The cold hits as soon as the door is opened, blown in by a shockingly cold wind that smells like water. It is minus three Celsius, and already it is black as midnight. There is nobody there but the crew that ties down the copter; the bright, white outside lights illuminate the copter, it casts long insect shadows in three directions. The only building I see is the research complex, I glance around quickly, looking for the town, but it’s too cold to look much. I walk across the tarmac and into the research complex with the pilot and co-pilot. “It gets dark early,” I say.
The pilot says, “Sunset was at fifteen-ten this afternoon.” Five P.M. I think, then realize I’m wrong. Three o’clock. Sunset was at three, because we are north of the frigging Arctic Circle.
Inside the station is all smooth, clean white walls and blue carpet, very institutional and not shabby at all. There are big windows looking out at the tundra on one side, and over the bluff at Lancaster Sound on the other. The shore ice is whiter than the finest of sand beaches and the open water is shining like black glass.
For a moment I think that the woman who has met me is Chinese. “Hi, you’re Zhang Zhong Shan?” she says. “I’m Maggie Smallwood, come on, I’ll show you your room.”
“Just Zhang,” I say. She is Native American, Eskimo I suppose.
Her face is round and her eyes are slanted. She chatters as we walk, she is the one that tells me the water is Lancaster Sound. She uses words I have never heard, polayna, belukha, bowhead. I finally figure out that belukha and bowhead are kinds of whales.
“You’re studying whales,” I say.
She laughs. “I’m sorry, we’re studying belukha migration patterns and their mating rituals.” She keeps talking as she opens the door to my room. It is actually two small rooms, the front room has a desk and two chairs, the back a closet and bed. The bathroom is off the back. There’s no kitchen. I was expecting an apartment, this is more like a dormitory.
“I’ll bet you’re hungry,” she says. “I’ll show you where the caf is.”
The cafeteria is full of people talking, playing cards, watching vids. Very few of them seem to be eating. There is food to flash heat, but Maggie tells me that during breakfast and dinner hours the food is made fresh. The cost of my dinner is debited against my wages, but it’s cheap food. We sit down with a group of people, all natural behaviorists: Jim Rodriguez, bearded, with straight, pale-brown hair; Eric Munk, blond, but not so blond as Peter, also bearded; Janna Morissey and Karin Webster (one has brown curly hair, and one has straight short hair, but I cannot remember which is which even though I can remember that the one with curly hair has a narrow face and a tough way of talking and the straight-haired one likes to dress pretty. I’m very bad with names).
“Your English is very good,” Eric says, “Aren’t you hired out of New York? How long did you live in New York?”
“All my life,” I say. “I’m ABC,” I explain.
They don’t understand.
“ABC,” I say, “American Born Chinese. I’m from Brooklyn.”
They laugh, they have never heard the phrase. I shake my head in wonder.
They’re all Canadians. They are naive in a nice way. There are not many Chinese in Canada because Canada has not had a
socialist revolution, it’s still a constitutional monarchy. This is probably a little like the U.S. used to be before the revolution. They ask me if I can speak Chinese, and how I came to be born in New York. I almost tell them only my father is Chinese, my mother is Hispanic, but I don’t. I’ve put my Chinese name on my application; I’m not going to loose the advantage of being Chinese, not even here.
They are all very nice, tell me about the complex. I tell my Newfie joke, and everyone tells Newfie jokes.
“How far away is the town,” I ask, remembering Hebron.
“What do you mean?” Janna or Karin asks (the one with straight hair).
“The town, Borden Station, how far is it?”
Jim says, “This is it. There’s nothing here but the station.”
They laugh at my expression.
When I wake up it is still dark. Of course, it is seven A.M., not so late, but it is as dark outside my window as if it were much earlier. I stand and look out the window, there is nothing but the Lancaster Sound, far below me. I would really like a cup of coffee, I’m not accustomed to having to face other people before my first cup in the morning.
