its occupants on a small scale. To stick to what he already knew.
If the basement of BIP was stuck in a bygone era of quasi-Soviet green and gray with all its whites yellowed, then the building’s lobby above was capitalism’s future as seen by the past: glass cubes, soaring ceilings sliced by odd architectural angles so whispers bounced until they were shouts, and steel tube furniture with plush pleather square cushions that squeaked and exhaled when you sat. But no one was sitting when Oscar emerged from the basement and no one was standing still, either. Every body in that bureaucratic cathedral was in motion from the elevators and stairwells en route to the exits: brown suits, blue suits, jacketless shirts and black skirts, all flowing together toward the revolving glass doors and bright street outside.
Cell signals and wifi couldn’t penetrate the fire doors and blast ceilings down to BIP’s basement, but once in the lobby Oscar pulled out his phone and went online to check the North Pole cam as he always did. The ice was calm, with only a slight wind across it stirring clouds of snow every so often, and as he watched he relaxed, his fingers at ease against the grained texture of his phone’s case; he’d seen cases of actual wood and had nearly bought one, but the plastic wood seemed more practical, more durable, yet more palatable—closer to the compasses and map cases of real wood the great men relied on—than the dull, gleaming alloy of the naked object itself. A lens flare in the far off northern sky trailed purple and orange orbs like a comet and pockmarks like footprints led away from the camera toward the haze of horizon. They weren’t actual footprints, just cracks and holes piled with snow and slightly lower than the ice sheet around them; they appeared often within view of the cam and Oscar knew why, but they still suggested footprints as if he’d just missed someone up at the lens before he logged on. He liked to imagine he had. He liked to imagine his own checking in had almost coincided with the arrival of some expedition though he would have known if a real expedition to the Pole was underway—it would have made the blogs, or shown up in the automated news searches that emailed him whenever the Arctic was mentioned.
Still looking down at the screen of his phone, Oscar merged with the building’s bureaucratic foot traffic and was ejected into the glare of Washington, DC’s lingering Indian summer and the heat hit him hard. The ice sheet went spotty, awash with dark stars for a few seconds as he stood blinking on the sidewalk, surrounded by his fellow government workers all blinking, too, many of them looking at their own phones—perhaps at the Pole cam, who knows, but more likely squinting at email or text messages or traffic reports; they all worked upstairs where cell signals reached and wifi worked so they weren’t catching up on a whole day’s passage as Oscar was. They weren’t taking their first look at the ice sheet in hours.
A text message popped up on his screen, from Julia hours before, telling him she’d be late after work, don’t wait up, some of her friends from a karate class she’d been taking were going out. It happened more and more often, whether karate class or late meetings or last-minute trips, and Oscar suspected he and his wife had more conversations by voicemail and text than in person. He’d begun to keep track one month but after a couple days’ record keeping the data were already sufficiently dispiriting to make him stop.
Oscar liked texts and voicemail. He liked the way he could come out of work, step into a signal, and they’d all come at once. Like it had been for Peary and Nansen and all the others, sailing into port after months or years in the ice, or running into a whaling ship carrying letters, and catching up on what had happened elsewhere only after the pressure of the moment had passed. A welcome soaking after a drought, all those letters and all that lost time at once, though the possibilities for failure were deepened: to be the crewman with no letters waiting, the days Oscar emerged but no messages pinged on his phone.
Beads of sweat ran from under his hair down his forehead and into his eyes, and he wiped them away with a sleeve without taking his gaze off his handful of cold northern desert. He held the phone at arm’s length and almost horizontal to lessen the glare as the shadow of a bus stopping in front of him fell upon both his eyes and the screen. The ice gleamed white as the marble of the city around him, the monuments, the columns, the glare of the Capitol dome, and each car window and side mirror flared silver as it grabbed every available particle of light from the air and condensed them, concentrated, into a thousand small suns that made walking down the street a minefield for the eyes. Everyone spilling out of those buildings, himself included, did their best to avoid any reflections and every few seconds a glistening government employee walked behind the extended screen of Oscar’s phone, picking at his or her sticky clothes or wiping sweat from a face, partly hidden behind the snowfield as they passed, a partially disembodied explorer passing across the top of the world and it jolted his eye when they didn’t appear at the Pole.
A souvenir vendor stood by his overloaded shopping cart hawking inflatable Washington monuments and cheap sunglasses and T-shirts bearing logos for the CIA and FBI and NASA and, in a stack that had either started out smaller or sold very well, for the IRS, too. Often, daily even, Oscar forgot there was so much light in the world while working in BIP’s basement under that singular bulb. It was easier in winter, when the Pole cam on his phone was dark after work and all day, when the sun had already set over Washington by the time he emerged for his commute home. But regardless of season, regardless of light, it was disorienting no matter how often he did it—and he’d done it for years—to pop out of the past back into the present at the end of a day, from a department where nothing changed and time passed backward and in the abstract, always alterable after the fact, into a present where the past existed only as a sales pitch for the future.
Eyes adjusted, he walked toward the Metro in the same direction as everyone else save the few who hailed taxis and the fewer still headed for private cars in parking lots and the odd duck from Agricultural Categories who day after day hauled his bike up and down the stairs to his office rather than lock it to the bike rack outside like all the other cyclists who worked in the building. Oscar held his phone close at an angle that let him keep one eye on the street, watchful for curbs and crosswalks and fellow commuters, while the other could watch the ice sheet for action, until he descended into the station.
His shot sliced only an inch or two wide of its mark, close enough to kill the creature regardless, in time. But off by enough to keep the caribou bleeding for hours which he couldn’t stomach. So when it staggered away the hunter crossed the distance between their two bodies and pushed into the brush on its trail, following breadcrumbs of blood. He hadn’t come north to leave things undone.
He heard stunned legs stumbling, an off-kilter body not heeding commands, bumping trunks and tripping over itself. Despite injury and blood loss and no doubt confusion the caribou managed to stay ahead, to always be on the far side of a gully when the hunter arrived or up the first leg of a switchback with him at its foot.
The day dragged on like that but he followed. Each extra meter or mile made him feel worse for the creature, let him borrow more of its pain, and the notion he was preventing its suffering by driving it on a long chase became more absurd the longer it went. But this was his mess, his mistake, and he would make things as right as he could.
He was thirsty but didn’t drink because the caribou hadn’t stopped to drink either.
He was hungry but the trail mix and pemmican remained in his pack.
He walked while the creature kept walking.
And there it was, close enough to take a new shot—not a retake, never those, but a chance to finish what had taken too long and what, had he known, he would not have begun.
The caribou wobbled below him on a scree slope then buckled onto front knees; the side facing the man was matted and running with blood. Its tongue draped low from far back in the mouth and the auburn chest heaved as the hunter took the clean shot he should have taken before.
It was done.
He slid sideways through the loose stones, stopping himself beside the carcass, then looked back up the slope wondering how he would haul that still-warm weight to the trail. He took hold of one foreleg and one hind, dug in his heels, and tried to work his way up by pushing with one foot at a time, alternating as if pumping some awkward machine, but the animal had hardly shifted before the hunter was spent.
He