Tribulation

by Kaz Morran

  “I don’t see anything blocking it,” she said, “but it curves. I can’t see more than a few feet in.”

  So, they returned to floating in silent contemplation. Like the image embedded in Taiyo’s mind of Anton’s body, the raft made slow orbits around the waterfall, its crew captive as if suspended in spacetime purgatory at the event horizon of a black hole, discarded into a singularity of misfortunes.

  Ronin took the crank charger wordlessly and without sitting up when Taiyo slid it to him along the deck. Taiyo alternated between stretching out and curling in on himself, unsure if he was hot, cold, or just dying.

  The jerky pushes and pulls of Ronin winding the crank melded into the backdrop of drips and plops. Someone else was rhythmically stirring the surface of the water with an overboard hand or toe. The sounds were hypnotic.

  Within his mind, Taiyo journeyed as the water crept higher. He practiced mental pacing, meditation, and plenty of introspection. He summoned the events of his past and future, and tried to come to terms with his place in the cosmos; his place on Earth, in Japan, in his family, and in the cave. But none of it mattered. It was all just thumb twiddling. It was all just waiting. Waiting to be saved. Waiting to die. Waiting for the resolve to discern which.

  Someone crawled across the slick coating of the deck. The person scarcely made a noise, so soft and deliberate were the movements. Taiyo knew it was Nel when she sat beside him and placed her head on his shoulder.

  Waiting with Nel, the ordeal felt less tragic.

  And then, she told him a story:

  32

  The great peril of our existence is that our diet consists entirely of souls.

  —Inuit proverb

  One morning, the outline of a giant ship appeared out beyond the ice. It looked black and ghostly amid the windswept expanse, obscured by the twisters of sharp-edged snow. The ice shifted and moaned around the ship but would not give way.

  The women of the village watched.

  A crew of hunched and languid figures emerged on the deck. With great effort, the figures were pitched overboard column after column of man-size black boxes.

  With the men of the village away on a hunt, the women all gathered in one igloo to hide. A history of colonization on their minds, they trembled in fear with their babies on their backs and their furs drawn tight in readiness to flee.

  The crunching of footsteps outside the igloo soon interrupted the frightened whispers inside. The figures had come ashore. Through the opening in the igloo, an elder spied up to eight beings, each with translucent-blue skin. The beings' eyes, empty of life, told no stories of what had brought them so near to death.

  “They are not Inuit. They are not human,” the elder told the other women. “But they are too weak to harm us.”

  Some of the women emerged from the igloo to examine the beings, but the beings were unable to speak. They were men of a sort, moving not under their own power, but as tools of demons oblivious to the women observing them. They staggered about aimlessly or ran their bare frozen hands over the contours of the igloo. The women touched the men’s cheeks and grasped the men’s hands to offer warmth, but the men did not react.

  The women emptied the igloo of their children and shuffled the visitors inside. The men went along but refused all food and drink.

  Meanwhile, one of the elder women set out to examine the ship. Debris from the expedition scourged the shore: dishes, wood furniture, clothes, and frozen bodies. Onboard, she found more men—both alive and dead. The two living were huddled inside the carcasses of seals. The dead were numerous. Frozen. Hanging on hooks. Pieces of their flesh hacked off.

  Back in the igloo, some of the men had grown awry. They blurted words in an angry alien tongue. At any offers to trade, the men clenched their meager possessions to their chests.

  The hunters returned to the village. They built a new igloo for the visitors and stocked it with a fire and the wares of the hunt—three seals. But the gifts were given in part out of fear.

  The villagers fled the area as soon as the visitors fell asleep. They didn’t want to be around when these beings regained their strength—visitors who possessed knives of iron, and had height and muscle much greater than an Inuk man.

  But in their haste to flee for safety, the villagers left too much behind, so the hunters returned in the night to collect some belongings. Curious, they peeked into the visitors’ igloo. There, the hunters found horror. Not one cut had been made into the seals. The visitors had bypassed the blubber and meat of the seals in favor of their own kind.

