China Mountain Zhang Read online

  When I look outside the window, I don’t see whales, I see dark. This place isn’t even in my Umwelt. Skimming across the ice with Jim I look out across the empty land. It has been a full moon for six straight days. It never sets, never rises. Sometimes it’s east, sometimes it’s north, sometimes west. It’s hard to believe we are on earth.

  We go farther away from Borden Station than I have ever been. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, Jim has done this before, we’ll get back. I could walk back across the ice if I had to. I realize that this morning I don’t care. I’m too tired of it all to care. I am along for the ride.

  As we go Jim explains that the ice we are on is called ‘fast ice’ because it is shorefast, meaning it’s attached to the shore. We’ll cross the lead of open water and then we’ll be in ‘pack ice’ which is ice that’s floating. Ahead of us the ice changes abruptly from white to black. We come closer, the ice beneath us shading from blue white under the moon to gray. Behind us a long streak of darker gray marks where the floater has crossed, and then we cross to the black ice. Jim shouts, “The lead!” over the sound of the floater. We’re over open water. Across the open water I see more ice, rough and tumbled, not like the ice we just came over. Floating free. As we cross I see that between us and those mounds is a flat skirt of ice. Big flat gray plates that have ridden up over the edges of other big flat plates so they overlap. “Nillis ice,” Jim explains, “when it does that it’s called ‘finger-rafting’.”

  Why?

  Jim turns the floater west and we run along the lead for about twenty minutes. He’s watching his location on the board and when it satisfies him he cuts the motors and together we manhandle one of the pick-ups-with their pointed noses and tail-fins they look like old-fashioned missiles-and heave it over the side. It disappears into the water, heading straight down to anchor in the bottom and monitor the area for animal life. Jim jams the floater back into forward and makes a wide turn that kicks up the black water and we head back the other way, east. With the full moon hanging above us we can see quite clearly, but it’s hard to tell how near or how far things are. I know we came over a kilometer across open water, but the ice shore could be just twenty meters away.

  Jim cuts north towards the pack ice, but we run for over twenty minutes before we reach it, then we’re on the flat sheets. The floater skims. There’s no snow, this far north is a desert, it rarely snows. We ride over a lip of bluish-white ice and then it’s like riding rough seas as the floater bounces over the terrain. Jim runs fast but steers carefully, the floater could ram a spire of ice. We rise over a lip-

  A stomach lurching drop of about a meter and a half and we are in a lead. I yelp and grab and Jim looks surprised. He turns us sideways in the lead and slows down. After a moment he sees a gap in the pack and we’re headed north again. This time we go a little more cautiously.

  I do not say anything. Jim does not say anything.

  We are on the pack ice when Jim says, “This is close enough. Cut fast, the pack is running east.”

  I climb out and he hands me the cutter. There’s no sensation of movement, the pack feels like solid land. “How fast are we running?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says, “pack ice runs irregularly. Don’t worry, the floater will keep us oriented.”

  I wasn’t worrying, but when someone tells me not to worry, then I wonder. I want to cut a well of about a third of a meter, it will take a few minutes. I set the cutter and start working while Jim hauls the pick-up out onto the ice.

  I cut through three-and-a-half meters of ice before I reach water, that’s pretty far for a cutter because I can’t go down with it. My arms are tired from suspending the cutter above the hole. Jim heaves the pick-up into the hole and lets go, we hear it splash below.

  “One more,” he says, “let’s go.”

  I climb in after him. “Is it in open water?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  I can only hope.

  Off across pack ice, but slowly because the leads we find close up in front of us. The wind is high and as we watch the narrow leads become gray. I have never seen water freeze as I watch. I am not cold, not in my suit, but I can feel the wind hit me.

  Jim is careful, we mount ridges of ice slowly. He calls this ‘close pack,’ and watches the location on his board. It feels to me as if we are going diagonally and I ask if we are going south. He says no, that the pack veers about thirty degrees off the wind. He skips us over narrow leads, running us fast enough that we don’t have time to sink before we hit the other side. Finally, near a lead, he stops.

