Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  It turned out that Vincent’s wife, Emma, worked in the town government. Vincent had a room at North Point that he used when the weather was bad, but his home was in Utqiagvik. The clouds had cleared a little. It was still -6° F but that was normal, that was balmy for an early spring.

  So it was thus that Varsha found herself in Vincent’s Land Rover, being driven along the coast road. The sea ice stretched as far as she could see, but it was breaking up in places farther out from shore. A long, narrow channel of seawater had appeared where there hadn’t been one before. The sun lay low in the sky, and the light was murky. But the sky was clear, a dim, hazy, ethereal blue.

  “Want to walk on the ice?” At her nod he pulled over and stopped. Her boots crunched on the low rise that separated the land ice from the sea ice.

  “Walk where I walk,” Vincent said. “The sea ice is all right close to the shore, but it is thinner than it should be.”

  She followed him out onto the plain. The wind was a cold knife in her face. She felt her toes turn numb. The ice sheet was vast, its immensity broken only by cairns of ice chunks that were carelessly piled up all over the plain. But the sky was clear and she could see the horizon, separating sea from sky.

  “You are walking on frozen seawater,” Vincent yelled over the wind. He pointed. “There’s water under the ice. See, you can tell by the broken up piles of ice chunks. That’s the wind and the currents breaking up the ice from below.”

  It was the worst cold she had ever experienced, and it was incredible. Vincent pointed.

  “Over there. Do you see those tracks? That’s polar bear.”

  She saw the broad, regular tracks a short run away from where they were standing. The tracks disappeared toward the sea.

  “Probably hunting seal. Not that many seal now, because we haven’t had much ice. They pup out on the ice to avoid bear, in little dens under the snow. This winter Kenny said there are a few.”

  She thought of little seal pups under the snow, and the polar bear sniffing the ground.

  In the truck the warm blast of heat was welcome. They met no traffic until they got to the outskirts of Utqiagvik.

  Home for Vincent was a small, warm, compact house on stilts, on a street with similar houses. Emma greeted them wreathed in cooking fragrances that were surprisingly familiar.

  Emma was small and round, with a mobile, humorous face.

  “Vince is a better cook than me,” she said, “but when he comes home after a bit I do the cooking. I thought you might like to try whale stew with a bit of curry. There’s fish too.”

  “Whale stew?”

  “Goodness, don’t tell me you’re vegetarian? Vince, did you think to ask?”

  “Oh, I eat everything,” Varsha said quickly. “I’ve been cutting down on meat lately, but this smells great!”

  “It’s the last of the spice powder Rima made for us,” Vince said, taking her coat. “She told us what is called curry here in America is garbage. So she sent for some spices from Anchorage and roasted and mixed them. Made us whale curry. It was amazing!”

  “This meat is from last year,” Emma said. “Come, sit down. Are you warm enough? Vincent’s uncle is a whale captain. They were fortunate because it had been a poor harvest the year before. With the waters warming, the whales have changed their routes. We see a lot more killer whales coming up from the Pacific, hunting the bowheads. And now there’s more shipping and the new searches for oil and gas.”

  “Noise disturbs them,” said Vincent. “We were blessed this one came to us. We sent whale meat to the other villages that didn’t have a good catch.”

  Among the family pictures on the mantel was one of Rima and Jimmy, along with four young people, sitting on top of a harvested whale.

  The wine was good. The table was neatly laid with a flowered table cloth. Vincent brought the dishes to the table. The fragrance rose in the air.

  “This is so nice of you,” Varsha said, taking a ladle of whale curry. “The smells remind me of home!”

  “This is the same whale as the one in the picture,” Vincent said, indicating the framed photos on the mantel. “Your aunt’s eaten of this whale.”

  The meat was like nothing she had ever tasted. It was melt-in-the-mouth soft and redolent with cumin and coriander, cinnamon and ginger and nutmeg. Tears came into her eyes.

  “It’s incredible!” she said. Vincent and Emma looked at each other, then they both smiled at her.

  “It means a lot to us, the whale,” Vincent said, chewing reverently. “It’s part of Eskimo identity, a sacred beast that makes us who we are.”

  “I have only read a little about it,” Varsha said apologetically.

  “You have to stay awhile, witness a whale hunt to really understand,” Emma said. “Here, have some more. The gravy is really good on the rice. At each harvest we thank the whale for its sacrifice. Its meat is never sold, only shared.”

  It seemed to Varsha that she had passed some kind of threshold that she couldn’t quite comprehend. She had thought she had come to perform the saddest of duties, to collect her aunt’s things and hope for some closure for herself and the family back home. I’m an outsider, she thought, but Rima had at least partially bridged the gap. And because of her somehow I have a link here. Like a foot in a door to a place I can’t see.

  At dessert—an apple tart—she asked Vincent if he had been on his uncle’s whale hunt.

  “Yes of course,” he said. “Since I was a kid. When it’s whaling time we cancel everything. Schools, work. Everyone gets together to help.”

  “Tell her properly,” Emma said. She gave Varsha a humorous look. “He talks like a running tap when he’s in the mood, but maybe he hasn’t had enough wine. Come on, Vince, tell her about how you grew up. She’s not going to hear about life in the great North from a better source.”

