Work Text:
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And even so, the Border hadn’t moved or apparently changed in 30 years. Still largely impassable, still essentially invisible until you were right up against it—could note its odd, diaphanous sheen that seemed to drip down through an unseen slit in the earth. Descending from nowhere, its origin too far and obscure to divine. They told him that within reaching distance it seemed to hum.
The first time Control saw it, even after concerted time reviewing the files, he vomited. Granted, they’d driven him up in the station Land Rover, jostling over every ounce of shale possible, so between that and the teeth-breaking chartered flight from Yellowknife, he was probably already nauseous. But getting there, stepping out, as close as they would let him, Control’s body knew immediately what he lacked the words to frame.
The head of labs who’d also come out reassured him nearly everyone had some physical reaction. “That’s what looking at an old god does to you,” she’d laughed, slapping his arm as he braced against the hood, spitting onto his new stiff boots and the carpet of rusty lichen.
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And now it was late November, and Control could feel the walls closing in. The heating was on the outs again, so the labs and offices had been issued space heaters. Control’s whirred anemically next to his desk. They had been warned not to set them too high, lest the whole station generator go down.
The cold made him unfocused and tetchy, but the two hours of daylight (and falling precipitously) made him insane. He’d been flown out in May, which had its own madness-inducing 20 hours of sunlight, but at least it was a madness bolstered by livable temperatures and featureless jogs to the shore.
The runs had tapered off, though, with the waning of the day, and an increasingly painful stitch in Control’s left side and arm whenever he would go for more than 20 minutes. The station medic could see nothing wrong, but then the tools available were rudimentary (and God knew he wasn’t dying, so why go to the fuss of traveling to the mainland).
All told, Control had failed. He wouldn’t have been posted to the Northern Reach if he hadn’t. For all that Central would curtly reassure him, Control knew better. It was a grand, global career failure that led one to positions like these. The kind one could hardly chart, made, as it certainly was, from a million unmarked mistakes. But damned if Control could put his finger on even one such bungle now, alone and freezing in a barely repurposed Cold War shed in the Arctic Circle. The previous director’s pothos was the only thriving thing around here, he mused.
Control rubbed the red joints of his hands with the idleness afforded satellite bureaucrats. He also couldn’t recall being so susceptible to cold. But then these past weeks he’d found it hard to recall with any strength or variety sensations from before he arrived on the island. Further madness of the midnight sun.
The pothos’s perked leaves caught the last direct ray of light, and seemed to hold it buoyant and hazy, even as Control watched the bright orange sliver cast on the office wall wink out. It was 12:33pm. The rest of the day now night. He was due in the interrogation room in 12 minutes. Control grabbed Aglooka’s file, zipped the parka he’d yet to take off, and headed out.
🌱
The Northern Reach was on the southern side of King William Island, 100 miles or so from Gjoa Haven (though they did have a barely passable airfield, so Control was denied the pleasure of meeting anyone from the island other than transplants). The station was a defunct Distant Early Warning Line site: two bulbous, unused radar towers, collapsing serenely into the dull grey landscape and three stilted outbuildings—one for barracks and living quarters (now largely empty), one for offices and storage, and the largest for the labs, which Control was meant to tour daily. As he trudged across the packed snow of the yard, shoulders up to the fall easterlies and left side twinging, he made a mental note to do that after speaking with Aglooka.
Really none of it was pleasant, though, thought Control with what he felt was admirable forbearance. Everything like setting bone spurs or chaperoning a toddler’s birthday. It all had to be a reminder, a mental note. Nothing was natural or easy here—even the doldrums of outpost routine which could otherwise be relied upon to move one through the days, for Control certainly could recall having been posted on the outskirts—Al Busayrah, Walvis Bay, a buggy estuary in the process of being incorporated into Tekong Island, &c., &c..
He climbed into the labs shed, hoping for the heat to be back at least here, where decades of samples from behind the Border were kept, ostensibly requiring precise preservatory climate conditions. But nothing more comforting than dead and slightly humid air hit Control’s cheeks past the door.
No one was around—no one ever seemed to be around—down either side of the entry corridor. Just the low hum of the generator vibrating the corrugation.
23 people worked at the Northern Reach, mostly lab technicians—a number far depleted from the government’s original intention for the station, 30 years ago, when the Border first came down. But too many expeditions had failed, too many expeditionaries coming back with rapid degeneration, aggressive sarcomas and tumors. Too many not coming back at all.
Control headed to the north end of the building where the interrogation room was sequestered (an unfortunate but necessary function of the agency once expeditionaries began to return not entirely as they’d left). A failure overseeing failures.
