9
Dear Herman—
My name is David Winkler. I grew up in Anchorage, too. I went to East High School. I met you once in your driveway on Marilyn Street. I was the one who fell in love with Sandy.
Nothing that could fit on this page, or a hundred of these pages, would possibly accommodate all the things I should say to you, all the things you deserve to hear. So please let me say this, although it is barely more adequate than saying nothing: I’m sorry. Sorry for whatever pain we caused you. For whatever pain you might still be in.
I don’t know if Sandy’s daughter is there with you or ever has been or if she’s been dead for twenty-five years. I don’t know how much you saw Sandy over the past decades either. But I wanted to say sorry. A lifetime is not really a long time, maybe, but I think I’m finally learning a little bit, coming around, and I hope it is not too late.
Enclosed is a print I made of a snow crystal earlier this month. I hope you will find it strange and beautiful, as I do.
Then:
Dear Herman—
Night makes things simpler, I think. I feel closer to the meanings of things. Here (far more than Anchorage, as I remember) there is no shortage of night. On the solstice we had only three hours and fifty-one minutes of light. The sun didn’t even clear the treetops.
But what I never knew was that these are not lightless voids, like we had in the tropics. There, on a moonless night, you can’t see your own palm in front of your eyes. The nights here carry their own kind of light, dim purples and navies, the golden stripe of the Milky Way, the snow reflecting and amplifying all of it. You can read newsprint by the light of a quarter moon. Dusk lasts two hours. Sunrise is still happening at noon.
I realize now I knew nothing about snow. It’s not white. It’s a thousand colors, the colors of the sky or what’s beneath the snow, or the pinks of algae living inside it, but none of those colors, really, is white. How wonderful it is to be my age—our age—and learn you were wrong about such a fundamental thing.
What you realize, ultimately, when you have nothing to lose, is that even though the world can be kind to you, and reveal its beauty through the thin cracks in everything, in the end it will either take you or leave you.
Then:
Dear Herman—
Please disregard my last letters if you find them strange. I think you will receive these all at once, because Naaliyah only goes into town on Fridays. Perhaps you’ll read this first. If so, maybe tear up the other two.
Naaliyah is the woman I’m with up here. She is an entomologist, and a good one. She spends all her time with her insects, trying to keep them alive in this wicked cold.
We eat noodles and margarine. And tuna. And canned peaches, although they’re supposed to be for the bugs. My favorite is curry—Naaliyah can make curry from almost anything. It’s a skill from her father, and although (don’t tell her this) she is not as good, we beggars cannot be choosers.
If I turn from the fire and set my food outside the cabin door, it steams for only about twenty seconds. It will begin to freeze in forty. Usually the surface of a mug of tea will freeze on the short trip from the cabin where we cook to the shed where I sleep.
But in the cabin, it’s warm—even hot. The stove gets cranking and I reach up and find sweat on my forehead.
The enclosed is my best print yet, I think. It has eight arms rather than six because of simultaneous and early growth from two adhering crystals. They locked on to one another high in the clouds, and managed to get all the way down here, into my little black bucket, without breaking. Rare indeed.
Looking at it feels like an unlocking to me, like something inside is finding shape outside. Does that make sense? I hope you are well, Herman. I hope you are beside a heater, with a blanket close at hand.
He’d give the letters to Naaliyah as he had once given letters to her mother, and asked her to mail them for him even if he begged her not to later, and every Friday she came back up the valley with smoked fish or margarine or tea bags but no letters, no answers, holding her hands palms-up exactly as her mother had done twenty-five years before.
