“The what?” I hear myself say. An echo of a museum long ago.
Bannerjee looks at me strangely. “The air is full of ghosts.” She delivers this information as though it were an ozone reading: a fact, visible to us all.
Later I wish that Bannerjee had explained herself. If I could have heard her version of the last twelve days—maybe I could have altered something.
But maybe not. “Come on,” Bannerjee says and pushes the door open.
I don’t like to think about what happens next.
Day One
“Is that it?”
Sanderson is framed by the doorway, a big, burly man who likes to wear his beard long and curly. He’s typical of a certain kind of Arctic visitor: the geologist who thinks of himself as a frontier throwback. And like a lot of geologists, he’s a bit odd.
Automatically I’ve thrown a cloth over the canister. For some reason I don’t want people to see it. Now, reluctantly, I remove the cloth.
Sanderson snorts. “Doesn’t look like much. Thought it might be the holy grail the way Bannerjee’s been carrying on.”
My stomach grumbles, and I am suddenly, painfully hungry. But I’ve already eaten three meals today. It isn’t even noon yet.
“Has she got through?”
Sanderson shakes his head. “All the com’s down. Murphy’s law. Bannerjee makes a find and she can’t tell anyone. It’s driving her nuts.” His shoulders shake as he laughs. Sanderson prides himself on being laid back. He finds the high-strung Bannerjee amusing.
“Do you think the plane will come through?”
Our station gets a bi-monthly supply drop. The pond-hopper that visits us and the southern Inuit villages is a tough little bird. It might be able to get through in this weather. But I’m not surprised to see Sanderson shrug.
“Maybe.” He sounds bored. “Wind’s bad. Don’t blame them if they postpone the drop. It’ll drive Bannerjee extra-nuts though.” He chuckles.
I wonder now if Sanderson remembers this moment. I wonder if he appreciates the irony.
The pond-hopper never arrives. Normally I mark a missed drop with a minus symbol in my diary: -1 day of supplies. But that evening, I write “Day One” at the top of the page. Because that is what it feels like. Like something has begun.
Day Twelve
The day she left, Anna and I argued in the parking lot. She said I was incapable of love. Worse, she said it sadly, as though it was something we both knew and had just been too polite to mention until now.
I protested, but words have never been my strong point.
If I could talk to Anna right now—if we could get a line out, if I could feel confident about baring my teeth to the air—I’d tell her that she was wrong. That what I find difficult isn’t love, but expressing it.
If she could see me now—the way I’m trying to shelter the children from danger, the way I’m trying to protect them from myself—I think she’d think differently.
At least, I hope she would.
“Tell us a story,” Olivia begs. I look away from her dark curls and Ethan’s bright, plump cheeks. The only stories in my head are awful ones. Franklin and his men staggering in the dark. Starving men cutting up their comrades for cooking pots. And the story Joel told me all those years ago.
“No,” I mumble. “No story tonight.” Olivia wails. Ethan bounces up and down.
“Fine,” I say. “Once upon a time there was…”
“A canithter,” Ethan lisps.
It takes me a moment to respond. I am tired. So very tired of fighting. And I really can’t think of anything else to say.
“A canister.” My voice sounds dull, even to my ears. “Buried in ice.”
“And then one day…” Ethan prompts. They look at me expectantly, with glittering eyes.
“One day,” I agree.
“One day,” Olivia says, her voice rising with excitement, “it gets out!”
Five Years Ago
Joel turns to me and says, “You’ve heard of the wendigo?”
I shake my head. Out of habit I want to stop him; I tend to be bored by Anna’s descriptions of legends and tale-types. But she is watching me closely.
“‘This is the blue hour / The ravenous night…’” Joel quotes. He pauses, looking at me. When I show no sign of recognition, he moves on. “It’s a Native American legend.” (Anna winces at his word choice.) “A cannibal spirit that possesses a person and makes him want to feed on human flesh. Particularly friends and family members.”
“We always hurt the ones we love.” Anna is smiling sadly to herself.
“Vampire and werewolf stories are similar that way,” Joel reflects. “But I think the wendigo’s scarier.”
