He drove the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. For days he had been forcing himself back, again and again, into sleep. “They’re dead,” he said.
“David…”
“My wife and daughter are dead.”
“You know this? Without a doubt?”
“Yes. No.” He tried to explain: Sandy’s obituary, the last address in Boise, how the possibilities had extinguished one by one.
“So you’re giving up. From one list. Without even trying Anchorage?”
He shook his head. “No. No.”
“Yes. You are. You’re giving up.”
She roiled her keys in her pocket and looked out across the meadow to the truck. The puffy blue jacket she was wearing, he realized, was the parka Felix had given her when she left the Grenadines. He wondered where Felix was just then, wearing his wool watch cap, his burn-scarred fingers flipping something in a pan, touching the neck of a bottle, the neck of his wife.
“What happened to your notebooks? What about your book?”
He shook his head. “I had to burn them. It suddenly seemed so unlikely to me.”
“Don’t give up, David. Exhaust the possibilities.’’
He clutched the edges of the cot and leaned forward. “You ever hope for something so much? So much you can’t sleep, so much your skull hurts? But the thing is, you don’t even know if the thing you’re wishing for is possible? You don’t even know if it could ever happen? And it’s all out of your control?”
“You mean faith.”
“I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask for any of it.”
She said nothing for a long time. “I need to take you with me, David. To Fairbanks. The highway will close soon. Until April.”
“I thought I could stay.”
She looked away. She shook her head.
“I could help. You’re going to stay out here alone?”
“David. It gets cold here. Very cold. All you have to wear is sweatpants, for God’s sake.”
He didn’t move. He tried not to look away. “Where will I go?”
She breathed, and pinched the space between her eyes. She had been preparing for this winter for five months. Were his answers in here? Behind the closed faces of moths and button larvae?
“You’ll need snow gear. And more food. We’ll need a lot more food.”
“I have money.”
“And you’ll need to get up, feed some of the insects. There are notations on top of the cages. Solutions are in the cabinet. Just change out any plant water. And drop a damp cotton ball in every insectary every morning. Fresh leaves for the caterpillars, if you can find any. The spiders will be all right, I think.”
“A damp cotton ball.”
“For moisture.”
“Okay.” He was nodding maniacally. “I can do that.”
“I’ll be back in a few days.” She studied him. “This is a bad idea, isn’t it? Tell me this isn’t a bad idea.”
“This isn’t a bad idea.”
“Okay,” she said. It was nearly a whisper.
He watched her cross the meadow to the truck. The sun hung above the tops of the trees, pale and thin. A late cloud of gnats appeared, illuminated in a beam of light, each rising and falling independently like an infinitesimal marionette.
3
Inside his threadbare duffel were three nerite shells, lying spire to spire in a bottom fold. He ran a thumb over their apertures. They were like dreams somehow, in their compactness, their fineness, in the way they seemed complete and incontrovertible.
He rolled in the cot. The crickets shrilled. I’ll get out of bed in a minute, he decided.
But he was not up until evening. He eased out of the mosquito netting and managed to cut open a can of tuna and eat its contents with a plastic spoon.
All night Naaliyah’s crickets pleaded their same urgent question—scree-eep? scree-eep?—but right before dawn they fell abruptly silent, as if they had finally found answers, or else expired from the effort.
Silence. Winkler lay in bed trying to listen but there was nothing to listen to. Blood traveled dully through his ears. He thought: I wish the crickets would start up again. He thought: A person could go mad out here.
He fumbled through a drawer until his fingers closed around Naaliyah’s hand lens. With his left eye against the eyepiece, and the focus brought all the way up, he could see whatever was in immediate proximity: creases in his palm, the grain in the wall. He went from cage to cage, peering in.
Caterpillars had forced open a hole in their wire cage; ants streamed out of a test tube and foraged systematically beneath the stove. A dozen pale beetles lay dead on the table, legs cocked at the ceiling. There were earwigs on the cot, spiders beneath the chairs. Several insectaries that may have been recently occupied now appeared completely empty.