  ***

  Nel’s grandmother always ended the story of the Franklin Expedition by saying the white men had succumbed to the spirit of the Qalupalik, the creature beneath the ice that pulls people under.

  “Qalupalik is why an Inuk child must not wander close to the edge,” Nel told Taiyo. “But here I am.” She laughed.

  Resting her head on Taiyo’s chest, she felt the clockwork of his breathing. His chest lifted her with each inhalation and laid her down with each measured release.

  “You must miss your family,” he said.

  His hand felt cold, like a fish. She brought it from her side to her lap to make it warm.

  “I miss my arnaliaq,” she told him. Of course, he wouldn’t have known what an arnaliaq was. “My mom raised us without our father. Like my grandmother, she was a tough woman.”

  “How so?”

  “The women wanted us to feel responsible for our community, to reclaim our traditions, but to do it quietly and respectfully. They have that survival mindset, where to resist assimilation is an end in itself. But my arnaliaq is different. She’s a fighter, but sophisticated. It is an arnaliaq’s role to help raise a child—to show us the ways of life alongside our mother. My arnaliaq believes that for us to preserve our traditions, we have to embrace progress and see past the horizon, past the edge of the ice. That’s how we fight.”

  “She’s not afraid.”

  “She says if we want our youth to relearn our language we have to let them learn it on their iPhones—carving letters in the snow won’t do.”

  Nel tried not to, but she had to grin at the memory of her arnaliaq’s old sun-split face and squashed body, rounded even more by her winter furs, bouncing with laughter at her own jokes.

  Taiyo said, “Sounds like you two really care for each other.”

  “Of course.”

  Nel found it strange that Taiyo never talked about his own family. She asked him if they had anything like an arnaliaq in Japan—or a godmother or something.

  “Grandparents serve that role, I suppose,” he said. “But it depends on the family.”

  Not in his family, she surmised. “Do you have siblings?”

  She felt him shake his head. A long pause. And then he replied, “I had a brother. Sora.”

  “It’s a nice name.”

  “It means, sky.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was a newborn when he died. Retinoblastoma. Eye cancer.” After a few minutes, Taiyo added, “I don’t remember him, obviously, but his short little life basically formed the foundation of the household I grew up in, so, in a way, I do carry his memory. If that makes any sense.”

  It did, but Nel asked anyway: “How do you mean?”

  Taiyo told her that in the years after Sora’s death, his dad had tracked down the labs that got Sora’s parts. The donations led to research advances that had probably saved a lot of lives. That gave his dad closure and solace, and a newfound passion for science. Taiyo would inherit that passion, and go on to follow up on his father’s detective work, striking up a bond with the head of the lab that got Sora’s eyes.

  “Dr. Chiba might be the closest I had to an arnaliaq, now that I think about it,” he said. “She helped me put the memory of Sora into the design of MONSTAR-X. The primary mirror of the telescope is essentially a living eye. If by some miracle the idea gets revived and they build it—if they follow my paper—then it’ll be Sora’s D
NA in the mirror.”

  “His actual DNA? You want to put a big living eyeball out in the vacuum of space.”

  “Well …” He chuckled. “It’s more like the lens of an eye. And it’s mostly synthetic. Composite ferrofluids infused with biological components for—”

  “But it’ll be his eye out there watching the stars.”

  Nel could feel and hear Taiyo’s heartbeat through his chest. “Well, there’s a lot more to the design than Sora’s differentially methylated rhodopsin. It’s one component of thousands, and the sheer number of people alone that made the proposal possible make it—”

  “Humanity’s eye, then.” She spoke louder than she would’ve liked to.

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s humanity’s eye you’d be sending out there.”

  “I like that. Humanity’s eye,” he repeated softly.

  “It has a ring to it.”

  He chuckled. “Good for PR.”

