From The Bering Strait
Gina Withnell
Up here at the top of the country, the half-light gets trapped between the double-paned windows. The light freezes and sticks there between the glass like a cold sap. The birds, too, have a hard time getting anywhere. Sometimes the ice catches them in mid-flight and for days they are stuck crooked in the freezing sky. If they are lucky, a warmer rain will unfix them, and if they are luckier still, none of their bones will snap from the shock of sudden flight, and they will fly South where they belong.
It wasn't always like this. We used to have Springs of wet snow and starlings, Springs of impossible, violent blue skies. But slowly it became clear as each year passed that Winter was stealing days from Spring, until eventually the thaw stopped coming altogether. Those were the years the fish froze solid in the water and our children stopped growing.
I remember the last true Spring. The thaw came in the middle of the night, like the bridegroom for the bride, my wife Dolores says to anyone who wants to hear the story of the Last Thaw. There we were, lying in our bed. The sun set early so the sky was black and thick as liver. We heard a groaning like some huge animal was sleeping below the ice and beginning to wake, to claw its way out. Then we heard a terrific crack, like the sound of a bone snapping, only much louder. We lay still in our bed, afraid to breathe because when the break-up happens, for a moment you're not sure if it's the thaw or an earthquake. Then I leapt out of bed, ran to the kitchen, and brought back a bottle of wine and two glasses.
"American Beauty," Dolores said, touching her glass to mine.
"Royal Princess," I said.
This was the game we played, naming prize-winning roses from the rose catalogues. This was how we welcomed Spring, planning our gardens, worrying over the beds, mulch, the enriched soil fortified by worm castings.
* * *
When we walk outside, even the hairs in our nostrils freeze stiff and it hurts to breathe. And here's another problem: our words and tears turn to ice on the tips of our tongues or in the corners of our eyes. It's hard to tell them apart, too, because when they chip off and fall, they look like little slivers of glass caught on our mustaches, sleeves, and the tips of our shoes. To cope with these problems, we have by unspoken consensus decided to try not to talk or sweat or bleed or cry. We have come to discover that exposing any of our bodily fluids is a very dangerous thing to do. Still, we make mistakes.
* * *
Last week, Mushie broke into the pharmacy and helped himself to a packet of codeine tablets and a few cc's of morphine. Then just yesterday he did himself in on anti-freeze. It had to have hurt like hell, like swallowing a Cuisinart jammed on high, but maybe, for a minute or two, he felt warm. They say that's what happens when you die, just as you are dying, even as you are freezing to death, for one split euphoric second, you are on fire. I knew something was wrong when I saw his dogs tangled up in front of the pharmacy. They were baying and howling, trying to push through the front door of the pharmacy, but Mushie had left them hooked up to the sled and the sled was jammed up in the frame of the door. I unharnessed them and they tripped over each other, trying to get to Mushie.
In the puddle of liquid that surrounded him I could see the striations of neon green and cobalt blue. If a peacock feather melted, maybe it would look like this. I smelled the plastic gallon jug of antifreeze. It smelled oily and a little sweet. He had curled himself into a fetal position so I rolled him to his knees, put my hands under his armpits, and dragged him outside to the sled. In this weather, he could have drank freon and died quicker. This is not at all how I'd do it, I thought. And yet, I couldn't deny that with the way the colors seemed to melt around him, he was transformed somehow and that this was beautiful. I strapped him onto the sleigh. I rubbed off a few drips of antifreeze from around his mouth and pushed his eyelids closed with my thumb. I didn't bother harnessing the dogs. They followed the sled for about a mile and then veered off towards their kennels.
When I reached home, I wrote down on one of Dolores' yellow Post-it pads what I saw when I found Mushie. The puddle, the way he was hugging his knees, the way pearly drops of those brilliant colors of the Caribbean-that's what I actually wrote, colors of the Caribbean-pooled around him like an oil slick. I wrote this all down because I thought it was important to remember, and because, of course, it would be too hard to say.
That night I carved a sculpture for him. I carved him with the flaps of his hat fastened down over his ears, his eyes squinting against the glare of the snow and laced tight against an invisible wind. That is the hard part-capturing motion, suggesting something that's not really there. I used a pen knife for the lines in his face and around his eyes. If you keep a small pan of lukewarm water nearby, all you have to do is dip the knife once, lightly tap it against the side of the pan, and then the knife is warm and wet enough to make fluid cuts in the ice.
I worked on Mushie all night and through the next day. His hands were the hardest for me to sculpt. I wanted to show him as he was-one hand gripping reins and another holding a bottle or the whip-but for some reason I couldn't get the fingers right. In the end, I hid his hands in the ruff of his dog's fur. He is leaning forward on the sleigh, one elbow resting on the headboard, his other hand cradling his favorite dog, the lead, Skete.
