Until the Night

From the Blue Notebook

It is possible in the Arctic—possible sometimes—to mistake oneself for a superhero, one’s faculties, one’s perceptions can be so transformed. Such is the array of optical and acoustic phenomena. It is a special moment, the first time you realize you are overhearing a conversation taking place more than a kilometre away. Distances of three kilometres are not unusual, depending on temperature, wind speed, surface conditions. In contrast to temperate climates, Arctic air is coldest close to the ground’ it refracts sound waves downward instead of upward.

That moment has the quality of an excellent dream—the feeling of vindication and exhilaration one sometimes gets from a gorgeous subconscious narrative: Yes, of course! This is who I am! I’ve always been infinitely more perceptive than others!

Wyndham, guileless Wyndham, reported such a dream to me once, over a midnight breakfast.

I was with Isaac Newton, he told me. At his lodgings in Cambridge. We were doing differential calculus together, performing it as if we were playing a duet. We had an enormous ledger open on the table before us. There was a cat sitting next to it, watching us with the greenest, most intelligent eyes. And we were doing these equations—incredibly intricate, incredibly precise—and they just flowed effortlessly one after another, and we took turns writing them out. I was filled with this incredible joy. The two of us were best friends and always had been. And I was thinking, How did I forget this? How did I forget that Isaac Newton and I are best friends and do equations together?

A sadness crossed Wyndham’s face.

When I woke up, I was thinking, you know, I really should give Isaac a call. And I couldn’t accept at first that it wasn’t real. That it was just a dream. It seemed so perfect. So right. And I lay there with reality seeping into my brain like dishwater, dirty and grey, and I felt utterly bereft. I was depressed for days.

So it is for some men, some researchers. They come back from the Arctic, where their superhuman visual acuity has shown them sun dogs and halos. Fata Morgana. Yes! It was always thus! My powers have come into their own! Only to return to their real lives in Calgary and Edmonton, Peterborough and Waterloo.

Such people, after less than a week at home, before they’ve even written up the data they’ve just brought back, start scrambling for the next possible research grant.

From the tinkle of candle ice on the shores of Lake Hazen to the subtle beauty of a fog bow—colourless owing to the fineness of the vapour—to the shattering storms of Tanquary Fiord, the High Arctic is a place to go mad in. A place to fall in love. A land of mirages.

In a sense it is all mirage, with the odd pocket of reality. The Antarctic may be more wild and more bitter—though opinions on this vary—but at least it offers actual solid ground somewhere beneath one’s boots. There is no land at all at the North Pole, just an unending frozen sea, so that even one’s footsteps are a kind of lie.

I told Rebecca one day that I had come to understand she was simply a mirage.

Thanks. And I suppose you’re real.

Completely. Utterly.

She gave a little snort of derision.

You misunderstand. I just mean at times like this you seem almost attainable. As in a superior mirage. Light warps in the cold and things appear on the horizon that aren’t really there. Or aren’t there yet. You’re on my horizon, but never quite in reach.

I just swallowed thirty millilitres of your semen, Karson. I’d say that’s within reach.

She was still calling me Karson at that point, not Kit. I turned away and lay on my back and sighed. Petulant. Childish, even. But this is the truth of the matter. I am—was—someone who chose a solitary life. Not womanless. Not gay. Solitary. The emotions and how we deal with them are every bit as Darwinian as fins, genitals, tentacles. We all find our mechanism of survival—or not. Mine was monkish solitude. It worked for me. Had done for more than a decade. I was frightened by my loss of equanimity.

After a while Rebecca turned on her side, propped up on one elbow, and looked at me with the intensity she brought to her cloud formations, her readouts and water droplets.

You’re hurt? Is that possible?

Look, I said, I’m not a poet. I don’t have words for this.

She ran her index finger along my cheekbone. I don’t want a poet. I want Karson Durie, ice physicist and seducer. You don’t have to fancify, just tell me. I don’t have a radar for you. I don’t know what you want or what you feel or where you’re going unless you tell me. Directly. No mirages.

I was trying to.

Trying not to, more like it.

You can’t expect me to express any feelings at all if you sneer at them.

She shifted in the bed, took hold of my face, her palms hot, and shook her head. Eyes the green of stadium night games. Not sneering, love. Please. Try again. I’ll listen, I promise.

All right, I said. I’ll try a quote. A song. Don’t worry, I won’t attempt to sing. But there’s a line I’ve never forgotten. It goes through my head a lot. I try to make out like I really don’t care …

She shook me a little by the shoulders, breasts pressing into me. And?