  She rolled onto her side and used his stomach as a pillow. His hand, now warm, rested on her shoulder. She didn’t want to think about how dire a situation they were in, and she knew she couldn’t sleep, so she kept on talking.

  “And this eye of humanity— It would look for signs we’re not alone?”

  “That was the goal.”

  She curled in her legs and gazed out into the hot, black air. She saw nothing, of course, but she knew it was there. She’d seen it: a real-life Qalupalik. She’d heard it, and when her legs were in the water, she’d felt it glide against the backs of her thighs. Why it hadn’t consumed her, she could only guess: its belly had already been filled. But its appetite would not stay quenched long.

  “We’re not alone,” she said.

  “If not at the edge of the solar system, then somewhere out there for sure.”

  “I mean we’re not alone, now,” she whispered. “In the water.” She didn’t want the others to hear. Unless they’d seen it, too, they’d think she’d lost her mind, and Maybe she had, but she didn’t believe Taiyo would judge her. She was wrong.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “Something swimming.”

  “There can’t be.”

  She tried not to sound defensive. “How do you know?”

  “We’re not at our best. We can’t trust our perceptions down here.”

  “I see.” She swallowed the hard lump that had built up on the back of her tongue.

  The two of them wallowed awhile, and the motion of Taiyo’s breathing beneath her ear and cheek almost distracted her from the pain in her guts, legs, and head, but none of it could take her mind off the thing in the water.

  “You didn’t finish telling me about your arnaliaq,” he said.

  Instinctively, Nel strained to hold in a smile, not wanting to let him see the dimples in her cheeks, even though all appearances—and perhaps behaviors, too—were absorbed by the infinite night. And so, she let herself smile.

  “After I was born, my arnaliaq told me my future—the type of person I would become, what qualities I’d gain in my lifetime. The story goes, that when I was born, my mom handed me to my arnaliaq and said, ‘Tell her who she is,’ and my arnaliaq answered, ‘She is a traveler. She will travel farther than an old woman can dream.’” Nel paused to breathe in the bleakness that surrounded the raft and felt her smile meld back into her face. “Now I am an arnaliaq to my niece. She’s six. She gives me strength. But I give her nothing in return. Not from here. Not from afar. Not even if we escape this.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is.”

  “You’re bold,” he said. “You’re a traveler. An explorer. An astronaut in the making. You give her inspiration. That’s your gift to her generation.”

  Taiyo was kind. Genuine. Likable. But too agreeable. He should’ve told her to toughen up.

  “It’s fine,” she said, “even if I don’t inspire her.”

  “You suppose?”

  “We have Skype.”

  He laughed. “Not down here we don’t.”

  “I suppose not.”

  Taiyo said, “I think a good name for the eye of humanity would be Arnaliaq.”

  He turned on his side, and she felt his breath on the nape of her neck. Despite the knots of sweat in their hair, and his strong arms, his scent and warmth reminded her of nuzzling a baby.

  “Maybe it’ll give humanity better vision.”

  “Glasses for humanity,” Taiyo mused in a whisper. “It has a ring to it.”

  “It rings like a marketing gimmick,” she said, and he poked her in the ribs in response. They prodded and tickled and giggled like kids until the disapproving grunts of the others prompted them to settle down.

  Nel felt the weight and warmth of his arm across her stomach. She wished it could stay there like that. Not forever, of course. But for a while. It was nothing more than an arm. But like a hot bath, the acceptance that came along with an embrace was the kind of gift that could add years to a person’s life.

  It came with a kind of melancholy, though. The moment would not last. She wondered if going to space would be that way. If the high would be tempered by a little voice in her head that called her selfish, that reminded her of the universe’s cruel joke: that in the end, everything you strive for comes out as a mere blip in the best case. For that blip, she’d left them all behind. Little Tiana, Mom, Aunt Jean, her arnaliaq.

  “If you could measure inspiration,” Nel said, wiggling in closer to Taiyo, “which do you think would rate higher, going to space and inspiring a lot of people a little bit, or staying home and inspiring just a few people a lot?”

