by Giles Blunt
She hit the button to silence the alarm and closed the window and went still for a minute. Fragments of a dream. A highly graphic scene involving Leonard Priest. “Oh, please,” she said aloud. “Gah.”
Lifting her T-shirt over her head, she caught the fragrance of Ivory soap and resolved to switch brands. She put on the clothes she’d laid out and went to the kitchen, where her coffee was waiting. She poured it into her thermal cup and put the lid on. She ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts standing up and put the bowl in the sink.
She strapped on her Beretta and sat down to pull on her big boots. Then the blazer and finally the big parka. She closed the inner door of her vestibule—her airlock, she called it—and stepped outside into the dark. Black sky, crescent moon, and air so frigid her lungs refused the first breath entirely, making her cough. She locked the door and went down the steps, then went back up and opened the door. She picked up the tool kit she had put there the night before and shut the door again.
Her Volvo was facing the street, the trailer and snowmobile already attached.
Black streets. Empty. Soft roar of the Volvo’s heater.
Ten kilometres north of the city, almost as if she had crossed a border, the world turned white. Snowbanks, shoulder high, lined the highway, and boughs hung down under their burden of snow. Delorme made a left at a sign that announced a series of recreational trails. The parking area was empty. She got out and unloaded the snowmobile. When she climbed on and started it, the noise was shattering. Thirty-five years she’d managed to live in Algonquin Bay without owning a snowmobile, but the previous year she had caved in and bought one. The winters were long in this place, and if you let them imprison you, it could make you crazy. She had joined a club, paid a fee, and got a trail map and a schedule of events. She had attended exactly one. The racket was unbelievable and the entire membership appeared to be twelve-year-old boys.
The trail wound away from the road and past a tiny frozen lake. That was it for open country. Trees and brush whipping by. The ruby numerals of the speedometer showed forty, but being inches from the ground gave a tremendous sensation of speed. Snowmobiling at four-thirty in the morning—it’s crazy in fifty different ways, Delorme thought. Is this how you get a promotion? Or is this how you get a reputation for being a little “funny,” with colleagues rolling their eyes when your name is mentioned?
The Ski-Doo’s headlight threw long shadows shuddering into the woods. The engine’s roar ensured the absence of wildlife. She came to a fork in the trail and kept to the right. The map showed a dotted line, meaning an unofficial trail, coming up. Half a kilometre farther, a small gap opened in the trees. Unofficial indeed. But the snow was packed down and chomped by snowmobile tracks, so she steered up and over the verge and into the woods.
The engine blared louder. The front blades slammed over rougher terrain. Then a steep rise and she crested the old railbed. She had to do a two-pointer to orient the machine, and then followed the railway line. It wasn’t far now. Ancient utility poles tilted at angles’ others, felled by beavers, sagged almost parallel to the ground, supported by smaller fir trees.
The railbed ran for fifty or sixty kilometres, but Delorme kept an eye on the passing trees for another gap. When it came up on the right, she turned and the machine clattered onto even harsher ground. At one time this would have been a construction road, but that was short-lived and nobody had kept it up since.
A few more bone-rattling minutes and then there it was.
When the tracks were torn up, the developer’s plan had been to build first a road and then a “winter recreation lodge” right here in the middle of the woods. But he underestimated the kind of delays that can ensue when you’re dealing with three levels of government, two or three public utilities, at least one defunct corporation, and a population of aging boomers who just wanted the woods left alone—but with nice cleared paths for skiers and snowmobilers. In a fit of defiance, he had begun construction and worked at great speed, perhaps counting on a fait accompli to sway fortune in his favour.
Delorme was looking at the result now. Whatever rustic glory the developer may have had in mind, what he’d actually left was a concrete-block rectangle. Half of this was covered with split pine cladding and a sharply peaked roof. The rest was bare concrete.
