About Grace (24 page)

He disembarked in Haines and rode motorcoaches through the Yukon Corner: a half dozen isolated towns, most named for animals: Whitehorse, Beaver, Chicken. The highway was gravel, occasionally chipped out of cliff sides, and the bus windows were soon pasted with an oily grime. Mosquitoes traveled the aisle hunting passengers.

The driver indicated highlights as they slid past. Abandoned mining dredges; midnight-sun gardens (like gardens on steroids: inflated cabbages, colossal pumpkins). Vast islands of spruce. A road-killed caribou the size of a dairy cow.

Thirty hours of bouncing in that seat and near the end of it Winkler could feel the minute dissociations between each vertebra. He was the last passenger. A trio of cabins marked the end of the route.

Eagle: population 250. He disembarked on traitorous legs. It was 8:40
P.M.
and there was still plenty of light in the sky, shadows reaching across the unpaved street, two boys in a Radio Flyer wagon harnessed to dogs watching the bus turn and start back toward Tok.

He started with them: “Naaliyah Orellana? Dark skin, a scientist?” They picked at paint on the wagon walls. “Hello? Do you speak English?”

They nodded.

“But you don't know her?”

They shook their heads, then mushed the huskies and the wagon started off, creaking up the street.

He could barely read the phone book (thirty or so sheets of paper,
clipped together) but there did not seem to be any Naaliyah listed. Out of habit he reached to adjust his glasses but pawed at air.

No one knew her at the Texaco, or the rental cabins, or the propane dealer, or the beadwork shop. He offered the station mechanic a hundred-dollar bill but the man only shook his head: “Can't summon her out of thin air.”

The sky was huge and purple and the town was tiny beneath it. Nobody seemed to think his plight was all that urgent. It didn't take long to run out of buildings: a warped box of a bar where a bartender was fast-forwarding a pornographic videotape; the old frame-building custom house; the trading company with its dusty fluorescent lights and neon bags of potato chips shining in plump rows. In his eyes everything was hazy and smeared with light. His ankle ached steadily. Have you seen Naaliyah Orellana? A young woman? Haven't seen her. Anybody? Nobody.

It was September 20 and he'd been in the United States less than seven weeks. The street ended at a series of sad-looking docks where a few houseboats were tied up. Beyond them the vast, khaki current of the Yukon River slid past, a quarter mile across, like some final and insuperable boundary.

“The airstrip,” a canoe-rental man told him. “I think I saw a gal like that out there. A couple months ago, maybe? Heading to the university land up there.” He waved toward an enormous bluff.

The airfield was less than a mile from town. He trudged the road in half darkness. Off to his right the Yukon rolled on, driving its immeasurable payload of silt northward. He could hardly believe its size: it was a sleek prairie, pocked with boils; it was an avalanche turned on its side.

He felt something uncoiling within him. Brent had warned him—sometimes things only heal partway, or heal wrong—but Winkler had been feeling stronger, his eyes recovering, his pains withdrawing. Now a cold wind came up, and Winkler stopped a moment smelling the night. Another town, another empty pocket. Where would he
sleep? All of a sudden his ankle could not hold him. He teetered, and fell.

The Yukon pushed on and on. Winkler tried to hold his head up. There was a sound in the air like women's voices. “Grace?” he called. “Grace?” He had a vision of her at the bottom of a lagoon, languid, a grown woman, bound in weeds, her hair a sea fan nodding in the current. But the voice came and went, and with it the vision, and then there was only the incessant glide of the river.

He staggered to his feet and went forward in his tattered suit and borrowed tennis shoes. The airstrip appeared abandoned, the shells of two Cessna 207s, cannibalized for parts, parked beside a barn.

The barn door was not latched. Inside it was hushed and beamy as a church, random debris in most of the stalls: tires, drums, bags of shingles, a row of ruined ten-speeds, a rusted snowplow. At the back of the hayloft rose a large, perpendicular trilancet window, looking over a trembling island of birch. There was an ancient mattress below the window and he climbed onto it and lay down and listened to the wind against the panes.

A spring, broken somewhere inside the mattress, groaned weakly. What did he have left? A sense of where the moon was coming over the trees, the wispy silhouettes of clouds. And this feeling, permeating every waking minute, that he had made too many wrong decisions, that he should have gone down to the house from the top of Shadow Hill and waded inside to see if his daughter was there. He should even have taken her in his arms and tried grappling her up the flooded street.

