The Blue (The Complete Novel) (10 page)

            On the last
fish
his voice rises into a high pitched howl. It’s so odd at first that I think he’s really losing his mind, but then I can’t help but think there’s some strange power in it. Voley starts to dance about, wild with Russell’s new enthusiastic squeals, and I try to grab his lower back, to ease him from the edge so he won’t slip in, but he’s too excited, and I can’t get keep a hold of him with my calf.

            Eventually I give in and sit down by his side while he fishes. I listen to the chant slow and then die down, as Russell’s voice dwindles with each passing minute of no success. I still tell myself to wait because there has to be at least a sign of a fish. I watch Voley, and then Russell, and then the seal. I repeat the pattern, staying vigilant and hopeful, listening for the excited squeal to return, the sighting of a fish swimming by. When enough time goes by in quiet, and I realize there will be no fish, and that I got him and Voley excited for nothing, I start to feel a wave of guilt come on. Like I did something dreadfully wrong by even guessing that there could be fish. And I know it’s true and I can’t reverse it now—Russell was filled with hope, and I tipped him over the edge, into frenzy. Too much hope. And I killed it all. And now, because of me, hope is the enemy for him, and he must be feeling like he’s been spewing poison, and all I’ve done is make him realize his foolishness. I am shivering by the time Russell gives up and crawls back onto the ice. He helps me up and we go slowly back to the center of the floe, avoiding the crack veins, neither of us saying a word.  

For most of the afternoon we stay huddled up right on top of each other. Every hour Russell gets up and tries the fishing pole again, even though I’ve told him I’m sorry and I was wrong. That the seal must just be accepting death in its own bizarre way. And that’s all it was doing—a death dance. Because look, I tell him, and I point to the seal, who lies lazily on his floe, eyes closed, no longer watching us at all. But it’s too late, and Russell won’t give it up. Like he has to keep hurting himself now with the thought of tasting fish. He mumbles something about the rotting fish that must be sitting all the way back on the Resilience, like the waste of it has become a new parasite in his mind. I wait his trips out alone at first, and later in the day with Voley, on the center of the ice, periodically checking the blue and the plane. I rub Voley’s neck and watch his sleepy eyes, and I know he knows how cold I am, and that must be why he stopped following Russell to the edge. He just stays right up against me, pulling his whole body into my legs and stomach. He lets me pet him and talk to him. And for no reason at all, I start apologizing to him. I say I’m sorry Vole, for taking you away from your home in Blue City. You had it good there, boy. And I tell him how sorry I am for getting him stranded out here. Where there’s no warm water, or dry tarps to sleep under. No other dogs to know, or food to eat. Nothing at all here but useless apologies and the cold. I feel the weight of our path, Russell’s and mine, the burden we brought, traveling all the way from Philadelphia, and how crossing Voley’s path did this to him. Tears come down my cheek because I can’t stop imagining Voley snuggled in the blue tarp with Dusty back in Blue City, maybe by a fire, well-fed and dry. His life if we missed their island. That’s where you’d be, I tell him. Voley doesn’t even look at me. And I think it’s because he understands, and he’s mad at me. But then he yawns, long and drawn out, and I think that maybe he’s just tired. But I don’t have time to ask him more questions and figure it out because Russell startles me from my daydream. Pack’s closing in again, he says, We can make it to the next floe I think. And then, before I even acknowledge him, he’s pulling me up to my feet, and the pain rides up my leg before I remember to shift my weight off it and onto Russell’s shoulder.

Chapter 11

The pack’s only about three feet apart where Russell leads me, but he thinks it won’t last, so we have to move now. I don’t like the look of the floe it leads to—small and filled with pockets of blue holes—but I don’t argue with him. There’s nothing to stay for anymore. Russell says he still feels uneasy about Voley making the jump for himself, and he squats down and lifts him up. Then, with one quick vaulting assist, Voley slides onto the new floe. One closer to the blue.