I kept the garage door open so the wind could blow in flakes of snow. I sprinkled the dogs coats with water because I wanted the snow to attach to the guard hairs so their fur would look fuzzy. It had taken me all day to shave long narrow slivers. Getting the fishhook curl into the ends of the shavings was the hardest part. I used one of Dolores' sewing needles as sort of a curling rod and exhaled slowly so that the ice would warm up slightly, curl, then refreeze. I was done and I let the wind score the ice a bit to give it the weathered look. Dolores came out, that yellow Post-it stuck to her index finger. She hadn't bothered to put her parka on, just her ratty old sweater. She looked up at me for a long time. She folded her arms across her chest, bit her lip, and shivered.
"You're jealous. You're jealous he's dead," she said. Her words fell onto the concrete and shattered into jagged pieces.
"What?" I asked, covering my mouth with my hand. "Could you repeat that?" But of course she couldn't. She snapped off the garage lights and stepped into the house. I turned the lights back on and kicked the pieces into the old snow drift outside the garage.
* * *
People seem to think this cold must have happened overnight, that one day we just woke up and found ourselves in this mess. But when I look out all around me, I'm nearly blinded by the unending grey light and I know it's coming, it's come, as regular and steady as my breathing. The blank sweep of the ice stretches on, everywhere, ice.
Dolores and I stay up late and we watch the television weather reports. One night they showed a segment about some gardener in Anchorage who coaxed some dwarf roses into bloom. Outside, the ice fell from the sky like old salt.
"The dirty bastard," Dolores said.
I wheeled the TV out of the bedroom that very night. So now I watch the TV by myself. The eerie, blue-green, incandescent glow of the screen is the same strange shade of blue that the snow reflects under the arctic light. People think snow is white, but if you look carefully in the shadows of the snow, you can see that it is really blue. When I go outside for a smoke, I think of those explosive blue skies of Spring, Bering blue.
* * *
The weather bureau sent a team of researchers up here to study the freeze patterns. We all laughed as best as we could without freezing our lungs. You may have heard this kind of laugh before. It is a tortured sound. You wouldn't even think a human capable of it, but you'd be surprised. Anyway, they came in with their helicopter mounted with a special engine heater and all of their equipment-thermometer, barometers, dopplers, radars, and small satellite dishes. They even built a greenhouse. We couldn't figure out why. Up here, even in a greenhouse, it would be too cold for anything to grow. But they wanted to experiment and they insisted that certain northern hybrids of roses were suited for inclement weather. We all nearly lost it that time. The corners of my wife's eyes froze shut for two days. It was a laughless cry, though. And then she got sick and wouldn't get out of bed. One day, to cheer her up, I brought her a picture of roses.
"I almost forgot what they looked like," she said.
She traced the edges of the roses with her finger. I taped pictures of roses all over the walls while she sat, propped up in bed, thumbing through the rose mail-order catalogues like Burpies and Jackson and Perkins and watching the gardening channel on cable TV.
"Fertilizer-that's very important," she muttered. I could barely hear her, she was so weak, and I knew what was happening to her-I could almost see it-the grey creeping past her ankles and up her shins. She tapped at a white JFK prize rose with her index finger. "You gotta feed those things. They're like people, you know."
* * *
My wife's mother calls almost every day. She wants to know what the hell is going on up here. I tell her that we are on the edge of a new Ice Age-a new millenia of freeze, that it is coming for her next. Does she have enought light bulbs and toilet paper? The silence on her end of the phone is heavy and then she asks me if I'm still going to AA. I tell her that I quit because it was getting too crowded. She calls because she wants to talk to Dolores, my wife, but talking is dangerous and Dolores is too sick to move.
More than once I'd thought of packing up and leaving. I was out the other day fueling up my Dodge. But before I could even get the gas through the funnel, the gas had frozen solid. That's when I thought to myself that we could really be in trouble up here. And it's not that we don't have heaters or electric blankets, fireplaces and microwaves. In fact, one of the researchers has a tiny sun-lamp. But even with all these things, people can only take so much of this blistering cold. The thought when you wake up that it is out there waiting for you is almost too much.
* * *
There's a funeral every other day, it seems, but nobody cries, of course. When our daughter died two months ago, I carved a swan family out of a huge ice block. The mother and father swan are nudging the swanlet into flight. The swanlet looks like it is flying right up out of that stump of ice, flying right out of this place.
"It's like the Phoenix," Dolores said, dabbing at her eyes.