But there was a worse feeling: the possibility that it didn't matter what he had done, that outcome was independent of choice, that action or inaction, no decision mattered, and his entire attempt at family was now dead and nobody was left to care whether he gave up or kept on.

He draped his arms over his head and peered up at the clouds. The troposphere, at that latitude, was about seven miles thick: a booming, swirling ocean of air. The clouds blowing through it were nimbostratus—made of ice, improbably blue in the moonlight, a collection of crystals so thin you'd feel nothing, only a chill inside your pores, if you could reach up and pass a hand through one.

Already snow was gathering, flying over the trees.

In his injured foot a dull pain pulsed. The shivering of his body had become something he did not quite understand, something far removed from him, as if the single, lukewarm kernel of his being had been set inside a quivering basket of muscles not its own. Leaves sailed toward the glass. And above them—among them now—the first snowflakes.

The wind assumed its voice: moaning against the window, humming around the roof corners; hissing through drafts. It whispered about darkness, about the coming shadows.
Let go
, it said,
let go.
A solitary snow crystal struck the pane and held there and expired. Then another. And another.

I have already been reduced, he wanted to say. Leave me be.

Who among us, in our lowest hour, can expect to be saved? Have you loved your life? Have you cherished each miraculous breath?

In a dream a rider came to him through the barn, the horse blowing twin rods of vapor from its nostrils. The rider dismounted and knelt on the boards beside him.

“Can you walk?” A woman's voice. A hood shading her face.

He did not answer; he realized he was incapable. He watched things from a distance. The rider was not a rider at all; she was a woman in a parka, leaning over the mattress. She lifted him by the belt and collar and heaved him into her arms, his head lolling forward. “Is that your bag?” the voice asked.

But she had a horse, didn't she? The two of them were gliding down the hay ladder, floating past empty barn stalls, past the ghosts of horses quarantined there, snuffling and pawing in their beds. He swayed in her arms like a drunk, the skin on his lips sloughing off, his eyes nearly rolling back, spectra blooming across the eyeballs and racing into the corners.

Down the stairs. A first breath of air. She—or was it the horse?—grunted beneath him. The wind swept the crowns of the trees and leaves flew among the snowflakes and the horse raised water as its hooves cleaved the mud.

But there was no horse. He was being carried to a truck. Snow gusted across the windshield. Heated air whisked through vents in the dashboard. Rescue was not a thing, he knew, that should happen to him. He reached down and felt the horse's flank—skin flexing over a rib. The warmth of it beneath his palm.

“Naaliyah?” he asked. “Did you lift me?”

“Ssshh,” she said. “Hush now.”

The horse stepped down through the trees. She folded him onto the bench seat of the truck and fastened the seat belt around him. The snow came harder.

From Eagle, Naaliyah drove him 145 miles south to the medical clinic in Dawson City. He slumped against the doorframe, asleep or deeper: submerged in a kind of torpor. The truck—a three-quarter-ton F-250 diesel four-by-four the university was letting her use for the winter—skidded through the curves.

In the treatment room they plugged an IV into his arm and asked Naaliyah to fill out paperwork she had no way of filling out. Address, insurance information, method of payment—she left it all blank. “I have a credit card,” she said. “Please.” The nurse swiped it, told her to sit down.

Dehydration, natriuresis, advanced fatigue, giardiasis, a hematoma (but no fracture) in his right foot, fever, corneal burn—the doctor ticked off a lexicon of afflictions. For three consecutive nights Naaliyah slept on the bench seat of the truck. At dawn she'd cross into the trees behind the clinic and watch the insects who had survived the first snow embark on their errands, all of them tentative, floating or crawling uneasily between the melting patches of slush as if conscious that these would be their last days and questioning the purpose of it all.

On the fourth afternoon she walked the hall to his room and stood at his window for a half hour or so: the parking lot beyond the hedge, a row of trucks, then a rising wall of spruce. A broken raft of clouds was driving across the sun and the trees alternately brightened and dimmed, a thousand shades of blue. When she turned back to the bed, his eyes were open.

“What's it like?” he asked.

“What's it like where?”

He swiveled his eyes toward the window.