He shivered. Was this the normal state of things? Naaliyah’s feeding notations were simple enough—sugar solution in eyedroppers, bruised fruit, rolled oats, or wheat bran in dishes. More difficult were the creatures who ate live insects—he was to seize a cricket or moth in forceps and drop it into a neighbor’s cage. The moth was the worst: he snared it in a tiny aquarium net and shook it into a jar that contained a praying mantis. With the hand lens he watched the mantid strike, invisibly fast, and her round mouth lap a bead of liquid from the moth’s split head; the wings still vibrating, a gray powder smearing the mantid’s arms, the moth’s arms still clutching her abdomen, like a confused, decapitated lover.
Dozens of awful dramas were climaxing around him every minute: jailbreaks, war parties, ambushes. When he listened closely he could hear them now: chewing, spitting, clacking about. He cringed, felt queasy; he pulled the lens away from his eye and let the world go blurry.
When he finished the main cabin, he went to the shed. There was firewood in every square inch of the place, and stacked around the outside as well. Here, jammed among the logs, the insects seemed calmer, arrayed on their two sets of shelves, numbed perhaps by the cooler air, more assured of their coming ends. The mosquitoes were fewer here, too, as if this was territory they had yet to discover. A draft trickled through gaps in the wood. The air smelled of spruce.
That night he went to sleep not in the main cabin but in the shed, between the shelves, on a narrow bed made from cut boughs and beetle-chewed furs: elk, maybe, or moose. Left here by some previous tenant: scientist, or miner, or trapper. Strange to think that the animals themselves had only been tenants, too, guests inside their coats.
When the cold came, seeping through the gaps like some patient liquid, he tried to imagine it as purifying: a cleansing, an ablution.
In the morning he took a walking stick from the log pile and went into the woods. Spruce, and some willow and what looked like cottonwood. Birch and alder in creases. He wondered if bears were about, and recalled the frontier fables of his childhood, wounded grizzlies swatting hunters, prospectors crashing through creeks, their feet freezing solid. All along, he thought, life has been going on here. For millennia. As it has everywhere. His breath showed in front of him. He wiped the back of his wrist and counted nine dead mosquitoes in his palm.
Along the edge of the meadow was a creek that slashed its way through a few hundred yards of deadfall and muskeg to a small, black pond. The pond, in turn, drained slowly through a jam of bleached trees, down a hill, into a larger waterway: narrow and bouncing, clear to its pebbles.
He bent over the riverbank and rinsed his face and arms. The water tasted like copper. He rested his hands against the bottom and felt the pebbles shift beneath his palms, the blood retreat up his wrists.
A half mile farther on he found a break in the trees where he could see the landscape to the west: a series of successive ridges all the way to the horizon: treeless summits and tundra fells—blues fading into whites, little more in his eyes than blemishes of color—the Alaskan interior. No houses, no lights, no antennas, no fire towers. Somewhere beyond it all, five hundred miles away, was Anchorage.
Even without eyeglasses Winkler could see this place had its own kind of light: pale but brilliant, permanently waning, something like the light he had seen reflecting off the Alaska Range from the rooftop of his youth.
He listened to the trees shift and toss, a sound like breathing.
When he returned to the cabin, Naaliyah was unloading things from the truck.
“Next time leave a note,” she said. She looked clean, newly washed.
“I was trying to get this foot back into shape.”
“Just leave a note.” She had more cordwood, bags of rice and sugar, a snowsuit and parka for him. Behind the truck was a tan-colored Skidoo on a trailer, which he helped her unhitch and drag behind the cabin. Through noon they worked together, unloading things and stowing them. She glanced once at the makeshift mattress in the shed, but did not remark on it.
A few hours after dusk he rinsed out his mug and went to the door.
“You’re not going to sleep out there.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“You’ll freeze.”
“There are a bunch of old furs in there.”
“It gets cold, David. You don’t know how cold.”
“I don’t mind cold.”
“David.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You’ll be in the cabin by midnight.”
