Good Morning, Midnight

THIRTEEN

THEY’D BEEN AT Lake Hazen for almost two weeks—long enough to explore every corner of the camp—and yet something about the radio shed still made Augustine uneasy. He avoided it, as though there was too much power behind the door, too much reach; an ear to hear things he didn’t want to know. There was no telescope here, no window to the stars, so instead of working he spent his time playing with Iris. They walked out to the little island in the middle of the lake and sneaked up on the Arctic hares, laughing as the hares bounded across the ice in a panic, leaping onto the shore and disappearing into the mountains that ringed the basin. He taught her chess with an old plastic set they found, a few pennies in place of missing pawns. They made snow sculptures.

And they feasted. The abundance and variety of nonperishable foods in the cook tent were thrilling after the monotony of the survival rations at the observatory. It was a museum of cans—canned pot roast, meat loaf, whole roast chickens soaked in brine, tuna fish, every kind of vegetable he could think of, even eggplant and okra; energy bars, protein bars, granola bars, shortbread bars, meat bars; powdered eggs, powdered milk, powdered coffee, powdered pancake mix; a shocking amount of butter, lard, and Crisco. Iris fell in love with fruit cocktail, treasuring every syrupy cherry with her eyes closed and a small smile on her lips. Augie was more enthused with the baking supplies, the possibility of conjuring something fresh and warm, and he began to experiment with pound cakes and scones studded with chocolate chips and raisins, then progressed to loaves of bread. The supplies of baking soda and baking powder alike were enormous, a stock that would last a dozen men a dozen years, and there were similarly vast quantities of onion and garlic powder, cayenne, cinnamon, nutmeg, curry, salt, black pepper. He’d scarcely used an oven since he was a boy, when he’d kept his mother company, but the pleasures of measuring and mixing and greasing the pan came rushing back to him. His mother had often begun ambitious projects in the kitchen and usually failed to finish them, leaving the chaos and the raw ingredients for Augie to deal with while she became distracted by something new. He’d forgotten he was good at finishing these projects, but more than that, he’d forgotten he enjoyed it. It was an unfamiliar feeling. He struggled to remember the last time he’d actually enjoyed something.

The days continued to lengthen and the snow around them to shrink. Grass sprouted on some of the lower hills surrounding the camp, then a few wildflowers popped up, crowding together in clusters of color, bordered by the remains of the snow. The equinox slipped past, and before Augie knew it the solstice was bearing down on them—the arrival of the midnight sun. He’d never been in the Arctic for a full polar day before; he had always fled south when the cargo planes began arriving on their biennial supply runs in the summer, when the stars disappeared from the sky for the season, leaving him with nothing to do and no reason to stay. As the weather warmed and the snow melted he began to realize how much he had missed.

When he’d chosen the Barbeau Observatory as a research destination five years ago, he was already an old man, near the end of his career, beginning to understand what a mess he’d made of things. He was drawn by the isolation and the punishing climate, the landscape that matched his interior. Instead of salvaging what he could, he ran away to the top of an Arctic mountain, nine degrees shy of the North Pole, and gave up. Misery followed him wherever he went. This fact didn’t faze him and it certainly didn’t surprise him. He had earned it, and by then he expected it.

Now, as he watched Iris dart along the shore, skipping rocks over the ice sheet, a strange sensation came over him, a muddle of contentment and regret. He had never been so happy and so sad all at once. It made him think of Socorro. Those years in New Mexico were the sharpest, the most vivid memories he had. Only now, decades later, did he finally understand that Socorro had been his best chance to have a life that felt like this—sitting by the edge of the lake, smelling spring, watching Iris, feeling grateful and complete, feeling alive. When he met Jean all those years ago, she lobbed him out of cool contemplation and into the heat of emotion. He couldn’t observe her; he had to have her, to be seen by her. She was more than a subject, a variable to be quantified. She unnerved him, confused him. He’d loved her, of course he had, he could admit it now, but it wasn’t so easy back then. She was twenty-six and he was thirty-seven when she told him she was pregnant. All he could think of were his parents and his own cruel experiments. He didn’t want to be in love. He told Jean he’d never be a father. Never, he said. She didn’t cry, he remembered that because he’d expected her to. She’d only looked at him with those big, sad eyes. You’re so broken, she’d said. I wish you weren’t so broken. And that had been that.