“Why?”
“Because of the way it’s transmitted.”
Joel smirks and preens a little. I know he wants me to ask him about the transmission. I don’t want to ask him. I try to catch Anna’s eye, but she isn’t looking at me. And I can’t figure out a way to exit this conversation. So I turn back to Joel, and ask him, “How?”
This, ultimately, is my tragedy. I go along with things.
“Anyone can become a wendigo,” Joel says. “It’s a culturally-transmitted madness. That’s actually documented, by the way. Wendigo psychosis.”
“Which means?”
“As soon as you learn about the wendigo, you can turn into a wendigo.” He grins triumphantly, haloed by the amber light of the museum. “Just by listening to this, you’ve been infected.”
I feel a flash of anger. Even now, all these years later, I still want to punch him.
I think I could forgive Joel for telling me about the wendigo. But I can’t forgive him for that grin.
Me, I apologize. I don’t know if that makes it any easier. I was just trying to make sense of things. And it was easier for me to do that on paper.
Even in reading these words, you have been infected.
Day ???
This is the blue hour. The ravenous night.
I find Macleay in the kitchenette. His body is bent like a broken straw. He looks dead. But I can hear his breath, even above the sound of the wind. The slow pump of blood in his veins.
His eyes slide open as I approach. Puppet’s eyes.
“Still alive, Hui?” He gives a mad, wet giggle.
I sink down in a crouch before him. I’m salivating at the metallic taint of blood in the air. This disgusts me. I wish I didn’t know what was going to happen next.
“It’s the canister,” Macleay says and smiles. His face slides into the same holy-fool expression that Bannerjee’s wore at the end. “Not from this planet after all.”
His smugness irritates me. Like Bannerjee, he thinks he has found an explanation. Bannerjee blamed ghosts. Macleay wants aliens. I suppose it does no harm to let them believe they figured it out at the end. That there was an answer.
“What happened?” I rasp, trying to delay the inevitable.
“Sanderson,” Macleay whispers. He smiles a red smile. “I thought he was all right. But he fooled me. The son-of-a-bitch.”
“Where is he?”
Macleay rolls his eyes towards the door. Outside. In the death-storm.
I hear a gasp behind me and know that Olivia has trailed me into the kitchen. I motion her back with my free arm. I don’t want her to see my face.
“Get him for me, will you?” The shred that remains of Macleay wants vengeance. I nod, to keep him happy.
The crunch of bone fills my mouth and I try to think about other things. About the line I once came across in an old explorer narrative that Bannerjee had picked up in Anchorage. “The North has induced some degree of insanity in the men.”
The North has induced some degree of insanity in the men. It’s untrue, of course. One of those annoying stories that southerners like to tell about the Arctic. But we bring those stories with us when we come up here.
My opinion? I don’t think there was anything in that canister. There didn’t need to be. All i
t needed was our stories.
“Sanderson’s putting gasoline around the building,” Olivia announces in a detached voice. I nod. I can smell it, an ugly, thick stench that corrupts the taste of blood in my mouth. I clamber to my feet, ignoring the stickiness on my hands and face.
I’ve always been good at ignoring uncomfortable truths. The wariness in Anna’s eyes. Macleay’s corpse at my feet. The children.
The only excuse I can make is that, when things descend into nightmare, you cling to the parts of the story you want to believe in.
“Hui!” Somewhere, Sanderson is screaming my name. He wants to test his story against mine. I grin a death-mask grin and click my nails together. I can feel my body stretching to accommodate the life it has devoured.
“Don’t worry,” I tell my silent, ghost-faced children. “I’ll protect you.”
I put my hand on the howling door. I pull it open.
This is the blue hour. The ravenous night.
JULIO CORTÁZAR
–
Headache
Translated by Michael Cisco
We owe the most beautiful images in this story to Dr. Margaret L. Tyler. Her admirable poem, “A Guide to the Most Common Remedies for Symptoms of Vertigo and Headaches” appeared in the review Homeopathy (published by the Argentinian Association of Homeopathic Medicine), vol. XIV, no. 32, April 1946, page 33 passim.
