he knew he deserved for dragging this out.
He tried again to haul the caribou up with no greater success. Now his arms were bloody, his boots and pants, too, and the animal’s thick, sticky fluid had soaked through his socks and run into his boots and oozed now each time he put weight on his feet.
One final attempt, pushing with both heels at once plus the boost of a keening yell that bounced back at him off the opposite slope. The weight of the animal dislodged all at once but instead of climbing toward him it slipped, freed from whatever had held it fast on the scree, and it pulled the hunter down with it; he let go just in time, barely keeping his own bloody body from following the other, the body he’d killed, off the edge of a cliff and onto the rocks far below.
The falling corpse carried with it the waste of a life, the waste of a day, weeks of meat lost for the hunter, his family, his village. He would return from his hunt empty-handed and his wife would tell him it was okay, they had enough in the larder to last, but the fan of wrinkles at the edge of each eye where for so long she’d squinted against harsh northern glares would tighten as it always did when she worried but wouldn’t say so.
This place. All its promise. Too much to leave now they’d come close to achieving what they came north to do, so close to cutting their ties to the world and untangling themselves from its net, but still. If there was something, just something, this place would give up to them more easily… if they found some resource they could sell back to the world, minerals or diamonds or gold, uranium or oil or even a way to send south the steam from the ground that powered their few contrapted machines, he wondered if the villagers would be willing to do it despite their ideals and the pronouncements they’d made upon packing up and heading north.
It was fortunate, in its way, that their excursions all over these mountains had given them nothing but berries and meat. Nothing to tempt them back into the web of the world. The decision was always already made for them.
The hunter leaned his head to his knees, cursed, and sat until his breath returned. Then he crawled up the slope, regained the trail, and walked back in the direction he’d come from toward where the mountains gave way to the coast and to home.
But it wasn’t a waste for everyone, that falling corpse. When caribou struck ground at the base of the cliff organs ruptured, bones cracked, and flesh tore. Before the thunderous waves of its impact reached the far point of their rippling across yellowed grass, flies lit on the syrupy blood of the wounds the hunter had provided them with and among the dark runnels congealed in the animal’s fur after walking so long with its heart pumping hard.
Those flies were already laying their eggs in rich layers of fat and of flesh before the body had cooled. Microbes descended out of the air and rose from the soil to penetrate every delectable niche. Foxes crept closer; a bear raised its nose into the wind with a snort and a sniff and shifted course toward the corpse; mosquitoes as large in actual fact as their southern cousins only sound in a dark, quiet room drew blood from the carcass and its four-legged diners alike.
How long would it be until every scrap of that carcass was broken down and devoured, and how long after that before every vestigial scrap of its generous energy had been exhausted in smaller bodies then in concentric tiers of even more bodies that fed second-proboscis through those? Generations of bacterium and black fly would rise and fall on that caribou’s haunches and a civilization of maggots and worms would reach the proportions of legend, an empire of gristle and blood in those vast dormant lungs, persisting through skirmish and snap-freeze and epidemics of food poisoning, perhaps someday half-remembered in wonder as another species might speak of Atlantis.
Elsewhere icebergs were crumbling. Elsewhere all signs were the Arctic was dying but here in the bloat and decay of a corpse there was life after death as millions of miniature stories were written in blood, an overflowing database of past, present, and future on the broken bones of a man’s failure.
4
Underground again and out of the heat so more comfortable for it, on the platform and shoulder to shoulder with other government employees at his own grade and above or below, Oscar awaited a train. Across the tracks on a wall hung a huge poster advertising the TV show Alexi had mentioned, To The Moon!, with its big silver slogan, “Who will conquer the greatest frontier?”
He shook his head, sighed to his scuffed shoes, and wondered how anyone could get so excited about something that’s all automated, the work done by computers, while women and men who could be anyone or even no one sit in a box and wait to arrive so they can turn around and go home. There’s the science, of course, he wouldn’t disparage that, the behind-the-scenes unsung work of professionals like himself, but why pretend there’s more to it? Why pretend it’s real exploration when it’s mostly a video game? The astronauts mere avatars for self-directed machines.
But the show was a hit. It had turned out to be the solution NASA needed for its falling budget, a way of reinstating itself in the public eye to a degree BIP could never withstand—if taxpayers knew what they were paying for… if taxpayers knew BIP existed at all. Sure, NASA had sold the country on space all over again with their reality show, but it wasn’t the work of explorers, just moderately attractive showboats who made good television. Oscar would have liked to see any of them try to steer a dog sled or hack ice from the hull of a ship with only an ax to avoid being crushed. There’s no autopilot to bring a lost sledge back to camp and no computerized temperature control in a parka or boot accidentally plunged into a subzero sea.
He’d said all that to Julia the evening before, when she mentioned being excited about the new season of To The Moon! while watching a recap of the last, and the night ended with the two of them in separate rooms. It hadn’t come up in the morning but later, on the subway to work, he’d texted, “Sorry.” She hadn’t replied, not directly, but she hadn’t not replied either—she’d told him she’d be out that night, after all, so she seemed to still be speaking to him, more or less—and it wasn’t the first time one or the other of them had been wrong about something at night, had been stubborn or stupid or angry and taken it out on each other, then gone on the next day as if nothing had happened. They’d been married long enough for that to work.
Still, Oscar had expected her to text back with “PF,” their own private code for when he’d gone too far and forgotten not everyone shared his own polar fever. Julia had picked up the habit in college, shortly after they began dating, of letting him know he’d become awkward and was alienating the people around him by dramatically announcing, “Pee-EEEH-eff.” They’d laugh, no one else knowing why, and he’d make an effort to talk about something else. Later, at dinner parties and work events she brought him to, she might pass a slip of paper marked “PF” across the table or flash the sign language for those two letters (the only sign language they knew). One Christmas he had the two letters embossed in gold on a durable card as a stocking stuffer, so she could hold it up in his direction whenever necessary without drawing too much attention. But more than once her subtle gesture across a table or amidst a group conversation had backfired into the two of them laughing together and making things more rather than less awkward for everyone else before they slipped away for some time to themselves, to act on the energy of that inside joke.
Lately, more likely than not it wasn’t a card or a note but Julia saying, “P fucking F, Oscar,” and leaving a room as she had the previous night. And Oscar not knowing if he should follow her to say he was sorry or stay where he was, unsure which she would want, if either, and which choice would just make things worse.
The train arrived in a blast of hot air and hissing, jerking to a stop between his eyes and that awful poster. He stepped into the tube of the car and was lucky enough to find a seat. The doors snapped closed, the next stop was announced, and he waited along with everyone else.
Space travel might as well be the subway.
Diagonally across from him, in the sideways seats by the door, a newspaper fluttered and over one folded corner he caught a pair of dark glasses, a dark gray fedora, a trio of curled fingers pulling back the page but as soon as he looked in their direction the fingers released and the paper wall was rebuilt. A moment later he looked again and the