Good Morning, Midnight

FIFTEEN

THEY BEGAN TO spend a lot of time in the little dinghy, out on Lake Hazen. Augustine would row them out, halfway to the island, and then they would take turns casting. It never took long—the lake was teeming with char that would snap at anything and the little orange spinner was too tempting to ignore. They would catch one, maybe two if they were smaller, pith and bleed them, then row back and gut them on the shore. Iris grew skilled at casting, and she was getting good at the gruesome parts, too, at severing the spine and removing the guts—she refused to leave the fish for Augie to clean.

The tiny wildflowers grew in thick, colorful carpets across the tundra. As mantles of color popped up among the new grass and the soft brown earth, Augie and Iris started to venture farther and farther from the camp to explore the unfamiliar abundance of summer. The surrounding hills and mountains were full of lemmings and Arctic hares and birds. The musk oxen and caribou kept to the tundra, eating all the tiny, rare botanical specimens like canapés at a fancy cocktail party. During one such hike, Augie rested on a boulder while Iris scrambled on ahead. A caribou approached and carefully snapped up the patch of marsh saxifrage that Augustine had been admiring, fitting its clumsy lips around the little yellow flowers and chomping off their stems at the root before sauntering off to sniff out more delicacies. Augie could see the whorl of fur in the center of its forehead, could hear its teeth clicking together, could smell the rich, musty odor of its breath. He’d never been so close to a wild animal—not a living one. It was enormous, with antlers that towered over him, so tall they seemed to disappear into the brightness of the sky, like the branches of a tree.

Augustine thought of the radio control building, as he often did. He still hadn’t gone inside, and as time passed he began to wonder why. What was he avoiding? He was curious to see what kind of equipment it might offer, what he might or might not hear, but everything else was so pleasant, it subsumed his curiosity. He didn’t want to disturb the tranquillity of their life at the lake. He didn’t know what he would find, and whether it was nothing or something, he was in no rush to risk the brand-new happiness they’d forged. For once, Augustine was content not to know. And yet—this search for another voice wasn’t about him. His own happiness wasn’t the most important thing to him anymore.

When they first arrived, he’d been fooled into thinking his health was improving—the calm of the lake, the relative warmth, the stillness of the wind made him feel stronger. But as time wore on, he came to understand that his days were as limited as ever. Comfort didn’t mean improvement. Life was easier here, but he was still growing older. The long night would come again, and when it did, the temperatures would plummet and his joints would seize and ache just as they had before. His heart would beat a little slower, his mind would not operate quite so nimbly. The polar night would seem to last forever. He both feared and hoped this year would be his last. He was old—wildflowers and gentle breezes would not make him young again. He looked up the incline to see Iris skidding back down, jumping from rock to rock like a mountain goat.

“How was the view?” he asked her. Instead of answering, she handed him a bouquet of mountain avens, a small white flower with a burst of yellow stamen in the center, frothy with pollen. A few of the blooms were spent, their seed heads sprouting long white tufts of fuzz, some still twisted in a glossy bud shape and others already blown out by the wind like the wiry white hairs of an old man’s beard. He laughed.

“Are these meant to look like me?” He gave one of the seed heads a poke and Iris nodded with her best serious-not-serious face.

“Things could be worse, I suppose,” he said, plucking one of the spent flowers and sliding it into his buttonhole. Iris smiled in approval and continued down. Augie struggled to his feet, scrabbling against the smooth surface of the boulder to haul himself up, crushing the flowers against the rock by accident. As he watched Iris make her way back toward the camp, he cradled the crumpled, half-dead bouquet in his hands and followed her. It was time.

WITH HIS COFFEE in hand, he ambled across the rock-strewn plateau and gave the doorknob of the little radio shed a try. It was stubborn, so he set his coffee mug on the ground and gave the door a hard shove with his shoulder. Inside the shed he found exactly what he’d been expecting: a well-equipped base station. With a few stacks of radio components, various transceivers for HF, VHF, and UHF frequencies, two pairs of headsets, speakers, a tabletop microphone, and a sleek generator in the corner, the station was complete—just ready and waiting for an operator. The trouble with the observatory had been its reliance on satellite communication—radio was used only as a backup or for local transmissions—but here the setup was built for radio frequency. He noticed a lone satphone on the desk, a few handy-talkie sets beside it.

Augie started the generator and let it run for a few minutes before he checked that the equipment was connected to the power source, then he started turning things on. Orange and green displays flickered. A low, even static emanated from the speakers, as if there were a hive of bees inside. Some survival gear was tucked under the desk—bottled water, emergency rations, two sleeping bags—and he realized that as the sturdiest building at the camp, this must be the emergency shelter as well. The three tents were durable enough to make it through Arctic winters, year after year, but they weren’t indestructible. The Arctic was anything but gentle to its inhabitants.

After a few moments of fiddling, Augustine plugged in the headphones, slipped them on, and began to scan. Here we go again, he thought. But it was different from the observatory—the aerial array outside was going to allow him to reach farther with his voice and his ears than he ever had at Barbeau. He ran an admiring hand over one of the transceivers and wiped the dust from the glowing green display with his thumb. He flicked the microphone on and pulled it close to his chin in anticipation, then chose a VHF amateur band and began to transmit, CQ, CQ, CQ, over and over as he scanned the frequencies. Nothing—but then, he hadn’t expected an answer. He kept transmitting, moving from VHF up to UHF, then down to HF, then back to the beginning. Eventually Iris appeared in the doorway, which he’d left open to let in the summer air. She shook a fishing rod at him. He looked from her to the equipment and back again.

