by Adam Johnson
Ralph’s mother balanced a yellow plastic laundry basket on her hip, and through the greasy dog-paw prints on glass door, I could see the the lip of her hysterectomy scar peek out above her low-slung house-shorts. I wanted to go to her, just to touch her maybe, but what good would that do? From the grass, I stared at the scar and wondered if my mom had maybe worked on that uterus in her pathology lab, if she had held it up close in the light and peered inside, or just dry-froze it for cross-sectioning.
THE CANADANAUT
I was pouring liquid argon into a bowl of flatworms when Secretary Mulroney arrived at our lab. He’d flown through the perpetual dark and taken a Sno-Cat thirteen kilometers from a tiny icefield landing strip before snowshoeing blind along frozen lifelines. I was doing some side research on reanimation, and the worms had just begun to crackle and flip in the Pyrex when Mulroney pushed his way through our storm-proof doors, his war medals glowing amber in the light of the heaters.
Mulroney had never come out to our Tundra Lab before, so it was clear something big was up, something far too important to risk using the scramble phone. He stomped his boots and grabbed a pair of red UV goggles—we’d been having problems with gamma rays. Scotty lowered his L-7 analyzer and groaned. Vu killed the dyno-burner and spit on the floor. But I wasn’t going to piss and moan. I believed in what we were doing. We hadn’t bathed since Boxing Day—that’s how serious we were. We all turned to Dr. Q for a reaction.
Dr. Q lifted his head slightly, bringing his eyes to bear on our surprise visitor, as if he knew right there that we were about to begin the greatest scientific odyssey in the history of Canadian weapons development. I looked at Q’s eyes, red through the lenses, and then packed my worms into the deep freeze for a week’s vacation, at which point I hoped to revive them.
“Gentlemen, I have an announcement,” Mulroney said, but as his eyes adjusted to our lab’s bright lights, he began to take in the deathray, something he’d never seen in person. He ran his eyes along the chrome transducer manifolds and walked agape down all seven meters of the glass charging tube, humming pink inside with energy. When he neared the radial accelerators, all the metal buttons flew off his jacket and raced for the field dampener, where they stuck in unison. That’s living with giant magnets.
“My word,” Mulroney said. “It’s enormous. It’s magnificent.”
Even as secretary of the Canadian Intelligence Agency, he’d probably never seen more than a rough sketch from Dr. Q. That’s how secret this was. Our supplies were dropped at night by multiprop transports, and we had no contact with the outside world. I wouldn’t even know Q’s real name until after the nitrogen accident, until it was too late.
Mulroney stood at the control panel and admired all the switches and relays. It was clear this was the CIA’s baby, and we were just building it. Mulroney could pull the plug anytime he felt like, and he didn’t have to look far for reasons. First, we were way behind on the deathray—not to mention overbudget. This was 1963, and Canada was tightening its belt. Then we’d wasted a whole year on microwaves, like fools. Finally, we lost half the lab in the rabbit fire. Thank God for Jacques, or the mercurium cells might have burned, and then foof!—good night Canada. But the problems were never ending. We’d get the targeting system running, and then there’d be trouble in beam modulation-land. We’d tune the spectrum stabilizer, and the ni-cad core would degrade (just the smell of cadmium can still turn my stomach). Dr. Q had to invent Level IV polymers just to make the O-rings. Invent them! There was no deathray book. We were writing it.
Mulroney levered the flux controller. He tugged the ropes that opened the exhaust cowling. Certainly he was envisioning a day when brave young Ottawans picked commies off of Siberian tanks with backpack versions of our ray. But I saw the deathray as a tool for peace. We had a chance to make a difference. I mean the whole reason we were building the deathray was so that we’d never have to use it. That’s what I was thinking when Mulroney’s eyes landed on the big red button.
Vu looked like he was about to shout a warning as Mulroney reached to press it, but it wouldn’t have done a lick of good anyway. Vu’s accent was indecipherable, simply maddening.
The important thing was to stay calm. Start hyperventilating, and you’re sunk.
