How High We Go in the Dark(2)

“Right,” I said, a little taken aback by his cowboy attitude.

“Some of our colleagues at Pleistocene Park, about a thousand kilometers east, have made progress reintroducing bison and native flora to the land. More vegetation, more large animals roaming the steppes packs the topsoil, preserves the ice below the surface—helps us keep the past in the past.”

I doubled up my gloves, pulled on my mask, and stepped through a slit in the plastic.

Annie rested on her side, fetal, on a metal table.

PRELIMINARY EXTERNAL EXAMINATION NOTES: Preadolescent H. s. sapiens with possible Neanderthal characteristics–—slight protruding brow ridge. Approximately seven or eight years old. 121 cm in length, 6 kg in weight (would have been approximately 22 kg in life). Remnants of reddish-brown hair remain at temples. Tattoo on left forearm–—three black dots surrounded by a circle punctuated with another dot. Body is covered in stitched garment–—likely a mixture of pelts. Seashells not endemic to the region woven into stitching–—further study needed.

The tissue around her eyes had shriveled, as if she were staring into the sun. The skin around her mouth had begun to recede, revealing a pained cry. I couldn’t help but picture Clara as a young girl, or Yumi, who was about this age, traversing barren plains in search of big game, stalked by giant steppe lions and wolves. I ran my hands over her clenched fists.

“Big fucking mystery,” Maksim said, coming up behind me. “Most of our research here is funded, in partnership, with the International Fund for Planetary Survival. We keep busy with soil and ice core samples and the occasional ancient animal carcass, but I’d be lying if I said all of us haven’t been distracted by Annie and the other bodies we recovered from the cavern. And of course, there’s the unidentified virus that Dave found within them in our preliminary samples.”

“Have you run any other scans, tested samples? The shells, for one thing . . .”

“From a small sea snail native to the Mediterranean. Trivia monacha. I mean, there’s evidence of Neanderthals and early humans in Siberia near the Altai Mountains as early as sixty thousand years ago, but nothing this far north. The complexity of how the shells are woven into the fabric is highly unusual. Honestly, this needlework would put my grandmother to shame.”

“It’s strange that Annie’s the only one with such clothing. The other bodies in the cavern showed evidence of simple fur cloaks. The station debrief file you guys sent over left me with more questions than answers,” I said.

“We’ve been waiting for someone to take up the task, fill in Annie’s story. Clara said she was here for the animals. She wanted to understand the Ice Age biome so we might re-create it. But it always seemed like she was searching for something else. She’d linger at the dig sites longer than any of us. And for someone whose job it was to study what was hidden in the earth, she spent a lot of time staring at the sky. I bet she would have seen Annie as part of her charge, too. She was always talking about how the unknown past would save us. For a scientist, she dreamed more like a poet or a philosopher.”

“Got that from her artist mother,” I said. As a child, Clara would spend entire afternoons in her tree house creating—her teachers called her a genius and we encouraged her as much as we could. She wrote reports on nebulae with crayons. We’d find lists of the constellations she’d spotted, alongside mythologies of those she’d made up, the cousins of the Pleiades, the dipper that was neither big nor little but just right.

“I think I can see that,” Maksim said. “It’s normally easy to get to know people around here, but Clara kept to herself. It took some sleuthing through her belongings to even find your contact information.”

“She was always about the work,” I said. Our eyes both fell to Annie, whose cry seemed to fill the silence of the lab.

Maksim nodded and said I should get some rest after the long trip. He told me Clara’s belongings were in a box in her sleeping pod, waiting for me.

When I departed for Siberia, my granddaughter, Yumi, sobbed at the airport even though, at almost ten, she insisted she was fine. Miki asked me again if I was absolutely sure about doing this. At least wait a few months, she said, so you’re not heading into winter. But I knew that if I stayed, I’d delay indefinitely, and the specter of my daughter would have faded from this faraway land.

I never could picture the place where Clara had chosen to disappear in her final years. When Yumi asked Miki and I where her mother was, we would point to a map, search Google Images for the Batagaika Crater and northern Siberia. My wife helped Yumi make papier-maché dioramas of the region that they populated with tiny toy bison, dinosaurs, and 3D-printed facsimiles of our family, on an expedition where time didn’t matter.

“Your mother loves you,” I’d reassure Yumi. “Her work is important.” And part of me believed this, but I’d also given Clara an ultimatum the last time we were all together, telling her she needed to come home, that it wasn’t fair to Yumi or to us. Apart from the postcards and the occasional video calls with Yumi, I hadn’t spoken directly to my daughter in over a year.

Before I realized her research outpost was an international effort, I’d imagined Clara roughing it in a yurt, falling asleep beneath animal fur, cradled by the light of the Milky Way. I saw now that her sleeping pod was a three-by-ten-meter cocoon, nested into the wall of one of the domes. Lined with thermal fleece, it had LED lighting, bookshelves, a fold-away worktable, and cargo netting for storage. I searched a duffel of her belongings that I found tucked into the netting—clothes, toiletries, one of her disaster journals, a personal diary, an old iPod, a few artifacts she’d procured on her travels—but the item I’d most hoped to retrieve, Clara’s crystal necklace, was nowhere to be found. I hoisted myself onto her bunk and removed my hiking boots, peeking under the mattress and inside a ventilation grate, anywhere she might have hidden her pendant for safekeeping. My feet had baked during the long journey, and the cheese-like odor filled the bunk, mixing with the stale scent of cigarettes and sweat that permeated the rest of the station. I lay back for the first time since leaving America and searched through Clara’s iPod, stopping at the Planets suite by Gustav Holst. The triumphant horns of the Jupiter movement transported me to happier times when Clara’s wonder was still caught up in the stars, like when she insisted her third-grade solar system project had to be at the correct scale or got into trouble at science camp for inventing a story about the lost star sister of the Pleiades that was once visible in the ancient African sky. What did Clara think of when she looked at the cosmos dancing above the gray of the tundra here? I grabbed her diary and began flipping through it, trying to hear her voice again.