by Cai Emmons
“You wear,” Vera commands proudly.
He finds a hole and jabs his arm into it, slouching the coat over his back, then locating the other armhole. The coat is massive, much too large for him. Its fur is rough and slightly oily. It comes to his ankles, its collar rising over the back of his skull. He looks for a way to fasten the front and finds twine loops that hitch over pieces of bone. With each movement the coat off-gasses unsavory smells. He might almost be wearing chainmail for the weight of the thing. Surely a coat this heavy could give you back problems over time. But it’s undeniably warm—he is already breaking a sweat. The old woman beams at him and he smiles back. Stretching his arms he spins.
“Ask her what animal this is,” he tells Vera.
Vera translates and the answer comes back. Bear. Vera adds, unsolicited, “Her husband coat.”
Matt does not need to ask if the husband died in this coat. He does not want to know. He removes it and lays it on his chair. “Ask her how much money I owe?”
Vera translates.
“No money. She want you wear it. She want you be happy. Like her husband be happy.”
“Yes,” Matt says. “I’m very happy.”
56
Bronwyn has never seen Diane so outraged. In the cab on the way back to Lubov’s she swears at Retivov for several minutes, without regard for what the driver might be thinking, or Bronwyn herself. “He’s a monster!” she rages. “He didn’t even have the courtesy—the human decency—to let me know about this epidemic. A quick email would have done it, for god’s sake.”
Bronwyn stares out the cab’s side window, cleaving to silence, not wanting to speak, incapable of speaking. The tundra’s lure is siren-like. Now their colloquy has begun, she cannot easily wrest her attention away. Diane’s rage may be justified, but to Bronwyn it is irrelevant.
Matt is back at the apartment with his new coat, a behemoth bearskin, rancid and reeking. He puts it on for them to admire and narrates his tale of its acquisition, but Diane, unmoved by the story of a man freezing in the coat, cuts him off. Sitting at the table, she slaps down her palm, demanding Bronwyn sit too.
“We have to talk. Listen, I can’t let you two go out to the tundra tomorrow. Any intervention is premature under the circumstances. We have to resolve the data problem first. I’m going to cancel the helicopter. We’ll book it later. We still have some time.”
Bronwyn says nothing, watches Matt removing his coat lovingly and laying it on the couch.
“Well? Bronwyn? Say something. Don’t go all zombie on me.”
Bronwyn angles her head to Diane, still unable to fasten herself in this moment and participate in an urgency and rage which is not hers.
“What were you doing out there while I was in the station?”
“Walking around. Getting a sense of things.”
“Honestly, Bronwyn. I see your attitude and I don’t like it. This gift of yours doesn’t invalidate the science. You should be making use of all we’ve got. Your intuition should be working in conjunction with the data, not against it. Synthesize everything. If you don’t, are you any better than some one-track-mind religious fanatic?”
Bronwyn blinks, bludgeoned. Her cheeks heat. Diane has never spoken to her so sharply before. A religious fanatic? Diane knows her better than that. There’s no possible retort.
“Well,” Diane says, rising from the table. “I’m going to make some calls, perhaps take a nap so I can see things freshly.” She gathers her laptop. “I thought we were in this together, but apparently—” She heads to her bedroom, arm arcing over her head.
Matt stands frozen, gaze downturned as if willing invisibility. Behind the closed door Diane jets back and forth, talks briefly on the phone. The bedsprings snap then quiet descends, but the fumes of her anger ooze past all the barriers, circling Bronwyn as if to curb her. The steam heat rattles on though it is already cranked too high.
“I have to get out of here,” Bronwyn whispers.
Matt nods. “Can I come?”
She nods and they bundle up in their furs and hats, faces muzzled by scarves as if they’re bandits. Matt’s coat lends him the resilience and might of a bear. They push out of the building into the town’s silence, aware of leaving Diane behind. Not a betrayal, but almost. Her words buzz in Bronwyn’s head, and her anger stalks behind them like an inescapable chaperone.
