But when Oscar couldn’t keep it to himself any longer, and assuming his partner, too, had been wondering all afternoon, he asked Alexi, “What do you think we’re being sent for?”
“Sent where?” his partner replied, distracted by the list of names he was inventing for the technical college’s honor roll of three years back.
“To the Arctic! The job Director Lenz talked about. It was only this morning, Alexi.”
“Oh, right. That. I don’t know, maybe a convention or something? I kind of forgot. What do you think? What was it before?” The lightbulb above them swayed with sudden vigor and in the same seconds Oscar’s monitor flickered—the power cord socket was loose and had been for years, and it always suffered when he bumped or kicked the wrong spots in the frame of his desk—and in those two simultaneous wavering lights his eyes swam. He felt dizzy and not quite himself, more a sailor at sea; he felt a bit like Franklin adrift in the ice for those slightest of seconds, not to make too much of it, and gripped the arms of his chair with eyes closed until the waves passed and he sailed again into the calm harbor of BIP’s basement office, guided back by the gibberish morse code of Alexi tap-tapping his keys.
“There never was a before. BIP’s never sent anyone north as far as I know so I can’t begin to imagine,” he said. “The Arctic, though. We’re going to the actual Arctic. That’s what he was saying, right?”
“I hope they give us a decent dining allowance.”
Alexi’s obsession with food, his one track, digestive tract mind was almost charming to Oscar for the first couple of hours they worked together but soon it began to annoy him, and how could it not? But he was trying to get used to it, trying to accept it as the way of the world or at least the way of the work while he worked with Alexi, because they would likely be partners for years to come. That’s how things go, how they must go, when men work in the close quarters and isolation a region like the Arctic necessitates. But there had already been moments when Oscar wished his new partner had a little more to him than impulse and appetite, even if it was for the sake of competitions which, by his own account, Alexi was pretty good at.
He’d asked a week or so ago how Alexi came to join BIP but all the answer he got was, “Oh, you know, I’ve moved around,” and in government work that was a hint not to ask any more questions—either the story wasn’t interesting enough to dig for or was more interesting than the inquirer wanted to know.
“When do you think we’ll go?” Oscar asked. “Director Lenz said we’d receive more instructions.”
“Whenever we’re meant to, I guess.” Alexi had stopped naming students and was reading the entertainment section of a newspaper he’d brought from outside after lunch.
Despite himself, despite the protocols of government work and the honor of Arctic explorers, Oscar gave in and asked if Director Lenz had told Alexi anything in their second meeting.
His partner turned a page and said, “Hey, the new season of To The Moon! starts tonight.”
Oscar groaned. “I can’t stand that show. Who cares about space? Who’s impressed by all that? I mean, if the idiots who win that show can go up, how hard can it be? It’s not a dog team to the Pole.”
“Five o’clock,” said Alexi, already standing and in motion toward the door and the end of the day. “See you tomorrow.”
Oscar said goodnight and shut down his computer, then he cleaned up the papers spread on his desk and filed them in the right drawers, sighing at the left behind chaos of Alexi’s own desk. He checked that the drawers were all locked, his own and Alexi’s, in case someone came wandering in; Oscar assumed and had for years that somebody ran through the office at night with a vacuum because the carpet had maintained a consistent level of dingy without giving over to filthy for as long as he’d worked in that basement. He checked the drawers in the archival cabinets where neither he nor Alexi ever had cause to roam, nor had Slotkin in the course of most weeks and months. Once, though, a few years earlier, Oscar had consulted that cabinet and its crisp, yellowed pages for details on brick manufacturing trends from Bylot Island—he needed to explain why the region’s largest brickworks had relocated to North Cornwallis—and in the course of that journey into BIP’s material past had discovered something surprising. In a fat, brown folder of pages, maps and records and lists and diagrams, he found a full accounting of the Jeannette, of her ill-fated voyage in search of Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld and his own vanished ship Vega. The details of the voyage didn’t surprise him; like any Polar enthusiast he was long familiar with DeLong’s abandonment of Jeannette near Wrangel Island after she froze into the pack ice. He knew how her crew had been scattered, wandering over the ice, but also how they had first tried to drift, to let themselves be stuck fast and slide toward the Pole on slow currents, only to have their ship sink and leave them stranded.
He knew because it was the unexpected drifting of DeLong and Jeannette that gave Nansen his vision, to build a ship intended to freeze and to drift, a ship meant not to fight for its own motion or set its own course but to equip its captain and crew for a long, patient wait. The kind of deep patience the Inuit call quinuituq, another word Oscar tried to work into conversation whenever he could. And for Nansen it had worked out so much better; rather than lose his ship he brought Fram safely to port with such stories to tell about months doing nothing in ways that meant everything.
He knew because Fram and her patient journey, her passive quest, was Oscar’s own favorite of all the Polar excursions. He admired Peary and Franklin and all the others, of course; he admired his American forebears with the pride of any government worker of any grade, but Nansen was the explorer who meant the most to him, the one whose words echoed loudest in Oscar’s mind from all his re-readings of Farthest North.
But that wasn’t the point of what he’d found in the filing cabinet, in that old folder full of old pages left behind by Wend, according to the handwriting inside. What he’d discovered was an account of the Jeannette, yes, but not quite the way things had happened: Wend had rewritten the voyage and the aftermath of its loss to the ice. He’d created records to show all the crew had come home, those who drowned in a launch and those who wandered to their death on the Siberian tundra alongside DeLong. Wend had filed tax returns and love letters written after the fact, he’d made accounting claims and real estate deeds and applications for library cards, as if none of those men had been lost on the ice. As if they’d all come back for long lives. Wend had filed obituaries for each of them, deaths by cancer and car crash and fire, but not one of them frozen up north.
Oscar had never mentioned those files to Slotkin or to Director Lenz or to anyone else. Certainly not to Alexi. He’d checked the database, though, to be sure Wend hadn’t put all his rewritten sailors in there; old paper in the back of a drawer was one thing but in the database, in electronic form with the long reach of wires, someone might notice and who knew where suspicion might fall. But sometimes, like that afternoon while locking up for himself and Alexi, he checked to make sure the folder was still where it belonged, whether it really belonged there or not.
Finally, using an old handkerchief kept for the purpose and left behind by a predecessor of his predecessor, so long ago the handkerchief itself sometimes came into productivity lectures as an inspiration in its own right—the subservient ego, the selfless sidekick and all of that; the bulb’s Matthew Henson, perhaps—he reached up to straighten the lightbulb left swaying by his partner’s departure before leaving the office himself, though he wondered, as always, if it would start swaying again when he’d gone. Would the residual heat left behind be enough to keep that faithful underground sun in motion?
Oscar climbed the dark stairwell from BIP’s basement into the lobby of an unremarkable building housing government departments unknown to all but the interchangeable bureaucrats working in them, and in which he’d spent all of his working life beginning with an internship during college. Weights and Measures upstairs, BIP in the basement, the Division of Agricultural Categories on the third floor, and some others he didn’t know because in all those years Oscar had never once taken time to read the whole orientation board