Desire Provoked

Part Six

WORDS for the sea:

In Old English the sea is called “swan road” or “whale road,” the pouting or billowy track. A ship is called a wave-traverser (yð1ida) or simply sea-wood.

A flight to London, a journey by car to northern England, past Penrith and Glassonby, then into the country where Adams visits Long Meg and her Daughters, a set of ancient stones in an uneven field of gravel and broom. Legends say that Long Meg, the largest rock, was a witch, and the surrounding fragments her coven. In the days of the Celts, the witches met on this spot until Michael Scot, a Scottish wizard, turned them into stone. If the rocks are chipped or scratched, it is said, they bleed. Adams approaches Long Meg. He can smell the salt in the air, the powerful scent of the broom. Dust-spots fly off the rock and shower his coat in the breeze. He cannot imagine stones — any stone, not even a stone at the bottom of the sea — moving. Surely they drop from the sky and remain where their great weight has placed them.

North from England. In late summer Svalbard is effectively cut off from the rest of the world. The North Atlantic freezes over in winds forecasting autumn, lean chunks of ice imperil ships, commercial air flights are canceled. Only Braathen’s SAFE lands on Spitsbergen, the largest island of the Svalbard group, on a permafrost landing strip in Advent-dalen, the largest outpost. Comtex, however, has made its own arrangements. In Edinburgh, along with a small crew of geologists and engineers, Adams boards a four-hundred-ton, one-hundred-and-fifty-foot square-rigger named Desire Provoked after a point in Hudson Bay.

A shark’s tail hangs from the jibboom, a voluptuous wooden maiden leads the ship into the cold Atlantic spray.

Adams stores his pack in a small cabin belowdeck. The hull is new — freshly painted metal. The cabin smells of varnish. Wooden bunk, blanket, and a quilt. A small hand mirror fastened to the wall.

One of the crew members gives the scientists a tour belowdecks. “We’ve recently renovated the entire ship,” he says. “It was originally built in England around the turn of the century and traded mainly in sugar, rum, and mahogany. Then a Swedish exporting firm bought it, reduced it to a barkentine, and put an engine in. After the Second World War, it kicked around the Mediterranean for a while before winding up in a Greek scrapyard. Then, in ‘79, Comtex purchased and restored it.”

He shows them the galley, the heads, and the engine room. Oil and steam. Standing water. Fresh paint. Already Adams feels cold.

The sixteenth century saw the first sea charts printed on paper. On board Desire Provoked, Adams discovers that paper doesn’t work at sea. Documents he has packed soon become soft and moist. On deck, maps shred in his hands or become so wet with spray that the ink begins to run. The crew’s maps, printed on vellum, still tear. The pilot depends for the most part on the compass and electronic equipment.

In his bunk, jostled softly against the hull, Adams realizes he’s never known the past. He knows its maps, but they’re only paper, bound in books or displayed in museums. The seamen’s actual charts must have been destroyed at sea or reduced to illegibility. Maps printed for the public were based on explorers’ notes, or on hearsay. The most accurate information was lost. In this sense the past has broken free, like ice from a glacier, making its way over distance.

In all there are twenty-three scientists aboard Desire Provoked: eleven geologists, eight engineers, one landman, two marine biologists, and Adams. He has touched base with only a handful of his colleagues. The geologists he likes — they’re openly curious about their surroundings. Engineers he finds aloof. An exception is Than Nguyen, a drilling engineer from South Vietnam on his first international assignment. Adams enjoys filling him in on the do’s and don’t’s of fieldwork.

The only other person who especially interests him is a young geologist named Carol Richardson, a recent graduate of the University of Texas. As the only woman aboard, she receives much attention from her colleagues and it’s hard to get a private moment with her.

After dinner one evening, Adams finds her alone on deck. She is striking, Candice Bergen with dark hair. Eyes that seem to wander on their own to the sides of her face, slightly out of focus. This has an unsettling effect, but the tension in her brow, when she concentrates and brings her vision back into line, is disarming. She appears angry and confused, then her face relaxes, her forehead pale and even. She stands at a distance from Adams, arms withdrawn, defensive.

“Do you have a cigarette?”

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t smoke,” Adams says.

“I quit two years ago, but I’ve wanted one ever since coming aboard.”

“Nervous?”

“Fidgety. The cabins are so small. I’m used to lots of space — spreading my stuff out all over the place. You’re the cartographer?”

“Yes.”

“I have a terrible memory for faces, but I remember you from the briefing.” She points to her eyes. “Plus I can’t wear glasses out here. The spray.”

“Ever been north?”

“Never strayed far from Texas. Until now.”

“I was in Alaska in the summer of ‘67. People on Svalbard consider that the tropics.”

Carol laughs. “I’m intrigued by what I’ve read of the island. I must say I never bargained for work like this.”

“More comfortable in an office?”

“I figured I’d go into academics, like the rest of my family.”

“What changed your mind?”

“No money in thought. Besides, when it comes to hiring, colleges are even more sexist than the private sector. It’s the tenure system. Bunch of cavemen in the department at UT.”

He wonders if in her view he’s a caveman, wrapped tightly in his parka, trying to imagine her without a heavy coat. She smiles. They talk for a few minutes more before, chilled by a sudden squall, walking down the stairs of the companionway together.

A cat’s mewling wakes Adams in the middle of the night. The sea is calm. He gets up, pulls on his pants, carefully makes his way down the narrow metal walkway between quarters in the hold. The officers are asleep. He climbs the metal stairs. No movement on deck. The canvas sails whip like towels in the wind. Adams’ throat is dry. He licks his lips, swallows. Salt in his nose, his mouth. His body is being reduced to its essentials.

He stands beneath the mizzenmast, listening to the sea. Two sailors on watch smoke cigarettes in the curve of the bow. Adams is learning the ship: bowsprit, foc’sle, foremast. Poop deck at the rear. The guests’ quarters are located in the hold, below the pumps.

At night, when a gale rises unexpectedly, Adams hears the cry “Aloft and stow!” The canvas, trapping too much wind, must be bound with gaskets; if not, the highest sails would blow away.

Tonight all is quiet except for the cat sounds. Adams returns down the companionway, pauses by the galley. Pots and pans rattle, but don’t account for the noise. Pumps hiss, otherwise the hold is silent. He returns to his cabin, lights the kerosene lamp beside his bunk, picks up The Travels of Amerigo Vespucci, and reads.

Ancient visions of the other world (prior to Dante’s cosmography) depicted the mysterious regions as an island or a group of islands reached by crossing a water barrier. In these accounts the ocean often is dense with swords.

