Red Clocks(79)

She lifts her cup. “To Mama.”

Dad lifts his. “To my dear heart.”

The refrigerator whirs. A distant lawnmower revs its motor.

“Should we also,” says the biographer.

He nods.

“To Archie,” she says.

“To Archer, who was the sweetest little boy.” Clears his throat. “To go from such sweetness to—”

Pawning their dead mother’s jewelry.

Pushing a steak knife into the fat of Dad’s upper arm.

“Peace,” says the biographer.

They raise their cups.

Dad eases himself down off the high stool. “This goddamn chair is hell on my back. I’ll just stand.”

She really needs to call his doctor.

“So today is my birthday,” she says.

He slaps his forehead. “What? Jesus, did I forget?”

“We don’t need to celebrate, I just—”

“Answer: I did not.” He takes a folded envelope from his shirt pocket. “Happy birthday, sweetheart.”

“Wow, Dad, thank you!”

Inside the envelope is a gift certificate for Rose City Singles, good for two months of online membership and three speed-dating evenings. MEET SINGLES IN OREGON AGES 40+.

“Okay.” She takes a long sip of coffee.

“An unconventional gift, I realize, but it might prove useful?”

He lives at Ambrosia Ridge. He’s in acute physical pain much of the time. She says mildly, “Thanks,” and sets the certificate next to her plate.

“I am a fan of the Shrovetide bun,” says Dad, buttering his third.

“I’ll buy more dough before I leave. You just twist open the canister and they bake themselves.”

“I wish you could stay longer, kiddo.”

“Me too.” Despite the gift certificate, this isn’t a lie.

Reasons I can’t:

Job



The school term ends in June. But she might apply for Fivey’s position. There are some changes she wouldn’t mind making. Fewer bubble tests, more music classes. Social-justice and meditation curricula. Principal Stephens. A good job for a pious bureaucrat?

Or she could work outside the apparatus, as the Polyphontes do.

After the body of Eiv?r Mínervudottír sank to the bottom of Baffin Bay, west of Greenland, it entered into many other bodies.

She is menstruating when she dies. Strips of burlap wadded into her crotch unfurl in the water, making a brief red cloud. A Greenland shark smells the blood from two miles off; turns in a slow, silent arc; and aims his sleek bulk in the blood’s direction.

Crumbs of her skin drift up into the brine channels. Reindeer fur and flannel threads catch on ice dendrites reaching down from the undershelf.

After the apex predators have had their fill, the smaller ones feast: hagfish, lobsters, limpets, clams, brittle stars. Then the amphipods, the bone-eating worms, the bacteria.

A narwhal hunting for air holes drags its shadow across her.

Krill gnaw green blooms of algae off the ceiling of ice.

The explorer comes, over time, apart.

Weeks after digesting Mínervudottír’s flesh, the Greenland shark is caught near the western coast of Iceland. The fishermen lop off his head and bury his body in gravel and sand, heap it with stones that press out the shark’s natural poisons (urea and trimethylamine oxide). After two or three months, the fish—by now fermented—is sliced and hung in a shed to dry. The pieces grow a brown crust, a shocking smell. When citizens of Reykjavík eat the shark on December 25, 1885, they are eating Eiv?r Mínervudottír.

She did not leave behind money or property or a book or a child, but her corpse kept alive creatures who, in turn, kept other creatures alive.

Into other bodies she went, but also other brains. The people who read “On the Contours and Tendencies of Arctic Sea Ice” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London were changed by the explorer. The English translator of her notebooks was changed by her. Mattie, hearing her tell of the grindadráp, was changed. The biographer, of course. And if her book has any readers, Mínervudottír will persist in them.

She brought in research that helped pirate ships penetrate the North, guns cocked, drills whetted.

And she brought: If wrecked in this vessel, we wreck together.

And she brought: The name I like best is “pack.”

Instead of applying for the principal job, the biographer could spend the summer at Ambrosia Ridge baking Shrovetide buns, calling doctors, and starting her next book. Go as Dad’s date to the Fourth of July picnic.

She could stay in the fog-smoked mountains, applying or not applying, breathing in the Douglas-fir and Scotch pine. The waves thumping, spilling, sucking back.

She wants more than one thing.

To write the last sentence of Mínervudottír.

To write the first sentence of something else.

To be courteous but fierce with her father’s doctors.

To be a foster mom.

To be the next principal.

To be neither.

She wants to stretch her mind wider than “to have one.”

Wider than “not to have one.”

To quit shrinking life to a checked box, a calendar square.

To quit shaking her head.