Until the Night

From the Blue Notebook

An evening lecture in the Arcosaur mess.

This was something we did twice a week. Partly it was a way of making our supply of VHS tapes last longer, and partly it was a way for us to keep each other apprised of progress on our various projects. The field of Arctic research is a small one and yet, within it, even within the same room at the same camp, it’s possible to have two scientists sitting next to each other in mutual incomprehension.

The evenings were informal and more for the benefit of the junior researchers than the old hands. It gave them a chance to practise their presentation skills in front of people who might have some influence on their future—a chance to display their private data hoard.

The wiring in the mess was unreliable, especially when the temperature got much below minus thirty, so these talks were often bathed in candlelight. I was being visited by an uncharacteristic fit of benevolence. The faces of my colleagues hovering and glowing in the half dark. The precariousness of our existence thrummed within me, the sense of how little stood between us and certain death should our generator fail entirely, say, or our supply lines be cut off for a serious length of time. Such a sense can drive a man sentimental.

Ray Deville stood in front of a whiteboard lit by two standing flashlights. His talk was rambling, repetitious, almost incoherent, but his accent was entertaining. Vanderbyl, Ray’s thesis supervisor, sank lower and lower in his chair, pressing his chin into his chest. He was possibly the worst adviser Deville could have had. A nervous soul like Ray needed the parental touch, motherly if possible. Rebecca would have brought out the best in him, but oceanography was not her field and her university was fifteen hundred miles distant from his.

Wyndham came up with a question for him, a kindness that got the young man on track for a few moments. His enthusiasm for his subject welled up and he spouted findings none of us would have been aware of.

I thought of the dead youth the Inuit “ghost” had brought us. We had heard back from researchers at Laval—terribly excited researchers—that they were pretty sure he was a member of the doomed Franklin expedition. The recent opening of three graves on Beechey Island had revealed that one of them, marked “Roger Arlington in his twenty-first year,” was in fact empty. Their theory: Young Arlington had been banished from the expedition—effectively executed—for some unknown crime. The empty grave was an effort to avoid uncomfortable questioning upon their return.

It was thought best not to mention any of this to young Deville, who was already spooked enough. In any case, for those few moments under Wyndham’s gentle prodding, the candlelight seemed to reach him, and he shone.

On clear nights such as this one, the stars were preternaturally bright, their ancient energy made new. When a few hours later I woke from a deep sleep, the walls of my cabin were glowing. I thought I was still dreaming, because my cabin seemed so absurdly colourful that it could occur only in a Disney film.

I sat up in my sleeping bag and looked out the porthole window. The night was awash with light. Some of the others were already outside: Rebecca and Vanderbyl, Wyndham and Dahlberg, four dark figures, faces to the sky in attitudes of amazement, as if all four were simultaneously receiving the stigmata.

High above, a waterfall of red poured down from the black heavens.

The next thing I remember, I was standing outside. The cold must have been blistering, but I have no memory of it. I stood like the others, drinking in the aurora. Red is the rarest, and this red was so brilliant and mobile it was as if an incision had been made in the exact centre of the sky and ruby light cascaded from the wound.

So incredibly red—I think it was Jens who spoke—I’ve never seen red before, never even heard of it.

It’s at least two hundred kilometres up, I said. Solar wind colliding with high-altitude oxygen. Green and yellow are generated at about sixty kilometres.

I saw a blue one once, Vanderbyl said. They think it’s caused by ionized nitrogen. I’ve only seen it that one time—in Svalbard. Our pilot actually wept.

Jens, ever practical, said, It’ll kill our radio contact. We’ll be blacked out for days.

The display curved away from us at its sides, shifting from a curtain shape almost to a funnel. A long crimson tail danced toward us, hovering on one side, then whipping to the other, a tornado of light.

And it’s composed of nothing, Wyndham said. Just broken bits of atoms.

Words fled me. At that moment I understood the pilot who had broken into sobs. I yearned for a new language, an idioglossia to span the unbridgeable distances that separate one human mind from another. This was unlike me, and probably had more to do with Rebecca than the aurora.

I wanted to hold her close, feel her warmth and reality, the human scale of love and desire, the infinitesimal beauty in the brush of her eyelashes on my cheek, the heat of her breath on my neck. But at that moment, she too felt the need of contact. And there, silhouetted against the ruby light, encircled by its corona of stars, she reached to rest her hand upon her husband’s shoulder, then tilted her head against him, Kurt’s arm in answer reaching around her waist.