China Mountain Zhang Read online

  There are no edges to the landscape, no tourist lodges, no sidewalks, no ships, no aerials, no wires, no planes, nothing but gradations of white and blue to black. It has nothing to do with me. It is perfect, sterile, dead. I think I love this landscape. I know I am afraid of it.

  I dress in pants and sweater and go to the cafeteria to get coffee. I will be working with Jim.

  Jim is already there. He is wearing a pullover that looks like the top part of an atmosphere suit which it is, complete was couplings. He has the hood pushed back. It makes him look like some sort of sea miner, or satellite tech, not like a scientist. He’s big, with an open face and a kind of easy, aw-shucks way with people that emphasizes the dumb-tech look.

  “Morning Zhang,” he says. “You prefer Zhang?”

  “Everybody calls me Zhang,” I say.

  He nods, slurping coffee. I sit down. He is eyeing me over his mug. “Nice sweater,” he says, in that funny way people compliment you when they are really saying, ‘I don’t know what to make of what you are wearing.’

  “Wrong, huh?” I say. It’s just a sweater. It’s woven in a sharkskin pattern, black, white and gray. It’s good enough to wear out drinking or something, but it’s still just a sweater.

  “No, I mean, I just never saw one like that. It’s not really sharkskin, is it?”

  Of course it looks like sharkskin. “No,” I say. “Wool and synthetic.” Sweaters are big at home right now. What will he say when he sees the wine sharkskin sweater with the leather ties and mirrors? Obviously he will say nothing because obviously I will never wear it here. Maybe I’ll send it back to Peter and he can get some wear out of it.

  The woman with the tough face and the curly hair walks in and Jim says, “Hi Janna.” I think, remember, Janna is the one with the curly hair, Karin is the feminine one.

  Janna says, “Morning Jim, Zhang, I love your sweater! Is that what they’re wearing in New York?”

  Ah hah. Overdressed. “Well,” I say, “It was when I bought it last winter.”

  “Karin will want one as soon as she sees it. But you’re going to freeze.” Janna stops and puts her hands on her hips. “Don’t you have any winter gear?”

  For the first time I think I jack Janna. Janna is tough, practical, no nonsense. That’s her mechanism. Maybe Janna and Karin are a couple? “This is winter gear in New York.”

  “Well it’s not winter gear here. You’re supposed to be issued an ARC.”

  ARC. Artificial climate suit. What the rest of us call atmosphere suits. “I just got here,” I say. “Maggie showed me my room and then the caf.”

  Janna looks at Jim, Jim shrugs. “He can’t go out like that,” Janna says.

  “We’ll have to find him something.” Jim frowns, “He couldn’t wear mine, it’d be too big, and I’ve got to wear it. Maybe Daniel’s. Is Daniel going out?”

  Nothing to do but ask Daniel. We tromp to Daniel’s room, carrying our coffee mugs. Daniel is asleep, after all it is only 7:45. And dark enough to be midnight. Sunrise isn’t until almost 10:00 a.m. I have that disoriented sense of being up at the wrong time.

  Daniel says I can use his ARC if it fits. He hands it to me and I shuck my sweater. The air inside the station is cool but not cold. I work out a little, haul tools around all day, I can be casual about being bare-chested, especially next to Jim who looks big but undefined. If he worked out I could never compare with the width of his shoulders. Under his ARC what does he look like? Forget all that for six months, Zhang. It’s a small place, people are in each other’s laps. I am a monk in the service of research, and Jim is not my type anyway. I tug the ARC over my head, pull the hood off my hair. It is not a good fit, but it will do. It’s too warm.

  Jim nods. “Better.”

  Janna nods, too.

  Daniel says, “Wear it in good health.” He hands me the leggings and shuffles back to bed.

  I look at Janna and Jim. “I think I’d prefer to put these on in my room.”

  Jim grins. “Yeah, probably.”

  I dress, feeling like I’m playacting, and meet Jim at the caf. We walk down to the pool. Not a water pool, a vehicle pool. There’s a cutter unit that looks like it’s barely been used, it’s not even dirty. I check it to make sure the seals have been broken, but actually it has been used before, so I load it in the back of the yellow floater. Then we load a couple of crates of pre-fab and I climb in the floater with Jim.

