About Grace (25 page)

Inside his threadbare duffel were three nerite shells, lying spire to spire in a bottom fold. He ran a thumb over their apertures. They were like dreams somehow, in their compactness, their fineness, in the way they seemed complete and incontrovertible.

He rolled in the cot. The crickets shrilled. I'll get out of bed in a minute, he decided.

But he was not up until evening. He eased out of the mosquito netting and managed to cut open a can of tuna and eat its contents with a plastic spoon.

All night Naaliyah's crickets pleaded their same urgent question—
scree-eep? scree-eep?—
but right before dawn they fell abruptly silent, as if they had finally found answers, or else expired from the effort.

Silence. Winkler lay in bed trying to listen but there was nothing to listen to. Blood traveled dully through his ears. He thought: I wish the crickets would start up again. He thought: A person could go mad out here.

He fumbled through a drawer until his fingers closed around Naaliyah's hand lens. With his left eye against the eyepiece, and the focus brought all the way up, he could see whatever was in immediate proximity: creases in his palm, the grain in the wall. He went from cage to cage, peering in.

Caterpillars had forced open a hole in their wire cage; ants streamed out of a test tube and foraged systematically beneath the stove. A dozen pale beetles lay dead on the table, legs cocked at the ceiling. There were earwigs on the cot, spiders beneath the chairs. Several insectaries that may have been recently occupied now appeared completely empty.

He shivered. Was this the normal state of things? Naaliyah's feeding notations were simple enough—sugar solution in eyedroppers, bruised fruit, rolled oats, or wheat bran in dishes. More difficult were the creatures who ate live insects—he was to seize a cricket or moth in forceps and drop it into a neighbor's cage. The moth was the worst: he snared it in a tiny aquarium net and shook it into a jar that contained a praying mantis. With the hand lens he watched the mantid strike, invisibly fast, and her round mouth lap a bead of liquid from the moth's split head; the wings still vibrating, a gray powder smearing the mantid's arms, the moth's arms still clutching her abdomen, like a confused, decapitated lover.

Dozens of awful dramas were climaxing around him every minute: jailbreaks, war parties, ambushes. When he listened closely he could hear them now: chewing, spitting, clacking about. He cringed, felt queasy; he pulled the lens away from his eye and let the world go blurry.

When he finished the main cabin, he went to the shed. There was firewood in every square inch of the place, and stacked around the outside as well. Here, jammed among the logs, the insects seemed calmer, arrayed on their two sets of shelves, numbed perhaps by the cooler air, more assured of their coming ends. The mosquitoes were fewer here, too, as if this was territory they had yet to discover. A draft trickled through gaps in the wood. The air smelled of spruce.

That night he went to sleep not in the main cabin but in the shed, between the shelves, on a narrow bed made from cut boughs and beetle-chewed furs: elk, maybe, or moose. Left here by some previous tenant: scientist, or miner, or trapper. Strange to think that the animals themselves had only been tenants, too, guests inside their coats.

When the cold came, seeping through the gaps like some patient liquid, he tried to imagine it as purifying: a cleansing, an ablution.

In the morning he took a walking stick from the log pile and went
into the woods. Spruce, and some willow and what looked like cottonwood. Birch and alder in creases. He wondered if bears were about, and recalled the frontier fables of his childhood, wounded grizzlies swatting hunters, prospectors crashing through creeks, their feet freezing solid. All along, he thought, life has been going on here. For millennia. As it has everywhere. His breath showed in front of him. He wiped the back of his wrist and counted nine dead mosquitoes in his palm.

Along the edge of the meadow was a creek that slashed its way through a few hundred yards of deadfall and muskeg to a small, black pond. The pond, in turn, drained slowly through a jam of bleached trees, down a hill, into a larger waterway: narrow and bouncing, clear to its pebbles.

He bent over the riverbank and rinsed his face and arms. The water tasted like copper. He rested his hands against the bottom and felt the pebbles shift beneath his palms, the blood retreat up his wrists.

A half mile farther on he found a break in the trees where he could see the landscape to the west: a series of successive ridges all the way to the horizon: treeless summits and tundra fells—blues fading into whites, little more in his eyes than blemishes of color—the Alaskan interior. No houses, no lights, no antennas, no fire towers. Somewhere beyond it all, five hundred miles away, was Anchorage.

Even without eyeglasses Winkler could see this place had its own kind of light: pale but brilliant, permanently waning, something like the light he had seen reflecting off the Alaska Range from the rooftop of his youth.

He listened to the trees shift and toss, a sound like breathing.