It is already sunset and high nacreous clouds striate the sky with threads of pink, orange, green. Its beauty is a sharp contrast to the ugliness of the streets, trash everywhere, food wrappers and slips of paper taking flight on gusts of wind then landing here and there, indiscriminate as gulls. Many of the buildings display fading images of Soviet glory, calling out from the brick like dying prideful pleas, exhaling a desolation that goes well beyond the frigid landscape. This is the home of renegades and loners, misfits and pioneers, people who have deliberately eschewed the comforts and conventions of more temperate climes.
“The harbor?” Matt suggests.
She nods, feeling a wave of appreciation for Matt, who knows little of the day’s events, but isn’t plugging her with questions. Instinctively, both their bodies angle north. They stay close to one another for ballast in the cold and fading light, their pelts grazing, sable and bear. She imagines them becoming animals, perusing this landscape, vigilant to all evidence of possible food and shelter.
The paved road becomes gravel. The wind subsides. The still air listens, waits. She takes up the waiting and it permeates her being.
They arrive at the water, the Port of Tiksi, the Laptev Sea. This was once an active harbor for fishing vessels and for Alaskan goods. Now it is a ship’s cemetery for fleets that were brought up decades ago from Murmansk and Vladivostok. These boats have idled here for years; once majestic, they’re now ravaged by weather and time, their hulls sagging, their masts split and rotting, their rigging whipped to fraying wisps. The pearlescence of the setting sun makes these abandoned ships even more poignant. A person with a particular vision might turn them into art, but they are long past reclamation as sea-worthy vessels. Ice floes the size of dinner plates stretch across the harbor, glowing pink, clattering against each other. The sea beneath them is not deep, she knows, but it appears darkly inscrutable. She feels the shadowy presence of the Soviet soldiers who were once stationed here, bored, stuck, drunk, looking for fun or distraction, staring out into near darkness as she and Matt are now. It wasn’t so long ago, not in geological time.
Matt’s respectful silence cloaks her, and she thinks of their time together in New Hampshire making love by the Squamscott River. The sun sets fast, taking every vestige of light as it goes, like a woman gathering harvested fruit in her full skirt. The safety of darkness gives rise to talk.
“I hope you didn’t take her personally,” Matt says. “I’m sure she didn’t mean it.”
How could it not feel personal? she wonders.
“How bad is the data situation?” he asks.
“She gets some data from other locations too. Satellite data and such. So I don’t exactly know.”
“If she doesn’t get this data will her project fail?”
“She’ll find a way to make things work. She always does. Failure isn’t a word in her vocabulary.”
“I guess there’s no way to help her?”
The question is an obvious one, but Bronwyn is stunned to hear it. Why hasn’t she thought to ask the same herself? Diane Fenwick has always been to Bronwyn like a human obelisk, solid and upright and self-supporting. Not someone in need of help. Bronwyn has always been the recipient of Diane’s help, not the giver of help herself. But Bronwyn knows things weren’t always easy for Diane. She was the youngest child in a rowdy family and different from her siblings, just like Matt. She had to fight to make herself into the esteemed Dr. Fenwick she is today. So much flux one fails to see—things on their way to becoming something else. Clouds moving, permafrost melting, a human body losing sweat. Stasis is an illusion, flux and entropy the rule.
Her attention, so often focused upwards on sky and clouds, turns down to the Earth, in this liminal zone between land and sea. She pictures the harbor’s manmade fixtures being stripped away, the rotting wharf, the chipped concrete pylons. She descends past layers of peat and soil, through rock—igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic—until she arrives, miles below, at the Earth’s core where she resides for a while amidst fire and heat.
She reels, and Matt hooks her arm, luring her back to the moment.
“Do you think you can do something?” he says. “Change something with the methane and all?”
She hesitates, reclaiming her vocal apparatus, thoughts still elsewhere. “You’re beginning to sound like Diane.”
