Good Morning, Midnight

FIVE

THE SUN CAME and went so quickly that it was hard for Augustine to tell how long he was laid out. Drifting in and out of dreams, his fever burning red hot, he would wake in the dark and struggle to sit up, thrashing in the tangle of sleeping bags like a fly caught in a web. At other times he opened his eyes to see Iris hovering above him, offering him water or a blue camping mug full of chicken broth—but he couldn’t raise his arms to take it, or even command his tongue to form the words that tumbled through his hot, heavy brain: Come closer or How long have I been here? or What time is it? He would close his eyes, and again he would sleep.

In his fevered dreams, he was a young man again. His legs were strong, his eyesight sharp, his hands smooth and tanned, with wide palms and long, straight fingers. His hair was black, and he was clean-shaven, the prick of dark stubble always just beginning to shadow his jawline. His limbs were responsive, fluid and nimble. He was in Hawaii, in Africa, in Australia. He wore a white linen shirt barely buttoned, pressed khakis turned up to his ankles. He was wooing pretty girls in bars, classrooms, observatories, or else he was in the dark, wrapped in an olive field coat, pockets bulging with snacks and gear and pieces of rough quartz or stones with pleasing shapes and colors, looking up into the starry night sky above whichever corner of the earth he was presently passing through. There were palm fronds, eucalyptus trees, fields of sawgrass. White sand next to clear water, yellow mesas punctuated with lonely baobab trees. There were long-legged birds with multicolored wings and curved bills, little gray lizards and big green ones, African wild dogs, dingoes, a stray mutt he used to feed. In his dreams, the world was big and wild and colorful again, and he was part of it. It was a thrill just to exist. There were control rooms full of humming equipment, enormous telescopes, endless arrays. There were beautiful women, college girls and townies and visiting scholars, and he would’ve slept with them all if he could have.

In his dreams he was a still-young man just beginning to fall in love with himself. He was growing more and more certain that he could, should, have whatever he wanted. He was smart, and ambitious, and destined for greatness. The papers he wrote were being published in the best journals. There were endless job offers. He was written up in Time magazine’s “young science” issue. A wave of praise and admiration followed, which he rode into his late thirties. His work was written about with unmistakable reverence. The word genius was tossed around. All the observatories wanted him to do his research there, all the universities were begging him to teach. He was in high demand. For a time.

But delirium wasn’t his friend. The sun began to fade, the stars to dim, and the clock ran backward: he was an awkward, spotted sixteen-year-old again, in the lobby of a mental hospital, watching two men escort his mother to the locked ward while his father signed forms at the front desk. He was alone with his father in an empty house, hunting in the woods with him, riding in the truck with him, living with his foot poised above a perpetual land mine. He was visiting his overmedicated mother at the hospital before he left for college, listening to her mumble about fixing dinner, her eyes half-closed, hands trembling in her lap. And he was at his father’s grave ten years later, spitting on the freshly laid turf, kicking the tombstone until his toe broke. Augustine watched himself from afar in these scenes. He saw his own face, over and over, from behind the eyes of women he’d abused, colleagues he’d cheated, servers and bellhops and assistants and lab techs he’d neglected, slighted, always too busy and ambitious to pay attention to anyone but himself. For the first time he saw the damage he had caused, the hurt and sadness and resentment. He felt shame, and deep inside the husk of his illness he named it.

The warmth and the beauty and the vistas were tantalizing, but they slipped away when he tried to hold on to them. The other, more painful memories were a reckoning in real time. Long minutes and even longer seconds: the feeling of his hunting knife slicing into taut, living deer skin, the pulse of its lifeblood, the metallic stench of it; the sensations of guilt and regret, emotions that in the past he had mistaken for physical ailments, burning deep in his stomach or intestines or lungs; the sound of his father’s fist against a wall, against his own body, against his mother’s. His mother before she went to the hospital: an unmoving mound beneath her patchwork wedding quilt, day after day, week after week, then watching her rise like a phoenix and burst into the living room, fire in her eyes, ready to do do do, go go go. Not stopping until she had spent all she had—energy, money, time, and then collapsing back into the blankets, to remain dormant until she would rise once more, or until her husband dragged her out to test her resolve. Augie was trapped in these moments by his sickness, held captive within the walls of memories he wanted to forget.