As soon as Mulroney’s fingers touched the button, the copper windings began to crackle green-blue, and Jacques jumped up from the hatch over the flash corrector. He’d been taking a nap in the overload chamber.
“Mon Dieu,” Jacques said. “Attemptez-vous me morter?”
Jacques wore buckskin trapper’s pants, birch bark boots, and a skunk fur hat. He was the hairiest man any of us had ever seen, and Mulroney winced at his breath, ten meters away.
I’d been feeling uncomfortable since Mulroney’s arrival. Jacques was liable to begin masturbating at any moment, and the secretary was the first guest we’d had in years. Jacques called his penis “le baton de joie,” which Q said translated roughly as “stick of joy.” Without warning and whenever the fancy struck him, Jacques would stand, announce “temps pour le baton,” and head for the Sno-Cat shed.
But there was no time to explain any of this to Mulroney. The button had been pushed, and once she was charged, you couldn’t stop. What if the core degraded? What if the mercurium cells lost matrix? It was all theoretical at that point, and we weren’t waiting around to find out.
There was only about twenty seconds to get a target for that beam. We had dozens of rabbits, but they weren’t shaved, and we couldn’t risk another fire.
Luckily Q took charge. “Scotty,” he commanded, “check the shaved rabbit bin.”
Normally Q wasn’t much of an authority figure. People didn’t take him seriously because of his grooming and posture, but as the huge platinum charging plates began to rattle, Scotty snapped to it. He plucked out the last shaved rabbit—dazed and razor-burned—and tossed it to Vu, who sent it sailing off to Jacques. You could hear the rabbit’s teeth chatter as Jacques caught it by the scruff. It is a haunting sound, if you know it.
Jacques moved with deft perfection. He climbed the aft transducer and wormed his way through the hatch until we could only see his tiny feet above the fire wall. Jacques was born to load the rabbit hopper. He was the only one small enough to squeeze into the parabolic targeting chamber. On top of that, he could tolerate incredible amounts of radiation. One time, Scotty absentmindedly left a dish of strontium 90 on the counter, and Jacques, thinking it was table salt (we iodize our own), sprinkled it on his meat. Afterward, Dr. Q scoped his chest, and the rads were off the chart, but Jacques was unfazed, felt nada.
The deathray was warming to full charge, and I knew what was next. Honestly, there was something cold and brutish about the deathray that I didn’t like. When her pink power tube heated up and began to vibrate, it gave me the chills. Then there was what lay ahead for the bunny. The first rabbit fire was a real wake-up call. I’d been telling myself the deathray’s subjects would just “disappear.” But the animals were terrifying when they burst, simply pyroclastic. Someday the subjects would be human. Were a man, sufficiently hairy, to be subjected to that beam—I shuddered at the thought. As for the fire, Q calculated that we hadn’t been adjusting for the fur resonance, a frequency that always eluded us, and we were forced, finally, to begin shaving them, which I took as a kind of defeat. You can’t shave a man on the battlefield.
The ray let out a brief, piercing whine, and then we all winced at the ghastly sound of our erupting subject.
Mulroney, semi-impressed, got back to business.
“Gentlemen, you have been in scientific seclusion for some time now, and it has become necessary to inform you that a couple years back, the communists launched a fixed orbiting vehicle into the upper atmosphere. Canadian Intelligence believes they named it ‘Studnik.’”
We all looked at each other. Mulroney continued.
“Now, gentlemen, our remote Saskatchewan sensing station is picking up high levels of iridium emissions in th
e upper atmosphere.”
We all paused in reflection.
“Iridium?” Vu asked.
God, his accent.
“I bet it’s blowing in from Russia,” I said.
Scotty, ever the critic, dismissed it as a solar anomaly. “It’s just a corona playing hell with the Van Allen belts.”
“Ya, but that’s about a heck of a place to find iridium, don’t’cha know,” Vu countered. “We’re talkin’ about some pretty big dispersion forces, eh.”
We all looked at Dr. Q. He closed his eyes and lifted a hand. It made me stop breathing.
