—
After Caleb leaves, Marian is lonely for the first time since coming to Alaska. The uninhabited ring of space she’d cultivated around herself begins to seem less like a protective barrier than scorched earth. At night, restless, she thinks of Caleb, sometimes of Barclay, of how he’d been before he turned. （A turn—that is how she thinks of what happened when he’d pried the diaphragm from her body.） She touches herself, thinking of Barclay more often than Caleb, and afterward is ashamed, troubled.
As an experiment, she goes to bed with a man and then a few others, ones she seems unlikely to run into again or can reliably avoid if she wants: no pilots, no miners, nobody in Valdez. There is a boatbuilder in Seward, a newspaperman in Anchorage, a Canadian geologist just passing through. Alaska has a glut of men. From each encounter she takes a small supply of images that she shovels like burial earth on top of her memories of Barclay: a stranger’s face contorted and exposed by concentration, the grip of hands on her hips, certain murmured words. She wondered what memories they take from her, what fragments they revisit in lonely times.
Jamie finally writes:
Dear Marian,
I know Caleb has told you the sad news. Forgive me for not writing sooner. We’ve had such a long silence that breaking it felt somehow overwhelming. I’ve been blue ever since burying Wallace—bluer than blue, like the tail end of dusk. Some of it’s plain grief, but I think I am also mourning the past. I told Wallace that you are a pilot in Alaska, and he didn’t seem surprised at all, though to be fair he was generally a little foggy. I’ve tried to throw myself back into my painting—my one real companion since I left Vancouver—and I’ve been finding myself painting memories of Wallace’s paintings, landscapes I haven’t seen in years and remember only in the vaguest way, trying to reproduce them and also capture some sense of time’s distortion.
From Marian’s response: It’s been too long a silence. For now let’s not try to fill in everything that we’ve missed but continue fresh from the present.
In July, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, nearing the completion of an attempt to be the first to fly the earth’s full circumference, an equatorial great circle of twenty-five thousand miles, take off from Lae, in Papua New Guinea, bound for Howland Island, a fleck of land twenty-five hundred miles away. They never arrive. For decades people will believe she is still alive, that some complicated saga followed her last radio communication. But almost certainly she ran out of fuel, crashed into the ocean, and died.
* * *
—
In January 1938, a spectacular aurora ripples over Europe. First a green glow on the horizon, then someone is connecting the stars with a quill pen, red ink bleeding upward, arching across in crimson pulses, in orange plumes that unfurl and vanish. London must be burning, people in Britain say, gazing at the sky. Firefighters in the Alps are sent to chase flickering reflections on the snow. Across the continent, people call their local police, ask, Is it war? Is it fire? Not yet. It’s a solar storm. Charged particles from the sun collide with gas molecules in the atmosphere. In Holland, crowds awaiting the birth of a princess’s baby cheer the aurora as a good omen. Across the Atlantic, in Bermuda, people think the streaks of red mean a ship is burning at sea.
Jamie, in Canada, takes the aurora as an omen, too. He will do what he has been thinking about doing. He heaps six months of work in the snow, making a tidy cone of his paintings of his memories of Wallace’s paintings, splashes them with kerosene, tosses on a match. The paint blisters and bubbles; black-edged holes spread, disintegrating the canvas. Prodding the pyre with a branch, he feels terrible regret and also relief. The paintings were halfway between one thing and another. He’d needed to make them, but only in order to experience destroying them.
The next time he goes to town, there is a telegram from Flavian. One of his landscapes has been chosen for a purchase prize by the Seattle Art Museum. Flavian, retroactively begging Jamie’s pardon for his audacity, had entered it in an exhibition. Flavian would like to know if Jamie has more work for the gallery. Also, Jamie is expected in Seattle in one month for the prize ceremony.
* * *
—
Once, caught out overnight in Cordova by abysmal weather, Marian meets a well-dressed woman older than herself, the unmarried heiress to a cannery fortune, who offers to share her room in a hotel already overcrowded with fellow strandees. There is only one bed, of course. After a good meal with wine, after they’ve gotten under the covers, the woman murmurs an offer to scratch Marian’s back, quietly enough that Marian could pretend not to hear. But she says all right, turns on her stomach, tugs up her shirt.