Behind the two-way glass he watched as Aglooka was led in to sit at the single table. He was unshackled, there being no meaningful reason to restrain him. He, as with the other returnees whose debriefings Control had reviewed for hours and hours on countless grainy tapes, had shown no aggression. But while the former Northern Reach expeditionaries exhibited a kind of unfocused placidity throughout their debriefings, Aglooka had what Control could only describe as the feral watchfulness of the skuas nesting at the island’s shore.
And in all fairness, Aglooka was not from the Northern Reach. Wasn’t even from this century, as far as the lab could tell. They’d picked him up entirely by accident. Often returnees surfaced close to their former homes—trying to get in their back doors, picking up mail at the post office—but their families usually turned them back in after a few days when it was clear something was off. Their speech would seem limited to pleasantries and repetition memories, and their body language still and undexterous. They would forget to pick up the children from school; forget they had children to pick up.
But the man previously known as Captain Francis R.M. Crozier—second to Sir John Franklin during the spectacularly failed expedition to chart the Northwest Passage in 1845—didn’t return home. Instead, he was found fifteen hundred miles south by loggers trespassing on their site at René-Levasseur Island.
At the time, Aglooka, as he insisted on being called, was dressed in the extremely worn remnants of a 19th-century naval uniform, carrying no provisions, and suffering from the early stages of scurvy and malnutrition. He refused (or perhaps couldn’t) tell the crew that found him how he ended up on the “eye of Quebec,” a massive, circular island in a massive, circular lake, formed in the impact cater of an asteroid, 200 million years ago.
I’m looking, was all Aglooka would say.
Canada has many annular lakes, Aglooka had told Control at one point in the long course of their mostly fruitless interviews.
“And what makes Manicouagan special,” Control had asked dutifully, wondering with little hope if they were actually getting somewhere.
The bitter star, said Aglooka simply, and by then Control knew he’d get no more from the man on that subject.
🌱
When Control replaced the Northern Reach director, he eventually realized the appointment came less from his credentials or proven management track record, and more from his availability on short notice.
According to her file, the previous director had insisted on being part of the most recent expedition, but had not returned from behind the Border. Control had never met her, and little existed to explain her life, let alone her interest in personally entering the incredibly dangerous and poorly understood Area under supervision by her organization. “She lost the thread,” as Central called it during one of their daily briefings early in Control’s tenure. “The Area affected her too personally.”
Would that we all showed such zeal for our jobs, mused Control, but immediately, as though he’d seen into Control’s mind, Central snapped, “Watch yourself, Control. You’re right up close to it now, and what you don’t know could fill a cesspit.”
“Yes, Central,” he had replied, blood in his ears.
“What you don’t know will consume you,” Central repeated, then said with a strange and patronizing vitriol, as though he’d upended a box of spy-advice fortune cookies and chosen one at random, “If someone seems to have changed from one session to another, make sure you haven’t changed instead.”
🌱
Aglooka was staring at the wall opposite him, placid as always. A man of medium build and medium stock (and from his file, medium accomplishment).
Increasingly, when Control closed his eyes for sleep, tuning in to the hum of the station around him, he would picture Aglooka—often in the interrogation room, occasionally as Control imagined him to have been when he was found by the logging crew: bedecked in tattered uniform, far from the open sea; wild and adrift. Control had never thought himself a particularly fanciful man, but of late he could picture little else.
And though Aglooka had yet to so much as glance at the two-way glass, Control knew he too was observed.
It was the constant feeling at the station, even in the solitary hours at his desk, in his bed. When he first arrived, Control had pulled over a dozen surveillance bugs varying in age, make, model, and functionality from the office and his quarters, and accepted that there were certainly more embedded in the architecture. Perhaps it was best to leave those anyway, he had reasoned. To play at ignorance as long as one could was its own kind of protection.
Control began today’s entry in the protracted ritual he and Aglooka had crafted. He went into the interrogation room and sat across from Aglooka at the lone table; he placed the file between them like a prize neither wanted; he folded his hands in a mirror of Aglooka to cultivate unconscious feelings of sympathy and openness between them; he poorly suppressed a sigh.
Good day, Control, Aglooka nodded.
“Good day, Aglooka,” replied Control, thinking of the pitch black outside. “Shall we?”
At your leisure, Control.
Control could feel a headache starting, right along his brow. Like distant heat lightning, seen across a hill-less plain.