He began patting his pockets, searching for a slide rule. I gave him mine. His thick fingers worked feverishly before me, his class ring winking in the moonlight. He asked me to remember the polynomial VX 2 - 5VX + 3V 2, and I repeated it over and over in my head, lucky to be the scratch pad of greatness. At last, Q stopped, turned grave. He and Secretary Mulroney exchanged a dark look.
“These are venting particulates from spent fuel,” Q said. “The Russians are testing a new engine. A tremendous engine.”
“Our worst fears have been confirmed, gentlemen,” Mulroney said and then raced out into the cold to deliver the news to Ottawa.
I didn’t have much of an appetite at dinner that night. Scotty’s pot pies weren’t even worth the meter of floss they cost me, and Vu was driving me crazy that danged puck. Dr. Q, my polestar, was lost in thought.
I grabbed my storm overalls and thermos and went for a walk on the ice fields. A man wouldn’t last ten minutes up here without a thermos. It must have been minus fifty Kelvin out. Many nights, too many, I would get lonely and walk the vast sheets of ice that swept up to the abandoned meteorology station where we worked. There was something wrong with me, but I didn’t know what. Months of continual dark and cold would get me turned around. I’d ask myself, did I graduate top of my class for this? For my dissertation, I created the world’s first Gas Amplified Stimulator of Emissions of Radiation. And here I was, in the cold and dark. I mean, one day I wanted to get married and settle down. I’ve always loved casserole, and Vu was continually screwing up the laundry. A base of operations would free me up to do lots of pure research. For now, though, Q needed me.
That night, I crunched through the drifting banks with my head leaned back. I stared into the night, imagining a whole sky full of Russian studniks, their brassy chests shining boastfully down on me, and I wished I had a GASER big enough to blast every one of them.
On the horizon, I spotted Jacques dragging his traps toward the glaciers, and I trudged after him. He and I had sort of become pals over time. Jacques had been using this old station as a base camp for trapping, and when our team arrived, I was the one who discovered him sleeping among the rotting weather balloons. He leapt up with a thin knife, and in his third-grade French, boasted that he was five feet tall, that I had better look out. I thought he was a barbarian because he seemed to have little knowledge of the metric system. Though he was clearly lying about his height, it was his breath I will never forget—a yellow cloud of vibrating spirochetes rising from the tarry saucepits of hollow tooth sockets.
Hygiene aside, Jacques and I sort of fell in together. True, he was a trapper, and I was a man who needed lots of small animals, but it was more than that. I didn’t know a dang word of French, yet we had an amazing ability to understand each other. We had both lived in the dark and cold, knew what it meant to be cut off from mankind, from warmth and companionship.
Ahead, Jacques’s snowshoes went still in the ice drifts.
He turned and beckoned me. “Bon soir, mon grand ami. Allons-y.”
Jacques handed me the bunny sack, and we set off into the dark, tromping side by side through snow so new it squeaked under us. How Jacques found his way, or even his traps in this absolute and featureless dark, I’ll never know, and tonight I didn’t even try. There was a beauty to this region of Canada that you came to know only through exile, and as we walked, I tried to look no further than the ghostly flicker of our little subjects struggling ahead. It was easier to focus on the little things—the rusty springs, the hempy smell to the burlap bag—because if you let yourself feel the shock of the snow around you, the depth of the black above, you’d be forced to consider the degree to which you truly belonged to this universe. Jacques, with his knotty arms and racked torso, would muscle open the iron hinges of a trap, I’d unwrap the bunny sack, and we’d stave our new guest home before moving on.
I needed to relax, but couldn’t. The thought that the Ruskies were up to some new monkey business really got my mind spinning. The deathray was about to take a great leap forward, and as the beam man, it all rested on my shoulders. The next step was to ditch our relatively weak thorium 232 fuel and begin processing the most theoretical of elements. We were going to push the edge of the periodic table. A demon lurked out past the end of row seven, beyond nobelium and lawrenciuim, beyond the mere unstable and volatile theoretical elements. We called this demon saturnium, and Q’s calculations showed it would burst into phenomenal radioactive decay the moment it was created. It would be my job to harness this bitch.