  “Have you ever been under the ice?” he says.

  Sure, I think to myself, I spend all my time under ice, usually up around Macy’s. What the hell does he think? New York is a glacier? I don’t know what he means ‘under the ice.’ I don’t understand these people when they talk. “I just got here,” I say.

  “It’s not so bad,” he says.

  Something never to believe, right up there with ‘It tastes just like chicken,’ is ‘It’s not so bad.’ If it wasn’t bad, they wouldn’t have to tell me it wasn’t bad.

  We rumble out into the darkness and I can feel the force of the wind hit me and the floater, when Jim sets the hover he has to head the nose into the wind, but in my suit I’m not cold. If anything I’m a little warm. It’s pretty. The sky is black, the land is white. It’s so big and empty that it’s scary. I wonder if I’m agoraphobic. Of course, I’m a city boy. It’s not the space that makes me nervous, it’s the absence of human reference. We head off, the nose of the floater about forty-five degrees the left of the direction in which we are actually heading, so we are kind of skidding sideways. I glance back at the station, expecting reassurance, but we scoot over the lip of the big hill down to Lancaster Straight and the station looks smaller and smaller. So I look forward again, which is slightly less unnerving than watching safety recede.

  Jim tells me about where we are going. We’re heading for Halsey Station, which, when it is finished will be the first of a series of stations that will monitor belukha whales. It’s under water in the summer, under the ice in the winter. “Why did you take this job, the chance to study in China?” he says.

  “Nobody said anything to me about studying in China,” I say.

  “That’s what the guy before you was out here for,” he says. “He said your government wrote it into a hazardous contract, if you renew your contract you get some kind of chance to study in China.”

  I didn’t really read the contract. All right, so you should always read a contract. “I’ll have to look,” I say. I don’t believe it. They wouldn’t give somebody a chance to study in China just for spending six months here.

  “So why did you come? You don’t seem very interested in the great outdoors.”

  I wonder what I seem like to him. He’s a scientist, here because he wants to be, he must get pretty tired of techies who want to do their six months and go home. “It was my third alternate,” I say. “I had to take it.”

  “You mean your government made you come here?”

  “Not exactly.” I explain about alternatives.

  “Were you at all, you know, interested?” he asks. “I mean I know it’s not New York, but like you said, it’s only for six months and it’s a change, you know.”

  “Yeah,” I lie, “I thought it would be interesting. And I thought it would make me study for the engineering exam.” He doesn’t want to hear how horrible I think this place is, he choose to come here. And I should study for the engineering exam. There isn’t much social life here.

  “You should check out that education thing,” he says. “Kevin only had to work a year and now he’s in Guangzhou.”

  Stay here a year? It would be worth it if I could study in China. But I’m sure that it’s more complicated than that, or that the regulations have changed. Madre de Dios, stay here a year?

  “There’s the station,” Jim says. We coast out onto the ice and he points to something that looks like an old-fashioned lighthouse. The ice is run with cracks, long spiderwebs. And as we get closer to the station I can see how the ice has piled up around it. “Shit,” he s
ays, “we ought to clear that ice.”

  The ice has ground against the west side, mounting the side of the tower. We’d need a light-hammer. I mention that.

  “There’s one in the station,” he says, “we have to clear ice every couple of weeks.”

  We park the floater on the ice and walk across to the station. Without the blow of the floater I can hear the ice groaning all around me. It groans like metal under stress, but there’s hectares of it. Wind moan and ice groan, black sky and white blue ice in the dark. We climb slabs of ice to metal rungs set in the side of the tower, and I follow Jim up to the top where he opens a hatch and we see the lit stairs curling down at our feet. He gestures for me to go first and closes the top after us. The wind stops and I realize I’ve been holding my shoulders tense. They ache. The stairs are a circular metal staircase in a reinforced concrete tower with a ribbon light down the wall, but ugly as it is in here it’s better than out there.