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It couldn’t be said that Aglooka was actively obstructive—rather, he always provided just enough to Control to keep him at the Northern Reach and not packed off south to the agency headquarters, but never enough for Control to fully rule out the kind of gross memory loss suffered by the station’s actual expeditionaries. He could relate basic facts about the man he appeared to be, Captain Francis Crozier, and was generally cooperative, but in the weeks since Aglooka arrived, the interviews’ greatest revelation had been that time inside the Border seemed to operate on a different scale. To Aglooka, he had separated from the Franklin Expedition within the past 18 months, and made his way on foot through Canada, stopping at several annuary lakes—Lake Wiyâshâkimî, Gow Lake, and Pingualuit Crater.
This had some implications for the Northern Reach expeditionaries, and Central had been, as far as Control could tell, pleased with the revelation. But it had yet to explain how a man from a British naval journey nearly two centuries prior was sitting across from Control, alive and breathing (through his nose, with a slight whistle), when the grave of his crewmember, Harry Peglar, sat growing moss five miles to the east.
“Return to the point of deviation,” Central had wheezed down the crackling line that morning. “Push him.”
“I have pushed him,” Control replied, watching the pothos bob counter-rhythmically in the breeze from the heater. “If he doesn’t remember how he crossed the Border, he doesn’t remember. You can’t make a man have memories he never lived."
“Push him again,” said Central, and then the call went dead.
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“Please describe the last day you were part of the expedition.”
I have described that several times.
“Please describe it again,” Control prompted, the intent being that any new turn of phrase from Aglooka may be an avenue worth pursuing. He wondered how long he’d need to dance today before he could leave and do actual work.
Aglooka raised one eyebrow, which Control knew to be the extent of his emotional expression, though it was deeply chastising nonetheless. All other crew with me had succumbed to the circumstances, and I was alone at what I suspect to have been the 69th parallel on the island’s western shore. I made my way to a lake of some size, approximately two miles inland, which I judged to be of sufficient depth to likely spawn freshwater char. The ice had begun to break, as it was July, and I thought to use one of the sledges we had hauled from the ships, take it out into the lake.
“You must have been relatively hale,” Control interjected, “to haul a boat weighing nearly a thousand pounds.”
I was well enough, replied Aglooka, I took my time.
This had been his basic answer on the other occasions Control had asked. There had been some documented instances of Northern Reach returnees exhibiting immense feats of strength, but just as frequently they could be drained of all capacity.
But it all felt to Control like a city made entirely of cul de sacs, each looping back on the other—uniform, anonymous, endless. He had long ago given up the idea that if he did well enough at the Northern Reach—if he brought the station back in line, back to the peak of its performance—that he would be rewarded with Central’s position. That he could be the anonymous voice down the phone.
No, the role for him now was this man across the table—a lifetime of questioning strangers in small, windowless rooms. What had come before this no longer mattered, clearly.
At the lake I pushed the sledge until it began breaking the ice with its weight, Aglooka was saying, then climbed in and made my way towards the center. There I lingered, as the ice floes made netting difficult, and the char remained sluggish and far from the surface. After some hours, I felt a weight on the net greater than should have been possible. I assumed it was caught on some detritus or rock, and in my exhausted state while attempting to free it, I tipped the boat.
“And then what do you recall.”
The weight of the water more than the cold, replied Aglooka, though his affect was not that of a man remembering so much as reciting. The body cannot feel cold of that register, so it simply numbs on contact. Had I been able to surface, the air would have felt more stinging.
“And what else do you recall,” prompted Control, an actor moving his scene to completion. His headache was now beginning to move down the bridge of his nose and touch his left eye. He had begun to get such migraines when speaking with Aglooka more and more frequently, almost like an allergic reaction. He gave a dry little sniff and indulged in a moment of self-pity while Aglooka continued.
I recall the water was cloudy with the silt I must have brought up from the bottom, though I could not divine how deep was the lake. I recall the light from beneath the floes, like great dim lamps lighting a wall-less room. I recall drowning.
Having reached the end of his narrative, nothing in Aglooka changed. He stopped speaking as if a call had been dropped, a tape shut off.
Control felt he should have been used to it by now, but even with his growing headache still found himself perversely enthralled by the course of Aglooka’s speech, as if it came to him from through the air of untold classrooms, court halls, and white washed churches, down the course of history. As if it came to him from across a darkwood wardroom; from along a frozen quarterdeck. “And what do you recall next,” he asked.
I recall drowning, repeated Aglooka. Then I resurfaced from water into which I had not fallen.
“Pingualuit Crater,” said Control, “in Quebec.”
As you say, replied Aglooka, and then spoke no further.
