“I’m sorry,” he said, but the wind snatched his words away before he could be sure he’d spoken them. He closed his eyes and felt the sting of the snow-heavy wind against his exposed skin. Behind his eyelids he watched prickles of light sparking across darkness, and when he opened his eyes the intense white of the snow momentarily blinded him. It would be a quiet end—they could either trudge onward, trudge back, or stay here beside the motionless snowmobile. In every direction Augustine saw the same conclusion. The same outcome. He imagined Iris’s eyes sewn shut with frost, a bruised blue seeping into her cheeks. It was his fault. He had brought them here, taken them away from the safety of the observatory into the white, menacing wilderness.
He’d been staring at the fuel valve tucked beside the right footwell for some time before he realized what he was looking at: a switch turned halfway between Off and On. Augustine got on his knees and brought his face up to the valve. The lettering was unmistakable—perhaps Iris had kicked it when she climbed down? He twisted it all the way to On and slowly got to his feet. He said a silent plea as he reached for the power switch. The snowmobile roared to life and relief flooded his body. His hands shook as he placed them on the handlebars, and he tightened his grip to ease the tremor. He felt the menace of the landscape more keenly than ever, but he guided the snowmobile forward despite it—into the blank distance, covering finite miles disguised as infinity beneath a low, indifferent sun.
When the light began to fade they stopped and unpacked the tent for the night. Augie had been on the lookout for a boulder, a small tree, even a tall snowdrift to block the wind and make their camp feel less exposed, but there was nothing in any direction, so he pitched the tent beside the snowmobile. The tent was tepee-shaped, a cone of orange in the middle of a white vista. The fluorescence of the fabric brought out the bluish tones in the snow. As they settled in for the night, Iris took off her helmet and two of the three hats, keeping the emerald-green cap with the pompom and her yellow goggles on throughout dinner. There was nothing to make a fire with. They huddled together inside the tent while the wind howled around them, pulling the orange fabric taut against the aluminum poles. The tent pegs squeaked in their shallow holes. Augustine hoped that they would hold through the night, that the tent wouldn’t go skittering across the smooth, slippery expanse of the tundra as they slept. He had pounded the pegs as deep into the packed snow as the can of baked beans he’d been using as a hammer had allowed. They heated those same beans over the little kerosene stove, the tent flap open for ventilation. Darkness fell.
Iris hummed along to the sound of the wind against the tent. There was no need for words, nothing to say. Augustine chewed and listened to the desolate moan of the wind, which suddenly seemed ominous, and he wondered again if they should turn back. If he had made a mistake taking Iris away from the known safety of the observatory. After dinner, they crawled out the flap of the tent to look up at the stars. The sky was full of them, but on that night the constellations were only a homely backdrop for the rippling river of the aurora borealis that flowed through the air, green and purple and blue streams of dancing light. The two of them walked a little way from the glow of the electric lantern that burned in their tent, transfixed by the aurora, ready to follow one of the shimmering paths of light—to climb right up into the sky. After a while, the lights dimmed and slipped away. Augie turned, not sure how long they’d been watching, and saw the illuminated orange shell of the tent and one last thread of green glowing above it, gradually fading from view.
They slept soundly that night, their breath rising from their nostrils as steam, their thickly bundled bodies curling toward each other, unconsciously searching for warmth as the wind continued to howl and sing around them.
IN THE MORNING they ate another can of beans, this time one with pieces of pork mixed in, then took down the tent. They wiped the tundra clean of their night and rode east once more. The day spread out before them, pale and infinite. It seemed as if they weren’t moving across the distance at all, but riding on an invisible treadmill. Late in the day they saw an Arctic hare bouncing across the tundra, jumping vigorously on its hind legs like a pogo stick, more interested in height than distance. When they made camp again that night they saw another hare, or perhaps the same one, bouncing nearby. Augie pointed it out as Iris slurped a mouthful of creamed corn, heated on the kerosene stove.
“It’s so they can see farther,” she said. He was speechless for a minute. She spoke so rarely that it always took him a moment to respond. Her knowledge of the Arctic wildlife would be extensive, he realized, and thought back to the field guide she’d reread so many times she probably had the whole thing memorized. He felt a small twinge of regret that he had never bothered to learn a single thing about this environment he’d spent the past few years living in—not on purpose, anyway. The child beside him knew about the wolves, the musk oxen, the hares. Augustine knew only about the distant stars, billions of miles away. He’d been moving from place to place his entire life and had never bothered to learn anything about the cultures or wildlife or geography that he encountered, the things right in front of him. They seemed passing, trivial. His gaze had always been far-flung. He’d accumulated local knowledge only by accident. While his colleagues explored the regions of their various research posts, hiking in the woods or touring the cities, Augustine only delved deeper into the skies, reading every book, every article that crossed his path, and spending seventy-hour weeks in the observatory, trying to catch a glimpse of thirteen billion years ago, scarcely aware of the moment he was living in.
There had been other camping trips, other nights spent stargazing, but whether it was because of the liquor that fueled him in those days or his preoccupation with the sky above him rather than the moment itself, Augustine barely remembered those trips. He had always craned his neck up to the heavens, had always looked away from so many incredible vistas on Earth. It was only the data he gathered, only the celestial events he recorded that had made an impression on his memory. When he considered how long he had been alive, it seemed remarkable how little he had experienced.