About Grace (27 page)

The generator hung on. Some nights they'd stop whatever they were doing and listen to it as if listening to a beloved tenor. The insects pressed onward, still eating, some even mating, metamorphosing.

Their lives moved deeper and cleaner, as if they were shedding weight. Conversations would lapse for whole hours or even days, and then one of them would pick up the thread again, as though their tongues had frozen midconversation and could only temporarily break free.

“Why not write him, David?”

“What's the use?”

“Why not try?”

He groaned. “She's dead. They're all dead. I'm trying to move on.”

“But you can't! You don't want to leave these woods, you don't want to do anything but peer into that microscope. This winter is going to end eventually. And I'm going back to school, back to Anchorage.”

He shook his head. The cold was difficult but for some reason the idea that this winter would end was not something he could allow himself to consider. He'd retreat outside to work with his microscope, scanning flakes, maybe—if he was lucky and it was snowing—making a single exposure. In the deep cold the only crystals that fell were columns, or pyramids, devoid of innovation. An hour or two later he was back in, rubbing his hands in front of the stove, feeling the cold slowly—so reluctantly—leave his clothes.

Naaliyah didn't look up from where she was dissecting a mantid.
“Don't you at least want to know what happened? Even if they
are
gone?”

He watched the embers in the stove.

“My mother is right,” she said.

“No.”

“You write him, David. I'll mail it. Just one letter.”

“You don't understand. I'm the last person he'd help.”

“Try it.”

Naaliyah made her Friday trips into town, wrapping herself head to toe in furs, ski goggles over her eyes. Sometimes it seemed like he could hear the chewing, droning engine of the Skidoo all the way to Eagle, the buzz of it in the high, frozen air, among the glitter suspended there. It would cease for an hour or so, then begin again, growing louder, as she made her way back up the valley. She brought film, vinegar, tomato paste, powdered eggs, five-pound cans of peanut butter, once a bottle of Chianti that froze and cracked on the way back up, so that they had to thaw it in a pot and strain out the glass and drink it hot.

The snow did not accumulate in enormous quantities there—maybe six feet all winter—but it snowed often, nearly every day in February, tiny flakes sifting through the pall of fog, landing in his basin.

On the fifth of February he made his first successful print of a snow crystal, a classic, cold weather hexagonal plate. It was unfocused around the edges, and slightly lopsided, but well centered in the exposure, and a formation very like the shape of a pilot's wheel was braced inside.

Looking at that tiny hexagon of ice—a crystal now lost to the world—he felt his heart stall; it was like watching an image from one of his dreams appear again in the air and light, right in front of his eyes.

Naaliyah held it to the window. “Lovely.”

“It's a start,” he said.

Watch the snow fly through the air. Watch the wind come up, and the flakes rise, and swim—each, it seems, travels in a separate direction. The flakes grow bigger; they blow in ghostly waves; they become flowers, raging through the boughs. In the arctic, Winkler had heard, explorers became hypnotized watching snow fall, so entranced they had frozen to death. And what, indeed, he thought, standing at the desk in the outrageous cold, could be more important than watching snow fly into the meadow, and settle on the hills, and gradually conceal the trees?

“Mango,” he'd say.

“Passion fruit,” she'd say.

“Pizza.”

“Oreo cookies.”

“Pineapple juice.”

“Oh, pineapple juice. How about draft beer? How about curried whelk?”

“Your father's curried whelk. With banana bread.”

“With banana bread and fresh butter. And baked grapefruit with honey and cinnamon.” On the stove their oats bubbled and murmured as they thickened.

February, late afternoon, hours after dark, and Winkler stood over his microscope studying the faint tracery of a snowflake in the wavering light of the microscope lamp (the opaline, almost translucent formation of the snow against the dirtier, more insistent white of the bulb) when Naaliyah appeared at his elbow. “David,” she said, and gestured with her chin. “Look up.”

A vast curtain flapped in the sky above the trees. It rippled, then became something like a scarf, then a green wedge, a wing, gliding solemnly in front of the Milky Way. He switched off the microscope
and they stood in the meadow together, looking up, the vapor of their breath standing out in front of them, and freezing, and settling back onto their cheeks.

