12 June 1984
At five tomorrow we fly to Inqaluit. Tove is yet packing, flustered and anxious, she moves about the house in a flurry, the innards of her bags splayed across every surface of the kitchen. She moans when I laugh at her, complains that Sebastian has been complacent when explaining in detail what she will need. Is worried about the sledges, how much weight they can carry, a number that has fluctuated wildly depending on whom is consulted. I try to hold her, to calm her but any attempt makes her more agitated. Tell her that anything she forgets we can pick up in Inqaluit. This is said half joking. She responds by asking me, What again are you going to do on this trip?
We’ve already gone over this question nearly a dozen times and she knows that asking it again is merely a provocation. I try to ignore the barb and retreat into the basement where I sit in front of the fish tank with a plate of brownies and a tub of ice cream. In the dark I watch the bamboo shark glide effortlessly along the bottom of the tank, its alternating bands of black and white moving through the dim light of the water. I wonder if this is the last time I will see her, if the directions I’ve left for Thomas are clear enough. We will return in a mere six weeks time yet I already feel as though this is our strange goodbye. Tove would be happy to see the shark disappear, doesn’t understand my strange fascination with the animal, how I can watch it and feel soothed.
13 June 1984
I’d fallen asleep in the basement chair and was awoken in a rush by Tove, a puddle of melted ice cream running down my chest. Last ones to board the flight after much running through the airport, a broken wheel on my luggage and a bag strap snapped on Toves. She waits until we’re aboard the tiny plane to tell me she didn’t sleep the night before and then proceeds to pass out, her snoring loud and drawing the attention of other passengers who lean forward and raise their eyes in disbelief when they see the diminutive stature of the person emitting such a baritone rumble.
Hard to tell if I am excited or nervous, either way I find it impossible to sleep on either of our flights and keep opening and closing one of the books I’ve brought, the words like undecipherable scratches on the page. Wonder again for a long stretch what Tove has actually told Sebastian about what I know. Will he resent my appointment on the trip or will he welcome the fact that I’ve not held this thing further out in the light. Something like this might undoubtedly belittle his status in the professorial landscape but I doubt that is foremost in his thinking. He was given final say on the team and here I am. So.
15 June 1984
We reached Inqaluit in the midst of a passing winter gale. That is what the straw faced pilot referred to the white out blizzard occurring outside of the windows on our approach to the insignificant town. For three hours we carved shuddering circles over the icy runway and then finally made our approach only a minute after the pilot was overheard telling the one crew member that we had to make a go of it before our landing gear froze over completely. I’ve never before been so happy to walk out into a tempest squall and slide my feet over frozen ground. Tove laughed at my excitement and suggested we make a move to this little outpost of a capital city. I laughed and squeezed her tight, the billowiness of our puffy downs rounding out the space between us. For a second she dropped her head to the side and smiled the way a much younger Tove did when I held her so but then just as quickly her expression hardened over when the planes hatch was opened and the jumble of bags inside were cemented together in a sheen of cloudy ice.
We spent the next day moving about the one tiny electronics store in town trying to get our gear to recover, a smiling Inuit blowing lightly on our cameras and sensors as Tove cursed from the bathroom where she held her microscope beneath the hand dryer. The trip has been doomed from the beginning, Tove told me, nearly in tears when we made it back to the high school we were using as a launch pad up on the hill above town. We spread our gear out across the history classroom and sat down in the students hard chairs staring up at the wall. We had some several hundred miles still to sail by boat and then an extra possible hundred more by sledge before we would be at the proposed beginning of our search. A distance that stretched nearly three feet on the large map of the arctic archipelago that hung in front of us.
18 June 1984
Two other expedition members arrived today, colleagues my wife had yet to meet, Alexandre, little more than a boy, diminutive in size and speech, frazzled and wiry. He did little more than shake my hand before he was on up the hill, two bags dragging nearly through the snow behind him. I was told not to take it personal by Anton, an older Russian man, a native of Moscow whose been living in Kamchatka for the last two decades. He was the near opposite of the bespectacled frenchman, genial and lighthearted, like an old friend whose come to visit and is content with merely seeing the sights. He’s more of an explorer than any sort of scientist per se which makes my inclusion in the team seem less obtrusive. There is still little I feel I can offer this group but to know that another feels the same is heartening to say the least.
We have collected nearly everything we’ll need and now wait mostly on Sebastian to arrive with the boat we’ve chartered, an old icebreaker on loan from the Danish. The HDMS Aleksander. Anton laughed when we told him the name and Alexandre leveled him with a playful slap across his broad chest. On a good day she smells like fermented piss and creaks like a red light carriage. He has taken her before through the Northwest passage and on into the USSR. Hoots in delight or astonishment that somehow they will cross paths again. Groups in delighted mood, a bit of vodka before bed and Tove suddenly reverts back to her old self, crawling silently over my crotch as Anton snores on the next cot and Alexandre muddles with gear in the room over.
21 June 1984
More than a week in Inqaluit and I find myself going slightly mad. Sun does little more than wink behind the horizon. I feel as though she is watching us. Doesn’t trust us on our own. Tove stares at me wide eyed when I tell her this. Can tell she is holding back a laugh. One thats filled with a bit of worry considering we are only going further North where the sun will never leave, will merely circle us like a vulture, praying on our feeble minds.