            We follow after him together. I tell Russell I can do it on my own, but he doesn’t want to hear it. He doesn’t trust me on my bad leg any more than Voley on his three. And we do a quick run together, and he gives me a lift. I more than clear the short gap and land awkwardly on my good leg. It slides out from under me before I can right myself and I go down on my side, slipping across firm ice and then stopping in a small pool of slush. When I sit upright and look around, I realize I’ve landed right in one of the light blue streams, a long vein running deep into the floe. Panicked that it will break under my weight, I stand as fast as I can, wincing from my calf as I lunge away. But the ice doesn’t moan or creak or make thunder, and no new sea opens up to swallow us. I turn and wait for Russell to throw the bag and jump over. And then, he’s across. All of us one step closer to
something
—I try to figure out in my head what it actually is that we’re getting closer to, but I can’t. The plane. To die under a blue sky. To starve to death while we march forward under the spell of a fake hope that’s nothing like our real circumstances. And as we all start to move, and I tell Russell I can do it on my own again, I watch the seal. And he watches us. He stares from our left now, one floe over. Lying still, quiet and motionless. Just like that, out of nowhere, as we approach the center of the ice floe, I say it: We should give him a name.

            At first Russell is confused and asks why I want to name the thing we’re hunting. To name it would just trick us into thinking it could survive. But it can’t, he says, Only we can. I tell him I understand that. It’s only him, me and Voley now. But then, after a prolonged silence, he succumbs. Okay, he says. But I don’t have any ideas to begin with, so I don’t say anything back to him. And just like that, my mind starts racing.

            When we get to the center of the ice floe and I tell Russell my first name choice, he tells me to make sure the seal isn’t dead first. And I stop—I hadn’t thought of that—so I study the seal, watching, waiting for movement. And I’m sure that I finally do see him move his head—just for a moment. Just a twitch. And I ask Russell again, life confirmed, about his feelings about my name. What do you think? I say it again. Spots? he repeats the name. Yea, Spots. And he just nods his head. Soft and slow, but deliberate, like he approves. And then, Russell goes off. Almost a jog. Like he has to get away from whatever place my head is in. He tells me he’s going to check the next floe, see how close the pack is, and that I can wait here. I watch him go, almost at a sprint, but dancing over the blue indents, avoiding the fissures, making sure he doesn’t slip into the miles of dark nothing that are only a couple of icy feet below us. Be careful, I shout after him. But he doesn’t need my warning. He’s become an ice adept, hyper-aware, his body starving to death but oddly full of agility and speed. And when he turns to come back, it’s only a trot, and then a walk. Like he spent everything getting to the edge, and it depleted him. And I know why. The ocean is too wide. We’re stuck again.

The rest of the day passes in depressed hunger and silence. We hardly talk, except to mention the wind changing, or the signs that the pack might be coming back together. Russell’s speculations about the plane are all but gone. Voley whines off and on, only getting up occasionally to pee. Spots keeps a vigilant watch over us, keeping track of all our movements on our new base aboard the ever-shrinking floe. And then, at last, after the maddening pangs and defeating quiet feel like they’ll never end today, only interrupted by the brief gusts of wind, the blue starts to fade into night. All three of us huddle tightly again, watching the stars come into view. And everything else has been so distracting that I’ve barely noticed just how big the open patch of sky is now—I try to formulate a guess, then I lay it on Russell. You think it’s tripled, since we first saw it? I ask. He needs no further explanation, as if he was looking at the stars and wondering the same thing. And for the first time today, he lets out some of yesterday’s optimism—It’s at least five times as big, he says, Since we first saw it? At least five times as big.

Neither of us bring up a watch. We’re too weak. Just the small knife on the snow by our heads. Grab it if you hear something, Russell says. And we have Voley to warn us if Spots tries to come onto our floe. It hits me that there’s a very real possibility, with each time that we drift off to sleep now, that one of us will not wake up the next day. From the cold, or from the seal, or from the pack opening up right under us and taking us down. I let the thought pass through me, almost preparing me for what has to come. What might come in the morning. And then, Russell starts to hum to me. It’s
Silent Night
. And all of the sudden, despite the intensity of my thoughts about death, they melt away like nothing.

