Until the Night

From the Blue Notebook

Did you hear Ray last night? Rebecca said, twiddling a knob on her lidar unit. He scared me half to death. I thought some little animal was being tortured.

He suffers from nightmares, I said. Minute he touched down, I told Jens he wasn’t suitable. Jens, of course, wouldn’t discuss it. I think Kurt pressured him to accept his acolyte.

Kurt isn’t like that.

No one is immune to worship. Except possibly you.

She ignored that. Kurt was looking for Ray earlier, she said. It’s a good thing you weren’t in here when he came by.

No doubt.

Ray does seem a little lost. Do you think he even wants to stay?

Wants? Maybe—if you can be said to want something that is killing you. He’s staring into the jaws of failure if he quits—and God-knows-what if he stays. Annihilation, I suppose.

God, you’re grim. Suddenly your ash-black globe makes sense. You’re not one of those people who mistake being depressed for being intelligent, are you?

This is the dark side of the earth up here, in case you hadn’t noticed. And anybody who loves it—in winter, at least—is not likely to be the life of any party one would care to attend.

Rebecca had removed the towel from her porthole window. She turned from her lidar readout and stared at the circle of fog pinned to her wall. The camp had been fogged in for days and nerves were raw.

Unlike you, I don’t feel any urge to come up here in the dark of winter. I’m not even slightly attracted—emotionally, I mean—aside from my research interests. And yet I’m drawn to those who are. Kurt. You.

Opposites attract? That’s your analysis? Eight years of postgraduate education and this is what we get?

I was leaning against her door, arms folded across my chest. There was nowhere to sit. I was smiling, but she wasn’t looking at me and took me seriously.

She shook her head. Not opposites.

I took a half-step forward and placed my hands on her shoulders. She rolled her chair aside to escape.

There doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it, she said. I’m drawn to you the way you are drawn to the dark.

Then why do you pull away?

Don’t be obtuse, Kit.

Tell you what, I’ll put together a repertoire of jokes. I’ll become the sort of person people call “a great storyteller.” Remember in your high school yearbooks they would always say so-and-so “livens up any gathering”? So-and-so “really knows how to tell a story”? That’s who I’ll become.

Please don’t.

Just for you. That’s how much I love you. Karson Durie, raconteur.

I know this is your version of being light-hearted, but why is it every time I talk to you about anything serious it’s like I’m feeling my way around the knife drawer?

My mother used to say something similar: You’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself.

It’s not you I’m worried about. I don’t think you should visit me here anymore.

Don’t think—or don’t want?

Just go, would you? I can’t take this. I’ll see you in the mess.

I opened the door and went out and the fog closed around me like a fist. The lights of the mess, not more than twenty metres distant, were a barely perceptible glow. I moved with one hand outstretched before me. The temperature was dropping. I could feel the difference in the texture of the slush beneath my boots.

I was startled by a loud crack. A slash of fire tore upward through the fog and vanished. I called out, What’s going on?

Wyndham’s voice came back, oddly close in the fog, though I could not yet make him out.

Ray’s missing. We don’t know what to do about it.

Thwock of the flare as it burst into a dandelion bloom, a dim throb beyond the fog.

Do you think he’ll see that?

It’s getting colder. The fog must be thinning in places.

My hand touched parka, but it was Vanderbyl. He stumbled a little to avoid me. I’ve been trying to radio Base, he said, but I don’t think they’re receiving me.

Wyndham said, Nobody’s seen him since this morning, when he went back to his cabin to rewrite some material Kurt critiqued. That was when, Kurt? About nine-thirty?

Nine-thirty, yes.

I asked them if he was armed and if he had his radio.

As far as we know, Kurt said. Not that he’s answering.

Hmm. How sharp was your critique?

The briefest of pauses before Kurt answered. It was a candid review. Not what you’d call harsh.

The two of them had searched everywhere: the radio shack, the power shack, the shop, kitchen, labs, and all the other huts. They had even radioed the seismic and core huts. Nobody had seen Ray Deville.

And so we hovered there, three disembodied voices in the fog, wondering where he might have gone. We didn’t even bother asking why, at least not aloud. Ray and his radio silence. Sometimes a man can be so lost there’s nowhere to look, nothing to be done.

We had a gloomy meal, a gloomy evening. People spoke but little. Wyndham attempted to lighten the mood by telling us a couple of unintentionally funny things Ray had said, these rendered in a note-perfect imitation of his franglais. He didn’t get much of a laugh. The truth was, Ray and his manifest neuroses were hard to endure. One sensed that there ran beneath them a slick black river of contempt.

God, I hope he’s all right, Kurt said later as he rinsed his dishes in the sink.

Wyndham listed the reasons for optimism. The temperature, at minus five Celsius, was crisp but far from severe. Ray’s parka and scarf and boots were not in his cabin, so it was likely he would be warm enough. Our ice island was not vast, and in half-decent visibility he should have no difficulty finding his way back. He was armed, he had his radio …

Kurt opened the door, and his irritated response hung there in the mess with the cold air that rolled in: Then why the hell hasn’t he used it?

In my narrow bed, I dreamed I had to climb a glass mountain that glittered in the glare of a savage sun. I was in the company of a man and woman who claimed to know the way but did not. Nor were they of any help when the mountain metamorphosed into a pure, unclimbable pyramid. It rose to a blinding point, and when I woke in the darkness, my eyes were wet as if I had been crying.

The fog had lifted and the hut was lit by a toppled pillar of light that angled through my porthole: they had left the floods burning on the Decca mast as a beacon. I lay there thinking about Ray Deville and imagining his encounter not with a bear or a walrus or a crippling fall, but merely with the Arctic in all its purity—an indifference that was boundless and exquisite, immeasurable to man.

After a time, I heard cries and answering shouts. Slamming doors and frantic voices—manly Vanderbyl and oboe-toned Wyndham. I hunched at my porthole, sleeping bag clutched around my shoulders. Wyndham was helping Ray across the last few metres of slush. Kurt waited, his back to my hut, erect and motionless, his shadow in the floodlight an endless black tangent. He said Ray’s name.

The staggering, limping boy looked up, and I saw in the silvery light the blank, staring eyes of one who has blundered into God’s private palace, who has looked his maker in the face and felt his marrow freeze.