On certain nights, when the moon was full, Jacques would bait his traps with salt. This we did tonight, and the whole world appeared elemental: the driven snow was unbonded calcium, the sky was dark as manganese. Our shoe prints filled with somber cobalt the moment we moved on, and ahead, the moraines of receding glacier heads seemed to glow with the lithial blue of radium. We worked slow and sure, measuring our breath between traps, places where we’d chip the old, frozen blood from the pressure plate before Jacques trigger-set a chunk of rock salt that, in this platinum light, was ten shades whiter than snow.
Of course, Jacques got all the salt he wanted from our supply shed, but in years past, when he could scrape no sodium from the thermal vents around Terminal Geyser, he would ejaculate on his traps, letting the semen freeze to the trigger pan. With this sel d’homme, or “man salt,” he could catch any minx or fox, even the elusive arctic beaver—all specimens sure to carry nasty diseases, if you asked me.
Using my hands, I gestured to Jacques that, because of sodium’s single electron valance and limited oxidizing potential, it was impossible for it to produce a smell that might be detectable by an animal. How could an odorless element work as bait?
The old trappers, Jacques gestured, still say the moon is made of salt. He pulled a salt lick from his pack and held it aloft. Animals can live alone in the cold and dark, he continued, but this they need. This is what makes them howl for the moon.
It was difficult to understand him with those mittens on, but it didn’t take much to get across the idea of “need” to me. Love felt like some cruel Canadian joke. The bunnies were white. The icefields were white. The sky, endlessly aflurry, was blind with white. Through a kind of pantomime, I asked Jacques how the heck animals even found each other in such a place.
“Dans le froid absolu de l’Arctique, avec le cammoflage parfait?” He shrugged. “Je ne sait pas.”
I wondered, where was my casserole? Where was my slice of the Canadian pie? Wind howled through my parka. I shook my head. “Sorry, but no parlez,” I told him.
It was a long walk home in the snow, and I arrived to find Q asleep in front of the thermal circulator. I felt the urge to sit with him in the warmth, imagine his dreams as I’d done on so many nights, but it was late. I spread a quilt over his lap, and with my little finger, wiped a faint line of dribble from his cheek.
Even Vu was snoring peacefully as I laid out my long johns for the morning and lined up my prebreakfast vitamins on the edge of the dresser. The last thing I saw before sleep was Jacques through my bunk window, half-naked out on the tundra, murmuring softly to the moon as he masturbated. His shoulders and chest, even through mats of hair, were perfectly defined. Neck craned, head back, he stroked himself in the lunar glow, a light just bright enough to illuminate the pearls of his semen, already half-frozen into globes, as they arced toward the snow.
Of course, it was hard to brag about the ray, considering we’d soon be needing human-sized targets. Privately, I saw the deathray as a necessary first step in the creation of a liferay. I had a theory about the true state of our universe, a theory so elegant and terrifying that I couldn’t even tell Dr. Q.
Basically, it goes like this, and stop me when you disagree: Matter doesn’t exist. “Things” are made of energy; atoms are really tiny packets of vibrating waves. The appearance of substance—of “weight” and “shape”—is simply a product of fluctuating frequency. Gravity also is a myth. Popular science would have us believe that bodies are magically attracted to each other by this invisible force. Don’t make me laugh. The real force at work here is something I call sympathy, an affinity between energies. In school, you may have been taught that love includes a rubbing of the genitals. Life, however, has hopefully proved this fleshy dance a lie. Love is our clearest manifestation of sympathy, a pulling of equal and opposite spirits. The moon is held in orbit by sympathy. The dancing poodle rolls a ball with sympathy. A man, finally, is only a beautiful, unwavering band of energy. If you could only harness this force.
That night, Secretary Mulroney was back.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “follow me.”
We tromped out to the Sno-Cat shed, a path Jacques shoveled by hand. The cold made me stiff and weary.
“Behold,” Mulroney said and rolled his eyes skyward. “What do you see?”
We turned our goggles toward the dark night above.
I didn’t get the point of the exercise. All I saw was our breath rolling upward in a column, my steam mingling with the others’, with Q’s.
