“Let me give you the nickel tour so you can settle in,” he said, ushering us past a wall covered with hooks that held axes, knives, rope, and a couple of rifles. We hesitated at the first room on the right, the largest in the building. “This is where I try to get work done.” He gestured at one corner, where a few old Macs as well as a sleek new PC battled for space on a long table strewn with files and papers. Metal cabinets flanked another beat-up wooden table crowded with microscopes, Bunsen burners, and test tubes. The room’s one long picture window looked out over the lapis water of an inlet packed with drift ice as tall as ships.
“And this is where we chill,” he said, half-heartedly picking up some old magazines—Journal of Glaciology, National Geographic, Scientific American—and arranging them in a pile. A chocolate-brown L-shaped couch so pummeled by time it looked almost comfortable took up most of the rest of the room. In the air: onions, sweat, chicken soup, and a sulfuric smell—formaldehyde? I couldn’t place it. Above us, tube-shaped fluorescent lights buzzed and snapped. An ancient television slouched under a well-used dartboard, its rabbit ears broken off. A plastic bowl of Cheez-Its teetered on the TV stand next to a half-eaten vanilla Hostess cupcake and an empty Wild Turkey bottle. So, there was alcohol here: Thank God for that. The floors were covered with cheap rugs, one over the other, the walls a noxious green.
“You’ve been here how long, Wyatt, a year?” Raj asked.
“Closer to two.” He turned toward the hall. “Let’s keep our voices down. The girl is sleeping.”
We all nodded and followed along behind him like ducklings, except for Jeanne, who clomped off to the kitchen, its floor-to-ceiling open shelves crammed with nuts, dried fruits, canned goods, all manner of grains and flours as well as a stunning cornucopia of junk food. Wyatt’s room was first: dark paneling, bed unmade, books, notebooks, papers, and magazines in teetering piles.
He knelt down. Peered at a pure white arctic mouse in a wire cage. “Here’s a guy you all need to meet. This is Odin.”
“Like the Norse god?” Raj said.
Narrow-eyed, Wyatt tilted his head up toward Raj. “What are you, some kind of wiseass?”
For a few seconds, no one said a word. Odin skittered up onto his hind legs, stretching his surprisingly long body upward—as if greeting Wyatt—scratching at the wire mesh.
“I know my Norse mythology,” Raj said, folding his arms across his chest, clearly trying to read Wyatt. “What, is that going to be a problem here?”
“Could be.” Wyatt pushed himself to his full height, which was quite a bit taller and easily fifty pounds heavier than Raj. His expression—or lack of one—remained, and I wondered if he was conscious of it, or if being stone-faced or on edge was the result of isolation in this place for years on end.
Wyatt burst out a sudden, forced-sounding laugh. Smacked Raj a little too hard on his back. “Kidding, my friend, just fucking with ya. But for the others here, who maybe aren’t up on this sort of thing, Odin was the god who killed himself to gain knowledge about the realm of the dead.” He reached down to the cage, unlatched the lid, and lifted up the mouse; after a bit of scrabbling, the creature seemed content to cuddle in his palm. Wyatt held him at eye level, studying him. “When I found this guy, over a year ago now, he was in the Dome, frozen solid. But now look at him.”
“Well, that’s impossible,” Raj said with an exasperated exhale.
“Really?” Wyatt said.
“Cells burst when they freeze—”
Nora took his arm and tugged at it. “Come on, darling, he said it happened.” She took off her hat; her shining hair fell all around her shoulders. “Look, we’re all exhausted—”
“Who do you think is sleeping in the other room?” Wyatt said.
Raj lifted his fine-boned hands in an appeal for a truce. “You know what? Fine. I’m here to do my research and go home.”
“That was my understanding too.” Wyatt settled Odin back into his cage with great gentleness as the mouse’s eraser-pink nose poked between his wind-chapped fingers. Without another word, Wyatt stepped between us, and we trailed him in silence past another open door.
“Jeanne’s room is here.”
Jeanne’s narrow bed was neatly made with a handmade quilt, its pattern of mismatched squares of birds and flowers bleached almost completely white. Half a dozen dolls sat propped against the pillows; these, too, were beat-up and grubby, hair ratty, eyes lazy in their heads, chubby little hands in a half grip in the air; next to them a couple of disturbingly real-looking doll babies in doll diapers cuddled one another. We all paused, Nora and Raj exchanging what the fuck glances, but Wyatt kept the tour on a clip and motioned us to the bathroom: a sad, beige affair with a beige porcelain toilet and plastic shower, narrow as a coffin, its mold-dotted beige curtain barely covering the stall.