Consumption (25 page)

He stood in the darkened dining room of the hotel and listened to the storm on every side. If he had been less high, he would have wanted a sweater. He thought a little more about Amanda. He was sorry to know that her parents were fighting so much, but neither was he surprised. He knew his brother too well to imagine that it was mostly Angela’s fault. He pictured his niece, lying in her bed at night, holding pillows over her head, and was dissolved for a moment by the sympathy he felt for her.

There was a sodium-yellow streetlight outside the entrance of the hotel. Martha lived across the street, and Brian the absent manager lived in a locked room adjacent to the kitchen. When the snow blew hard it stretched out in long yellow streaks across the night sky. Balthazar was drawn to the window, staring out at the very absence of anything to see. He pressed his nose against the glass and held it there, feeling the aching cold spreading into his face, and then the ache diminishing as his nose became numb. Still he stood there, his breath misting up on the glass and freezing, a widening butterfly-shaped spot of ice extending on either side of his face. He leaned his forehead into the glass now and felt it slowly become numb.

Balthazar blinked his eyes. It was morning. Or mid-afternoon, more accurately, he judged from the dimming light. He rubbed his face and then he stretched. He was no longer high. He still had most of the weekend to pass here. He closed his eyes for a long minute.

He opened his eyes again and reached into his travel bag and pulled out a thick spiral-ringed notebook with a yellow cover that read
SCHOOL DAZE
and had a cartoon of a boy fishing. He felt around the bottom of the bag until he found a pencil. He opened the notebook and began rereading the last thing he had written. He touched the eraser of the pencil to his lip. He narrowed his eyes. He scratched out a sentence. He wrote out a phrase,
opiate addiction
, and underlined it.

The line crackled with satellite interference, and each of them leaned into their telephones, to hear the other’s breath:

“I felt like I was nineteen again. Like I was drunk.”

“Me too.”

“Why don’t you come up next weekend? I’ll pay.”

“How about the one after?”

“Oh, you have plans.”

“It’s just the short notice.”

“Doug, are you still seeing people?”

Satellite hum.

“Doug?”

“Why do you ask?”

PART TWO

 

Eskimo Poetry

I will walk with leg muscles
Which are strong
As the sinews of the shins of the little caribou calf
I will walk with leg muscles
Which are strong
As the sinews of the shins of the little hare.
I will take care not to go towards the dark.
I will go towards the day.

—Recorded and translated from the Inuktitut by Knud Rasmussen,
Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921–24

TWELVE

IT WAS THE CONSTRUCTION
of the ice road from Rankin Inlet into the mine site that made it clear that the mine was something other than pure abstraction. Work began in earnest just after Christmas, 1988. Tractor-trailers—an unprecedented sight in the eastern Arctic—shuttled between the port and the road camp, which a week into the project was already five miles into the tundra. The sound of the trucks was audible throughout the town. Multiple flights arrived at the airport simultaneously—a new thing—disgorging twenty construction workers at a time. From the steps of Balthazar’s apartment building at night, he could make out the track of the ice road winding its way inland, headlights twinkling along it like bioluminescence in nearly still water.

Ice roads depend on the innumerable lakes and rivers that cross the barrenlands and freeze with the onset of winter. For the duration of the cold, they make the country quite passable, even for heavy-wheeled vehicles. As the ice rots in June and July they are abandoned for the summer. Gravel sinks cloudily to the riverbed; the road signs float downstream to wash up in an oxbow someplace, or to the sea. The portions of the road built on muskeg and rock are more enduring, and can be seen from the air during summer, looking like dashes interrupted by glistening dots of small lakes, a Morse code message reaching across the land: Poor Drainage Here.

If the ice road is renewed the following winter, these portions of the road will be used again, and this much, anyway, of the effort, is cumulative. The muskeg is more easily graded with each effort, as the ratio of gravel to ooze slowly increases. After a number of years the gravel remains distinct in the summer—a ribbon of grey abutted by damp greenery on either side. The engineers describe such a roadbed as “maturing.”