He had intended to call it Deep Forest Lodge, but it was known to cross-country skiers as the Ice Hotel. It was set on the crest of a long slope that faced south, so it caught the sun all day, even in winter. Any snow that fell on it melted and dripped down the walls, where it froze into a sheath of translucent, impenetrable ice.
The place couldn’t be torn down until armies of lawyers had finished wrangling—much to the chagrin of the provincial police. Although they tried to secure it, it was impossible to keep teenagers away. The place was dark, unfinished and unsafe. Every year the OPP had to rescue some kid who had climbed inside, only to end up with a broken leg.
DANGER: KEEP OUT. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
The usual signs were prominently posted, and just as prominently defaced. Delorme regarded the ruin with a shudder. Some women like to be scared. It wasn’t the place that frightened her so much as the idea that anyone would fantasize about bringing a woman out here and doing God knows what.
She left the snowmobile running to have the benefit of its headlight. She took up the tool kit and flashlight and walked toward the fence, her shadow totemic against ice and concrete. The gate was padlocked, but ten metres to the right someone had clipped the chain-link fence—none too recently by the look of it, and high enough that you could slip through without great difficulty.
She forced the fence back even more and managed not to rip her parka climbing through. She walked up to the wall and shone her flashlight upward to where the concrete wall became a glacier wall. Entrances had been bricked up, but there were gaps. She climbed through one, turning her ankle on the jagged detritus underneath the ice so hard that she gasped.
The snowmobile’s headlight was no help here. She looked up. A thin cirrus dimmed the stars, but the crescent moon hung low and bright just above one wall. No glimmer of daylight yet. She played the flashlight beam over what looked like a small prison yard. A perfect square of white ground, with a frozen white wave of snow about two feet high curling up against one wall, giving the whole a tilted effect. No tracks of any kind. Solid concrete block on three sides, then on Delorme’s right the partially collapsed building.
The cold was getting to her and she wanted to keep moving. She pushed on one boarded-up window, but there was no give in it. She tried the other window. Someone had put the original three-quarter ply back in place and wedged a two-by-four over it, but there was nothing securing it. Delorme pulled away the two-by-four and dislodged the plywood without even opening her tool kit.
Utter blackness inside. Shadows veered and lurched in the flashlight beam. Exposed struts and temporary plywood flooring, curled and separating at the edges. Delorme got up on the ledge and examined the flooring below. She turned around and lowered herself to test it with one foot. She lowered her other foot, holding on to the window ledge.
She wished Cardinal was with her. The cold seemed worse in this darkness. She moved slowly, sweeping the flashlight beam from side to side. Graffiti jeered from the walls. Old cigarette packs, beer bottles and candy wrappers littered the floor. Whoever liked this place, it wasn’t health food addicts.
A square of emptiness opened up in the floor ahead of her, a concrete stairwell that looked like an invitation to hell. She was tempted to call out, make her presence known, but the thought of how it would reverberate dissuaded her.
She went halfway down the steps and shone the flashlight around. Forest of I-beams. Could anyone—even Leonard Priest—conceivably come out here for sex?
Not far from the stairs, a sleeping bag, much stained and torn, lay in a twisted heap. Nearby, the charred remains of a small fire and a pile of feces, thankfully frozen. In a corner, a dead fox lay on its side, smal
l white teeth exposed.
Graffiti everywhere. Many sexual invitations, many phone numbers. An individual of loftier ambition had written in letters three feet high, Become Your Dream. And Jenny P, whoever she might be, was apparently blessed with a “hot vag,” which to Delorme sounded like something you’d find in the produce section. Clearly, in the minds of many, sex and isolated ruins were a natural combination. A longing overcame her to be inside her car with the heater going full blast.
Ambition like a pheromone. Is it just ambition—or are envy and resentment making me stupid? She stood outside again and swept the flashlight beam over the walls, the snowdrift, the rest of the emptiness. She was glad she had not called Cardinal to come with her on this jaunt. He wouldn’t have anyway, she told herself, because he would have realized it was dumb.