When he returned to the cabin, Naaliyah was unloading things from the truck.

“Next time leave a note,” she said. She looked clean, newly washed.

“I was trying to get this foot back into shape.”

“Just leave a note.” She had more cordwood, bags of rice and sugar, a snowsuit and parka for him. Behind the truck was a tan-colored
Skidoo on a trailer, which he helped her unhitch and drag behind the cabin. Through noon they worked together, unloading things and stowing them. She glanced once at the makeshift mattress in the shed, but did not remark on it.

A few hours after dusk he rinsed out his mug and went to the door.

“You're not going to sleep out there.”

“I'll be all right.”

“You'll freeze.”

“There are a bunch of old furs in there.”

“It gets cold, David. You don't know how cold.”

“I don't mind cold.”

“David.”

“I'll be fine.”

“You'll be in the cabin by midnight.”

“We'll see.”

She sighed. “At least take these.” She held out a small felt sleeve. Inside were a pair of glasses. “I didn't know your prescription, of course. But I knew you were nearsighted. So.”

He held them a moment, studying the lenses.

“The doctor said nobody ever came to pick them up.”

“Thank you. Very thoughtful.”

“Well,” she said. “You're welcome.” He opened the door and crossed the meadow. He climbed into his makeshift bed and pulled the furs up to his neck. The moon sent its light through chinks in the shed walls. A moth flapped softly against the glass of its cage.

The eyeglasses, miraculously, worked. They were wide, aluminum-framed things, heavy on his nose, and the centers of the lenses didn't quite match the centers of his pupils, so that by midday an insistent pain camped out behind his forehead, but he could see. In the dusks and dawns, when the light was mild, everything became momentarily clear: the beauty of spruce, light filtering between the needles. He was even able to read a bit, a few paragraphs of one of Naaliyah's entomology texts
(…the subgenual organ, joint chordotonal organs, campaniform sensilla and mechanoreceptors, such as the Johnston's organ in antennae, might be used to detect these vibratory signals…)
before his eyes began to feel as if they were being forced in opposite directions, and the headache reasserted itself.

To see again—to discern a tree or face or cloud with an acceptable level of clarity—was the smallest kind of revival, a tiny breakthrough, but enough to start happiness in his heart—the joy of recognizing things, an improvement in his relationship with the world.

Every morning Naaliyah was up before he was, writing at her outdoor table with a battery-powered headlamp strapped around her head net. He watched her press the stinger of a hornet to the pad of her pinkie finger, release the hornet carefully, and take notes with her left hand while the stinger throbbed and ejaculated in her right.

He tried to stay out of her way: he split wood and hauled water, and went for careful strolls beside the river. Each night he drank a cup of tea with her beside the fire, the insects close around them, then said good night and went out to the shed to sleep.

Fridays she took the truck into Eagle for the mail, and to telephone Professor Houseman in Anchorage. She'd grind back up the makeshift road after dusk, and Winkler would tramp to the gap in the trees he had found: her headlights edging up the valley like a pair of sparks, the big opaque acres of the Yukon below sliding on and on. Sometimes, if the wind was blowing, branches or whole trees would blow down across the little gravel track during the hours she was gone, and Winkler would hear her chainsaw start up—the up-and-down chewing noise of it—as she cut the tree to get the truck through.

The air grew colder. Nightfall arrived sooner and sooner. A more permanent snow line advanced down the contours. And the mosquitoes started expiring—Naaliyah would wipe a thin gray fuzz of them off her table in the mornings.

During the summer, she explained, the university paid men in Eagle to haul firewood to Camp Nowhere, cord after cord of it on trailers. When she swung the maul it fell cleanly through the logs, as if they were already split. When Winkler swung it, it bounced back, nearly into his teeth, or sent slivers flying at his coat. The wood this year was not great, she said, mostly thin stacks of spruce and alder, not much larch (she peered into split logs for sawfly larvae). How did she know all this? Winkler wondered. Where did she learn these things? She was afraid, it seemed, of nothing but the cold, and it was about this that her mind incessantly returned, as if, like her insects, its coming would signal the end of her.

After dark the light of the cabin's lantern mixed with the lights of the heat lamps to produce a carroty, almost garish orange, a glow that escaped not just through the cabin's fogged window, but through chinks in the walls, too, and the piles of wood stacked around them, until in the darkest hours it looked as though the cabin had a tiny sun trapped inside, burning through the night. Winkler would cross the meadow on his way to the outhouse and step through long beams of orange light, his shadow slipping along beside him, antic and huge.