The room is warm, difficult to believe how cold it is outside. I keep standing there, half asleep, looking out at the landscape. There are so many stars! The sky is thick with stars, from glittering points to tiny scatterings. No moon. But the snow is bright, it must be bright enough to read a paper by. Right outside my window is tough, dried grass, then the steep fall to the water. There is a band of shore ice, like a long smooth desert from here.
Looking at the shore ice, I see it is not perfectly smooth. There are shadows. I can see very far to the water. I don’t know if the shadows are indentations, cracks, or frozen waves. I have no sense of proportion, how far away is the ice?
How far away is the next nearest person? How far is Hebron? Montreal? New York? If there was an emergency here that we couldn’t deal with, how long until someone could get here, how long until we could get to a hospital?
There are no edges to the landscape, no tourist lodges, no sidewalks, no ships, no aerials, no wires, no planes, nothing but gradations of white and blue to black. It has nothing to do with me. It is perfect, sterile, dead. I think I love this landscape. I know I am afraid of it.
I dress in pants and sweater and go to the cafeteria to get coffee. I will be working with Jim.
Jim is already there. He is wearing a pullover that looks like the top part of an atmosphere suit, which it is, complete with couplings. He has the hood pushed back. It makes him look like some sort of sea miner, or satellite tech, not like a scientist. He’s big, with an open face and a kind of easy, aw-shucks way with people that emphasizes the dumb-tech look.
“Morning Zhang,” he says. “You prefer Zhang?”
“Everybody calls me Zhang,” I say.
He nods, slurping coffee. I sit down. He is eyeing me over his mug. “Nice sweater,” he says, in that funny way people compliment you when they are really saying, “I don’t know what to make of what you are wearing.”
“Wrong, huh?” I say. It’s just a sweater. It’s woven in a sharkskin pattern, black, white and gray. It’s good enough to wear out drinking or something, but it’s still just a sweater.
“No, I mean, I just never saw one like that. It’s not really sharkskin, is it?”
Of course it looks like sharkskin. “No,” I say. “Wool and synthetic.” Sweaters are big at home right now. What will he say when he sees the wine sharkskin sweater with the leather ties and mirrors? Obviously he will say nothing because obviously I will never wear it here. Maybe I’ll send it back to Peter and he can get some wear out of it.
The woman with the tough face and the curly hair walks in and Jim says, “Hi Janna.” I think, remember,
Janna
is the one with the curly hair,
Karin
is the feminine one.
Janna says, “Morning Jim, Zhang, I love your sweater! Is that what they’re wearing in New York?”
Ah hah. Overdressed. “Well,” I say, “It was when I bought it last winter.”
“Karin will want one as soon as she sees it. But you’re going to freeze.” Janna stops and puts her hands on her hips. “Don’t you have any winter gear?”
For the first time I think I jack Janna. Janna is tough, practical, no nonsense. That’s her mechanism. Maybe Janna and Karin are a couple? “This
is
winter gear in New York.”
“Well it’s not winter gear here. You’re supposed to be issued an ARC.”
ARC. Artificial climate suit. What the rest of us call atmosphere suits. “I just got here,” I say. “Maggie showed me my room and then the caf.”
Janna looks at Jim, Jim shrugs. “He can’t go out like that,” Janna says.
“We’ll have to find him something.” Jim frowns. “He couldn’t wear mine, it’d be too big, and I’ve got to wear it. Maybe Eric’s. Is Eric going out?”
Nothing to do but ask Eric. We tromp to Eric’s room, carrying our coffee mugs. Eric is asleep, after all it is only seven-forty-five. And dark enough to be midnight. Sunrise isn’t until almost ten A.M. I have that disoriented sense of being up at the wrong time.
