The first person in the village to go to work was the person who found her. Before the sun popped above the horizon, before the wind stirred things, when the only sound was an occasional dog chain dragging in the dirt, someone saw a woman sitting on the road. That person might’ve been a construction worker in a dump truck or a man on his way to open the little airport or even someone heading out of town, hunting. It could’ve been me or Go-boy if she’d been there a few months before, when we’d worked mornings on the fish tower. But whoever it was, they found her—the unknown woman—sitting on Main Road in the middle of everything, crying and confused, her fingers clutching handfuls of gravel. Later that day someone would theorize that she had fallen from the sky, but the first person to see her early in the morning didn’t care where she was from—he just went for help.
Go-boy and I heard about the unknown woman sometime before noon. She was still incoherent—crying and lashing out at the air all around. The police had taken her first, trying to learn who she was and where she was from and how she’d managed to get to Unk. She had no bag or purse or wallet. No plane ticket. Go-boy said a person could walk to town, but the nearest village was fifty miles. And he said fifty miles over the bare tundra was like a hundred on solid ground.
“Probably take a week,” he said.
By the time the ladies at the clinic heard about the unknown woman and demanded she get medical attention, around eleven, the police were ready to give up anyway, frustrated that she wouldn’t speak. Mom called us when the unknown woman arrived at the clinic, asking Go-boy if we could help. She asked him if we could search around town, find out if anyone was missing a visitor or expecting a visitor. And Kiana also got ahold of us, asking for help with distributing unknown-person flyers. When she called, Go answered and handed me the phone. He said, “It’s for you.” He was pretending he didn’t know his sister. I talked to Kiana and she was genuine and concerned, not gossiping but motivated to join this unknown-woman thing. She was soft and assured. Her voice had energy and it brought me into the cause, making me want to participate—partly for the woman, partly for Kiana.
“We should help,” I told Go.
He was busy and distracted, flipping through his new auto-repair manual. His nails were framed with rusty grease and he left dirty fingerprint smudges on the corner of each page. And because of the way he ignored me right then—flipping pages and not answering for a moment—I became suspicious.
“Kiana wants you to copy flyers.”
He turned page after page, not reading. After a while he said okay and closed the book—maybe out of the loyalty he carried for his sister—and we left the house. But in that brief time when he waited to respond, I knew something was up.
“Let me first try the Eagle,” Go said, sliding behind the wheel of his AMC wagon—the car he’d been reading about, the car that had just stopped working altogether.
With the driver’s door open and his left leg hanging out, Go-boy turned the key and let the engine roll over and over for a minute or more until it slowed, then only clicked.
He said, “I’ll jump it.”
I was standing at the end of the little driveway, almost in the road. “It won’t fire,” I said.
“I’ll try-pour gas down the carb. Maybe it’s out of gas. Or maybe it’s flooded.”
I told him there was no spark, but for some reason he wouldn’t hear me. He wasn’t listening to what I said about the car, or what I said about anything.
Go-boy had just flown back from Anchorage a few days earlier, and since then he’d been strange. He no longer made eye contact, acting distant and nervous like a person being videotaped. He no longer asked me questions—didn’t ask me to do anything, didn’t ask me what I thought about anything. He wasn’t interested, I guess. And when I asked if he had gone to Seattle and then to New York City, he waved off the question, walked away.
This morning he’d been fixated on getting his car to run. He camped out at the dining room table reading the repair manual. He hovered over the engine of the AMC with a handful of tools. He ran warm water in the kitchen sink, thawing his cold, oil-stained fingers. But that was just today.
Yesterday morning he’d decided to make paper, shitting up the whole kitchen with a washtub, a screen frame cut from a brownie pan, and a blender full of something he called slurry—a pasty soup of paper mixed with crabgrass and dried fireweed. But he didn’t finish that project. He quit before lunch. In the afternoon he set out to record his family history. He interviewed Uncle Stanley, filled up two pages of notes, and photographed the wooden crosses of dead family members; then he dropped the idea and tried to start a recycling program before dinnertime. When he didn’t get immediate support from the city, he quit. Sure, Go always had projects, but he always finished them. I’d never known Go to be such a mess. Or so disconnected. He seemed out of control.
I said, “Man, that engine isn’t getting spark.” I told him when the engine doesn’t fire it means bad points or wires or distributor, or maybe messed-up timing. But he didn’t listen. And regardless if the car could run or not, the whole town was only a mile from end to end, and the clinic was just two blocks away, so I said, “We can walk.”
Go-boy continued to hook up a battery charger and turn the engine over till it twitched. He poured gas from an empty pop can down the air intake, then he tried to start it again, and a few flames shot back through the carb.