Likewise, we thank Ireneo Fernando Cruz, who first imparted to us, during a trip to San Juan, his knowledge of the mancuspias.
WE LOOK AFTER the mancuspias until pretty late in the afternoon. Now that the summer heat has come they have become changeable and full of caprices, the latecomers require special nourishment and we bring them malted oats in big china bowls; the largest ones are shedding the fur on their backs, so we have to keep them separated, tying a blanket around them and taking care they do not socialize at night with the other mancuspias that sleep in cages and receive food every eight hours.
We aren’t feeling well. It’s been coming on since the morning, maybe caused by the hot wind that blows every day at dawn, before the rising of a sun that pours down on the house all day like a rain of hot pitch. It is hard for us to attend to the sick animals—this at around eleven—and check up on the young ones taking their naps. Walking is getting to be more difficult, keeping up the routine; we suspect that one solitary night of neglect could spell doom for the mancuspias, and irreparably ruin our lives. So we proceed without a thought, completing tasks one after the other alternating according to routine, pausing only for food (there are bits of bread on the table and on top of the mantelpiece in the living room) or to stare at ourselves in the mirror that duplicates the bedroom. At night we fall abruptly into bed, and the inclination to brush the teeth before sleeping yields to our fatigue, so that we can only manage a wave of the hand toward the lamp or the medicine bottles. Outside is the sound of the adult mancuspias walking and walking in circles.
We aren’t feeling well. One of us has to take Aconitum, a name derived from drugs containing large amounts of aconite in solution, which are used if, for example, fear induces an attack of vertigo. Aconitum is a violent thunderstorm, that passes quickly. How else would you describe the counterattack of an anxiety that is triggered by any insignificant thing, by nothing. A woman is abruptly confronted with a dog and begins to feel wildly dizzy. Then aconitum, and after a little while the fit becomes a sweet giddiness, with a tendency to move in reverse (this happened to us, but it was a case of Bryonia, which caused us to collapse just the same, with a feeling as if we were sinking into bed).
The other one of us, in marked contrast, is thoroughly Nux Vomica. After bringing the mancuspias their malted oats, maybe after doing too much bending down to fill the bowl, one experiences a rush as if the brains were suddenly spinning, not that everything around one spins—as is the case with vertigo—rather it is the vision itself that spins, such that the inner consciousness rotates like a gyroscope in its hoop, while the exterior is all tremendously immobile, it is only that which is fleeing, and impossible to grasp. We have wondered if it might not be a case of Phosphorus, because one is terrified by the perfume of flowers (or of the little mancuspias, that smell weakly of lilacs) and it physically resembles the phosphorus box: tall, thin, craving cold drinks, ice cream and salt.
At night it is not so bad, the fatigue and the silence come to our aid—because the mancuspias keep watch sweetly over the silence of the pampa—and at times we sleep until dawn and awake with a hopeful feeling that things will improve. If one of us jumps out of bed before the other, that one may be smitten with trepidation at the prospect of a repetition of the phenomenon Camphora monobromata, which causes one to believe one is going in one direction when in reality one is going the opposite way. It’s terrible, we go with complete assurance toward the bathroom, and suddenly we are pressing up against the naked skin of the tall mirror. We always laugh off such things, because you have to keep your mind on the work and we would gain nothing by getting disheartened so early on. We look for the capsules, to follow the instructions of Dr. Harbin scrupulously without comment or discouragement. (Maybe we’re secretly a touch Natrum muriaticum. Typically, a natrum cries, but nobody can be permitted to see that. One is sad, one is reserved; one likes salt).
Who can lose time contemplating such vanities when there’s work waiting for us in the corral, in the greenhouse and in the dairy? Chango and Leonor are already stirring up a racket outside, and when we go out with the thermometers and drive them toward the bath, those two precipitate themselves into the work as if they wanted to become tired quickly, to look busy for us and postpone their goofing off for later. We know what’s what, and thankfully we are still fit enough to handle the daily work ourselves. As long as we’re not too busy, or suffering headaches, we can keep it up. Now it’s February, in May the mancuspias will be sold and we will be secure through the wintertime. We can hold out.