Control resisted the urge to touch his palm to his eye. “Let’s go back. What did the drowning feel like?”
It felt like drowning.
“Have you had much experience with drowning, Aglooka?” Control said pettishly.
Enough experience, Control, replied Aglooka, and when Control looked at him then, there was a light in him so starkly different from what had been there a moment before that for reasons he couldn't fathom, Control felt a strong shock of irritation.
“This isn’t a joke,” he said, deciding to see how Aglooka would respond to frustration; ignoring that he was actually frustrated. He bit the inside of his cheek to prevent saying anything further.
I don’t recall more, Control, what can I say. Aglooka replied, raising a single brow. I think I would remember forgetting.
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His first evening as director—in May when the sun still slipped beneath the horizon but the night never truly arrived—as he was finally leaving for the barracks, Control found the faint outline of raised letters behind his office door. As though someone had written words then delicately retraced them with the same light blue paint of the walls. He wouldn’t have noticed a thing if the lettering itself hadn’t seemed to leave an after image in the twilight once he turned off the overhead fluorescent. Reading them was like looking away from a neon sign.
Control had not been briefed on any words on the director’s wall, and he had seen nothing about them in any of the files he had read and reread. This was the first indication of a flaw in his process.
He brought himself closer and closer to the wall, following the writing as far as he could see:
but time runs on time and starvation and the weakness carries me in across the gray regions and the soul’s dark night will slowly be lowered through me which is why I now fold myself like a muscle against the wet clay to press the flesh against the sleep-gland’s mouths and I will sleep now in my low body in the down and
And there it stopped. Control had stood there before the words for long long minutes, listening to the hum of the station’s generator through the wall, unsure of any meaning but with the immediate sense this was an ode to the plant on the director’s desk. That waxy, unkillable little pothos. He dismissed that quickly, however, as ridiculous, because, if anything, pothos were non-native. Should the plant leave the building—and were it to even survive—it would be invasive. And no one wrote odes to invasive species.
What he felt start to burn through him then, after his foolishness, was not fear, or even confusion, but the irritation he now felt in session with Aglooka. It shocked but did not surprise him—like falling into an Arctic lake and never coming out.
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Control reached across the table and slid the folder back towards himself for want of something to do. There was very little of value contained within it: written materials which, when read, were designed to trigger key responses, had the reader been subjected to agency hypnosis; maps of the Area and Border within King William Island; basic information on the life and career of Francis Crozier (a material reality based as much in the limited information readily available on a historical figure, as it was any Northern Reach interrogation tactic).
Control had yet to show Aglooka the file, in part because Aglooka had yet to show even the slightest interest in it.
Sometimes, at night, or at least in the part of the day when he laid in bed and ruminated—darkness present or not—Control tried to think of new ways to engage Aglooka. To consider weaknesses and exploitable points. But he found this harder and harder as the weeks dragged on.
Part of the difficulty was he had no one to discuss strategy with. Central merely asked for updates and offered no advice or direction (and more often than not berated him even for his successes). Another difficulty was Aglooka himself. Control knew he was a man in his early 50’s, knew he was of medium build, medium stock. Knew that he spoke relatively little, but when he did speak, some low thing inside the down of him made Control desperately want to listen.
But when he explicitly tried to think on Aglooka outside of the interrogation room, it was as though the man’s face was scratched from photographs. All that would come to Control were his new imaginings—Aglooka in rags, wandering the meteor’s island; Aglooka in full dress blues astride the groaning boards of an icelocked ship; Aglooka bending near him, face flush, weeping.
Control could hardly speak to the place from which these images grew. It felt to him now, after months in the white wastes of this station, as though the borders of his thought were increasingly porous; that the mind of another was seeping in through a living, slipping veil. That he must look away, look away, and be saved.
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It occurred to Control that he wasn’t entitled to Aglooka’s memories. That perhaps no one was. Inconsequential things could lead to failure; one small breach creating another. Then they grew larger, and soon you were in free fall. It could be anything. Forgetting to enter field notes one afternoon. Skimming a file you should have read with your full attention. Getting too close to your surveillance subject. Countless ways of losing the thread.
🌱
Control flipped open the file and thumbed to a random document: an area encompassing the Victory Point cairn, the grave of Lt. J. Irving, Terror, and four (4) additional burial sites of unmarked human remains… He played at reading for some moments, nursing his headache. He couldn’t end today’s session yet. It was barely 1pm.
“You said that all the crew with you had succumbed before you went to the lake,” he asked eventually. “Did you and Captain Fitzjames split the party at some point?”