Shivering emeralds and blues, trimmed with red. Jades. Violets. An eerie green traveling the meadow, lighting their maze of frozen prints. In the nights to come the auroras appeared around the same time, as if scheduled, and stayed sometimes until after midnight. He'd lie under his blankets and old furs beside the cages of frozen, entombed insects, and the borealis would shuttle and crackle overhead, illuminating the shed through the ever-increasing gaps in the woodpiles, as though a dim and alien craft had landed in the meadow.

He closed his eyes. The light crept through his eyelids. Dreams came over him like tides, like glutinous liquids.

He dreamed of trees freezing, exploding in the night; he dreamed of wolves galloping a ridgeline, and of miniature labyrinths beneath the snow. Maybe, he considered later, they were the dreams of the insects themselves, traveling in the frigid air between them on invisible threads. Maybe they had always been there and he was only now tuning them in, as if he were still on the beach, roaming the frequencies with his shortwave. Their hibernal dreams: ice crystals beneath their exoskeletons, inside their minuscule organs, their blood suspended in filigrees and crowns and diadems. Each dreaming of that day when the thaw would come, when the sun would reach them in their stump or cocoon or tunnel and switch them on like a lamp.

Naaliyah had discovered an odd thing, and had been grappling with it since December. Despite heat, and extended periods of light, even despite the abundant food she placed in their cages, maybe a third of her insects had gone ahead and stowed themselves in their hibernacula anyway. As if they understood that their environments were contrived, artificial. Or as if they understood the changing of the season internally, some chemical turning calendar pages inside them. As if what they were was something inescapable, determined by evolution and independent of circumstance.

Two successful prints. Four. Seven. Ten. He pinned them to the walls of the shed with penny nails, little four-by-five-inch postcards of snow crystals, a hall of fame of departed snowflakes, some prints speckled with white or missing a corner, others blue and curled from the cold. But still, not even a dozen. Bentley had tens of thousands. How had he done it?

Past the middle of February he went out in the early dusk and tramped his way to the gap in the forest, a raven following him as he went, sailing above the trees, as if lonely for company in the silence. He was thinking of his father. Though he had read the newspaper cover to cover each evening, he had never once said: “Hey, David, listen to this,” never seemed to know anything at all about current events. Whenever somebody around his father spoke of things going on in the country, his father would say nothing, or worse, look down the street, into the distance, not listening. “Nixon,” a neighbor would say. “I said, Howard, what do you think of the vice president?” As if the newspaper were in a different language, or the words were not words at all, or else his father had lost the ability to process them.

The air was so cold that it burned his nostrils. He stood and watched the light seep out of the sky for as long as he could—maybe five minutes—the blue light failing, but another coming up on the hills, as though the snow itself was incandescing. The trees and bare willows below him, out on the floodplains, had become so heavily caked with ice that they'd become otherworldly things, big ice-caked cauliflower heads, and there was no wind, and far below him, like black specks, past the reach of his eyesight, a pair of ravens as big as eagles tore into something dead out on the frozen plains of the Yukon. Out there, beyond it all, in the place where distance merged everything into a swirling, depthless color like mercury, was Anchorage: where his father had lived his whole life, bringing people milk.

On his way back to the cabin, he stepped in and out of his boot prints, the snow squeaking beneath his weight. He was halfway across the meadow—Naaliyah's cabin light glowing, leaking through the
slats in the siding, the chimney blushing smoke, as if the place contained some secret and fortunate enchantment, something worth hiding from the world—when he saw the moose.

She stood at the cabin window, peering in. Her tail flicked back and forth like a milk cow's. Her big eyes blinked. She was almost as big as Naaliyah's F-250.

For a moment he was not afraid, only curious. What must she have thought, staring in there? The heat and moisture escaping through the walls, the smells and sounds of insects—as if summer had been trapped inside a little box and kept in the middle of the woods—it must have stretched her ability to comprehend.

She stood a while longer, huge and quiet. Cold crept up Winkler's arms. Then she turned and contemplated him, entirely unsurprised. A moment later, she trotted off into the trees, light-footed as a fawn, disappearing into the snow.

