and calm—the great, reliable sameness—of the North Pole, safe in the small space of a screen.
Oscar and his wife often arrived home at about the same time, running into each other there on the steps, and he waited a few minutes expecting her to come down the street along the same detour he’d taken before remembering her text. So he climbed three flights on his own to their green door, swollen all summer in the humidity and stuck in its frame, where he dug out his keys and wrestled his way into their home.
He did his everyday things: changed out of his work clothes into a T-shirt and shorts, checked the mail (nothing much), read the news on his laptop and watched the same news again, more or less, on TV. Ate a dinner of leftovers from takeout they’d gotten the evening before because neither of them felt like cooking or like eating other leftovers they already had. And through all of that, the routine he and Julia went through any evening but tonight on his own, Oscar thought about the day’s news. Not the news he’d been watching but the news of his own: that he was going to the Arctic. If he was going, if Director Lenz hadn’t changed his mind after their meeting and that was why there had been no more information as he’d expected in the afternoon.
He stood in the living room he shared with his wife, surrounded by three yellow walls where his built-in bookshelves of National Geographic reached floor to ceiling: every issue since his birth and most of the earlier ones, though not quite all the way back to 1888. Any issue with even the briefest bit of Arctic lore was marked by a red sticker dot on the spine so he could find them when needed, though he probably could have pulled down whatever issue he wanted to find a specific passage or report from the Pole just by remembering where in the room he’d found it before. He was lucky, he knew: Julia didn’t mind his magazines or at least she didn’t complain. She’d never once asked him to get rid of them or even move his collection, perhaps because it was a big room in a big enough apartment and between the two of them there was nothing else to fill up the space, busy as they both had always been with their jobs. Apart from his magazines and her cookbooks in the kitchen—which she read but rarely cooked from—and her karate trophies (if it was karate: he had a hard time remembering which martial art she actually studied and she’d never invited Oscar to watch her compete; she just came home with a new trophy sometimes) in a display case above the TV, there wasn’t much to their home. The usual things, of course, the furniture and clothes and shoes. A few photo albums, but most of those they’d scanned and stored on hard drives and discs instead, the way they’d ripped all their CDs and cleared the shelves of jewel boxes. So they’d given themselves plenty of room for storing the things that needed storage and even for hiding what they wanted out of the way. The evidence of their lives both apart and together were nestled in one database, their choices and memories and tastes, and they only had to ask that database for what they wanted via laptops or phones or menus summoned on their TV to get back just what they were after and leave all the other, unwelcome choices tucked away out of sight, out of mind, without the guilt Oscar used to feel about listening to the same CDs and watching the same movies over and over while so many others stared him down from the shelves that once filled the fourth wall of the room. He couldn’t enjoy one direction when all the others he hadn’t chosen insisted on making themselves known.
He’d been against that consolidation at first, the stripping away of relics he’d always thought grounded their lives, but after the compromise of letting him keep his magazines—making more room to display them, in fact—he’d given in and soon admitted Julia had been right all along.
A whole extra bedroom hadn’t ever been slept in for more than a night or two at a time when some friend passed through town and Julia had done what she wanted to with that unoccupied space, making its emptiness her own. So Oscar’s century-plus of magazines had the run of the front room with only the sliding glass door to a small balcony breaking into their yellow expanse, letting in genuine light all afternoon and through the evening though at times it paled beside those bright spines.
He pulled a beer from the fridge and had to stop his other arm’s muscle memory from grabbing a second for Julia as it often did, though less consistently lately since her promotion and increase in karate nights. Then he stepped outside to that railed-in rectangle hardly large enough for their two folding lawn chairs without a lawn and a small, square table between them, where Oscar stood his bottle before sitting down.
They were a quiet couple, he and Julia. They didn’t talk much and they’d always been that way or else had slipped into their quiet so gradually neither one noticed the change, like a bath you’re sitting in cools but you don’t realize you’re shivering until you’ve turned blue or—let’s hope not—have died.
He drank his beer slowly and whenever he set it down between pulls habit made him check to avoid knocking over Julia’s absentee bottle. Below on the street one car ran into another. Neither was traveling fast, one was pulling away from the curb and the other was pulling up to it, but the crunch of plastic-on-plastic and the “oohs” of kids and adults on the sidewalk and stoops rose to the balcony like a much bigger accident had taken place. The drivers got out, exchanged papers, shook heads and eventually hands, and went on their way without waiting for the police. Across the street, on the far side of the smash up, a man in a hat and dark glasses ducked backward around the corner of the Chinese takeout that had provided Oscar his dinner. The strangeness of it, the absurdity, reminded Oscar of the man on the train, too conspicuous behind his newspaper to mean anything, and he even wondered for a thin second if those two men were in fact one but dismissed the idea: it still felt like summer and was still sunny so hats and dark glasses should be expected on an evening like this, a more likely explanation than, what, spies watching him drink a beer on a balcony without his wife?
He spotted his phone on the table and thought of the Pole cam and what it might be showing—the clean simplicity of the ice sheet, nothing superfluous as the sun set almost in sync with his own farther south, the equinox only a few days away. Soon after the swathe of sky visible between the underside of the balcony above his own and the flat roof of the more or less identical building across the street had taken on the faintest purplish tinge, and soon it was dark. Leaving his empty bottle to the flies Oscar headed inside after holding the door open for a ghost or a wife to go first.
He turned on TV without optimism and the first thing he saw on a channel left behind by his news earlier was the opening sequence of To The Moon!. Oscar snarled, and he sneered, and he slapped at the remote but, predictably, worked up as he was he wasn’t precise and probably watched that infuriating show longer than he might have done had he calmed down, kept control, and carefully pressed a button to shift the channel one way or the other. A single stroke would have sufficed but instead he flailed across all the buttons at once, blindly hoping for change, and half the buttons he managed to push negated the other half and it took longer—a few seconds at least—until the change he so longed for could come. Which we shouldn’t belabor but isn’t it always the way?
He tried watching a show about food and a show about dogs, and he tried watching a news magazine about murders or celebrities or celebrity murders (he couldn’t quite tell because none of the celebrities or corpses or celebrity corpses were polar explorers so he wasn’t sure which ones were meant to be famous and which were just meant to be dead) but after the unfortunate episode with the remote he saw astronauts everywhere and gave up on TV. The screen going black, first at the edges then closing in toward the center, came like a breath for his eyes and his ears the way winter’s night comes to the Pole.
Instead of TV Oscar turned to his shelves and after a moment’s consideration—finger poised, scanning the red-dotted spines—he ventured forth with a surgeon’s precision and withdrew volume XVIII, number 7, July 1907 and it fell open within a page of his destination, one of his favorite passages of Arctic lore: Max Fleischman’s account of July 4, 1906 at Virgo Haven with the Wellman expedition, fireworks bursting over their half-built but American houses so far above the 49th parallel, north of another continent altogether, of course, but… no, he’d forgotten, there weren’t fireworks, no room in the hold for such extravagance. The men had fired their rifles and pistols into the sky of that bright northern night in Spitzbergen, at Major Hersey’s command, “Make a noise!” and it’s a good thing they did, too, Oscar thought, because within a few weeks their airship was grounded, its engines