The Age of Ice: A Novel (22 page)

I suppose I did premeditate. I bound his arms with shoulder straps of the knapsack in which I kept my thermometers and now also one of Robeck’s scalpels. I lowered the anvil onto his legs. According to the gentlemen of the Royal Society of London, there were two ways to proceed—a urethral or rectal insertion—but after practical consideration, both disgusted me; besides, my thermometers were quite large, their bulbs the size of partridge eggs. I turned his head to one side and forced him to open his mouth. I pushed the thermometer in until he gagged. His tongue pushed back. I said, “If you crush it in your teeth you’ll die a painful death. If you try to spit it out, if you so much as twitch a finger, I’ll break it in your gullet and you’ll die a painful death. Be still.” I fixed the thermometer in place with my handkerchief. “I am doing this to you because you deserve punishment.”

A merry singsong could be heard from the barracks. Here—only Feodor’s panting. I kindled a fire in the forge, enough to light a splinter of wood for a candle, and piled more weight—logs of firewood—on Feodor’s trunk and legs. Now I could see into his left eye, the darting, blinking little eye. His left nostril worked hard to push air in and out. The thermometer jutted out of his mouth by a foot. Its scale was toward the ground. I twisted it: +36º. He mumbled indistinctly. I said, “Lie still. If I have to break this one, the next one will go in your ass.” I put “the next one” on the ground near the first. It settled on ‒32º.

The merry song kept echoing over the fort, like the indefatigable tune of animal heat.

Animal heat was working in Feodor’s favor. I sat over him, realizing
that the wait would be long. And that I would be thinking through every moment of it. Each time I checked his temperature, I saw his desperate eye, darting sideways in its socket, then hiding under the eyelid. His nostril blew a streak of glistening snot. I had to look into his eye to see what was happening to him. I had to note the temperature when he started and stopped shaking, when his eye became sluggish. I had to. It was important to know. And it was hard to do.

Even for quid pro quo—it was hard.

I took my leave once Feodor’s eye stayed shut after I booted him in the ribs. I collected the thermometer and untied his hands—I had to make it look like an accident. Then I headed out—past the dock, up and up the frozen bed of the Yasachnoi. I walked for an hour, then another, till I felt safely away. I found a place that I liked, took off my greatcoat and parka, and hung them on a trunk of a fallen tree. I pinched a fold of skin on my abdomen right through the shirt and sliced through with Robeck’s scalpel. I inserted one thermometer under the skin and squeezed another in my hand. From now on my observations were to come in the form of H (for hand) / B (for belly) temperature.

Would I react the same as Feodor? Shake when he shook? Slur incoherently when he did? Or would I be like that eelpout? I took a breath and looked. My belly temperature read +36º. I ordered myself to sit down and be patient.

At H +20º/B +36º, pins and needles started in my body. I wanted to stretch my limbs, but forced myself to be still. I dived into memories instead. I smiled remembering Andrei Junior’s cavalier judgment:
I can’t believe you haven’t found out how sturdy you are against cold!
—
I’m finding it out now,
I whispered to him. Then I thought about Anna. No longer with indignation, just with clear-faced sadness. Would I ever dare approach her again, would I live to do it? With what I’d just done? Nothing would ever be the same, would it? I remembered Orenburg, the blind saint and the promise of his overwhelming blessing that would erase every sin. The kindness of snow. The cruelty of ice. Suddenly, fear gripped me. I thought I’d tricked Old Man Frost, but what if I hadn’t? What if I was being ice-sick again, if in a different way? Had it been
me
back at the forge killing Feodor, was it
me
now, here, on the verge of panic? Or something else? And if so, when had I stopped being myself, how far back? The H temperature began to creep down as I stared, and the more I willed it to stop, the faster it went.

My skin crawled, my limbs tingled, my breath got stuck in my breast. But the hand temperature slowed and stopped at ‒4º. Belatedly, I recognized the familiar pattern: I became anxious—my hands became cold, nothing more than that. The belly thermometer still held at +36º. This was a relief.