“We’ll see.”
She sighed. “At least take these.” She held out a small felt sleeve. Inside were a pair of glasses. “I didn’t know your prescription, of course. But I knew you were nearsighted. So.”
He held them a moment, studying the lenses.
“The doctor said nobody ever came to pick them up.”
“Thank you. Very thoughtful.”
“Well,” she said. “You’re welcome.” He opened the door and crossed the meadow. He climbed into his makeshift bed and pulled the furs up to his neck. The moon sent its light through chinks in the shed walls. A moth flapped softly against the glass of its cage.
4
The eyeglasses, miraculously, worked. They were wide, aluminum-framed things, heavy on his nose, and the centers of the lenses didn’t quite match the centers of his pupils, so that by midday an insistent pain camped out behind his forehead, but he could see. In the dusks and dawns, when the light was mild, everything became momentarily clear: the beauty of spruce, light filtering between the needles. He was even able to read a bit, a few paragraphs of one of Naaliyah’s entomology texts (…the subgenual organ, joint chordotonal organs, campaniform sensilla and mechanoreceptors, such as the Johnston’s organ in antennae, might be used to detect these vibratory signals…) before his eyes began to feel as if they were being forced in opposite directions, and the headache reasserted itself.
To see again—to discern a tree or face or cloud with an acceptable level of clarity—was the smallest kind of revival, a tiny breakthrough, but enough to start happiness in his heart—the joy of recognizing things, an improvement in his relationship with the world.
Every morning Naaliyah was up before he was, writing at her outdoor table with a battery-powered headlamp strapped around her head net. He watched her press the stinger of a hornet to the pad of her pinkie finger, release the hornet carefully, and take notes with her left hand while the stinger throbbed and ejaculated in her right.
He tried to stay out of her way: he split wood and hauled water, and went for careful strolls beside the river. Each night he drank a cup of tea with her beside the fire, the insects close around them, then said good night and went out to the shed to sleep.
Fridays she took the truck into Eagle for the mail, and to telephone Professor Houseman in Anchorage. She’d grind back up the makeshift road after dusk, and Winkler would tramp to the gap in the trees he had found: her headlights edging up the valley like a pair of sparks, the big opaque acres of the Yukon below sliding on and on. Sometimes, if the wind was blowing, branches or whole trees would blow down across the little gravel track during the hours she was gone, and Winkler would hear her chainsaw start up—the up-and-down chewing noise of it—as she cut the tree to get the truck through.
The air grew colder. Nightfall arrived sooner and sooner. A more permanent snow line advanced down the contours. And the mosquitoes started expiring—Naaliyah would wipe a thin gray fuzz of them off her table in the mornings.
During the summer, she explained, the university paid men in Eagle to haul firewood to Camp Nowhere, cord after cord of it on trailers. When she swung the maul it fell cleanly through the logs, as if they were already split. When Winkler swung it, it bounced back, nearly into his teeth, or sent slivers flying at his coat. The wood this year was not great, she said, mostly thin stacks of spruce and alder, not much larch (she peered into split logs for sawfly larvae). How did she know all this? Winkler wondered. Where did she learn these things? She was afraid, it seemed, of nothing but the cold, and it was about this that her mind incessantly returned, as if, like her insects, its coming would signal the end of her.
After dark the light of the cabin’s lantern mixed with the lights of the heat lamps to produce a carroty, almost garish orange, a glow that escaped not just through the cabin’s fogged window, but through chinks in the walls, too, and the piles of wood stacked around them, until in the darkest hours it looked as though the cabin had a tiny sun trapped inside, burning through the night. Winkler would cross the meadow on his way to the outhouse and step through long beams of orange light, his shadow slipping along beside him, antic and huge.
The shed, on the other hand, grew only darker. Already it was quiet, the ants sluggish in their test tubes, the wasps stilled, the whole structure dim and shadowed save Winkler’s occasional candle, flickering small and white in the aisle between woodpiles. There was so much wood in there, he thought, they could weather three winters, but Naaliyah did not stop, splitting twice as quickly as he could, working in a T-shirt, her arms pasted with sawdust.
