How High We Go in the Dark(9)
At night I wrote to Clara in her journal, instead of watching The Goonies or The Shining for the umpteenth time. Most of the researchers had dispersed to their own pods as the quarantine dragged on, as winter storms limited our research to the domes. The outpost alcohol and cigarette stash ran low between supply drops. Some took on new hobbies—learning how to play chess, crocheting, drawing, magic card tricks. Yulia was sketching a group portrait of the entire team. I opened Clara’s notebook one night and wrote YOU WERE RIGHT on the interior cover in big bold letters, circled and underlined.
Dear Clara,
It’s strange to think I’ve started to build a life in the same place I saw as your escape from home. But you saw something else, and I think I understand now why you never could rest. It wasn’t about us or a job or all the little things we call a life. You saw a future of dead soil and dead oceans, all of us fighting for our lives. You had a vision of what life would be like for future generations and acted like the planet had a gun to our head. And maybe it does. I was always so proud of you, but it took Siberia, a quarantine, and the mystery of a 30,000-year-old girl to help me realize that. Maybe tonight I’ll look at the stars and make up a new constellation for the both of us, a woman standing at the precipice of a great chasm. I’ll be here with you.
Love,
Your father
Sometimes, late at night, Yulia and I overheard Dave and Maksim talking in Russian as we were finishing our evening game of chess in the common room. They tried to be covert, but voices ricocheted off the walls around here. She’d translate what little she understood around the scientific jargon—video conferences with medical and government officials, reports that a strain similar to the Batagaika virus had been found hundreds of kilometers away in soil and ice cores. But no one had gotten sick and so maybe we were all okay. Perhaps we possessed an immunity to the illness deep inside of us because some of our ancestors had fought the virus. Dave reiterated this to us all: unless we’re taking shots out of lab test tubes or snorting infected amoebas, we shouldn’t be overly paranoid.
“But they’re still going to keep us here,” Alexei, the mechanic, said. “They can’t keep us here if nothing is wrong with us.”
“Actually, they can,” Dave said. “Right now, we’re their best bet for learning more about the virus.”
We looked at the amoeba samples under the microscope every day. Maksim and Dave explained any changes, how the cytoplasmic structures inside them had begun to disintegrate. We watched a rat injected with the virus inexplicably slip into a coma.
“It’s like the virus is instructing the host cells to serve other functions, like a chameleon—brain cells in the liver, lung cells in the heart. Eventually, normal organ function shuts down,” Dave explained. “There’s still no reason to think any of us are infected, though, or could be infected.”
“There’s also no reason to think that we’re not,” Yulia said. “You said you haven’t seen anything like this before.”
“We should have left it alone,” one of Maksim’s assistants said, pointing to Dave. “Everything will be your fault. I have a family. We all have families.”
Later that evening, Maksim assigned everyone to dining and common area groups.
“If you can’t be civil with each other, this is the way it has to be,” he said. “I will not tolerate arguments. We have enough to deal with right now.”
Lately, I can’t help but think about all the times the team was covered in mud and water from the crater, of the jury-rigged clean lab, the respirators that probably need their air filter cartridges replaced. I question Dave’s decision to inject the virus into a rat, one of history’s most notorious vectors for disease. We’re told to report anything out of the ordinary. We’re told the quarantine is to be extended and to expect supply drops every two weeks. We’re told biohazard medical teams will be sent if necessary. I fall asleep every night video-chatting with my family, telling fairy tales to Yumi: And they all lived happily ever after. I wake up half expecting to find something wrong—a fever, a stiff neck, a rash. I examine every inch of my body in the mirror. We are all waiting for nothing or everything. I dream of going home and holding my family, telling Yumi that her mother has saved her. I dream of the last trip Clara took with us, flying over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, watching the last remaining wild caribou migrate. When Dave tells me he has a splitting headache, I tell him to take his own advice and not jump to any conclusions. But I tell him this while standing across the room. When Yulia says she has a stomachache, I tell her to drink tea. We’ll be okay, I say, but I see the fear in her eyes. Dave tests positive for the new virus with both saliva and blood samples. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to help Yulia. In the real world, people comfort themselves with ignorance, politics, and faith, but here in the domes only hard numbers matter. She has stopped running, her portrait of the research team left unfinished. We keep telling ourselves we’re going to complete our work and go home—some days I even believe this. I put on my daughter’s snow gear, take the dogū figurine with me, and walk out onto the tundra, picture Clara there beside me beneath the aurora. I don’t take the ATV. I walk the mile to the crater’s edge. I imagine the virus and anything else the ice has kept hidden from us being sucked into the figurine, its stone belly filled with all that can harm us. I tell my daughter I love her and throw the dogū into the crater, waiting for all that has been unburied to be retaken into the earth. I walk back to the outpost. I can barely breathe.