“Rainy. It rains all the time. But it's beautiful. Back at the camp there's a creek. A laboratory in the cabin. And insects, of course.”

He nodded as if this was something he had guessed. She levered the blinds shut. They could hear the quick percussions of a typewriter through the wall.

“They say I won't make it,” Naaliyah said. “The other graduate students. The ranger in Eagle. Hell, everyone I meet in Eagle. Even Professor Houseman back in Anchorage. They say I'll break down and radio for help when the real cold comes.”

“They don't know you.”

“Maybe they're right anyway.”

“I doubt it.”

Both of them were quiet. Winkler shifted in his bed. Outside the door, in the hall, a doctor dropped a tray of metal tools, spoons or scalpels, and they listened to her curse and collect them off the floor. A CB in the nurses' station sizzled and went quiet.

“Naaliyah,” Winkler said. “Will you take me with you?”

She dressed him in a thrift shop sweatsuit and Brent Royster's sneakers (unlaced to accommodate his swollen feet), helped him sign a voluntary release, and half-carried him to the truck.

She drove fast. Raindrops smacked the windshield and streaked toward its edges. Winkler could still not see very clearly; speed limit signs were smudges of white, the road shoulders long, wet blurs. He had the sense that the endless avenue of spruce was closing off behind them, that they pushed back toward Alaska like an air bubble forced through ice, the exit sealing off behind.

Camp Nowhere was five hours from Dawson, twenty-five miles northwest of Eagle, in a corner of the two and a half million acres of streams and bluffs the government had named the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. The snow had all but melted and the road
was heavy with mud. At a park service station, two sad brown buildings, Naaliyah stopped for a few moments and stood in the drizzle talking with a ranger who touched her shoulder lightly and peered past her into the truck.

Winkler looked away. Out across the river the trees were unbroken, a single gray stain. From the park service cabins she turned east and left the river, ascending a tributary stream along a ragged, switchbacked track. For an hour they saw no one, not the flat, rusted barges on the river behind them, not even contrails of airplanes in the sky above the trees. The truck churned higher; the road became little more than creekbed. Winkler couldn't help the fear starting in his chest. He thought of Idaho, the lightning storm gathering in the air; he thought of the night he had spent in the sea, clinging to a smashed thwart, the hordes of stars crowding above him.

Eventually the track spit them out into a clearing: an outbuilding, a cabin with one long window and a door, moss growing on the roof, unsplit logs stacked against the outer walls. He blinked through the windshield. “Home?”

Naaliyah nodded. The truck ticked; drizzle sounded lightly against the roof. “Come on,” she said.

He breathed, and tried to steady himself. Out of the truck his eyes felt dry and sandy. Even from the clearing, thirty feet away, he could hear her insects inside—a relentless, almost genital thrum.

It was a single twelve-by-eighteen room and three-quarters of it were given to bugs. Along every wall gleamed shelves of insectaries: traditional glass-walled boxes; milk cartons capped with cheesecloth; trees of cotton-plugged test tubes; mulch-filled fishbowls; baby food jars; flowerpots with conical screens braced over them; a half dozen other kinds of containers Winkler with his poor eyes could not make out. Naaliyah was moving among them, prying open lids, murmuring things he could not hear. The smell was of overripe fruit, humid and sticky.

Furniture was arrayed around the space as afterthought: a sawhorse-and-plank table, an army cot draped in mosquito netting, two chairs, a barrel stove, a lantern.

He settled on the cot. His eyeballs throbbed. “You get used to the noise,” Naaliyah said. But to Winkler the clamor seemed to rise, waxing, and waxing further still: clacking mandibles, vibrating wings, wet, smacking sounds like something large being chewed.

He tried to nod. “I might close my eyes,” he said.

He did not get up for two days. Naaliyah moved through the space around him, soaking his foot, tending insects, stacking more and more logs outside the walls. She eased onto a blanket in the corner for a few hours of sleep each night.

It was as if her vigil from the boat shed, decades earlier, had begun anew. In his clearer moments Winkler wondered if, sooner or later, every event recurred, if life consisted of a series of repeated patterns: the scar on his knee; now an injury to his foot. Viewed from above, maybe lives looked like matrices of color, scarves on a loom. He wondered: When I wandered out of that town, heading toward the airstrip, was I planning on coming back? Or was I trying, as I did with Nanton's rowboat, to let the world take me?

