China Mountain Zhang

BAFFIN ISLAND (Zhang)

I am unemployed.

The man who hands me the application says, "Filled out one before." It's supposed to be a question. He doesn't look up to see my answer so I don't say anything. I hope my interviewer will be waiguoren-not Chinese. Or if Chinese, at least huaqiao, like me. Perhaps an overseas person will be more sympathetic to another overseas person, unless, perhaps they have to prove that they're as tough as a Chinese with citizenship. You can never tell, but I always feel Chinese are the worst.

I sit at the karal. Surname: Zhang. Given name: Zhong Shan. China Mountain Zhang. My foolish mother. It's so clearly a huaqiao name, like naming someone Nikolai Lenin Smith or Karl Marx Johnson. Zhong Shan, better known in the west as Sun Yat-sen, one of the early leaders of the great revolution in China, back in the first days, the days of virtue. The man who held up the sky, like a mountain. Irony.

But better that than Rafael Luis.

I give my address, really Peter's address out in Coney Island as I'm Without Residence. When one has no job one cannot afford the decadent luxury of paying one's landlord, and one must accept government housing or stay with friends or family. I have been staying with Peter for almost six months. Soon I'll have to apply for government housing, I can't keep living with Peter. Living in Virginia won't be so bad, it is only ninety minutes to Journal Square Station in New Jersey, lots of people do it everyday. If one is unemployed, the train is free at off-peak hours.

IDEX: 415-64-4557-ZS816. Trade Designation: Construction Tech. Job Index: Comex Constr., 65997. Comex Constr. wants administrative experience I don't have, but I have three years experience in construction. In school, I wanted to be an Engineering Tech and my math scores were good, but there were no openings that year. I have an Assoc. Certificate instead of the full Bach. Sci.

I should study on the side, teach myself, take the exam. I should. Maybe when I get a job, have a place of my own again, I'll study in the evening after I get home from work, spend less time going out, waste less time and money. I've said it before, every time I was without a job.

I hand my application to the man at the desk, he glances up at me, his lips move while he keys into the network and puts my application on file, then he peels the contact off his wrist. "Have a seat," he says. I sit and read my paper. The waiting room is large, large enough to be a cafeteria or something. There are a lot of people, twenty or thirty, but that's not enough for the size of the room. While I'm reading more people hand in applications, people waiting are called for interviews. I want to check the time, but why? Time doesn't matter to me, I'm unemployed.

Still, I notice it is almost an hour before I'm called. My interviewer is a woman, a huaqiao I am sure. She looks too New York to be from China itself.

"Zhang," she says in English, "you have insufficient administrative experience for the job you are applying for." Her hair is pulled smoothly back from her face, shining as if lacquered. It is caught with a red cord, and the short ponytail curves under like a 'c'.

I nod.

She looks at the screen in front of her. "You have turned down two alternative offerings."

"I had hoped to stay in New York," I say. One job was in Maryland, the other was in Arizona. If I turn down another alternative it will go on my record. Perhaps she won't have an alternative.

She says to me in Mandarin, "You are from New York?" She is clearly huaqiao, she has a New York accent.

"I'm from Brooklyn," I say.

"I'm from Brooklyn, too," she says. "You like Coney Island?"

"I am staying with a friend, but I like it much better than I expected," I say. "When I get a job I expect to get a place there."

"I am thinking of joining a co-op group," she says.

So nice! An interviewer has never talked to me so personally. No doubt it is because of the address, but maybe she'll give me the job. I study her. Watch her bite her bottom lip in concentration. She has lines at the corners of her eyes, but the way she frowns makes her look very young.

Finally she sighs. "Bukeqi, tongzhi," she says. 'I am sorry citizen.' "I cannot give this to someone with so little admin experience." The polite address softens the blow.

I nod. I understand. I thank her.

"Let me check new listings," she says, "Sometimes things do not get posted." She feels badly, she wants to offer me something.

It is a kindness, I should not expect anything but I cannot help hoping. She is relieved she can do something. I watch her flick through entries. She stops and I become more hopeful. She reads quickly then flicks expressionlessly forward. At each flick she shakes her head slightly. Her lips are the perfect rose of a doll's mouth. They shine like satin. She begins to flush, she is not so happy now. Something is wrong. An alternative, not a good one, I am sure. Do not offer it, I think, pretend you didn't see it.

She straightens her shoulders. "Zhang, I have a job available for someone of your experience," she says, in English. She names a salary which is three times my present salary. She doesn't look at me. "It is working at a research center, the salary is high because you will have to live at the facility, but it is a six month contract with the option to extend or renew."

"Where is it?" I ask.

" Baffin Island."

Baffin Island? Where the hell is Baffin Island?

"It is in the Arctic Circle," she says primly, handing me a card with the specs, but not looking at me. "You have forty-eight hours to decide on the job, should you want me to hold it for you, otherwise you risk someone taking it from you while you make up your mind."

"Don't hold it," I say.

The Arctic Circle, Arctic Circle, Arctic Circle, the train to Brooklyn rumbles. We stop at Arctic Avenue, and then I realize it is Atlantic and I get out to transfer. It is my third alternative. If no one takes it in forty-eight hours, I will have turned it down. That means I will be dropped from the category of prime candidates, I will only be offered jobs that have been available to prime applicants for fourteen days. No New York job will be available after fourteen days.

Why did she offer it? Maybe there is some rule that she had to. But who would ever know? It wasn't even posted. She knew I wanted to stay in New York. She was angry at something. She is a bitch. She has ruined my life. If only she didn't try to do me a favor. I would never have applied for so risky a position as the Comex Constr. job if they had Arctic Circle posted for fear it would be my alternative.

I go back to Peter's. Peter is at work, he works in an office, doing paper sorting and filing for a dental clinic. I find beer in the box and sit down. Peter is supposed to get off work at 4:30, but I'm not surprised when he doesn't get home by six. At 9:30 he comes home. "Rafael?" he calls as he comes in, and the lights come up. I have been sitting in the dark.

"Hello, Peter," I say.