The only image of the Underworld Adams remembers from college is the punishment of Tantalus: Having angered the gods, he was placed in cool water up to his neck. Luscious grapes hung above his head. When he bent to drink, the water turned to dust. When he stretched his tongue for the grapes, they rose out of reach. Perhaps spatial expressions such as “over my head” and “I’ve had it up to here” spring from this. “Underworld” itself is a spatial expression, remarkably resonant even today. Ways of seeing, understanding. He remembers, as a child, questioning his ability to see. “Can’t you see I’ve got a headache?” his mother said. He asked her what the headaches did. “They make the whole world red.” He didn’t see until the afternoon he noticed a melted red candle on the kitchen table. Wax had dripped down the golden stem of the holder onto the tabletop glass. He imagined a candle burning inside his mother’s head.

One afternoon, playing in back of the house, Adams heard a sputtering in the sky, getting louder. A small airplane came into view just above the tree line, climbed, then fell again, close to the ground. Adams ran inside to tell his mother. She was lying in the bedroom with the blinds drawn, a cool rag over her eyes. She told him to hush, she had a splitting migraine. He rushed to the window, parted the blinds. “There’s nothing out there,” she told him. “Now leave the blinds alone.”

The plane rolled wildly out of control, trailing a plume of smoke. Adams ran outside and watched from the back porch as it dipped, its right wing just missing the water tower at the end of the block. There was a flash of light, a scattering of wood in the air. Adams ran down the block past a gathering crowd. The plane had come apart above the neighborhood and was lying out of sight. A gaping hole in the roof of a nearby house. Adams shoved his way past spectators at the front door, followed a group of men to the bathroom. Lying in the tub, a man in a crumpled suit, arms and legs at impossible angles. A thin line of water leaked from the faucet. Washcloths covered the floor.

The man’s head resembled a melted red candle.

Mama’s migraine, Adams thought, then someone whisked him out of the room. “There’s nothing to see, nothing to see,” a man said, holding people back.

He asks his colleagues at breakfast if they happened to hear a cat in the night. They shake their heads. One young geologist says his bunk is right below the pumps. “Can’t hear a thing.”

“You hear lots of funny noises at sea,” says Harry Schock, the senior geologist. “The jibboom creaks, sails tear, bolts rattle. It doesn’t mean anything. You get used to them. You’ll see.”

A few nights later, after dinner, Adams strolls the deck. The breeze gets cooler each evening; the air becomes thinner.

Human beings were not made to live in this environment. Though he’s glad of the assignment, sometimes he misses the quiet of his kitchen.

He wonders if the kids will forget him. For the first time since leaving the States, he hopes the trip is brief.

He’ll bring them something special. A piece of the North Pole. Better yet, he’ll make them a map, the way he used to do when they were small. Brick roads, waterfalls, mountains. The princess who slept on the pea, Brer Rabbit, the three little pigs.

This time he’ll make a magical map of the north with mythical beings like Gog and Magog roaming the Ural Mountains, waiting to break loose and storm through Europe, eating everyone in sight. He returns to his cabin, unrolls a sheet of paper. With a grease pencil he marks the center of the page longitude seventy-five degrees, latitude fifteen degrees north, the approximate location of Desire Provoked.

In swirling script at the bottom of the page he warns that vipers inhabit the sea: “Sailor Beware: They Will Shake a Ship to its Rafters Like a Happy Child Dancing in His Bones.”

Carol says, “My father used to take the family on vacations through Texas and New Mexico. He’d point out the geological features: ‘Mount Capulin, that’s a volcano. See how the land here is flat and smooth? Lava has evened it out.’ Or, ‘This is the Permian Basin — it used to be under water.’ His explanations were far more interesting than the places we stayed.”

Adams nods. They’ve taken roast beef from the galley and climbed up on deck with it. Already the air has chilled the meat.

“I guess what he taught me,” Carol says, “is that knowing how something works doesn’t diminish its beauty. From a distance a mountain is gorgeous, right, then you get up close and it’s just a bunch of rocks. But then if you look at the rocks, the mountain seems more amazing than ever. The way the mica shines or the sulfur rubs off on your hands.”

“I just like to know where everything is,” Adams says. “In case I need it.” Carol laughs. “I remember seeing a book in the library as a child. I never read it, but the title stayed with me. It was called You Must Know Everything.”

“Exactly,” Carol says, balancing her plate on the ship’s copper rail. “That’s how I felt, growing up. And I love what I’m doing now, but sometimes I wonder if I’d followed other options…”

“It’s good that you wonder.”

She smiles. Adams feels attractive.

“Well, I can’t change it,” she says, inadvertently brushing his sleeve. “There are lots of things — and lots of people — I’d like to get to know.”

On his map for the kids Adams draws an Island of Beautiful Women.

Than invites Adams to his cabin. Iťs amazing what he’s done with the space. Books stacked neatly in corners. Photographs of his family. An old Vietnamese flag taped to the wall. The flag is gold, with three thin red stripes running parallel through the center. Circular stains, as though someone had set a can of varnish on it, appear in one of the corners.

Than was trained at UCLA. His family remained in Saigon until the end of the war, he says, when they escaped with the last Americans.

“What was Saigon like at the end,” Adams asks.

“For a long time it wasn’t Saigon. It was a French city — like paintings of Paris, you know? Wide boulevards in the center of town, security apartments for the French civil servants. My father said a French laborer could earn more money in Saigon than a Vietnamese merchant. In school the courses we took were based on the classical French tradition. Languages and literature.” He laughs. “My family complained I was getting an elitist education that wouldn’t help me in my own country. When Ho Chi Minh ran the French out of the northern provinces, my father, who was not a Communist, cheered.

“Anyway, Saigon became an American city, very flashy and noisy. Money changing hands. The army tried to clean it up so it would look prosperous and democratic on the news. The cameras never showed the edge of the city where American products were dumped.”

“I remember wondering before they changed the city’s name if I was going to have to take Saigon off the map.”

Than nods. He lights a kerosene lamp, offers Adams a cup of tea. “The first thing the American military did was to lay a new set of coordinates on the country, ignoring the old boundaries. Aggression is not always physical.” He sits on his bunk. “Sometimes it takes place in the imagination. The West forced values on Vietnam that had no place in its culture. For example, here you divide the mind into conscious and unconscious. All very rational. In the East it’s generally believed that the mind is unknowable, that its processes are more intuitive than rational.”

“How did you get interested in science?”

“Naturally, many of us do value rational thought.”

“Knowledge is comforting,” Adams says.

Than agrees. “But on the most basic issues, I think education fails.”

From A.D. 300 to 500 pilgrimages were the fashion in western Europe, from Britain to the Orient and points in between. They were not scientists, these solitary travelers on their way to the Holy Land. The first geographical documents in Europe, however, grew out of these pilgrimages. Early records are scanty, but they do mention a Gallic matron who in A.D. 31 walked across Europe to the Holy Land and returned with a shell filled with the blood of John the Baptist, murdered that year by Herod Antipas.

The first authentic guidebook dates from A.D. 330: the Itinerary from Bourdeaux to Jerusalem, a route to the Holy Land via southern Europe. Though mapless, it mentions cities and towns along the way, with listings of hotels and inns. The unknown author traveled on donkeys and records that the distance from Bour-deaux to Constantinople is 2,221 miles, with 112 stops and 230 changes of animals.