An asylum. Penal colony. Nut house. How the locals keep their wits about them I am unsure. Landscape is rocky and rootless, an unrepentant sky surrounded by a limitless expanse of water and ice. Anton sits and plays cards with me, teaches me brusque words in Russian and Danish, nods his head like a sage when I muse on about this uninhabitable place. Do I offend him I wonder, is his home no different than this? For an hour I walked out on the ice today, East NorthEast, the compass drifting as I carefully slid further into the Arctic. A bearing was nearly impossible to render and I became nauseous at the thought of us out there on the ice without the hinting plumes from Inqaluit to lead me back. A band of little Inuit boys had followed me out and were atop the knoll behind me when I turned back. They fired rocks out across the ice with crude homemade slingshots and practiced the swear words they knew in English, shouting them across the empty expanse and laughing, puffing their chests out. Polar bear, the one told me as they followed behind on the way back to town, eat you.
Not cut out for this line of work I venture to Anton back at the camp, the sun swirling in dizzying circles. Will make you fuller man, he intones.
23 June 1984
We’ve finally cast off. Sebastian arriving yesterday in a huff. Had stopped in the Shetland Islands for nearly a week, a gaggle of drunk Danes cast off the ship and a few motley Shetlanders brought on. Is rightly fuming. Nearly ran aground an underwater shelf off the Orkneys on the second day out, the useless Danes skipping through their duties in a haze. Has little more than perfunctory cheer for our introduction. Thought he would be a larger man. Slight in stature but commanding in presence. I joke to Tove that Napoleon must be somewhere along his familial tree. He has yet to do little more than yell, at the Danes and Shetlanders, at us, at the sledge dogs, at the howling wind. I wonder how long he can keep it up. I have the over on six days, Anton the under. Tove mostly laughs at the man. Refreshing.
Our trip is all sea and air. A sprawling inky black to starboard side and a relentlessly glaring sheet of crackling white to port. Little changes but I feel comfort in the movement and the myriad tasks at hand. I haul gear and man lines alongside the grizzly Shetlanders whom I find nearly impossible to understand. Marvel at the fact that we speak the same language. Anton was not far off, the whiff of piss is ever present on the old boat but Sebastian is somewhat of a neurotic so one young boys entire job is to keep the boat clean. Nearly as much disinfectant on board as booze.
25 June 1984
Tove and I don’t talk much but I feel more at ease in her presence than I have for some while. I can see why she derives as much pleasure and intrigue from her work as she does. We are the only couple on board, Tove the only female, and I sense some sort of softness applied to me. Alas, being a writer, a man of the mind and not of the whip as Anton likes to say, does not help my cause. I work as hard as the other men though and avoid public displays of affection as does Tove. We have our own quarters at least, a small room no larger than an airplane toilet, a depressed cot elevated over our chests of gear. The slim shaft barely fits both of our bodies so we’ve taken to hot bunking like most of the crew, sharing several minutes of togetherness during our one overlapping sleep hour, our bony appendages rattling off the metal walls and pipes as we assuage what little passion can be contrived of this place.
Anton confides in me today that his wife of twenty four years has all but left him. He seems no more remorseful than one might be for the loss of a pet. He says that love was never a problem, it was merely that he was never around. When I ask if he regrets that, he humps his shoulders and looks out towards the flat black sea, the reflection in his obsidian eyes like twin shafts of coal. He tells me that his heart has turned cold over the years, that he cannot help leaving despite the fact that he would never want to destroy his family. I tell him that age makes all of us a bit colder, a bit more hardened. This makes him smile. He does not ask about Tove and I. This makes me wonder what he knows.
To turn the corner we muse about the odds of finding love in the arctic. Anton mimes cuddling up to a seal on the cold wet deck, his limbs flailing as some of the Danes stare dumbfounded from their hidey holes. On a fleeting note he tells me that Alexandre is a gay. Makes sense I respond. The words crinkle the corner of his mouth.
28 June 1984
Tove, Sebastian, Alexandre, and Anton all disembark today in a rubber dinghy. I feel my heart drop slightly when Sebastian reaches out to Tove and hoists her gently into the boat and onto the bench next to him. They confide quietly and easily without turning to see if I have seen them. Love is a fickle feeling. I’ve been given the day off and spend it mostly reading within my cabin, my heart turning over with the sight from the morning. My mind a wretched tousle of self castigation and self righteousness. I cannot change how anyone else feels. I should appreciate all of Tove’s relationships, how they foster her growth, how they round her out. Yet I can’t stop picturing them together. What are they doing out there, what are they talking about. Are they planning a future that has nothing to do with me? Are they even getting along? She wouldn’t choose a man like Sebastian I tell myself. I have more to offer than that angry little man yet if I believe that what am I really doing here. Did I just come on this trip so that I could keep an eye on my wife. I am supposed to trust and believe in her, am I not? Have we already failed if that is the case? Does everyone else pity me because they can see why I’m here but I cannot? These are the things I think about as the hours tick by ever so slowly and the words of the novel in front of me seem to wash away across the page.
I need to stop this debilitating spiral so I leave my cabin for a walk about the ship. It is warmer today, the breeze almost pleasant as I stroll back and forth alongside the starboard bow. A luminesce sun dog hovers on the horizon above the placid waters of the inlet and I find my gaze lost in the prisms of refracted ice. Solhound, one of the young Danes shouts, breaking the spell. The fresh air has done its trick and I feel a bit relieved as I venture back below deck, ducking carefully beneath the pipes that jut at random across the path, my vision still daunted by the trio of suns that appear in my sight. Be it that or my general muddled haze I reach for the door to my quarters and turn it to find the wiry Frenchman on his knees, the young cleaning boys member swelling his mouth. I slam the door immediately and hope that I was unseen but only a second later Alexandre appears and brushes past me without a word down the hall. I find Tove and Anton a minute later in the mess hall and sit down beside them without a word. I wonder what will come of this. Do Alexandre and the boy know that their secret is safe with me.
