Aren’t you scared that you might get sick?
Do you have plans to handle a riot?
What if you are ordered to fire on civilians?
Someone in line said that the mayor had agreed to talk to reporters, along with General Homza. As you can see everything is under control. Meanwhile, a film crew in the chopper circled the town, hovered over the high school, and the icebreaker at sea, hovered above the hospital, so the camera operators could get steady shots.
The reporters filed back into the Hercules and it took off, headed back for Anchorage, or Fairbanks.
The rest of the world would see the film that evening.
No civilians in Barrow would see it, as satellite reception was jammed. General Homza, who had access, didn’t care.
I went back to vaccinating. Our supply of rabies serum ran out. We had over three thousand unvaccinated people in Barrow. I checked in with the general. I told him, nothing new.
“You’ve got frostbite in your lungs.”
The Ranger in front of me had to be all of twenty-three years old, a tall, fit-looking warrior whom I’d insisted on examining when I heard him wheezing, saw him wince with each breath. His voice had gone scratchy. His lungs sounded like cracking ice. He said he’d patrolled the wire for four hours last night, and the pain had started then.
“In my lungs, sir?” He didn’t believe it.
“I’ll write you a note. Take it to the hospital. Where are you from, soldier?”
“Florida. People get frostbite in their lungs?”
The city lay sheathed in cold, its angles sharper, its air clearer, any delineation between land and sea beginning to blur into white void. The ice out there starting to thicken. Light seemed dimmer, and lasted a few minutes less each day. The planet seemed to shrink.
Up here, in the old days, this time of year, people would disappear into their sod houses or subterranean homes, bundle up, bunch up, live off body heat and stored animal meat and, like bears, begin the long hibernation. If winter lasted too long, they’d starve, eat pebbles to try to keep hunger at bay. If the sea ice moved the wrong way, it would suddenly sweep onto land, as fast-moving mountains that the Eskimos called ivus. A family could go to sleep at night and never wake up. The ivu would crush them, Merlin had told me only a few days back, when we were friends.
Now we did not speak.
Streetlights glowed beneath the thin, cold moon.
Henry David Thoreau once said you can gauge the health of a society by the trust that its members have for each other, even if strangers. By that measure we were all sick. The country was sick. And it wasn’t a sickness that came from a germ.
The “polar spa” was a joke of a slummy two-story building that stood a few blocks from Arctic Pizza, across the street from the beach. The white paint job was the only thing new about it. On its side were depicted three polar bears wearing Ray-Bans, sunning themselves on lounge chairs, on an ice floe, while orcas leaped at sea. Inside, the place was falling apart. In summers it functioned as bottom-of-the-barrel bunking for spillover researchers during weeks that scientists packed town; slept in cots at the community center, like hurricane victims, and tripled up in hotel rooms. Unlucky grad students ended up here.
I lowered my binoculars, standing on the rickety roof. Out on the tundra, the weather had caught the Rangers by surprise. They were the Wehrmacht in Russia, 1942. Machinery stopped. Humvees needed to be plugged in when parked, but there were no electrical outlets there. No one had anticipated early winter. No one had provided proper equipment for sustained land-based winter Arctic ops.
I watched Rangers tottering around. In the round binocular O, halos of freezing breath trailed men walking or stamping in the snow to keep warm.
Come and get me.
I went inside where it was only slightly warmer, made my way down stairs that seemed ready to collapse. The bunk room was designed to sleep fifteen in tiers of racks that ringed the walls. The saggy mattresses were assaulted by cross currents, drafts slipping through wall gaps and plastic sheeting stapled to sills. An ancient gas heater chugged away in a corner, coughing fitful bursts of lukewarm air against the steady assault of cold.
I slept in a bunk farthest from the heater. It was warmer by the heater, but its chugging would mask the sound of an attack. I wore long underwear, a Marines sweatshirt and a stocking hat, even indoors. I removed my Beretta 92A1 pistol from the back holster and broke it down for cleaning. I pushed the right side button and rotated the breakdown lever and moved the slide forward and cleaned the gun. I made sure to rack it back when it was on the frame. It was a heavy pistol, with a Teflon-based black finish. It had a thick grip. The trigger needed extra pressure. It fired fifteen rounds.
Eddie was on duty at the hospital at the moment. I was alone.
There were four big bunk rooms, each equipped with the antique gas burners. The floors were concave plywood. Locker-room style showers ran rusty and cold. The kitchen looked as if it had been installed in 1920, and featured a vintage Maytag, four-burner stove, and metal cabinets filled with plastic glasses featuring logos from the 1964 world’s fair.
I spent hours with Kelley’s diary files over the next two days. I ventured out for walks, advertising that I was alone. Once, outside, I noticed a North Slope police department SUV pull up across the road. The windows were up. Deputy Luther Oz sat inside. I nodded at him. I felt a glare through his sunglasses. Slowly, he pulled off.
On the fourth morning — no vaccine supply that day — I ate Army-supplied oatmeal with cold water and raisins and powered up the computer for the hundredth time and inserted the memory stick and called up Kelley’s diary, the written parts. The bunk room smelled of mold. The words of a dead fifteen-year-old teen popped up. I scrolled back and forth, trolling, reading inanities written months before the Harmon deaths. I went over the same stuff for the twentieth time. Sometimes I concentrated on specific passages. Sometimes I skimmed. I chose random pages and started at the bottom, moving up, hoping that something I missed before would pop out.
I had an argument with Mom about candy. She said I can’t bring Snickers bars along. So how come Dad can have his own ice cream and I can’t have a few bars of candy?
I randomly chose another day.
Mom got another parking ticket. She’s always leaving the car where she can get a ticket! Dad gets mad about the tickets, but she always thinks she’ll be out of the store before the cops see the car.
I jumped forward. She was in Barrow now.
I met the new guide today. His name is Clay and he seems pretty nice. He offered me pickled muktuk. It’s good!
Dad’s birthday is coming. I want to play a joke on him.
The diary told me about her crush on Leon Kavik. It told me that she feared acne was breaking out on her face. A girl named Jessica back home was making fun of Kelley on the Internet. It was useless. Maybe there was no answer here. Maybe the diary was just the ramblings of a teen.
Someone was banging on the outer door. BAMBAMBAMBAM!
I shoved the pistol in the rear holster. My breath frosted in the hall. The cunnychuck door was closed and the front door had no knob, just one of those four-digit punch-in codes, even to exit. It lacked a spy hole. I held the gun low, at my side.
“It is Ranjay!”
The little Indian stood stamping and freezing. He was growing a beard, probably because facial hair might raise warmth by a fraction of a degree. His Honda SUV was plugged into the electrical outlet outside; the only modern amenity the place offered. He was alone, a bundled up ball with legs, Humpty Dumpty style, wearing two hats, one pulled over the other, the whole effect pushing his nose down and his mouth up. Ranjay as Picasso painting. Arctic cubism. The white period.