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May brought new faces, first in a trickle and then in a flood. The snow caps retreated up the mountains as the day stretched and stretched again; as the climatologists consulted their grimoires and wagered on the greenup; as the botanists pulled on their Xtratufs and exclaimed over snarls of what looked, to Francis, like dead stems. Despite this, Francis took care not to antagonize the botanists, or discard their tufts of grass. Francis’s funding, which was reliant on institutional ability to recognize the importance of the occurrence, distribution, and ecology of microfungi, had the durability of an early-summer snowflake. He had, for years, counterbalanced its capriciousness by taking on administrative responsibilities at the research station. Having discovered his talent for rendering food inedible via the kitchen, the other overwinterers had relegated him to monitoring arrivals and departures, supporting ongoing experiments, general maintenance, and naturalist log duty.
12 arrivals today, he wrote. Alex spotted a muskox on the far side of the lake while snowshoeing. He thinks she’ll be calving soon and counted a number of other females who will follow shortly. Silna reports caribou moving north in groups nibbling at the exposed tussocks and sedges and browsing the lichens. They’ll follow the snow melt.
The new arrivals stumbled from the van and squinted toward the horizon, which today lay buried in a thick bank of grey cloud cover. They introduced themselves to Silna, who assigned them bunks, and to Alexander, who led the tour of the squat, rectangular buildings, and to Francis, who pasted on his least unconvincing smile and said something to the effect of, “If you forgot a bug shirt you will rapidly come to regret every decision that led you here,” which made the least senior member of the group blanch. Considering the man's face had started the color of a Hericium abietis, this was no mean feat.
“In any case,” said Silna, “you may come to us with questions or concerns. We will be available in shifts around the clock, though at night we do sleep and expect not to be woken except in case of emergency.” She leveled a look at a set of three newcomers huddled together with wide eyes and added, “An emergency means there is real and immediate threat to life. A fire. A missing limb.” Her mouth thinned in a way Francis had come to recognize as a warning signal. “A rampaging bear.”
Francis ducked his head to catch the reaction in his periphery. Silna never disappointed.
“We have condoms in the health office,” Alex contributed. “If someone says no once, you don’t ask again. If someone says yes, remember that this is a small group of people, and that we live closely together in minimally soundproofed quarters.”
The new arrivals shuffled minutely farther apart.
“All right,” said Silna, “find your room and settle in.”
The group dispersed, Francis turning toward the lab to check on his most recent cultures. This winter had turned up a number of potentially unrecorded species, which had necessitated a series of increasingly arcane emails with Ross in Siberia and Franklin in Greenland, as well as the department secretaries of the mycologists with whom he was not, currently, on speaking terms. It was, in Francis’s experience, all too common to declare oneself the discoverer of a new species, only to find that people had known about it all along. He had no patience for the kind of meticulous disentanglement that Jopson had made his specialty, nor the kind of wanton disregard for taxonomy that marked Franklin’s approach. His via media resulted in fewer publications and thus also fewer retractions, which compromise had placated his tenure committee and earned him one sublimely passionate note of thanks from Jopson, who had ever since pretended not to recognize him at conferences.
Today, the culture plates awaited him. Under the microscope, the fungi had stretched into rhizoid displays: long tendrils and strange fractal coils. He recorded the growth of each specimen, trading one plate for another as he slipped into the comfortable flow of the work.
“Dr. Crozier,” someone said from immediately behind him, just as Francis had removed the latest set and was en route to setting it down elsewhere.
The last samples, in their cylindrical polystyrene homes, met a startled demise. Francis, who had been fostering them for six months, stared down at the jellied mess of his clothing. The interloper, who had a nest of dark hair and the manner of an animal made suddenly and acutely aware of its own mortality, said, “Oh, shit.”
“Name,” said Francis, through the roaring between his temples.
“Edward Little,” said the man.
Francis fought down an unexpected wave of nausea, and the vertigo it left in its wake “Reason for being here.”
Edward stood taller, as if Francis had called him to attention. “Migratory bird count.” He didn’t append a sir, but he might as well have.
“You don’t need the lab?”
“No.”
“Then you are, as of now, banned.”
Edward winced. “Understood.” He didn’t move.
