Girl in Ice(26)

“Bahl!” Sigrid called from the bank, alarm tinging her voice as she sprinted alongside the shore as I had done, waving her arms. But I just floated, paralyzed, stomach heaving with every roll of the sea. I couldn’t find my voice; all my languages had burrowed deep into the cavern of my body. Panic in her face, Sigrid turned toward the cluster of three buildings, then the bay where the Dome shimmered banana yellow on its plate of sea ice.

“Bahl,” she cried in frustration.

“Sigrid, go get help, please!” I tore one hand off the ice to point at the Dome.

For a long, terrible minute she ran along the bank, calling my name, until finally she turned and bulleted off toward the Dome.

A choppy sea rocked the loose floes around me. Gulls landed on nearby bergs, eyeing me as they waddle-walked on the ice. One held a slender fish down with a webbed foot and tore it open with its hooked beak. I was just twenty feet from shore, but it may as well have been a mile. I couldn’t stand. I knew that if I did, I would slip into the ocean, so I stayed in my crouch.

I began to lose feeling in my hands and feet. Where are my words, I thought, which one can save me? Blinking tears into my eyes so they wouldn’t freeze open, I conjured the Japanese word zanshin, a state of relaxed mental alertness martial artists strive for when facing an opponent. Fears of losing, winning, even dying are set aside; muscles are relaxed and ready to fight.

As the floe rocked beneath me, splashing icy seawater on stiffened limbs, I breathed zanshin over and over until it thrummed in my head, until ice and sea disappeared and only the word remained.





ten


It took all of thirty seconds for Nora to tow me to shore.

Sigrid had been able to communicate my distress—so she could make herself understood if she wanted to—and Nora had come running from the Dome and tossed me a rope. Now we sat on a wooden bench under the sunshiny glow of saffron canvas, Sigrid bundled in a fur blanket drinking hot chocolate cooled by ice chips.

Nora squatted near the four-by-eight-foot hole in the ice floor where she and Raj set off for their dives into the polar sea. The temperature inside the Dome hovered at forty degrees.

“He should be up any second,” she said, checking a gauge on a piece of equipment nearby.

“Thanks for coming to get me. I’d still be out there—” I shivered.

“It’s okay,” she said, her concentration full on the slushy blue hole. It eyed me like the deep well of my subconscious mind, a terrible place to go. Raj was swimming somewhere under us, submerged in freezing water.

Suspended from one of the curved metal struts that held up the Dome and kept its shape, like the ribs of a whale, was a laminated placard entitled “Diving Checklist,” a twenty-five-step-long agenda to be checked off in preparation for a dive. A spare diving suit hung like a dead man from a large hook over the specimen table.

Nora paced in front of the hole, eyeing the timer as it clicked from fifty-nine minutes to an hour. “Okay, Raj, anytime now would be good—”

Raj fairly exploded out of the water, his tank and gear clanking against the icy walls of the diving hole.

In alarm and surprise, Sigrid flung her cup of chocolate up in the air. The liquid sizzled onto the ice as she bolted for the door, but I caught her arm and forced her to stay. She looked equally fearful, bewildered, and strangely delighted, repeating the same two words over and over.

Nora seized Raj by his armpits, heaving him up and out of the hole and onto his stomach. He slid a yard or so across the floor. Rolled over and yanked out his mouth gear, slipped off his tank, and lifted his goggles from his eyes, shuddering.

Nora laughed as she helped him wrestle off his tight-fitting neoprene headgear. “Poor girl’s freaking out! Could she think he’s some kind of seal-man?” Smiling, she handed him his spectacles.

Maybe that’s what she’s saying, I thought. Seal man.

“This is Sigrid,” I said, taking her firmly by the arm and escorting her over to Raj.

He sat up and smiled, held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Sigrid. I’m Raj. I mean, Seal Man.”

She didn’t take his hand but, grinning with astonishment, reached up to touch his forehead gently, then his rubber-encased shoulder. Said, “Seal Man.”

“How was it, darling?” Nora asked as she helped unzip the many crisscrossed zippers on the front and back of his suit.

“Perfect. I was able to plant it about forty feet down. Got the coordinate, took a shot of it. We’re good, I think.”

“Brilliant,” Nora said, freeing him from the rest of his suit. “Well done, my love.” Shivering in his long johns, Raj hopped into layer after layer of clothing that had been laid out for him across the specimen table. Sigrid couldn’t take her eyes off him.

Nora poured Raj some chocolate, which he took gladly. Stomping his feet and rubbing his hands between sips, he reached into a dry bag and extracted a shrunken, sad-looking orange. Nora slid him a questioning look.

“Yes, I stole it from Wyatt’s stash,” he said, biting at the peel. “Guy needs to learn to share.”

“He’s been on the ice over a year,” Nora said. “We just got here.”

“He’ll live,” Raj said, digging in to the fruit.

“How’s it been going with her?” Nora asked me.

“Slow. She’s probably speaking some West Greenlandic dialect, I’m not sure yet.”