himself.
The director loomed behind a desk so small his round body peeked out on both sides. Everything about the director was round—his body, his face, his bald head laced by the few long white hairs he combed over—yet he was not, per se, a large man. And beneath those white hairs bright red skin on his face and what showed of his arms. He looked, always, like he’d just stepped from a bath drawn so hot it boiled him red as the lobsters he posed with in a photo on his desk from a National Geographic gala to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of Richard Byrd’s Polar flight—another great man nearly undone by hobgoblins of gossip, by petty desires for him to fail. Had Byrd only kept better records—had BIP been established a few years earlier—he might have fended off those attacks, those charges that sloppy erasures in his flight log were “proof” he had not reached the pole… As Slotkin had said more than once while he and Oscar discussed some expedition or another over their lunch (they hadn’t been prone to chat while they worked), it’s a wonder explorers ever come home at all when such unwelcoming welcomes await. The way they worked, the way BIP explored the far reaches without ever leaving their office, made it all so much smoother by controlling the whole story start to finish without leaving loose ends and left-open doors where doubt and distrust and after-the-fact changes of heart could creep in.
Behind Director Lenz in his office, where a window might have been if the Bureau weren’t housed in a basement, hung a window-sized photograph of the mysterious centenarian lightbulb from Oscar and Alexi’s own office, a photograph many times larger than life in which curled filaments shone more brightly behind the glass of the frame than behind the glass of the actual bulb. Though perhaps that brightness was a reflection, some trick of the light trapped between photo and glass and so magnified; that sort of thing happens all the time in the Arctic. Light makes you see land where there is none, land where you want it to be when you most desperately hope to find some, and many a man—good men and even great ones—has steered a wrong course toward those vanishing shores of Fata Morgana.
In short, all was as expected in the director’s office. All was as it had been every Monday when the prognosticators stood on the threadbare gray carpet before him and as it had been for years before that, with the exceptions of being called to his desk on a Wednesday, and that Director Lenz wasn’t alone. In ten years Oscar had never seen anyone else in that office, but on that morning two stiff men sat in stiff chairs to the director’s left, one in a dark green army uniform festooned with ribbons and medals and a whole sky of stars on his shoulders amidst other decorations and badges no doubt impressive enough in their own right for reasons indecipherable to Oscar and his limited fluency in regalia. Close-cropped gray hair crept from under the rim of his cap and a thin, steel-colored mustache had been drawn across his face like a blade. The other wore a gray pinstriped suit that fit him so well even Oscar could tell it was nicely cut, and he knew as much about the way suits should hang as he knew about lunar travel. Neither Director Lenz nor his guests offered an introduction and it isn’t a prognosticator’s place to speak first, so the partners waited to be spoken to.
“Listen, both of you,” said the director, leaning across his small desk, wide red hands wrapped around its plastic woodgrain veneered ends. “Sit down and listen.” He always told them to sit though until that morning there had never been any chairs but his own in the room (who knows where the chairs for his guests had come from) so generations of underlings stood where they were despite the instruction, shoes slotted into old footprints left in the pile of the carpet not only by their own feet but by those that came first, varying a size up or down over the years so the impressions in the carpet were blurry.
The man in the uniform and the man in the suit sat glacier-still with a posture in common: backs straight against straight-backed chairs, knees together with hands flat upon them. Oscar thought of sleeping skuas hanging impassive on the edges of cliffs but had only seen skuas on the pages of National Geographic and they might move around more in those crowded Arctic colonies than he imagined them to. Real skuas might be nothing like those two rigid men but skuas were what he was used to—their still images, anyway—so thinking of them helped Oscar stay calm in the face of strangers appearing in BIP.
Director Lenz crabbed his fat fingers back and forth on a sheet of paper, crumpling until it lifted away from the surface of his desk enough to allow him a grip. Triumphant, he waved it around. Oscar spotted BIP’s bright red stamp in one corner and some other stamps he didn’t know: blue stamps and green stamps and brown. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Alexi’s head look one way then the other, no doubt scanning the office for bagels.
“You two,” Director Lenz said, and Alexi’s face popped with surprise. He pointed back at his own chest as if the director might mean someone other than the underlings he’d called to his office. “This paper here just came down. It just came down from upstairs who said it came from downtown on the hill and it says the two of you have an assignment. A very important assignment. Are you listening?”
“Yes, sir,” Oscar said and Alexi nodded while holding the empty teacup near his face where the director would be sure to see it, as transparent as those dark slipcovers fooling no one on his magazines when he pulled them out to read over lunch. Not that the director would care, on either account.
“A very important assignment and it’s going to supersede your regular duties. You’ll be on this assignment as long as it takes. But it shouldn’t take long. It had better not take you two long. Only as long as it takes.”
Oscar knew better than to ask, he knew Director Lenz would get there when he got there if he got there at all, but Alexi—perhaps because of his tea-deprived state or because he was new—couldn’t hold out and asked, “What’s the assignment?”
“Let me talk!” roared the director. “How can we maintain efficiency if you won’t stop talking?”
“Sorry, sir,” Alexi mumbled into his mug as the strangers in chairs shook their scowling heads.
“Where was I? Yes! You two are being sent north. You’ll go, get the job done, then come right back. Take too long and it’s your vacation days.”
“North?” Oscar asked, body aquiver as a compass needle at high latitudes.
Director Lenz turned toward the Suit and the Stars in exasperation and all three of them raised their eyebrows at once. Then he turned back to his prognosticators with those big, bloodshot eyes. “North. Yes. The Arctic, you dolts. The fucking Arctic. You’ve heard of it, yes? That bastard map on your wall? Where else would you be going, the moon? The goddamn moon? Are we NASA now, for Christ?”
Oscar’s face grew hot at the shameful suggestion and it was all he could do to hold his tongue and not defend himself against the vile charge. He was glad to see Director Lenz look away, underlings already dismissed from his mind. Focused now on some papers fanned over his desk, with more seals and stamps unknown to his subordinate’s eyes, he said, “Now get back to work. You’ll receive the details when it’s time.”
They turned toward the door, and Oscar was shocked at the slump in Alexi’s cake-starved and tea-deprived shoulders. Hadn’t he heard the director? Wasn’t he listening? They’d be going north, for some reason, for whatever reason—and who cares what reason so long as it would deliver them to Arctic?
Then he realized what was obvious and only briefly obscured by the excitement of going north: it meant going somewhere, traveling, and probably meals in strange restaurants and sitting on planes and other things Oscar wasn’t quite crazy about. But the Arctic! He’d be willing to sleep in a roomful of strangers for that, which was easy enough to tell himself while he was still comfortable in BIP’s basement.
He knew it would be hard to stay focused on the day’s prognostications with so much more to think about now but as senior employee it was his job to keep Alexi on task, to get him his tea then get him to work and to get a good morning’s hypothetical mapping accomplished by lunch so they might get on with filing and copying the corresponding forms in the afternoon to prove what they’d invented was actually there, and not end up working through dinner again. Not that Alexi would work through dinner. He’d be off like a lost ski at 5:00, leaving Oscar to stay behind in the basement until the day’s