  “Not open water,” I say. I don’t like cutting through this.

  He shakes his head. “Make it quick, we’re drifting.

  “Could we heave it into the lead?” I ask.

  He squints, looks back down at his location on the board. “Yeah,” he says, “we could.”

  I climb out and he passes the pick-up to me, then while I hold the nose and he holds the fins, we set out under the night sky. We have to go slowly, the footing is uneven and we have to climb over boulder sized chunks of ice. The edge of the lead is not even like the bank of a river. The lead is almost a meter below us and the ‘edge’ is an irregular slope about a meter wide. The lead is gray, nillis ice that gently rises and falls. The ice looks like grease. Because I suggested using the lead rather than cutting, I go down the slope, gingerly, supporting the nose of the pick-up. I wedge my feet against pieces of ice and say, “I’ve got it.” I take the weight of the pick-up, bent awkwardly towards Jim.

  I feel as if I have over-balanced, my feet go out from under me, I hit the ice hard enough to knock the wind out of me. Then I am under water. There’s no air in my mask, which has shut off to keep the water out, and the suit is not made to insulate against ice water, so I feel the cold. I surface and flail for the edge, Jim is holding on to the ice, and I keep failing to reach far enough to grab the edge.

  Get out, my mind is screaming. The slush is thick and grey and it sticks in clumps to my faceplate. I am not thinking that I will get out. Always before, when something happened, I have been afraid I would be injured, that it would be a long time before things would be okay again.

  I am thinking, this is serious. I am thinking, I am not going to be okay. I realize, I don’t care. Startling thought, that, I don’t care. The worst that can happen is dying. The cold makes it hard to move, to swim, and I have half a notion to give in, but I am not sure how. If I give in, if I stop fighting, what do I do, tread water and look at Jim? Stop treading water? I flail and fight and watch myself as if from a great distance. I am trying to get out because it is too embarrassing not to. The truth is, I am not sure how to drown.

  “Zhang!” Jim keeps shouting. I finally grab something. I can’t get out, can’t do more than hold on. For a moment Jim doesn’t move, then he scrambles down and grabs my arm. I can’t get leverage to get out, he can’t find enough purchase to pull me out, but he keeps pulling and sliding, and I keep reaching for something to hold on to, and finally manage to get halfway out. My body is suddenly heavy, the way it feels after being in the water, and Jim helps me get the rest of the way up.

  “The lead shifted!” Jim yells, although my mike is working fine and I can hear him clearly. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” I say, still feeling as if I am watching myself. “Where’s the pick-up?”

  “It’s in! Are you wet?”

  I’m cold, and I feel coldest around the waist. “No,” I say.

  “Are you okay?” He says again.

  “Yeah,” I say, “just cold.”

  “We better get back to Borden,” he says. We make better time going back across the ice than we did carrying the pick-up and climb into the floater. I am curious about this not caring. I am aware that it is not a good thing, but it is a lot better than worrying.

  “Damn,” Jim says, “that was freaky! The lead shifted, I mean they do that, you read about it happening to Eskimo hunters, but I’ve never se
en it happen. It just moved farther apart, like a goddamn earthquake. I saw you thrown in, just thrown in, wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it, and if I hadn’t grabbed that chunk of ice, I’d have gone right after you, and we’d never have gotten out!”

  Jim talks except when he has to concentrate on the floater. I say, “Yeah,” when I need to. I have nothing to say. The lead got wider, that’s how I fell in. The lead opened up. It occurs to me it could have as easily closed.

  Now that I am out of the water the suit is beginning to keep me warm again. My strange mood lifts suddenly, I am not the watcher anymore, I am Zhang, sitting in a cold ARC suit, wondering what it would have been like to have tried to come up for air and found only ice. My teeth start chattering. I realize I can’t go home. I want very badly to go home.

