by Cai Emmons
They are back in their “apartment” by 7:30 p.m., and at 8:00 Diane retires to let Matt and Bronwyn talk without feeling watched. Their bonding matters to her unexpectedly, as if some new calling has been opened up in her, tasking her with making sure these two young people do not let this opportunity pass, this chance at happiness that she herself has had with Joe. Perhaps it took coming to the Arctic to see this as her job, here where everything is pared down to bare essentials, food, warmth, sex and human companionship.
She dozes and wakes, worrying about her meeting with Retivov. An internet photograph of him swells in her vision, his broad face with mouth pinched to a short horizontal dash, an event horizon sucking everything into the black hole beyond. After years of working as a geologist for Rosneft, a state-owned oil giant, he was appointed to the directorship here, and he relocated from Moscow to Tiksi. Why would they appoint such a man, with ties to oil so out of sync with the weather station’s mission? Why would he accept? Back in the States, when the data problem came to light in June, she assumed, as did her colleagues, that the problem was a mere technical glitch. But after a number of people made unsuccessful efforts to communicate with Retivov, Diane began to understand the problem might be more complicated.
Matt and Bronwyn’s conversation makes for a soothing susurrus that lulls her to sleep, but when she rises to pee sometime in the night and passes through the living room to the bathroom, she is disappointed to see, on the fold-out couch, a single dark, bushy-haired head, emerging from under the heavy quilt.
Matt awakens to the sound of someone moving, it’s unclear who. It is 7:30 a.m. and still dark out, not the loose gray-black of pre-dawn, but a glossy solid dark that seems entrenched. If it is supposed to be light by 8:00, as Diane has said, the sun better get busy soon.
His task for the day is clear—while Diane and Bronwyn visit the weather station, he must find a warm coat. Without a serious coat he won’t be able to accompany Bronwyn tomorrow on her mission out to the tundra. Lubov has promised to help him out. He can’t believe his luggage was lost on the final flight from Yakutsk to Tiksi. Maybe the bag never got on the plane in the first place—he’s fairly certain someone stole it. All that new equipment was worth a lot, not just the Himalayan parka, but the wool pants and long underwear and socks and boots and space blankets and camp stove. When he lodged a complaint at the Tiksi airport everyone shrugged, blank-faced.
Bronwyn’s door opens, and she makes her way to the bathroom, tiptoeing past the foldout couch without glancing down at him, her sable coat draping her shoulders like the cape of a reigning monarch. He doesn’t move, feigns sleep. Minutes later Diane awakens him.
He hangs outside with Bronwyn and Diane while they wait for their cab. It is overcast and two degrees Fahrenheit. A light wind stirs the gelid air, dispersing it everywhere. Inescapable. Below a certain temperature does a human cease to feel gradations of cold? He hops up and down, listening to Diane and Bronwyn’s playful banter.
A twinge of envy comes over him as he watches them drive off in the cab. He has never had anyone invest in him as Diane has invested in Bronwyn. Like a parent’s investment, but possibly better, not clogged with the baggage of history and shared biology, still rife with the possibility they can surprise one another. If he were to accompany them today he would only be extraneous, trailing behind them and making wisecracks and yearning to be alone with Bronwyn, or the available version of her. He goes back inside to find Lubov.
53
Diane chats with the cabbie. Until this trip Bronwyn had no idea Diane was such a linguist. It has come to light that she speaks French, Italian, Spanish, and German, and even some limited Chinese. Who knew! She’s obviously not entirely fluent in Russian, but she does a credible job of speaking with drivers and waiters, and with Lubov. What she lacks in vocabulary she fills in with gesture and facial expressions and, like Matt, she’s uninhibited. As long as Bronwyn has known her, Diane has emphasized that scientists must also be good communicators. If they can’t convey their ideas to the general public, much is likely to get lost. In this regard Bronwyn understands herself to be sadly lacking.