Fitzjames had died long before that, Aglooka replied dismissively. The crew were split in mutiny after abandoning the ships. Crozier would never have intentionally divided the party had he maintained control of the situation.
Control looked up at Aglooka to catch the tail end of a sneer. “You’ve never mentioned mutiny before,” he said with genuine surprise.
It was an unpleasant business, replied Aglooka after some thought, then a thick silence followed. When it became clear Control was waiting for him to continue, Control could have sworn he saw Aglooka squint in irritation, but he did continue.
Crozier began the expedition as a drunkard. He remained one and worsening through the first year locked in. John Franklin died in the summer of 1847, and with no sign of breakup in the ice, Crozier folded himself further into his vices. The mutiny likely fomented during that time, as Crozier isolated himself, neglected his station, and gave daily governance of the ships over to Fitzjames and his lieutenants.
Control hadn’t read in any file that Crozier was an alcoholic, but in listening he began to feel the kind of distant thrumming, warming sense one had at confirmation of a truth already known.
But this is what Crozier surmised, Aglooka added. I can only relay his memories from that time.
Control sniffed irritably. His left eye was pounding dully, and his lips and fingertips were tingling as his migraine progressed. This goddamn useless, cryptic back and forth.
“For god’s sake, Francis,” he spit, then checked himself immediately. He had never once thought of the man across from him by that name. Madness of the midday black, it had to be.
“I apologize, Aglooka—but speak plainly.” He hated having to genuinely ask for clarification. The interrogator was meant to know the answers to any question he asked. “What do you mean, you can only relay his memories?” Control snapped his head side to side to try and shake the buzzing fog spreading out from his eye. A shadow flowered in the corner of the room, then dissipated.
But Aglooka remained silent, and when Control looked back to him, he wore such a tight expression of contemplation that Control nearly started in his chair. As he waited for Aglooka to continue, Control tried to sift through their conversation for what may have tipped some scale, but his mind was beginning to feel as cloudy as his eye.
I do not recall crossing the Border, as you call it, began Aglooka slowly, as though Control were an arching street cat, or trophy-pointed buck in the forest. I do not recall leaving any so-called Area of mystery which your ministry is quite obviously attempting to study, but about which you truly appear to know nothing.
Control began to interject, but Aglooka unclasped his hands for the first time in their interview to hold up a palm between them, calloused and ruddy, before continuing. I do not recall how I began drowning in a nameless lake on King William Island to resurface instead in a flooded ancient crater—to resurface in another lifetime. I know this is not my century, Control. I know this is not my home.
What I do recall— and here he took a great breath and looked, for the first time, to Control, as any ordinary and weary man would— is that Crozier purged himself of drink in the winter of 1848, and while in his foetid throes, losing much, something in him began too to grow. A new bud breaking from him, a twin egg’s yoke. This was the Brightness.
Something in Control hummed then—the same immediate sense of knowing which came over him reading the wall of the director’s office—
but time runs on time and starvation and the weakness carries me in across the gray regions and the soul’s dark night will slowly be lowered through me—
Crozier’s feverish state left him vulnerable, yes, Aglooka was saying, but receptive, too, in some way. All on the ships were vulnerable; all on the frozen sea. And all who were filled by the Brightness would be overwhelmed—save Crozier.
He paused now—less, it seemed to Control, for dramatic effect, and more in a small, genuine moment of understanding. Everyone save Crozier and myself.
The pressure behind Control’s eye and the spreading song through his body left him feeling insubstantial, hanging above himself with a feral readiness.
I was within Crozier from those weeks. Or, Crozier was within me. We were no longer as we had been, to put it simply.
The subject looked him fully in the eye, then, and Control knew that all these weeks he had been the one observed; that to bear the unfettered force of Aglooka’s gaze was a violence. Control began pinching the skin of his left hand to bring his faculties in line. Pain shot up his arm as though he’d been running. The stitch in his side began to bloom.
I was always Crozier, you must understand, Aglooka said, and his voice was no different than Control had yet heard, but still it pulsed in his ears like a feverish heartbeat.
I have always been him. I have his memories—I feel his chilblains and tremor from the Weddell Sea as if they were marked in my own body; I see through the smoke and close air in the Royal Society rooms to the men who never so much as read one of his papers, let alone contributed their own. I want the want he felt for the mixed-skin women and men on Pitcairn—a strange and solitary species, and all the more desirable for it. I know the number of horsewhippings he received as a boy. I keep his siblings’ names, all 12, incantatory in my mind, for they are my siblings, too—though their blood mixed with mine would be flush as oil to water.