29 June 1984
I wake to a clanging of metal and the deafening roar of the ships engine being thrown about. The cabin is dark and my first thought is that we are sinking, that I will die in these frigid waters as I watch my wife cling to that decrepit Quebecois crab. I stumble to the deck expecting to find some frenzied chaos but instead see the young crew hoisting a pair of Esquimaux on a taut line, their round faces harried and vacant. Through some halting Danish and erratic gesturing it seems that the pair had been sledging across the frozen waters of a thin inlet when they broke through. Their sledge, burdensome with seal meat and provisions from a long hunt, was yanked down, halted only by the pull of the dogs, whom, slowly succumbing to the increasing weight were, in a howling fury, dragged under as well. I tried to picture the scene, the chaos, the noise and desperation of the tethered animals. The image leaves me feeling gutted. Several of the dogs survived though, the Esquimaux indicate, as they watch the faces of the crew wrench. Some of the tender young Danes rush to the port side rail and peer over anxiously but the Esquimaux wag their heads, bring their fingers to their mouth. Death provides life.
In a hurry to phone Iqaluit with the good news, a young first mate slipped on the deck and landed awkwardly atop the sat phone, crushing it. I feel as though Iqaluit proper might have heard Sebastians castigation without the aid of the phone. Needless to say, we are left now with one working satellite phone and a crew that works silently and without protest.
2 July 1984
After the Esquimaux were plucked from the ice by a helicopter we continued our voyage, North by Northwest along the gnarl fingered coast of Baffin Island, the fjords growing icier and more prominent, solid slabs of granite rising like knuckles from the barren land, their steep faces bending over the rocky coast as if peering down over us. Steely clouds huddled over the peaks so that any light was diffuse and somber, etching everything around in a funereal pitch. At mid-afternoon we passed a lonely polar bear sitting on his rump at the edge of a jagged headland, his face painted a deep crimson red, the slim remains of a seal at his feet. He seemed to be watching us, his black eyes unwavering, the dogs tethered below howling with the scent of blood.
Alexandre pulled me aside today to thank me for helping as much as I have been throughout the ship, his eyes barely able to meet my own. I nodded. We both knew what was actually being said. He stood silently for an extra beat and then put his hand on my shoulder and leaned in so that his warm breath startled my neck. He meant to start but then coughed and drew back, his thin face looking worn. I stood awkwardly while he doubled over, his skeletal fingers curled over spare lips. I asked if he was alright but he shook off the question as if it were nonsense. Finally he straightened out, his usual feeble hunch disappearing so that he gazed down at me and quietly he said, Sebastian has no plan for this expedition other than to win your wife.
5 July 1984
I dreamt that a brood of termites had crept into our home and begun to devour it piece by piece. Their maggoty little bodies climbing over everything, slithery and incessant. I call for Tove but no one else is home and the support beams of our old house seem to be slowly dissolving, softening. I swipe them off the mushy wood and crush them under my boot but seconds later a thousand others fill their place. In a panic I run outside and stand in the cold lawn, turn my gaze back to the house but it looks the same, like nothings changed.
Tove is pressed against the wall on the far side of the bunk this morning, her face turned away from me. We didn’t talk before I stumbled down here and she hadn’t tried to wake me while climbing in. I lay there, an acrid stench of cheap lager filling the damp bunk and take some slight solace in the fact that at least I haven’t so wronged her that she couldn’t come back to me. How foolish. All of it. I work myself into such a state that I seem to shoot out of the bed when I get up. The adrenaline and acidic churn of my stomach have me shaky as I pluck clothes from the exposed beams where I’ve hung them for the night and slide them on in the dark.
Earlier in the day the crew had thrown a party, lining up during mess lunch when nearly the whole ship was awake and hollering out the star spangled banner. I had entirely forgotten about the 4th until I heard their garbled crooning, their eyes all directed at me, the lone American, glasses of booze poured and shoved into my hands. I had tried to be cordial, good-humored, but then I saw Sebastian in the rear of the lounge, a smirk on his face and I turned into somewhat of a beast, downing whatever was handed to me and laying into the crews provocations. Duties had been relaxed for the day which meant that it all quickly devolved into a frenetic slosh.
Puke was plastered all over the stern of the boat while piss sloshed along the deck and amidst it all, there I was, befuddled and berating. I threw Antons cold hard phrases around with ill regard and drew raucous laughs from the Danes and Shetlanders nearly half my age. Boxing gloves came out from someones hold and unsteady, glazed faces traded cock eyed blows. America versus the USSR, someone shouted, and the gloves were thrust into Anton and mines hands, an array of wet currency littered the deck, bets shouted out and then we touched gloves. I had reach on the old Russian but he had sobriety on his side and dodged my sloppy haymakers until I toppled myself into the starboard rail and opened a gash on my forehead. Sebastian shouted sharply, as though chastising a dog, and the crew quietly split, leaving only the most crooked drunks stumbling for purchase on the wavering deck.
Let the kids play, I remember shouting at the cantankerous Quebecois, his disgusted eyes roving the ship. He moved slowly through the mess, his hands clasped behind his back, his booted feet kicking at and turning over the detritus until he was right next to me, standing beside the railing I needed for support, his slim face and deep set eyes moving up and down my slouched frame.
Why the fuck are you here, his voice slithered and shot at me in a coarse whisper. I had the urge to lay a gloved fist up and into his sharp chin but thought better of it and straightened myself instead.