There are no cats aboard Desire Provoked, yet Adams is awakened by a whine. He’s hot and muggy under the covers. The ship rocks. His left hand, limp with sleep, thumps the metal wall above his head. He listens. Again, as though the hull were being sheared.

Is there a psychological trigger for these sounds? Does the fact that he misses Toby and Deidre, for example, have a bearing on what he hears, the way latitude affects the location of a city on a map? A reasonable explanation, but the kids never had cats, unless you count the stray…

The hold is quiet. He lies awake for a while, remembering the children’s faces, then turns to the wall and sleeps.

From the deck of Desire Provoked Adams spots the first piece of ice in the sea. A small fragment, about the size of a Victorian chest of drawers.

He shivers. Long johns, two cotton shirts, a pull-over sweater, a jacket, a parka, and still he is cold. Fog hits the sails, spreading them like a bellows. They are the color of biscuits. He hunkers down against the bow. He has been reading accounts of Arctic explorers. Pytheas from Massilia — a contemporary of Aristotle’s — wrote that six days north of Ireland was an island named Thule, near the frozen sea. From there northward, he reported, there was no longer a distinction between earth, air, and sea, but a strange combination of all three, a gelatinous suspension similar to a jellyfish, which made navigation, not to mention human life, impossible.

Carol taps on his door, offers him a cup of coffee. He invites her to have a seat on his bunk, lights the kerosene lamp. She picks through the sketches he has made for his kids.

“Let me show you,” he says. He’s fashioned a square mat of old palm fronds found in the ship’s storage room. Placing his fingers on the edge of the mat, he wiggles the yellow fronds. They appear to ripple. “A living map,” he says. “Wave movement.” He drops tiny seashells onto the mat. “These are the islands.”

“It’s wonderful,” Carol says. “And these?”

“Sketches for another map — a mythical guide to the north.”

“They’re delightful. Do you mind?” She goes through the stack. Watching her long fingers shuffle paper reminds Adams of von Frisch’s famous experiments with honeybees in 1954. The scouts would locate a pollen source and then report, dancing, to the hive. The shape of the dance indicated the distance of the pollen source from the hive. A circular dance meant “nearby,” a tail-wagging dance meant “far.”

Adams is oddly touched that bees should have a spatial sense. Carol’s dancing fingers are oddly touching, too. He sits nearer, brushing her hip.

The ocean at night breaks white and black. On deck a forgotten coat, stiff with salt, raises an arm to him as he approaches the bow. He’s far from the flat country that made him — far from himself in sleepless longing for his kids. He must want to stand here tonight, turning colder with each new rush of spray.

The rigging thunders with the sails like horses rocking in their stalls. He must want to hear this. He remembers accompanying his father to a neighbor’s ranch when he was ten or eleven years old. Cowboys, drunk, hugging each other, a mare who bit herself in the back giving birth. Sometimes he watched the neighbors’ wives haul baskets of laundry out under the webworms’ silk. The women cracked pecans in the grass and strung their clothes between the trees. Peaches barely made it through each burning spring; his father washed his father with a sponge.

Tonight it’s all one sound: water and wind, memory and breath. He would like to say some of this to Carol Richardson. Because of his desire for her. He would like to tell her about intimacy and maps, the direction of the hands: He’s put the old man to bed now, Carol. His father’s whiskers float in a bowl of water and he looks at me, thinking something I can’t name. Outside, a foal is trying to stand.

He pulls a practice pad from his bag, takes out his sticks, and does an extended roll. He had thought life in the cold would be slow. Instead each moment is crisp, the days divided into abrupt little scenes. He tries to imagine the island of ice. Like the ocean, it is blank, ever-changing — defined for him only in texts, where words and lines can guide his eye.

On a rotating basis, members of the crew are allowed to use the communications equipment for personal business.

“How are you, honey?”

There is a moment’s delay and a slight echo of his own voice before Deidre finally answers, “I’m hungry.”

“Well, tell Mommy to fix you a sandwich.” “I did already.” “Do you miss me?”

“Yes. Come home and watch me dance.”

“I will soon. I love you.”

Toby says “Hi.”

“How’s school,” Adams asks.

“Fine.”

“You taking care of your sister?”

“I’m trying not to bug her.”

“I’m going to bring you something special.”

“Great.”

Pamela comes on the line. “Take care of yourself, Sam.”

“I will. Anything you need?”

“A straitjacket for Toby.” She laughs. “Otherwise everything’s smooth.”

“I’ll call again as soon as I can. They don’t give us much time on this thing.” (Conversations must be as brief as possible, and messages must be truthful, according to the manual.)

Adams overhears Carol talking to a young man in Austin, Texas. “Remember the Willie Nelson concert when you took off your shirt?”

He wishes he knew guitar. It’s hard to play Willie Nelson on a practice pad.

“Have you heard noises at night?” They are sitting on Carol’s bunk.

“I sleep like a baby at sea. What kind of noises?”

“Like cats, close to the hull. But I can’t locate them.”

“Maybe your bunk’s near a stress point.” She lowers the kerosene lamp.

“Tell me about your friend in Austin.”

Carol lies back on the bunk. “We lived together for a while. His name is Jack,‘ she says. “Neither one of us wanted to settle down, really. We agreed to see other people, he moved out.”

“And?”

“I don’t know.” She sits up on one elbow. “I’m jealous of the women he meets. And the men I’ve gone out with may as well have died in a war or something. I think, sometimes, a whole generation of American men has been ruined. They say the first World War wiped out every English boy between seventeen and thirty — well, that’s how it feels. Like nuns have been sending brain waves out to all the men in the country, fucking them up forever.”

“What’s wrong with them? Us?”

“You’re always running. I swear, the business world is full of these asexual men living by the clock, putting all their energy into contracts and torts and things. I mean, careers are important and all, but there’s an inordinate number of guys out there whose lives are nothing but careers. And I think a lot of men are turning gay because they’re fucked up about women.”

“You’re not serious.”

Carol shrugs. “Something’s going on. They couldn’t handle Women’s Lib or Vietnam or something. American men are just wimps.”

“Was Jack a wimp?”

“He couldn’t make a commitment. But then neither could I, I’m not being fair. It’s just that … my feelings are hurt.” Adams rubs her neck. “I feel rejected when I want to feel enjoyed.”

Adams smooths her dark hair (she is fragrant), holds his lips against her temple. “I’m over forty,” he says. “I’m fucked up, but maybe in different ways than you’re used to.”

Carol smiles. He holds her breast. “Not so hard,” she whispers. They rock with the motion of the ship. She has opened the port above her bunk and soon their hair is glistening with salt spray.

