Good Morning, Midnight

SEVEN

ONE MORNING AUGUSTINE woke later than usual. The sun was already high, the snow’s blinding albedo shining in through the windows like a floodlight. Augie lifted his head from the pillow and squinted at the tangled bedding beside him, gently poking it until he established that Iris was no longer there. The sleeping bags were cold, despite his own body heat, the bright sun shining in through the windows, and the sturdy furnace. The cloud of his breath bloomed above his face. He sat up and looked around for her, first to the table where she sat with her books, then to the chair where he sat with the radio equipment, then to each of the windowsills where she sometimes perched. She was in none of these places. She had been with him constantly since his illness, and Augustine realized it had been weeks since he hadn’t been able to find her. The incessant hiding he’d become accustomed to in their earlier days had ceased.

He got to his feet and began wrapping himself in clothes in preparation for the search. Having slept in woolen socks and a full suit of long underwear, he layered a flannel shirt, a fleece-lined sweater, and an insulated vest over his winter silks, then jammed his legs into a pair of flannel-lined work pants. Next came the scarves, two of them, and the parka and the unwieldy mittens, which he put on prematurely in his rush to get outside, then had to remove again in order to get his boots on. In the stairwell, a blast of cold air ruffled his white hair. He cursed and trudged back to the desk to snatch his hat from where it lay draped over the backrest of the chair. Getting dressed for the Arctic outdoors, even in spring, was an ordeal. And then, as he pulled the hat down over his ears, he looked out the window and saw her. He took the stairs as quickly as he could, the sounds of his haste reverberating in the empty stairwell: the waxed canvas of his pant legs rasping, the thud of his boots landing heavily on each stair tread, the whiz of his mittens skidding down the handrail, the throb of his breath pounding inside his eardrums.

He burst out onto the blinding white mountain, snapping a pair of mirrored ski goggles over his eyes to dull the brightness. He could see the shape of her, down the mountain path, just beyond the outbuildings. It looked as if she was lying on the ground, but he couldn’t be sure, he only knew that the color was wrong—she was dressed in bright blue, the color of her long underwear, not the color of her parka. Spring was coming, but it was still devastatingly cold. Augustine ran down the path, past the cluster of outbuildings, and arrived at her side out of breath and half-blind with the white glare. Iris was sitting up, cross-legged in the snow, wearing only her thin winter silks and the thick wool socks she slept in. He collapsed next to her—the adrenaline that had gotten him this far this quickly was nearly spent. He began taking off his own parka to give to her.

“Are you all right?” he asked as he struggled with the toggles. “Where’s your parka, my god, your boots? How long have you been out here, are you crazy?” His voice steadily elevated in volume until he was practically shouting. He finally got his parka off and wrapped it around her like a blanket. Taking her tiny hands in his, he felt the hot but not-too-hot flush of healthy circulation. He leaned back and looked her over, carefully this time. She smiled, an uncertain slant to her brow, as if she was worried about him—as if he were the one acting strange. She extracted her hands from his grip, reached out, and touched his bristled cheek with her warm fingers.

“Look,” she said, pointing toward a nearby valley. He followed her finger and saw the small herd of musk oxen they used to watch, back when the sun was just beginning its return. The herd had been away for the last week or two, having undoubtedly found some other valley to graze in. Augie had barely noticed their absence, but clearly Iris had. She paid attention to things like that.

“They’re back,” she whispered with rapt excitement. Augie watched with her for a moment as the animals nuzzled the snow for the grass just beneath it. He closed his eyes and caught his breath, listening to the soft squeak of their hooves in the snow and the scrape of their horns against the frozen ground. When he opened his eyes, Iris’s expression was full of wonder, her face illuminated with curiosity. He pulled her onto his lap and she didn’t protest, just made herself comfortable, laying her head against his shuddering heart. Augie wrapped his arms around her. His lungs finally relaxed, his voice left his throat and sank back into his sternum. He exhaled, long and slow. Somewhere a wolf howled, but it was far away and Augustine wasn’t scared. He was just tired and worried, feelings he was beginning to grow accustomed to.

“Please, can we go back now?” he asked her.

She nodded, her eyes still on the herd, and together they rose to their feet. He looked down at her socks, crusted with snow, and asked, “Shall I carry you?” They both knew quite well that he was barely able to haul his own weight back. She shook her head, wordlessly pressing his parka back into his hands, returning it to the person who needed it more. She waited until he had redone the toggles, then they plodded back up the mountain, between the outbuildings, along the zigzag of the steep mountain path, to the observatory.

