Borealis(25)

He crept up to the foredeck and pushed open the double hatch. Shafts of hoary light stung his eyes, though he couldn’t tell what time of the day it was. Or what day it was.

Topside, he crossed over to the bow and looked out upon a vast ice field, its size indeterminable, upon which, at some point during his unconsciousness, the Borealis had run aground. The hull was destroyed, stabbed by countless knives of ice, an explosion of boat pieces sprayed across the snow.

He turned and proceeded toward the pilothouse. Walking was less about moving his legs independently of each other but merely pivoting each foot and twisting at the hips, for this seemed the best way to conserve what warmth hadn’t evacuated his body. At the control room door, he wiped away thick grime from the window and, cupping his hands at either side of his face, peered inside.

Mike was on the floor, his hand still clutching the hilt of the boning knife that he’d used to open his throat. His skin was gray as bird down, his eyes milky pustules overloaded in their sockets.

Shaking, shaking—

Breathing into his hands, he retreated down the steps and noticed something in the snow he hadn’t seen when he’d first looked over the bow.

Footsteps.

She.

And she—





12


Down in the galley he scooped handfuls of cereal off the countertop, which he ate without expression, then ate two slices of wheat bread, which were covered in frost. Afterward, he urinated in the galley’s steal sink—a stream so pungent and yellow it was nearly solid. From his cabin, he retrieved the flare gun then, on second thought, packed the entire first-aid kit in his laundry bag. He pulled tight the laces on the bag and slung it over one shoulder.

There was a flashlight in Mike’s room. It didn’t work but, for some reason, Charlie was confident the farther he got from the trawler the greater the chance the flashlight might start to work. Again he thought of those blackened footprints on the floor of Mike’s stateroom, the tentacled star on the seat of the cot. The girl, he knew, had poisoned the Borealis, and everything on it. Well, almost everything.

While he prepared his gear and changed into warm clothes, he thought of Gabriel. When he was born, on the day Johanna and he had taken him home from the hospital, the infant had been silent as a dormouse. This reddened, squinty-eyed little garden gnome with a tiny, upturned nose and square little pink fists. And the hair on his head! Dark as the pelt of a black bear. They’d been living in Oregon then, in a small cabin backed by redwood trees as formidable as minarets while the front yard opened up on a pebbly gray beach where the cold Pacific waters rushed up to lap against the seawall. He’d been piloting charters back then while sustaining a hunger to get his hands back into the gullets of cod instead of just coolers of Bud. It was what he hoped for that pink, squirming little baby too—a lifetime of doing as opposed to the pursuit of doing. Anyway, he’d get back to the sea, the real sea, in due time. There was the baby. Gabe. Gabriel. The way Johanna, slight in frame and just as beautiful as she’d ever been, nursing the baby in the half-gloom of midday coming in through the cabin’s windows, framing her in some angelic penumbra while she rocked gently in the old rocking chair that had once been her—or his?—grandfather’s…

Back abovedecks, the world was colorless. Snow snowed. The boat’s prow had shriveled and turned black as rotting fruit. There came the steady glug-glug from the hull as the trawler slowly took on more and more water. With a pair of field glasses, Charlie surveyed the expansive strip of ice, miles long, practically its own continent. He could see the girl’s footprints in the snow, soon to be covered over by the fresh fall.

Shouldering his gear, he climbed down the side of the trawler via an overhang of cable. The ice nails in the soles of his boots left pockmarks in the fiberglass hull. Touching down on the ice field, he found the frozen terra firma solid as pavement. Charlie hefted his gear and, without a second thought, pushed forward through the twirling snow. He followed the girl’s footprints until the storm covered them up. Then he continued in their estimated direction, up over frozen buttes, across jagged crevasses and down the throat of winding, bluish canyons through which dense, crystalline fog called “pogonip” hung like spectral gauze. He walked until hunger cramped his stomach and the silver aurora of sun bled away behind the sea, leaving a velvety, star-encrusted firmament in its place.

In the dark and miles from the Borealis, the flashlight came on.

Trudging through the snow, his head down and his stiff-bristled beard glistening with ice crystals, he pursued the ghostly mirage. When he caught a glimpse of her in the pale cast of moonlight, white against a whiter background, he had to question what he was seeing—was it real or only in his mind, a trick of his eyes? Had she ever existed? Had any of them?

Holes everywhere, Bryan’s voice came back to him. You get it, man? The whole goddamn world…

At one point, he collapsed in the snow. Thinking, Mailboxes full of firecrackers. Thinking, Moon-bugs. He managed to roll onto his back and, with some semblance of consciousness, propped himself up against a pillar of ice. Shivering, he pulled his gear into his lap for warmth against the biting, unforgiving wind. However, the seat of his pants soon grew wet and cold, the snow soaking through both pairs of underwear, long johns, his BDUs. His buttocks went numb. Thinking of Gabriel, zigzagging around the yard in Saint Paul, lobbing fistfuls of snow over Dale Carver’s fence. Dale’s German shepherd barked wildly, poking its snout through the quadrangular rings in the fence. He chased the boy around the yard, feinting for him just as the boy pivoted in the snow and darted in the opposite direction. From the trailer’s stoop, Johanna looked on, dressed in a heavy pink bathrobe and rabbit-fur slippers, her arms folded in mock-disapproval across her chest.