I try to make out like I really don’t care. And the way that I do it is I really don’t care.

The briefest pause.

This is what you’re struggling to tell me? That you really don’t care?

No. I’m saying not caring has been my mode of existence. It’s what I’m afraid of losing. You can’t blame me for that, surely. I lose it and then I finally reach the horizon only to find …

I was a mirage.

Well, a superior mirage.

Of course.

Goes without saying.

She pushed herself up and straddled me, knee on either side of my chest, hands pressing down on my shoulders. She reached out with one hand to steady herself against the wall behind my head. A few more adjustments and then she is there. My nostrils fill with the glorious, intoxicating scent of her. I raise my face and kiss her cunt, a flurry of kisses, but she moves again and presses me against the pillow.

Oo, you need a shave.

So do you, I said with some difficulty.

Pervert. Not a chance.

She rubbed herself over my face in a kind of dreamy delirium. Let me know, she said, when I’m real enough for you.

Afterward, I fell asleep, and when I woke up she was reading a fat hardback by Robertson Davies. I watched her for a while and she pretended not to notice.

You’re the only person I’ve ever met, I said, who’s as Canadian as the CBC.

She smiled her cat’s smile but kept reading.

You’re a curling rink, I said. You probably have pyjamas with matching toque and mittens.

She was making an effort not to laugh, but she refused to look away from her book.

You gorge on poutine, I said. You wolf down donuts and pea-meal bacon when no one’s looking. You have a complete set of Tim Hortons mugs.

Go away, she said, exasperated.

I got dressed and tossed on my coat and left her reading. I crossed the slushy rectangle between the huts and went into the mess, where Wyndham, Vanderbyl, Dr. Dahlberg and Ray Deville were all sitting around the table like figures in a painting. Cups and mugs and magazines were spread out along with the remains of their various dinners and snacks. Mozart on the sound system, lanyard clanging on the flagpole outside. We often hung around the table after dinner, not necessarily talking.

This fresh? I said, lifting the teapot.

Reasonably, Wyndham said. He was the only one who didn’t seem to be doing anything. Perhaps he was just listening to the music. Vanderbyl was reading a biography of Niels Bohr, his professorial pencil poised to correct even published material. Ray Deville was rewriting a paper he was preparing to submit. And Jens Dahlberg was tormenting himself with a Rubik’s cube.

I took the empty seat between Wyndham and Dahlberg. I said to the doctor that I thought those colourful cubes had disappeared from the face of the earth.

I’m a firm believer, he said, twisting the thing, turning it, twisting again, in attempting to do things you’re not good at.

Sounds painful, I said.

Uncomfortable. Not painful.

I reached for a plate of cookies and dunked one in my tea.

Ray had put down his pen and was staring at me across the table. I twiddled my fingers at him and smiled.

His expression changed to stern disapproval. He gathered his papers, stood up and left the room. The Arctic attracts eccentrics, but Ray Deville was strange even by the standards of graduate students. A bit of a lurcher, Ray was. A starer and a blurter with an extreme accent.

I turned to make a light-hearted comment to Vanderbyl but found he was staring at me too. His face, that fair Dutch skin, was a deep, stinging red. He pushed back his chair, almost falling in his rush to flee.

Then Dahlberg. He placed the cube neatly on the table, took his plate to the sink and left the mess.

All right, I said. Apparently I have leprosy.

Don’t be an idiot, Wyndham said. I mean, really, Kit. How far do you want to push him?

I realize every expedition has its designated pariah, Gordon. Call me obtuse, but I would have put odds on young Deville of the thousand-yard stare. You might at least explain why this time the mantle has fallen on my shoulders.

He turned to me, eyes shadowed by the overhead lamp. Your aftershave might have something to do with it.

Aftershave. I don’t wear any aftershave.

Your face, man, your face. You reek of pussy.

I raised a hand to my cheek, still warm from bed.

That’s right, Wyndham said. That wonder of nature we all know and love and adore. Fabulous. Miraculous. Bully for you. But Rebecca is the guy’s wife, man. She’s the guy’s wife. He’s trying to play the Stoic, the picture of calm reason. He’s lead scientist, for God’s sake. But he’s utterly torn up over the idea of her sleeping with someone else. And if you can’t see it—or won’t see it, pardon me—then you’re just an out-and-out bastard.