Each night, Balthazar looked out the window above his desk at the twinkling headlights extending to the northwest in a line straighter than anything that had been imposed on the tundra in the previous twenty centuries of human habitation. Though he was generally disposed to approve of knowledge and capability, this manifestation of technology offended his eye. The straightness of the stream of flickering headlights held his attention, like a glimpse of something obscene.

Penny wondered every day whether she should ask to be transferred somewhere farther north, less exposed to the effects of industry and ambition. What dissuaded her was her affection for the sullied land itself. She had learned the sinuous curves of the Meliadine River and Ferguson Lake and Wager Bay. She knew where to find caribou and char. Her dogs did too. She imagined spending as much time as it had taken her to know this country over again, on Baffin Island, where there were mountains and glaciers, far more narwhals but fewer caribou, and higher tides—she would be nearly as much a child as when she first ventured out here with Emo. So she stayed. In the summer of 1989, a succession of rust-orange barges floated up the coast to Rankin Inlet, depositing bulldozers and dynamite and cases of food and radios and lumber, prefabricated buildings, and as many tons of goods as the entire town would have required to survive for several years running. The work camp became another, newer and more moneyed, version of the town itself, with its own dispensary,
cafeteria, and rows and rows of bunkhouses. The mining company’s policy was to attempt to limit the distorting effect it was having on the local economy, and hire more Kablunauk workers, who shuttled directly from the airport to the mine site, and back again.

The sound of blasting rang out along the length of the Meliadine River Valley that summer, and the caribou did not appear to graze there for the first time since the famine thirty years earlier.

The ice road to the mine site was functioning by early December 1989. The enormous quantity of stores that had been laid in by the mining consortium—far too many reels of steel cable, forty-gallon drums of gear oil, and bundles of two-by-fours to fit in any warehouse, stored instead under huge tarps on the land—were then hauled out to the mine site. Every journeyman of any sort in the town was hired that winter—and for wages that were hard to believe for those who had not been. When they returned to the town on breaks or upon the completion of their contracts, they emptied the Northern Store of rifles and snowmobiles in successive waves. Every two weeks men and women rotated in and out from the mine site, cooks and welders and mechanics and electricians began crowding the Northern Store with their unparticular tastes and limitless credit cards. Anyone who did not work in the mine found themselves unable to buy almost anything substantial, which compounded the less tangible but more toxic issue of jealousy. Soon the town was full of men and women seething at absent friends and cousins.

When the first North American diamonds appeared for sale in the Antwerp auctions, they generated excitement quite out of proportion to their quality or number. The diamond buyers were less interested in them as a mineralogical fact than as a public relations issue: the word
blood
had been glued to their product by newsmagazines (not referring to crimson fancies). With the wars in Africa generating steadily starker photographs, these new, more palatable Canadian diamonds were good news.

The people of Rankin Inlet had no way to judge how successful the mine was. A privately held consortium, it issued no public annual
reports. Rumours abounded: one month they had found gold in the ore too, and would be tripling the size of the development. The next month, the mine was a bust and the South Africans were leaving entirely. Waitresses and assistant managers at the grocery stores became acquainted with the politics of Namibia and the international diamond cartel that sustained and dictated the valuation, production, and marketing of the gems around the world. At work they exchanged opinions derived like sports-page expertise on hockey, opining on the futures market in diamonds the way furniture salesmen in Edmonton held forth on Grant Fuhr’s butterfly stance.

Okpatayauk and his group did not fold after their failure to stop the mine. They continued to meet every Saturday afternoon (except the sunny ones) and the attendance at these meetings slowly grew, as people became irritated at not having landed a job on the mine site. Older hunters began coming, to express their anger at what was being done to the land. Only the hunters, and mine employees, had actually seen that, and what the hunters described was awful. Great towers of spotlights illuminating a pit sunk steadily wider and deeper into the land. Pumps spitting out a grey slurry of melted permafrost and snow into fantastic shapes on the frozen soil.

But, at the same time, what most of the townspeople knew was that their houses had suddenly doubled in value. And lots of their kids had stopped wasting their time in town, and started apprenticeships at the mine. Which made for more room in their parents’ crowded houses. So there was no easy consensus to be had. As time progressed, those who abhorred the mine did so more violently. But the rewards to those involved in it grew, and so did their gratitude.