vin Gupta’s “The Next Pandemic Will Be Arriving Shortly,” in Foreign Policy; Michael Specter’s “The Doomsday Strain” in The New Yorker; Robinson Meyer’s “The Zombie Diseases of Climate Change” in The Atlantic; Maurice Walsh’s “You Can’t Live in a Museum: The Battle for Greenland’s Uranium” in The Guardian; Stephen Pax Leonard’s “Greenland’s Race for Minerals Threatens Culture on the Edge of Existence” in The Guardian; James Fletcher’s “Mining in Greenland: A Country Divided” on BBC World Service; Matt Birney’s “Rare Earths Permitting Hurdle Ready to Fall for Greenland” in The West Australian; Katie Pieper’s “The Unique Genetic Variation of the Greenlandic Inuit Population Could Help Find Novel Disease Associations” in Genes to Genomes; Amesh A. Adalja, M.D.’s “Anthrax-like Disease Caused by Bacillus cereus” in Clinician’s Biosecurity News; Jay Walker’s “Civil Society’s Role in a Public Health Crisis” in Issues.org; Annie Rogers’s A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy; Alice Barber’s Blue Butterfly Open; Joyce McDougall’s Dialogue With Sammy: A Psychoanalytic Contribution to the Understanding of Child Psychosis; Amber Robins, M.D.’s The Chronicles of Women in White Coats; and of course, any number of utterly invaluable papers and studies and synopses and lessons on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website: cdc.gov.
I also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to any number of new friends in Greenland who did so much to help this book on its way. In Ilulissat, that includes Dr. Peter Vedsted and Dr. Nikolai Hughes, as well as Eyð Petersen, Stellan Holmelund Fly, Karoline Nikolajsen, and Sanningasoq Tungujortoq, while in Ilimanaq, that includes Kim Schytz, Pernille Neve, and Therese Vihelmsen, and especially Karen Johansen and Isak Johansen, who not only provided gracious hospitality, but also fielded with endless patience my never-ending questions, and shared in particularly valuable ways their community’s experiences with the qivitoq.
This is the first fiction on which I’ve ever worked with the benefit of a research assistant, and that assistant, Gabrielle Giles, smoothed my way and helped me face the hubris of what I was attempting with a huge amount of preparatory work that was hearteningly astute and fastidious.
This book was also inconceivable without the inspiration and support provided by Tom Frieden, who was spectacularly helpful on all matters pertaining to the CDC and international responses to outbreaks; Lois Banta, who was tirelessly patient and gratifyingly brilliant and resourceful on all matters pertaining to microbiology; Fiona Socolow and Sandra Leong, who were crucially informative on the specific challenges facing Emergency Room health pers
onnel; and Sarah Towers, who provided a masterful on-the-fly seminar as to how I might self-educate when it came to social workers’ engagement with troubled children. In those areas and more, anything that seems accurate and persuasive is the result of their guidance, and any mistakes the reader encounters are mine.
I’m equally indebted to the saving editorial enthusiasm, intelligence, and resourcefulness provided by Peter Matson, Michael Ray, and Deborah Garrison. I continue to benefit enormously from the editorial training I received for years by example from Gary Fisketjon. And finally, I want to single out for special thanks and praise the contributions of those readers who encountered this work in its earliest stages, and whose optimism and rigor helped keep the project afloat: Gary Zebrun, Ron Hansen, Nalini Jones, and Sandra Leong. And as always, I want most to celebrate my first and final reader, Karen Shepard, who remains justified in continuing to inform everyone within a five-hundred-mile radius that she renovates me for the better day after day.
A Note About the Author
Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody Medal for Excellence in Jewish Literature, the Harold Ribalow Award for Jewish Literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches at Williams College.