They’ve left behind the cluster of buildings that define the most inhabited part of town, and now they travel on a gravel road across the tundra where the stamp of humanity is less evident. A few small deserted structures made of concrete. A military tank from decades ago, hammer and sickle inscribed on its side. Blackened car parts and discarded wheels of a broken bicycle. Signs of surrender. Patchy snow dots certain areas, in others there is only dead grass and peat. She’s impatient to get outside and feel this peat underfoot, begin to acquaint herself more intimately with the landscape.
Diane has fallen into silence, no doubt strategizing about the upcoming meeting. She wants Bronwyn to meet Retivov, though Bronwyn isn’t sure why. Spending so much time with Diane again has made Bronwyn more acutely aware of their differences, how completely she, Bronwyn, has forsaken the norms of science. Today’s expedition is of great importance to Diane and she wants Bronwyn to care as much as she does, and Bronwyn has pretended to be interested, but she isn’t really, not in the passionate way she might have been in the past. She remembers seeing data on her computer—numbers, tables, graphs—and a moment would arrive after she’d been studying them for a while, when clarity would suffuse her, meaning emerging in a sudden, almost magical, way. It was a wonderful rush, removing her from the ordinary hum-drum of daily living. But numerical calculations—the very ones Diane prizes—are useless to Bronwyn now. She depends on reports from her body, received through open pores, retinas, ears, and nostrils. A wave of defiance comes over her—she must assert the thing she’s become.
The weather station is a low, white, rectangular building, reminiscent of a manufactured home, and set in a place as “nowhere” as any she’s seen. “What does it say?” she asks of the sign on the front door lettered in red Russian letters.
Diane shrugs. “Beyond me.”
The large room they step into is empty. The lights are on and there is the hum of human presence, but no sound. Diane is puzzled. On the last visit the place was a hub of activity with visiting scientists and reporters coming and going from all over the world, and there was a regular staff of at least ten. It’s one of three Arctic monitoring stations that gather essential surface data and report to the world. Her own research team’s projects on clouds and the permafrost are only a small part of all the scientific investigations that rely on this place. Others are doing black carbon sampling, aerosol sampling, ozone measurements. There are probably twenty separate projects, many international collaborations, that depend on the data gathered here.
“Hello? Anyone here?” Diane calls out. “That’s odd. He was expecting us at ten and it’s already ten-fifteen.”
She ventures around the corner and finds two women sitting at computers wearing headsets and white masks over their noses and mouths. They look up, eyes above the masks bloodshot and wary. The closest of the two makes a shoving motion, back off. Diane retreats a few steps.
“We’re here to see Dmitry Retivov.”
The woman blinks, says nothing, continues the shoving motion. She wears a fleece with high white pile that makes her look like a sheep. Does she not speak English? On Diane’s last visit everyone at the station was fluent in English.
“Is he here?” Diane persists, speaking Russian now. “He was expecting us around ten. I’m Diane Fenwick from the U.S.—MIT—and I’m here with my research associate.”
The woman rises and retreats hurriedly down the hallway, entering one of the offices at the end. Something is clearly wrong. The woman returns with a man trailing her. She resumes her seat, nodding at Diane with lowered eyes. The man is gaunt and bespectacled, his back sporting the widow’s hump of an academic.
“A terrible situation,” he says. “You’re Dr. Fenwick, am I correct?” His accent is British and he has the infamous disturbing gray teeth of that nation. “I am Tim Thom.”
Diane o
ffers her hand in greeting.
“I’m not going to shake your hand. We have an epidemic of the flu going around. Nasty strain. Almost everyone in the office has come down with it.”
“How terrible.”
“Yes, it has been. Dmitry didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“He went home yesterday afternoon. He was so weak he could hardly stand.”
Diane closes her eyes. She can’t believe her bad luck. “How long does this flu last?”
“Two weeks. Three. Sometimes even more.”
“I’ve come from the United States and we’re only here for six days. It’s imperative that I speak to someone about the data for the Arctic Cloud Project. Is Hannes Ekstrom here? Or Galina Konstantin?”