Carol’s hips are narrow — he feels that he will break her. “It’s okay,” she says, pulling him closer against her. She wets the tip of a finger and rubs his nipple. Her touch is so light he can barely feel it, yet he is tingling in his shoulder, all the way down to his elbow, where a pool of sensation has him frozen. They are awkward with each other, out of synch. He begins to think of Pamela, Jill … but Carol is a surprising lover. She becomes daring, excited when he least expects it, gripping the base of his neck, pulling him down. Before they are through, she has brought him back to her.

He is twelve years Carol’s senior, Mesozoic to her Paleozoic, Cretaceous, reptilian, seed-bearing, of relatively short duration, whereas she is Carboniferous, amphibian, seaweed and spore, full of new life testing its legs. If they grow together they will never be together. Her Shepherd Kings will just be setting up shop in northern Egypt while his Joan of Arc is being burned at the stake. In the night she reaches for him with affection and assurance.

Icebergs: yellow mist, yellow ocean. The wooden rigging of Desire Provoked looks yellow in the fog. Adams sips hot yellow tea, leans against the railing. A giant slab of ice breaks the mist, water lapping its base. To the port side another slab, then another, like one-story office buildings. Their movements are abrupt, broken by the sea. Quietly Desire Provoked slides past them, its sails lax and yellow.

When Adams and Carol make love, they stroke each other carefully. Their hands are rough from handling rope. Twice a day they are asked to assist the regular crew in raising and lowering sails. The ropes are smooth and white, made of polyester fibers, but burn when tugged through the hand. Gloves don’t help much. To keep the ropes from chafing, the crew has wrapped them in pieces of leather or split pieces of garden hose.

Adams has learned the eight essential knots that every seaman needs: the figure eight, the square knot, the sheet bend, the bowline, the clove hitch, the doublehalf hitch, the fisherman’s hitch, and the rolling hitch. In the evenings, when the wind is steady, Adams’ task is to tie the jib sheets to the clew, accelerating ship’s speed. Adams gazes at the sails. They are beautiful white surfaces, curved with the wind. He remembers Deidre sticking her arm out the car window (a habit he tried to break). When she held her palm flat, her arm was forced straight back, but when she cupped her hand, she felt less stress. Desire Provokeďs sails work on the same principle. He imagines maps painted on the canvas, vivid colors pointing home.

“Magnetic north is located at about seventy-six degrees north, a hundred and one degrees west,” the helmsman explains. “It’s not the same as true north, which lies almost directly beneath the polestar, so we’ve got to make adjustments. I prefer old-fashioned potato navigation myself. You toss the potatoes ahead of the ship as you go. When you don’t hear a splash, you turn the son-of-a-bitch fast.”

One of the engineers manages to collect small sections of an iceberg as Desire Provoked, in still waters, floats by. Adams takes a piece about the size of a golf ball, and with bright red colors draws on it the petals of a flower. After supper he presents it to Carol. She holds it in her palm, and slowly they watch the flower melt.

In 1613 William Baffin piloted one of seven ships fitted out by the Muscovy Trading Company, and traveled to Spitsbergen to fish and whale.

From Baffin’s journal: “Upon this land there be manie white beares, graie foxes, and great plentie of deare; and also white partridges, and great store of white fowle, wilde geese, sea pigeons … and divers others, whereof some are unworthy of naming as taste-ing. The land also doth yield much drift wood, whales finnes … and some times unicorn homes.”

Adams sets the journal down. He shivers, lights the kerosene lamp, pulls on his parka. He can smell his breath. Fumes from the lamp warm his throat.

He picks up the journal again: “Theise things the sea casteth forth upon the shoare, to supplie unreasonable creatures on the fruitless land, the country being altogether destitute of necessaries wherewithal a man might be preserved in time of winter.”

Something’s tearing the hull. He gets up, explores the hold, but cannot locate the noise. It seems general, throughout the area belowdecks. The following morning, when he reports to the ship’s skipper, he’s given the standard line: “You’ll get used to the noises at sea.”

“Here is a book you might enjoy,” Than tells Adams. They are sitting in Than’s cabin, sipping tea.

Adams picks up the book. The Philosophy of Hegel. He thinks of Jurgen and laughs. “Why?” he says.

“For Hegel, Reason is the generating principle of the universe. A philosophy compatible with your thoughts.”

“Maybe.” Adams smiles.

“In Vietnam men sometimes hold hands in public — it’s part of friendship, an accepted custom. Americans can never get used to that. It unsettles them. This book.” He taps Hegel. “Affected me the same way. My introduction to the West.”

Adams laughs. “If you’re going to practice science here, Than, you’ll have to adopt a Western bias. You’ll have to trust objective methods.”

“I do. But there are problems with that.”

“Like what?”

He thinks for a moment. “Let’s say that you and I are walking down a street and we see — what? A television antenna on a building, all right? How tall is it? From a distance of two kilometers it appears to have one height. If we move closer, it appears to be taller.”

“So we measure it.”

“With a notched tape, standing next to it. Is that an accurate measure?”

“I see what you’re saying,” Adams interrupts. “What gives the tape authority?”

“Exactly. Our standards are someone’s invention. How tall is the antenna? One meter. What is one meter? The length of this tape. What is the length of this tape? The height of the antenna.”

“But we agree on the standards.”

“Still, they exclude a wide range of perceptions. We know our own knowing, that’s all. Interpretation is all we have.”

Adams shakes his head. “I interpret from the growling in my stomach that I’d rather eat than talk.”

Than laughs. “It’s getting late, isn’t it?”

They rise. “There’s something about the fog and the cold,” Adams says. “Turns you inward.”

“Where you find the center.”

Sea stories: after supper several members of the crew leave the galley, walk up the companionway stairs, and stand on the poop deck, smoking. “Sailing alone does funny things to a man,” says one. “I tried it once. Eight days out to sea, I heard voices saying, ‘Go back to land.’”

“You know the story of Joshua Slocum, don’t you?”

The crewmen nod.

“We don’t,” Carol says.

“Slocum was a down-and-out sail captain, couldn’t find no work ‘cause the steamer’s so popular. He sets out on an old oyster sloop named Spray, aimin’ to be the first man to sail around the world by himself.”

“He done it, too,” says the first speaker.

“Yeah, but three days out to sea he got the cramps. He’d been eatin’ plums and cheese. So he goes below, sits there sick at his stomach, and finally falls asleep. When he wakes up, he can feel 01’ Spray heaving into the wind. He crawls up top and there’s an old man with a red cap at the helm. He says he’s the captain of the Pinta and he’s come to guide the ship. Then he lays into Slocum for mixing plum with cheese. ‘White cheese is never safe unless you know where it comes from,’ he says. Slocum faints again, and the next day he sees he’s still on course. To the end of his life he claimed what he saw was real. ‘I’s grateful to the old pilot,’ he said, ‘but I wondered why the hell he didn’t take in the jib.’”

