Good Morning, Midnight

THREE

ONE DARK AFTERNOON, after the sun had gone down but before the sky had erased all its evidence, Augustine and Iris headed out to the hangar. Iris wanted to go for a walk—a long walk, she said—and the hangar seemed like a new and interesting destination. Augie hadn’t been there in a long time—not since his last flight in, the previous summer—but the eerie blue twilight, casting shadows on the snow, stirred his sense of adventure. They would be far from the observatory when the deep darkness of early evening fell, but they took a flashlight, and at the last minute Augustine swung a rifle across his back and made sure the chamber was full. The weight of the gun barrel against his shoulder blade and the thick yellow beam of light swinging across the blue snow in front of him quenched his apprehension.

He carried the flashlight in one hand and steadied himself with a ski pole in the other. Navigating the shifting snowdrifts on foot was difficult—his arthritis was getting worse. Iris skidded fearlessly down the mountain, running out in front of the flashlight’s reach, turning occasionally to see what was taking him so long. He was out of breath before they were halfway there, and his knees had already begun to ache, the muscles in his thighs to burn. He should’ve taken the skis, but they were too big for Iris, and it didn’t seem fair to make her walk while he sliced through the drifts. After almost an hour of walking, the roof of the hangar came into view, a glint of corrugated metal against the endless snow. Iris began to move even faster, wading through the soft drifts on her short but determined legs.

As they came closer, he noticed that the long sliding doors of the hangar were wide open. Snow had begun to accumulate inside. Where the floor was bare he could see dark oil stains soaked into the concrete. It was the scene of a hurried departure. A set of ratchet wrench sockets lay scattered across the concrete like hexagonal stars in an earthbound constellation, the empty case tossed nearby. Augustine closed his eyes and imagined the plane on the tarmac, researchers on board, luggage stowed, and one last military mechanic rushing to collect his things, picking up the case without latching it and watching the wrench sockets spin across the floor. Augustine had heard the Herc take off from the observatory, then watched it climb into the sky from afar. Here, he couldn’t help but fill the long, white runway with an imaginary plane. Augustine pictured the copilot hanging his head out the hatch, shouting Come on, while the mechanic decided to let the fallen pieces lie where they were, throwing the empty case down with them and running to board the waiting plane, climbing the rickety staircase, then kicking the stairs away and swinging the hatch shut. The plane thundering down the white runway, lifting up nose-first into the sky. Returning to a world Augustine no longer had access to.

Where the plane might have idled was the empty, derelict runway: the plastic glimmer of unlit LEDs, orange flags half-buried in the snow. The staircase was still there, knocked on its side, one loose wheel spinning in lazy circles in the wind. Augustine held one of the wrench sockets in the padded palm of his mitten, then let it fall to the ground with a hollow clatter. It reminded him of his father—the smell of stale grease, the tools and machine parts scattered around the hangar. Augustine used to watch his father sleep, feet propped up on the recliner, mouth half-open, a ragged snore erupting from deep in his throat. And the smell—that thick, oily smell that wafted off his father’s clothes like an unlit fire or the underbelly of a diesel truck. The television would be flickering in the background, his mother either working in the kitchen or lying down in their bedroom, and Augie would kneel on the carpet, feeling the rough polyester fibers pressing into his shins, pretending to watch the television but watching his father instead.

Augustine brushed the snow off a large stainless steel toolbox in the hangar and forced open the top drawer. A jumble of drill bits and screwdrivers stared back at him, a tangled spool of wire, an assortment of thick bolts. He shut the drawer. Something moved in the corner of his eye and he turned toward the runway outside to see Iris climbing on the fallen staircase like a jungle gym.