  “You’re the running tap, not me! But yes, I grew up in Utqiagvik at the time of the start of the Great Melt. Sometimes it would get to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, in the winter. When it was supposed to be 10 or 20 below. My grandfather wanted me to learn to hunt seal and polar bear and whale according to our traditions, but the seals had gone, and the bowheads were moving away, driven by killer whale swimming up from the Northern Pacific. And the sea ice was so thin, it wasn’t safe to walk on. I remember when the last of the multi-year ice disappeared. My uncle wept. He was a hunter, a great whale hunter who had learned the skill from my grandfather. “When the ice goes,” he said, “so does the way of our people.”

  “People down south don’t understand that,” said Emma. “They think that if the cold goes, and the ice, we would be glad. Not so for us. We are who we are because of the ice. I remember when the Great Melt started—I grew up in Anchorage but I used to come up here to see my great-aunt. We—my cousins and I—drove off polar bears in the streets when they came starving, looking for rubbish. My cousin still works in the local wildlife department.”

  “Things changed for everyone,” said Vincent. “The polar bears—we heard that some were going south into land, mating with the grizzlies. I thought: if the way of our people is gone, maybe I have to go south with the polar bear. That was the summer that moose started coming up North, where they had never been seen before. Everything was changing, faster than the memories of our ancestors that go back thousands of years. Never had the ice gone so fast every spring, or developed so slowly every fall. Now in the summers the ice pack would melt so much that there would be clear passages right across the North pole. The circumpolar countries were vying with each other over shipping routes and oil and gas drilling, even after the bans and the declarations of protected zones. What it meant for us is that the whales left the shores. The bowheads who make us what we are as a people, who have given us their lives as a gift so we may live—they started to change their migration routes around the Arctic. The whale hunts were less and less successful. Some years there were hardly five or six whales harvested per season.

  “So I was well into my teens un
til the time one year that the winter was strong enough that the ice came back. My grandfather was very old by then but just like all the other whale hunters he was very excited. Bowhead had been spotted off the shore ice, and the ice was thin, but thicker than previous years. So we made camp not far from the shore. I remember that first whale hunt of mine. The whale that gave itself to us was an old male, he had been seen many times by my father when he was a boy. Now here he was, giving himself to us, as though to say—I give you my life so you may be Iñupiaq a little longer.

  “But when I was grown and my grandparents gone, so much had changed that I felt the old ways would not survive. So I left—I went south to college in Fairbanks, and got a degree in business, and had a bunch of jobs that took me from Alaska to Oregon and down even to Colorado. I tried to become this person who changed with the times.”

  He laughed. Emma gave him an affectionate look.

  “Meanwhile my cousin Jimmy—he’s my cousin’s son—he was of the new generation that was inspired by the Native revival movements—he studied Iñupiaq, got a degree in comparative linguistics, and then he decided he needed to know what the white man knew about the world. He’d always gone whaling with us when he was a boy, just some ten, twelve years younger than me he was. He’d interned for a while at Wildlife—that’s the town’s wildlife management department, some of the world’s best people on whales and marine life out there. It piqued his interest. He wanted to know what science could teach him about the whales. So he did marine biology at the University of California in San Diego. And then he came back here. Helped set up North Point Research. Then your aunt comes here, wanting to study wind generation in a place where you had gusts and gales without much sustained speed. They got to be friends. She started helping him in his research, and next thing, they’re a couple.”

  There was a soft, remembering silence. From the pictures, Rima and Jimmy looked out at them, smiling. Their absence was like a presence in the room.

  “What happened to all their things—their research, I mean—after—afterwards?”

  “Rima’s renewable-energy prototypes are all at the college. The tribal college—she worked with the kids. The program will continue. There’s a machinist in town she worked with, we sent him the scrap bits and pieces. Jimmy’s equipment and records are all going to go to the University in Fairbanks. Their work will live on.”

  The wine had softened her spirits. The whale stew had warmed her through. I never knew, she thought—I never knew the world was so full.

  “What brought you back here?”

  “Well, after two decades in the south I couldn’t take it. Came back here and decided if the young were doing it, I had to return too. Figure out what it meant to be Eskimo, to be Iñupiaq without the ice. I couldn’t be a grizzly bear anymore. So I started running the radio station.”

  Emma took up the story.

  “There’s a popular program we’ve had for a long time, when not enough young people knew their language, so our elders would come on the air and talk in Iñupiaq. Vince expanded that. We had the elders telling us stories, explaining what certain words meant—you know, people who belong to the land, to whom land is sacred, have words and concepts that are tied to the land, to the context. You lose the context, you lose half the lexicon. There were words that had lost their meaning, orphaned words and concepts—but the elders brought them alive, situating them in stories so people would know what had once been, even if it was no longer there. Then, when North Point Research was set up, Jimmy asked Vince to run the Native Science liaison over here. So that’s what he’s been doing for the last seven years or so.”