"What are you doing sitting in the dark?" He goes into the kitchen to put away groceries. I hear a low whistle. "Drink our dinner, did we. Good day at the employment office, no doubt."

"Celebration," I call, a little thick. "I think I have a job."

"Congratulations," he says, "In that case I don't care if you drank most of the beer." He sings something quietly as he puts things away, I hear him open a beer and he comes in to sit down. Blond Peter with his Eastern-European heritage and his easy, sleepy way. He is a good friend, bright yang to my dark yin. "Tell me the particulars," he says.

"It is a six month contract," I say, "with option to renew or extend." I name the salary. His pale eyebrows arch, he is waiting for the punchline, but I draw it out, saying it is my third alternative.

"What's the kick," he says.

I smile, "It is on Baffin Island, somewhere up around the north pole."

"Oh shit," he says. "You didn't take it, did you?"

"Not yet," I say. "There is a chance that during," I check my watch, "the next forty-two hours, someone will snatch this wonderful opportunity away from me."

"You think maybe the salary will tempt someone?"

"No, do you?"

"It can't be that bad," Peter says gamely, "lots of people would be willing to do it for six months. Turn it down, you can stay here."

Good of him, the apartment is really too small for two roommates who aren't in love with each other. It is not that I don't love Peter, I love Peter more than anyone in the world, but I'm not in love with him. I was once, and he with me, but that was years ago.

"It's only six months," I say. "I'll use the extra time to study for my engineering license."

"Six months in Siberia," he says. "Six months for you to brood yourself into catatonia."

"But then I will have three alternatives when I get back. I can get a job in New York." I am being very practical. "Besides, catatonia is a symptom of bourgeois or maladaptive thinking, something swept away by the revolution."

Peter is looking at me in a way that says he is exasperated with me, that he doesn't trust me. Normally he would laugh, since we are clearly maladapted by virtue of our preference. Angry, he says, "Don't drink any more beer tonight."

"It's your beer," I say.

"That's right," he says.

And now we are both hurt and angry. He makes himself some dinner, I am too drunk to be hungry. There is not much to say. He goes into his room where he probably watches a vid, and I make my bed on the couch and go to sleep.

I don't see much of Peter the next day, which is my fault. The day after that I go back to the employment office. The Baffin Island job is still posted. I take it.

Two weeks later, the first week in October, and I am sitting in a copter. Five hours ago I was in Montreal, changing flights. Now, since I only had a fifteen minute transfer in Montreal and barely made my plane, I am torturing myself about whether my luggage was transferred. We will land in Hebron, Labrador. I have discovered that Labrador is part of the province of Newfoundland. I have already heard my first Newfie joke. In Hebron they still have the old-fashioned manhole covers that can be pried up with a crowbar, big round metal things. A Newfie is jumping up and down on the manhole cover saying, "Sixty-seven! Sixty-seven!" every time he jumps. A man visiting on business stops to stare and the Newfie beckons him over, explains that what he is doing is a way of relieving stress. (This is told with a Newfie accent, every sentence ends with, 'ay?') He tells the business man to try. The business man is not sure that he wants to, but slowly he is convinced to step on the manhole cover. He jumps into the air and says "Sixty-seven."

The Newfie says that he's got to put more into it (ay,) really shout it out. So the business man jumps and shouts "Sixty-seven!" He finds it is kind of fun, so he jumps higher, shouting "Sixty-seven!" louder and louder, until he's red in the face and his long coat tails are flying. He jumps really high, shouts "Sixty-seven!" and the Newfie whisks the manhole cover off and the business man disappears into the manhole. Then the Newfie puts the cover back on and starts jumping up and down shouting, "Sixty-eight!"

I wonder what Baffies do to American Born Chinese.

The field at Hebron, Newfoundland is small, most of the traffic seems to be freight. It doesn't have the usual amenities of public fields, there's no arcade of shops, and no vendors wandering around hawking things. It just slowly stops being an airfield and becomes a town. The town is all ancient pre-fabricated housing (the kind shipped on trucks and fitted together) but the units have been painted and added onto, sometimes fantastically ornamented in vividly tinted aqua and red aluminum and plastics. It is terribly tacky and antique looking, but very very real. I think I like it. There is one little restaurant. Once I have convinced myself that my luggage has transferred, I go into the little restaurant. It is run by Thais, which surprises me, although I guess there are Thai restaurants everywhere. I order Thai-Moo Shu, and it comes, pork and cabbage in a spicy coconut sauce, wrapped up in a pancake. The restaurant has a screen door that leads to what looks like a mechanic's yard where a gray and white dog with pale eyes is tied to a doghouse made out of blue tinted chrome/aluminum, but the Thai food tastes exactly like it would at any little Thai hole-in-the-wall back in New York. The restaurant is filled with men and women in coveralls. I feel a little conspicuous, everybody knows everybody else, but the beer and the food are reassuring.

Maybe there will be a Thai restaurant on Baffin Island, too. If so, I will probably go every day for the whole six months.

My last flight is a copter, smaller than the one I came in on. There is no one on it except for myself and the pilot and co-pilot. I imagine Baffin Island will be like Hebron. I left New York at 8:00 a.m., at 7:22 p.m. we land at Borden Station, Baffin Island.

The cold hits as soon as the door is opened, blown in by a shockingly cold wind that smells like water. It is minus three Celsius, and already it is black as midnight. There is nobody there but the crew that ties down the copter, and the bright, white outside lights illuminate the copter, it casts long insect shadows in three directions. The only building I see is the research complex, I glance around quickly, looking for the town, but it's too cold to look much. I walk across the tarmac and into the research complex with the pilot and co-pilot. "It gets dark early," I say.

The pilot says, "Sunset was at 15:10 this afternoon." Five p.m. I think, then realize I'm wrong. Three o'clock. Sunset was at three, because we are north of the frigging Arctic Circle.

Inside the station is all smooth, clean white walls and blue carpet, very institutional and not shabby at all. There are big windows looking out at the tundra on one side, and over the bluff at Lancaster Sound on the other. The shore ice is whiter than the finest of sand beaches and the open water is shining like black glass.