A window in a barn; a riptide off a reef. Both eventually gave him back, fishermen hoping for something better. Saved, nursed back again. And to what?

The insects grunted and drummed. She spooned oatmeal into his mouth. “I feel like one of Einstein's astronauts,” he said. “The one who travels at light speed and then comes back to Earth and everyone who knew him has aged and died. He has, what, a granddaughter left? But she's so old she doesn't remember him.”

Naaliyah frowned. “Don't be ridiculous.”

He rolled in the mosquito netting. Her crickets sang without pause, like a throng of deranged egg timers counting him down. And the smell: like old breadfruit, like conch-egg cases stranded in the sun. When he woke it often took an entire minute before he figured out where he was.

He'd try to see Naaliyah clearly: a reflection of light in her hair; a smell on her hands like mashed banana (a paste she fed beetles); a shift in temperature as she crossed the room. It was hard sometimes to believe she was actually there, in the space around him, thousands of miles from the place he had last seen her—as if St. Vincent and its outer islands had been a dream no one could cross over from, a wall erected between two places and times; as if she were still a child, balanced on his shoulders, ducking to avoid an overhanging branch. She could not also—simultaneously—be this grown, competent woman, a young biologist prying larvae from a rotten stick with a jackknife.

But here she was—not a ghost or figment, but
real
: a hand on his ankle, water pouring out of a bucket, a kettle scraping across the stove. She had slipped through a crack somehow, a rift in the fabric, an intersection at the edge of things.

Out the window was a white diesel tank on wheels, rusted around the edges, and a clattering generator in wooden housing. Fifty yards behind that stood a small shed, half the size of the cabin, crammed with unsplit logs. This gloomy assemblage composed the entirety of Camp Nowhere: cabin, shed, generator, and a cracked and mosquito-haunted Porta Potti, all in a boggy clearing encircled by millions of stunted pines. “Is this Canada?” he asked, forehead at the window. “Is it America?”

“It's Alaska,” she said, then looked up from her work. “The boundary is east of the river. Out there.” She pointed over her shoulder. “We passed it on the way in, don't you remember? They shave it. A thirty-foot-wide swath and they mow it all the way to the Arctic Ocean.”

Lice brewing in a mayonnaise jar; arctic wooly bears climbing fishbowl walls; two dozen mosquitoes furring the gap between a cuff and glove. She held a hand lens over their intricate, alien faces; she let them cross her throat, traverse her shirt.

Thirty-one years old, and already Naaliyah was more comfortable with insects than people: they were more chemically predictable, more elegantly designed. Ten billion insects for every square kilometer of
land surface—a million ants for every person—
and humans
, she scribbled in the margin of a textbook,
think they dominate Earth.

Halfway between the cabin and shed hunkered a big trapezoidal desk, warped from rains and frosts, and an office chair with the padding rotted out. It was here Naaliyah worked, in nearly any weather, sitting at that table with a row of specimen bottles in front of her, wearing gloves and a head net against mosquitoes. Up here, she said, things were simpler, the numbers of species smaller, easier to get her mind around.

But she was a romantic still: she could spend a whole morning watching the high-wire act of a garden spider spinning silk; or a pupa chewing at the seams of his chrysalis. At night she'd close her eyes and imagine: over a hundred million billion insects hatching and dying every year—all those bristling, pointed, winged lifetimes: murderers and egg raiders, cooperators and queens. There were the glamorous dragonflies and fearsome widows; slave-holding ants; migrating monarchs; the delicate mantid chewing down her lover; dragonflies making love at thirty miles an hour—all the flagships of entomology.

But lately she had become a fan of the lumpen multitudes: midge larvae and tubal worms, button lice, firebrats, mites no bigger than poppy seeds who weathered nine-month winters as chips of ice tunneled beneath snow. The lesser insects gorged and tumbled their way toward metamorphosis—they were as purely engineered as anything on earth. Not trees or elk or Venus flytraps or humans: none had perfected such singleness of purpose, such diversity of arrangement. A housefly, she told Winkler, made a fighter jet look embarrassingly inept. An ant had the strength of four elephants.

Her desk, Winkler would later decide, was almost like a big insect itself, its warped carapace glinting in the sun, its legs curled as if it might spring away at any moment.