“Careful,” he called to her, and she raised her arms above her head in a defiant no hands gesture. She edged along the thin metal framework like a balance beam. He continued investigating the hangar, shining the flashlight into the dim corner and kicking snow off mysterious shapes buried beneath the drifts. A few limp, frozen piles of cardboard, more toolboxes, a stack of tires. Augustine arrived at a sizable mound covered with a stiff green tarp and fastened with bungee cords. He unhooked the cords and drew back the tarp to find a pair of snowmobiles. Of course, he thought. He, along with his luggage, had been shuttled to and from the runway on his various arrivals and departures from the observatory via these snowmobiles. In previous years, Augie had left the observatory during the summer months, when the precipitation from the melting snow clouded the atmosphere and thin blankets of fog rolled off the Arctic sea, up into the mountains, stretching over the sky like a scrim that prevented him from doing his work. He would go somewhere warm on his escapes from the Arctic: the Caribbean, Indonesia, Hawaii, a different world entirely. Staying at extravagant resorts, eating nothing but shrimp cocktail and raw oysters, drinking gin at noon and then passing out on the pool furniture and burning to a crackling red crisp. What I wouldn’t do for a few liters of gin right about now, he thought.

Augustine ran his mittened hands over the sleek machines. The keys were still slotted into the ignitions. He turned the nearest one to the On position and pulled out the choke, then gave the start cord a pull. The engine made a halfhearted groan but didn’t catch. Augustine kept pulling the cord, as hard as he could, until finally the engine turned over and the pistons started pumping on their own. Oily smoke billowed from underneath the hood, and the engine settled into a hesitant but steady beat. The smoke thinned and Augie gave the machine an affectionate pat on its shiny black haunch. There wasn’t anywhere in particular he wanted to go, but it was good to have an engine at his command. Perhaps they would ride back to the observatory. Augie grinned at the idea and wondered if Iris’s limbs were long enough to ride the other one, but when he saw her, he immediately forgot about the snowmobiles. The cold engine sputtered and died, and he barely heard it.

There was another shape on the runway. Augie squinted to make out its silhouette against the luminous blue of the snow in the fading light. It was on four legs, a grayish-white color that almost disappeared into the background. If Iris hadn’t been so entranced by it, Augie might not even have noticed. Iris moved toward the figure, scooting along the thin metal poles of the fallen staircase and cooing, singing that strange, guttural song he had grown accustomed to. The figure cocked its head. It was a wolf.

Without pausing to think, Augustine swung the rifle down from his back. The thick canvas of the strap buzzed against the windproof material of his parka, and he froze. The wolf swung its head toward him and growled, the scant light bouncing off its eyes, making them shine like marbles. The wolf took a step closer to the hangar. Augustine held his breath and waited. Iris was creeping closer and closer along the length of the staircase, reaching out her hand to stroke its fur. The wolf sat down in the snow and watched her, pawing the ground and pricking its rounded ears at the sound of her voice. Augie slipped off his mittens and flexed his fingers in anticipation. He hadn’t fired a gun since he was a teenager, hunting with his father in the woods near their house in Michigan. The two of them would wait in silence, father and son, and when the moment was right and something found its way into their crosshairs, they would aim their guns and squeeze. Augustine hated every minute of those trips.

He lifted the rifle and rested the butt of it against his shoulder. He found the wolf in the scope and trained the crosshairs on its shaggy head. Iris was still creeping closer and closer, shedding her mittens and outstretching her hands, making soft, sweet noises. Just as his finger found the trigger, the wolf moved. It threw back its head and howled, a mournful, lonely sound, then took another step closer to Iris. Augustine corrected his aim, the wolf stood up on its hind legs, raising its snout toward Iris’s tiny palm, and he pulled the trigger.

THE SOUND OF the shot must have echoed over the mountain range, bouncing from peak to peak, reverberating in the valleys, but Augie didn’t hear it. Everything was silent as he watched the wolf’s head snap back, the fine mist of red that fell on the snow as its body hung in midair, then collapsed onto the ground in a crumpled heap. When it was over, all he could hear was Iris screaming.