To watch your snake, I slurred back to him, dimly aware that it made no sense. He shook his head and turned from me, marching back through the slop and in through the stern doors.
7 July 1984
The crew seems to avoid me now, faces turn or look down when I approach, conversations turn quiet. It’s either all in my head or Sebastians had a talk with the whole lot and told them I’m bad news, just some crusty barnacle. Even Anton seems a bit wary of me, sullen when I approach. We still get along just fine but I feel as though he’s always on the opposite ledge of this unbridgeable void and we’re just shouting pleasantries across without even looking down at what separates us. Silly that in a mere two weeks time I’ve somehow managed to ostracize myself.
Tove though, at least my wife has turned herself towards me when everyone else has looked away. She’s begun to go out of her way to seek me out throughout the day, to see how I’m getting along. Maybe she’s seen that I’ve been made to feel like the black sheep. Maybe she’s been on my side all along after all.
Such a sappy wench I am, babbling prosaically about my emotions while we sail through a landscape few will ever get to see.
We crossed a long inlet today and came upon the coast of Somerset island, it’s dull expanse of dry brown earth seemingly endless. A great mass of snow and ice still laid on parts of the land but in one long patch of green earth was one of the most striking sights. A flock of arctic terns dipping and swirling over this emerald mile. Alexandre approached me with excitement to explain that they were courting. The female will chase the male far up into the sky and then down they will come to fish together before circling each other to decide if it is good match. He took my arm excitedly and spun me around in a whirling dance while some of the crew jeered. Some 50,000 miles a year they fly. He closed his eyes and spun wistfully. My God.
Sebastian must have been in a good mood, for later in the day, as the sun touched off a shifting pink over the dark waters, the engine on the Aleksander was killed and we coasted around a wide headland and into a shallow bay. An old cabin sat all alone on the deserted coastline, rusty oil drums stacked against its peeling boards, the words Hudson’s Bay Company visible in a stark black over the doorless entry. We drifted silently in amongst the tidal marshes where the nutrient rich runoff painted the water a deep forested green and birds hopped amongst the sandy bars. A hushed gasp went up amongst the crew and I followed their outstretched arms to a wider estuary but saw only chunks of ice floating and bobbing in the water. I moved closer to the bow where Alexandre was excitedly leaning over the railing, a look of childlike glee on his face, and asked him what we were so excited about. Belugas, he whispered, look at them all. It was only when he said something that it became clear to me. There, packed tightly and winding their way up the shallow waters, was the largest pod imaginable of those stately white whales, weaving and nodding amongst each other, their slender white bodies lapping beside the protruding sand bars, squealing out their high pitched cries. It felt as though we’d stumbled upon some enchanted island, a last bastion for the animals we’ve pushed to the edges of the Earth.
8 July 1984
An angry gray lid rolled over the boat this morning and opened its maw with some strange immortal ferocity. Hail pummeled us like falling hammers and then just as quickly the ocean seemed to turn upside down and dump onto our heads, such a great wall of rain it was that I was beaten down by it, like buckets being dropped from a thousand feet on high. We huddled like a group of soggy felines below deck, licking at our pride, cursing how naively comfortable we had become.
We were told in the afternoon that we had nearly reached the site of our search but no one made a celebratory move. Tove would be gone most of the days now she told me with a subdued giddiness, out with Sebastian and Alexandre doing what it was they came here to do. Anton would be in charge of the ship and had elected me his first mate. I raised my eyebrows and the Shetlanders at the table laughed.
Tove was granted an extra eight hours of rest and we retreated to our cabin together after dinner meals. Stripping down amongst the twisted metal we held each other silently, unsure of what to make of ourselves in this strange place until she finally pulled me off the bed and positioned me behind her. I was surprised and relieved at the animal passion that had returned to us, eager in some way to make it last, to be almost cruel in my need for her. I passed out in a wild naked clutch of her slim frame only to awaken hours later to an eager moaning from Tove. I moved my hand slowly down to her warm crotch thinking I’d already find hers there but instead she shivered with some fantasy world desire and in the damp darkness drawled out the word, Sebastian.
12 July 1984
We’ve settled into a decent mooring in the wide bay that backs the Beechey Island. Alongside the ship is a narrow isthmus, some mile or two long, that appears like an apparition each day at the lowest mark of the tides. Some of the crew have taken up a fund for any man who will run the length of it without succumbing to the sea. The Shetlanders feel it haunted but a pair of Danes, reedy thin and bright faced, have taken to sprinting laps on the deck in the early mornings in preparation.
The days seem to pass unimaginably slow for me at present and I wonder how long I can keep this up before my mind atrophies to a point of insanity. It has become ever more difficult to not become lost in the silly trivialities that my mind plays out for me like some grotesque theater. Tove out there huddling with Sebastian on that island in this incessant breach of rain and wind. I imagine they take comfort in each other but I dare not ask. I confronted Tove about that dream the other night. Told her she had been thrashing and mumbling something awful but she merely looked down, busying her hands with some device, and told me she couldn’t recall any dreams. Is she trying to hide something, fore there isn’t enough room on this ship for secrets.
For now they are exhuming the bodies of those four boys. Those thin white headstones that stand like stark flags on the barren land. Some 140 years they have lain there in the permafrost, their bodies frozen in time, preserved almost perfectly. Eerie, I find it all, yet I am anxious to gaze upon these strange mummies.