Still he worked at photographing crystals, making one or two good prints each snowfall. He was reaching the point now where he could sense snow coming hours before it hit—clouds veiling the sun, casting a pearly light, and the trees throwing their shadows across the meadow. Indeed, he was surpassing that point; he had never known snow so well, or so intimately. A smell would rise, an odor he associated for some reason with flame, and he felt his whole body tune in, as if it were connected to the sky by thousands of invisible wires, as if he himself might precipitate. Soon it will snow. In fifteen minutes it will begin to snow. He found he could go so far as to predict the structure of crystals: on warm noons they might get hexagonal plates, or needles; when it got colder, columns like little prisms; colder still, plates again, or equilateral triangles, or stars, or barbells, or scrolls.
In the deep cold the aluminum frames of his eyeglasses would contract and pinch the bridge of his nose, creating a compressed, squeezed feeling, like the cold had his head in a vise. Coupled with the fatigue of working with such small things all day, a simple, clarifying pain emerged behind his temples, and he would have to stand over his microscope, eyes closed, the cold cinching in around him, the blues and reds of blood in his eyelids crawling slowly across his vision.
Before long it was late March, the vernal equinox, pivot between light and dark. Days were lengthening; Naaliyah was dreaming of other seasons. She talked into the CB of pizza, of walking barefoot through sand. “Where I’m from,” she’d say, “the sun gets so strong it can melt the paint off boats.” Winkler, on the other hand, was almost sad to see the daylight extend; to hear, one afternoon, water dripping from the eaves. Again he thought of Sandy, the way she blinked after a movie had ended, lingering to watch the credits. “Like waking up,” she had said.
Indeed they were waking up, he and Naaliyah, and the entirety of Camp Nowhere—reentering life again. Spring: a tapping on the eggshell from the inside.
In winter whole chunks of time calved and fell away, like icebergs from a glacier. It was almost as if time ceased to exist, or asserted itself in a new, previously undiscovered way. In those long, imperceptibly shrinking nights, he might look up and not even realize that the daylight had come and gone, and here it was dusk again—as if the standard method of measuring time—life, death; sunrise, sunset—was only one way, and not necessarily the most relevant one.
But in spring everything resumed: birth, daylight, family.
Dear Herman—
I remember reading this pamphlet by Kepler in graduate school, where he mused about why snowflakes each seemed to have their own individual pattern. He said all things in nature appeared to have a key—invisible to us—inside them that contained the blueprint for their exterior, for what they were. The nucleus inside a cell, the germ inside a seed. This was 350 years before Watson and Crick. Kepler went so far as to call it a soul.
Standing out there in our little meadow, watching crystals come down, I can’t help but admire the idea: every snowflake with a soul. It makes as much sense as genetics, as anything—more sense, I think, than the notion that snow crystals don’t have souls.
You should have seen the ice I used to grow in graduate school—perfect, immaculate little crystals. Little wonders. Out here in the woods crystals break easily, go lopsided under the slightest pressure. But the flakes are magnificent, bigger and more real than they were in the lab, in the way that wild animals make zoo animals seem like shadows.
It is not so much the science of snow for me, anymore. I’d rather just look at it. The light, the way it absorbs sound. The way we feel as if the more that falls, the more we are forgiven.
What were dreams? A ladle dipped, a bucket lowered. The deep, cool water beneath the bright surface; the shadow at the base of every tree. Dreams were the reciprocal of each place you visited when you were awake, each hour you passed thr
ough. For every moment in the present there was a mirror in the future, and another in the past. Memory and action, object and shadow, wakefulness and sleep. Put a sun over us and we each have our twin, attached to our feet, dragging about with us in lockstep. Try and outrun it.
He had, ultimately, only one dream left: to know his daughter, to see her hand—what would have become of Grace’s hands? All he could remember was the tiny, intricate detailing of her knuckles, and the way she had slept, as if a huntsman had come to seize her, as if her body had been temporarily vacated.
This was enough, enough to get him up in the morning, enough to break the maul free from where it had frozen against the cabin wall and drive it through a log.
10
On the first Friday in April, Naaliyah returned once more with empty hands. Winkler thought: I am living the same story over and over.