“There’s some spark!” he said.
“It’s in the wiring. There’s a bad connection somewhere and the juice isn’t getting to the cylinders.”
“Not necessarily, because one time I had a bad fuel pump act just like this.”
I went in the house to warm up, and like I’d been doing for days, I waited for him. When the car still wouldn’t run after almost an hour of his troubleshooting, Go-boy came into the living room and said, “I need a different battery charger.”
He dug in a closet. He threw a parka into the hall. Then skis. A tackle box. Bunny boots.
“Yeah, in a minute.”
“Do you know if the mail came today?” I asked.
He didn’t know. Or just didn’t answer.
Yesterday and the day before, planes had been flying in and out of town like normal—clear skies, no wind—but for whatever reason the mail never came. I asked around town but nobody thought it was that big a deal. It was just something that happened.
I was waiting for those journals from Wicho. He’d said to look for a package this week. I still wasn’t sure why he was sending them to me. I didn’t know his angle or if he even had one. Wicho and me would always be brothers, through this—his life sentence and me living in Alaska—and through anything, and yet, since he’d been locked up, brothers or not, we’d had no relation to each other at all. Not until this idea of the journals. But even now it was more of the same. More waiting. Guessing. And then more waiting.
Mom met us in the lobby of the clinic. They’d been giving the unknown woman fluids, thinking she might be on drugs because she had dark circles under dilated eyes and looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks. The nurses were successful at calming the woman and had convinced her to lie down. And even though she wouldn’t close her eyes and rest, she seemed to be a bit more relaxed in the company of health workers, who had brushed her long hair free of tangles, cleaned the gravel from under her fingernails, and pooled together some clean clothes for her to wear.
We wanted to see what this unknown woman looked like.
In a hushed voice, Mom said, “I checked with the airport; in the past couple weeks there’s only been a few strangers fly in, and they’re all accounted for. She didn’t fly to Unalakleet.”
I asked how else the unknown woman could’ve gotten here, and Mom said maybe by the ocean. The police were checking for mysterious boats along the shore, which was easy this time of year because most people had pulled everything they owned from the water, fearing that first overnight freeze. But Mom was less interested in how she’d come to town and more concerned with her condition.
While she talked about the woman’s health issues, Go-boy wandered down the hall and snooped around in a supply closet. He pulled out tongue depressors and stuffed his pockets full.
Mom said, “You guys need to go door-to-door. There’s seven hundred people living here and with enough help we should be able to talk to everyone.”
The day Go-boy returned from Anchorage he was in good spirits and handed me a gift as soon as he got back to our house. While in the city he’d had two t-shirts made, one for me and one for him, that said, SAME-SAME. It was a yellow-gold shirt with gold print, and I wasn’t surprised because I’d read about his t-shirt idea in the second letter to Yoko Ono, but I didn’t want him to know I’d read either of the letters, so I faked like I was surprised, held the shirt by its shoulders and forgot to say thank you.
“Sometimes we’re always real same-same,” Go said, and laughed.
I wondered if this shirt had been meant for Yoko Ono. I wondered if he had even made it to New York City.
I forced a smile, looking at how the second SAME was flipped, mirroring the first.
Go said, “It’s just village, man. You just sometimes always never understand.” Then he pulled his over his head. “Same-same is like your Eskimo name—Atausiq.”
“How?”
“Atausiq means one.”
This first day he was back Go acted like the normal Go-boy—energetic but relaxed, funny but intent. It was maybe the following day that he started unraveling, acting like he’d disappeared behind a curtain, but instead of him vanishing, it was as if everyone and everything around became invisible to him.
I left that t-shirt in the living room for a few days, sitting on an end table the way he’d handed it to me—shoulders and waist folded behind, the words SAME-SAME framed on the front. When Go saw I’d left it there, he said, “If you don’t want the damn shirt, give it to Kiana. She’ll wear it.”
And right then I knew—he’d finally heard about me and his sister.
The unknown woman was still a mystery when the clinic closed at eight o’clock. She still wasn’t speaking and was frightened by any people or noises. Go-boy and me had helped the search mission, running door-to-door with a poor-looking pencil sketch of the woman that Kiana was distributing, but nobody recognized her—she wasn’t from Unalakleet or anywhere around the Norton Sound.
After fifteen minutes of walking Go ditched me, leaving me alone with that picture. I didn’t find him for three hours. And when I did find him, he was behind the fish plant, pulling carburetor jets off a four-wheeler engine that was propped on a fifty-five-gallon barrel.
“What the fuck, man?”
He said, “These might work.”
