He patted his sore hands against his hips and looked up. The sky had turned soft and thick, the light suspended above their heads like a sheet. As if light were a language spoken between heaven and earth.
Kermin realized then that this was the most beautiful place he would ever see in his life. The thought saddened him, for it was an empty beauty, a reluctant beauty, a landscape of longing you did not want buried with you in your grave.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about the pole,” Leif said suddenly.
“What is the pole?” Kermin asked, not quite listening.
“The North Pole. It’s a place that often recurs in my dreams. Did you know that at the pole, the sun only sets once a year? A six-month day followed by a six-month night.”
“When do you have breakfast?”
“Ah! You are a funny man, Kermin. Most people probably don’t understand this about you. When indeed? Two months in? Three months? Or do you go directly to brunch? You can see my dilemma. On the one hand, the pole is a point of infinite possibility. The lines of longitude converge there, and so the North Pole contains all longitudes at once. In essence, you could choose any coordinate with a latitude of ninety degrees north and you would be correct about your position. How to function with so much choice? But then on the other hand, the only direction you can head is south. Can you imagine? You have no choice. You must head south, there is no other way. Wait—” Leif grabbed Kermin’s arm and pointed.
“Look.”
They stopped and watched the sky. The sun, perched on the lip of the horizon, seemed to tremble before sliding from view. The world blinked, waited, and then there was the sun again, rising unperturbed, as if it had all been some kind of performance.
Kermin turned and seized Leif’s shoulder. They stood looking at each other, caught inside their own magnetic field.
“Will you hurt him?” Kermin asked. His grip was firm, but there was tenderness in that connection, an insistence to the present.
“I will not,” said Leif.
“But you can do what you say?”
“I’m not in the business of lying, my friend. I say what I mean.”
“I care about him more than anything.”
“Of course.”
“But I must also take care of my wife.”
“Of course you must.”
Kermin released his shoulder. “After, how will he be?” he said quietly.
“This I cannot say,” said Leif, shaking his head. “But how does that saying go? ‘To know the son, look at the father.’”
They walked on and came to the entrance of another lodge. Another eye above its doorway, staring at them. Leif saw Kermin looking at the emblem.
“If the eye belongs to no one, what does it see?” he asked. And then he opened the door and flicked on the light, which sputtered to reveal a large room filled with shelves of cogs, gears, and pulleys. There were rolls upon rolls of wire and dangerous-looking three-pointed mechanisms and small wooden mannequins contorted into ghastly pirouettes. Kermin looked up at the ceiling. From the rafters hung hundreds of puppets. Hundreds and hundreds of them. All of them headless.
Kermin stared. He had never seen such a collection of wonders in his life.
“As you can see, we’re running out of room,” said Leif.
“Where are their heads?”
“An old superstition. If you leave the puppet’s head on overnight, it may come to life and take its revenge,” said Leif. “You must separate the body from the mind.”
“And all of this stuff is for making your puppets?”
“Yes. But unfortunately, for our next show we need something more.”
“More than this?”
“You know how it is. You want what you cannot have. Our next show is about a brand-new idea in theoretical physics called the quark-gluon plasma, a condition that existed briefly after the Big Bang — at least in theory.”
“I don’t know about this.”
“The basic idea is that following the birth of our universe, there was a moment of extremely high temperatures. We are talking extremely high, as in never before or since — a singular thermopoetic event. At these temperatures, all matter breaks down into essential building blocks. And for a moment there, right after the creation of our world. . everything was broken and everything was the same. No larger unique molecules, no atoms, no nuclei — just a sea of indistinguishable quarks and gluons. Can you imagine it? The whole universe as a sea of sameness.”
“It sounds bad.”
“It sounds beautiful. And it sounds a bit like some of the most extreme forms of communism, yes? Complete and utter equality?”
“Communism never works this way.”
“Not yet, at least. And I’m not talking about your brand of bourgeois Eastern European Tito communism. This is like window dressing. You must look farther east for the plasma. Burma. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. North Korea. China. Well, maybe China no longer.”
“So your show is about this? Quark gluton communism?”
“You’re good, Kermin. One must say this about you,” said Leif. “No, the challenge we face right now is much more mundane. You see, we’re building puppets with screens inside of them. Televisions. So they can become anyone they want. . like an infinite mask. These are certainly our most complex constructions to date. And their circuitry must be able to function in very hot and wet conditions — in the Cambodian jungle, you see, where there’s no electricity. We’re struggling to make all of this work. . The wiring is really very tricky. You work with televisions, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Little televisions?”
“Little televisions.” Kermin felt a great delight in saying this. “Very mini televisions.”
“Maybe I could pick your brain sometime about a few small matters. For instance, we are interested in liquid crystals on plasma-polymerized films. Do you know about these?”
“Of course.”
“Of course you do. You see? You and I are not so different.”
They stood, staring at the vast collection of puppet detritus. In the middle of the room sat a strange machine that looked like a suspended metal barrel resting on two trapezes, with a large collection of spiraling wires exploding from either end. The barrel was covered in bulbous glass protrusions. Kermin put his hand on one of these glass lumps. It was warm to the touch. He felt a sudden, precise absence in his chest and then his head swam, as if he had been holding his breath for too long.
“What is this?” he asked, withdrawing his hand.
“That. That’s a vircator,” said Leif. “That is what will cure your son.”
9
The next morning, Charlene awoke early to find Kermin already up. Radar was next to him, quietly working on an exploded radio at the little wooden table. It was chilly inside the cabin. Outside, summer snow had fallen sometime during the long, illuminated night. A fresh wet coating of white covered the ground, broken only by a lone set of paw prints that wove and wandered through the cluster of buildings.
“What’re you doing?” Charlene said sleepily, coming over to the table.
“We are repairing, aren’t we?” said Kermin.
“This radio is broken,” Radar agreed.
“I had the strangest dream last night.” She yawned. “Did you have any dreams?”
“No,” said Kermin.
“No dream,” Radar agreed.
“It must be something about being up here. Or maybe it’s just all the travel, but I swear, it was so vivid. I was on this boat or barge or something. In the jungle, floating down a big river. And I knew these people were watching me from the trees. I couldn’t quite see them, but I knew they were there. And I hear this shout, like a warning, and I expect some kind of attack, but then I look up and I see that the river is ending. Just disappearing into nothing. It’s like the water is there one minute and then it’s not there. And then, just before I get to the place where the river is ending, I wake up. And you know what’s strange? In the dream, it wasn’t that I was scared to go through that point of no return — it was that I wanted to go through, to see what was on the other side. When I woke up, I could feel this disappointment, you know?”