Control was unsure of much he was hearing, as though Aglooka was speaking beneath the sound of wave on rock. “How,” he managed. “How.”
If I knew, Control, Aglooka replied across the churning sea, I would not be in this room with you now.
—will slowly be lowered through me which is why I now fold myself like a muscle against the wet clay to press the flesh against the sleep-gland’s mouths and—
Crozier’s men were stalked, on the ice, those final months, Aglooka continued. There was a great bear spirit of the Netsilik. The expedition angered and antagonized it, and the people of the island could no longer control it. Something had shifted, perhaps when the English arrived, perhaps sooner. Change was apparent, even to Crozier.
At times when we were first separated, I could still hear Crozier’s thoughts as my own. Aglooka shifted in his seat and sighed, and Control felt his every movement as a ripple through the air. He and the Natives who took him in surmised it to have been the great meteor shower in ‘33. The ‘year of too many caribou’; the ‘year of the falling stars.’ But since drowning I can no longer feel or hear him. It is as though I am deaf in one ear.
For a moment Control closed his eyes to abate the throbbing of his head, and so saw with the clarity of perfect dreaming a small knoll of glacial rock in twilight, above a bound, unmoving sea. He saw a party of men-hardly-men, chained to a sledge boat, chained to each other, and Crozier among them, bloody and bruised. Control watched one man call an equally skeletal bear—a monstrous thing of weeping sores, and yellow, matted coat—and the bear then devoured the men on their chain with the lifeless rigor of one completing a long-due task. And when only Crozier was left, Control saw that the bear could not eat him, so stoppered it was by the rest of the men and their rusting tether, and so it laid down to die as well, and Control could see as it died that a green light from uncountable points began to drift outward from its body, like pollen off a plucked blossom. And Crozier sat and watched it, watched the green move against the sky into an aurora all its own before he too then laid back and seemed to give his soul—also made from green and shining pinpricks beginning to coalesce into the shape of something substantial, something man-like—up to the halfnight.
And all of this dream was over in an instant, and Control was back in the close little room with Aglooka, knowing now the moment this man was born from the other.
All to say, it was not the bear that was the enemy of the men, was saying Aglooka. The bear was an old god, but what came in the shower of stars was far far older. Or perhaps it had always been there, dormant beneath the ice and shale, waiting for the right vessels—for men lonely, capricious, empty, lost, and weak. The expedition laced the ground, the water, the particles of the air in some way. A tally in the great ledger of the universe was added, subtracted. You and I will never be privy to it, Control, and nor will your Northern Reach.
Aglooka shouldn’t know the station name, but Control had long passed such small thoughts.
—and I will sleep now in my low body in the down and a bitter star will radiate eternally above the glowing face’s watercourse—
“The bitter star,” Control mouthed, tongue tacky on the edge of his teeth. The land of annular lakes.
Fitzjames died on June 3rd, 1848. The Brightness was in him, but that wasn’t what killed him. As such, his body remained, as far as Crozier and the men knew, intact. He was buried and the men decamped later that day, continuing south. The grave consumed Fitzjames, and his Brightness consumed the grave.
Aglooka was speaking now, an engine’s steady purr, gaining no more animation, losing no volume or speed.
The body was plundered some hours later by men who were themselves close to death—who already had the Brightness in them too, and their Brightness had become their own, and they were their own new things. And when they consumed Fitzjames, they consumed his Brightness, and became again new things.
Control could feel the hot, low pulse of something in his abdomen, like a poorly-stretched drum being beaten. His side stitch a licking hot.
Men are not meant to consume the Brightness. It is only the Brightness that consumes.
—I haul and I haul and when I touch myself I touch the skin-rind with chafed and viscous fingers for I am a stuck and flayed seal from ocean foam molded hauling my long veils and layers of cartilage and slipping membrane—
Nothing in Aglooka was different, but to Control it seemed the blue of his eyes was darkening, his pupils slowly blowing out; the white in his beard and sandy hair brightening; a shimmer licking off his skin.
If someone seems to have changed from one session to another, make sure you haven’t changed instead.
I am not Crozier, Aglooka was saying, and Crozier is not me. And yet I have his memories, his body, his feelings. Crozier’s men died—decades ago, it seems—but still there are men now living who have an echo of their memories, their bodies, their feelings.
Another voice seemed to be overlaying Aglooka’s, like a humming static, like feedback down a crackling phone. Control was unsure if it was Aglooka’s voice doubled, or some other thing; if it was his own voice speaking the words along with Aglooka, as if he knew Aglooka’s thoughts; as if one mind was slipping into the other.