Mom agreed to take the unknown woman in for the night, or even longer if necessary. With the help of Kiana, they would try to give the woman a comfortable bed and a room with enough security so she could sleep. They started by bathing her. Then they wrapped her in a bathrobe and added blankets. She lay on the couch in the living room afterward, motionless. Mom said, “It’s to get her acquainted with me and Kiana.” They found she relaxed when listening to Buffy Sainte-Marie and drinking lukewarm hot chocolate, and soon realized she liked anything sweet. Mom reported all this over the phone. After a while the woman wasn’t scared, and in the company of the ladies, she began behaving normal. She pulled her own hair into a ponytail. She sucked on a piece of hard candy and left the wrapper on an end table. By ten o’clock she was finding the bathroom, flipping the lights on or off, and flushing.
We got sent on an errand to a pie social at the church. Mom wasn’t letting us see the unknown woman yet, theorizing that she was uncomfortable with men, thinking she might have been abused by a boyfriend or a husband in the past. Mom wanted us to stop at the church and buy two whole pies because she thought sweets were helping the woman. She said, “Her blood-sugar level is probably real low.”
In the basement of the church, about forty people sat beside long card tables, laughing and eating dessert. The popular conversation topic was the unknown woman. We wove between tables and heard all the different theories. The city mechanic thought she might have come through town on a connecting flight to some other little village along the coast. He said, “The airport wouldn’t have any record of her then.” As we stood in line, waiting to buy pies, we heard another guy theorizing that scientifically it was possible she’d just appeared, saying, “Basically, it’s like she fell from the sky.” He claimed that it happened more than people knew—living and nonliving objects entirely disappeared and relocated to some other place in the world, or some other year. He said, “Half the time, when we think we’ve lost an ink-pen or a gas cap, it’s actually vaporized to some other location.” And Uncle Stanley, sitting next to that guy, said, “Talk about science, maybe she’s the new teacher.” Everyone laughed.
“What do you think?” I asked Go-boy. “You think she’s maybe White Alice, reincarnated?”
Go puffed a quick laugh. He hadn’t been as interested in the unknown woman as the rest of us. Go acted like she didn’t exist. At first I thought he might have had something to do with her, but the one thing Go couldn’t do was lie, at all. So I knew he just didn’t care. He’d never been into gossip or rumors. And yet he was always into helping people, especially those who were powerless, and especially when it related to the community. It was as if Go had now become self-centered overnight.
“I think she’s whacked out on some kind of acid trip.” I told him maybe she could’ve lived in town with us all summer without anyone knowing who she was. It was possible. A village of seven hundred is big enough to disappear in. She might have had an apartment somewhere or even been sleeping in some garage. Maybe the one person she knew in this whole town was on vacation. It was possible.
Go said, “No way, man. I’ve lived here forever and I know every person I see.”
“What would she eat?” he said, picking up a crumb of pie crust from the counter and tossing it into his mouth. His hands and wrists were cut up with fresh gouges and scrapes—puffy and reddish-pink spots on his sensitive skin—from working on the AMC. The cuts looked like they would start bleeding at any moment. “The minute she’d go to AC Store to buy some bread, half the town would see her.”
“But you don’t know any of the fishing-lodge tourists.”
We paused to check out the pies. The whole room went quiet for a moment, with just a few murmurs here and there, like every conversation lulled at the same time. That was when Go spun around like he’d heard someone shouting his name from the stairs. It was abrupt and his face got pale and limp for a quick second. He dropped his napkin. It was startling. But nobody said anything. As he stared across the room it was like the air between us had pushed me onto my heels. And it was then I knew Go needed my help.
Go-boy turned back to the pies, said, “Man, that’s because we know they’re fishing-lodge tourists from the moment we see them.”
“What if she looks like them? You haven’t seen her.”
“Believe me, man, she doesn’t look like one of them.”
Go-boy then ordered two pies for my mom without consulting me. We handed a young girl some money and her friend grabbed tin foil and napkins. Behind us we heard a man telling people he thought the unknown woman was a prostitute. He said they sneak onto cargo planes out of Nome. After they do a few jobs and have enough money, they buy a one-way ticket back. “It happens,” he kept saying. He guessed she came to Unk and didn’t get paid, and that was why she couldn’t leave and why nobody admitted to recognizing her face. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.
The postmaster was eating a slice of pie with a couple young kids and I flagged him down to ask about the mail.
“It came today,” he said. “Lots.”
“All of it?”
“Well, I assume so.”
Go and I walked back to Mom’s house, each carrying a pie—Go-boy had blueberry and I had rhubarb. The huge sky above us was black with the smoky texture of clouds, looking ready to dump sleet, or hail, or even snow. The air collected our breaths in short bursts of fog.
