seen too many movies, he thought, and looked instead to the heating and cooling vents near the floor of the train, dented, scarred steel cut with square patterns of alternating horizontal and vertical lines. If he looked back and forth between them quickly, flitting his eyes, latitude aligned with longitude and both vanished as the lines become a hole for a second. It was a game he’d been playing all his years on the Metro and even in other cities when he’d had occasion to visit and their own subways used the same models of car. He passed time by trying out different ways he might combine sets of absence or presence, different ways to group data, until his eyes couldn’t tell them apart. It gave him the same down-the-rabbit-hole feeling as when he got sidetracked in the BIP database or reading about the Arctic in his magazines and books or online. He’d follow some reference or footnote or hyperlink then follow another until he was far from what he’d intended to read, his original direction abandoned so many sidetracks ago he could never return, but all those sidetracks and diversions along with his initial intent adding up to something whole in his head.
He thought about Director Lenz and the mission, wishing he’d heard more about it by the end of the day as the director had promised. It might be anything or nothing at all; he had so little to go on, so little to speculate with, Oscar couldn’t imagine what the mission might be—he needed something to work with the way he worked with a blank map but not a blank wall to get the day started. It was hard to get nervous about the assignment when he couldn’t be sure it was true, but he daydreamed and saw himself and Alexi in fur hoods and mukluks, skiing across the ice sheet and waving to the Pole cam as they passed. Then daydream Alexi stopped skiing and pulled a sandwich from under his furs, pulled off his mittens and started to eat while Oscar stood waiting with his skis sinking into the powder. Undefined animal shapes appeared in the distance and crept slowly closer on the scent trail of his partner’s lunch, and that brought him back to the train. He checked the web cam again and he wasn’t there and neither were Alexi and his sandwich, so that was something at least.
It was a shame he’d go to the Arctic with his new partner instead of the old. Slotkin’s polar fever had perhaps rivaled even his own and the older man could talk for hours about the details of any expedition Oscar brought up, recounting the progress of Peary’s first attempt on the Pole with precise latitudes for each day’s events, or reciting long lists of supplies included in some explorer’s memoirs. If anyone at BIP deserved a trip to the Arctic, it had been Slotkin. It wasn’t that he didn’t care for Alexi, or didn’t like working with him, more that he hadn’t had enough time yet to decide. From what he’d seen in those first couple weeks Alexi didn’t care one way or the other about the north. Working for one agency was as good as another to him as long as he got paid and built up his pension, but Oscar wanted to give him a chance. Even the most unlikely members of an expedition prove crucial when the moment is right, when their unique skills and experience are what a tense situation demands.
Avoiding another glance at the creep with the newspaper and glasses, he looked down the length of the car. Two benches away a redheaded woman sat wrapped in a brown trench coat despite a heat in which everyone else had taken off jackets and loosened ties and unbuttoned collars. Plaid lining showed where it flapped open at her crossed thighs; Oscar knew the brand’s pattern from buying Julia a scarf for her birthday one year. Each leg ended in a glossy red shoe and atop a slender, unadorned neck she, too, wore dark glasses. From behind he could see in at the side of her face to the flame of her hair caught in the lens, and he was probably staring but had never seen such vividly reflective sunglasses before—not reflective on the inside, that is. He wondered how she could see anything but her own eyes.
She caught Oscar’s reflected gaze and turned to face him, and before he could react or turn away she’d raised a tan wrist and laid a finger tipped with the same shade as her shoes across her lips. He could have sworn she nodded her head the slightest bit in the direction of the creep behind the newspaper who was looking again, then wasn’t, again. Oscar felt certain she couldn’t be telling him to be quiet because he already was being quiet, and even if he had been speaking she’d never have heard him from two rows away over the noise of the train and other passengers talking and playing their chirping and beeping and buzzing games, over so much music too loud in headphones designed to share sound with the world whether the world wanted it shared or not. Still he felt scolded, as if she’d shushed not his voice but thoughts he hadn’t had about her—he might have, in time, if he’d kept looking for a few stops, though whatever women crept into his passing public transportation fantasies more often than not morphed into his wife as the scenario developed, into a body he actually knew well enough to imagine though he’d done more imagining than knowing the last couple years—and Oscar turned back to the vents near the floor a bit shamed.
He’d seen her before or at least thought he had but he couldn’t place where. Did she work in his building? Was she a train regular? Many of the riders were familiar by then and he’d ridden with some of them for the better part of the years he’d made that commute. He noticed when they were gone for a while; in summer, he hoped they were enjoying a vacation and in winter he worried they might be sick. And when someone vanished—when Oscar realized, for instance, he hadn’t seen for some time the woman with the big bag of knitting or the man who carried two insulated lunch bags each day—he hoped they’d retired or moved and not died. For a few years he and Julia had commuted together, before she transferred across town to Tires and Treads, and they’d often talked about who had or hadn’t been on the train the way other couples might talk about old friends they’d run into or family members who called. He’d felt the loss of their riding together as keenly as the disappearance of any other long-time regular; it always took a few weeks or months to get back to normal when someone was gone.
Theirs was a silent communion, a twice-daily band of brothers and sisters. More like Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s team of professionals in it together to get the job done but not to make friends, a far cry from the phonographs and light opera and group entertainments of Franklin’s expeditions or, for that matter, Peary’s. Shared purpose but still aloof, cohesion without camaraderie. They watched out for each other, the regulars, but kept themselves to themselves; they weren’t about to publish the subway car’s own North Georgia Gazette or toast one another’s birthdays.
But the redheaded woman: Oscar didn’t think he knew her from the train or from work, so maybe he recognized her from someplace else—where else did he go?—or maybe she just had a look the way some people do. Whichever it was, however he knew her or not, his station was next so he stood up and moved toward the door in plenty of time, maximizing the efficiency of entry and exit, his own and everyone else’s.
He flowed with his fellow riders up through the station, between the turnstiles and onto the street, where he refreshed the web cam on his phone. The ice was still empty as he walked two blocks toward his apartment, past a trio of boys on a corner fighting over who got to wear the toy space helmet next, who got to be the astronaut and who had to settle for mission control in their game.
Doused in blood, sore from the weight of the caribou and its loss—sore, too, from his own failure—the hunter’s day felt very real. The kind of day he’d come north to find in these strange, steaming mountains for better or worse.
As he reached the pass from which the trail led out of the mountains and down to the shoreline and home, the thundering churn and chop of helicopters led him by instinct back into the trees. Black metal wasps came from all sides, some over water and some over land, all enormous and all closing in on the log cabins and bright-hued houses with roofs of sod or dull, rippled steel, on the small geothermal plant that powered the village, and what remained of a failed attempt at at some kind of mill abandoned long before his own time, now an industrial ruin with crumbling walls and overgrown windows and some of the tallest trees in the region growing up through its floor where they were sheltered from the worst of the wind.
He watched his family and friends and neighbors come out of their homes at the sound overhead, as distant and indistinct as figurines on a tabletop railway display when they took to the village’s single dirt track to cluster and point to the sky.
Almost as soon as the helicopters flooded his sight their rockets were launched, their guns rattled and blazed. The hunter saw the flashes, the flames, the explosions