The shed, on the other hand, grew only darker. Already it was quiet, the ants sluggish in their test tubes, the wasps stilled, the whole structure dim and shadowed save Winkler's occasional candle, flickering
small and white in the aisle between woodpiles. There was so much wood in there, he thought, they could weather three winters, but Naaliyah did not stop, splitting twice as quickly as he could, working in a T-shirt, her arms pasted with sawdust.

The warblers left. No aircraft traveled the sky.

He closed his eyes and saw Felix and Soma, praying over food at their picnic table; he saw Brent Royster's turntable spinning on and on; he saw Sandy's photo go to lint in his hands. He saw Naaliyah walking away from the inn—not thirty years old, but sixteen—the clean, bare backs of her knees, shadows closing like water over her.

He began to get a sense of how things would change: the insects here in the shed were nearly done, settling into a long sleep or giving themselves up to death—their natural states unfurling, the abominable silence and cold of this uninsulated laboratory, the million distant candles of the stars.

In November the freezing began. It started first in hollows and alcoves in high rocks, where structures of frost appeared on the lichen, and whatever soil had gathered there darkened and hardened to the touch, as if the land was contracting, stiffening, like armor plates drawing together on the back of some titanic animal. The mosquitoes vanished altogether, and the birch and alder gave up their leaves all at once, leaching them into the wind as if desperate to be rid of them. Soon the outhouse hole froze over, as did the fringes of the creek, the unfrozen center flowing in a gluey sludge, midstream boulders wearing caps of ice. Each morning they'd find dead insects, bees and flies mostly, arched on the windowsill.

By the middle of that month the sounds of the Yukon freezing—deep, metallic reverberations, as though a Goliath beyond the next hill repeatedly flexed an enormous sheet of tin—sounded everywhere, echoing off hills and seeming to lodge in unseen hollows, only to come spiraling out minutes later, so that the air was filled, always, with the eerie, anchorless sound of water going to ice.

Naaliyah chopped plates of it from small bogs in the woods and turned them over. Beneath were water striders, squirming larvae, macroinvertebrates. “Astounding,” she'd tell Winkler, and show him her plunder: a slushy mug livid with tiny swimmers: iceworms; the large-jawed larva of an antlion.

Pockets of life amid all that freezing. It was as if the cold was forcing all of them closer, into tighter and tighter communities, hurrying to find the creases and chinks in the great contracting armor of winter.

After dark, out of reach of the orange, leaking light of the cabin, Winkler would tramp to the edge of the creek and listen: its sound had grown thicker and harsher. It had frozen over now and already successive overflows were lacquering the surface. He could hear ice rolling along the bottom, grinding itself against stones, a sound like dozens of glass tumblers being crushed inside a towel. And above it the sound of the liquid water had deepened, lost some of its animation, the molecules reluctant to give up their bonds. Animals would come down tentative and shy to slurp at the overflows, deer, skunks, chipmunks, even lynxes in the night like big, sleek ghosts (he wouldn't see them but would find their prints frozen in the banks).

Still the snow marched down the mountainsides, mantling summits, filling the high trees. Stones began rising from the ground, thrown up by frost heaves, budding from the earth like strange, monolithic cabbages, and creeping down exposed slopes.

Naaliyah worked harder than ever, almost entirely abandoning her research in favor of gathering wood. She stacked wood everywhere—the shed was filled to the roof, and logs stood around the cabin's perimeter two-deep, and still she was out there, wrestling a big half keg of pinewood onto the block, dropping the maul, cleaving it to its dark, grainy heart.

Sleet, like grains of rice against the windowpane; then the tiny snowballs of graupel, wads of rime skittering across Naaliyah's field desk. Then rain again, and Winkler was disappointed to see it. Winter, he was remembering, was a balky, slow thing—it did not arrive smoothly.

One Sunday, near the back half of the month, he woke to a strange and sad concert, a creaking and yawping that drew him out into the meadow, beneath the impossible spread of stars. The face of the pond had overflowed and the new, upwelling water began to ice over the already frozen surface, and as it froze it ticked, scales of floating ice reaching across, stitching themselves into an unbroken plate, the plate thickening, trillions of water molecules ranging out and lacing. From beneath the new sheet came a sad and eerie moaning, as though the ice had trapped women beneath it.

All month the ice muttered and howled and whistled. The trees echoed back and forth among themselves. Taken collectively, the sound was of deep wounding, of winter inexorably taking the life out of things. That night Winkler stood in the meadow listening as if in a trance—the cold, the answering sounds of grief—until he couldn't bear it. He hurried toward the shed, to bury himself under his furs, to sleep among Naaliyah's thousand slumbering insects.

