Inukshuk (22 page)

Distancing?
He'd tried to keep the incredulity in his voice down.
Wow. Did you really say
distancing
?

Maybe so,
he'd said.

That's my hope
.

Then it's mine, as well
.

Only later, he'd realized she hadn't been talking about
hope
in the sense of suggesting a reconciliation or way forward for them. She'd been describing for him what she wished he'd become, without her. And in doing so, asking him to relinquish the single personality trait of his that had probably done most to keep them together.

Meanwhile, time seemed to have dilated or slipped sideways and backward. Still only 6:42, which made no sense, given how long he thought he and Moira must have sat at Pearle's. Was his car clock frozen? Stalled because of a cold battery? Possibly. He tried to check it against the time on his watch but couldn't manage to push aside his coat and shirtsleeve at exactly the right moment to see. Too, the upper-right corner of his windshield seemed to have been lit with a glow like the sunrise, only paler, more like some kind of neon condensation stuck on the glass. Like aliens had landed. “What the fuck?” he said, swiping a hand at the windshield. Was it somehow 6:42 A.M. and he had managed to lose an entire night? No, wrong part of the sky. He bent lower to see, and realized, Of course. Northern Lights. The crazy elastic ribbons of supercharged particles caught in the Earth's Van Allen belt and streaming along the horizon. Always put him in mind, however incongruously, of sea anemones and underwater currents lit by phosphorescent algae, the chorus to Ringo's “Octopus's Garden” starting up reflexively in his head:
I'd like to be under the sea. . . .
Also some of his earlier,
mushroom-enhanced concert experiences watching the troupes of young aerial dancers spinning and twisting from vertical ribbons of colored cloth, doing crazy airborne yoga. The lights tonight were paler but somehow more radiant than usual. Not for the first time he wondered just how different they'd look closer to the source, how much more intense and colorful from Jane's perspective, up there in the true north. This was the cheap, bargain version, he was sure—the one that came with at least some hours of winter sunlight. He pictured the point he'd jogged to that night, at the edge of town in Inuvik. Threw in Northern Lights, snow, wind, cold . . . no sun. Decided, no, if he were in Inuvik now, he'd probably venture no farther than the edge of the driveway.

Turning off the main road and under the overpass, headed north toward home and past the open field that eventually ran into lots abutting their backyard, he thought he saw a solitary figure, almost like a rock cairn, arms upraised to the spires of electronic static, as if summoning them.
Thomas,
he thought instantly, and just as instantly dismissed the thought. Couldn't be. Anyway, looking a second and third time, he was pretty sure it was two people. That, or one large man pulling something larger behind him; or maybe it was a rock cairn after all. One he'd never noticed before? Unlikely. What was the Inuit word for it? He tapped his leg, trying to remember.
Inukshuk
. Stones placed to resemble a human form, marking the place. Sig-nifiying,
Someone was here; You are on the right path
. Or,
Here is meat and fish; here lies the body of so-and-so
. And wasn't that where Thomas had said Sir John Franklin's remains must be interred, somewhere undiscovered on King William Island, in a concrete cairn? No one knew for sure. The light continued seeping its weird designs up the horizon.
What a show,
he thought, turning into their block, and realizing then that, if he'd wanted to know what time it was, he could always just check his phone. Of course. Flipped it open and saw not the clock numbers in the top corner of the phone screen, but the red square message in the middle alerting him again, as it had the night before, “
New Text Message! View Now?
” He bumped to the side of the road and up the driveway. Didn't even put the car in park or turn
the key in the ignition. Clicked
Yes
and waited, eye nerves straining through darkness to make out the pixilated, blocky sans-serif script:
Maybe Tonight lover not sure but do lv door unlocked . . . in case.
He snapped the phone shut. Slotted the gearshift to PARK, stood out of the car, and leaned back inside for his bag, her white hat. The cold outside air smelled of exhaust and hot new metal, sweet as the taste of adrenaline at the back of his throat as he started up the walk, wondering giddily,
Tonight, tonight
?

 

 

DESPITE HIS AWESOME NEW IMPERVIOUSNESS to the cold, he didn't want to stay outside. Something at home drew him—food, his notebooks, the possibility of his dad waiting, wondering where in the world he was. He stayed just long enough to see Jill's parents enter the kitchen, first her father, mostly bald, freckled as she was, pudgy, with a fringe of reddish hair. He stood with hands on his hips, and then with the back of a wrist raised to his forehead—classic woe stance, face absolutely stilled by some emotion, puzzlement or horror—eyes narrowing, mouth tightening.
Oh,
Thomas thought.
The hot chocolate. Shoot.
They'd forgotten and never cleaned that up. Then her father was gone. A male voice, higher than he'd anticipated, given his seeming bulk, echoed from inside. Scottish accent? Couldn't be sure—couldn't actually make out any words. Next Jill's mother, exactly in the spot where he and Jill had stood kissing, opening mail. She was slender and pretty—prettier or perkier, anyway, than Jill. Like she was the original, full-color version, the genuine article, Jill the carbon-copy reduction. This was a disturbing-enough comparison on its own—Jill's own
mother
—and led immediately to a full-on recognition of how bad it must be for Jill, always feeling less than and overshadowed, maybe especially because of the birthmark. Birthmark
s
. Kind of explained all her crying.
Tough luck,
he thought.
Sucks to be you
. But then minutes later when Jill stomped in, sheepish, tragically red-faced, father right behind her, he had to reassess. Actually, facial stain or not, she was the dazzling one. Radiant. He caught her in glimpses coming in and out of the window
and once he was sure she was staring right out at him here by the apple tree. Even thought he saw her wink and nod her head. But that was impossible. If she was winking and nodding, it would be at her own reflection. Must be the pills, making him not just impervious to the cold but allowing dream thought to seep up through the optical nerves and seem real. And that was when he knew, in the same way he'd known earlier that day at school, the clock ticking ahead during second period, that his time here was up. He'd been released.