A slow breeze pushed through the trees and snow unloaded from several boughs. He thought of those tiny deer he had seen on the roadside years ago, when he and Sandy were speeding toward Ohio—the deer that Sandy had not bothered to look up to see, deer like the ghosts of deer. He wondered if this moose, too, was a ghost, and he knew somehow that when he went in, Naaliyah would not have seen it.

But here were her tracks, right beneath his feet. High on the window glass, far above his head, were two intersecting discs of vapor, quickly fading. He went in and asked Naaliyah for a piece of paper and an envelope.

Dear Herman
—

My name is David Winkler. I grew up in Anchorage, too. I went to East High School. I met you once in your driveway on Marilyn Street. I was the one who fell in love with Sandy.

Nothing that could fit on this page, or a hundred of these pages, would possibly accommodate all the things I should say to you, all the things you deserve to hear. So please let me say this, although it is barely more adequate than saying nothing: I'm sorry. Sorry for whatever pain we caused you. For whatever pain you might still be in.

I don't know if Sandy's daughter is there with you or ever has been or if she's been dead for twenty-five years. I don't know how much you saw Sandy over the past decades either. But I wanted to say sorry. A lifetime is not really a long time, maybe, but I think I'm finally learning a little bit, coming around, and I hope it is not too late.

Enclosed is a print I made of a snow crystal earlier this month. I hope you will find it strange and beautiful, as I do.

Then:

Dear Herman—

Night makes things simpler, I think. I feel closer to the meanings of things. Here (far more than Anchorage, as I remember) there is no
shortage of night. On the solstice we had only three hours and fifty-one minutes of light. The sun didn't even clear the treetops.

But what I never knew was that these are not lightless voids, like we had in the tropics. There, on a moonless night, you can't see your own palm in front of your eyes. The nights here carry their own kind of light, dim purples and navies, the golden stripe of the Milky Way, the snow reflecting and amplifying all of it. You can read newsprint by the light of a quarter moon. Dusk lasts two hours. Sunrise is still happening at noon.

I realize now I knew nothing about snow. It's not white. It's a thousand colors, the colors of the sky or what's beneath the snow, or the pinks of algae living inside it, but none of those colors, really, is white. How wonderful it is to be my age
—
our age
—
and learn you were wrong about such a fundamental thing.

What you realize, ultimately, when you have nothing to lose, is that even though the world can be kind to you, and reveal its beauty through the thin cracks in everything, in the end it will either take you or leave you.

Then:

Dear Herman
—

Please disregard my last letters if you find them strange. I think you will receive these all at once, because Naaliyah only goes into town on Fridays. Perhaps you'll read this first. If so, maybe tear up the other two.

Naaliyah is the woman I'm with up here. She is an entomologist, and a good one. She spends all her time with her insects, trying to keep them alive in this wicked cold.

We eat noodles and margarine. And tuna. And canned peaches, although they're supposed to be for the bugs. My favorite is curry
—
Naaliyah can make curry from almost anything. It's a skill from her father, and although (don't tell her this) she is not as good, we beggars cannot be choosers.

If I turn from the fire and set my food outside the cabin door, it
steams for only about twenty seconds. It will begin to freeze in forty. Usually the surface of a mug of tea will freeze on the short trip from the cabin where we cook to the shed where I sleep.

But in the cabin, it's warm
—
even hot. The stove gets cranking and I reach up and find sweat on my forehead.

The enclosed is my best print yet, I think. It has eight arms rather than six because of simultaneous and early growth from two adhering crystals. They locked on to one another high in the clouds, and managed to get all the way down here, into my little black bucket, without breaking. Rare indeed.

Looking at it feels like an unlocking to me, like something inside is finding shape outside. Does that make sense? I hope you are well, Herman. I hope you are beside a heater, with a blanket close at hand.

He'd give the letters to Naaliyah as he had once given letters to her mother, and asked her to mail them for him even if he begged her not to later, and every Friday she came back up the valley with smoked fish or margarine or tea bags but no letters, no answers, holding her hands palms-up exactly as her mother had done twenty-five years before.