“I’m just curious.”
“I don’t know for sure. I’ll see when we go out tomorrow.”
“But I thought Diane doesn’t want us to go out yet.”
She turns to him, sees only his brooding, dolorous eyes above the scarf. He trusts Diane, believes in her prevailing wisdom as Bronwyn once did. She can’t blame him for that—she knows how it feels.
Something moves out on the water. It could be a boat, a bird, a whale. Her vision, she thinks, is her least reliable sense. She would like to have the vision of a bird of prey, or the acute sense of smell of a bear or a shark.
“I’m scared for you,” he says.
“Why?”
He pauses and when he speaks his voice wavers up and down, traveling a sine curve of assertion and hesitancy. “I just am.”
By mutual accord they begin to move again, strolling back up the gravel road to the pavement, trailed by the ghosts of their different worries, past buildings whose lights have come on, reminding the world there are people inside, still alive.
57
Diane has withdrawn under the voluminous down quilt fully clothed, trying to escape the apparitions that have arrived with the day’s dimming. The apartment’s close air is much too hot and humid and a profuse tropical sweat has erupted on her scalp, armpits, and groin. There isn’t a chance she can nap, not after such a horrendous day.
The plan has always been to get the data released and then to send Bronwyn on her mission. But now, with the data situation uncertain, everything is open to question. They have only five more days here, not enough to get everything done, certainly nowhere near the time Bronwyn said she hoped to have to ready herself for an intervention. If Bronwyn were to be able to freeze the permafrost—a big if at this point—then future data would reflect the change without “before” data to indicate how bad things had gotten. Then what? People would assume the earth is mending itself. Then the urgency to make changes would fade, and burning fossil fuels would cease to be suspect, and people all over the world would continue to extract and consume and burn with abandon, and climate change deniers would lash out with impunity: See, nothing’s wrong. You scientists are all alarmists. How she wishes Joe were here to use as a sounding board—they are so accustomed to solving problems together. She forces herself from under the covers, missing Joe intensely. A visit to Retivov can’t wait.
Out in the living room she discovers Bronwyn and Matt have gone, taking their fur coats with them. No note. She stands in the emptiness not sure what to think. Of course they need to go off on their own—she is all about encouraging their bonding—but at this moment their absence feels like a desertion. She wishes they’d left a note.
She slogs through the dark streets. Cold fog has begun to roll in from the harbor in long plumes that reach through the streets and alleys and climb spectrally over the rooftops. Dmitry Retivov lives in one of the block apartment buildings that reminds her of a smaller version of Co-op City, which she sees so frequently on trains to New York.
The building’s lobby has an untended reception desk and a few folding chairs; its walls are a dreary yellow. The quaking elevator transports her slowly to the seventh floor where she steps out into a bleak hallway, its walls whispering of fear, echoes of the totalitarian past. She knocks on Retivov’s door and waits. This building, too, is overheated. She unzips her coat, loosens her scarf, removes her hat, and fluffs her hair, suddenly aware of wanting to create an unimpeachable professional impression.
She knocks again. Still nothing. She will not knock a third time, she decides. She can’t stand the idea of dragging him out of bed, something he might hold against her for years to come. A terrible thought accosts her—he could be dead in there. It’s not extremely unusual for people to die of the flu. As she turns over this dreadful thought, she hears footsteps. The door opens. A middle-aged woman with the affronted eyes of a raccoon opens the door and greets her in Russian.
“Good evening.”
Diane introduces herself and asks to see Dmitry. He’s sick, he cannot be seen, the woman tells her. Diane asks if she speaks English.
“A little,” says the woman.
“You’re Mr. Retivov’s wife?”
The woman doesn’t answer, as if to disclose her marital status would be too intimate a revelation. Diane explains that she has traveled from the U.S. to work something out, that she is only here for a few days, that she would like to see Mr. Retivov just briefly, it is of utmost importance. The woman impales Diane with a stare, before disappearing wordlessly, leaving the door open so Diane can see through the modest living room to a window whose curtains are drawn. It is unclear whether she should step inside or not. She hears a blather of Russian coming from a back room. She wonders where Bronwyn has gone, wishes things were not so strained between them, just when she could use a companion.