We walked on the road that curved past the point where the river met the ocean. It was the long way to Mom’s, and it seemed appropriate not to take any shortcuts. The road straightened out and the Bering Sea was spread out on our left side. The only thing between us and the ocean was piles of pale driftwood illuminated by a streetlight, stacked in rows all the way down to the water. There was a tangled fishnet knotted around one of the branches.
Go-boy handed me the pie he was carrying. He said, “I’ve got to leave.”
“Where?”
“Home,” he said. “I know what’s wrong with the Eagle. It’s the intake gasket.”
“You can’t work in the dark.”
“I’ve got to find some Form-A-Gasket,” he said. “Try-patch it.”
“The problem’s not a gasket. The engine isn’t getting spark.”
Go-boy turned and walked straight down the road.
“Don’t you want to see the woman?” I asked.
“No.”
“Before she’s asleep? Before they take her away?”
Go then turned and ran straight at me. His hair blew back and his eyes were intense with anger and I wondered if he was going to throw a punch. He stopped in front of me, right in my face, and yelled, “I can’t help her! I can’t.”
His breath was all stale coffee and I stared back at him for a second, not sure what to say, not sure if there was anything to say.
He turned and walked away, quicker than before.
I said, “I’m sorry.”
But Go was already half a block away, and I would’ve needed to yell for him to hear me.
I got to Mom’s just as the rain started. All of the lights were shut off and there were small candles placed throughout the house. She and Kiana were in the kitchen, drinking ayuu tea—tundra tea—and whispering. Steam blurred the windows and caught the glow of orange candlelight. Mom put her finger to her lips, urging me to be quiet. She mouthed, sleeping. I set the pies between them and the sound of tin foil sliding on the table seemed too abrasive for the moment. Kiana looked relieved I had arrived. It was peaceful, giving me the idea that maybe we had something real growing between us. I hadn’t seen her all day and now I wanted to sit her down and tell her everything that had happened since we’d last been together. I’d tell her about Go. How I was worried. How he’d almost hit me. Tell her what people were saying about the unknown woman. Tell her about the mail and how the journals from my brother hadn’t come, and that I’d been thinking about her. I had been thinking about her. I wanted to tell her everything. And again she looked up at me with the same expression, and held it.
“Can I?” I said, hoping to see the unknown woman.
Kiana stood up. I grabbed her arm just below her bony elbow and held it for a second. We moved to the edge of the kitchen, where the linoleum met the carpet in a small doorless frame, where the living room began. We stood shoulder to shoulder, looking. And right there, three steps away, on the same couch I had sprawled on many times to watch TV, the unknown woman slept.
She was younger than I’d imagined. Her face was wide and square and she had black hair that disappeared into the cushions behind. The candlelight gave her a dark orange hue. On her cheeks there was soft, transparent fuzz where men grow sideburns, denser than it was on most women, but not quite facial hair. One of her hands had spilled out from under the blanket and was dangling from the edge of the couch. It was thin like a piece of bread, darker than her face, and each finger was perfect and straight. Her hand and her whole body were this way—slight, fragile. She looked weightless, like she could walk up old stairs without making a sound, like she could fetch a snack from the kitchen without the three of us noticing. . . . And she even looked so light that when she burst out of the house later that night—while Mom and Kiana and I slept in the living room chairs—and ran down the road with only a bathrobe around her, running straight off the fifteen-foot seawall at the mouth of the shallow river (and surviving), I was surprised that she didn’t fly up and blow away to some other unsuspecting small village down the coast.
I stood in the doorway with Kiana, watching the unknown woman sleep for maybe ten minutes or more. Kiana leaned into me and we were hypnotized by the feathery breath that lifted and dropped the woman’s small chest. In her breath we couldn’t see that the doctors in Anchorage would call tomorrow and say that Sean had miraculously woken up; we couldn’t see how ill Go-boy really was and how his situation was even worse than we knew; we couldn’t even see that I would cancel my tickets to LA; but we could feel, all in this moment, that something was about to happen.
We kept watching the unknown woman sleep. She was covered in quilts, but as we stood there I wanted to blanket her head to toe with something very thin. I wanted to take a picture so I could show Go-boy what it was like to watch the unknown woman—to show him what I now saw. This house and town were nowhere to her. She was alone and unfamiliar and didn’t know where her real life had gone. She was isolated, and her helplessness held us captive. And as I stood there, I wished Go were there with us, standing in the doorframe of the candlelit room, the silence all around. I wished Go-boy were there so he could watch a person who wasn’t known by anyone, sleep.