The warmth and the beauty and the vistas were tantalizing, but they slipped away when he tried to hold on to them. The other, more painful memories were a reckoning in real time. Long minutes and even longer seconds: the feeling of his hunting knife slicing into taut, living deer skin, the pulse of its lifeblood, the metallic stench of it; the sensations of guilt and regret, emotions that in the past he had mistaken for physical ailments, burning deep in his stomach or intestines or lungs; the sound of his father’s fist against a wall, against his own body, against his mother’s. His mother before she went to the hospitaclass="underline" an unmoving mound beneath her patchwork wedding quilt, day after day, week after week, then watching her rise like a phoenix and burst into the living room, fire in her eyes, ready to do do do, go go go. Not stopping until she had spent all she had—energy, money, time, and then collapsing back into the blankets, to remain dormant until she would rise once more, or until her husband dragged her out to test her resolve. Augie was trapped in these moments by his sickness, held captive within the walls of memories he wanted to forget.
AFTER A TIME—HE couldn’t tell how long—the fever passed. The nightmares finally left him, and he became aware that he was awake. Weak but conscious; hungry. Pulling himself to a sitting position, Augustine looked around the control room, rubbing the sleep from the corners of his eyes. The room was unchanged. He swiveled his head and let out a short sigh of relief when his eyes found her. Iris was sitting on the windowsill, looking out onto the twilit tundra. When she heard him getting up and kicking off the heap of sleeping bags, she turned. He realized that he had never seen her smile before. One of her bottom teeth was missing, and he could see the pink wrinkle of her gums showing through the gap. A dimple lingered on her left cheek and a flush crept across the bridge of her tiny nose.
“You look terrible,” she said. “I’m glad you’re awake.”
It was still rare to hear her voice, and it again surprised him with its deepness, its scratchiness. He was relieved to hear it. She circled the nest of sleeping bags like a wary animal, tempering her excitement, surveying all the details before she moved closer. She produced a vacuum-packed serving of jerky, a can of green beans, and a spoon, and held them out to Augie.
“Do you want broth also?” she asked as he took the food. He peeled back the tab on the green beans and began scooping them into his mouth. She ripped open the jerky package with her teeth and set it down beside him, then went to heat the electric kettle. He was ravenous, and suddenly alive again. After the can was emptied he turned his attention to the jerky, wiping bean juice from his beard with the back of his hand.
“How long was I out?” he asked.
Iris shrugged. “Five days, maybe?”
He nodded. It seemed about right. “And you…you’re okay?”
She looked at him strangely and turned back to the kettle without answering, unwrapping the foil from a bouillon cube and dropping it into the blue mug while she waited for the water to boil. The mug was too hot to hold, so she let it cool on the countertop and returned to her perch on the windowsill, silent once more, looking out over the darkening tundra.
AUGUSTINE BEGAN TO test his atrophied muscles on the stairs of the control tower. When he could trudge down to the first floor and back up to the third without collapsing, he decided it was time to go farther afield. Navigating the snow and ice outside tired him even faster than the stairs, but he went out every day, sometimes more than once. After a while, his endurance returned. He would walk down the narrow path cut into the mountain, through the abandoned village of outbuildings, and out onto the open, rolling mountains. He was winded and weak, but alive, and the joy of that simple fact flooded his tired old body. Both the joy of survival and the weight of regret were unfamiliar to him, but neither would let him go, as hard as he tried to sweat them out. The feelings from his fevered nightmares still remained vivid. His muscles ached from exercise, but also from the unfamiliar emotions that coursed through him, like someone else’s blood running through his veins.
On these walks Iris often tagged along, either running in front of him or lagging behind. The snatches of daylight lengthened from barely an hour, to a few hours, to a whole afternoon. As the days progressed Augustine began to walk farther, always keeping the emerald green of Iris’s pompom hat in his sights. She seemed different since his fever, as though there was more of her—more energy, more physicality, more words. Before, she had hung back in his peripheral vision, sitting aloof in the control room, wandering stealthily among the outbuildings, always elusive. Now, Augie couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her. She was everywhere, and her smile—still rare but somehow always hinted at just beneath the curve of her cheeks—was glorious.
One day, when the sun had been hanging low in the sky for several hours before it began to sink, Augustine went farther than he had been able to go since the hangar—since the fever. Now he always went north, over the mountains. Never south, toward the tundra and the hangar and the wolf’s mounded grave, marked with veins of pink blood running through the white. To the north, the Arctic Sea stretched up over the top of the globe, an icy blue cap covering Earth’s cranium. The shore was miles away, a distance he could never hope to cross on foot, but he imagined that when the wind was blowing in the right direction he could smell the crisp salt air from the unfrozen sea, rolling up over the glaciers and traveling to his keen, searching nostrils. He decided that the farther he walked, the stronger the brackish smell became.
That day, they’d already been walking long enough that his muscles burned and even Iris had slowed her gait, dragging her little boots through the snow instead of lifting them with each step, but Augustine wanted to go farther. There was something ahead, he told himself, something he must see. He didn’t know what. The sun slipped behind the mountains, sending shots of color into the sky like a dancer throwing silk scarves in the air. He was admiring the sunset melting into the snow when he saw it: the solid outline of an animal against the changeable northern sky. It was the polar bear he remembered from the first day of sunlight—the same bear, he was sure of it, not because he could see any distinct features but because he recognized it by the quickening of his heartbeat. It was so big it had to be a bear, with long, shaggy fur, a deep, aging yellow. Augie was at least a mile away, perhaps several, but he saw these details with telescopic clarity. This was what he’d been searching for. It was as though he were standing next to the bear, or as though he were riding high on its massive, arched back, his fingers dug deep into the matted fur, heels locked around the wide, padded rib cage. He could feel the thick fur between his knuckles, see the yellow tint of it, the pink stains on its muzzle, and smell the musky, rotten odor of old blood.