AFTER A TIME—HE couldn’t tell how long—the fever passed. The nightmares finally left him, and he became aware that he was awake. Weak but conscious; hungry. Pulling himself to a sitting position, Augustine looked around the control room, rubbing the sleep from the corners of his eyes. The room was unchanged. He swiveled his head and let out a short sigh of relief when his eyes found her. Iris was sitting on the windowsill, looking out onto the twilit tundra. When she heard him getting up and kicking off the heap of sleeping bags, she turned. He realized that he had never seen her smile before. One of her bottom teeth was missing, and he could see the pink wrinkle of her gums showing through the gap. A dimple lingered on her left cheek and a flush crept across the bridge of her tiny nose.

“You look terrible,” she said. “I’m glad you’re awake.”

It was still rare to hear her voice, and it again surprised him with its deepness, its scratchiness. He was relieved to hear it. She circled the nest of sleeping bags like a wary animal, tempering her excitement, surveying all the details before she moved closer. She produced a vacuum-packed serving of jerky, a can of green beans, and a spoon, and held them out to Augie.

“Do you want broth also?” she asked as he took the food. He peeled back the tab on the green beans and began scooping them into his mouth. She ripped open the jerky package with her teeth and set it down beside him, then went to heat the electric kettle. He was ravenous, and suddenly alive again. After the can was emptied he turned his attention to the jerky, wiping bean juice from his beard with the back of his hand.

“How long was I out?” he asked.

Iris shrugged. “Five days, maybe?”

He nodded. It seemed about right. “And you…you’re okay?”

She looked at him strangely and turned back to the kettle without answering, unwrapping the foil from a bouillon cube and dropping it into the blue mug while she waited for the water to boil. The mug was too hot to hold, so she let it cool on the countertop and returned to her perch on the windowsill, silent once more, looking out over the darkening tundra.

AUGUSTINE BEGAN TO test his atrophied muscles on the stairs of the control tower. When he could trudge down to the first floor and back up to the third without collapsing, he decided it was time to go farther afield. Navigating the snow and ice outside tired him even faster than the stairs, but he went out every day, sometimes more than once. After a while, his endurance returned. He would walk down the narrow path cut into the mountain, through the abandoned village of outbuildings, and out onto the open, rolling mountains. He was winded and weak, but alive, and the joy of that simple fact flooded his tired old body. Both the joy of survival and the weight of regret were unfamiliar to him, but neither would let him go, as hard as he tried to sweat them out. The feelings from his fevered nightmares still remained vivid. His muscles ached from exercise, but also from the unfamiliar emotions that coursed through him, like someone else’s blood running through his veins.

On these walks Iris often tagged along, either running in front of him or lagging behind. The snatches of daylight lengthened from barely an hour, to a few hours, to a whole afternoon. As the days progressed Augustine began to walk farther, always keeping the emerald green of Iris’s pompom hat in his sights. She seemed different since his fever, as though there was more of her—more energy, more physicality, more words. Before, she had hung back in his peripheral vision, sitting aloof in the control room, wandering stealthily among the outbuildings, always elusive. Now, Augie couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her. She was everywhere, and her smile—still rare but somehow always hinted at just beneath the curve of her cheeks—was glorious.