In the control room Augie checked her extremities—every toe, every finger, even the tip of her nose, searching for the frostbite he was certain must be lurking. She humored him. He tried to remember the symptoms he’d read about before he came here: discolored skin, a waxy texture. When he found nothing amiss, he began to doubt the dependability of his own mind. He went over the details again: the sight of her from the control room, the brilliant blue of her winter silks against the white of the tundra, the crust of snow and ice clinging to the wool nap of her socks, the sensation of her warm hand against his cheek and her compact body on his lap. The herd before them, the sounds of their grazing. There was no room for doubt in his recollections.

His mind rewound, back to the beginning. He envisioned finding her just after the evacuation, alone in one of the outbuilding dormitories, sitting on a bottom bunk with her arms wrapped around her knees. He thought of the first time she spoke, to ask how long the polar night would last; of them walking together under the vivid stars; their trip to the hangar, the wolf, the sounds of her anguish and the severity of her distress; his fever, the sickly dreams, her ministrations throughout. Had she gotten sick, too? Was she ill in some way that he couldn’t see? Was he? Perhaps he was still in bed—still fevered after killing the wolf down by the hangar.

He held her wrist and found her pulse, beating briskly. Her hair was tangled and greasy, thick clumps of matted curls hanging around her neck and a halo of softer, shorter wisps framing her pale face. He pressed her forearm and watched the brief white thumbprint appear and then fade to pink. She was an ordinary, healthy girl. Iris watched him knowingly, as if she could read his mind, which both comforted and unsettled him. He asked her not to leave the observatory without him and she shrugged, a gesture that filled him with irritation. He hadn’t asked for this, hadn’t wanted a companion, had never signed up for another life to care for, especially now, at the end of his days, but—she was here. And so was he. They were stuck with each other.

He considered her for a moment, her unkempt hair, the way the curls were threatening to merge into lumpy dreadlocks. There was something feral about her, he realized, and he was suddenly ashamed of himself. Carried along by a gust of proprietary resolve, he went to fetch the wooden comb he ran through his beard occasionally. When he wordlessly offered it to her she didn’t seem to know what to do with it, looking at it like a foreign object. The comb was inadequate, and the task of untangling her hair was enormous, but Iris was patient with him and he was determined to make this child—a child he had somehow ended up responsible for—look more like a little girl and less like a musk ox. He did his best. In the end there were a few pieces he had to cut off, and he tried to even out the ends in some semblance of a hairstyle. The dark curls ended abruptly just below her ears and a short set of bangs had become necessary when the tangle that flopped into her eyes proved impossible to disengage. Iris ran her hands through her new hair and nodded her approval. There was no mirror, but she seemed to enjoy the bounce and sudden lightness, whipping her head back and forth to test the movement of her new ’do.

They ate together afterward, among the snippets of dark, matted hair: soup, saltines, and a can of ginger ale between them. After he had swept up the clippings and washed the dishes, Augie moved to his ham radio station and turned on the equipment, sinking into his chair. It had become a daily routine. He watched Iris open her astronomy book and begin to read, pressing her lips together and holding the covers tightly, as if the tome might run away. Occasionally she reached up and took a curl between her fingers, testing the texture of it, rolling it around her pointer finger and then releasing it. There was still something wild about her, Augustine thought, as he watched her play with her hair, but it was harder to pinpoint now. She looked like a recently adopted stray—unaccustomed to care, but no longer abandoned. Neither of them moved from their seats until the sun had sunk and the daylight had dripped down behind the mountains, moving off to saturate some other skies.

AUGUSTINE’S RADIO SEARCH had proceeded with the anticipated level of success—none. But he persevered anyway. It was a familiar momentum, the fierce determination that had guided him over the years, the cutthroat struggle to achieve, to possess, to understand; his coldhearted quest for knowledge. But it was different this time: here, at the end of it all, he had given up on triumph and was persisting for reasons beyond ambition, for reasons he didn’t fully understand. In the control room on the third floor he set up shop in front of the south-facing window, looking out over the tundra that stretched down toward warmer climes. While he scanned the frequencies he reclined on a wheeled chair upholstered with supple black leather, appropriated from the director’s office on the first floor. With the heap of outdated radio equipment in front of him and the sepia globe he’d salvaged from one of the outbuildings to his right, he would settle in for the day, prop his feet up on the filing cabinet just beside the table and lazily spin the globe as he scanned the airwaves, letting his finger drag through the oceans, across the continents. Initially, he made notes about which bands he’d searched, but as time wore on and he’d searched them all several times over, he let his method become more whimsical, tuning the frequencies like picking tarot cards from a fortune-teller’s deck.