15 July 1984
I am almost sick with regret. Queasy just at the opening of this god awful journal. I tell myself there is nothing I could have done but then am struck with how self serving that sounds. Noah, that poor boy. How rotten I am to only learn of his name now. He was the cleaning boy, found by Sebastian at 0500 hours this morning, his body hanging from the pipes just outside of Alexandre and Antons door. Thankfully Alexandre has come clean with the story so that I have not had to.
The mood aboard the ship today has been nearly as dark as the sky outside. The study of the mummy explorers has been suspended indefinitely and we have all taken to our own dim little corners to square our minds. Alexandre has huddled with Tove in our cabin for a great part of the afternoon, distraught to say the least. Says the boy told him he loved him and he responded by laughing and writing it off. Feels terrible now, a shaking of his thin bones that doesn’t seem to abate. Sebastian has granted him an honorable discharge but Alexandre wants to keep working, says he can’t imagine what he would do with so much idle time.
Tove and I lie in the bunk together now wordlessly, each of us stricken. I wonder when sleep will come but then feel sick again that I’ve made this about me and my suffering. Can’t imagine what poor Noah must have been thinking the past several days. My heart aches.
18 July 1984
Tove and Sebastian have returned to the island now with two of the Shetlanders to continue the research despite some bits of upheaval from the crew. Several of the Danes have threatened mutiny, though I’m unsure, as are they, where this would lead. Regardless, they have stopped working and spend their days now pitching about the deck running themselves into a huff. I understand their distress but I do not see what good might come of these agitations.
Below, Alexandre has taken full time to his quarters. A fever collapsed into pneumonia and now the lean boy has become ever more gaunt. I fear that his frame of mind does not bode well to recovery and I spend as much time as I can with him, patting at his sweltering skin and reading him stories in English that I wonder if only perturb his mind further.
What has become of this expedition. Sebastian refuses any test of his will and has held off on using the satellite phone to report Noahs death, urging instead that it’s more humane to deliver the news himself in person. Not many agree. If Alexandre was speaking the truth before and Sebastian has no heart for this voyage than I am bewildered by this latest turn.
20 July 1984
What has happened. Only a week ago we were sitting idly, casting jokes about and now one of the crew is dead and the rest is a vicious powder keg.
I was below deck whispering quietly to a worsening Alexandre when I heard the commotion above. Whipping up the stairs, I burst through the aft doors and saw a scramble of bodies along the starboard rail. Men were on the ground rolling about the wet deck while others were scrambling over the pile trying to separate the bodies. I saw Tove in the mix of it, her long blond hair toppling in a heap of the bright arctic jackets. I ran towards the lot, ready to throw a handful of the young Danes aside when a shot rang out and everyone startled. I turned to see Anton walking towards the pile, a .22 held aloft in his gloved hand. The bodies slowly untangled and patted themselves down innocently until finally the bright yellow jacket of Sebastian was pulled to a standing from the bottom of the rut and his thin face bore a scowl of disgust that would have given Lucifer pause. He produced slowly from his jacket then the one satellite phone we had left, its plastic entrails hanging loosely from a cracked face.
I did not stay for the haranguing but could hear and feel the reverberations from his speech below deck where I was tending to the gashes across Toves cheek and arm. Anton later related that some of the boys had broken into tears, so coarse was the screed. Sebastian made a visit to Alexandres cabin where we were not long after and cradled the resting Frenchman in his arms like a baby bird while he informed me that my duties, as well as my pay, would be doubled for the entirety of the voyage. I felt as though it were the first time he had not spoken down to me and the pride I thusly gained was discombobulating. They had finished their work on the corpses this afternoon he went on, and would be moving West Southwest towards the proposed sight of their search for the rest of the missing explorers. Fascinating work, he said in a hush, addressing the sleeping face of Alexandre, cradling it ever closer to his own, gash marks on the bones of the explorers that indicate cannibalism. Tove nodded but added nothing, her expression barren. This landscape, so destitute. How easily it could incite the most barbarous of instincts.
21 July 1984
Tove was not herself through the night and into the morning but I said nothing, eager as I was to appear as though I was not worried, as though this voyage and our marriage could not be so easily cast off the rails. Finally, on the deck, as I was helping Anton and the remaining bare bones crew hoist the moorings, she pulled me aside and begged a word with me as soon as was possible. An hour later, as the thunderous engine roared to life once more and the rooms below deck again took on their cacophonous clamor I found her in our bunk, eyes puffy, staring blankly at the weeping walls.
He’s up to something. It was the first thing she said. I nodded in agreement and sat down on the warm cot beside her. Yesterday when we were on the ice he pulled me aside and showed me the sat phone in his jacket, told me that he would call his friend and we would be gone, whisked away to the new estate he’s built himself along Hudson Bay. I just shook my head and kept working. Treated it like a joke. But then a minute later he comes back and tells me not to worry about them. That they won’t be a problem.
I shifted uneasily on the cot and looked around the tiny room. Was it bugged. I didn’t even know what to look for.
He’s not himself. I don’t know, Tove continued.
What did you do after he said that?
I gave him this look like he was crazy but he just gave this wane smile and went back to work. Was talking again about the mummies a second later as if nothing had been said.
We have to tell Anton.
No, no, you think Sebastian could carry out some plot all on his own. No, we cannot talk to Anton.
Okay then we get the crew and we tell them. They’ve already lost their faith in him.
And what? Lock the crazy captain in some room. It wouldn’t work because we don’t know whose on his payroll. We have to just keep going. Remember when you asked me about my dream the other night. He had a gun to your head. You confronted him and he put a gun to your head. We have to just keep going.