            He traces his hand along my head, running frozen fingers back and forth through my hair. The sensation and the sound is all that I know. And then I reach out, to share this, and I use my own hand to caress Voley. When Russell’s done humming, and I’m almost asleep, I ask him how long it takes to starve to death. I don’t know, he says, Fatter the better, I guess. What’s that mean? I ask. And he says if you’ve got enough fat, it probably takes a few weeks, maybe even a month. He says it like starvation is the last of our worries. And I know he’s right, because of all the scenarios I’ve played through in my head, the different ways that one of us, or all of us, will die tonight, none of them have been from starving. But then I picture Russell’s body, and Voley’s, and the exposed ribs, and the corded ribbons of muscle that even themselves seem to be trading out for bone. What if you’re not fat? I ask him. Well, I don’t know, he says. Still a few weeks, he finally says, unwilling to change his estimate. And then, his hand stops stroking through my hair. I want to beg him to keep doing it, to not stop, because it’s the only thing keeping me sane. I wrestle for ten minutes, working up the courage to ask him to keep going. But when I whisper his name, finally, he doesn’t answer. And he’ll never know how much I need his touch right now. I press into him and give it up. It’s like he’s found himself a slice of sleep after all, and he’s riding it away from me, and I have to let him. After a couple minutes, I say his name again. Very softly. He doesn’t move one bit.

My head fills with Russell’s ribcage again. His body. The mirror image of Spots. Thin ridges of muscle and bone. And it’s all I can think about—that he must not have an ounce of fat left on him to use up. And I wonder what his body’s living off of now, if it’s not the fat anymore. And then I run my hands down my sides, up and over the scar along my own ribs where I was shot, and notice just how skinny I’ve become too. And it dawns on me that I need to ask Russell something this very instant, need to ask him where the body goes once it’s done with fat. If it starts to use the heart and lungs for energy. Something too important to lose. But I can’t bear to wake him up. Instead, I crane my neck, holding it up into the windless night to see if I can find Spots’s silhouette. Voley lifts his own head too, following mine, wondering what I’m up to. Sure enough, just as my gut told me, Spots is watching. I see his dark form against the lighter darkness. Back and forth, crawling along the edge of his ice floe, as if he’s contemplating jumping in. Taking the plunge so that he can come up on our side of the lead. I try to stay awake as long as I can, keep my eye on him in case he does try it, but I can’t. It’s too easy once the cold has you to go to sleep. My body draws what heat it can from Russell and Voley’s bodies, and then I say to Voley, in just a whisper: Keep an eye on him, boy, okay? I shake his ear. You hear him come onto our ice, you wake us up, okay? And then, placing all my trust in him, I doze off.

Chapter 12

The first thing I notice is the wind—it whips from overhead, kicking up whatever soft powder is left on the floes, blowing it around in tiny swirls and eddies. But mostly it’s just cold, dead air that bites, and I lift myself to witness Russell at the far edge of the floe, and Voley walking around near him. I kick my feet a few times, waiting for some feeling to come into them, but after a minute they’re still frozen. I loosen my hands inside my gloves, and they feel like dead weight—as if they’re not even my own hands. When I rise, I forget about my bad calf, but at first the weight doesn’t hurt. I realize my entire leg has gone numb, and I should be feeling the pain. Even still, without the pain, my leg buckles and I almost fall. It scares me so bad that I call out to Russell, but he’s distracted by something. He waves his hand to let me know he’ll be right back to me. And then I twist around to take in the pack. All I see is Spots.

He’s pulling himself slowly up onto our floe, as if he waited all night until the morning to do it. To give us a fighting chance. I see the head first, rising out of the abyss, and then the flippers, smoothly following in one motion. And all of the sudden, he jerks forward a few feet, on solid ice again, like a short burst missile. Russell! I yell, and then I am choked of my voice. I try to walk backwards, but immediately my leg caves in again. Even with the numbness blocking the pain, the muscle is useless. I land on my butt and the wind-carried powder slaps right into my cheeks and nose and eyes and stings me. I know the pain is a good sign, but I am going to die anyway now. Russell’s too far. But Spots doesn’t come any closer. He stays near the water and watches me patiently from thirty feet away, staring at me in some calculation, weighing his opportunity. I search the ice around my body, hoping the knife is still there, but it’s gone. Russell must have grabbed it this morning. And then I hear the barking, and the pounding of feet, and they’re back. Right behind me, Voley and Russell, standing, watching Spots. All of us in our last stalemate.