He’d found a position in Chile, in the Atacama Desert, where he’d lived once before. He got out of New Mexico as quickly as he could and forgot Jean as completely as he was able. It wasn’t until years later that he allowed himself to think of her, of what could’ve been and what already was—a child, with his genes and maybe his eyes, maybe his mouth or his nose, but without him in its life. A child without a father. He tried to banish the idea from his consciousness, but it crept back, again and again. Eventually he made a call to Socorro and found out what little there was to know. Jean had left New Mexico shortly after he did, but she’d stayed in touch with some of the other research fellows. Augustine was told she’d had a girl, born in November, somewhere in the southern Californian desert. He tracked down a work address for her and kept it tucked in his wallet for months, just behind his driver’s license.
He waited until the child’s birthday, and then he sent the most expensive amateur telescope he could afford. No note, no return address. Jean would know who it was from, and she could decide what to tell her daughter. He wondered what she’d already told her about her father, whether she’d lied and said he was dead, or a military POW, or a traveling salesman, or whether she’d told the truth and said—what, exactly? That he didn’t want her? That he didn’t love either of them? He kept sending things for a few years, never a card, just an occasional investment in his genes. Gestures that he couldn’t actually claim were thoughtful, but that seemed better than nothing. Now and then he sent Jean a check. He knew she cashed them, but he only heard back from her once: a plain white envelope with a photo in it. She’d sent it to an old address, the observatory in Puerto Rico after he’d already moved on to Hawaii, and it took an extra few months to find its way to him. The girl looked like her mother. Probably a good thing. The next year his gift, sent to the same place in southern California, was returned and labeled Invalid Address. He never heard from them again. It was almost a relief to lose them; sending the gifts every year was just a reminder of his inadequacy to be anything more than a blank return address and a medium-sized check. The passionate, promising focus he’d begun his career with had narrowed into lonely obsession. He’d known this about himself for years. He didn’t need more proof.
A PAIR OF Arctic terns had begun to build a nest on the ground, not far from the camp. They were apparently under the impression that they had the entire lake to themselves, so whenever Augie ventured closer for a look at the nest, he was regaled with swooping and screaming, little gray and white bombs with red feet and beaks emerging from the feathery masses. Iris didn’t seem to provoke these wrathful displays, but Augie could hardly walk in their direction without giving rise to an attack. More than once he received a vicious peck to the crown of his head, and eventually he took to shielding himself with a square of plywood he’d found lying around camp. After a few collisions with a creature decidedly larger and more solid than they, the terns gave up their offensive and let him look. He wondered at their easy surrender, but reasoned that birds who spent their entire lives making the trip between the Antarctic and Arctic regions—more than forty-four thousand miles of migration every year—probably weren’t the most innovative of creatures. The nest progressed nicely. What sights had they flown over on their long journey? How had they survived to make the same nonsensical trip every year? Augustine looked at the terns preparing for the arrival of their chicks and marveled at their tenacity—hatching new life at the end of the world. One of the terns swiveled its head to stare at Augustine with one eye. What do you know that I don’t? Augustine asked it. But the tern only ruffled its feathers and hopped away.
One morning the sun rose and decided not to set. For a couple of days it sank below the mountain ridge in the evening but never dropped behind the horizon, and soon it stayed high and bright without pause. Within a few days of the midnight sun’s arrival, Augie and Iris lost all sense of time. He had long ago lost track of the days, but he knew it must be mid-April if the midnight sun had risen, the same way he would know late September had arrived when the lake was bathed in twilit days, the sun hovering just beneath the horizon before it set completely and plunged the Arctic into another long, dark night.
Time didn’t matter anymore. The only reason to keep track of time was to stay connected with the outside world, but without any sort of connection it was meaningless. Light and dark had always been the earth’s clock, and Augie saw no reason not to abide by it now, even at this strange latitude. The winter had laid him low—his joints, his immune system, his temper had all been slow and dark—but with the endless light in the sky he felt a kind of buoyancy, a charge of electricity running through his nerves. His life took on a pleasant rhythm: he slept when he was tired, cooked when he was hungry, visited the terns when he felt like a stroll, and set up a little open-air porch at the mouth of their hut, with a lopsided Adirondack chair some previous resident had constructed from spare pieces of plywood, an empty packing crate for an ottoman. Augustine bundled up and sat in his chair, squinting against the bright albedo of the snow on the lake, waiting for the cold air that lingered on the plateau to be stirred by warmer currents.
Iris adapted with ease too. She began to favor short naps instead of longer, uninterrupted sleep. She ate when Augie set a plate in front of her; otherwise, if she found herself hungry, she took a shortbread bar from the cook tent or foraged among the other nonperishables. She spent a lot of time on the ice, skating back and forth, sometimes making the trek out to the island to startle the hares. She looked for more bird nests, which were always on the ground because there were no shrubs or trees, only low-lying vegetation and rock. The snowy owl they’d seen on their first day became a fixture, as did the faraway howls of the wolves in the mountains behind them. One bright night, or day perhaps, it didn’t matter anymore, Augie awoke to the sound of a large furry body brushing up against the side of the tent. He sat straight up to check that Iris was napping also. He realized it was a wolf scratching an itch on the hut, separated from Augustine’s head by mere millimeters of vinyl and insulation. He shuddered a little at the thought but was largely unperturbed and went back to sleep. The other habitants of the lake and the surrounding mountains had become accustomed to the new human presence there. Gradually, Augie grew to accept their neighbors too.
They woke up in the brightness one day to discover the snow had finally vanished. The lake ice began to get louder, to shift and groan against the shore. Meltwater puddles multiplied and the ice’s pale blue color became dull and gray. Eventually the ice sheet broke apart and gentle winds blew the fragments against one another with sounds like glasses being clinked, a toast to summer. One day—Augie guessed it was early July—a gale howled along the surface of the lake and pushed the shards of candled ice out of the water and onto the muddy shore, where they crashed against the earth like solid, splintering waves of white quartz. The water washed over the soft brown earth and the basin of the lake began to warm. Before long, it was mild enough that Augustine sat in his homemade Adirondack chair wearing only his long underwear while Iris walked barefoot along the stony beach.
Soon after the lake cleared, following a long sleep and a slow breakfast, Augie walked out to the upside-down dinghy and flipped it over. He’d noticed an outboard motor, two oars, and some fishing gear in the unused sleeper hut. He gathered up everything but the motor, which he wasn’t sure he could carry, and dragged it out to the edge of the lake. Iris looked on with excitement and began pushing the dinghy toward the shore, inch by inch. Together they pushed it halfway into the water.