The night outside, the night within. This was a place where dreams and reality could intersect; where night would be the dominant feature of the landscape.

He could feel snow coming. He could taste it. The mountains were already covered with a half meter.

His right foot had healed as much as it was going to. Probably he would always limp. When he walked it would be as if one foot was permanently a step behind, as if that part of him remained in Boise, Idaho, stepping into a stranger's house, pawing at her photographs. Why couldn't he see the path in front of him? Why couldn't he dream of something to come, some reunion, or at least an answer, some glimpse of who Grace might have been?

There was the Datsun at the bottom of its canyon; the ocean sucking and sucking at Nanton's glass floor; the quiet breathing—in, out, in, out, in, out—of Naaliyah sleeping on her cot. He thought: I should have given Brent Royster all my money. I should have tucked a hundred-dollar bill into every one of his records.

On the twenty-third of November snow finally reached the camp. It battered the cabin window all day. Naaliyah came in and stoked the stove and stood at the glass beside him looking out. “You know,” she eventually said, “I see what you meant. How each crystal can be a prism. How it's full of light.” '

Winkler did not turn away for several hours. All day—indeed, ever since he'd arrived at Camp Nowhere—a sensitivity had been building
within him: the slightest shift in light or air touched the backs of his eyes, reached membranes inside his nose. It was as if, like a human divining rod, he had been attuning to vapor as it gathered in the atmosphere, sensing it—water rising in the xylem of trees, leaching out of stones, even the last unfrozen volumes, gargling deep beneath the forest in tangled, rocky aquifers—all these waters rising through the air, accumulating in the clouds, stretching and binding, condensing and precipitating—falling.

He ate his dinner standing up, forehead at the window.

The flurries didn't stop until well into the night. He tried lying in bed, but his blood was surging, and the pale light of the snow was pouring through the shed walls, touching a place very near the center of him. He pulled on his snowsuit and boots and mittens and went out. Maybe six inches had fallen. His feet passed soundlessly through it—the ice skeleton, one of his professors had called it, that loose scaffolding of new-fallen snow, individual crystals re-forming into lattice; with a vise the professor had compressed a loaf of Wonder Bread into a two-inch cube to demonstrate how much air was trapped within.

Winkler's breath plumed up onto his glasses. The entire valley was enveloped in a huge, illuminated stillness. Above him the clouds had pulled away and the sky burned with stars. The meadow smoldered with light, and the spruce had become illuminated kingdoms, snow sifting from branch to branch. He thought: This has been here every winter all my life.

He tramped along the creek until nearly dawn, his hands and feet stinging with cold, his heart high in his throat. The sky was going a dim olive in the east, and Naaliyah was still asleep in the cot when he returned to the cabin and kicked the ice from his boots. On back shelves, where Naaliyah kept her instruments, he knew, there was a microscope: an inclined Bausch & Lomb Stratalab, probably forty years old, monocular, with a brass arm and revolving nosepiece.

He brought it outside to Naaliyah's desk. He swept snow from the tabletop, switched on the microscope's light source (a battery-powered six-volt bulb beneath the stage) and, trembling, pressed one lens of his eyeglasses to the eyepiece.

It worked. There was a disc of white light, a few specks of debris in it like tiny black commas.

He started with a spruce needle, something big, something easy. He closed the aperture on the light source, turned the focus knob. And there it was: long and green, diamond-shaped, paler on the bottom two planes.

He could not contain himself: he extracted the glass slide, wiped it, and sifted the clumped aggregates of a few snowflakes onto it. Then he slid them onto the stage.

It was like stepping back in time. A thousand frozen bonds, stunted ice structures, even the severed branch of an individual dendrite, all leapt large and backlit to his eye like a memory, like a smell—crushed mint, or his mother's skin lotion. It was as if time was pliable and he was able, for a moment, to become a graduate student once more, standing in the cafeteria freezer, all the succeeding years fallen off him like an old coat. As if the snow had been waiting all this time for him to come back.

It took Winkler the rest of the remaining daylight—only four and a half hours, by then—to locate an individual snow crystal. The snow was already aging, settling in, and he was cold, clumsy with his fingers and breath, and his eyes quickly tired. But he managed to find one, sifting down from a tree—star-shaped, the classic six-branched sectored plate—and spear it with the spruce needle and transfer it, mostly undamaged, onto the glass slide.