For a moment I think that the woman who has met me is Chinese.

"Hi, you're Zhang Zhong Shan?" she says. "I'm Maggie Smallwood, come on, I'll show you your room."

"Just Zhang," I say. She is Native American, Eskimo I suppose. Her face is round and her eyes are slanted. She chatters as we walk, she is the one that tells me the water is Lancaster Sound. She uses words I have never heard, polayna, belukha, bowhead. I finally figure out that belukha and bowhead are kinds of whales.

"You're studying whales," I say.

She laughs, "I'm sorry, we're studying belukha migration patterns and their mating rituals." She keeps talking as she opens the door to my room. It is actually two small rooms, the front room has a desk and two chairs, the back a closet and bed. The bathroom is off the back. There's no kitchen. I was expecting an apartment, this is more like a dormitory.

"I'll bet you're hungry," she says. "I'll show you where the caf is."

The cafeteria is full of people talking, playing cards, watching vids. Very few of them seem to be eating. There is food to flash heat, Maggie tells me that during breakfast and dinner hours the food is made fresh. The cost of my dinner is debited against my wages, but it's cheap food. We sit down with a group of people, all natural behaviorists: Jim Rodriguez, bearded, with straight, pale-brown hair; Daniel Munk, blond, but not so blond as Peter, also bearded; Janna Morissey and Karin Webster (one has brown curly hair, and one has straight short hair, but I cannot remember which is which even though I can remember that the one with curly hair has a narrow face and a tough way of talking and the straight haired one likes to dress pretty. I'm very bad with names.)

"Your English is very good," Daniel says, "Aren't you hired out of New York? How long did you live in New York?"

"All my life," I say. "I'm ABC," I explain.

They don't understand.

"ABC," I say, "American Born Chinese. I'm from Brooklyn."

They laugh, they have never heard the phrase. I shake my head in wonder.

They're all Canadians. They are naïve in a nice way. There are not many Chinese in Canada because Canada has not had a socialist revolution, it's still a constitutional monarchy. This is probably a little like the U.S. used to be before the revolution. They ask me if I can speak Chinese, and how I came to be born in New York. I almost tell them only my father is Chinese, my mother is Hispanic, but I don't. I've put my Chinese name on my application; I'm not going to loose the advantage of being Chinese, not even here.

They are all very nice, tell me about the complex. I tell my Newfie joke, and everyone tells Newfie jokes.

"How far away is the town," I ask, remembering Hebron.

"What do you mean?" Janna or Karin asks (the one with straight hair.)

"The town, Borden Station, how far is it?"

Jim says, "This is it. There's nothing here but the station."

They laugh at my expression.

When I wake up it is still dark. Of course, it is 7:00 a.m., not so late, but it is as dark outside my window as if it were much earlier. I stand and look out the window, there is nothing but the Lawrence Sound, far below me. I would really like a cup of coffee, I'm not accustomed to having to face other people before my first cup in the morning.

The room is warm, difficult to believe how cold it is outside. I keep standing there, half asleep, looking out at the landscape. There are so many stars! The sky is thick with stars, from glittering points to tiny scatterings. No moon. But the snow is bright, it must be bright enough to read a paper. Right outside my window is tough, dried grass, then the steep fall to the water. There is a band of shore ice, like a long smooth desert from here.

Looking at the shore ice, I see it is not perfectly smooth. There are shadows. I can see very far to the water. I don't know if the shadows are indentations, cracks, or frozen waves. I have no sense of proportion, how far away is the ice?

How far away is the next nearest person? How far is Hebron? Montreal? New York? If there was an emergency here that we couldn't deal with, how long until someone could get here, how long until we could get to a hospital?

There are no edges to the landscape, no tourist lodges, no sidewalks, no ships, no aerials, no wires, no planes, nothing but gradations of white and blue to black. It has nothing to do with me. It is perfect, sterile, dead. I think I love this landscape. I know I am afraid of it.

I dress in pants and sweater and go to the cafeteria to get coffee. I will be working with Jim.

Jim is already there. He is wearing a pullover that looks like the top part of an atmosphere suit which it is, complete was couplings. He has the hood pushed back. It makes him look like some sort of sea miner, or satellite tech, not like a scientist. He's big, with an open face and a kind of easy, aw-shucks way with people that emphasizes the dumb-tech look.

"Morning Zhang," he says. "You prefer Zhang?"

"Everybody calls me Zhang," I say.

He nods, slurping coffee. I sit down. He is eyeing me over his mug. "Nice sweater," he says, in that funny way people compliment you when they are really saying, 'I don't know what to make of what you are wearing.'

"Wrong, huh?" I say. It's just a sweater. It's woven in a sharkskin pattern, black, white and gray. It's good enough to wear out drinking or something, but it's still just a sweater.

"No, I mean, I just never saw one like that. It's not really sharkskin, is it?"

Of course it looks like sharkskin. "No," I say. "Wool and synthetic." Sweaters are big at home right now. What will he say when he sees the wine sharkskin sweater with the leather ties and mirrors? Obviously he will say nothing because obviously I will never wear it here. Maybe I'll send it back to Peter and he can get some wear out of it.

The woman with the tough face and the curly hair walks in and Jim says, "Hi Janna." I think, remember, Janna is the one with the curly hair, Karin is the feminine one.

Janna says, "Morning Jim, Zhang, I love your sweater! Is that what they're wearing in New York?"

Ah hah. Overdressed. "Well," I say, "It was when I bought it last winter."

"Karin will want one as soon as she sees it. But you're going to freeze." Janna stops and puts her hands on her hips. "Don't you have any winter gear?"

For the first time I think I jack Janna. Janna is tough, practical, no nonsense. That's her mechanism. Maybe Janna and Karin are a couple? "This is winter gear in New York."

"Well it's not winter gear here. You're supposed to be issued an ARC."

ARC. Artificial climate suit. What the rest of us call atmosphere suits. "I just got here," I say. "Maggie showed me my room and then the caf."

Janna looks at Jim, Jim shrugs. "He can't go out like that," Janna says.