  He was quiet for a minute, then said, “You’re still thinking about your niece.”

  He hadn’t answered her question. He knew people often filled the silence in a conversation with more than they’d intended to say.

  “We had a new girl at school once,” Nel offered. “Samira Nasry. Her family came to Resolute Bay for work. From Syria—I found out later—not Pakistan, but we called her paki. When Samira told us she wasn’t Pakistani we beat her while we chanted ‘Paki go home.’” Nel paused. She’d only told her arnaliaq this. She focused on the gentle motion of Taiyo’s arm moving up and down with her breathing. “We did that. … I did that.

  “Samira’s older sister had been taken by the Syrian army because of a school essay she wrote. Taken from her bedroom in the night. Caged for eight months. Beaten. Tortured. Everything you can imagine. They came for Samira one night, but she was at her grandma’s house, so they left. Samira’s family fled the country with her. But they left Samira’s older sister behind, even though they knew she’d die in prison. They did it so they could save Samira.

  “And I beat her. Called her paki. Told her to go home. … She moved to Toronto after that. Maybe people have better vision in Toronto. I don’t know, but I don’t want Tiana—my niece—to grow up that way. I should be there to show her.”

  Taiyo shifted his arm, moved to place his hand near Nel’s face, maybe looking for tears to wipe away, but before he could touch her, she heard a splash. As fast as if the sound had been a gunshot, she jolted upright, retreating on her knees to the center of the raft, arms up, ready to defend herself. The splash might have been from a bit of rock coming loose from the ceiling, and it might have been made by the thing in the water, but she’d reacted to the latter.

  “I’m sorry,” she heard Taiyo say amongst the panicked voices and scrambling bodies. “I was just—”

  “Quiet,” she said. She was trembling.

  Hadn’t he heard the splash? Maybe she hadn’t actually heard anything either. Maybe nobody had, and they were feeding off each other’s fear.

  Or maybe they weren’t as scared as they should be.

  ***

  Afloat on the raft, the five of them shared stories from childhood. They sang songs, played word games like kids on a car trip, and they made up delightfully macabre limericks about their predicament.

  They dug into the last of the re
covered meal packs—crab bisque, smoked salmon wraps, and keema curry.

  With information in even shorter supply than food, it was tempting to catalog the minutes and hours as they passed, but given the absence of natural cues and the diminishing battery life of the phones, it made more sense not to bother.

  For the next meal, however long it may have been since the previous one, they scooped dead glow-worms from the water.

  “Cheers,” said Ronin, raising a tiny corpse beneath the light of Kristen’s commandeered headlamp. “May this not be our last meal.”

  Sleep did eventually come to the candidates on the raft. They shivered, and some of them—not Nel, for fear of what lurked in the water—went for short swims just to break the tedium. But mostly they just stared up into the blackness, taunted by the only hope for escape, now three meters overhead and closing in. The torrent from the chimney had eased, but only enough to drag the ordeal out.

  Nel bit down twice quickly and washed the glow-worm down with a cupped hand of floodwater. The texture, more than the taste, made her wonder what the candidates would die of first, starvation or drowning.

  She took several turns flinging a rope up at the chimney but came no closer to getting it to catch than any of the others had. Her arms hurt from all the attempts, as did her neck from looking pointlessly up into the clogged passageway.

  “Fuck this,” said Ronin.

  Though vulgar, he was often right. He wasn’t as bad as Taiyo made him out to be. He knew how he wanted things and didn’t care if people approved. Ronin was far from the leader they needed. Walter was supposed to be the commander, but Nel wasn’t the type either. She didn’t have the assertiveness. Taiyo had that quiet competence that people would follow if he learned how to leverage it. He had no trouble giving orders to turn left or hurry up, and he never shied from a risky climb or tough task, unless he thought someone might disagree. He was scared to upset anyone—especially Ronin. Why did he let Ronin bully him?