He’d found a position in Chile, in the Atacama Desert, where he’d lived once before. He got out of New Mexico as quickly as he could and forgot Jean as completely as he was able. It wasn’t until years later that he allowed himself to think of her, of what could’ve been and what already was—a child, with his genes and maybe his eyes, maybe his mouth or his nose, but without him in its life. A child without a father. He tried to banish the idea from his consciousness, but it crept back, again and again. Eventually he made a call to Socorro and found out what little there was to know. Jean had left New Mexico shortly after he did, but she’d stayed in touch with some of the other research fellows. Augustine was told she’d had a girl, born in November, somewhere in the southern Californian desert. He tracked down a work address for her and kept it tucked in his wallet for months, just behind his driver’s license.

He waited until the child’s birthday, and then he sent the most expensive amateur telescope he could afford. No note, no return address. Jean would know who it was from, and she could decide what to tell her daughter. He wondered what she’d already told her about her father, whether she’d lied and said he was dead, or a military POW, or a traveling salesman, or whether she’d told the truth and said—what, exactly? That he didn’t want her? That he didn’t love either of them? He kept sending things for a few years, never a card, just an occasional investment in his genes. Gestures that he couldn’t actually claim were thoughtful, but that seemed better than nothing. Now and then he sent Jean a check. He knew she cashed them, but he only heard back from her once: a plain white envelope with a photo in it. She’d sent it to an old address, the observatory in Puerto Rico after he’d already moved on to Hawaii, and it took an extra few months to find its way to him. The girl looked like her mother. Probably a good thing. The next year his gift, sent to the same place in southern California, was returned and labeled Invalid Address. He never heard from them again. It was almost a relief to lose them; sending the gifts every year was just a reminder of his inadequacy to be anything more than a blank return address and a medium-sized check. The passionate, promising focus he’d begun his career with had narrowed into lonely obsession. He’d known this about himself for years. He didn’t need more proof.

A PAIR OF Arctic terns had begun to build a nest on the ground, not far from the camp. They were apparently under the impression that they had the entire lake to themselves, so whenever Augie ventured closer for a look at the nest, he was regaled with swooping and screaming, little gray and white bombs with red feet and beaks emerging from the feathery masses. Iris didn’t seem to provoke these wrathful displays, but Augie could hardly walk in their direction without giving rise to an attack. More than once he received a vicious peck to the crown of his head, and eventually he took to shielding himself with a square of plywood he’d found lying around camp. After a few collisions with a creature decidedly larger and more solid than they, the terns gave up their offensive and let him look. He wondered at their easy surrender, but reasoned that birds who spent their entire lives making the trip between the Antarctic and Arctic regions—more than forty-four thousand miles of migration every year—probably weren’t the most innovative of creatures. The nest progressed nicely. What sights had they flown over on their long journey? How had they survived to make the same nonsensical trip every year? Augustine looked at the terns preparing for the arrival of their chicks and marveled at their tenacity—hatching new life at the end of the world. One of the terns swiveled its head to stare at Augustine with one eye. What do you know that I don’t? Augustine asked it. But the tern only ruffled its feathers and hopped away.

One morning the sun rose and decided not to set. For a couple of days it sank below the mountain ridge in the evening but never dropped behind the horizon, and soon it stayed high and bright without pause. Within a few days of the midnight sun’s arrival, Augie and Iris lost all sense of time. He had long ago lost track of the days, but he knew it must be mid-April if the midnight sun had risen, the same way he would know late September had arrived when the lake was bathed in twilit days, the sun hovering just beneath the horizon before it set completely and plunged the Arctic into another long, dark night.