At the break in the wall, she reached through and set her tool kit down on the far side. She turned and made one last sweep of the courtyard and the long curl of the snowdrift, which ran the length of the wall about knee high. Toward the far corner it rose higher, and now, as she held the beam steady, she saw that there was something in it. Some material partially exposed. Impossible to tell the colour.
She crossed the white square on a diagonal toward the corner. Probably another sleeping bag. She leaned closer, and now, in the more intense light, she could see that the fabric was blue, and more like a jacket than a sleeping bag. She reached with her big snowmobile mitten and brushed at the snow. It was crusty from melting and refreezing and she had to break a piece off.
A shoulder, a scarf, hair.
Delorme took off her mitten and worked her fingers under the crust of snow and broke more off. The powder underneath slid away. She went down on one knee to get a closer look.
A woman’s face, eyes closed, white crescents of snow clinging to the lashes.
Delorme reached into her parka and pulled out her cellphone. It took a while for Cardinal to answer.
“You’re not gonna believe this, John. I’m looking at a dead body. A woman … No. That’s the incredible thing. It’s not Laura Lacroix.”
From the Blue Notebook
It is possible in the Arctic—possible sometimes—to mistake oneself for a superhero, one’s faculties, one’s perceptions can be so transformed. Such is the array of optical and acoustic phenomena. It is a special moment, the first time you realize you are overhearing a conversation taking place more than a kilometre away. Distances of three kilometres are not unusual, depending on temperature, wind speed, surface conditions. In contrast to temperate climates, Arctic air is coldest close to the ground’ it refracts sound waves downward instead of upward.
That moment has the quality of an excellent dream—the feeling of vindication and exhilaration one sometimes gets from a gorgeous subconscious narrative: Yes, of course! This is who I am! I’ve always been infinitely more perceptive than others!
Wyndham, guileless Wyndham, reported such a dream to me once, over a midnight breakfast.
I was with Isaac Newton, he told me. At his lodgings in Cambridge. We were doing differential calculus together, performing it as if we were playing a duet. We had an enormous ledger open on the table before us. There was a cat sitting next to it, watching us with the greenest, most intelligent eyes. And we were doing these equations—incredibly intricate, incredibly precise—and they just flowed effortlessly one after another, and we took turns writing them out. I was filled with this incredible joy. The two of us were best friends and always had been. And I was thinking, How did I forget this? How did I forget that Isaac Newton and I are best friends and do equations together?
A sadness crossed Wyndham’s face.
When I woke up, I was thinking, you know, I really should give Isaac a call. And I couldn’t accept at first that it wasn’t real. That it was just a dream. It seemed so perfect. So right. And I lay there with reality seeping into my brain like dishwater, dirty and grey, and I felt utterly bereft. I was depressed for days.
So it is for some men, some researchers. They come back from the Arctic, where their superhuman visual acuity has shown them sun dogs and halos. Fata Morgana. Yes! It was always thus! My powers have come into their own! Only to return to their real lives in Calgary and Edmonton, Peterborough and Waterloo.
Such people, after less than a week at home, before they’ve even written up the data they’ve just brought back, start scrambling for the next possible research grant.
From the tinkle of candle ice on the shores of Lake Hazen to the subtle beauty of a fog bow—colourless owing to the fineness of the vapour—to the shattering storms of Tanquary Fiord, the High Arctic is a place to go mad in. A place to fall in love. A land of mirages.
In a sense it is all mirage, with the odd pocket of reality. The Antarctic may be more wild and more bitter—though opinions on this vary—but at least it offers actual solid ground somewhere beneath one’s boots. There is no land at all at the North Pole, just an unending frozen sea, so that even one’s footsteps are a kind of lie.
I told Rebecca one day that I had come to understand she was simply a mirage.
Thanks. And I suppose you’re real.
Completely. Utterly.
She gave a little snort of derision.
You misunderstand. I just mean at times like this you seem almost attainable. As in a superior mirage. Light warps in the cold and things appear on the horizon that aren’t really there. Or aren’t there yet. You’re on my horizon, but never quite in reach.