“As of now,” Francis prompted. In short order, he had the room once again to himself. He leaned heavily against a table, dragging air into his lungs. The rushing sound of his own mind threatened to submerge him. He gasped at its surface.
“I’m sorry,” said yet another visitor, from just ahead of him. The man had on a pair of leather boots, impractical for the weather, and above them no clothing from the required or recommended lists. He sported, for some incomprehensible reason, an old-fashioned captain’s hat. It was a wonder he hadn’t frozen to death. Francis would report him to Silna for the requisite talking-to and re-outfitting from the emergency storeroom.
“I’m busy,” said Francis, wiping at his shirt and breathing, breathing.
“I apologize for the imposition,” said the man. “I was just—would you be kind enough to tell me where I am?”
At that, Francis paused. The vertigo drained and left him casually ashore. He took another look at the man—at his canvas and fur, his windburned face, his wool trousers. “How did you arrive here?”
“That’s where you have the advantage of me,” said the man. He smiled, but his eyes darted toward the exits. “I’m afraid I have no idea. I’m James Fitzjames.”
“It's all right; you're all right,” said Francis, who had already begun to calculate the expense and hassle of an evacuation. But when he offered a handshake, his palm encountered nothing but a clarifying draft of frigid air.
It was one thing to spend winters so isolated from the rest of humanity that you knew your two companions from the sound of their breathing. It was fully another to hallucinate a man who, a quick request to the internet revealed, had died almost two centuries prior.
“I was second-in-command of the expedition,” the ghost said. “When Sir John died, I took command. We couldn’t break free of the ice. We—the men and I decided to walk out. I must not have—I don’t remember—”
Francis knew this, because he had access to the requisite Wikipedia pages. What he did not know was how he had come to this particular delusion.
“You can rest,” he said, vaguely aware that this was the way one ought to speak to ghosts.
“I can’t rest,” said the ghost. It turned and turned again, as if lost in a maze.
“Well you can’t stay here,” said Francis.
“There we agree,” said the ghost. Then it said, “oh, I—,” and disappeared.
“Who were you talking to?” asked Alex, who was carrying a camera. He delighted in taking frazzled portraits of new arrivals for a loosely articulated posterity.
“No one.”
Alex shrugged and raised the camera. The flash snapped up. “First day of school. Smile.”
“Where are my men,” said the ghost. It did not have the decency to hover like a ghost in a film but instead trudged after Francis, appearing and vanishing at what seemed to be random intervals.
“Dead,” said Francis, who was trying to sleep.
“That’s not possible.” The ghost glimmered closer. “We had set out on a walk. Where are the sledges? Direct me back to them.”
Francis rolled over and covered his head with a pillow. “You’re welcome to explore elsewhere.”
The ghost made an urgent sound. “I’m not. I have attempted to walk from here, but the landscape is unfamiliar. Then I blink and I am returned to proximity with you. I have walked the length of this confinement and find it extends roughly five hundred paces. It is therefore your duty to—”
Francis growled into his bunk. “I owe nothing to the dead.”
A spike of cold lanced Francis’s shoulder. The ghost was trying to touch him again. “Please,” it said. It sounded as if it might cry, or scream. “I must return to my men.”
Francis removed the pillow and sat up. “Your men are dead,” he said, with the methodological precision of someone who detests children and nevertheless feels obligated to talk to one. “You are dead. You have been dead for almost two centuries. You died thousands of miles from here and your body decomposed into the wilderness. Some of the fungi here might have had a part in it. They break you down into what’s needed to build more life. You can now do whatever it is the dead are supposed to do next.”
The ghost’s eyebrows drew together. Its eyes brimmed. “I can’t,” it said. “I can’t do what I’m supposed to do next.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t do what I was supposed to do before. I didn’t—those men are my charge.”
“Fine,” said Francis. “You saved them all. They lived long lives. They fathered fat babies. You can go now.”
“Is that true?” The ghost, its brow furrowed, looked unbearably hopeful.
Francis weighed the ramifications of a lie. The ghost might leave. It might dissipate itself to wherever ghosts were supposed to go instead of haunting around a research laboratory bothering mycologists. But in the moment, watching it wreathe itself in tentative joy, Francis lost the stomach for it.