After two weeks at sea, Adams has become a meteorologist of sorts. Though the ship receives broadcasts from the United States National Weather Service, he prefers to make his own predictions. He listens to weather broadcasts on the AM band, sketches maps from day to day, noting cold fronts, warm fronts, high and low pressure systems, wind direction, and tern-perature changes. Using this data, combined with fog readings, Adams has learned to spot weather trends and is quite proud of himself, though the crew laughs at his enthusiasm.

He is particularly good at predicting winds. At an altitude of three thousand feet, wind direction parallels the prevailing weather system, and on the ocean the wind is two thirds the velocity of high-altitude currents.

Adams walks out on deck, says casually but confidently, “Wind’s going to pick up tonight.”

The sailors bundle up and laugh.

After supper one evening (green beans, roast beef, banana pudding), Adams checks his charts, predicts high winds. That night he is awakened by cats screaming. Shortly afterwards, “Aloft and stow!” He is thrown violently against the hull. He tries to stand, cannot. People yelling from their quarters. Finally he makes it to the door. The crew is running in the hold, water pouring down the companionway. He cannot get his balance. The captain announces that Desire Provoked has hit gale force winds (isn’t it the other way around, Adams wonders). Everyone is ordered to remain belowdecks until further notice. Carol crawls out of her cabin. She huddles with Adams at one end of the hold. She’s sick. Adams grips her waist as she coughs and spits. Than brings her a towel from his cabin.

The storm continues through the night. The following morning, calm water. Desire Provoked sails limply, tattered, tilted at an angle. The compass is shattered; the Loran-C receiver is out.

The pilot tells the captain they’re off course.

“How much?”

“It’ll take a while to determine our position. Without the Loran it’s largely guesswork. The RDF’s still working — ”

“We’re too far out to receive signals.”

Desire Provoked drifts for a day and a half. Heavy fog. On the second day an object appears on the horizon. With their instruments out, the crew cannot determine their distance from it. Adams knows that if he can figure the object’s height, and his own height above water, he can calculate the range of visibility between it and him. Using a hand-held compass and a divider, he estimates the object’s height.

He determines the height of his eye above water, estimates his own range of visibility. Then he adds the two results to determine the approximate distance between the object and the ship. Hastily he sketches a Circle of Position chart (where every object on its circumference is equidistant from the center of the circle). With a sextant he measures vertical angles, smooths his drawing compass across the chart.

He points to a spot in the ship’s atlas. “We’re here. Not far from where we were.”

Studying the atlas, he presumes the object to be a lighthouse on the coast of Bear Island. He thumbs through the Light List. The Bear Island lighthouse has a Fixed and Flashing light, red to green.

“That would explain why we’ve seen no light,” says the captain. “In bad weather, red and green are harder to see than white.”

Adams also discovers in the Light List that the tower contains a radio beacon. He switches on the RDF and receives a signal. Desire Provoked is, indeed, off the southwest coast of Bear Island, another day from Svalbard.

“Very impressive,” Than says.

Adams laughs. “We agreed there’s no true standard of measurement.”

“In a manner of speaking. But you did determine our position.”

“Yes.”

“Logical. Practical.”

“You won’t mind, then, if I learn what I can?” Adams smiles.

“No, no. But be careful.”

“Too much reading makes you crazy?”

Than heats a cup of tea. “In 1967, where I lived, it was impossible not to find on certain country roads American mines in the shape of dogshit. It took very clever minds to disguise the bombs, but they failed to realize that there were no dogs in the country. Napalm had driven them away, so the mines fooled no one. All that learning, technology, and effort, and it was in the end exactly what it looked like.”

From the preliminary information packet Adams received on boarding Desire Provoked: “Svalbard belongs to the Kingdom of Norway. A governor (sysselman) presides over its domestic interests. In December 1975 the total population of Svalbard was 3,431: 1,177 Norwegians and 2,254 Russians, concentrated on Spitsbergen Island.

“On the west coast of Spitsbergen, the temperature rarely drops below — 30 degrees centigrade, and in summer rarely exceeds +10 degrees centigrade.”

Harry Schock, the senior geologist, calls a meeting of all scientists aboard ship. They gather in a tiny drawing room near the galley. “All right, listen up,” he says. “Before we get to Svalbard, you need to know some things. There’s a lot of tension between Norway and the Soviet Union. It started in ‘61 when Norway granted American Caltex Oil two hundred prospecting claims based on geological indications, maps, aerial photographs, the works. In ‘63 Arktikugol, a Russian oil company, applied for a claim. They had the same type of evidence, but Norway turned them down. Arktikugol filed a complaint and finally the Department of Industry granted the claim. Otherwise they’d be violating Svalbard’s principle of equal treatment.”

Before leaving the United States, Adams had requested through a Comtex spokesman oblique and vertical photographs of the Svalbard archipelago. He was told that the Norwegian Polar Institute, in the interests of fair play, no longer made aerial photographs available to foreign commercial interests. His job cannot begin before he sets foot on Spitsbergen.

Comtex wants him to concentrate on Svalbard’s continental shelf: to explore it with the geologists and prepare contour charts. There are political problems with this, too. At times Norway opens the shelf to commercial exploitation; then, without warning or explanation, the shelf is declared off-limits.

Adams’ latest information gives him the go-ahead, though he’s warned that tension is high on the island.

The Norwegians feel undercompensated, and the Russians, who outnumber every other group on the island, do not welcome Comtex.

In two and a half weeks at sea, Adams has hardly had time to think of home. In private moments, working on his map, he has wondered if the kids are eating junk food, if they’re getting enough sleep. Is Pamela bringing strangers home to bed? He has the sense that his responsibilities are on hold, waiting for him to return.

He sits on his bunk, unrolls the children’s map, weights one corner with Hegel, and sketches the Island of Reason, surrounded by mist.

Desire Provoked is scheduled to dock at the southern tip of Spitsbergen Island. From there Adams and the others will fly inland. At the airfield, American, Norwegian, and Soviet officials closely monitor one another’s activities. In addition, Soviet scientific expeditions are allowed to move freely throughout the archipelago; frequently, says Harry Schock, these expeditions are reconnaissance activities, attempts to inspect other nations’ progress in exploring the islands. The Soviets make no secret of their aims, though Norway has warned that surveillance of this type violates Norwegian sovereignty. Schock tells Adams and his colleagues not to resist any such inspection by Soviet “scientists.” “The best way to defuse tension,” he says, “is not to create it in the first place.”

Adams says good-bye to the sailing crew of Desire Provoked. Among the icy docks with its canvas folded, the ship looks abandoned. Before leaving the harbor, Adams learns that eighteen feet of the inner hull had been sheared by heavy equipment: his noises at night.

The scientists board a plane for Barentsburg, on the west coast. There they will undergo a briefing and be assigned specific duties.

The flight is short. Adams, Carol, and Than sit in the rear of the plane with backpacks and equipment, huddling together in their parkas. The land below is a solid white sheet of snow. Mørkitiden, Norwegian winter.