24 July 1984
We’ve motored for three straight days now towards the ice. The rain has stopped but the clouds have failed to part and the sea has become an ever increasing swath of white floes. I see seals still out there amongst the thickening pack, their gray bodies sliding through the rough dark water, but little more. This stretch of sea feels vast and ominous, the bergs here dwarfing us. These glinting towers of the most iridescent blue, moaning past us like wayward goliaths, seemingly lit from within, their mass below the surface appearing as some eerie green glow.
I’ve become almost numb to whats ahead of us. Sebastian still briefs the ship on the search we will conduct for the lost Northwest Passage explorers but I feel as though not even his heart is in it. Everyone merely tucks their faces away from the sharpening chill and stays silent. It feels to me like some floating graveyard.
26 July 1984
The search began today. A large grids been mapped out and we will slowly cover each parcel with the advanced sonar and underwater imaging we have on board hoping to find the two boats from the British expedition that was lost 130 years ago. Despite the fact that not a single Brit is aboard, we were granted Her Majesties blessing along with not a slim pinch of Her Majesties pounds. I pray that we find the downed ships sooner than later.
Sebastian informed the crew that we have at max fifty days to scan these waters, at which time we will turn around and motor back to Iqaluit with or without a discovery. His announcement drew a smattering of dissent and no fewer than a handful of boos. Tove spends most of her days now perched over the camera or sonar equipment staring at an infinite expanse of nothingness. I do not envy her. I for one have become quite the hand at Hearts, Spades, and Poker and have found my purse slowly growing. Anton no longer joins us at the table and has taken to work to busy himself. The anxious fears I felt some days ago have for the most part receded and I see Sebastians warning to Tove now as little more than boisterous threats. Hopefully this feeling holds.
Oh, and Alexandre. The wiry Frenchman has finally begun to come around and has joined the crew in the mess hall for some meals now, his frail appearance drawing a round of applause. He stays mostly quiet but I try to encourage him with trivialities nonetheless.
30 July 1984
Again I have awoken to an upheaval. A coursing of footfalls on the deck and a smattering of shouts. In the pursuant scuffle a Dane was lobbed into the frigid waters below and huddles now like a human popsicle in the engine room. Sebastian, it turns out, has shuttled poor Noahs body out to sea and the Danes, having gone to tend to it and finding nothing, have rightfully become loosened. He claims that the corpse was rotting in the freezer hold and that it is customary to bury any deceased members while at sea. This has rankled an outsized majority of the crew and a mere temporary peace holds now. I have attempted to broker a deal but both sides scoff at my bargaining. The crew wants to turn towards Iqaluit at once but Sebastian and his cohort insist on completing their search and refuse to kowtow to even the slightest of demands. What is left unsaid is that Sebastian and his cohort possess all of the weapons on board. Tove and I fear something awful brewing. We sleep now but each with one eye open.
2 August 1984
The mood on board is toxic. Insults and profanities ring throughout the ship unannounced while the research crew does their work timidly behind locked doors. I feel for the most part safe in my middle ground but am unsure what bold foolhardiness the young Danes are cooking up. They run about the ship like jackals inciting each other into some kind of frothy hysterics and then suddenly fall quiet.
We are sitting on a powder keg in the middle of a wasteland of water and ice with no hope for salvation.
4 August 1984
I pulled Sebastian aside this morning and tried to reason with the stubborn Quebecois. He listened wordlessly, a slight grin spreading across his face, and then merely brushed me aside saying, they are just little boys. Little boys play games. He seemed not to understand the extent of their fervor, how it continues to build in place of anything else to do. They are not little boys, I tried to tell him, blocking his path in the dim hallway, which of them is not larger and stronger than you?
He shook his head at this, as if I had gone too far, and glancing behind him quickly, pulled from the pocket of his large puffy jacket a handgun. At this he smiled and laughed fore my face must have given away something inside of me. My disbelief. My timidity. My rage. My pity. I stepped aside without a word and let the foolish man past, my mind and body numb from some sort of shock.
All of this for what, some silly pride? I said it quietly but he must have heard because he laughed so obnoxiously loud that its baritone din rang off the pipes. Without turning he shouted a jovial response, his words still choked with laughter.
You would never understand the role of the alpha.
7 August 1984
Tove was now escorted by Anton and a feeble Alexandre to and from the bridge each morning. Their secret knock on our cabin door signaling that it was safe to unlock the hatch, a protocol that filled each of us with some unconscionable dread. Sebastian had said that a little birdie told him the Danes had some childish plot to exploit the sole woman on board as leverage, but neither of us believed it. Those boys knew we were just as much of pawns as they were.
My safety could not be guaranteed outside of my cabin, another precaution echoed by Sebastian that I treated as foolish, some divisive tactic that I would not buy into. Instead, I went to the tiny berths behind the mess hall that the Danes and Shetlanders shared and tried to calm their minds.
Time had cooled their frenetic energies and they did little more than cast about their bunks now in some spiritless antipathy merely wishing to be home. A few still were emboldened by the indignities of Sebastian and his men but casted it forward instead, threatening violence if they’re not to be paid or if the search stretches beyond the promised fifty days. I took solace in their brotherhood and promised that I would look out for them, a promise they returned.
The deck is all but empty now and I drag a chair up from below and perch in the rounded bow at the head of the ship, my feet on the flaking white rails, staring out at the mass of sea and sky that folds into one shocking expanse of metallic blue. On some days the thin blocks of sea ice fit together like a puzzle and the ship chugs along slowly, the hull groaning as it pushes and fractures its way through the seemingly endless expanse. Then other days the winds turns and the floes separate so that the Aleksander zigs and zags briskly across the dark surface. The sun is finally dropping now too so that it is possible around midnight to come aboard to find the ice drenched in a deep purple, the entire sky backlit with some ethereal glow. It’s only then that I understand why I’ve come along, why, despite everything else that has happened, I still find this voyage somehow redemptive.