Tim Thom looks down the hallway as if a genie might appear to help him out. “I believe they’re both out. I’ve only been here a month. We’re pretty bare bones now. They’re even thinking of closing down for a couple of weeks until everyone’s better. I can’t believe Dmitry didn’t get in touch to explain.”
“Frankly, I can’t either.” She sighs, but she’s furious. She would like so badly to stage a scene, yell at someone for incompetence, but she can see the futility of that. Tim Thom is merely a transient researcher and unlikely to be able to help her much, and these masked staff women might report back to Retivov, blackening her name. For Christ’s sake. She looks around for Bronwyn, but Bronwyn has stepped outside.
Tim Thom regards her apologetically, as if he’s responsible. His skin is yellowish. He does not look hardy enough to survive in the Arctic.
“Have you been sick yourself?”
“Oh yes, I went through it.” He shakes his head. “I’m still recovering.”
“Do you have an address for Mr. Retivov? Maybe I could visit him?”
Tim Thom looks dubious. “Honestly, I don’t believe you would want to risk a visit. This thing had me in bed for three weeks. Dreadful. I lost fifteen pounds. Very unpleasant.” He swallows in such a pointed way that Diane has to work hard not to picture him vomiting.
“Well, give me his phone number and we’ll see. His address too, while you’re at it.”
“Indeed.” Tim Thom disappears.
Diane wanders to the window, rage simmering. They knew full well she was coming—why the hell didn’t they get in touch with her? Outside Bronwyn is ambling in the peat several hundred feet from the building, immersed in her own world. She is almost comical in her sable coat, like some diminutive, bright-eyed, fictitious animal you might see in a Disney movie. It’s good she’s stepped out. They can’t risk her getting sick; she, their most precious commodity.
54
The snow-crusted peat crunches underfoot as if it’s alive, a quiet bleating, reminding her of walking over rocks at the beach, barnacles and mussels being crushed, a kind of murder.
The whir of wind. Not a single tree. White, brown, black. Along the horizon a curdling of gray indecision. Nothing blue except the feeling of blue with each intake of breath—a mentholated cleansing, cold constricting the nose, the trachea, the lungs. Who knew existence held so many new sensations?
She thinks of the Earth’s curvature here, so different from New Hampshire’s. Her vision splits equally between sky and Earth, soars into the distance, searching for animals she knows are out there, but are beyond her vision’s range. Foxes. Wolves. Herds of reindeer. For now, they’re concealed, but she can wait. She knows the rewards of patience, knows how the world reveals its wonders if you invest the time to watch, sniff, listen.
Though she walks, she seems to float, overcome with a new lightness, as if her body has lost its density, its molecules separating, about to disperse. She could travel forever over this flat landscape which now seems to beckon.
The top of the world, she tells herself, trying to understand, though top, bottom, up, down, are losing their meaning. The universe pays no attention to prepositions.
A patch of bare peat trampolines beneath her. She stops, taps a foot then releases it. The peat springs back, buoyant and spongy. Stepping back to firmer ground she crouches, reaching forward with mittened hand, pressing again. Again the surface ripples under her touch. A burgeoning bulgunyakh, she supposes, about to bulge into a larger mound, eventually to explode. How much pressure from beneath can this peat withstand? How long will it take for this particular one to build to the point of explosion? This poor land—does it feel as wounded as she feels it to be?
Bringing her nose down low to graze the peat she sniffs for methane. Nothing. Tendrils of moss—brown and green, black and yellow, tickling her cheeks—tangle into paisley filigrees. Beneath her sable coat she is her anemone-self again, opening, stretching, exposing the tentacles of all her surfaces to receive news.
55
Matt tugs the ear flaps of his hat lower and tries to keep pace with Lubov who, for all her excessive weight, is an impressively swift walker. It is only two degrees and there’s a high cloud cover—are those the clouds that scatter the heat or reradiate it? How can you tell? Despite the cold, Matt appreciates the clarity of the air, its strange pinkish glow—it is quite possible he has never breathed such clean air in his entire life. A light clanging at the harbor draws his attention, but that will have to wait. Lubov turns in the other direction. He isn’t sure where she’s taking him to find the promised coat. He enjoys her company and they communicate like a pair of clowns, but all their miming and mugging has not been useful in clarifying exactly what she has in mind.