The mancuspias are very entertaining, in part because they are clever and full of wickedness, in part because raising their young is a tricky business, which requires exacting oversight, incessant and thorough. There isn’t much to say about it, but here’s an example of how it works: one of us releases the mother mancuspias from their greenhouses—that would be at 6:30 AM—and they are gathered in the corral, which is lined with dry grass. They are left to frolic for twenty minutes, while the others check the young left in their numbered pigeonholes where each one undergoes a quick physical and rectal temperature exam. Those who exceed 37 C are returned to their pigeonholes while the rest are placed in a chute of sheet metal to nurse their mothers. This might be the most beautiful time of morning, as we are touched by the joy of the little mancuspias and their mothers, their noisy, nonstop chatter. Leaning on the railing of the corral we forget the phantom of midday that approaches us, the hard afternoon that will not be postponed. For a moment we are a little afraid to look toward the ground of the corral—a very distinct case of Onosmodium—but the episode passes and the light saves us from the complementary symptom, the headache that is aggravated by darkness.
Eight o’clock is bathtime, one of us goes and throws handfuls of Krüschen salts and bran into the basins, the other tells Chango to bring buckets of tepid water. The mother mancuspias don’t like the bath, so they have to be handled carefully by the ears and legs, held firmly like rabbits, and dunked and redunked in the water over and over. The mancuspias bristle in desperation, and that is what we want, as it allows the salt to penetrate to their very delicate skin.
The task of feeding the mothers falls to Leonor, who does it very well; we have never known there to be an error in the distrubtion of portions. They are given malted oats, and twice a week they get milk with white wine. We don’t entirely trust Chango, it seems to us that he drinks the wine himself, so it would be better to keep the Bordelaise inside, but the house is small and the sweet smell would leak out when the sun is high anyway.
Maybe what we’re saying would be monotonous and
useless if things did not gradually alter as they repeat; the last few days—now that we are entering into the critical weaning period—one of us must acknowledge, with bitter feelings, that a Silica phase is coming on. It begins the moment one goes to sleep, a loss of stability, an inner leap, a vertigo that scales the spinal chord and into the head; just like the creepy crawling (it can be described in no other terms) of the little mancuspias up the posts of the corrals. Then, suddenly, above the black hole of sleep we’d fallen deliciously into, we sense just what hard and caustic post the playful mancuspias are climbing on. And closing the eyes makes it worse. So much for sleeping, no one sleeps with open eyes; we’re dying of fatigue but a little nod-off is enough to make us feel vertigo crawling, swinging in the skull, as if the head were full of living things spinning around and around inside. Like mancuspias do.
And it is pretty ridiculous, since it’s well-known that the illness proceeds from a lack of silica, which is to say, sand. And we are surrounded by sand dunes here, we live in a little valley threatened by immense dunes of sand, and yet we have none when we go to sleep.
Notwithstanding the likelihood that encroachment will continue, we prefer to spend a bit of time severely doped up; by noon we have noticed the medications taking effect, and the afternoon of work that follows comes off seemingly without a hitch, except maybe for a few minor derangements of things, so that, after a little while, the objects seem to stand motionless before us; a sensation at the very edge of life in every way. We suspect things are becoming more Dulcamara, but it is not easy to be sure.
In the air the down of the adult mancuspias floats gently, after our naps we go with scissors, rubber bags, and Chango out to the corral where they are gathered for shearing. The nights in February are cooling already, the mancuspias needed their coats to sleep in, because they sleep stretched out and so are more vulnerable than animals that curl up to sleep with their legs crossed. However, the fur on the back sheds, sloughing off bit by bit and floating in the air, eventually filling the corral with a floury haze of lint that tickles the nostrils and chases us back into the house. So we gather them together and trim their backs only halfway, being careful not to leave them too much exposed to the cold. When the clippings are too short to billow in the air, they fall in a yellowish residue of dust that Leonor wets down with the hose and rolls up into the daily wad of paste, which is then tossed down the well.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2 Page 5
