I felt safest in my office, alone with my books, charts, runic symbols, and scraps of old text; and when I deciphered a chunk of language—even a word!—a thrill of understanding juddered up my spine. The distance between me and another human being, just for that moment, was erased. It was as if someone were speaking to me, and me alone.
For two decades, these glimmers of connection had been enough to sustain me, but over time, they began to lose their shine. These private revelations no longer fed me, warmed me like they had. I yearned to be drawn closer to the human heart. Not through words—however telling or ingenious—but in the living world.
* * *
AT PRECISELY EIGHT o’clock that night—the end of office hours—I got up and locked the door. Squared my shoulders, smoothed my skirt, and sat back down. Outside my window, remorseless late-August sun cast long shadows across the drought-singed grass of the quad.
I clicked open my email. The subject line was blank, but then, Wyatt had never bothered with niceties. My head pounded with end-of-summer-session exhaustion. I was in no mood to hear from Professor Speeks about my brother, his fond recollections of mentoring Andy through the rigors of grad school, or even some funny thing Andy had said or done during their year together on the ice.
I considered deleting the message without reading it, but a tingling buzzed my fingers. Something said: Don’t. Still, I resisted until some darker knowledge swarmed up from the base of my spine, warning me it would be a terrible mistake not to open it.
From: [email protected]
Hey Val, hope you’re doing well, all things considered. Something’s happened out here. We found a body in the ice out on Glacier 35A. A young girl. We were able to cut through the ice and bring her back to the compound. Val, she thawed out alive. Don’t ask me to explain it, I can’t. She’s eight, nine years old, I’m guessing. And she’s talking pretty much nonstop, but in a language I’ve never heard before. Even Pitak, our supply runner from Qaanaaq, had no idea, and he speaks Inuktun. Jeanne’s stumped, too, so we’re both just keeping the girl fed and nodding our heads a lot and trying to figure out what to do next.
I’ve pasted here one of her vocalizations. Maybe you can figure out what she’s saying? You’re the expert. Give it a try, then call me as soon as you can. And please don’t tell anyone about this.
Wyatt
The MP3 stuttered across my screen like a city skyline. The girl thawed out alive?
Sweat bloomed on my brow, even though the air conditioner was blasting. I got up, walked to my window, sat back down. Checked the time: too early for a pill. I knocked back the remaining swallow of stale coffee in my mug, rattled open my file drawer, extracted a bottle of Amaretto, and filled the cup halfway. The sweet, warm alcohol hit my empty stomach fast. Smoothed away the sharp edges.
I thought about all the times I’d let Andy’s voice play in my head these past five months, how he was still so alive for me in this way. Memories of us as kids chasing each other through the lake house in upstate New York, T-shirts still damp from swimming. Or cozied up with our beloved mutt Frida, playing go fish and Monopoly while our parents got tight and happy on cocktails: a rare glimmer of joy during their disintegrating marriage. And so we were comforted, sharing the delusion that if we were just good enough, they would stay together.
Little by little I’d pored over the photos, letting myself “feel everything,” as my shrink instructed. Mourning every shirt and shoe, I gave away or got rid of his clothes and belongings; though, there were a few I couldn’t part with, his drawings especially. The only other place he lived on was in my phone: a dozen saved messages remained.
Now, on my screen, the forward arrow on the voice clip throbbed red. My finger trembled as it hovered over the play button. I steadied it, pushing down.
The first slam to my gut was the panic in this high, sweet girl voice that—even if you didn’t understand a word she said—made you want to reach out and wrap her in a hug. The tremulous ache in her utterly foreign words only intensified in the twenty-eight-second clip, as if she was pleading for something. I tried to picture this child trapped in the ice, to imagine what horrors had brought her there.
I played it again.
What language is this?
Of course, West Greenlandic was my first guess, but I heard no correlation. It wasn’t Danish, either—Greenland had been settled by Danes—but no, this was Danish put through a blender and mixed with what, Finnish? Not quite that, either. The vowels were too long, the accent on the last syllable. It wasn’t Norwegian, clearly, and it was too clipped and choppy to be Swedish. I pulled up some Old Norse, the language of the Vikings, and listened alongside the girl’s quavering voice. The cadences were similar in places, but I couldn’t match up a single word. This language was completely new to me.