He loped toward her, the glowing flashlight forgotten on the seat of the stalled snowmobile. Iris had tumbled down from where she had been balancing on the stairs and landed face-first on the snowy runway. White powder clung to her hair and eyelashes, her nose and cheeks red from the cold, and she was still screaming. She threw herself on the body of the wolf, burying her tiny hands in its white fur. Augie struggled to move fast enough. He didn’t have the breath to call to her, the weight of the rifle slapping the leftover air from his lungs with each awkward stride. When he finally reached her he saw that the wolf was still alive, but just barely. He had caught it in the neck. As the blood soaked into the snow, the shallow heave of its belly slowed. Augie reached out to pull Iris away from the dying creature and he saw that it was washing the tears and the snow from her face with its lolling pink tongue, as a mother might do to her cubs.

The wolf’s blood was on Iris’s face, in her hair, and on her hands, but she didn’t seem to notice. The animal drew a few more ragged breaths, then expired, its hot tongue collapsing in its mouth, the gleam of its eyes clouding into darkness. The wind stirred the snow around them and sent the shards of ice sideways like a million tiny razors. Augie put his hand on Iris’s tiny, shuddering back. She let him keep it there, but she wouldn’t release the dead wolf’s fur, nor would she stop her low, keening moan. She kept her fingers knotted in its warm, shaggy coat as the snow stung their exposed skin.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought—” but he couldn’t finish. He tried again. “I thought—”

But he hadn’t thought. He had identified a target before thinking anything at all. And he knew, with a sinking burn in his gut, that he would do it again. He told himself it was to protect Iris. To keep her safe from the danger that lurked all around them. And perhaps that was true—wolves are not harmless creatures, after all—but there was something else. A primal taste, sour, like fear, rising in the back of his throat, or maybe loneliness. He looked up to the stars, waiting for them to dwarf the immensity of emotion welling inside of him, as they had so many times before. But it didn’t work this time. He felt everything, and the stars winked down on him: cold, bright, distant, unfeeling. He was filled with an urge to pack his suitcase and move on. But of course there was nowhere else to go. He stayed where he was, still looking up, still with his hand on Iris’s back, and he felt—for the first time in so many years, he felt: helpless, lonely, afraid. If the tears hadn’t frozen in the corners of his eyes, he might have cried.

THE FLASHLIGHT WAS lost, burned out and left in the dark hangar somewhere, so they made their way back toward the observatory in the dark, following the hulking black shadow of its dome set in relief against a starlit sky. Augustine had lost his ski pole as well, and he moved slowly without its support, his joints exploding in pain with each step. He shifted the rifle to the other shoulder. He wished he had left it on the runway. Wished he hadn’t thought to bring it at all. His spine and shoulder were bruised from where the heavy barrel had been knocking against him and his chest ached from the recoil.

Iris was solemn but dry-eyed. As they walked she took up her usual song, low and desolate; Augustine was grateful for it. Anything to drown out the echo of her screams. They had covered the wolf’s body with snow and packed the bulging grave down as best they could, a glowing white mound streaked pink with blood. Iris had made a plow with her mittens and pushed the powder up over the corpse with vigorous thrusts. If it weren’t for the hollowed half moons beneath her eyes and the inconsolable quivering of her chin, he might have mistaken her for a child at play in her own backyard. He tried to imagine that this was the case, but there was no snowman when they were finished, only a swollen grave.

At the observatory, Iris went straight to their home on the third floor. Augustine stowed the gun in the armory cabinet in one of the outbuildings. The rifles were stored in an unheated building to keep the mechanisms from reacting to abrupt changes in temperature when they were used outside. He remembered learning when he first came to the outpost about the special Arctic lubricant used on the guns to keep the pieces fluid, and how little he cared at the time. The man who had showed him the guns had been a Marine before becoming a scientist, and the loving way he handled the firearms reminded Augustine of his father. Augie had told the man abruptly that he wouldn’t be using the armory while he was there.