Although there were still nights of astonishing cold (the trees expanding and flexing, one or two giving up and exploding, the echoes dying quickly in the heavy air) the winter began to wane. The auroras diminished; a wedge of geese appeared in the sky one morning, winging north. Some days the sun rose high enough to melt snow off the roof of the cabin, and icicles formed during the night, pillars between the eaves and the ground. There were even hours now when Winkler could work at his microscope without gloves, could chop wood in only a wool shirt.
The warblers returned, and the juncos. Even a robin—so motionless on the eave Winkler wondered if maybe it had frozen solid and Naaliyah had placed it there as a prank. But when he reached for it, it blinked, and flapped off
Aircraft started appearing in the southern sky, Beechcraft and Cessnas and even a big Twin Otter, circling a bit before lazing down toward the airstrip at Eagle. Naaliyah looked better each day, her cheeks taking on color, her work accumulating momentum. The winter had been a triumph she would carry with her the rest of her life. Her insects—many of them—were still alive. She was still alive. Some afternoons he would walk into the cabin and she’d be laughing on the CB with the ranger. “Really?” she’d say. “He said that?”
He could see health in her arms, in the cords of her neck. When she bent she kept her legs straight, like an athlete, her hamstrings long and tight. She washed herself with buckets of hot water and wrapped her hair and midsection in towels and walked around with her bare calves sticking out of her boots, laces trailing behind. Desire flared in him—when she brought a spoon out from between her lips, when she stood in the meadow, eyes closed, chin tilted up at the sun. He hated himself for it, for being an old and lecherous man, for the times she caught his eyes on her body a half second too long.
He sat beside the stove until after midnight and wrote. The snow pecking at the window was almost rain.
A Wednesday in early April: the sky a pale, fabulous blue. Naaliyah stood in the doorway and announced, “Tonight I’m going to town. I’m going into town and I’m going dancing. Anybody who wants to can come along.” All afternoon Winkler fumbled with the Stratalab. Naaliyah shaved her legs in the dying light; she brushed her hair; she pulled on a dress he did not even know she had, black printed over with bright red macaws, and zipped her snowsuit over it.
“Do you need me to feed the insects?”
“They’ll be fine. I’ll be back tonight. You’re sure you don’t want to come?” He looked around at the meadow; he shook his head. Two minutes later she started the snowmachine and half stood off its bench and throttled off, arcing over the crust frozen on top of the snow.
The daylight slowly left the trees. He could hear the growl of the Skidoo as she guided it down through the trees, and he stood out there a moment longer, watching the light change, snow drifting between branches, and then went in.
She started going often—every few nights, staying in town until past midnight, once not returning until dawn. Sometimes he’d walk out into the spruce, toward her tracks, waiting to see the speck of her headlight as it turned up the long trail toward the camp, shaking snow from the overhanging trees, starting animals from the path. Through gaps in the treetops the frozen Yukon loomed below him, huge and wide, here smooth as a runway, there buckled with heaves.
He’d eat his dinner alone; he’d stare at the CB and consider switching it on. Certainly it was the park service ranger, the one with the wind-blasted face and khakis, but he did not ask her and it was none of his business anyway.
Silence boomed over the meadow, big and pale. He fell asleep in the chair by the stove and when he woke, still in half dreams, he dragged himself to Naaliyah’s cot and continued sleeping there.
He woke later still to the sound of the snowmobile roaring into the meadow. The door opened and closed, and he heard logs thump into the stove. He opened his eyes. The heat lamps were all down and the only light came from embers flaring in the stove and a candle burning on her desk.
She smelled of beer, and hamburgers, and cigarette smoke. Ice melted from her hair and dripped onto the floor. He found his glasses on the shelf beside him. At the far end of the cabin he could just see her, bending over a cage, lifting a wire lid, taking a spider up in her fingers.