Still he worked at photographing crystals, making one or two good prints each snowfall. He was reaching the point now where he could sense snow coming hours before it hit—clouds veiling the sun, casting a pearly light, and the trees throwing their shadows across the meadow. Indeed, he was surpassing that point; he had never known snow so well, or so intimately. A smell would rise, an odor he associated for some reason with flame, and he felt his whole body tune in, as if it were connected to the sky by thousands of invisible wires, as if he himself might precipitate.
Soon it will snow. In fifteen minutes it will begin to snow.
He found he could go so far as to predict the structure of crystals: on warm noons they might get hexagonal plates, or needles; when it got colder, columns like little prisms; colder still, plates again, or equilateral triangles, or stars, or barbells, or scrolls.

In the deep cold the aluminum frames of his eyeglasses would contract and pinch the bridge of his nose, creating a compressed, squeezed
feeling, like the cold had his head in a vise. Coupled with the fatigue of working with such small things all day, a simple, clarifying pain emerged behind his temples, and he would have to stand over his microscope, eyes closed, the cold cinching in around him, the blues and reds of blood in his eyelids crawling slowly across his vision.

Before long it was late March, the vernal equinox, pivot between light and dark. Days were lengthening; Naaliyah was dreaming of other seasons. She talked into the CB of pizza, of walking barefoot through sand. “Where I'm from,” she'd say, “the sun gets so strong it can melt the paint off boats.” Winkler, on the other hand, was almost sad to see the daylight extend; to hear, one afternoon, water dripping from the eaves. Again he thought of Sandy, the way she blinked after a movie had ended, lingering to watch the credits. “Like waking up,” she had said.

Indeed they were waking up, he and Naaliyah, and the entirety of Camp Nowhere—reentering life again. Spring: a tapping on the eggshell from the inside.

In winter whole chunks of time calved and fell away, like icebergs from a glacier. It was almost as if time ceased to exist, or asserted itself in a new, previously undiscovered way. In those long, imperceptibly shrinking nights, he might look up and not even realize that the daylight had come and gone, and here it was dusk again—as if the standard method of measuring time—life, death; sunrise, sunset—was only one way, and not necessarily the most relevant one.

But in spring everything resumed: birth, daylight, family.

Dear Herman—

I remember reading this pamphlet by Kepler in graduate school, where he mused about why snowflakes each seemed to have their own individual pattern. He said all things in nature appeared to have a key
—
invisible to us
—
inside them that contained the blueprint for their exterior, for what they were. The nucleus inside a cell, the germ inside a seed. This was
350
years before Watson and Crick. Kepler went so far as to call it a soul.

Standing out there in our little meadow, watching crystals come
down, I can't help but admire the idea: every snowflake with a soul. It makes as much sense as genetics, as anything
—
more sense, I think, than the notion that snow crystals
don't
have souls.

You should have seen the ice I used to grow in graduate school
—
perfect, immaculate little crystals. Little wonders. Out here in the woods crystals break easily, go lopsided under the slightest pressure. But the flakes are magnificent, bigger and more real than they were in the lab, in the way that wild animals make zoo animals seem like shadows.

It is not so much the science of snow for me, anymore. I'd rather just look at it. The light, the way it absorbs sound. The way we feel as if the more that falls, the more we are forgiven.

What were dreams? A ladle dipped, a bucket lowered. The deep, cool water beneath the bright surface; the shadow at the base of every tree. Dreams were the reciprocal of each place you visited when you were awake, each hour you passed through. For every moment in the present there was a mirror in the future, and another in the past. Memory and action, object and shadow, wakefulness and sleep. Put a sun over us and we each have our twin, attached to our feet, dragging about with us in lockstep. Try and outrun it.

He had, ultimately, only one dream left: to know his daughter, to see her hand—what would have become of Grace's hands? All he could remember was the tiny, intricate detailing of her knuckles, and the way she had slept, as if a huntsman had come to seize her, as if her body had been temporarily vacated.

This was enough, enough to get him up in the morning, enough to break the maul free from where it had frozen against the cabin wall and drive it through a log.