Most of the time, Iris read at the table across the room. He guessed that she had read the Arctic field guide from cover to cover a few times over before she put it down, and from there she moved on to an astronomy text he’d found shoved into one of the research assistants’ lockers, the cover laminated and marked with a Dewey decimal sticker, forgotten in the chaos of the evac. A rogue library book, far from home—how fitting, he thought, as she buffed the smudged covers with the sleeve of her shirt, then smeared them with new fingerprints as she read. Their silence was companionable as they sat at opposite ends of the control room, engrossed in their solitary projects.

He let his mind wander to the mystery of her proximity: sitting with him in the control room, and more broadly, joining him here at the end of civilization—the edge of humanity, measured in both time and space. He wondered how it had happened, how she had arrived here and how she had stayed, where she came from, whom she belonged to, whether she had any feelings on these subjects; she never once said anything about it, and it was somehow unimaginable that she ever would. She was a puzzle, but she was his puzzle, and her presence kept him working, kept him striving without rational expectation of success. It was possible, he mused, that she was what had kept him alive this long.

AUGUSTINE DIDN’T SLEEP that night after he and Iris returned from the tundra. He tried, but by the time Iris began to make her wordless sleep sounds he knew it was futile. He extracted himself from the sleeping bags as quietly as he could, the synthetic whisper of the fabric hushing him as he slithered out onto the cold floor. At the ham station he plugged his headset into the receiver and switched the equipment on. Outside the window the tundra glowed blue under the yellow-pink blush of the full moon. He settled into his chair to listen to the white noise from the radio waves. Now and then he glanced at the swell beneath the sleeping bags to make sure she was still there, her chest still rising and falling, perhaps accompanied by the slight twitch of an unconscious mind tickling the nerves of an arm or a leg.

The tuner scanned automatically. Augie pulled out one of the Arctic atlases that had been gathering dust in the control room, holding it on his lap while he listened, flipping through the pages. He eventually came to the well-worn map of Lake Hazen in the center of the book, an enormous body of water roughly fifty miles east of the observatory, where the researchers used to fish in their free time. Augie could recall a number of trips being organized, trips he never went on, though he was always invited, and countless stories being told, stories he never listened to. Fishing trips are for terrestrials, he would scoff to himself, and return to the images of some distant galaxy. When he needed time off, he preferred the exotic glamor of other places—tropical beaches, expensive resorts, dense jungles. Yet now—the journey was feasible. The destination was desirable, in fact. Perhaps a journey was just what he and Iris needed: an adventure to welcome the strengthening light. The year-round snow and ice of the mountain would give way to wildflowers and warm breezes down by the lake, closer to sea level. Perhaps the change would do his small companion some good. Perhaps it would do them both good. Supposedly some of the warmest temperatures on the archipelago had been recorded there: as balmy as the low seventies in high summer. Augie let his finger drift along the length of the blue outline in the atlas, tracing the long slope of its western shore. And why shouldn’t they go? He had been listening to white noise and transmitting into the void for long enough. Hope dwindled in the face of probability. He needed a change. If they left soon they could use one of the snowmobiles from the hangar. The snow cover wouldn’t last forever, but there was time.

He lifted the ear of his headset and listened to Iris breathe for a moment before letting the earphone slap back against the side of his head. Augustine felt like an animal awakening after a long wintry sleep. Perhaps they would even find something useful at the lake, something like—and suddenly he remembered. He slid the headset down to hang around his neck so that he could hear his own thoughts without the stuttering static. The shore of Lake Hazen had boasted a small seasonally staffed weather station for decades, since the 1950s, back when radio communication was their only option. He recalled the aerial array he’d seen in more recent photographs of the station—vastly superior to his own antenna here at the observatory. It followed that their transmitting equipment would be more powerful as well. He snapped the atlas shut. Another reason. It was settled. They would go.

He was scribbling plans and supply lists when the sun came up and Iris began to stir. She stood up with a sleeping bag wrapped around her like a long, hooded cloak and shuffled over to where he sat, her new hairdo jutting out in unexpected directions. She touched the pad he was writing on and then let her hand rest on his shoulder, shrugging as if to say What gives? He covered her hand with his and turned his chair to face her.

“Let’s take a trip.”