"We'll have to find him something." Jim frowns, "He couldn't wear mine, it'd be too big, and I've got to wear it. Maybe Daniel's. Is Daniel going out?"

Nothing to do but ask Daniel. We tromp to Daniel's room, carrying our coffee mugs. Daniel is asleep, after all it is only 7:45. And dark enough to be midnight. Sunrise isn't until almost 10:00 a.m. I have that disoriented sense of being up at the wrong time.

Daniel says I can use his ARC if it fits. He hands it to me and I shuck my sweater. The air inside the station is cool but not cold. I work out a little, haul tools around all day, I can be casual about being bare-chested, especially next to Jim who looks big but undefined. If he worked out I could never compare with the width of his shoulders. Under his ARC what does he look like? Forget all that for six months, Zhang. It's a small place, people are in each other's laps. I am a monk in the service of research, and Jim is not my type anyway. I tug the ARC over my head, pull the hood off my hair. It is not a good fit, but it will do. It's too warm.

Jim nods. "Better."

Janna nods, too.

Daniel says, "Wear it in good health." He hands me the leggings and shuffles back to bed.

I look at Janna and Jim. "I think I'd prefer to put these on in my room."

Jim grins. "Yeah, probably."

I dress, feeling like I'm playacting, and meet Jim at the caf. We walk down to the pool. Not a water pool, a vehicle pool. There's a cutter unit that looks like it's barely been used, it's not even dirty. I check it to make sure the seals have been broken, but actually it has been used before, so I load it in the back of the yellow floater. Then we load a couple of crates of pre-fab and I climb in the floater with Jim.

"Have you ever been under the ice?" he says.

Sure, I think to myself, I spend all my time under ice, usually up around Macy's. What the hell does he think? New York is a glacier? I don't know what he means 'under the ice.' I don't understand these people when they talk. "I just got here," I say.

"It's not so bad," he says.

Something never to believe, right up there with 'It tastes just like chicken,' is 'It's not so bad.' If it wasn't bad, they wouldn't have to tell me it wasn't bad.

We rumble out into the darkness and I can feel the force of the wind hit me and the floater, when Jim sets the hover he has to head the nose into the wind, but in my suit I'm not cold. If anything I'm a little warm. It's pretty. The sky is black, the land is white. It's so big and empty that it's scary. I wonder if I'm agoraphobic. Of course, I'm a city boy. It's not the space that makes me nervous, it's the absence of human reference. We head off, the nose of the floater about forty-five degrees the left of the direction in which we are actually heading, so we are kind of skidding sideways. I glance back at the station, expecting reassurance, but we scoot over the lip of the big hill down to Lancaster Straight and the station looks smaller and smaller. So I look forward again, which is slightly less unnerving than watching safety recede.

Jim tells me about where we are going. We're heading for Halsey Station, which, when it is finished will be the first of a series of stations that will monitor belukha whales. It's under water in the summer, under the ice in the winter. "Why did you take this job, the chance to study in China?" he says.

"Nobody said anything to me about studying in China," I say.

"That's what the guy before you was out here for," he says. "He said your government wrote it into a hazardous contract, if you renew your contract you get some kind of chance to study in China."

I didn't really read the contract. All right, so you should always read a contract. "I'll have to look," I say. I don't believe it. They wouldn't give somebody a chance to study in China just for spending six months here.

"So why did you come? You don't seem very interested in the great outdoors."

I wonder what I seem like to him. He's a scientist, here because he wants to be, he must get pretty tired of techies who want to do their six months and go home. "It was my third alternate," I say. "I had to take it."

"You mean your government made you come here?"

"Not exactly." I explain about alternatives.

"Were you at all, you know, interested?" he asks. "I mean I know it's not New York, but like you said, it's only for six months and it's a change, you know."

"Yeah," I lie, "I thought it would be interesting. And I thought it would make me study for the engineering exam." He doesn't want to hear how horrible I think this place is, he choose to come here. And I should study for the engineering exam. There isn't much social life here.

"You should check out that education thing," he says. "Kevin only had to work a year and now he's in Guangzhou."

Stay here a year? It would be worth it if I could study in China. But I'm sure that it's more complicated than that, or that the regulations have changed. Madre de Dios, stay here a year?

"There's the station," Jim says. We coast out onto the ice and he points to something that looks like an old-fashioned lighthouse. The ice is run with cracks, long spiderwebs. And as we get closer to the station I can see how the ice has piled up around it. "Shit," he says, "we ought to clear that ice."

The ice has ground against the west side, mounting the side of the tower. We'd need a light-hammer. I mention that.

"There's one in the station," he says, "we have to clear ice every couple of weeks."

We park the floater on the ice and walk across to the station. Without the blow of the floater I can hear the ice groaning all around me. It groans like metal under stress, but there's hectares of it. Wind moan and ice groan, black sky and white blue ice in the dark. We climb slabs of ice to metal rungs set in the side of the tower, and I follow Jim up to the top where he opens a hatch and we see the lit stairs curling down at our feet. He gestures for me to go first and closes the top after us. The wind stops and I realize I've been holding my shoulders tense. They ache. The stairs are a circular metal staircase in a reinforced concrete tower with a ribbon light down the wall, but ugly as it is in here it's better than out there.

Our steps echo as we go down. Underneath is a large space, maybe twenty meters across, with windows for the outer walls. It's bare unfinished concrete floor and ceiling except where someone has started finishing one of the walls in porcelain white. "The actual shell is raconite," Jim says. "We've got this level wired so the lights come on whenever anyone enters but then there are two more levels below us. The middle one isn't as finished as this one, the bottom is labs. I need some help setting up some stuff for a lab, then there's a building protocol you can use to do some work on the place while I run some tests. Ah, the hammer is under stairs, there's only one." He's embarrassed that there's only one, he doesn't want to tell me to do the ice myself.

"Well," I say, "that's what they're paying my inflated salary for."

He grins, relieved. He's a nice guy, big and wooly as a bear. "It won't take you too long," he says. "Just break up the top stuff and be careful not to cut too deep, remember there's water underneath. I'll be on the first level."