11
We went to the movies on Wednesday nights while you were at hockey games. Only in December did she start going back to my place. She would eat Apple Jacks and look out the window, thinking about you probably. As far as I could tell, she was often thinking about you. I think she had the idea of leaving Alaska before I met her, although I don’t say this to deemphasize my role in it. I don’t even know if “idea” is the right word, really, just an impulse, a notion—she’d open my road atlas and trace routes away from Anchorage with her finger. She said she wanted to be an airline pilot, or a cop, or a doctor. We’d lay on my mattress and look out the window at the sky. I think she wanted, more than anything, to be a mother.
I have a hole in my life because I know so little about my daughter—my and Sandy’s daughter—and I beg you to search your heart and locate whatever kindness is there. Let me know in some way what happened to her. Probably I do not deserve peace but you could give me some.
I know words aren’t going to do it. I used to write Sandy and think I could make her understand, but there was no way. We were too far apart.
Call me a jerk, a demon, whatever you will. But if you can, please, answer this letter.
12
One by one the ponds gulped down their ice like big, painful pills. The stars changed, and soon Naaliyah was finding tiny blades standing up from the ground when she shucked aside spruce needles to search for grubs. Everything dripped. Branches unloaded snow like they were finally and completely finished with it. In the shed a first chirring started. When Winkler got up to see, something had gnawed its way out of a stick—it had left a neat, fresh pile of wood dust on the floor of the cage.
The sound of the creek, rushing and bubbling, filled the clearing. Naaliyah dragged him down to the water and held him in it and he stood with her, the water painfully cold against his legs and the graveled bed shifting under his shoes. “Quiet,” she said. “Still yourself.” He shifted, shrugged, eventually managed to settle in. And for a brief moment, he felt it, a cloud of insects around him, landing and taking off, a thousand points of sense on his skin, nearly weightless. He tried to see them but could make out little more than a spotty cloud, there one second, gone the next.
“What are they?”
“Adult midges. Just emerged. Still working to harden their cuticles.” She was waving a hand gently through the air. “A hundred thousand will probably hatch on this stretch alone.”
It was a sound, Winkler thought, like the thrumming of the spheres, the mechanisms of the universe made audible. Spring: the sheer vigor of it, the warm and benevolent wind, stirring everything.
Just one more Friday, Naaliyah heading into town for the mail and to use the satellite phone, and check the condition of the roads. It was nearly May and she had been making preparations to leave for more than a week now, preserving insects in jars of alcohol, cons
olidating others into more portable cages, letting still others go. Five adult mourning cloak butterflies had survived the winter, rolled into the crevices of a stick, and she carried them out into the sun and watched them slowly heat up, opening and closing their wings, finally flapping off.
The snow left the roof, sliding off in big slabs and collapsing to the ground with a whump. Winkler jumped each time.
On this last Friday, Naaliyah buzzed up in the snow machine, its suspension and cowl lacquered with mud. “David!” she called, shouting, and he walked out into the boggy meadow and splashed through the slush. “A letter.” She was breathless, glowing, fumbling through her backpack. Mud was smeared across her goggles. “He wrote back.”
She held it out. A single ivory envelope with a First National Bank of Alaska return address embossed in the corner. “He wrote back,” she said again.
She might have said more. But there was only that letter, caught between his hands, a bit of ink—Winkler’s own name—on a field of white. If he was not careful he would lose himself in those loops of letters, lose himself there and not find his way back. He stumbled backward, making for the cabin.
Naaliyah waited outside, standing at her big warped desk, not working—all of her mind was on Winkler inside, bent on him, every thought leaning toward him, offering him so much hope that Winkler wondered, teetering before the stove, if hope might be visible on some other, still-imperceptible spectrum, coloring the air, like auroras rippling into the sky.
Sparrows moved up the ancient corridors toward Canada; elk stirred in their beds. Somewhere a brown bear stood and stretched and yawned, and three volleyball-sized cubs went tumbling out of the den after her. High on south-facing tundra the first lichens, some of them centuries old, spread their scales across the rocks. He opened the envelope.