He turned and headed into the empty field bordering their yards, up the incline, breaking through the undergrowth and scrambling over frozen, rocky soil, then turned again and continued along the ridge toward home. He wished he could always be this numb. It was really pretty terrific. Not just the cold but the branches whipping his legs and bare wrists, the ground prodding his sore feet—all of it was dialed down to about one or zero. Barely there at all. Just amazing. He could go anywhere, do anything in this condition. The Northern Lights, wheeling around on his right like the old Spirograph-set designs he'd sometimes drawn as a kid at his grandparent's house—one of his dad's old childhood toys kept there in California and never brought back to Calgary—seemed to be converging in the corners of his eye and coalescing back into the shape of the men, Hoar and Work. He searched the ground for their shadows alongside his own but didn't dare look right at them. That would cause them to vanish for sure. “Guys!” he said. “Can you hear me?” No response. Of course not. What would they want from him anyway, and what could he possibly provide? He reconstructed their likeness in his imagination and matched their shadows with how he would draw them as soon as he was inside again, warm and fed, their actions and facial expressions. He had to remember not to make Hoar anything like Malloy. Darken the edges, imagine a heavy green underpainting, enlarge the nose, angularize everything. The twenty years between the two men would have been almost erased by their time in the Arctic and the ravages of scurvy. Only the color in Hoar's beard might give away his relative youth.
What do you want first? Food or a hot bath? Just to stand over a hot air vent, thawing out awhile?
Their bathwater would
blacken with dirt and blood and shit, all the places where blood had congealed and scabs formed around missing toes, reopened old wounds and new suppurating sores probably oozing freely. Little eddies of pinkish red making tornado clouds in the water. A bath would do them no good, really. Yet he had no doubt they'd each want one first. Probably with a jigger of rum and plate of fresh fruit and meat right there on the side of the tub. He'd set Hoar up in the upstairs tub and Work in the downstairs half bath. Work would have to settle for a hot shower for starters, or else wait his turn. And in lieu of new clothes for them: blankets. The thick new felted blankets from the hall closet, one apiece. Then a stew of fresh meat and carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, fresh gallon of milk for them to split. Lemon juice over everything. Side of C supplements. They would love him so much, he'd never be alone again in his life.

Not with those teeth gone you won't!
Work laughed his cruel sibilant
see-see-shoe-shoe
laugh.
Won't eat nothing till you get some falsers.

Their shadows bumped together on the ground beside Thomas and did not progress any farther. Thomas stopped, too, and did his best to follow where Work seemed to be pointing—not at the Northern Lights but away from them at a smaller pair of lights heading up
the main access road toward them. Car headlights. The men were exclaiming to each other, shouting and waving their arms in amazement:
Some kind of travel machine with lights, carriage but no horses anywhere, a ship on the ground but no sails, and how much oil would it take to make that much light shine anyway? Impossible! Amazing! Where are the horses?

He left them there and cut down the ridge through the underbrush to the picnic table and around the side of the house, up the front walk. No car yet; no Dad. Good. But here they were again, one of the men anyway, detaching from the shadows at the other side of the yard and approaching at an angle, fast, seemingly set on instersecting his path to stop or confront him. He lowered his eyes and gripped the house key between thumb and forefinger, ready, though he was fairly sure he wouldn't make it to the door before being stopped. Like in horror movies where you can see the stalker coming up behind the main character and she starts to run, but you know she doesn't have a chance—still, she has to run, and you have to hope for her. Part of the formula for fear. He heard footsteps crunching over ice, faster, closer, and felt anew the excitement of being face-to-face with the men. Skin prickling. They'd followed! Definitely no escaping it. What would he say? Would he invite them in after all?

“Excuse me, maybe you can help,” the man said. He was not one of the men from the ship, after all. No accent.

Thomas looked up.

Someone from present day—a stranger whose car must have died on the main road, or else he was just lost, wandering. New neighbor? Something off or affected about him for sure, like he was trying too hard to seem normal, upstanding and adult, so that instantly you wondered whether or not you were supposed to trust him. His mustache was not the same color as his hair and looked superimposed on his face, and his eyebrows had grown together over the bridge of his nose. Maybe it was the flatness of the eyes and cheeks—made him seem just too handsome and wrongly proportioned, both at once. If you were doing his head on a computer-modeling program, you'd need insanely few polygons for a likeness.