The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [24]
He uses more kerosene than he can afford, buying extra lamps and keeping a circle of them burning around his table as he works, getting up to crank the gramophone, to set the kettle to boil, to stamp his feet, change his gloves, examine his blood-shot eyes in the mirror propped above the basin—anything to distract him from solitary nights twenty hours long. Inside his moat of light, the maps he draws have the smudged and amateurish look of those he produced as a novice, their quality sacrificed to disruption, inattention, his sudden inability to sit and focus as the work requires.
But what does it matter? Tracking storms in order to forecast the weather: isn’t this just another conceit? If hail destroys crops, if drought produces fires, if another hundred ships are lapped up by the tides—well, tragedy is humankind’s one talent. Without elements to oppose, they invent their own disasters. Look at Europe, digging herself into rat-infested trenches.
Bigelow paces and sighs and yawns. He opens the door to the stove and kneels to watch as a log collapses into coals, sits on the floor with his chin propped on his knee and lays out game after game of solitaire, never winning but starting over and over and over again. He reads through his crate of books and then reads them again, failing to enter their pages, tumbling through lines of words only to fall back into his desolate station, with its door hinges furred with frost, nail heads bristling with ice crystals.
Not that the cold is unmanageable, not along the coast, anyway, where temperatures may rise or fall thirty degrees from one day to the next. There are dark mornings when he opens the door and the air he inhales is so frigid it makes him gasp and cough, when urine freezes before it hits the ground. But there are reprieves as well, warm enough that the sun’s flattened arc brings icicles under the eaves. On these days it’s almost suffocating in a bed piled with blankets. And Bigelow is spending too much time in his bed, unsatisfied lust consuming his attention as it hasn’t since he was sixteen.
Somehow the Aleut woman has deprived him of his body as well as her own, leaving him numb to his own touch. He runs his hands over his chest and doesn’t feel them, jerks his flesh until it produces orgasms as sudden, wet, and unmemorable as sneezes.
Perspiring under layers of wool and skins, Bigelow can’t guess if the clock on the table reads nine at night or nine in the morning. Whereas masturbating used to be, like shaving or breakfast, a ritual performed once each day, providing him another means of distinguishing one dark hour from another, now it has become the opposite, a way of losing himself in time. Between orgasms he sleeps and has dreams of unrelieved tedium, plotless dreams of counting nails, winding thread on spools, chewing tasteless mouthfuls of gruel.
When the heavy sun appears, rolling sullenly along the horizon, it reveals landscapes of unutterable splendor, ice glazing every twig, turning gravel to diamonds, garbage to ransoms. On the walk down to the inlet, Bigelow holds his arm before his eyes, dazzled behind his snow glasses, treading carefully on the polished path. But what he described as grandeur in last year’s letters to his mother and sister now strikes him as threatening, the inlet’s water black and violent, heaving under a mantle of splintered ice.
Even if he felt like making the effort, there’s nothing in walking distance that might pass for a Christmas tree. In the past year, Anchorage has consumed all the forest around itself, milled or hammered or incinerated every usable branch within miles, leaving stumps, like fields of gravestones, in the weird blue twilight of noon.
And it isn’t just in winter that the light is wrong. No matter the season, the Alaskan sun is never overhead. A different incarnation entirely from the frank and workaday midwestern sun of Bigelow’s childhood: Calvinist, forthright, up in the morning to show him his chores,