The warblers left. No aircraft traveled the sky.
He closed his eyes and saw Felix and Soma, praying over food at their picnic table; he saw Brent Royster’s turntable spinning on and on; he saw Sandy’s photo go to lint in his hands. He saw Naaliyah walking away from the inn—not thirty years old, but sixteen—the clean, bare backs of her knees, shadows closing like water over her.
He began to get a sense of how things would change: the insects here in the shed were nearly done, settling into a long sleep or giving themselves up to death—their natural states unfurling, the abominable silence and cold of this uninsulated laboratory, the million distant candles of the stars.
5
In November the freezing began. It started first in hollows and alcoves in high rocks, where structures of frost appeared on the lichen, and whatever soil had gathered there darkened and hardened to the touch, as if the land was contracting, stiffening, like armor plates drawing together on the back of some titanic animal. The mosquitoes vanished altogether, and the birch and alder gave up their leaves all at once, leaching them into the wind as if desperate to be rid of them. Soon the outhouse hole froze over, as did the fringes of the creek, the unfrozen center flowing in a gluey sludge, midstream boulders wearing caps of ice. Each morning they’d find dead insects, bees and flies mostly, arched on the windowsill.
By the middle of that month the sounds of the Yukon freezing—deep, metallic reverberations, as though a Goliath beyond the next hill repeatedly flexed an enormous sheet of tin—sounded everywhere, echoing off hills and seeming to lodge in unseen hollows, only to come spiraling out minutes later, so that the air was filled, always, with the eerie, anchorless sound of water going to ice.
Naaliyah chopped plates of it from small bogs in the woods and turned them over. Beneath were water striders, squirming larvae, macroinvertebrates. “Astounding,” she’d tell Winkler, and show him her plunder: a slushy mug livid with tiny swimmers: iceworms; the large-jawed larva of an antlion.
Pockets of life amid all that freezing. It was as if the cold was forcing al
l of them closer, into tighter and tighter communities, hurrying to find the creases and chinks in the great contracting armor of winter.
After dark, out of reach of the orange, leaking light of the cabin, Winkler would tramp to the edge of the creek and listen: its sound had grown thicker and harsher. It had frozen over now and already successive overflows were lacquering the surface. He could hear ice rolling along the bottom, grinding itself against stones, a sound like dozens of glass tumblers being crushed inside a towel. And above it the sound of the liquid water had deepened, lost some of its animation, the molecules reluctant to give up their bonds. Animals would come down tentative and shy to slurp at the overflows, deer, skunks, chipmunks, even lynxes in the night like big, sleek ghosts (he wouldn’t see them but would find their prints frozen in the banks).
Still the snow marched down the mountainsides, mantling summits, filling the high trees. Stones began rising from the ground, thrown up by frost heaves, budding from the earth like strange, monolithic cabbages, and creeping down exposed slopes.
Naaliyah worked harder than ever, almost entirely abandoning her research in favor of gathering wood. She stacked wood everywhere—the shed was filled to the roof, and logs stood around the cabin’s perimeter two-deep, and still she was out there, wrestling a big half keg of pinewood onto the block, dropping the maul, cleaving it to its dark, grainy heart.
Sleet, like grains of rice against the windowpane; then the tiny snowballs of graupel, wads of rime skittering across Naaliyah’s field desk. Then rain again, and Winkler was disappointed to see it. Winter, he was remembering, was a balky, slow thing—it did not arrive smoothly.
One Sunday, near the back half of the month, he woke to a strange and sad concert, a creaking and yawping that drew him out into the meadow, beneath the impossible spread of stars. The face of the pond had overflowed and the new, upwelling water began to ice over the already frozen surface, and as it froze it ticked, scales of floating ice reaching across, stitching themselves into an unbroken plate, the plate thickening, trillions of water molecules ranging out and lacing. From beneath the new sheet came a sad and eerie moaning, as though the ice had trapped women beneath it.