Barentsburg has no distinguishing features. Hard snow crackles beneath their feet once they leave the permafrost landing site. Adams can see only swirling flakes as he makes his way to a dark green wooden building resembling a barracks. Inside, the scientists are offered coffee and doughnuts, and asked to sit on metal folding chairs facing a raised platform.

“This looks like an army briefing,” Carol tells Adams. He nods. Even inside the building their breath turns to smoke.

A man named Pepperstone mounts the platform, asks them to make themselves at home. “Svalbard is not particularly pleasant this time of year,” he says, “but you’ll become accustomed to the conditions.” He is a heavy man with a blond beard. He gestures to his right. “We have a room full of beds back here, along with lavatory facilities. You’ll be spending the night here, then tomorrow morning you’ll be flying to specific locations along the coast to begin your work.”

Arrangements have been made for Carol to sleep alone in a tiny room. The men will sleep in a large room in metal spring beds placed side by side. Carol’s room is just off the kitchen and the walls are thin. Even if there was more privacy, it is too cold to make love.

Before supper, Adams shaves (the tap water stays warm for just a few seconds) and changes. He joins his colleagues in a large chilly room. Picnic tables and folding chairs have been arranged in rows. Meat loaf and peas: though the food is warm, it tastes frozen.

“I feel like I’ve been drafted,” Carol says.

“They’re very organized,” Than agrees.

“I expected more of a welcome.”

“It must be hard to get anything done here,” Adams says. “They’ve got to be all business.” Still, he too is a little disappointed in the barrenness of the place, the brief formality of their welcome.

After supper members of the expedition line up to call their families on radiotelephones.

“Jack has probably fallen in love with one of those women who sell turquoise bracelets on Guadalupe Street,” Carol says. “I’ll be a voice from his past.”

Adams notes that he has not been enough to make her forget about Jack. She squeezes his hand.

When Adams finally gets a turn, he radios Pamela’s house. The kids are asleep. He’d forgotten all about the time difference. “I’m sorry if I woke you,” he says.

“That’s all right. So you made it okay?”

“Yes.”

“What’s it like?”

“Cold. Nothing but snow.”

“Prettier than Alaska?”

“Nowhere near.”

Waves of static. “I remember when you went to Alaska. It’s exciting to get postcards from faraway places.”

Adams nods, realizes she can’t see him.

“We were just married. I missed you.”

“I miss the kids,” Adams tells her.

A long pause. “Have you met anybody interesting,” Pamela asks.

“No.”

“I’m meeting all sorts of interesting people through the galleries. A sculptor from San Francisco’s in town this week.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“I sold a new piece. The moon. On a coat hanger. In a closet.”

“Congratulations.” The line squeaks. “They’re going to cut me off soon. Are the kids all right?”

“Deidre’s got a dance recital next Sunday. And Toby’s been pretty calm.”

“Tell them I love them.”

“I will.”

“I have to go now.”

“All right. Sam?”

“Yes?”

“They miss you, too.”

Fitful sleep. The room is cold, the bed hard, the pillow too soft. For extra support he places The Philosophy of Hegel under his head. He lies awake listening to the wind scratch the wire-and-glass windows.

Carol’s in the next room. He can’t help feeling that their attachment is temporary, dependent on the circumstances, yet when the other men look at her he feels possessive.

He misses Jill.

Forty-one years old. Incredible.

He clutches his legs to his chest and tries to sleep.

The following morning the scientists are divided into groups and flown to designated points along the coast to begin exploratory work. Than is scheduled to fly to a valley forty-five miles west of Barentsburg. “See you here in a few weeks,” he says.

“By then I’ll have mastered Hegel.”

Adams and Carol are flown to the same spot — a site near Ny-Alesund, northwest of Barentsburg. There are only a few temporary buildings — a generating plant, a fuel depot, a maintenance shop, and three plastic bubbles, geodesic domes. Behind the bubbles, two metal tunnels, like corrugated sewer pipe, large enough to shelter six horses.

“The company’s too cheap to give us snowmobiles,” says one of the scouting engineers. He has been here two weeks. “A horse is handy if you’re traveling more’n a mile.”

Carol’s assigned to check a series of core samples that the drilling engineers have already collected. The men are obviously delighted to see her, and she stays close to Adams.

Adams must go up in a Cessna to take some aerial photographs. The sky is overcast, thick at intervals, and condensation forms on the windows of the cockpit. The pilot says, “That’s it for now.”

When they try again in the afternoon, the same conditions prevail. Adams can’t see a thing out the cockpit window. A sudden change in pressure jolts the plane. Adams’ stomach turns over. When the-pilot lands, the craft skids several yards, spinning sideways on a sheet of ice. Adams opens the door, steps unsteadily onto the snow.

“I’ve had several offers already,” Carol tells Adams. They are sitting inside a plastic bubble, warming themselves by a portable heater. The plastic wriggles with the wind. “These two guys hung around looking over my shoulder while I worked. I barely got anything done.” She picks up a small leather bag. “They gave me some pot. I don’t have the stomach for it anymore, but it’s better than beer and I gotta have something out here. Want some?” She rolls a cigarette, lights it, inhales, and offers it to Adams. He takes it from her.

“It never did much for me,” he says. “The only time I had it was in Alaska. This was ‘67, height of Vietnam, all that. Most of us on the field trip were just out of graduate school, thrilled to be making money. Thought we were real radicals sitting out in the middle of nowhere passing pot.” He takes a short puff.

“I’ll be glad when we get back to Barentsburg.”

“So will I,” Adams says. “I can’t do a thing until the weather clears.”

“Based on what I saw today, there’s a good chance of activity here. Those core samples have good permeability.”

Adams smiles.

“What?”

“How’s your permeability?”

“If you don’t mind a little frostbite, you can check.”

“I don’t mind.”

“We should probably join the others for supper.”

“I guess.” He strokes her arm. “But don’t eat too much. We’ve both got to squeeze into your sleeping roll.”

Clear skies. Up in the Cessna, Adams snaps the terrain. The sunlight reflecting off the snow is blinding, and for a second Adams wonders if the glare, like concentrated light through a lens, might set the wings of the plane on fire.

The pilot circles the snowy rifts seven times before Adams says he has enough pictures.

Back at the camp, Carol’s frying bacon and slicing cheese for lunch. She has a cut on her lip.

“What happened?” Adams says.

With the knife she points out one of the men sitting beside a Coleman stove. “He tried to kiss me. When I pulled away, he bit.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

She flashes him an impatient look. “Eat your lunch. We don’t need any macho scenes out here.”

Bacon grease spatters over the pan and sizzles in the snow.

“Halloo!” someone calls.

Behind the camp, at a distance of two or three miles in the direction of the coast, there’s a line of hills. Against this backdrop seven or eight men are walking toward the camp carrying backpacks. One of them raises his hand. “Halloo!” he calls again.

“Russians,” says the man who kissed Carol. “They checked us out the day we got here.”