Eric says I can use his ARC if it fits. He hands it to me and I shuck my sweater. The air inside the station is cool but not cold. I work out a little, haul tools around all day, I can be casual about being bare-chested, especially next to Jim who looks big but undefined. If he worked out I could never compare with the width of his shoulders. Under his ARC what does he look like? Forget all that for six months, Zhang. It’s a small place, people are in
each other’s laps. I am a monk in the service of research, and Jim is not my type anyway. I tug the ARC over my head, pull the hood off my hair. It is not a good fit, but it will do. It’s too warm.
Jim nods. “Better.”
Janna nods too.
Eric says, “Wear it in good health.” He hands me the leggings and shuffles back to bed.
I look at Janna and Jim. “I think I’d prefer to put these on in my room.”
Jim grins. “Yeah, probably.”
I dress, feeling like I’m play-acting, and meet Jim at the caf. We walk down to the pool. Not a water pool, a vehicle pool. There’s a cutter unit that looks like it’s barely been used, it’s not even dirty. I check it to make sure the seals have been broken, but actually it has been used before, so I load it in the back of the yellow floater. Then we load a couple of crates of pre-fab and I climb in the floater with Jim.
“Have you ever been under the ice?” he says.
Sure, I think to myself, I spend all my time under ice, usually up around Macy’s. What the hell does he think? New York is a glacier? I don’t know what he means “under the ice.” I don’t understand these people when they talk. “I just got here,” I say.
“It’s not so bad,” he says.
Something never to believe, right up there with “It tastes just like chicken,” is “It’s not so bad.” If it wasn’t bad, they wouldn’t have to tell me it wasn’t bad.
We rumble out into the darkness and I can feel the force of the wind hit me and the floater; when Jim sets the hover he has to head the nose into the wind, but in my suit I’m not cold. If anything I’m a little warm. It’s pretty. The sky is black, the land is white. It’s so big and empty that it’s scary. I wonder if I’m agoraphobic. Of course, I’m a city boy. It’s not the space that makes me nervous, it’s the absence of human reference. We head off, the nose of the floater about forty-five degrees left of the
direction in which we are actually heading, so we are kind of skidding sideways. I glance back at the station, expecting reassurance, but we scoot over the lip of the big hill down to Lancaster Sound and the station looks smaller and smaller. So I look forward again, which is slightly less unnerving than watching safety recede.
Jim tells me about where we are going. We’re heading for Halsey Station, which, when it is finished will be the first of a series of stations that will monitor belukha whales. It’s under water in the summer, under the ice in the winter. “Why did you take this job, the chance to study in China?” he says.
“Nobody said anything to me about studying in China,” I say.
“That’s what the guy before you was out here for,” he says. “He said your government wrote it into a hazardous contract, if you renew your contract you get some kind of chance to study in China.”
I didn’t really read the contract. All right, so you should always read a contract. “I’ll have to look,” I say. I don’t believe it. They wouldn’t give somebody a chance to study in China just for spending six months here.
“So why did you come? You don’t seem very interested in the great outdoors.”
I wonder what I seem like to him. He’s a scientist, here because he wants to be, he must get pretty tired of techies who want to do their six months and go home. “It was my third alternative,” I say. “I had to take it.”
“You mean your government made you come here?”
“Not exactly.” I explain about alternatives.
“Were you at all, you know, interested?” he asks. “I mean I know it’s not New York, but like you said, it’s only for six months and it’s a change, you know.”
“Yeah,” I lie, “I thought it would be interesting. And I thought it would make me study for the engineering exam.” He doesn’t want to hear how horrible I think this place is, he chose to come
here. And I should study for the engineering exam. There isn’t much social life here.
“You should check out that education thing,” he says. “Dennis only had to work a year and now he’s in Guangzhou.”
Stay here a year? It would be worth it if I could study in China. But I’m sure that it’s more complicated than that, or that the regulations have changed.
Madre de Dios,
stay here a year?
“There’s the station,” Jim says. We coast out onto the ice and he points to something that looks like an old-fashioned lighthouse. The ice is run with cracks, long spiderwebs. And as we get closer to the station I can see how the ice has piled up around it. “Shit,” he says, “we ought to clear that ice.”