In a vacant lot two young boys, not older than five and unsupervised, pile rocks into a tumbling stack, shrieking as they collapse. A few feral dogs poke around a pile of trash. A young girl, not more than ten, emerges from a building and speeds toward Lubov, grabbing the older woman around the waist as if scaling a cliff. The two laugh, spouting Russian greetings. Has Lubov arranged this meeting? Matt can’t be sure. The girl is a thin thread of happy energy, but she’s as underdressed as Matt is. Hair, long and ratty, a stunning honey color, flies from the edges of her fur cap. Her eyes, he notices with surprise, are the same green as Bronwyn’s, and the longer he looks the more he feels he’s seeing a ghostly younger version of Bronwyn.
Lubov introduces them. Vera is the girl’s name.
“You want coat?” Vera says, in heavily accented English.
“You speak English?” Matt says, stupidly delighted.
“Oh yes, I learn in school. Lubov says you want coat. I find you coat?”
“Yes. Thank you so much,” Matt says, playing along, wondering what kind of coat this child can get him. She takes off down the street; he and Lubov follow.
The girl enters a small café with fogged windows and a handful of diners, all men. She proceeds to the back, oblivious to the men’s stares. A dark stairway leads them to a second-floor apartment where they knock for a long time before anyone answers. Finally, an elderly woman, dressed in black, comes to the door. Her face is dusky, every inch drawn with wrinkles so fine they look like the work of a master calligrapher. She retreats slowly from the door with the aid of a cane and lets them in.
Daylight filters softly through the fogged windows and passes through several glass vases on the window sill, making prisms that dance lightly across all the surfaces. Bold primary colors issue from wall hangings, rugs, pillows, throws. It is cozy here and blessedly warm. Matt removes his jacket and mittens and hat. A muffled raucousness trundles up from the café below.
They sit at the table and the woman makes them tea, heating the water in an electric kettle, moving slowly but confidently around the kitchen which occupies a corner of the living room. The woman asks a few questions and Lubov and Vera trade off speaking. Matt drinks his tea and tries to enjoy his peripheral, invisible status, hoping they haven’t forgotten his need for a coat.
“She has coat for you,” Vera says suddenly.
“Great!” says Matt. “I’m so happy. Will you tell her thank you very much?”
Vera translates and the old woman smiles and
nods. But where is this coat? Is it an excuse for a visit rather than a real end in itself? Matt is beginning to have a new understanding of Chekhov’s plays—people sitting around, talking and talking, but never actually getting to Moscow. He waits, sips his tea, swaddling the cup with both hands and savoring its heat, thinking of Bronwyn and Diane and wondering how their day is going.
The old woman, whose name he has not yet received, tells a long story, and Lubov and Vera pay somber attention. Vera appears slightly frightened. When the story is done silence reigns. The old woman sighs and Lubov pats her hand.
“What did she say?” Matt asks Vera.
“Her husband die. He freeze.”
“He froze to death?”
Vera nods. “His car break.”
Great, thinks Matt, just what I need to hear now. The woman rises from the table and leaves the room.
“She get coat,” Vera says, hopping up. “I help.”
Back they come, Vera and the old woman, Vera lugging an unwieldy slab of dark brown fur, what looks to Matt more like a dead animal than a coat, almost too heavy for Vera to carry. Vera lays the thing on Matt’s lap, and he stands and shakes it out, looking for an entrance. This is an exotic item, an old and well-used coat, worthy of museum display for its ancientness. He can’t tell what animal it comes from, but it smells strongly of something primitive. Fermentation and body odor, perhaps lingering smells from the animal itself. Could a person get used to a coat that smells like this? Lubov, Vera, and the old woman watch him.
