The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [25]
The Alaskan sun remains unknowable, every day a new prank, pulling along its bows and parhelia and other odd, errant optical paraphernalia, too lazy and distracted to achieve altitude, rolling along the tops of the mountains, infusing the icy fog with a strange and sullen greeny gold. Halos and sun dogs, auroral curtains of purple and pink, livid green coronas trailing ribbons of white, airborne ice devils that whirl from red to blue, secondary and even tertiary rainbows, prismatic explosions and ricocheting arcs of light, the basin of the inlet on fire, the sky dark, twinkling. From his station windows Bigelow has seen all manner of phenomena he would never before have called weather.
Because light bends toward the cold—toward cold’s denser air—falling temperatures summon vistas that remain invisible during warmer months. Every day at noon, Mount McKinley marches south, flanked by lesser, pinker peaks, whole landscapes yanked back up over the horizon. Like sliding off the edge of the world into sleep, Bigelow thinks, only to be jerked back to the glare of consciousness.
Bigelow’s breath clouds before his face, hanging still in the windless winter air. He tries to picture himself in the landscape before him. He turns, making a full circle, trying to impose an image of himself on what he sees, but he can’t. The scale is wrong, or the sky, the way it presses down on the land, and its emptiness, birds as evident in their absence as when they crowded out the sun. Can a man exist here? Can Bigelow?
He hasn’t mastered the required optimism. Everywhere else he’s lived, he’s taken his presence for granted. Here, in the north, alone now, he finds himself not quite credible.
HOW CAN IT BE he has no friends in Anchorage? He’s not, after all, an ungenial person. He had friends in Chicago, in Seattle. University friends. Bureau friends. But, having come north alone, he finds that here he works without company, eats alone, has no money to spend in those places where men gather to talk: taverns, pool halls.
And besides not being much of a drinker or a fisher or a trapper, he’s not a gambler, either, not really. The only bet he’s ever made was the one on the schoolteacher, an ill-considered flirtation, and one that failed. In a town where gambling would guarantee companionship, Bigelow cannot make himself understand a bet as anything other than the invitation to throw away the few dollars he has. He believes he’s not lucky; he’s sure he wouldn’t win.
He walks along Front Street, looking at clumps of men on corners and in doorways; they trade news about the war in Europe, usually, the loss of Russian labor, the inevitability of U.S. involvement. Sometimes he pauses in their midst; but feeling that he stops conversation, he tries to appear as casual in departure as he did in arrival.
What is it that he wants? Human contact, a person to talk to. But about what? Certainly not the weather, or his work. His work arouses suspicion in people, as if he were really only fooling the government into supporting some private crackpot pursuit. In winter, the punishments of climate seem to be of his devising. Even when his storm warnings are accurate, they seem to inspire more blame than gratitude. And on those days when his forecasts are wrong, he’s the target of jokes, enough that he takes the longer, less populous route to the cable office.
HE’S NOT SURE how it begins, can’t remember if something sets him off, or if, as it will seem to him afterward, rage arrives like a tornado or a blizzard, a storm whose antecedents might have been plotted, had he only known what phenomena to