Time didn’t matter anymore. The only reason to keep track of time was to stay connected with the outside world, but without any sort of connection it was meaningless. Light and dark had always been the earth’s clock, and Augie saw no reason not to abide by it now, even at this strange latitude. The winter had laid him low—his joints, his immune system, his temper had all been slow and dark—but with the endless light in the sky he felt a kind of buoyancy, a charge of electricity running through his nerves. His life took on a pleasant rhythm: he slept when he was tired, cooked when he was hungry, visited the terns when he felt like a stroll, and set up a little open-air porch at the mouth of their hut, with a lopsided Adirondack chair some previous resident had constructed from spare pieces of plywood, an empty packing crate for an ottoman. Augustine bundled up and sat in his chair, squinting against the bright albedo of the snow on the lake, waiting for the cold air that lingered on the plateau to be stirred by warmer currents.

Iris adapted with ease too. She began to favor short naps instead of longer, uninterrupted sleep. She ate when Augie set a plate in front of her; otherwise, if she found herself hungry, she took a shortbread bar from the cook tent or foraged among the other nonperishables. She spent a lot of time on the ice, skating back and forth, sometimes making the trek out to the island to startle the hares. She looked for more bird nests, which were always on the ground because there were no shrubs or trees, only low-lying vegetation and rock. The snowy owl they’d seen on their first day became a fixture, as did the faraway howls of the wolves in the mountains behind them. One bright night, or day perhaps, it didn’t matter anymore, Augie awoke to the sound of a large furry body brushing up against the side of the tent. He sat straight up to check that Iris was napping also. He realized it was a wolf scratching an itch on the hut, separated from Augustine’s head by mere millimeters of vinyl and insulation. He shuddered a little at the thought but was largely unperturbed and went back to sleep. The other habitants of the lake and the surrounding mountains had become accustomed to the new human presence there. Gradually, Augie grew to accept their neighbors too.

They woke up in the brightness one day to discover the snow had finally vanished. The lake ice began to get louder, to shift and groan against the shore. Meltwater puddles multiplied and the ice’s pale blue color became dull and gray. Eventually the ice sheet broke apart and gentle winds blew the fragments against one another with sounds like glasses being clinked, a toast to summer. One day—Augie guessed it was early July—a gale howled along the surface of the lake and pushed the shards of candled ice out of the water and onto the muddy shore, where they crashed against the earth like solid, splintering waves of white quartz. The water washed over the soft brown earth and the basin of the lake began to warm. Before long, it was mild enough that Augustine sat in his homemade Adirondack chair wearing only his long underwear while Iris walked barefoot along the stony beach.

Soon after the lake cleared, following a long sleep and a slow breakfast, Augie walked out to the upside-down dinghy and flipped it over. He’d noticed an outboard motor, two oars, and some fishing gear in the unused sleeper hut. He gathered up everything but the motor, which he wasn’t sure he could carry, and dragged it out to the edge of the lake. Iris looked on with excitement and began pushing the dinghy toward the shore, inch by inch. Together they pushed it halfway into the water.

“Char for dinner?” he said with a wink, and she made a high-pitched squeal he’d never heard from her, hopping from one foot to the other as if the ground had become too hot and the boat was her only refuge. It had been a long time since they’d eaten anything so fresh. The rod was strung; he had an orange spinner in his pocket, and a sharp hunting knife on his belt. He went inside to grab a container for the fish and scooped up some of the candled ice from the shore to put in the bottom. Iris was already waiting in the boat, alert with excitement. Augie gave the dinghy a good push, then leaped in as it floated away from the shore.