One day, when the sun had been hanging low in the sky for several hours before it began to sink, Augustine went farther than he had been able to go since the hangar—since the fever. Now he always went north, over the mountains. Never south, toward the tundra and the hangar and the wolf’s mounded grave, marked with veins of pink blood running through the white. To the north, the Arctic Sea stretched up over the top of the globe, an icy blue cap covering Earth’s cranium. The shore was miles away, a distance he could never hope to cross on foot, but he imagined that when the wind was blowing in the right direction he could smell the crisp salt air from the unfrozen sea, rolling up over the glaciers and traveling to his keen, searching nostrils. He decided that the farther he walked, the stronger the brackish smell became.

That day, they’d already been walking long enough that his muscles burned and even Iris had slowed her gait, dragging her little boots through the snow instead of lifting them with each step, but Augustine wanted to go farther. There was something ahead, he told himself, something he must see. He didn’t know what. The sun slipped behind the mountains, sending shots of color into the sky like a dancer throwing silk scarves in the air. He was admiring the sunset melting into the snow when he saw it: the solid outline of an animal against the changeable northern sky. It was the polar bear he remembered from the first day of sunlight—the same bear, he was sure of it, not because he could see any distinct features but because he recognized it by the quickening of his heartbeat. It was so big it had to be a bear, with long, shaggy fur, a deep, aging yellow. Augie was at least a mile away, perhaps several, but he saw these details with telescopic clarity. This was what he’d been searching for. It was as though he were standing next to the bear, or as though he were riding high on its massive, arched back, his fingers dug deep into the matted fur, heels locked around the wide, padded rib cage. He could feel the thick fur between his knuckles, see the yellow tint of it, the pink stains on its muzzle, and smell the musky, rotten odor of old blood.

The bear stopped at the top of the peak and raised its snout. It swiveled its head one way and then the other, finally turning to look in Augie’s direction. Iris was skidding down a small slope on the seat of her snow pants, green pompom bouncing as she went, unaware of what Augustine was seeing. Augie and the bear looked at each other, and across the miles of snow and jagged rock and buffeting wind that separated them Augustine felt a strange kinship travel between them. He envied the bear its immensity, its simple needs and clear purpose, but across the vista a whiff of loneliness swirled, too, a feeling of longing and doom. He felt a piercing sadness for the bear, all alone on the mountain range—a creature consumed with the mechanics of sustenance, the killing and gnawing, rolling in the snow, the necessary bouts of sleep among the drifts and in the snow caves, the long walks to and from the sea. That was all it had, all it knew, all it needed. An emotion stirred in his stomach and Augustine realized it was discontent—for the bear, but also for himself. He’d lived through his fever, but for what? He looked down the slope in front of him in time to see Iris barrel-roll to a stop and sit up, her green pompom dusted with white. She was waving up at him, smiling—a child at play. The usual pallor of her face was lit from within, a pink glow flooding her white skin. When Augie looked back to the mountain range, the bear was gone.

“Iris,” he called, “time to go back.” On their way home, Iris stayed close, by his side or right in front of him, looking back to check on his progress from time to time. In the last stretch, as they climbed the path up the mountain to the observatory, to their home in the control tower, she took his mittened hand in hers and held it till they were inside.

IN THE BEGINNING, Augie had felt it fitting that his life should end so quietly, so simply: just his mind, his failing body, the brutal landscape. Even before the exodus of the other researchers, before the eerie silence and the presumed cataclysm—even before all of that, he had come here to die. In the weeks before his arrival, when he was still planning his Arctic research from a warm beach in the South Pacific, he’d considered the project to be his last. A finale, the capstone of a career, a bold conclusion for the biographer who would someday write a book about him. For Augustine, the end of his work was inextricable from the end of his life. Perhaps his heart would beat for a few more empty years after the work was done, or perhaps not; it didn’t trouble him to think of it. So long as his legacy burned bright in science’s archives, he was content to flicker and die alone, a few degrees shy of the North Pole. In a way, the evacuation only made it easier. But something happened to him when he looked across the Arctic mountains and saw the great yellow polar bear looking back at him. He thought of Iris. He felt gratitude for a presence instead of an absence. The feeling was so unfamiliar, so unexpected, it moved something inside him, something old and heavy and stubborn. In its wake there was an opening.