  Emma was in the town’s scenarios planning team. “When things are changing so fast with the climate, we can’t plan effectively for the future. So we prepare scenarios of all possibilities so that we can be better prepared. Did Vince show you the sinkhole on the way to North Point? No? Well, it’s south of the coast road. Must be fifty feet deep. The permafrost that used to be always frozen is thawing here and there, so the land sinks. They’ve had that all over the Arctic Circle.”

  They were so kind to her. They had known Rima and had been fond of her, and the grief that was like a stone in her chest seemed lighter.

  The living-room sofa folded out into a guest bed.

  “Here are some extra blankets,” Emma said. “Rima used to be cold all of her first year, then she acclimatized.”

  She sat at the edge of the bed. Vince had gone upstairs and Emma and Varsha finished their hot chocolate in the living room.

  “She was a special person, your aunt. All kinds of people come to Utqiagvik, either to study us or the ice or both. And lately we have tourists, come here to see the Northern Lights and all. We’ve kind of become inured to it, you might say. And a bit sick of it, I have to admit. But Rima, she was different. Never gave up on anything or anyone, stubborn as a mule, a good match for Jimmy. Jimmy was our—we never had a child of our own. Always thought we’d have him with us, see us grow old.”

  She blinked away tears and got up. “Time to sleep or we’ll be up all night,” she said, smiling. In the dark a few moments later, Varsha thought—the link between us is the link of a shared grief. And sleep came.

  When I was in California I once watched a movie of emperor penguins swimming underwater. It was astonishing—they were flying through the water, flapping their wings with an effortless grace. The same wings that look so pathetic and useless on land are amazing instruments underwater. At the time I was with the biomimicry group. We talked about submersible boats and how inadequate their designs were. I didn’t think further about it then, but after hearing Jimmy talk about whales, I’ve been sketching. I sit in the observation bubble—it’s the best place for me to think—and I imagine a vessel that can fly through water like a penguin. A squid-inspired propulsion device that takes in and expels water—I’ll have to look into energy usage—and then I think—what about ocean currents? If I put an acoustic Doppler device on this boat, it could find ocean currents and use them—and it occurs to me—a sail! A squid-propulsion amphibious boat with penguin wings and a sail to catch the underwater currents! I was so pleased I showed Jimmy, and he got really excited. I’ve put some rough sketches here.

  Oh Papa, I know you said no engineering diagrams, but this is the most exciting thing I’ve done. Forgive me! It’s such a warm winter we’re having here, not even one good storm to give us some excitement. Warm is a relative word—you would shiver here, Ma, even when the sun is at its highest. The sun never gets very high in the sky here. I know you are thinking of the shawl you said you were knitting for me, Ma, and I think of it too, when I am feeling cold.

  But it is so important that it stay cold here. You know, Papa, how you always emphasized in us that we see connections between things. Never just be content with what’s at the surface. Well, here’s a connection for you. If the Arctic melts, we are all cooked. The Arctic keeps the whole Earth cool. Next time there is a severe summer back home—and I can’t even imagine one hotter than when I was in Patna this July, when I thought I would faint if I stepped out—next time please remember that it’s in part because of what’s happening here in the Arctic. We’ve warmed the Earth so much that the Arctic is melting, and that will only warm the Earth further.

  So now I’ve given you an engineering diagram and a science lesson. I’ve got to make up for it.

  I want to write this especially for Varsha and the other kids, although they aren’t kids anymore. It is hard to be in the world—if you live in it fully, it is easy to sink into despair. What, after all, can one or two people do, when the world is dying? Why not submit to the alluring logic of GaiaCorp’s promise to save the Earth, to their megamachines seeding the oceans, their satellites seeding the skies, their winged shades reflecting the sun’s light away from whichever politically expedient, remote, hard-scrabble country is out of favor? Why not bide the time as gently as possible by surrendering our full, human, curious, questing selves, lulling
ourselves into dreams? The deal is that to be fully alive you have to be willing to bear pain. That is what I swore to, when I was in my twenties—that I would be fully alive. But nobody can do it alone. I am so fortunate to have been born as part of the Guava Tree family in Chandragupta Park, and to live on the best possible planet, and to have the friends I have, and to have met Jimmy, whom you will all love, I promise.

  I think about all this sometimes because my job is occasionally dangerous, and I know Ma and Papa tend to worry, but you must remember, should anything happen to me, that it is love that moves and motivates me, and love leaps all chasms, and you can’t get rid of me so easily. So if ever the unthinkable shall happen, repeat after yourself: that Rima is in her own way always and forever with you. Say it now, just for practice.

  The morning she was going to leave, Varsha paced back and forth in her little room. There wasn’t much room to pace, but she needed to think. At last she came to a decision.

  She found the Station office, where a young Iñupiaq woman called Irene was organizing a filing cabinet.

  “Sorry, Irene. I need to talk to the machinist who worked with my aunt. Can you get me his name and number?”

  “Sure. He sometimes sent her stuff down to Anchorage, in case you are looking for anything in particular.”

  After a brief conversation Varsha went back to her room and finished packing. The four boxes that were going back to Boston would be dropped off at the post office. Emma had given her an old suitcase—she was carrying a few of her aunt’s things on the flight back.