  Our steps echo as we go down. Underneath is a large space, maybe twenty meters across, with windows for the outer walls. It’s bare unfinished concrete floor and ceiling except where someone has started finishing one of the walls in porcelain white. “The actual shell is raconite,” Jim says. “We’ve got this level wired so the lights come on whenever anyone enters but then there are two more levels below us. The middle one isn’t as finished as this one, the bottom is labs. I need some help setting up some stuff for a lab, then there’s a building protocol you can use to do some work on the place while I run some tests. Ah, the hammer is under stairs, there’s only one.” He’s embarrassed that there’s only one, he doesn’t want to tell me to do the ice myself.

  “Well,” I say, “that’s what they’re paying my inflated salary for.”

  He grins, relieved. He’s a nice guy, big and wooly as a bear. “It won’t take you too long,” he says. “Just break up the top stuff and be careful not to cut too deep, remember there’s water underneath. I’ll be on the first level.”

  “Meishi,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Meishi, you know, ‘no problem’,” I say.

  “Is that Chinese?”

  I guess it is, I never thought about it. Everybody says meishi. Except Canadians.

  I hoist the hammer, brand-new, just like the cutter, but a little more used, and climb back up the steps with it. When I open the hatch the wind is still going and the ice is still groaning and creaking and my shoulders bunch up again. I close the hatch behind me and wonder if people get accustomed to this. Man is an adaptable animal, I tell myself, you’ll get accustomed to this. I sling the hammer across my back with the shoulder strap and climb down. How am I supposed to use a hammer on a substance I have difficulty standing on? Cleats would help. Remember when back at the base to ask someone about ordering some kind of mountain climbing boots. I wrap the contact round my wrist and jack into the hammer. Ice is freaky stuff, it’s not like concrete because it’s got a weird surface and the density is different. It’s hard to judge how much headway I’m making, first I think I’ve done a lot and then when I look I haven’t done anything. Then I really whale and suddenly I’ve cut the surface too deep and the hammer is skipping all over the place.

  Someone who knows what they’re doing would finish a lot faster than I do, but in an hour I’ve cut away a lot of ice. I don’t know how close I am to water and that makes me nervous, there are all these cracks on the ice and I’m not sure it’s safe, don’t people get killed out here? I walk away from the tower out on the groaning ice-I almost think I can feel it move-to the floater and pull the cutter out of the back. I walk farther out, about thirty meters away from the tower and jack into the cutter. I focus the beam as tight as it will go and aim straight down and in no time I’ve cut a hole straight through the ice to water. One meter before I register a change in density. The ice is about a meter thick. Well, a meter of ice isn’t likely to dump me into Lancaster Sound. But if it stress fractures it would shatter spectacularly and I’d hate to be there when it happened.

  When we get back to the base I’m going to do some reading about ice.

  In the evenings I study engineering, and a letter to the Bureau of Education brings back the information that workers under thirty-five years of age who take hardship jobs for one or more years get preferential treatment when applying for school in China and qualify for loans to help with their education, if needed.

  To go to school in China. Chinese citizens can take the entrance exams, and ten percent of the seats are open to overseas Chinese and foreigners by competitive exam. If I could get a B.A. Engineering in China I’d be set. I’d be able to get good work anywhere, in New York, maybe even in China. I could probably get a job and stay in it, I’d be assigned good housing, maybe after a couple of years I could live in Manhattan. Talk about luck, like winning the numbers. I begin to request math texts from the library so I can prep for the entrance exam.

  Most days I spend at Halsey Station doing construction while everyone else checks recordings and makes observations. Maggie Smallwood tells me everything is going to happen in the spring, when the belukha and the bowhead mate. She says the Sound is just constant activity then. Even now the lights attract plankton and the plankton attract all sorts of fish. Everyone is nice, everyone is friendly, but distant. They’re scientists, they have a mission. I’m a six month techie, and although no one would say it, working class. Muscle rather than brain.

  Still I hang around sometimes with a cup of coffee and listen to them talk about what they are doing. When Janna needs someone to label bottles I’m happy to oblige. When Jim’s atmosphere suit-excuse me, his ARC-seems to have mic problems, I find the fault in the receiver and use one of the labs microtools to repair it. Daniel can never keep all of the tools he needs at hand, so I hang a toolholder over his lab table, like chefs use to hang pots and pans in a kitchen where they’ll always be in reach. I hang a rack over Karin’s and rig it so she can raise and lower it so her samples will be out of her way when she needs the workspace. Soon they’re asking me to do little things for them and I’m busy all the time.