Inside the Border, time is various. Outside the Border, time is a child’s metric. James Fitzjames never left King William Island, but when you close your eyes to sleep at night, Control, you see the fine plaster and Chinoiseried walls of a house you never actually lived in, lit by an angle of light which was never of your latitude. When, in exhaustion, you must forcibly turn your body to your will, you feel a vileness in your side, in your arm, in your eye, as though they were weeping but there is no blood, no tear. When you look at me, you feel a comfort you do not understand, a desire you do not want.
“How do you know I don’t want it,” Control rasped, fast and unintended, the pressure in his head overwhelming, crawling down his legs and firing through his hips and groin.
You are not Captain James Fitzjames, Aglooka said, and he is not you. And yet.
“And yet,” echoed Control.
And in another perfect dream with open eyes, Control saw before him then the man as he had been—Crozier—and as he was now—Aglooka—and the two were slipping and shifting into one another like film cells overlaid, taken seconds apart, and they were sitting in a low wooden captain's chair held as a palanquin between men in ragged navy blues and creams above a flat land extending in all directions to further and paler flatness. And the man—Crozier, Aglooka—was in his own blues and cream and the sky was grey and his skin was grey and his hair was white and his eyes Control could see were also white bearing no iris or pupil to sanctify them. And from the living edges of the man began to stream a greenness and a light so steadily mounting and so living a color it yanked at Control’s throat like the sudden need to vomit. And Control’s own edges even in that small close room seemed to reach for the Brightness. His own body longing to be consumed by the light, by the man, and Control couldn’t be sure he wasn’t opening his arms and reaching, opening his mouth and calling.
So instead he began to blink as he would to clear sunspots from his eyes, but his eyes themselves were thick and viscous now, and it took some endless time for the outline of these images of the man, Crozier, Aglooka, to reconstitute into the other, same man across the table in the Northern Reach interrogation room beneath the green fluorescent light.
What did you see, James? Aglooka asked him, and James heard it as from the bottom of a lake’s ancient mouldering bed. Who did you see.
“I saw,” James began, “I saw—“ and then couldn’t think of a better answer than the truth, so he stopped and let the silence cotton between them.
Aglooka raised his brow again, and Control had the sense his body was settling like the feathers which realigned on great birds at rest.
For his own part, Aglooka continued, almost lazily, Crozier felt Fitzjames, or some part of him, had been realized in a snowy owl which soon began following the final survivors. Crozier felt so strongly about this, he forbade the men from shooting it. This angered them, but they did not disobey him. They were wrung too dry by then. Crozier was taken hostage by the mutineers who had earlier struck off from the main crew. They are those you saw die before Tuunbaaq.
And Control, who could no longer feel surprise or fear felt instead a kind of wash of relief, like a waterfall beneath his skin. His skull and eye were humming now so loudly, they nearly drowned out the man across the table. An owl, James thought vaguely. How beautiful.
He looked to the walls, and perhaps it was the migraine and perhaps it wasn’t, but they appeared to be breathing.
Control began reaching his hand out to touch the grey wall to his left, and Aglooka continued his speaking undisturbed.
The owl came and picked the chain from Crozier’s wrist as he lay among the carcasses. I sat watch nearby, too weak yet to assist, and truth be told, unsure if the owl would have allowed me, had I even the capacity.
All had succumbed then, save Crozier. He remained himself for some time, by holding his Brightness at bay with conscious acts of bodily violence and deprivation. The owl continued to follow him. It brought him gifts of fish and rodents and parts scavenged from larger carrion found. It kept watch in the night as he slept. It shielded him with its vast wingspan when the teeth of the easterlies bore down at night.
Control’s fingertips were nearly brushing the wall. He was fully extended from his chair to reach it, tipping the legs onto one side. It had taken him hours and hours to come this far. The knotty joints of his knuckles stood fishbelly white and bulbous under the unnatural green of the overhead. The heat was still off, but he felt the sweat trail down his back as furrows turned by the plow.
—the shudder and glow deep down in this chasm of tissue constantly rustling squeaking gasping for air and a whirling howling in a desperate lack of oxygen in the mouth if the mouth had enough to scream or instead swallow the entire lung of this clear wind—
And the owl was with Crozier when he was taken in by the Netsilik for a season, came Aglooka’s voice, like wind through bare valleys. And save the group’s wariness of owls, they two surely would have lingered, but the Natives know the owl to be a harbinger of the dead.
