Until the Night

From the Blue Notebook

The first time I stepped onto ice pack above 80°' N, I was utterly vanquished by the immensities of white and blue. A voice not my own reverberated in my skull and rib cage both: You should not be here, it told me—no one should be here. A friend of mine who is a neurosurgeon had the exact same thought the first time he inserted a gloved finger into the cerebral cortex of a living human being.

It costs a small fortune to keep a man alive in the Arctic for any length of time, and governments and funding agencies like to be sure that anyone they put there is capable of completing a mission. We all had to undergo not just physicals but psychological exams before we were cleared. It was also for that reason that Arcosaur enjoyed the services of Jens Dahlberg, an expert in Arctic medicine and nutrition, as camp physician.

I do not belong here is an idea that can very rapidly turn crippling. Many an Arctic adventurer has had to make the humiliating call for rescue in a matter of days, undone not by the cold but by looking into the face of what might have been called—before overuse rendered the word useless—the awesome. Air so preternaturally clear that you can see the curve of the earth. And in all that vista nothing but snow and ice and, in summer, veins of open water. Even the most thoroughgoing atheist can be destabilized by setting foot where only gods should walk. In that white desert, the only thing worse than a crack opening up beneath your feet is a crack opening up in the psyche of the man next to you. Arctic missions rely on people like Jens to weed out such risks.

We each had our area of expertise. Vanderbyl was oceanography, a man who mapped mountains and valleys no human eye had ever seen. I was ice, Wyndham snow. Rebecca was clouds. Her tools were radar, lidar and radiometers, and she spent many hours a day staring at readouts and computer screens in an effort to define the vertical structure of cloud water contents. She measured the size of droplets and crystals, properties that determine how energy is exchanged between the Arctic surface and the atmosphere.

She was embarked on a long-term project to measure how clouds interact with aerosols, and how they change with the seasons and from one year to another. At some point in the future her findings would be correlated with mine and Wyndham’s on seasonal meltage. Already by this time, which was 1992, much research had been done on global warming, and the models were predicting an especially high rate of warming in the Arctic. But so far (surprisingly, given the dolorous certainties to come) we had found no hard evidence of it.

And I hoped desperately we wouldn’t find any. I had nightmarish visions of oil platforms and tourists overrunning the only place on the planet I felt at home. Of all of us, Wyndham was the most pessimistic. When depressed, he would spin scenarios of catastrophes—of floods and cyclones and mass migrations. I wasn’t willing to call him paranoid, as some of the others did. Instead, I chose not to think about it, the way one chooses not to imagine the death of a spouse.

What happens in your ideal world? I asked Rebecca one day.

My interest was entirely selfish, of course, and there may even have been a touch of irritation in it. It should not be possible for a woman to be such a dedicated scientist, such a humble and reliable trader in hard fact, and yet have such a beautiful neck and throat. I was not usually one to notice these things. When it came to the appreciation of female beauty, I had always been strictly an impressionist. But Rebecca taught me to be a detail man. I thought about the elegant and shifting columns of tendon and cartilage. I thought about her way of blinking exactly once whenever I spoke to her, as if capturing my remark like a lattice of crystals for later analysis. I thought about her fingers, slender and tapered, the nails perfectly formed, neatly shaped. Her skin was darker than mine, not quite tawny, and I had to suppress the desire to touch her hands as she typed, despite the wedding band.

My ideal world?

I had spoken to her from the doorway of her office. Only three of the scientists had private offices: Dahlberg, Vanderbyl and Rebecca. In Rebecca’s case, it was a matter of getting her instruments as far from the power shack as possible, because the generator tended to interfere with her readouts. The space was not much bigger than a graduate student’s carrel, but it had a porthole window over which she had hung a towel to keep the glare off her screens.

My ideal world?

She didn’t turn to face me but spoke to my reflection in her radar screen.

In my ideal world, we don’t have a sea station here, a drift station there, we have an international network of cloud observatories: Tiksi, Hammerfest, Alert and Barrow—at least those four. And every day I get to chat with Russians and Danes and Americans about Arctic clouds. And you?

It must be wonderful to be so easily amused.

Now she did turn to face me. Why ask, if you’re only going to make fun? A coordinated network of stations is what we need. It’s going to take a lot more than a drifting dysfunctional family to figure out what’s going on up here.

I didn’t respond, only stood for a few moments reading the Ice Island Regulations that were taped to every door in the facility.

Please appreciate that this camp is in a very remote location. In the event of an accident, every effort is made to evacuate the injured party(s). However, we cannot control bad weather or radio blackouts, which can last up to 10 days. Exercise extreme caution and good judgment in your daily work and activities during your stay on the Ice Island. Thank you for your co-operation and have a pleasant stay.

A few days later, I stopped at her door again. The temperature had dropped ten degrees and there were loud cracks and pops from outside. Ice contracting.

I’ll tell you about my ideal world, I said. My ideal world is one where you turn around the moment you hear footsteps, because you hope it’s me.

She shook her head, not looking. You can’t talk to me that way.

You and Vanderbyl are breaking up. You’ve already broken up.

She shook her head again. You can’t.

But I am. I think you want me to.

She removed her hands from the keyboard and folded them in her lap and looked down at them. When she looked up again, she pointed at her lidar readout. The screen resembled a spray of yellow and red confetti.

You know what that is?

No.

You’ve just come in from outside. How would you rate ground-level visibility?

Right now? If it wasn’t for the curve of the earth, you could probably see Denmark.

Clouds?

None. Not one.

That—she tapped a trim fingernail on the screen—is a cloud. It’s not visible to the naked eye. It’s not visible to a telescope. It’s not even visible to infrared. I’m looking at a cloud here and I have no idea what it’s made of. I’m going to be analyzing these readings for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t want also to be trying to figure out if you love me or hate me. There’s only room in a life for so many mysteries. I couldn’t face coming home to another.

A wave of bitterness took me by surprise. Don’t flatter yourself, I said. I just want to sleep with you.

She gave me one of those single blinks. Data received. There was always the risk with Rebecca that you transmitted more than you knew. She raised her hands once more to her keyboard and resumed typing.

If I thought that was true, she said, it might stand a chance of actually happening.