The bear stopped at the top of the peak and raised its snout. It swiveled its head one way and then the other, finally turning to look in Augie’s direction. Iris was skidding down a small slope on the seat of her snow pants, green pompom bouncing as she went, unaware of what Augustine was seeing. Augie and the bear looked at each other, and across the miles of snow and jagged rock and buffeting wind that separated them Augustine felt a strange kinship travel between them. He envied the bear its immensity, its simple needs and clear purpose, but across the vista a whiff of loneliness swirled, too, a feeling of longing and doom. He felt a piercing sadness for the bear, all alone on the mountain range—a creature consumed with the mechanics of sustenance, the killing and gnawing, rolling in the snow, the necessary bouts of sleep among the drifts and in the snow caves, the long walks to and from the sea. That was all it had, all it knew, all it needed. An emotion stirred in his stomach and Augustine realized it was discontent—for the bear, but also for himself. He’d lived through his fever, but for what? He looked down the slope in front of him in time to see Iris barrel-roll to a stop and sit up, her green pompom dusted with white. She was waving up at him, smiling—a child at play. The usual pallor of her face was lit from within, a pink glow flooding her white skin. When Augie looked back to the mountain range, the bear was gone.
“Iris,” he called, “time to go back.” On their way home, Iris stayed close, by his side or right in front of him, looking back to check on his progress from time to time. In the last stretch, as they climbed the path up the mountain to the observatory, to their home in the control tower, she took his mittened hand in hers and held it till they were inside.
IN THE BEGINNING, Augie had felt it fitting that his life should end so quietly, so simply: just his mind, his failing body, the brutal landscape. Even before the exodus of the other researchers, before the eerie silence and the presumed cataclysm—even before all of that, he had come here to die. In the weeks before his arrival, when he was still planning his Arctic research from a warm beach in the South Pacific, he’d considered the project to be his last. A finale, the capstone of a career, a bold conclusion for the biographer who would someday write a book about him. For Augustine, the end of his work was inextricable from the end of his life. Perhaps his heart would beat for a few more empty years after the work was done, or perhaps not; it didn’t trouble him to think of it. So long as his legacy burned bright in science’s archives, he was content to flicker and die alone, a few degrees shy of the North Pole. In a way, the evacuation only made it easier. But something happened to him when he looked across the Arctic mountains and saw the great yellow polar bear looking back at him. He thought of Iris. He felt gratitude for a presence instead of an absence. The feeling was so unfamiliar, so unexpected, it moved something inside him, something old and heavy and stubborn. In its wake there was an opening.
In the early days with Iris at the observatory, he had idly wondered what would become of her when he died. But following the bear sighting, as the sun hung in the sky longer and longer, he began to consider it more carefully. Augie began to think beyond his own timeline and into hers. He wanted something different for her—connection, love, community. He didn’t want to go on making excuses for his inability to give her anything but the same emptiness he’d given himself.
After the other scientists had evacuated, he’d made halfhearted attempts to contact the theoretical remnants of humankind, to find out what had happened out there beyond the icy borders of his reach, but once he’d realized the satellites were silent and the commercial radio stations had gone off the air, he’d abandoned the search. He got comfortable with the idea that there was no one left to contact. That something, everything, had ended. He wasn’t troubled by the physical reality of being marooned—that had always been his plan.
But things had changed since then. He was suddenly burning with determination to find another voice. The probability of survivors had always been in the back of his mind, but even if he had cared enough to search them out, the remoteness of the observatory made such contact logistically useless. Assuming he could locate a leftover pocket of humanity, there would be no way to get there. And yet—it was suddenly the connection itself that was important. He knew the odds—in all likelihood his search would yield nothing, or as good as nothing. He knew they weren’t going to be rescued, or discovered. Even so, he was fueled by this new feeling, this unfamiliar sense of duty, this determination to find another voice. He abandoned the telescope and turned his attention to the radio waves.
AS A BOY, eleven or twelve or so, Augustine knew the radio bands better than he knew his own body. He cobbled together crystal sets out of wire and screws and semiconductor diodes and quickly tackled more-complex projects—transmitters, receivers, decoders. He built radios with vacuum tubes and with transistors, analog and digital, from kits, from scratch, from scavenged appliances. He constructed big antennas, dipoles in the backyard, delta boxes hoisted up into the trees—whatever he could forage the parts for. It took up all of his free time. Eventually Augie’s interest caught the attention of his father, and this new intimacy was a surprise to them both. His father was a mechanic, not for cars but for car factories. The machinery he spent his time on during the day was enormous, bigger than houses, and so when his son began to tinker with the tiniest of mechanisms, the boy piqued his curiosity. Before he built radios, Augie had been his mother’s son, stirrer of batter, peeler of potatoes, escort to the hair salon. He’d do his homework at the kitchen counter when she was well enough to cook, or in her bedroom, curled at the end of the bed like a dog, when she wasn’t. He was her mascot, a little boy easily molded to fit any of her moods. Even as a child, Augustine sensed, without knowing why, that his father hated their rapport.
He felt the shift of his mother’s moods keenly. He could sense the darkness descending before she did. He knew when to let her wallow in her dim bedroom and when to lift the blinds; he knew how to coax her back home when things got out of hand during one of their errands. He managed her with such subtle skill that she never suspected manipulation, never saw him as anything more than her little boy, her trusted friend, her constant companion. No one else could soothe her the way he could, especially not his father. Augie engineered his mother’s moods out of necessity. Reining her in was the only way he could protect her, and as he got better and better at it he began to think he had decoded her affliction, that he had bested it—that he had fixed her.
The winter he turned eleven she went to bed and didn’t get up until spring. That was the winter he realized she was a puzzle he’d never be able to solve, that despite all his efforts and skill, she was beyond his understanding. He was alone, all of a sudden, and lonely. He didn’t know what to do without her. While his father berated the inanimate mound of her fetal form beneath the bedspread, Augustine retreated to the basement and found a new pleasure in the clarity of electronics: the joining of wires, the flow of current, the simple mechanisms that fit together and made something so wonderful it bordered on magic, plucking a symphony of music and voices from thin air. The basic lessons he received in school on amps and watts and waves were all it took to give him a running start. He’d always been a good student. In the dark, musty cellar, in a circular pool of yellow light, he taught himself the rest. On rare occasions, Augustine’s father descended the crumbling wooden steps and sat with his son, and on even rarer occasions, Augustine enjoyed these visits. More often than not, his father came to chide him, to show him his errors, to gloat over his failures. By then it was clear to everyone in their household that Augie had no ordinary intellect, and his father was sure to punish him for it every chance he got.