When he finally touched the wall it was with the force of his chair falling. He should have collided violently with it—smashed his wrist in, cracked his fingers at unnatural angles.
Instead, his hand sank into the wall’s crepe-soft and forgiving surface.
🌱
When he first arrived on the island, in an attempt to create routine, Control would jog from the station to the water and along as much of the coast as was clear of ice. Throughout the early summer, as the ice began to break up, he would see ringed seals surfacing, solitary and dark, the sun gleaming off their round wet heads. He had never touched one—had no interest in it. But had he ever run his hand down one of their smooth, speckled flanks, he knew it would have felt beneath his palm as the interrogation room wall did now.
The Border had not moved or apparently changed in 30 years. Essentially invisible until you were right up against it. Within reaching distance it seemed to hum.
The overhead light in the interrogation room winked out; the afterimage of its coils hung before James’s eyes in the pitch black. The wall breathed steadily in beneath his hand.
From across the table, he heard Aglooka get up unhurriedly and come over, crouching down beside him. Felt a cool hand on his sweat-drenched arm; felt it move to his hollow cheek.
Come, James, Aglooka murmured. Get up from there.
But Control stayed on the ground, hand pressed to the wall, his own breathing fierce and shallow. “I don’t,” he started, but felt bile rise in his throat. The places Aglooka was touching him seared like frozen metal. “I don’t—”
But then he did vomit, down and into his lap and his knees, and what his body expelled had a green and hanging phosphorescence that lit the dark of the room, and spread outward like mist along the floor. The wall breathed out.
Come, James, said Aglooka again, taking him beneath his armpits like a small child and lifting him to his feet with ease. Let us go outside.
🌱
In the empty halls, lit only by the gently glowing spume which now poured from James, they made their way back through the labs building.
Where are the others, James said, passing open doors and deserted rooms.
They’re gone now, came the reply beside him. Some dead, some left, some part of it now. And he knew Aglooka to be right.
James stopped to vomit again, heaving and choking on the air like new catch against the floor of a dinghy. The humming in his ears was flush and shrill as panic. He had lost them, lost the men and the Northern Reach; he had failed so completely—and I now lick my tongue against the outer claws of the fingers to tear life into the ions—he wanted to pass out and die and be done with, wanted his body to burst into a hundred skuas taking wing, or to be wrapped in the leaves of the pothos which he could see now vast before him and sprung with an untold multitude of saxifrage buds and campion cockles and willow grass and flowering moss and lichen rusting through the walls of the crumbling station shed—to make sores bitter in a kind of pain which radiates against the faint spasm of cheering that goes before it in the nervous system’s last communicate with the dying—But Aglooka held fast to his waist and forced him along the undulating corridor.
Outside, it too was dark, but when James looked up, grabbing Aglooka’s collar for balance, he saw that the sky was shattered with color—with the mists that smart and shimmer, and the lumps of blue cobalt from the mustard gas corroding through otherwise red shrouded-clouds that drag their bellies against the frozen surface of the sea—An aurora so brilliant James knew he was seeing color no man had before seen and perhaps no man had yet seen, for what was he now, James wondered.
His sweat had frozen instantly, his vomit sheeting to his chest as a glacier to its rock, but he felt none of it. He looked to Aglooka, who held him upright still, and James could see he was similarly unmoved by the wind and cold and the blackness. His hair, which had seemed so matte and thin beneath the artificial light, shone beneath the savage sky, and his eyes when he blinked them blinked now to pure white.
James’s own left eye was no longer swollen and aching, his arm and side no longer hot. He touched each point on his body in turn and felt the smooth weight of polished ice. Aglooka blinked again, and the blue iris and black pupils returned to look at James with estimation.
You have not failed, James, Aglooka said, and though the easterlies whipped around them like loyal hounds, James heard every word clear and true. Failure means a thing has ended, and no thing in this world ever ends. All which imagines itself one thing has always been and is and will always become another new thing in its time.
Aglooka held his waist, held his shoulder, as if they were dancing in some grand hall, surrounded by men and women holding and being held—and they were with and among them then as well.
Where is the Border, Aglooka, James asked, though he already knew the other man’s thoughts, for they were his own, just as he knew the thoughts of the light above him and the shale beneath his feet. Where is the end of the old world and the beginning of the next.
Aglooka smiled at him, then, and it was a radiance to match the blazing sky.
For the first time, James could see a gap between Aglooka’s front teeth. What a perfect, human thing, knew James. How beautiful.
Let us go find it, James, Aglooka replied, and together they turned south into the day’s great night, and they walked and they walked and they walked and they have not found it still.
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