When he reached the observatory and pushed open the door, his legs finally failed him. He fell into a chair on the first floor and waited for his muscles to respond to his brain’s commands. It took the better part of an hour for the cramps to fade. The warmth was just out of his reach, at the top of three flights of stairs. Augustine finally found the strength to haul himself up by the railing. When he burst into the heated control room, his chest heaving, he collapsed onto the nest of mattresses and sleeping bags on the floor. Piece by piece, and with great effort, he removed his boots, his parka, his hat and mittens. As he lay there he wondered why he hadn’t just chased it away, why he couldn’t have aimed high and let the crack of a warning shot send the wolf running back into the wilderness. A few minutes later he was asleep.

WHEN HE FINALLY woke, the sun was beginning to show, sending faint fingers of light in through the thick windows of the control room. The clock said it was noon. Augustine let himself lie there for a long time before he got up. The sun had already reached the zenith of its shortened day before he dragged himself to the window. He could see Iris sitting down the mountain a fair distance, past the outbuildings, watching the horizon. At first he was annoyed and wanted to tell her not to wander so far without him, but he realized he had no right to disturb her, nor to limit her movements. She understood the tundra better than he did. She was more at home here than he would ever be. And yet—it was his job to keep her safe, wasn’t it? There was no one else to do it. No one to help, no one to intervene if he was doing it wrong. No Internet, even, to ask for advice. Again, he was afraid, and again he pushed the emotion away, a feeling too strange, too unpleasant to sit with for long. He stared at his own reflection in the window, his skin crinkling around his features like a sheet of notebook paper balled up and then smoothed out again. He looked even older than he remembered, and more tired.

Augustine took a granola bar from their food stores and sat at the table Iris liked best while he ate it. The field guide he had given her was open and lay facedown, its spine cracked in a dozen different places. He picked it up and found himself looking at a photo of the Arctic wolf. He read and reread the section on the white wolf’s forty-two teeth and didn’t let his eyes wander to the picture of their pups. The Arctic wolf is generally unafraid of humans, as their habitat is so desolate they rarely come into contact with them. Augie snapped the book shut. Forty-two teeth.

IRIS WAS STILL out there, unmoving. When the sun had sunk behind the mountains for the day, Augie abandoned the old astrophysics journal he had been trying to distract himself with. By then, he’d read and reread every journal, every magazine, every book left in the control tower. He felt strange, as if his own mind was unfamiliar to him, stricken with a deep wave of emotions he couldn’t name, didn’t recognize, and was unwilling to look at head-on. Augustine closed his eyes and did what he always did: he imagined the blue dome of the planet as seen from the other side of the atmosphere, and the emptiness beyond it. He pictured the rest of the solar system, planet by planet, then the Milky Way, and on and on, waiting for the awestruck relief to wash over him—but it didn’t come. All he could see was his own haggard reflection in the window, the bright rim of his white hair and wiry beard, and the empty holes where his eyes should be. The dead wolf, and the little girl stretching out her bare hand to a snout bristling with teeth. Was it remorse, he wondered, or cowardice? Perhaps he was ill. He touched the back of his hand to his forehead and found it very warm. That was it. He was ill. He could feel a fever building beneath his skin, heating his blood to a simmer. A buzz filled his ears and a pressure began to throb behind his eyes, beating against the inside of his skull like timpani. Was this it, then? The end? He thought of the first aid kit, down in the director’s office on the first floor. Should he get it? Was it worth it? He thought of all the medicines that weren’t in it, all the anatomical knowledge he didn’t possess, all the diagnostic equipment he didn’t have and wouldn’t know how to use anyway. Augustine went back to bed and imagined that it was his deathbed. Just before he drifted off, he thought of Iris, still out there, all alone on the tundra. Sleep overtook him slowly, like a wave rolling up the length of his body, and just before it reached his brain he wondered if this was what it would feel like. He wondered what would become of Iris if he never woke up.