Girl in Ice(27)

“Wyatt pushing you?”

“Every day,” I said. “How is it out here for you? Don’t you get cold?”

“We’re used to it. We love the quiet.”

“She does,” Raj said. “I’m not sure I like it. Sometimes it’s so quiet I can hear my own heart beating. Spooks me.”

“Some days I forget we’re standing on the sea,” Nora said. “That there are seals and humpbacks and belugas floating under us, giving birth, fighting, dying…”

“Do you want to listen to them?” Raj asked. “We have a very low-tech way.”

“Sure.” Sigrid’s hand in mine, we followed Nora and Raj out of the Dome. Stood together in the rigid pristine air. Endless twilight burnished the sky; the bergs looked plated with gold. Nora was right: The silence was profound. Our footsteps squeaking along the ice were the only sound. Sigrid wasn’t pulling away, but I drew her to me and said, “You stay with me, understand? No running. Okay, Sigrid?”

She shook her head solemnly, said, “No.”

Sigrid, no, mother, father, seal man. Six words in one day. I was ecstatic.

“You can actually feel the sounds through the bottoms of your feet, but it’s better to do this.” A few yards from the Dome, Nora got to her hands and knees on the ice, then lay down on her side, her ear pressed to it. Raj did the same. “Come on,” he said. “Listen.”

I copied them, holding my ear a centimeter from the ice, which steamed cold into my head. Sigrid, watching us, lay down next to me, her face inches from mine.

Right away, I heard it—a Martian language of clicks, pings, squeaks, pocks, chirps, and staccato thumps. Even though I was losing feeling in my ear, I didn’t want to stop listening. Would have given anything to understand this language, or languages: a seal calling to her pup, warning of a polar bear nearby? A fin whale singing to his mate? I pictured white belugas rising like enormous drowned ghosts beneath us. Just how close would they come to us as we lay on the ice?

Nora sat up, brushed herself off. “We can also make or record sounds into a hydrophone. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Back in the Dome, she shuffled around in a dry bag, extricating a digital recorder and two microphones attached to it with cords. One she dropped into the hole, feeding it down several yards. The other she flipped on and spoke into. Her amplified voice filled the Dome.

“Hello down there, brilliant sea creatures—”

Sigrid reached up for the microphone.

“Should I give it to her?” Nora asked me.

But Sigrid had already swiped it from Nora’s grip. She made noises into the machine, similar to the squeaks and chirps we’d heard on the ice.

“Listen to that,” Raj said. “She’s quite good.”

Sigrid squatted at the edge of the hole, ignoring us as she kept up her calls.

A long white spear poked out. What in hell? The adults jumped back from the hole, Raj knocking over a specimen bucket. Seaweed and half a dozen silverfish slid across the ice floor as the spear thrashed at the brash ice, rapping at the glassy sides of the opening. Sigrid didn’t budge; a proud smile stretched across her face as she glanced at each of us, drew a breath, and—with even greater gusto—renewed her uncanny whistling and clicking.

“Sigrid,” I said, approaching her, as if I got closer, or touched her, I might absorb some of her wizardry. “What are you—”

“Holy fuck,” Raj breathed. “It’s a narwhal.”

She kept calling.

The length of twisted bone lifted eerily higher, then turned toward us as if sensing us there. Two more horns broke the surface, each approaching six feet, each fighting for room in the narrow space. One of the creatures lifted its dark gray head from the water. A blast of fishy-smelling air burst from its blowhole as the muscular flap opened and closed.

“She’s called them—those are male narwhals,” Nora said.

Sigrid was reaching across species, across worlds! She was the linguist. Never had I felt such wonder, this delightful urge to cry and laugh at the same time.

“Get the camera—Raj?” Nora said in a whisper, unable to take her eyes off the rubbery gray heads and waving spears.

But he couldn’t look away either. “It’s in the dry bag.”

Cursing, she scrambled in the bag and pulled out her phone.

The unicorn tusks waved, as if trying to feel their way around in the strange air of the hut—What is this place?—before clacking together one last time and sinking down and out of sight. The steel-blue water closed over them, shushing against the sides of the hole.

Now silent, Sigrid sat back, as if spent.

“Did you record that, Nora?” Raj said in a hushed voice.

“It happened too fast. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.”

“That was… that was yūgen,” I said.

“Yūgen?”

“It’s a Japanese word for something that gives rise to feelings there are no words for…”

“That was yūgen all right,” Raj said. “Just incredible.”

We all watched the water settle, as if waiting—or hoping—for another appearance of these fantastical creatures. But this moment was over forever.

“If I were an opportunist of the Wyatt variety, I’d say this is the road to fame and big bucks. Forget the thawed girl fairy tale.”