"Meishi," I say.

"What?"

"Meishi, you know, 'no problem'," I say.

"Is that Chinese?"

I guess it is, I never thought about it. Everybody says meishi. Except Canadians.

I hoist the hammer, brand-new, just like the cutter, but a little more used, and climb back up the steps with it. When I open the hatch the wind is still going and the ice is still groaning and creaking and my shoulders bunch up again. I close the hatch behind me and wonder if people get accustomed to this. Man is an adaptable animal, I tell myself, you'll get accustomed to this. I sling the hammer across my back with the shoulder strap and climb down. How am I supposed to use a hammer on a substance I have difficulty standing on? Cleats would help. Remember when back at the base to ask someone about ordering some kind of mountain climbing boots. I wrap the contact round my wrist and jack into the hammer. Ice is freaky stuff, it's not like concrete because it's got a weird surface and the density is different. It's hard to judge how much headway I'm making, first I think I've done a lot and then when I look I haven't done anything. Then I really whale and suddenly I've cut the surface too deep and the hammer is skipping all over the place.

Someone who knows what they're doing would finish a lot faster than I do, but in an hour I've cut away a lot of ice. I don't know how close I am to water and that makes me nervous, there are all these cracks on the ice and I'm not sure it's safe, don't people get killed out here? I walk away from the tower out on the groaning ice-I almost think I can feel it move-to the floater and pull the cutter out of the back. I walk farther out, about thirty meters away from the tower and jack into the cutter. I focus the beam as tight as it will go and aim straight down and in no time I've cut a hole straight through the ice to water. One meter before I register a change in density. The ice is about a meter thick. Well, a meter of ice isn't likely to dump me into Lancaster Sound. But if it stress fractures it would shatter spectacularly and I'd hate to be there when it happened.

When we get back to the base I'm going to do some reading about ice.

In the evenings I study engineering, and a letter to the Bureau of Education brings back the information that workers under thirty-five years of age who take hardship jobs for one or more years get preferential treatment when applying for school in China and qualify for loans to help with their education, if needed.

To go to school in China. Chinese citizens can take the entrance exams, and ten percent of the seats are open to overseas Chinese and foreigners by competitive exam. If I could get a B.A. Engineering in China I'd be set. I'd be able to get good work anywhere, in New York, maybe even in China. I could probably get a job and stay in it, I'd be assigned good housing, maybe after a couple of years I could live in Manhattan. Talk about luck, like winning the numbers. I begin to request math texts from the library so I can prep for the entrance exam.

Most days I spend at Halsey Station doing construction while everyone else checks recordings and makes observations. Maggie Smallwood tells me everything is going to happen in the spring, when the belukha and the bowhead mate. She says the Sound is just constant activity then. Even now the lights attract plankton and the plankton attract all sorts of fish. Everyone is nice, everyone is friendly, but distant. They're scientists, they have a mission. I'm a six month techie, and although no one would say it, working class. Muscle rather than brain.

Still I hang around sometimes with a cup of coffee and listen to them talk about what they are doing. When Janna needs someone to label bottles I'm happy to oblige. When Jim's atmosphere suit-excuse me, his ARC-seems to have mic problems, I find the fault in the receiver and use one of the labs microtools to repair it. Daniel can never keep all of the tools he needs at hand, so I hang a toolholder over his lab table, like chefs use to hang pots and pans in a kitchen where they'll always be in reach. I hang a rack over Karin's and rig it so she can raise and lower it so her samples will be out of her way when she needs the workspace. Soon they're asking me to do little things for them and I'm busy all the time.

Then we go back to the base in the dark, and the evening is dark, and we wake up in the morning and it's dark, and since we spend most days under the ice at Halsey the only sunlight I see is the blue glow filtered through a meter of ice. Every couple of weeks I have to hammer the ice free of the tower and usually replace ladder rungs where it's torn them away-I never do get my mountain boots-and although I can't get used to the groan of the ice I look forward to it because I do it at noon, when the sun is above the horizon and the ice is blinding white and I feel surrounded by light. If it's after ten and someone mentions they left something on the floater I'm the first to volunteer to get it.

"Do you miss the sun?" I ask Maggie Smallwood. Maggie looks Chinese to me, but she doesn't act Chinese. She acts Canadian.

She thinks a moment, looking at the black windows. "Yeah, some. But after summer it's nice to have some darkness."

Summer. In July the sun never sets. "Is it warm in the summer?" I ask.

"Sure," she says. "There's grass and flowers and baby caribou. You'll see it. Wait, you won't, will you, you'll be gone in April."

"I don't know," I say, "I have to find out about this school thing in China."

"Great," she says abstractedly, then, "look at that seal!"

Outside the window a seal is coasting past, gray and sleek with a neat head like a cat's, looking in at the lights with it's great, almond eyes. Maggie turns to me, beaming from her round Eskimo face, "Isn't he wonderful?"

I've never seen a live seal before. "Yeah," I say, and then without thinking, "Do they all look so sad?"

She looks at me oddly but doesn't answer.

Early in November we stand on the ice at 11:54 and watch the sunrise with the rest of Borden Station. The edge of the sun's disk flashes above the horizon for less than a minute and then sets. I watch the red sky darken. Tomorrow the sky will redden as if the sun will rise but then darken. This is the evening of a long night. Dawn is in February. The Arctic landscape is beautiful at night.

It just isn't meant for human beings.

Maggie's people have lived here for generations. She says I shouldn't worry about the darkness, but suggests full spectrum light therapy, so once a week I go to the clinic and get thirty minutes of full spectrum light. I feel foolish lying underneath the lights like a sunbather but the doctor explains to me how some people are more sensitive to light changes than others. "Do you experience bouts of depression in January?" she asks.

According to Peter I experience bouts of depression if I miss a subway connection. "Not that I noticed," I say, "but my friends say I'm moody." I smile apologetically.

She smiles back and says, "Why did you come here?" It occurs to me that in less than two months a lot of people have asked me that question.