And yet—I was nothing like Feodor. My temperatures dropped where his held, and vice versa. Where Feodor shook, I didn’t. Only the tingling in my body increased and merged into one zinging, buzzing pressure. Then my internal thermometer lost a degree for the first time (H ‒5º/B +35º). The buzzing presence seemed to break through me and spread. It was so loud it gave me chills. The chills were followed by a heat wave, which carried such a great sense of urgency that I sprang to my feet. I started pacing, then remembered “Motion is heat,” a quote from Sawyer;
That is not what we are doing here,
I said through the buzz in my ears,
so stand still,
and fell to my knees. At H ‒10º/B +30º, I was overtaken with the greatest, most frigid fear,
This is intolerable
. At H ‒13º/B +29º,
Stop resisting
. But I wasn’t resisting anything, or if I was—there were so many urges hot-cold-tearing at me at once that I could not possibly have yielded to them all. Should I run down the ice bed of the river kicking my legs out and swinging my arms like a windmill? Or burrow face-first into snow as into Anna’s petticoats, and feel it rub my cheeks, pack into my eyes, nostrils, throat. Or tear my remaining clothes off. Or stretch so wide that I could hug the river—because the river was Anna—claw through her armor of ice and scoop her body up—her long, sleeping body where fish of secret desires floated in suspended animation. At H ‒20º/B +27º, I started convulsing, trying and failing to vomit out my shriek, to weep out my wail—I could not stand it anymore, could not explode over and over, and scatter apart, and yet remain so small and separate, so pressurized and dense, so burning with heat-cold of envy and love.

Then H ‒25º/B +25º struck as the twelfth hour. I looked at the thermometers because everything changed. The heat-cold buzz, the wail-scatter—they stopped. And in front of my eyes, the column of mercury in the “B” thermometer nudged back and forth, as if incredulous, then plummeted, multiplying into a forest of falling needles in my collapsing vision. And, as all these mercury needles sank into the white flesh of snow and were swallowed and disappeared without a trace, I realized with the last bit of my mind capable of human irony, that in the end no one but I had the temperature point of transfiguration. No one’s last
words but mine were freezing into garlands straight out of his mouth. But the next moment none of it mattered, everything turned into contentment. The blind saint was here, raising his hand for a blessing, no, I was him, blind, but I did not need eyes, I saw through my ten million fingertips and my words of kindness were snowing gently on every tree and every home, and so I stretched all my arms and blanketed the river, its banks, forests, the fort, people and beasts, Ouchapin and Feodor, Sawyer and Billings, Robeck and Merck with one loving-cold, serene-white, peaceful-glacial blessing.

• • •

From here, Merck’s notes must carry the story. In March he finally received two Yakuti guides, a horse-drawn sled, and Billings’s blessing to go up the river and recover his coveted mammoth remains. He came upon something else instead. He wrote:

In a few German miles traveling up the Yasachnoi we encountered a majestic ice formation that blocked our way. Twenty feet tall, it had a coniferous shape, with many downturned limbs extending from the main body. These limbs reached the banks of the river and merged with the surrounding snow and ice. As we approached we could discern the remarkable multiplicity of forms that shaped the structure. Its broad base was formed of thick and smooth masses of ice, layered upon one another in a manner resembling wax depositions at the foot of a candle. These were covered with dense groupings of mushroomlike ice growth, and bigger, cauliflowerlike heads of ice. Further up the structure, the main body tapered and seemed to be predominantly built of elongated elements. The extending limbs were extremely complex in composition, and appeared to be a knotted and tangled profusion of different ice forms: cascades of water frozen in motion, foaming eruptions of rime, long veins like icicles, tufts of finest hairlike ice, fanning thin sheets of ice, dendritic formations remarkably similar to spruce branches, complete with needles. It was a remarkable display, as if purposefully put there by Providence in our path to demonstrate the inexhaustible richness of its wonders.

Merck’s notes say the Yakuti took it for a particularly ominous manifestation of Ulü-Toyon and balked. To them, it was a clear warning to go no farther. Naturally, Merck had to come close and inspect, if only to dismiss irrational fears. About halfway up the ice trunk, he discerned a thermometer. He hacked at the ice with an ax and came across my body. I was hard as a rock, eyes closed, the face—my face—bore a peaceful expression.

I only know this from Merck’s journal. At the time, I was still insensate. I am sure Merck downplayed the drama of the scene when he wrote, “When I asked the savages for help in recovery of Mr. Velitzyn, they took leave of me.” Hard to blame them—demolishing Ulü-Toyon and bringing home its core was more than they could stomach. The fact is, displaying great determination and bravery, the caw-handed, bookish Dr. Merck hacked me out of the ice all by himself and loaded me in the sled and managed to direct the horse back to the fort, which exertions took him the rest of the day and some part of the night. Not to mention that he sacrificed the one chance he had at laying his hands on a perfectly preserved mammoth!