In the early days with Iris at the observatory, he had idly wondered what would become of her when he died. But following the bear sighting, as the sun hung in the sky longer and longer, he began to consider it more carefully. Augie began to think beyond his own timeline and into hers. He wanted something different for her—connection, love, community. He didn’t want to go on making excuses for his inability to give her anything but the same emptiness he’d given himself.

After the other scientists had evacuated, he’d made halfhearted attempts to contact the theoretical remnants of humankind, to find out what had happened out there beyond the icy borders of his reach, but once he’d realized the satellites were silent and the commercial radio stations had gone off the air, he’d abandoned the search. He got comfortable with the idea that there was no one left to contact. That something, everything, had ended. He wasn’t troubled by the physical reality of being marooned—that had always been his plan.

But things had changed since then. He was suddenly burning with determination to find another voice. The probability of survivors had always been in the back of his mind, but even if he had cared enough to search them out, the remoteness of the observatory made such contact logistically useless. Assuming he could locate a leftover pocket of humanity, there would be no way to get there. And yet—it was suddenly the connection itself that was important. He knew the odds—in all likelihood his search would yield nothing, or as good as nothing. He knew they weren’t going to be rescued, or discovered. Even so, he was fueled by this new feeling, this unfamiliar sense of duty, this determination to find another voice. He abandoned the telescope and turned his attention to the radio waves.

AS A BOY, eleven or twelve or so, Augustine knew the radio bands better than he knew his own body. He cobbled together crystal sets out of wire and screws and semiconductor diodes and quickly tackled more-complex projects—transmitters, receivers, decoders. He built radios with vacuum tubes and with transistors, analog and digital, from kits, from scratch, from scavenged appliances. He constructed big antennas, dipoles in the backyard, delta boxes hoisted up into the trees—whatever he could forage the parts for. It took up all of his free time. Eventually Augie’s interest caught the attention of his father, and this new intimacy was a surprise to them both. His father was a mechanic, not for cars but for car factories. The machinery he spent his time on during the day was enormous, bigger than houses, and so when his son began to tinker with the tiniest of mechanisms, the boy piqued his curiosity. Before he built radios, Augie had been his mother’s son, stirrer of batter, peeler of potatoes, escort to the hair salon. He’d do his homework at the kitchen counter when she was well enough to cook, or in her bedroom, curled at the end of the bed like a dog, when she wasn’t. He was her mascot, a little boy easily molded to fit any of her moods. Even as a child, Augustine sensed, without knowing why, that his father hated their rapport.

He felt the shift of his mother’s moods keenly. He could sense the darkness descending before she did. He knew when to let her wallow in her dim bedroom and when to lift the blinds; he knew how to coax her back home when things got out of hand during one of their errands. He managed her with such subtle skill that she never suspected manipulation, never saw him as anything more than her little boy, her trusted friend, her constant companion. No one else could soothe her the way he could, especially not his father. Augie engineered his mother’s moods out of necessity. Reining her in was the only way he could protect her, and as he got better and better at it he began to think he had decoded her affliction, that he had bested it—that he had fixed her.

The winter he turned eleven she went to bed and didn’t get up until spring. That was the winter he realized she was a puzzle he’d never be able to solve, that despite all his efforts and skill, she was beyond his understanding. He was alone, all of a sudden, and lonely. He didn’t know what to do without her. While his father berated the inanimate mound of her fetal form beneath the bedspread, Augustine retreated to the basement and found a new pleasure in the clarity of electronics: the joining of wires, the flow of current, the simple mechanisms that fit together and made something so wonderful it bordered on magic, plucking a symphony of music and voices from thin air. The basic lessons he received in school on amps and watts and waves were all it took to give him a running start. He’d always been a good student. In the dark, musty cellar, in a circular pool of yellow light, he taught himself the rest. On rare occasions, Augustine’s father descended the crumbling wooden steps and sat with his son, and on even rarer occasions, Augustine enjoyed these visits. More often than not, his father came to chide him, to show him his errors, to gloat over his failures. By then it was clear to everyone in their household that Augie had no ordinary intellect, and his father was sure to punish him for it every chance he got.