I study engineering texts under full spectrum lights wearing only my underwear.

I work on construction on the first level and they work in the labs on the third.

So I cope, and people are nice to me, if distant, and it's only a year. It's a great experience, back in New York I'll be able to say, "When I was in the Arctic Circle… " One day Jim says to me, "I've got to go out on the ice, want to come? I could use some help."

I don't particularly want to go, I don't want to stay at Halsey all day. It will be an experience. It will make the time go faster. So we load gear into the floater and take off across the ice. We'll plant some pick-ups either in open water or drive them through the ice and then we'll come back. It will only take the morning.

Morning. It's not going to be morning until February. I keep thinking of it as 'dark in the morning.' I find myself waiting for it to get light. The doctor prattles on about the need for something to focus on, a goal. It seems that the reason the scientists are less likely to have problems with depression is because they have an obsession and that orders their Umwelt, their self-world. We live in the same physical space but our feelings about it make us order it differently. Maggie Smallwood tells me that her ancestors used to be able to draw marvelous maps from memory but that their hunting-grounds were always drawn disproportionately large. That's because in their Umwelt, those were the places where their lives were lived, and everything else was thought of in relationship to them. I think if Maggie had to draw a map, the largest place on it would be the open water where her beloved whales lived. Her whole life is organized around whales. Her lab is where she organizes her data on whales, so in a way, that's where the whales are. If she goes someplace else, she's away from her whales, out of her normal world. She would probably be homesick.

When I look outside the window, I don't see whales, I see dark. This place isn't even in my Umwelt. Skimming across the ice with Jim I look out across the empty land. It has been a full moon for six straight days. It never sets, never rises. Sometimes it's east, sometimes it's north, sometimes west. It's hard to believe we are on earth.

We go farther away from Borden Station than I have ever been. I tell myself it doesn't matter, Jim has done this before, we'll get back. I could walk back across the ice if I had to. I realize that this morning I don't care. I'm too tired of it all to care. I am along for the ride.

As we go Jim explains that the ice we are on is called 'fast ice' because it is shorefast, meaning it's attached to the shore. We'll cross the lead of open water and then we'll be in 'pack ice' which is ice that's floating. Ahead of us the ice changes abruptly from white to black. We come closer, the ice beneath us shading from blue white under the moon to gray. Behind us a long streak of darker gray marks where the floater has crossed, and then we cross to the black ice. Jim shouts, "The lead!" over the sound of the floater. We're over open water. Across the open water I see more ice, rough and tumbled, not like the ice we just came over. Floating free. As we cross I see that between us and those mounds is a flat skirt of ice. Big flat gray plates that have ridden up over the edges of other big flat plates so they overlap. "Nillis ice," Jim explains, "when it does that it's called 'finger-rafting'."

Why?

Jim turns the floater west and we run along the lead for about twenty minutes. He's watching his location on the board and when it satisfies him he cuts the motors and together we manhandle one of the pick-ups-with their pointed noses and tail-fins they look like old-fashioned missiles-and heave it over the side. It disappears into the water, heading straight down to anchor in the bottom and monitor the area for animal life. Jim jams the floater back into forward and makes a wide turn that kicks up the black water and we head back the other way, east. With the full moon hanging above us we can see quite clearly, but it's hard to tell how near or how far things are. I know we came over a kilometer across open water, but the ice shore could be just twenty meters away.

Jim cuts north towards the pack ice, but we run for over twenty minutes before we reach it, then we're on the flat sheets. The floater skims. There's no snow, this far north is a desert, it rarely snows. We ride over a lip of bluish-white ice and then it's like riding rough seas as the floater bounces over the terrain. Jim runs fast but steers carefully, the floater could ram a spire of ice. We rise over a lip-

A stomach lurching drop of about a meter and a half and we are in a lead. I yelp and grab and Jim looks surprised. He turns us sideways in the lead and slows down. After a moment he sees a gap in the pack and we're headed north again. This time we go a little more cautiously.

I do not say anything. Jim does not say anything.

We are on the pack ice when Jim says, "This is close enough. Cut fast, the pack is running east."

I climb out and he hands me the cutter. There's no sensation of movement, the pack feels like solid land. "How fast are we running?" I ask.

"I don't know," he says, "pack ice runs irregularly. Don't worry, the floater will keep us oriented."

I wasn't worrying, but when someone tells me not to worry, then I wonder. I want to cut a well of about a third of a meter, it will take a few minutes. I set the cutter and start working while Jim hauls the pick-up out onto the ice.

I cut through three-and-a-half meters of ice before I reach water, that's pretty far for a cutter because I can't go down with it. My arms are tired from suspending the cutter above the hole. Jim heaves the pick-up into the hole and lets go, we hear it splash below.

"One more," he says, "let's go."

I climb in after him. "Is it in open water?" I ask.

"I don't know," he says.

I can only hope.

Off across pack ice, but slowly because the leads we find close up in front of us. The wind is high and as we watch the narrow leads become gray. I have never seen water freeze as I watch. I am not cold, not in my suit, but I can feel the wind hit me.

Jim is careful, we mount ridges of ice slowly. He calls this 'close pack,' and watches the location on his board. It feels to me as if we are going diagonally and I ask if we are going south. He says no, that the pack veers about thirty degrees off the wind. He skips us over narrow leads, running us fast enough that we don't have time to sink before we hit the other side. Finally, near a lead, he stops.

"Not open water," I say. I don't like cutting through this.

He shakes his head. "Make it quick, we're drifting.

"Could we heave it into the lead?" I ask.

He squints, looks back down at his location on the board. "Yeah," he says, "we could."

I climb out and he passes the pick-up to me, then while I hold the nose and he holds the fins, we set out under the night sky. We have to go slowly, the footing is uneven and we have to climb over boulder sized chunks of ice. The edge of the lead is not even like the bank of a river. The lead is almost a meter below us and the 'edge' is an irregular slope about a meter wide. The lead is gray, nillis ice that gently rises and falls. The ice looks like grease. Because I suggested using the lead rather than cutting, I go down the slope, gingerly, supporting the nose of the pick-up. I wedge my feet against pieces of ice and say, "I've got it." I take the weight of the pick-up, bent awkwardly towards Jim.

