Girl in Ice(7)
Her shiny, non-Ativan’d self nearly knocked me over.
“This is huge for us. Competition is brutal for any assignment in the Arctic. We’re all killing ourselves to be chosen, you know? We’ve been in Antarctica once but never Greenland, and even better, it’s such a remote island, never really explored before.”
“Being in the lab all the time gets tiresome,” Raj said. “I’m jumping out of my skin half the time.”
“Same for you, right?” she asked brightly. “Don’t you leap on the chance to study languages in the field?”
“Absolutely.”
“Boarding for Group A,” an exhausted-sounding voice droned over the loudspeaker. I looked at my ticket: Group A. My last chance to run. To escape back to life as I knew it: circumscribed, safe, terrifying. As Nora and Raj turned toward the gate, I told myself, Take deep breaths so you don’t vomit. Keep your eyes on the floor. Just follow Nora and Raj—along with dozens of others who are clearly not the least bit afraid to board this plane.
Don’t think.
Just walk.
Our footsteps echoed on the corrugated metal floor of a long, gray umbilical passageway into the plane. The small digital recorder where I had downloaded the girl’s twenty-eight-second vocalization rested in my jacket pocket. I reached in to hold it, the heat from my hand warming the narrow plastic cylinder. With every step, I told myself, This is why you’re going to keep on walking: this girl needs your help.
Steep, narrow stairs led to a vast, poorly lit space, like a hollow whale made of steel. A domed ceiling soared far above. Chained-down parts of polar stations, machinery, stacks of cut wood, even snowmobiles, jammed the center aisle. Berths fitted out with army cots bolted to the floor flanked the mountains of gear, a sleeping bag rolled tight at the base of each, but no seats. Passengers—either in military gear or suited up for polar conditions—mulled around, trying to get comfortable. Those used to this arrangement promptly claimed their spots and laid out their belongings. Nora and Raj grabbed a berth; I snagged the one next to them. A few people immediately got down to the business of sleeping, some women but mostly burly, suspendered men in skullcaps bundled in their sleeping bags, faces wind-bitten and red, arms folded against remembered cold. Others lay with their heads propped up on one elbow, reading, or: headphones on, iPads out. I wondered what they were reading, or dreaming about, or working on; what were their reasons for traveling halfway around the earth?
We blasted off into the night. Without windows, it felt surreal, as if we were in a rocket ship hurtling to Mars. I bit an Ativan in half and chewed it like candy. Marveled at everyone around me who appeared to be in a state of utter indifference to the fact that we were shooting off into the sky carrying enough equipment to birth a new world on another planet. Again I wondered why I hadn’t told anyone except my father where I was going; again concluded that it seemed impossible to say I was headed to Greenland and not talk about the girl who had thawed from the ice.
Nora and Raj curled up together on their cot under a sleeping bag, every now and then whispering to each other as they read by headlamp. An hour later, Nora was asleep on Raj’s chest, her paperback spread-eagled on the sleeping bag, his arm around her, the other cradling his head. He gave me a little smile as he glanced over, eyeglasses glinting in the dim light, then went back to his book. They seemed altogether smitten with each other, and I envied their intimacy.
Shivering, I curled up on my cot, searching for comfort in the drafty space that smelled of crankcase oil, bad breath, and warmed-over chicken noodle casserole—supper served in a TV dinner–style tray distributed to us by pimpled recruits who looked barely high school age. I freed my cartoon-orange government-issued parka from my pack, balled it up, and stuffed it under my head for a pillow. A symphony of snorers held sleep at bay, as did the grinding roar of the engine that kept hundreds of tons aloft.
Hot in my hand: a quarter-sized, heart-shaped piece of lead, formed in the gizzard of a loon in the lake where Andy and I spent our childhood summers. Loons ate fishing sinkers thinking they were fish, dying as a result. He’d found this one in the skeletal remains of a loon along the shore. He gave it to me for my birthday—our birthday, really—when we were ten. At the time I said it was a weird, sad present, but he told me that everyone loved loons and that the heart shape was a sign that it was time for us to love them back.
I’ve carried it with me ever since.
* * *
AS I BEGAN to pore over my language books, I was reminded of the complexity of West Greenlandic. Most words in this language are composed of multiple elements called “morphemes,” word parts that often create “sentence-words”; the longest stretches to over 200 letters. Nouns are inflected for one of eight cases and for possession. Eight moods as well as the number and gender of both the sentence’s subject and object inflect every verb. Subdialects spring like weeds. Translation? Sure, I had all my downloaded dictionaries and American movies with Greenlandic subtitles, but in all honesty, I felt screwed. The learning curve seemed impossibly steep.
Fresh cracks on my fingers throbbed. The thin red lines looked like nothing much in the dim light, but often woke me at night with pain. I rummaged for my salve, which gave me a few moments of relief.
To distract myself, I scrolled through images of tiny West Greenland coastal towns––many with fewer than three hundred souls—barren, rocky hillsides dotted with small, brightly painted wooden houses, the great Greenland ice sheet in the distance. In the past, delicacies included fermented meat or fish and fermented seal oil, which apparently tasted like blue cheese. Seal eyes were a treat, as were the half-digested stomach contents of walrus, and fully formed chicks in their shells. I reminded myself of the reason Greenland was called Greenland. One theory held that when the Vikings discovered Iceland, they fell so in love with it they wanted to keep it a secret, so they gave Greenland its attractive name, hoping to lure explorers away from Iceland and to this nearly seven-hundred-thousand-square-mile block of ice—two miles deep at its center—ringed by black, craggy mountains that shot straight up out of the sea.