I
became his mammoth find. Of sorts.

• • •

My first sensation—how shall I best describe it?—
love because your love has died, hang on to it because you lost it
. Something impossible, something moving in two directions at once. The meaning of life under my fingers, like a long tail of a goddess’s dress—slipping, slipping past, as she walks—walks—away—and now she is gone. All that was left was me, raw and broken, and alive—only, being
alive
was so much
smaller
than what I had been just moments before.

Then I smelled burning wood and saw—through my eyelids, and, eventually, opened eyes, a light of fire pulsing through the cracks of a makeshift wall. From it issued ghostly tongues and currents of warmth that slinked in and touched me, pushed me, nuzzled me.

I went through stages of rediscovering reality. A symbol—
Sailcloth, Edmondson & Gardner, Moor Lane, Lancaster, Lancashire—
on a crate above my head was a complete enigma at first, then the words waxed with meaning, then they formed a sentence. The sentence entered into a relationship with a crate it was written on, and the crate became part of a stack of crates. Comprehension crept over reality like a hoarfrost pattern over a windowpane.

I was prostrate in our expedition’s storage shed, next to the smithy. But as soon as I understood this, I rushed to the peculiar—and dreadful—conclusion that I was Feodor. And the face that just showed over a workbench behind which I lay—had to be Mr. Velitzyn, the avenging angel thermometrist.

The face’s mouth opened in awe, then whispered, “Good heavens!”

I rasped, “Please! I promise to do no evil.”

The face withdrew. Somebody started pacing and praying rapidly. Then the face cautiously reappeared. It said, “Mr. Velitzyn, is that you?” and instantly became the face of Dr. Merck.

I said, “I don’t know.”

Again, Merck retreated behind the workbench. I followed up on the thought, “I hope I am.”

Somebody—Merck, I presume—took off running, but stabbed his foot on something heavy and suffered considerable pain, by the sounds of it. After a plaintive grunt, there was a long silence. I used it to consider the good and bad repercussions of being Mr. Velitzyn, which train of thought led me to realize that I could barely move. Arms obliged but were shaky and fatigued as if after a great exertion; legs felt bound.

“Dr. Merck? If I am Alexander Velitzyn . . . then . . . I think I need your help. I am sorry.”

Minutes lapsed before Merck came back. His face was different now—grave, almost gaunt with determination. This made me wonder what he saw. Made me afraid of whatever had happened, and of whatever else would happen. All I had was a memory of my transfiguration and a memory of Feodor and myself, situated just across the wall from where I lay now. Merck said, “What would you have me do, Mr. Velitzyn?”

“Tell me what state I am in. What do you see? Tell me how you came across me.”

His tone was almost reprimanding when he said, “You
look
like Mr. Velitzyn. I found you on the Yasachnoi,
entombed
in ice. You have been missing for over two months. You
still
have ice on”—he cast an evaluative glance—“parts of you, and yet you are making conversation.”

• • •

To witness a miracle is ultimately a burden, a strain on one’s faculty of reason. “Did you tell anyone about me yet?”
No,
Merck said. A yet bigger burden is to witness a miracle and take a vow of silence. I begged Merck not to make the circumstances of my discovery public knowledge. “Please, Dr. Merck, promise me,” and he did, and his cooperation did not surprise me as much as it should have, not the least because my mind had not yet fully grasped my own state. Most of what I acted out was only reflex, a hatchling’s reaction to avoid open spaces.

Merck remained skeptical that I could eradicate the most offending signs of the “miraculous”—the rock-hard, frozen quality of my legs, for example—in the time that I had, until morning brought in the working
folk. Thus he deferred to me to orchestrate a cleanup and a cover-up, and I did my desperate best to succeed. At my prompting, he broke off the remaining ice, then warmed up some water in the smithy’s hearth, lugged it in, and poured it on me. We even managed a moment of humor, however morbid, when I reprimanded him for not unloading me in the smithy in the first place, and he said, “That’s because I intended for you to remain
well preserved,
in cold storage!”