I feel as if I have over-balanced, my feet go out from under me, I hit the ice hard enough to knock the wind out of me. Then I am under water. There's no air in my mask, which has shut off to keep the water out, and the suit is not made to insulate against ice water, so I feel the cold. I surface and flail for the edge, Jim is holding on to the ice, and I keep failing to reach far enough to grab the edge.

Get out, my mind is screaming. The slush is thick and grey and it sticks in clumps to my faceplate. I am not thinking that I will get out. Always before, when something happened, I have been afraid I would be injured, that it would be a long time before things would be okay again.

I am thinking, this is serious. I am thinking, I am not going to be okay. I realize, I don't care. Startling thought, that, I don't care. The worst that can happen is dying. The cold makes it hard to move, to swim, and I have half a notion to give in, but I am not sure how. If I give in, if I stop fighting, what do I do, tread water and look at Jim? Stop treading water? I flail and fight and watch myself as if from a great distance. I am trying to get out because it is too embarrassing not to. The truth is, I am not sure how to drown.

"Zhang!" Jim keeps shouting. I finally grab something. I can't get out, can't do more than hold on. For a moment Jim doesn't move, then he scrambles down and grabs my arm. I can't get leverage to get out, he can't find enough purchase to pull me out, but he keeps pulling and sliding, and I keep reaching for something to hold on to, and finally manage to get halfway out. My body is suddenly heavy, the way it feels after being in the water, and Jim helps me get the rest of the way up.

"The lead shifted!" Jim yells, although my mike is working fine and I can hear him clearly. "Are you okay?"

"Fine," I say, still feeling as if I am watching myself. "Where's the pick-up?"

"It's in! Are you wet?"

I'm cold, and I feel coldest around the waist. "No," I say.

"Are you okay?" He says again.

"Yeah," I say, "just cold."

"We better get back to Borden," he says. We make better time going back across the ice than we did carrying the pick-up and climb into the floater. I am curious about this not caring. I am aware that it is not a good thing, but it is a lot better than worrying.

"Damn," Jim says, "that was freaky! The lead shifted, I mean they do that, you read about it happening to Eskimo hunters, but I've never seen it happen. It just moved farther apart, like a goddamn earthquake. I saw you thrown in, just thrown in, wasn't a damn thing you could do about it, and if I hadn't grabbed that chunk of ice, I'd have gone right after you, and we'd never have gotten out!"

Jim talks except when he has to concentrate on the floater. I say, "Yeah," when I need to. I have nothing to say. The lead got wider, that's how I fell in. The lead opened up. It occurs to me it could have as easily closed.

Now that I am out of the water the suit is beginning to keep me warm again. My strange mood lifts suddenly, I am not the watcher anymore, I am Zhang, sitting in a cold ARC suit, wondering what it would have been like to have tried to come up for air and found only ice. My teeth start chattering. I realize I can't go home. I want very badly to go home.

By early December I have stopped studying. I always do. I do not like to study, I always tell myself I should, but then after a few weeks, I stop. Always before, I have slowly gone from studying five nights and going out two, to studying three nights and going out four, to not studying. Always before I have said that if I didn't have any distractions, I would study. Now there is no place to go, but I don't study. I sit at the window and look out at Lancaster Sound. Sometimes I watch the Arctic foxes, trotting along with their short legs nearly a blur of motion, and often after I see the foxes I go to the cafeteria and get a cup of coffee, sit and talk with Janna, or Karin, or Jim. But mostly the landscape is empty except for the slowly unfurling cliffs of the aurora borealis, glowing lavender and pink and pale green above the blue ice and snow. I see my own reflection in the window, so I turn off my lights and sit in the dark. I loose track of time. I discover that it's possible to listen to outside noises, and then the outside comes into my room. The wind is so constant that after awhile I don't hear it anymore, and then there is nothing to hear.

I am not adapting well, I know.

Once in awhile Maggie Smallwood comes to ask me to come watch a rec or a vid. 'Corin is showing the rec he's put together on polar bears,' she says, or, 'It's a vid from the States.'

So I go, and sit. If I can sit on the end I say I am tired and leave early. When Maggie traps me in the middle, then I have to stay to the end.

I am tired. All day when I am working, I want to sleep. I think about going to sleep. But as soon as I get back to my room, I am tired but not sleepy. The clinic sends me notes to come lay under the lights, but when I lay under the lights, there is nothing to do but study, and I can not bear to think of my engineering text, so I stop going.

In my room I think about what I am trying to do. I am twenty-seven. I am thinking of trying to pass an examination to University, so I may go to China and study engineering. Okay. Say I work very hard this winter, I study all the time, I pass the examination. Then I would go to China, where everyone wants to go. Old Mother China, where there is possibility. I would study for four years in China, away from New York, in a foreign place-granted I am Chinese, well I look Chinese, and I speak the language, but I have never been to China. But I do this for two years. Then I have a choice, either try to stay in China, where I can get a good job, maybe become well off. Or come back to New York, where I will be able to get a good job.

All of that work to make a little more money. But I will still be Zhang. I carry myself where ever I go, and it is myself I want to escape from. I hate myself. I hate this place. And I find it is very tiring to carry hate all the time. So I sit and listen to the night on the Arctic Tundra, defeated before I start. And sick to death of all of it.

I remember reading about the first crew at Canalli Base on Mars, how they suffered from depression. I tell myself it's only dealing with an unfamiliar environment. But mostly I sit in my room surrounded by a wind I can't even feel.

Five of us go out to Halsey in the big floater, Jim, Maggie, Janna, Eric and me. I am almost finished with the construction on the first level, but all I can think of is the immense amount of work needed on the second level. I'll be gone before the second level is ever completed.