9 August 1984
I lay in my cot this morning shaken with a fever, a heedless night sweat forcing Tove to lay atop a pile of arctic downs on the floor. What little sleep I did come upon in between bouts was livid with dreams, a twisting world of conversations and encounters that seemed to stack upon each other in haphazard ways. Tove has asked me to describe them but I can’t find the words other than to say that none of it fit together, like a life lived out of order. Were you here, she asked. Only once. For a glinting second I was out in the water, floating in that numb world unconscious of any boat or why I would have been there. I was treading water, turning slowly around, awestruck by the bright blaze of the sun and how it cascaded through the ice floes gliding past. I thought of shouting, I can remember that, of somehow feeling as though I wasn’t alone. But I didn’t and finally when I turned back to a spot I was sure I’d already glanced over there it was in front of me, no more than fifteen feet away, his long snout sniffing the cold water. I felt the brunt of the cold then, that water like an ice chest suddenly crushing my meager frame. I knew movement would alert the giant bear but I could do nothing but splash recklessly, my limbs a haphazard flurry. Lowering his enormous head his eyes locked on mine for just the briefest connection before his lean body slid into the water. I was dead, sure of it, my body going catatonic with fear and chill, gripped almost as if in a vice by the inevitable clench of that massive jaw. Any instant it would be around me, I knew, rending limbs from torso, turning the inky black a putrid crimson. Please just let the water take me down. I let my body sink, the crews endless chatter about how hypothermia induces some pleasurable bliss invading my dream as I dropped, my eyes gripped shut. I could feel a bottom, sense it somehow, that ship that we’d been looking for down there on the floor of the giant bay. I was nearly to it, my legs kicking at a long mast when suddenly the jaws found my shoulder and I barreled from the dream in a dripping sweat, tugging for air, the cold hands of Alexandre retreating from my bare skin.
12 August 1984
My body rattles like the cage of some giant beast. Lucidity wanes. One minute I am trudging through the Sahara, a burning sand clinging to my wet skin, the next, fifty meters below the arctic, naked, swaddled in some icy tomb. Not turning back. Words from the captain. Tove cries. Alexandre cries too. Danes in the doorway staring at a pale ghost. Set my body on fire or dip it in the sea.
15 August 1984
Three days like haunted seconds. Tove touches my skin, cries. My hand shakes.
A dictation, verbatim I promise him. This is Tove.
What do I really look like.
Not good.
There’s more. I know it Tove. Write it if you can’t say it.
You look like your skin has frozen, like its been plastered over, like a man people assume has already passed to the other side. They can’t look at you for more than a second and they can’t seem to find their appetites even after just that.
Good, he moans, croaks a laugh, sees my hand moving spasmodically. Finds some strange bliss in seeing thoughts put to page. Cannot leave anything undocumented. I’ll keep writing. Not sure what to write. Not sure how he does it. When I first met him I found it peculiar, the constant scribbling, thought of it like someone living his life once removed. An observer of his own story. How sad and detached. But now he smiles when he sees my hands erratic flurry. I’ll tell him whats happened now. Seems more cognizant than anytime in the last week.
Can’t. A pinch of worry that I hadn’t expected. I don’t know where to begin. Feeling like a girl who’s prayed and sacrificed all night for the sun to return only to feel clumsy as it breaks so assuredly over the eastern horizon. He’ll be alright. It’s always darkest before the light.
Ask him if I might burn the page. Why? Worked myself into a corner. Only way out is the truth.
He sighs after I’ve laid it out. Not for me, he says, both dejected and proud. He thinks what. That I wouldn’t have done anything to save him. That I’d cast him aside for some hotheaded, shrill ego’ed Quebecois. He motions with his hand, a scribbling gesture about the air, eyes closed. Write it, he says, then hide it.
We meticulously tallied out a weeks worth of food and threw the rest overboard in the night. This will get us home and nothing else. A note was written and left on the captains door. Check the pantry..it’s time to go home.
16 August 1984
I woke today to an unsettling darkness, the room still, no other breathing besides my own, a shrill bleating coming from somewhere far off on the ship. I thought, naively now, that that would be the end of it, that an ecstatic clamor would roll throughout the ship on our voyage home but now I sense that something has turned. The footfalls overhead are absent along with the voices down the halls. Eerily calm as I toggle the light in the dark, nothing, the ships motor and electrical systems powered down, the moaning of ice against metal hull missing. My thought is that they’ve left me aboard a floating burial ground or that maybe I’m still dreaming. I reach teeth to shoulder and bite at the cold bony flesh but nothing changes.
My legs are weak as I move through the big steel door and down the pitch black hallway, muscle memory carrying me over the pipes and raised frames that jut across the floor. I gain the stairs with careful effort and push open the door to the deck. I’m confronted by a cold night, the moon and stars filling the sky alongside a sun that has only disappeared backstage momentarily, the sky still effuse with its remnant glow. The squeal of whatever alarm or sensor is louder here, coming from somewhere above the bridge, thankfully drowning out the moan of the door as I slowly drag it closed again.
I sit down at the top of the stairs and try to gather whatever strength I can but with each breath I seem to be sinking, my body folding over on itself. I want to vomit. Naturally my body follows that thought and I wrench between my legs, the thin string of bile dripping through the grated slats like some poisonous venom. I wipe my mouth on the blanket slung over my shoulders just as a beam of light blinds my sight. I’ve nothing. I merely duck my head between my legs and watch as the beam silently follows the toxins dripping from the stairs.