“You’re absolutely right,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the boat.”

She disappeared from the doorway, leaving the slender rectangle of lake and mountain and sky unbroken. He began to switch everything off, the generator last, then unfastened the headset from where it hung around his neck and coiled the cord. He shut the door behind him, letting his eyes adjust to the blaze of the sun reflecting on the water.

Iris was sitting on the upside-down hull, tapping out a jazzy rhythm with the butt of the fishing rod.

“Ahoy,” he called, and she jumped up.

Together they flipped the boat over and shoved it into the shallows, a smooth and effortless movement by now, after all of their fishing trips. Augie went to get the oars and the net, and then they pushed off from the shore. He let them float for a few minutes, closing his eyes, listening to the lap of the water against the earth, against the hull, and feeling the heated gaze of the midnight sun on his face. When he opened his eyes, Iris was hanging her legs over the side of the dinghy, the tips of her toes dragging on the lake, leaving brief ruts in the water: there and gone, there and gone. He dipped the blades of the oars beneath the glassy surface and began to row.

SUMMER SEEMED TO fade faster than it had arrived. The warmth seeped out of the valley and a cold front crept in, chilling the delicate wildflowers and icing the muddy shores of the lake with frosty crystals. Augustine continued to sit in his Adirondack chair by the lake, watching the progression of time, the descent of the sun, but now he bundled himself again in woolly layers. The cold returned to his bones, his joints, his teeth. He didn’t leave the camp anymore. Iris wandered the tundra and the mountains alone. They still fished together, taking the dinghy out for as long as the lake would allow it, but rowing had grown difficult for him in the cold air and the frosts fell heavier with each passing week. It won’t be long now, he thought.

Augustine continued to scan the bands once a day in the radio shelter, but the silence was perpetual, the isolation complete. He listened only out of a need for work, for purpose. As the days passed and grew colder, getting from his chair to the shelter and back again escalated from a pleasant stroll to a challenge. Augie hoarded his energy for the short walk, unwilling to give it up. He became unable to row the dinghy even a short way. Eventually a thin rind of ice formed at the edges of the lake. It’s just as well, he thought. Not long after, the sun finally reached the horizon and dipped beneath it before climbing back up. The sunrise/sunset concert it created was magnificent and lasted several hours, bathing the mountains in a fiery orange glow and sending spurts of violet cloud into the sky before fading back into vivid blue. These moments of day’s end and day’s beginning, pressed together into a continuous event, became a regular marker of time’s passing.

The lake froze, then melted, then froze once more. One afternoon, as the sun dipped behind the mountains and hid there briefly, a cold drizzle began to fall. In the cool twilight, the rain hardened into sleet and then softened into thick, white flakes of snow, which drifted slowly down and covered the brown landscape. Augie had retreated from his chair when the drizzle began, but he returned to it when the sleet changed to snow. Iris joined him, sitting on his little footstool made from a packing crate, and together they watched the contours of the land disappear beneath a blanket of white. When the sun cleared the mountains a few hours later it bathed the freshly covered peaks in pale fire, and as it climbed higher the tundra burned brightly, a field of white flame. The familiar cloak of the Arctic had returned and would not be shrugged off for many months to come.

The stars also returned. One night, after the color-soaked mountains had dimmed and then darkened into black peaks set against a sleepy blue sky, Augie walked down to the edge of the frozen lake to test the ice. He tapped it with his boot, and when it held he took a few cautious steps, giving it another tap and finally a good hard stomp. It was firm. It would hold him. He walked back to the shore and headed toward the radio shed. He noticed a set of fresh tracks in the snow, illuminated in the starlight, leading down from one of the hills and then disappearing at the edge of the lake. The prints were enormous and widely spaced, with the pricks of long claws indented around the impressions: polar bear prints. Here? He was surprised—forgetting the radio for a moment he doubled back, following the tracks to the shore, where they disappeared onto the ice. He bent down to examine the shallow scratches on the surface where the bear had dug in as it crossed the frozen water. Perhaps it was on its way to the fjord, he thought. Perhaps it was lost. He shrugged and turned back toward the radio shed.

Slipping the headphones over his ears, he began to scan, adjusting the controls in the soft glow of the flickering kerosene lamp. The static was soothing—it obscured the utter silence of the Arctic, a silence so complete it seemed unnatural. The lapping of the water had ceased, the air was still, the birds had all gone. The silence of winter had descended. The terns had left their beautiful nest, flying south toward the other pole, and the musk oxen and caribou had returned to the wide-open tundra. Every now and then the quiet was punctuated with the long, trembling howl of a wolf, but otherwise the lake was wrapped in hushed stillness. The white noise of the radio waves was a relief, a soft crackle to obscure the loneliness. He set the receiver to scan automatically and closed his eyes—let his consciousness drift. He’d fallen asleep when he heard it: a voice, slipping through his eardrums and into his dreams. He bolted upright and pressed the headphones against his ears. It was so faint Augie wasn’t sure he’d really heard it. But no, there it was again—not words, just syllables, interrupted by static. He strained to make out what they were saying and pulled the microphone toward him, suddenly unsure how to respond. The language of amateur Q codes abandoned him in his excitement, but it didn’t matter. The FCC wasn’t listening anymore.

“Hello?” he said, then realized he was practically shouting. He waited, straining to hear a response. Nothing. He tried again, and again, and finally, on the third try, he heard her. A woman’s voice, clear as a bell.