  By early December I have stopped studying. I always do. I do not like to study, I always tell myself I should, but then after a few weeks, I stop. Always before, I have slowly gone from studying five nights and going out two, to studying three nights and going out four, to not studying. Always before I have said that if I didn’t have any distractions, I would study. Now there is no place to go, but I don’t study. I sit at the window and look out at Lancaster Sound. Sometimes I watch the Arctic foxes, trotting along with their short legs nearly a blur of motion, and often after I see the foxes I go to the cafeteria and get a cup of coffee, sit and talk with Janna, or Karin, or Jim. But mostly the landscape is empty except for the slowly unfurling cliffs of the aurora borealis, glowing lavender and pink and pale green above the blue ice and snow. I see my own reflection in the window, so I turn off my lights and sit in the dark. I loose track of time. I discover that it’s possible to listen to outside noises, and then the outside comes into my room. The wind is so constant that after awhile I don’t hear it anymore, and then there is nothing to hear.

  I am not adapting well, I know.

  Once in awhile Maggie Smallwood comes to ask me to come watch a rec or a vid. ‘Corin is showing the rec he’s put together on polar bears,’ she says, or, ‘It’s a vid from the States.’

  So I go, and sit. If I can sit on the end I say I am tired and leave early. When Maggie traps me in the middle, then I have to stay to the end.

  I am tired. All day when I am working, I want to sleep. I think about going to sleep. But as soon as I get back to my room, I am tired but not sleepy. The clinic sends me notes to come lay under the lights, but when I lay under the lights, there is nothing to do but study, and I can not bear to think of my engineering text, so I stop going.

  In my room I think about what I am trying to do. I am twenty-seven. I am thinking of trying to pass an examination to University, so I may go to China and study engineering. Okay. Say I work very hard this winter, I study all the time, I pass the examination. Then I would go to China, where everyone wants to go. Old Mother China, where there is possibility. I would study for four years in China, away from New York, in a foreign place-granted I am Chinese, well I look Chinese, and I speak the language, but I have never been to China. But I do this for two years. Then I have a choice, either try to stay in China, where I can get a good job, maybe become well off. Or come back to New York, where I will be able to get a good job.

  All of that work to make a little more money. But I will still be Zhang. I carry myself where ever I go, and it is myself I want to escape from. I hate myself. I hate this place. And I find it is very tiring to carry hate all the time. So I sit and listen to the night on the Arctic Tundra, defeated before I start. And sick to death of all of it.

  I remember reading about the first crew at Canalli Base on Mars, how they suffered from depression. I tell myself it’s only dealing with an unfamiliar environment. But mostly I sit in my room surrounded by a wind I can’t even feel.

  Five of us go out to Halsey in the big floater, Jim, Maggie, Janna, Eric and me. I am almost finished with the construction on the first level, but all I can think of is the immense amount of work needed on the second level. I’ll be gone before the second level is ever completed.

  “Look at that ice,” Eric remarks, referring to the ice piling up on the west side of Halsey Station. It is a lot of ice, but I cut Halsey free not too long ago (how long ago was it? Maybe sunset? A month?) I feel the implied criticism. “I’ll take care of it,” I say, and get out of the floater before anyone else. I go straight for the cutter, and wait for everyone to go downstairs, then back out of the warm light into the night. I start to work on the ice, which will come back again. And next winter, another tech will cut away the ice, and it will grow back. Each year they will cut away the ice, each year it will grow back, and eventually, when they no longer use Halsey station, they will stop cutting away the ice, and it will erode the station away, and then there will be nothing here but the flat plane of ice, moaning with the cold.

  And I am here, and it makes no difference. I have built part of this place, and someday it will be gone, so why am I here? I turn my back on Halsey Station and score wide shallow cuts in the ice. I cut Chinese characters, ‘Wo zai jar,”I am here. And then I use the cutter to smooth them over until it is smooth as glass, polishing away the traces.

  “Zhang?”