I just swallowed thirty millilitres of your semen, Karson. I’d say that’s within reach.
She was still calling me Karson at that point, not Kit. I turned away and lay on my back and sighed. Petulant. Childish, even. But this is the truth of the matter. I am—was—someone who chose a solitary life. Not womanless. Not gay. Solitary. The emotions and how we deal with them are every bit as Darwinian as fins, genitals, tentacles. We all find our mechanism of survival—or not. Mine was monkish solitude. It worked for me. Had done for more than a decade. I was frightened by my loss of equanimity.
After a while Rebecca turned on her side, propped up on one elbow, and looked at me with the intensity she brought to her cloud formations, her readouts and water droplets.
You’re hurt? Is that possible?
Look, I said, I’m not a poet. I don’t have words for this.
She ran her index finger along my cheekbone. I don’t want a poet. I want Karson Durie, ice physicist and seducer. You don’t have to fancify, just tell me. I don’t have a radar for you. I don’t know what you want or what you feel or where you’re going unless you tell me. Directly. No mirages.
I was trying to.
Trying not to, more like it.
You can’t expect me to express any feelings at all if you sneer at them.
She shifted in the bed, took hold of my face, her palms hot, and shook her head. Eyes the green of stadium night games. Not sneering, love. Please. Try again. I’ll listen, I promise.
All right, I said. I’ll try a quote. A song. Don’t worry, I won’t attempt to sing. But there’s a line I’ve never forgotten. It goes through my head a lot. I try to make out like I really don’t care …
She shook me a little by the shoulders, breasts pressing into me. And?
I try to make out like I really don’t care. And the way that I do it is I really don’t care.
The briefest pause.
This is what you’re struggling to tell me? That you really don’t care?
No. I’m saying not caring has been my mode of existence. It’s what I’m afraid of losing. You can’t blame me for that, surely. I lose it and then I finally reach the horizon only to find …
I was a mirage.
Well, a superior mirage.
Of course.
Goes without saying.
She pushed herself up and straddled me, knee on either side of my chest, hands pressing down on my shoulders. She reached out with one hand to steady herself against the wall behind my head. A few more adjustments
and then she is there. My nostrils fill with the glorious, intoxicating scent of her. I raise my face and kiss her cunt, a flurry of kisses, but she moves again and presses me against the pillow.
Oo, you need a shave.
So do you, I said with some difficulty.
Pervert. Not a chance.
She rubbed herself over my face in a kind of dreamy delirium. Let me know, she said, when I’m real enough for you.
Afterward, I fell asleep, and when I woke up she was reading a fat hardback by Robertson Davies. I watched her for a while and she pretended not to notice.
You’re the only person I’ve ever met, I said, who’s as Canadian as the CBC.
She smiled her cat’s smile but kept reading.
You’re a curling rink, I said. You probably have pyjamas with matching toque and mittens.
She was making an effort not to laugh, but she refused to look away from her book.
You gorge on poutine, I said. You wolf down donuts and pea-meal bacon when no one’s looking. You have a complete set of Tim Hortons mugs.
Go away, she said, exasperated.
I got dressed and tossed on my coat and left her reading. I crossed the slushy rectangle between the huts and went into the mess, where Wyndham, Vanderbyl, Dr. Dahlberg and Ray Deville were all sitting around the table like figures in a painting. Cups and mugs and magazines were spread out along with the remains of their various dinners and snacks. Mozart on the sound system, lanyard clanging on the flagpole outside. We often hung around the table after dinner, not necessarily talking.
This fresh? I said, lifting the teapot.
Reasonably, Wyndham said. He was the only one who didn’t seem to be doing anything. Perhaps he was just listening to the music. Vanderbyl was reading a biography of Niels Bohr, his professorial pencil poised to correct even published material. Ray Deville was rewriting a paper he was preparing to submit. And Jens Dahlberg was tormenting himself with a Rubik’s cube.