The woman returns and nods in such a curt way that Diane understands she’s being allowed in, but isn’t welcome. She’ll make it quick. She only needs to communicate her commitment to resolving the problem as soon as possible. She hopes to be able to detect if the data roadblock is intentional or not.
The apartment smells of antiseptic and Clorox, with undercurrents of stewed meat and sauerkraut. The woman opens the door to a dim bedroom. The curtains here are drawn too. Dmitry lies on his back, slightly propped up by pillows, but still lying more than sitting. As soon as she sees him she wishes she hadn’t come. He looks exactly as he looked on the internet, broad-faced and thin-lipped, but his eyes are more listless, his body limp, his chin stippled with the ragged start of a gray beard. She considers bolting, but indecision rivets her in place. She will state her case, then leave.
“I’m Diane Fenwick from MIT, here on behalf of the Arctic Cloud Project. I’ve emailed you—”
“Make it quick,” he says.
“It’s about the data sets. We haven’t gotten them for a number of months now and they’re crucial. I came to find out what the problem—”
“Look at me,” he says, his voice a low whir, stripped of affect. “You bother a sick man with this?”
“Yes, I’m sorry you’re feeling so badly. I know now isn’t the time to resolve this fully, but when you’re better I’d like to talk. This is why I came all this way, to see you and work this out. I’m only here for six days, so perhaps . . .”
He coughs extravagantly, as if to underscore the gravity of his illness. When he stops he sits up straighter. “You stop at nothing, do you? You come to a sick man’s house. At night. Anything for publication, no? Pure ambition. No humanity. You are a missile.”
He shakes his head and closes his eyes, and her insides curdle. A missile? The word itself, delivered with so much venom, is aggressive and penetrating. This is almost worse than finding him dead, finding him so weak and still so capable of rage. Surely this rage predates her arrival tod
ay and has to do with more than she?
“Thank you, Mr. Retivov, Dr. Retivov. I’ll go. We’ll talk when you’re feeling better.”
She turns and finds herself face to face with the glaring wife. Diane says nothing, ducks around her, and walks as speedily as she can to the front door. It is bolted shut and takes her a moment of fiddling to open.
She stands in the caterwauling elevator aghast, appalled at her own misjudgment. She should never have visited him, especially so late in the day—what possessed her? Not only has she ruined her reputation with him and her ability to negotiate further, she has also jeopardized her own health. She hopes her robust immune system can handle the assault. Will her colleagues on the project forgive her? She was selected to come here because she was deemed the best negotiator, blunt but gracious. But gracious she has not been.
You are a missile. Is she? As a woman in science she has always had to be bold, and she’s lucky to have been born bold. She’s always felt one of her greatest attributes is knowing where to draw the line between assertive and obnoxious. Now, she wonders.
She emerges from the elevator to the lobby and realizes she has misplaced her hat and gloves. They must have fallen from her grasp in her haste to escape. She can’t stand going up there again, but it would be foolish to go outside with bare head and hands.
She steps back into the punishing elevator. Up to the seventh floor. Down the Kafkaesque hallway. There, outside the door to the Retivov apartment, lie her mittens and hat.
58
Lubov delivers a tray of food to the room and, though they did not expect this, the bowls of hot stew and bread and cheese, hot tea and a bottle of vodka are exactly what they need. Lubov deposits the tray on the table, lays out bowls and plates and utensils for three, and gestures around the apartment. “Diane?”
Matt and Bronwyn shrug. Diane has disappeared. “Gone,” Matt says. “We don’t know.” He shrugs more theatrically. Lubov lingers for a few more minutes, chatting in unintelligible Russian, exclaiming again over Matt’s coat, then she leaves them alone to eat.