"Yesterday it was eighty in Phoenix. Don't even talk to me about Phoenix," I said, running my fingers along the neck of the baby swan. She'll never melt away in this freeze, and I think that there's something perfect about all this cold.
Mushie had found them, our daughter and her three high school friends, on the way back from working out his team. The dogs started whining and pulling against their harnessess. They pulled Mushie towards what he thought were some dumb-shit optimistic ice-fishers. When the dogs saw them, they howled and tangled themselves up in their reins and refused to run. But the girls, they were sitting in a circle, holding hands, listening to Bob Marley. They were frozen stiff, bluer than blue, Mushie said, and the radio was still playing. Energizer batteries. Sometimes it's the small things that really amaze me. I wrote to the CEO of the Energizer company and told them how impressed I was with their batteries. I explained how my daughter's radio played forty-eight hours straight, no problem, in the middle of an arctic freeze when everything else froze solid. The president wrote me back on Energizer stationary with that drum-pounding pink rabbit on the top, thanking me for my interest in the product. He wished there were more customers like me.
* * *
The weather bureau researchers are packing up and getting ready to leave. They're tired of the cold and they're afraid of what it could do to them. Someone threw an ice rock and shattered a square of the greenhouse and they've interpreted this action as a sign. They're leaving on the Swedish freight-liner tomorrow even though they didn't finish collecting all the data. They're leaving in a flurry of equipment and printouts and the knowledge that maybe they've failed here. Still, it wasn't hard to get them to talk, once I gave them a bottle of gin and some long straws.
Two of the researchers thought that the ice caps had expanded and where we all thought we were living on frozen steppe, or permafrost, was actually an ice shelf, like an extension of Greenland. They explained that the cold was not only working above the ground, but below it as well, pushing the soil south and replacing it with ice, as far down as you'd care to dig, everywhere ice. There were some other theories: the polar disparity theory, the alien conspiracy theory. But my personal favorite came from the guy who brought the roses in. He attributed the cold to mass-hysteria. That's right-we're all hallucinating the freeze.
"Well then, aren't we all a bunch of crazy fuckers," I said.
He laughed a choked sort of laugh and he forgot to cover his mouth with his scarf or mitten. Later, they had to load him on the freighter with a very real oxygen mask connected to his face.
* * *
I check in on her every hour. Sometimes I read to her. I lean over and put my ear to her mouth to feel her breath because she's so still and turning such a strange shade of grey that I'm not sure she's alive. But today she caught me by surprise. I leaned over and she grabbed my arm, clenched it tight and pulled me down to her.
"Are the roses in bloom yet?" she asked.
I wanted to buy her a whole garden of roses. I wanted to throw ice blocks at the greenhouse. I wanted to rip up those roses in there, grind the stalks up in my mouth, chew them up and spit them out.
"Well, are they?" she asked again.
I looked at her lying there, at her purple lips and the tiny pearls of snot frozen on the end of her nose. I looked at her, held up by her pillows, and I lied to her."There's a very small, small but sturdy bud on the Jacob's Ladder."
"That's a climbing rose-a trailer."
"Yeah. Maybe a couple of weeks, it'll open. Three weeks tops."
Sometimes I hate myself, I really do. She looked at me for a long time. She shouldn't do that-her eyes could freeze-and I was just about to remind her when she shut them at last. She collapsed against her pillows and the entire bed shuddered.
"I'm cold," she said. I put two more blankets on her, turned up the thermostat, and then I went outside.
* * *
I think about what Dolores might be feeling, how it feels to slowly freeze, about how I am feeling. I think about how your heart still beats as it always did, but there is a tightness as if papier m‰chŽ or plaster of Paris has been slathered over your heart and has now solidified. Your heart is fighting like a bird from within the shell, fighting to break free from the weight of the cold. And then your heart, over time, doesn't fight as hard as it did the day before. And so it goes, and so it goes, until one day your heart just stops. Literally stops cold. Like that. And it's true what they say. It's true that when the cold consumes you, it consumes you completely, takes you as if it had been waiting for you your whole life. And when it does, all you can do is feel the weight of it crushing your chest, and you close your eyes then and allow yourself this once to dream of the sun.
Tables of Content
Seventeen (Fall 2003)
Sixteen (Spring 2003)
Fifteen (Fall 2002) Fourteen (Spring 2002)
Thirteen
(Fall 2001) Twelve (Spring 2001)
Eleven (Fall 2000)
Ten (Spring 2000)
Nine (Fall 1999) Eight (Spring 1999)
Seven, (Fall 1998) Six, (Spring 1998)
Five (Fall 1997) Four (Winter/Spring 1997)