"Look at that ice," Eric remarks, referring to the ice piling up on the west side of Halsey Station. It is a lot of ice, but I cut Halsey free not too long ago (how long ago was it? Maybe sunset? A month?) I feel the implied criticism. "I'll take care of it," I say, and get out of the floater before anyone else. I go straight for the cutter, and wait for everyone to go downstairs, then back out of the warm light into the night. I start to work on the ice, which will come back again. And next winter, another tech will cut away the ice, and it will grow back. Each year they will cut away the ice, each year it will grow back, and eventually, when they no longer use Halsey station, they will stop cutting away the ice, and it will erode the station away, and then there will be nothing here but the flat plane of ice, moaning with the cold.

And I am here, and it makes no difference. I have built part of this place, and someday it will be gone, so why am I here? I turn my back on Halsey Station and score wide shallow cuts in the ice. I cut Chinese characters, 'Wo zai jar,"I am here. And then I use the cutter to smooth them over until it is smooth as glass, polishing away the traces.

"Zhang?"

Maggie is standing on the tower, lit from underneath by the light. She is faceless behind her face mask, hidden in her ARC, but I know her size and shape, her voice. It infuriates me to see another faceless person in an ARC suit. The Arctic makes people things. I do not answer her, but make abrupt, choppy cuts in the ice.

"What are you doing?"

I think the wind and the stressed ice sounds are answer enough. Then I think, damn it, I want to be in the wind. So putting down the cutter I take off my mask, pull back my hood. The wind is so cold it makes my eyes tear, the air is so cold it hurts to breath, much colder even than going into the water. I open the seals, pull the top off. I don't care if I'm cold. The pain of the cold seems like the right feeling, seems real. I pick up the cutter and make a cut.

Part of me cannot believe what I am doing, but I have had enough, I want them to know I have had enough. "It's all shit!" I shout at Maggie. "This base, the polar bears and whales! None of it matters! We don't frigging well belong here! We are nothing! Nada!" Maybe I am posturing, but here in the wind I do not feel that. I cut through the ice, to the water underneath, a smooth shhhiffffzzz, as the laser hits water and vaporizes it. I start to cut a trench, burning along, but I cannot concentrate, so I throw down the cutter. I am talking, talking, talking, talking, but what I am saying does not seem important. Some of it is English, some of it is Spanish, my mother's language. I am talking to Maggie. I am talking to myself.

I am talking to the ice, and I am saying over and over, "I have lost my frigging mind, do you understand? I have lost my frigging mind. I have lost my frigging mind."

Maggie comes over and takes my arm and says, "Come inside. Come inside."

At first I think, no. But then I realize I am cold, and that I really want to, so I let her pick up my pull-over and the cutter and we go inside. Now she talks and I am quiet. "It's nothing," she says, "it happens in the winter. Come inside, have something hot, have some tea. The Eskimo call it perlerorneq, winter depression, it happens when it gets dark and you're unhappy, but now it's over, you're okay, you'll be okay. I'll make you a cup of tea, very sweet, here put this back on and get warm." To Jim and Janna, "Zhang is tired, I'll take him back, he's not going to work today. Don't worry, he's okay now."

Words wash over me, I don't care. I don't care, except I am so tired that I could weep. I wonder if I am going crazy, but I think that if I am, at least I will go home.

Maggie takes me back, and takes me to my room. She sits with me on my bed and tells me, "Right now, you are just sick of life, perlerorneq, but you'll feel better."

"I'm sorry," I mumble. But I have a feeling now, not anger. Underneath my tiredness I feel grateful. "Thank you," I say.

"Go to sleep," she says.

I sleep for sixteen hours, through the day and the next night. And when I meet everyone the next morning for breakfast, I am embarrassed, and they are all kind. I cannot look at Maggie Smallwood, so I don't.

Janna says, "It's hard for all of us, but for you, well, you didn't even want to be here."

"I don't know what happened to me," I say, penitent and confused. I go to work, and they keep me working on the third level, close to them, and they talk to me often.

Maggie talks to me, matter-of-fact. "When they had trouble with depression in space, they asked the Inuit Eskimo and the Greenland Eskimo about perlerorneq. It's like a circuit breaker. Now the Eskimo train research crews in space ways to deal with it. I learned about it in school, in my Native Studies course."

My unhappiness is still there, but it is gray, not black. I go back to the full spectrum lights, I study a little. Janna begins to teach me calculus on Monday and Wednesday nights, to keep me studying. I have taken calculus, and she is good at explaining, so it is easy. I do not talk much to Maggie, except to say hello. I am ashamed of my behavior towards her, but what is there to say?

So December passes. Christmas, a package from Peter, sweaters in the most outrageous styles, with little capes; all the rage, he writes. I give one to Karin. We exchange gifts, sing songs. It's not so bad.

We are expecting sunrise at 12:14 p.m. on February 2. In January I study and wait through the days. I have the feeling that I have felt the worst and now it will be all right. I decide to renew my contract.

"Don't worry," Janna tells me, "You'll love the summer, a sun worshiper like you. Explorers used to wear felt blindfolds so they could escape the sunlight to sleep."

On January 29 we are studying in the late morning. Eric is running an experiment at Halsey from 8:00 p.m. until almost 3:00 a.m. and he needs a tech, so I won't go out to Halsey until later. Each day now there is a false dawn. The sky gets rosy and the sun threatens to rise, the stars paling in the south, but it doesn't quite come up. Still, I watch. Only four more days.

Janna is checking my figures, I am watching the horizon. Dawn seems so close, so possible. The sky is the pearlescent white of dawn, shading to pink, lavender, indigo, and then somewhere above, to black. The ice is the color of the sky.

And then, four days early, I see the edge of the sun, blinding, above the horizon. "Janna!"

She looks up and her eyes widen and then crinkle with delight. "Oh, Zhang, wonderful."

It's morning. I smile and smile.

"It's not a real sunrise," Janna explains, "It's refraction. The earth's atmosphere bending light rays. The sun is still five degrees below the horizon."

We sit in silence and watch the sun rise and then dip. In minutes it is over.

I expect to feel the weight of the night again, but no, the sunrise is enough. I can wait. I can study, I can pass the exam. And the second night is not so bad, never as bad as the first.

I have survived. And I think, finally, I am adapting.