When he focused it in the viewfinder, the crystal wavering, then sharpening, he felt the old spark flare: six dendrites jutting off a central hexagonal core, scored with ridges. Adrenaline fired down the length of his body. His breath melted it; he stooped and began searching for another. When Naaliyah finally came out, tramping toward him with a steaming tin can, he was shivering so much he sloshed the tea onto his sleeves.

She persuaded him to go inside. Beneath his furs he saw snow crystals on the undersides of his eyelids. Like birds stirred from a rookery, memories flew into his consciousness: the sound of the fan in the cafeteria freezer, rattling as if ice were caught in its blades; Sandy's frozen bootprint that he'd excavated and preserved in his freezer; the cool,
washed-cotton smell of his mother. He saw Sandy's thin form fold itself into a theater seat; he saw his mother take her nurse's uniform from a hanger and spread it across the ironing board, heard her steam iron suck and sigh as she brought it across the fabric.

He thought of Wilson Bentley, whose book of snowflakes his mother used to keep beneath the coffee table, an old farmer peering through the bellows of his camera, and the sound of Bentley's pages turning in her hands.

Thirty-six hours after the first snow, a second arrived, falling like stars, filling the trees. He stood in the clearing and caught flakes in a black plastic tub Naaliyah used to sort ants. When he snared a flake he thought might be an undamaged crystal, he coaxed it onto the glass slide with another of Naaliyah's tools: tiny forceps, intended for a watchmaker.

Hollow bullets, sectored plates, prismatic columns, dozens of elaborate stellar dendrites—soon he was seeing all the patterns of his youth, all melting fast beneath his attention and the heat of the microscope's lamp.

With each shift in temperature or humidity, the crystals' shapes varied slightly, like finely tuned thermometers. He imagined them growing in the clouds, the initial molecules precipitating, the wind blowing them through slight gradations in temperature, each prismatic arm growing—the invisible made visible. He could not, it seemed, grow tired of them—watching light travel their arms, whole spectrums of blues and greens and whites, the edges softening already, wilting toward water.

After dark he went into the cabin and sat with Naaliyah over a bowl of noodles. “You know,” she said, “that microscope has a photomicrography kit somewhere in here. I haven't used it, but I'd bet you could get it to work. All you'd need is film.”

Winkler stopped chewing. “To take photos?”

“Of course.”

He stood. “Can I do that? Do you know how to operate it? Will you order the film? Next time you're in town?”

“Of course.” She laughed. “Of course.”

She radioed in her request and nine days later brought it back from the post office in Eagle with their laundry and perishables: four-by-five-inch color print Polaroid film in packs of twenty. His hands shook tearing open the package. The pieces were big, and went brittle in the cold, and he creased two of them before he could even load the sheet film holder properly.

These were not the only obstacles. He needed more light—he was afraid to increase the wattage of the tiny bulb in the microscope's base for fear it would melt the crystals even more quickly. He needed steadier hands; he needed better eyesight. He needed more daylight—there was hardly any left. And his breath proved a substantial obstacle: if he breathed in the direction of the crystal, he blew it away, or softened its edges; if he breathed while he tried to hold the camera steady, it shifted and spoiled the image.

In the end what this amounted to was rushing through the snow trying to grasp at seconds. He had to wait for it to snow, then locate a whole crystal among the billions of flying aggregates. Then—if he found one—he had to transfer it undamaged onto a slide, position the slide under the microscope, focus it, ensure the crystal did not touch the lens, screw on the camera, align the film, and speculate a proper length for the exposure.

His first day he made four exposures. His second he made six. None of them came out: each a field of black with a tidy white border.

He was far from discouraged; indeed, Winkler felt he was at the cusp of something, a discovery, a lesson he profoundly needed to learn. Inside him things were unlocking, thawing, or clarifying—something like the sharpening image of a crystal as it came into focus in the eyepiece of the microscope.

Long underwear, two pairs of wool socks, two wool shirts, jeans, a down vest, a balaclava, gloves, and the snowsuit—second, third, fourth skins. Naaliyah had thermometers in several of the shed's insectaries but
Winkler decided it would be better if he did not look at them. It sank to perhaps a dozen degrees below zero. The snow that fell was thin and fine as flour.

Cold and darkness became the normal state of things. Marmot tracks written in the snow around the cabin; crows standing in trees; the stovepipe groaning and creaking as the morning fire heated it. Sometimes the sound of the Yukon shifting under its burden of ice—the last water in the valley to freeze—would repeat up and down the valley, a great, internal buckling, as if dwarves were at work, detonating things inside the earth.