To the very last man, the Russians are big, bearded, ruddy. Carol offers them coffee. The leader, a redhead, smiles, nods at Adams. “American?” he says.

“Yes.”

“How do you like our island?”

“It’s very cold.”

The Russians laugh as if he’s made a joke.

“You are here for oil?”

“I’m here to draw maps.”

“Maps? I thought Norwegians gave you Americans maps?”

“The Department of Industry won’t release any cartographic information.”

“Ah, that’s what they say.” He motions to Carol for another cup of coffee. “But we hear American oil companies get whatever they want.”

“You hear wrong.”

Carol’s eyes widen. Did he say that?

“Is that so? We are, at any rate, forced to work in the dark. In this area in particular our charts are inaccurate. We have not been able to explore the region to our satisfaction. Could you supply us with information?”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” Adams says. “Beyond preliminary sketches, we have nothing as yet.”

The Russian spreads his arms. “You have committed all these people and you have no information?”

“We have scouting reports,” Carol says, stepping close to Adams.

“As I said, preliminary information is all we have to go on. I’ve only been here two days. This morning was the first time the weather cleared enough for me to take accurate aerial photographs and trigonometric measurements.”

The redheaded man tosses his coffee into the snow. “Do you mind if we have a look at your preliminary information?” he says.

The Russian team rummages through backpacks, bedrolls, crates. A clatter of cooking utensils. Carol blushes when the redheaded man opens a bag containing her personal belongings. He carefully unfolds her long johns.

Satisfied, he extends his hand toward Adams. “We are working in the vicinity,” he says. “I am sure that when you obtain your information, you would have no objections to sharing it with us?”

“Not at all,” Adams says.

“Good.”

At night he develops photographs with clumsy portable equipment. The red bulb above the fixing tray lights crystals in the diamonds of the plastic bubble. He is fortunate that the sun was low when he took the pictures. The stakes he had set out as markers are invisible in the glare, and the long shadows create relief in what would otherwise have been grainy white fields.

Meanwhile Carol studies core samples and rocks supplied by the engineers. She is encouraged by the signs. “Get me a map soon, will you?”

Tracing lines across the pictures, Adams imagines his own world sectioned off into patterns. Carol nearby, tethered to him with a tight elastic band. Carter at a very sharp angle, difficult to watch. Far off, so far he can barely see them, Pamela and the children. Their lines are slack. When he tugs, he sometimes gets a faint response.

Adams requests recent American satellite photographs of the Arctic. Three days later the pilot returns with a stack of pictures. Adams compares them with the more detailed shots he had taken earlier.

He wishes he had a gravimeter and a set of seismic probes, but must be content with metal pillows to record topographic shifts. Lead-shielded packets of Cobalt-60, emitting gamma rays, help define the terrain, as do the tellurometer (a two-way microwave system) and theodolite (a sighting tube with horizontal and vertical scales).

None of the instruments is completely reliable by itself, and Svalbard is so heavily glaciated that it is difficult to determine the island’s actual topography. He must record a number of observations and test them against one another. There is no room for misinterpretation; faulty mapping could encourage drilling on a precarious site.

He produces a rough map for Carol.

“It’s amazing how glaciation has smoothed out most of the terrain,” she says, “but overall, the structure’s what I expected. This, with the core samples, ought to be enough to lay in a claim for a drilling permit.”

“Good,” Adams says. “We’ve got to run the sound tests on the shelf. Then we can head back to Barentsburg.” “And privacy.”

At night around the fire the engineers drink beer and challenge one another to run naked into the snow. The one who goes farthest gets to sleep late the following day. Tonight there is a tie; the two men shiver near the fire and the Coleman stove, their faces blue. Adams and Carol join them for supper.

“I saw a polar bear this morning,” one says. “Mile or so from the hills.”

“Big?”

“You bet. Thick yellow fur … spooked my horse a little, but it wasn’t much interested.”

“Shoulda shot it. I’m getting tired of bacon.”

“I don’t have a license to carry a gun here.”

“You know they don’t let the Russians carry weapons?”

“Damn straight. I don’t want those bastards poking around here with rifles.”

After several more beers it is generally agreed that if the Russians return to camp, they’ll get their asses kicked.

Carol is asleep. The camp is quiet. Adams lies awake inside the plastic bubble, listening to the wind whip snow around the embers of the fire, the equipment, and tents. The horses chuff and stamp. Ice breaks.

Manscathers. Walkers in the waste.

Old English words for fear.

Gog and Magog.

He wonders where the Russian camp is. Perhaps Redbeard is awake, listening to the ice.

In a geologically active world, what does territoriality mean?

Vyduv: a Russian tribal word for “wind-swept plain.” The man who kissed Carol taught him that.

In two weeks on the island he has seen seven different types of snow: star, plate, needle, column, column with a cap at each end, spatial dendrite, irregular.

One day, pacing out distance on a plain, he paused by his horse to listen. The ground bristled. Worms by the thousands surfaced in a snowbank: Mesenchytraeus, a distant relative of the earthworm. Ladybugs, too, insulated in deeply packed drifts.

He’ll take some to Carter.

He gazes through the plastic bubble at the stars. In the daytime the sky becomes a map. The sun is so intense in the thin air that it glares off the ground, making shapes on the clouds. Reading shadows in the sky, Adams can determine if there is water or rough terrain ahead. At night he’s blind. Light travels so slowly through space. The star at the end of the Dipper appears to him tonight as it was when the first American colonists plotted revolution. What’s up there now?

Carol turns over in her sleep. A thunderous crash along the coast: another block of ice has broken free.

From the U.S. Army manual on survival: “On exceedingly cold nights, dig a hole in the ground, place your weather balloon in the hole so that half of it rests in the snow. Cover the other half with snow a foot deep and let it set for an hour. Tunnel into the balloon, deflate it, and leave the snow dome standing free. Snow, packed tightly, provides sufficient warmth for short-term survival.”

Adams was issued an Army manual at Barentsburg. But not a weather balloon.

The Russians return. Redbeard offers them a nearly frozen bottle of Scotch, looks around shamelessly, asks Adams what progress he has made.

“I know the area pretty well,” Adams says.

Redbeard is discomfited. “You have numbers,” he asks.

Adams shows Redbeard his map.

“You have accomplished no more than we have.”

Adams pours himself a cup of Scotch.

“You expect to find oil?”

“I’m not a geologist,” Adams tells him.

Redbeard turns to Carol. She says nothing.

“There is not enough oil here to make it worth your while.”

“We’ll see,” Adams says. He passes the bottle to Redbeard, who pours himself a cup. Then, to his own astonishment, Adams begins to remove his parka. “Care to join me in a race?” he says.

Ten minutes later, naked Russians run around him in the snow. The bottle is tossed to and fro until it shatters on a sheet of ice. Adams tumbles wildly into a snowdrift — the shock stuns him for a moment. The bare-assed burly men, chests heaving, follow him with prancing steps. The hair on their legs is frozen. They point to one another’s white bodies, laughing with painful abandon.