  Then we go back to the base in the dark, and the evening is dark, and we wake up in the morning and it’s dark, and since we spend most days under the ice at Halsey the only sunlight I see is the blue glow filtered through a meter of ice. Every couple of weeks I have to hammer the ice free of the tower and usually replace ladder rungs where it’s torn them away-I never do get my mountain boots-and although I can’t get used to the groan of the ice I look forward to it because I do it at noon, when the sun is above the horizon and the ice is blinding white and I feel surrounded by light. If it’s after ten and someone mentions they left something on the floater I’m the first to volunteer to get it.

  “Do you miss the sun?” I ask Maggie Smallwood. Maggie looks Chinese to me, but she doesn’t act Chinese. She acts Canadian.

  She thinks a moment, looking at the black windows. “Yeah, some. But after summer it’s nice to have some darkness.”

  Summer. In July the sun never sets. “Is it warm in the summer?” I ask.

  “Sure,” she says. “There’s grass and flowers and baby caribou. You’ll see it. Wait, you won’t, will you, you’ll be gone in April.”

  “I don’t know,” I say, “I have to find out about this school thing in China.”

  “Great,” she says abstractedly, then, “look at that seal!”

  Outside the window a seal is coasting past, gray and sleek with a neat head like a cat’s, looking in at the lights with it’s great, almond eyes. Maggie turns to me, beaming from her round Eskimo face, “Isn’t he wonderful?”

  I’ve never seen a live seal before. “Yeah,” I say, and then without thinking, “Do they all look so sad?”

  She looks at me oddly but doesn’t answer.

  Early in November we stand on the ice at 11:54 and watch the sunrise with the rest of Borden Station. The edge of the sun’s disk flashes above the horizon for less than a minute and then sets. I watch the red sk
y darken. Tomorrow the sky will redden as if the sun will rise but then darken. This is the evening of a long night. Dawn is in February. The Arctic landscape is beautiful at night.

  It just isn’t meant for human beings.

  Maggie’s people have lived here for generations. She says I shouldn’t worry about the darkness, but suggests full spectrum light therapy, so once a week I go to the clinic and get thirty minutes of full spectrum light. I feel foolish lying underneath the lights like a sunbather but the doctor explains to me how some people are more sensitive to light changes than others. “Do you experience bouts of depression in January?” she asks.

  According to Peter I experience bouts of depression if I miss a subway connection. “Not that I noticed,” I say, “but my friends say I’m moody.” I smile apologetically.

  She smiles back and says, “Why did you come here?” It occurs to me that in less than two months a lot of people have asked me that question.

  I study engineering texts under full spectrum lights wearing only my underwear.

  I work on construction on the first level and they work in the labs on the third.

  So I cope, and people are nice to me, if distant, and it’s only a year. It’s a great experience, back in New York I’ll be able to say, “When I was in the Arctic Circle… ” One day Jim says to me, “I’ve got to go out on the ice, want to come? I could use some help.”

  I don’t particularly want to go, I don’t want to stay at Halsey all day. It will be an experience. It will make the time go faster. So we load gear into the floater and take off across the ice. We’ll plant some pick-ups either in open water or drive them through the ice and then we’ll come back. It will only take the morning.

  Morning. It’s not going to be morning until February. I keep thinking of it as ‘dark in the morning.’ I find myself waiting for it to get light. The doctor prattles on about the need for something to focus on, a goal. It seems that the reason the scientists are less likely to have problems with depression is because they have an obsession and that orders their Umwelt, their self-world. We live in the same physical space but our feelings about it make us order it differently. Maggie Smallwood tells me that her ancestors used to be able to draw marvelous maps from memory but that their hunting-grounds were always drawn disproportionately large. That’s because in their Umwelt, those were the places where their lives were lived, and everything else was thought of in relationship to them. I think if Maggie had to draw a map, the largest place on it would be the open water where her beloved whales lived. Her whole life is organized around whales. Her lab is where she organizes her data on whales, so in a way, that’s where the whales are. If she goes someplace else, she’s away from her whales, out of her normal world. She would probably be homesick.