Inside his threadbare duffel were three nerite shells, lying spire to spire in a bottom fold. He ran a thumb over their apertures. They were like dreams somehow, in their compactness, their fineness, in the way they seemed complete and incontrovertible.
He rolled in the cot. The crickets shrilled. I’ll get out of bed in a minute, he decided.
But he was not up until evening. He eased out of the mosquito netting and managed to cut open a can of tuna and eat its contents with a plastic spoon.
All night Naaliyah’s crickets pleaded their same urgent question—scree-eep? scree-eep?—but right before dawn they fell abruptly silent, as if they had finally found answers, or else expired from the effort.
Silence. Winkler lay in bed trying to listen but there was nothing to listen to. Blood traveled dully through his ears. He thought: I wish the crickets would start up again. He thought: A person could go mad out here.
He fumbled through a drawer until his fingers closed around Naaliyah’s hand lens. With his left eye against the eyepiece, and the focus brought all the way up, he could see whatever was in immediate proximity: creases in his palm, the grain in the wall. He went from cage to cage, peering in.
Caterpillars had forced open a hole in their wire cage; ants streamed out of a test tube and foraged systematically beneath the stove. A dozen pale beetles lay dead on the table, legs cocked at the ceiling. There were earwigs on the cot, spiders beneath the chairs. Several insectaries that may have been recently occupied now appeared completely empty.
He shivered. Was this the normal state of things? Naaliyah’s feeding notations were simple enough—sugar solution in eyedroppers, bruised fruit, rolled oats, or wheat bran in dishes. More difficult were the creatures who ate live insects—he was to seize a cricket or moth in forceps and drop it into a neighbor’s cage. The moth was the worst: he snared it in a tiny aquarium net and shook it into a jar that contained a praying mantis. With the hand lens he watched the mantid strike, invisibly fast, and her round mouth lap a bead of liquid from the moth’s split head; the wings still vibrating, a gray powder smearing the mantid’s arms, the moth’s arms still clutching her abdomen, like a confused, decapitated lover.
Dozens of awful dramas were climaxing around him every minute: jailbreaks, war parties, ambushes. When he listened closely he could hear them now: chewing, spitting, clacking about. He cringed, felt queasy; he pulled the lens away from his eye and let the world go blurry.
When he finished the main cabin, he went to the shed. There was firewood in every square inch of the place, and stacked around the outside as well. Here, jammed among the logs, the insects seemed calmer, arrayed on their two sets of shelves, numbed perhaps by the cooler air, more assured of their coming ends. The mosquitoes were fewer here, too, as if this was territory they had yet to discover. A draft trickled through gaps in the wood. The air smelled of spruce.
That night he went to sleep not in the main cabin but in the shed, between the shelves, on a narrow bed made from cut boughs and beetle-chewed furs: elk, maybe, or moose. Left here by some previous tenant: scientist, or miner, or trapper. Strange to think that the animals themselves had only been tenants, too, guests inside their coats.
When the cold came, seeping through the gaps like some patient liquid, he tried to imagine it as purifying: a cleansing, an ablution.
In the morning he took a walking stick from the log pile and went into the woods. Spruce, and some willow and what looked like cottonwood. Birch and alder in creases. He wondered if bears were about, and recalled the frontier fables of his childhood, wounded grizzlies swatting hunters, prospectors crashing through creeks, their feet freezing solid. All along, he thought, life has been going on here. For millennia. As it has everywhere. His breath showed in front of him. He wiped the back of his wrist and counted nine dead mosquitoes in his palm.
Along the edge of the meadow was a creek that slashed its way through a few hundred yards of deadfall and muskeg to a small, black pond. The pond, in turn, drained slowly through a jam of bleached trees, down a hill, into a larger waterway: narrow and bouncing, clear to its pebbles.
He bent over the riverbank and rinsed his face and arms. The water tasted like copper. He rested his hands against the bottom and felt the pebbles shift beneath his palms, the blood retreat up his wrists.
A half mile farther on he found a break in the trees where he could see the landscape to the west: a series of successive ridges all the way to the horizon: treeless summits and tundra fells—blues fading into whites, little more in his eyes than blemishes of color—the Alaskan interior. No houses, no lights, no antennas, no fire towers. Somewhere beyond it all, five hundred miles away, was Anchorage.
Even without eyeglasses Winkler could see this place had its own kind of light: pale but brilliant, permanently waning, something like the light he had seen reflecting off the Alaska Range from the rooftop of his youth.
He listened to the trees shift and toss, a sound like breathing.
When he returned to the cabin, Naaliyah was unloading things from the truck.
“Next time leave a note,” she said. She looked clean, newly washed.
“I was trying to get this foot back into shape.”
“Just leave a note.” She had more cordwood, bags of rice and sugar, a snowsuit and parka for him. Behind the truck was a tan-colored Skidoo on a trailer, which he helped her unhitch and drag behind the cabin. Through noon they worked together, unloading things and stowing them. She glanced once at the makeshift mattress in the shed, but did not remark on it.
A few hours after dusk he rinsed out his mug and went to the door.
“You’re not going to sleep out there.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“You’ll freeze.”
“There are a bunch of old furs in there.”
“It gets cold, David. You don’t know how cold.”
“I don’t mind cold.”
“David.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You’ll be in the cabin by midnight.”
“We’ll see.”
She sighed. “At least take these.” She held out a small felt sleeve. Inside were a pair of glasses. “I didn’t know your prescription, of course. But I knew you were nearsighted. So.”
He held them a moment, studying the lenses.
“The doctor said nobody ever came to pick them up.”
“Thank you. Very thoughtful.”
“Well,” she said. “You’re welcome.” He opened the door and crossed the meadow. He climbed into his makeshift bed and pulled the furs up to his neck. The moon sent its light through chinks in the shed walls. A moth flapped softly against the glass of its cage.