  Maggie is standing on the tower, lit from underneath by the light. She is faceless behind her face mask, hidden in her ARC, but I know her size and shape, her voice. It infuriates me to see another faceless person in an ARC suit. The Arctic makes people things. I do not answer her, but make abrupt, choppy cuts in the ice.

  “What are you doing?”

  I think the wind and the stressed ice sounds are answer enough. Then I think, damn it, I want to be in the wind. So putting down the cutter I take off my mask, pull back my hood. The wind is so cold it makes my eyes tear, the air is so cold it hurts to breath, much colder even than going into the water. I open the seals, pull the top off. I don’t care if I’m cold. The pain of the cold seems like the right feeling, seems real. I pick up the cutter and make a cut.

  Part of me cannot believe what I am doing, but I have had enough, I want them to know I have had enough. “It’s all shit!” I shout at Maggie. “This base, the polar bears and whales! None of it matters! We don’t frigging well belong here! We are nothing! Nada!” Maybe I am posturing, but here in the wind I do not feel that. I cut through the ice, to the water underneath, a smooth shhhiffffzzz, as the laser hits water and vaporizes it. I start to cut a trench, burning along, but I cannot concentrate, so I throw down the cutter. I am talking, talking, talking, talking, but what I am saying does not seem important. Some of it is English, some of it is Spanish, my mother’s language. I am talking to Maggie. I am talking to myself.

  I am talking to the ice, and I am saying over and over, “I have lost my frigging mind, do you understand? I have lost my frigging mind. I have lost my frigging mind.”

  Maggie comes over and takes my arm and says, “Come inside. Come inside.”

  At first I think, no. But then I realize I am cold, and that I really want to, so I let her pick up my pull-over and the cutter and we go inside. Now she talks and I am quiet. “It’s nothing,” she says, “it happens in the winter. Come inside, have something hot, have some tea. The Eskimo call it perlerorneq, winter depression, it happens when it gets dark and you’re unhappy, but now it’s over, you’re okay, you’ll be okay. I’ll make you a cup of tea, very sweet, here put this back on and get warm.” To Jim and Janna, “Zhang is tired, I’ll take him back, he’s not going to work today. Don’t worry, he’s okay now.”

  Words wash over me, I don’t care. I don’t care, except I am so tired that I could weep. I wonder if I am going crazy, but I think that if I am, at least I will go home.

  Maggie takes me back, and takes me to my room. She sits with me on my bed and tells me, “Right now, you are just sick of life, perlerorneq, but you’ll feel better.”

  “I’m sorry,” I mumble. But I have a feeling now, not anger. Underneath my tiredness I feel grateful. “Thank you,” I say.

  “Go to sleep,” sh
e says.

  I sleep for sixteen hours, through the day and the next night. And when I meet everyone the next morning for breakfast, I am embarrassed, and they are all kind. I cannot look at Maggie Smallwood, so I don’t.

  Janna says, “It’s hard for all of us, but for you, well, you didn’t even want to be here.”

  “I don’t know what happened to me,” I say, penitent and confused. I go to work, and they keep me working on the third level, close to them, and they talk to me often.

  Maggie talks to me, matter-of-fact. “When they had trouble with depression in space, they asked the Inuit Eskimo and the Greenland Eskimo about perlerorneq. It’s like a circuit breaker. Now the Eskimo train research crews in space ways to deal with it. I learned about it in school, in my Native Studies course.”

  My unhappiness is still there, but it is gray, not black. I go back to the full spectrum lights, I study a little. Janna begins to teach me calculus on Monday and Wednesday nights, to keep me studying. I have taken calculus, and she is good at explaining, so it is easy. I do not talk much to Maggie, except to say hello. I am ashamed of my behavior towards her, but what is there to say?

  So December passes. Christmas, a package from Peter, sweaters in the most outrageous styles, with little capes; all the rage, he writes. I give one to Karin. We exchange gifts, sing songs. It’s not so bad.