Augustine rowed while Iris sat in the bow, facing the island and running her hands through the water. Had she ever been in a boat before? he wondered. She seemed so small, dwarfed by the scale of the mountains before her, the island, the lake itself. Her shoulders seemed too narrow to hold a human together. When they’d rowed far enough out, he put down the oars and took up the rod. He’d fished before, as a boy, but now he felt clumsy and uncertain. He toyed with the reel for a moment and the mechanics of casting came rushing back to him. His first cast wasn’t very good, but his second went farther and landed with a soft plop. He began to slowly reel it in, just enough to keep the spinner dancing at the end of the line. Iris watched him closely to see how he did it. After he’d reeled it in, he cast again, then handed her the rod. She took it without hesitation and began reeling. They passed the rod back and forth, Augie casting, Iris reeling, but they didn’t have to wait long. There was a jerk on the line and the tip of the rod bent toward the water, softly at first, then sharply, until the rod was inches from the surface of the lake. Iris’s eyes widened and her grip tightened. She looked to him for instruction.

“Hold tight and keep reeling it in. Looks like you hooked a good one.”

The fish fought harder the closer she dragged it to their little boat. At first Augie thought he should take the rod from her and reel it in himself, but she was doing well. Soon the fish was splashing against the side of the boat, churning up white froth. He got out the net and scooped it up, guessing it to be a five-pound Arctic char, longer than one of Iris’s arms and twice as thick. It flopped in the bottom of the dinghy, exhausted but determined to fling itself back into the water. Augustine got out his knife and was about to plunge the tip into the char’s brain in order to sever its spinal cord. He paused and looked up at Iris, remembering her tenderness toward the wolf that night at the hangar.

“You might not want to watch,” he said.

She shook her head gallantly and kept her eyes trained on the fish.

He severed the char’s spine with the knife, slid the hook out of its mouth, then ran his knife through the gills, a short cut on either side. He held the fish over the side of the boat while it bled out, dark, thick streams running down the length of the tail fin and into the clear, cold lake water. He looked up at Iris and caught her wrinkling her nose.

He laughed at her expression. “Sorry, kid,” he said. “Can’t eat live fish.”

“I’ll do the next one,” she said in defiance.

Augie laid the char down in the container he’d prepared, a pink stain spreading across the ice. He rinsed his hands and his knife in the lake and folded the blade back into the handle.

“All right,” he said. “How about you cast this time?”

He passed her the rod and showed her how to hold the line with her pointer finger and release it at the last minute.

She nodded impatiently. “I know,” she said, and waved him off. “Give me some room.”

AFTER A FEAST of baked char and canned peas and powdered mashed potatoes with plenty of powdered garlic mixed in, Iris and Augie sat outside their tent and watched the ripples on the lake, curling across the surface like ribbons of light. When Augustine woke in his Adirondack chair later, it was impossible to tell how long he’d been out—the water continued to ripple, the sun still blazed down on his bare feet. Across the lake he saw a small herd of musk oxen drinking at the shore. He tugged the broad-brimmed hat he’d found in the cook tent down over his eyes and squinted across the water. There were eight of them, and almost hidden in the great shaggy layers of their half-shed winter coats was a ninth, a tiny calf pressed against the side of its mother as she drank from the lake. He turned to Iris, but her chair was empty and she was nowhere to be seen. Maybe she was asleep. Augie struggled to his feet, pulling himself up by the rough plywood arms of the chair, and went down to the edge of the water.

The musk oxen continued to bury their noses in the shallows. He watched the little calf become impatient, braying and scuffing its hoof on the soft earth, nudging its head against the hindquarters of its thirsty mother.

“Umingmak,” he murmured under his breath. It was the Inuit word for musk oxen; he couldn’t say where he’d learned it or how he’d remembered it. The bearded ones.

He raised his hands to his face and felt the clumps of wiry hair on his chin and neck, the long tufts on his head—still thick after all these years. He smiled, and felt the corners of his mouth with his fingertips, just to be sure he was doing it right.