She split wood and heated stews; she took notes, hauled water from the stream, hunted the forest for more specimens:
Upis ceramboides
beneath decaying birch bark; a cluster of hostage
Pogonomyrmex
pupae in the chamber of an ant mound. Her dissertation would attempt a survey of overwintering: both diapause and freeze tolerance—how
Alaskan natives and nonnatives reacted to temperature fluctuation: why, where. What triggered the voiding of water each autumn, what triggered the creation of glycerol and antifreeze proteins? How did warming regional temperatures affect reproduction? When winter came, she would let the little woodshed go cold (she had insects in there, too, stacked in terrariums on two metal shelves), while she'd use the generator, heat lamps, and stove to keep her insectaries in the main cabin warm.

In the shed the little animals would face winter as usual: the long freeze, death or diapause; a baseline experiment in the natural course of things. But in the cabin, her insects would be given amnesty: heat, light, food. How they reacted, juxtaposed against the control group, would, she hoped, lay the foundation for her study.

Winkler rose every half dozen hours to stagger to the Porta Potti and stagger back. After seven days she stood over him with a bag over her shoulder and stirred the truck keys in her pocket.

“Weather's coming,” she said. “By the weekend. I'm heading to Fairbanks to get some things. I might be gone a few days.”

He sat up. A smell came off him, old and powdery. Inside the mosquito netting, clenching the sides of his forehead, he looked to her like some wasted, malarial sailor.

“I'm okay,” he said. “I'm feeling better.”

“Fine.” They eyed each other through the barrier of the netting. “No,” she said. “It's not fine. You can hardly stand up. I'm not a nurse, David. What if you're sick? I've enough to do around here.”

He drove the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. For days he had been forcing himself back, again and again, into sleep. “They're dead,” he said.

“David…”

“My wife and daughter are dead.”

“You know this? Without a doubt?”

“Yes. No.” He tried to explain: Sandy's obituary, the last address in Boise, how the possibilities had extinguished one by one.

“So you're giving up. From one list. Without even trying Anchorage?”

He shook his head. “No. No.”

“Yes. You are. You're giving up.”

She roiled her keys in her pocket and looked out across the meadow to the truck. The puffy blue jacket she was wearing, he realized, was the parka Felix had given her when she left the Grenadines. He wondered where Felix was just then, wearing his wool watch cap, his burn-scarred fingers flipping something in a pan, touching the neck of a bottle, the neck of his wife.

“What happened to your notebooks? What about your book?”

He shook his head. “I had to burn them. It suddenly seemed so unlikely to me.”

“Don't give up, David. Exhaust the possibilities.''

He clutched the edges of the cot and leaned forward. “You ever hope for something so much? So much you can't sleep, so much your skull hurts? But the thing is, you don't even know if the thing you're wishing for is possible? You don't even know if it could ever happen? And it's all out of your control?”

“You mean faith.”

“I didn't ask for this. I didn't ask for any of it.”

She said nothing for a long time. “I need to take you with me, David. To Fairbanks. The highway will close soon. Until April.”

“I thought I could stay.”

She looked away. She shook her head.

“I could help. You're going to stay out here alone?”

“David. It gets cold here. Very cold. All you have to wear is sweatpants, for God's sake.”

He didn't move. He tried not to look away. “Where will I go?”

She breathed, and pinched the space between her eyes. She had been preparing for this winter for five months. Were his answers in here? Behind the closed faces of moths and button larvae?

“You'll need snow gear. And more food. We'll need a lot more food.”

“I have money.”

“And you'll need to get up, feed some of the insects. There are notations on top of the cages. Solutions are in the cabinet. Just change out any plant water. And drop a damp cotton ball in every insectary every morning. Fresh leaves for the caterpillars, if you can find any. The spiders will be all right, I think.”

“A damp cotton ball.”

“For moisture.”

“Okay.” He was nodding maniacally. “I can do that.”

“I'll be back in a few days.” She studied him. “This is a bad idea, isn't it? Tell me this isn't a bad idea.”

“This isn't a bad idea.”

“Okay,” she said. It was nearly a whisper.

He watched her cross the meadow to the truck. The sun hung above the tops of the trees, pale and thin. A late cloud of gnats appeared, illuminated in a beam of light, each rising and falling independently like an infinitesimal marionette.