Now, years later, in the cold Arctic, Augustine remembered that basement as clearly as if he were still sitting down there, alone at his work table with the spools of wire, germanium transistors, rudimentary amps, oscillators, mixers, filters laid out before him. The soldering iron at his right elbow, plugged in and already warm, the schematics for his latest endeavor to his left: a smudged pencil sketch, little arrows and clumsy symbols to remind himself of the current’s flow. His father wasn’t welcome in these memories, but his voice intruded from time to time:

“What kind of an idiot can’t fix a transistor?”

“This looks like a two-year-old made it.”

At the observatory, in the control room, Augie double-checked the satellite phones and the broadband network to be sure he hadn’t overlooked something. Communication from the outpost had always been haphazard, mostly reliant on satellites, but without the satphone or broadband working, with no satellite connection to speak of, there was only ham radio. He hunted through the control tower and the outbuildings for anything that might be useful, but there wasn’t much. The equipment was there only for backup. The system in place was less than ideal, barely powerful enough to talk to the military base on the northern tip of the island, mostly used for communication with planes passing over. The power supply was weak and the antenna sensitivity even weaker; a signal would have to be very close, very powerful, or riding a lucky sky-wave to register. Assuming there was anyone out there to hear it in the first place.

It reminded him of his years in the basement, turning his machines on and transmitting the first CQ of the day. Simple, straightforward, with a single purpose. He was seeking anyone, it didn’t matter who. He’d collected QSL postcards—confirmations of radio communication between two ham operators—from his various contacts and filed them away. There were earnest cards with call signs scrawled over an outline of the operator’s home state, silly cards with cartoon sketches of the operators hanging from their antennae like monkeys or wet laundry, dirty cards with busty, half-naked women draped over radio equipment and murmuring into a handheld microphone. Augustine would sit down at his microphone in the basement and scan the empty ham frequencies, issuing his call as he moved through the dial, and whether it took him a minute or a few hours, someone would eventually respond to him.

A voice would fill his speakers and say, “KB1ZFI, this is so-and-so responding.” They would exchange locations and Augie would add up the miles on the atlas he kept nearby—the more distant the contact, the better. The QSL cards were just for fun—it was the contact itself that thrilled him most, the idea that he could send his signal out across the country, across the world, and make an immediate connection somewhere, anywhere. There was always someone at the other end—someone he didn’t know, someone he couldn’t picture and would never meet, but a voice all the same. He didn’t bother chatting over the airwaves after the initial contact. He just reached out to see if someone was there, and he was satisfied once he knew there was. After the initial connection had been made, he might go for two, three, half a dozen if the weather conditions were prime and the signals were traveling far. When he was finished with his CQs he’d turn off his equipment, address a few QSL cards of his own—a simple globe with a signal shooting off into space, scattered stars and his own call sign in block letters at the top—and then tinker with the electronics in the quiet solitude of the basement. These were his happiest moments as a child. Alone, without the cruelty of the other kids at school, without the volatility of his mother, without the belittling comments of his father. Just him, his equipment, and the hum of his own mind.

In the Arctic, he fine-tuned the equipment, and when he was finally satisfied he turned it all on. Iris had been watching him work with vague curiosity but didn’t say anything. She was outside wandering among the outbuildings when he began transmitting. Augie could see her from the window, her small shape dark against the snow. He picked up the handheld microphone, pressed the Transmit button, then let it go. He cleared his throat; pressed it again.

“CQ,” he said, “CQ, this is KB1ZFI, kilo-bravo-one-zulu-foxtrot-india, over. CQ. Anyone?”