Aw my poor writer. Something is whipped at my prone form but I can’t see it until it hits me and rolls down the stairs, resting in the illuminated vomit. Toves dark orange bag. How could I have boarded this ship with a deranged man.
She’s gone. Seems you’ve missed the boat. I don’t move or respond. What is there to do. My body feels so heavy that I fear if I stand I’ll merely topple down the stairs. Instead I pull the blanket further over my body so that I’m just a dark shell. The light disappears and I feel on the verge of sleep, the edge of some barren void. I have no will to fight or fret. I know Tove is safe somewhere. He couldn’t have hurt them all. I’m only unsure what he might do to me.
The light returning, silence, a sudden rush in the air and then a spasm of wet cold. My body contorts as the frigid water runs off my back and drips down the stairs. The blanket a frozen sponge now. I cast it off with a hatred I had forgotten existed, a cackling from the bottom of the stairs.
Another bucket Mr. Pulitzer prize? I shake my head as the thick down jacket on my back clings to me in a frozen damp, the rattling chill returning.
Sick fuck.
Oh, my hero. Do you need back rubbed?
Fuck you.
Oh, another bucket you say? I watch the light turn and retreat down the hall, Sebastian whistling as he goes. There’s nowhere for me to run to, no place to hide from this psycho. I could try to make it to my room but to what, to wait in there while I run out of water and food. I raise my head to look for some kind of weapon but all I see are stars swimming across my vision. I can’t remember the last time I ate.
Monsieur Pulitzer, the words echo down the hall as the light bounces steadily closer. Look up this time so that I might clean that vomit from your ghastly face. There is quiet murmuring at the bottom of the stairs, Sebastian confiding with someone. I scream out a plea, my voice choked and tattered as I listen to the water sloshing back and forth, but no other voice responds. I pull my knees up to my chest and bury my head against my thighs. My teeth are quivering so I bite into the flesh of my emaciated thigh to stop the clatter, to halt that sound that says my body can’t take much more. Sebastian lets out a low laugh and I brace for the icy water but instead theres a roaring crack and then a heavy thud. I drop my knees and peer down the stairs to see the light flooding a body lying diagonally across the hall, the puddle around the yellow hood slowly diluting a thick red. The light suddenly shoots back up to me, remembering that I’m there and I can’t help but hide behind my legs again, my bleating cries muffled by the wet cocoon I’m going to die within.
No, no, you’re fine. Please. It’s the voice of Alexandre, his steps heavy and fast on the stairs, his hand on my shoulder, kneading the thin bone. It’s okay. You’re okay. Everyone’s okay.
24 August 1984
Pointed home.
It took Alexandre and Anton less than an hour to find the life raft that Tove and the crew were floating on, the bright yellow dinghy pushed to a corner of the bay by the waves of a building storm. They said they weren’t scared, that they knew everything would work out, but by the way some of the young Danes dropped to their knees when they were back on deck I knew otherwise.
I for one had no time to be scared. In some feverish pitch I had missed the entire squabble, the shouting match and the drawn guns, the entire crew corralled onto an exposed raft with zero food and only a gallon of water. Sebastian had told them to start paddling if they wanted to be home so badly and then tossed them a handful of dining trays. The current merely pulled them away as they watched the HDMS Aleksander motor off and then power down.
What was Sebastians end goal? No one was sure. Alexandre confessed that Sebastian had told him he was in trouble back in Canada, that he had been dodging taxes for years and a sexual harassment suit was likely to soon cost him his university gig as well. He wasn’t trying to go back, had even emptied his bank accounts and stashed his savings overseas. Maybe he never even planned on returning the boat, was going to merely drag us all through the fabled Northwest Passage and on into the cold expanse of Siberia where we’d all come to live as civilians of the Soviet Republic.
Alexandre sits now in the big blue governmental office above town. Upon our arrival in Inqaluit he confessed to the murder in front of a confused room of Esquimaux and was given an empty governmental office to sleep and relax in while a sentencing came back from Ottawa. With an entire crew lauding him as hero we expect he will be freed of any charges shortly and onward to France where he intends on staying for some time. When I brought him lunch the other day he confessed that, I’ve realized the cold is not so much for me.
Anton, that burly Russian who I first imagined to be my only friend. Gone. A note left on the door of our old room in the Inqaluit high school that first morning back.
I’m sorry. Very much. One thousand times. I am no good person and you will never see me again. I am not explorer, not adventurer, not seaman, only thick headed fool. Sebastian pays me to watch you. Bonus to make your death accident, but I never would. No gulag for me, my mind gulag. Ya lyublyu tebya. That is I love you. Be safe.
With a couple of the Danes we searched for him but he was nowhere. Inqaluit is a tiny place yet no one had any idea where the big Russian had gone. Another boat or a sledge out across the ice pack. It only took a handful of hours for the man to disappear.
As for Tove and I, in some strange way we’ve never been happier. I’ve heard it before, that traumatic events actually bring people closer, weave the bonds ever tighter, and can only attest to that now. Slowly we’ve dismantled the gear and catalogued all of the data, Tove ecstatic that I’ve filled in happily where Sebastian and Alexandre cannot. We won’t leave the island until Alexandre has received his sentencing so there is no rush, each day a slow crawl from our sleeping bags and a long gaze out over the icy bay towards the soaring granite peaks beyond.
Stills on Stilts 