Adams loads a pack, saddles a horse with help from one of his colleagues. “I’ll be back after lunch,” he tells Carol. “I want to check the coast.”

Forty minutes later he has reached the base of a small snowy cliff. He stops to rest. In his heavy coat he feels warm. The horse is warm. He can see no passage through the cliffs to the sea. He shoulders his pack, dismounts.

He finds a manageable spot on the face of the cliff and digs in his hands. Halfway up, the snow gives out beneath his feet. A low creaking noise. He tumbles backwards.

The slab of ice in his hands disintegrates. Fragments spin about him as he falls, glittering needles shattering in front of his face. Snow swirls into his eyes. A sudden rush of wind knocks the breath out of him.

He feels pressure on his back and legs. Ribs ache. He didn’t fall too far. That probably saved his life. He is pinned, not by ice but by several feet of snow. When the temperature warms and the snow melts a bit, he’ll be able to move. Nothing, he thinks, is broken except one of his bicuspids, upper right. He can wiggle it with his tongue.

Stupid, trying to climb pure snow.

His backpack lies within reach of his left hand. The horse has wandered off a few yards.

His watch shattered in the fall, but he figures someone’s looking for him by now. A light snow has begun — the first in days. If it turns heavy, his tracks will be obscured.

He twitches the muscles in his legs and toes. He can still feel his extremities. The snow is getting heavier.

His tooth aches. He wiggles it, spits blood. His gum throbs — pain in the back of his neck, at the top of his head. He presses the tooth with his tongue, trying to stop the throbbing. The tooth comes loose and he spits it onto the snow.

The discomfort comes from not moving. The snow is actually warm, much warmer than the wind. He doesn’t know how long it takes to get frostbite.

They won’t come after him until the snow lets up.

He digs a shallow hole beneath his head, shoves the backpack in it, and rests his cheek against the cloth. He can feel the circulation in his head.

The main thing is not to straggle. Stay calm, wait for a bit of clearing. Move only enough to stay warm.

He remembers hearing that polar bears have a nictitating membrane in their eyes, to wipe the slush away. His own eyes sting. He can barely see his hands.

For an hour or so the blizzard clears. It’s warmer — the snow on his back breaks up a bit. He moves slowly, deliberately. If he overexerts, he’ll start to sweat and his clothing will grow damp.

Soon the snow begins again, visibility is reduced once more. Still, he doesn’t rush. Dimly, he sees his horse lie down in the snow.

Assuming the blizzard continues, what method will his colleagues use to find him? Rescue systems are well coordinated in resort areas and major scientific outposts; though Comtex has not yet made a commitment here, surely the engineers came equipped.

A device to trace his heartbeat (would it be muffled by snow?) or detect his body heat. No — the snow he upset when he fell is thick, temperature will vary wildly from mound to mound.

X-ray fluorescence? Radar?

In the seventeenth century rescuers set bowls of water on the rubble after an avalanche. In the water floated pieces of bread. Wherever the bread “pointed” the rescuers dug for victims.

The wind howls like air inside a shell.

He reaches into his backpack. A geologist’s pick. The Philosophy of Hegel. An extra pair of drumsticks.

Whatever possessed him to pack these things? He longs for warm sand, tropical fruit. Coconuts, bananas, berries. The cold, sharp pang of juice.

A man springs, fully clothed, from the snow where Adams spit the tooth. The tooth is gone. The man looks at Adams, picks up the backpack, walks away, pausing only to pat the freezing horse’s nose.

Stop this.

He’s hungry. He’s hallucinating.

If he could send a new self into the world, how would he act? Take Carol home? Fight for his kids? Would he be a smarter man, stronger, more articulate than the one beneath the snow?

Both his arms are free. He can move his legs. Sore but intact. He feels the pack beneath his cheek. For some reason he thought he’d lost it.

He digs with the pick and the drumsticks — 9A, thin, not much good in the snow. If only his hands were bigger. The snow is starting to harden, but he’s got room to wiggle.

A half hour later he’s free.

Standing unsheltered in the wind, he shivers. He tries to build a shelter of ice, but this proves ineffective. He can already feel the effects of hypothermia.

The horse lies in the snow like something dropped from the sky. Not quite dead. Adams huddles near it for its body heat, but the temperature continues to drop.

Without thinking, he lifts a heavy chunk of ice from the avalanche pile and brings it down on the horse’s skull. With his pick he slices the belly, hollows out a space inside, removing the internal organs. They are slippery, bilious, gray. He is nauseated, but his stomach is empty. He takes a deep breath and crawls inside.

He can only stand lying inside the horse for a period of, he guesses, one hour. Then the smell gets to him and he has to crawl outside. His clothes are damp with snow and blood, the wind eats through him.

He sits beside the dead animal, smelling of shit, clots of hair, bone, and blood. He rubs his face, balls of hard flesh stick to his lips. He opens his mouth, the crumbs fall onto his tongue; slowly he chews. The animal creaks like an old chair whenever he lifts the stiff flap of ribs and hair, icy now, to crawl in or out.

From time to time he hears sounds. Looks around. Shouts.

He’s afraid to sleep. His legs are numb. He stumbles out of the horse, walks a few steps to keep the blood moving, drinks water from a piece of ice, curls up again inside the horse.

To stay awake he thinks of Pamela and the kids. Deidre, naked in the tub; Toby, naked on the floor of his room, doing sit-ups; Pamela, naked in his arms.

Why are they all naked?

His body has grown too stiff inside the horse. He crawls out and walks around, vigorously rubs his legs.

He can’t find his tooth in the snow. It has become a man and walked back to camp. They won’t come looking for him now.

The horse’s body is losing its heat. Soon it will be a rock, frozen.

His cheek stings. He has fallen asleep on the ice. No snow. No wind. A rapidly clearing night sky. He pulls himself up, grabs his pack. He pauses, wondering what to do with the horse. He doesn’t have the strength.

His lips are chapped. He licks them, feels a gap in his gum. Did he lose a tooth?

His muscles relax as he walks. Feeling returns to his feet and hands.

He imagines Carol, or tries to. He cannot picture her. He has forgotten what she looks like. Without touching his face he tries to recall his own features. High cheekbones, short nose, thick head of hair. Is that right? Yes, yes, his fingers confirm it. His skin is cold, like bone itself.

His jaw aches. He’s hungry. He dreams of steak and wine, but his stomach constricts and he falls to the snow, heaving.

The rule is, Stay where you are until they find you. Too late for that. But the polestar’s clear. He’s sure of his direction.

A curtain of color bursts above his head. The aurora borealis. Cepheus, Cassiopeia, Ursa Minor, awash with red and green. An hour or so later the sun begins to rise. Ridges and gullies take the light inside their slowly forming ice, glow from within.

He can see the camp far off, figures running toward him. The whole plain is lighted, like a tungsten bulb. He laughs. Stops to catch his breath. The last stars fade.