“It’s not,” he said. “They died on the walk. So did you. None of you returned.”
The ghost drew itself up tall. It set its shoulders and flattened its mouth, as if bracing for an inspection. “I see,” it said. “Thank you for your honesty.” Then it was gone.
“Dr. Crozier,” said Edward, who had come into the dining hall rimed with frost and promptly filled a plate with three sandwiches. He moved as if to set the plate down adjacent to Francis’s before thinking better of it and taking a seat several chairs down. Soon enough, his two companions joined him, and they entered a close, hushed conversation that sparked an occasional loose word.
Silna had no compunctions about sitting next to Francis. She nodded at him, and took an enormous bite of an apple. Then, she opened her book and began to read.
Francis continued picking at his meal. Silna cleared her throat without raising her eyes. “Alex says you haven’t been in for your wellness check.” She turned a page.
“I haven’t had time,” said Francis.
With a finely sharpened Blackwing pencil, she underlined several phrases and added a star to the margin. “Make time. It’s a condition of your residency.”
They sat in silence for several moments. “Do you ever—” Francis began, feeling unsure of what he wanted to ask.
Silna circled a word and jotted something in the white space above it. “Do I ever what?”
See ghosts, Francis thought, which was a perfect way to fail a wellness check. “Feel history?”
She did look up at that. “I’m eating, here, at a table with four white men.” Then she returned to her book.
That was fair. Francis assumed she had said what she intended to say until, quietly, she added, “The muskoxen are calving. There are three new young among the yearlings.”
Francis, who had walked the loop but spotted only ptarmigan and fox tracks, took a sharp breath. “They’re healthy?”
“I think so; I’m not an expert. They’re nursing. Alex wants to name them.”
“Of course he does.”
“If he does, I’ve told him not to tell me. I don’t want to know. Some of them will live and some will not.”
“Do you think—” Francis hesitated before gathering his courage and continuing, “Do you wonder what people thought, hundreds of years ago? When they died here?”
“I don’t have to wonder,” said Silna.
“That isn’t—the people who came here. Who weren’t ready for it.”
She focused a puzzled expression in Francis’s direction. “You suggest that a child not touch a hot stove. He touches a hot stove. Then he has learned not to touch a hot stove. Those people?”
“Those people.”
“They should not have come. Before they died, I hope they realized.”
“They were curious.”
“They were vanguards of something they didn’t understand. They were ignorant, and pitiable. That doesn’t earn them forgiveness.”
Those men are my charge, the ghost had said, in a stricken tone that Francis had recognized as grief.
“They were people.”
“They were the long fingers of a greedy hand. Why this sudden interest? They don’t have spores.”
I’m haunted, Francis desired to say. I think the past is attempting passage.
“I don’t know,” he said instead. “Something one of the new arrivals mentioned.”
“All right,” said Silna, clearing her place. “Don’t tell me, then. Get your wellness check.” She moved with a graceful heaviness, like the earth clung tightly to her body. She did not seem to notice the weight.
The ghost attempted no further conversation. Instead, it walked determinedly east, counting its steps. Then it blinked out of existence and appeared once more at arm’s length. It repeated this experiment: running, pacing, crawling. No method of movement extended the leash. Like a bird battering itself against its cage, the ghost tested the limit again and again. Francis, cataloging cultures and photographing their growth, steadied himself before lifting each plate. He had never been one to read meaning into the Rorschach spread of fungi, but now they suggested masts and spars and rigging; sledges and buckled ice. He thought of lumbering bears and telescopes and the round pancakes of ice that bobbed through the water. Did you know him? he wondered, describing margins. Did you know the wool of his coat, or the leather of his boots? Did you know his bones?
“One,” said the ghost, counting its paces. “Two.”
By the end of the third day, Francis had reached the end of his tolerance. “Stop it,” he said. “It’s not going to change.”
The ghost ignored him and started counting again. Its voice trembled and it cleared its throat.
“Stop it,” Francis said with more force. “It won’t change.”
“Seven,” said the ghost, with an edge of desperation. It was weeping in a straightforward way, choking on the numbers. “Eight.”
It wanted so badly to leave. It wanted so badly for things to have gone differently. But nothing it wanted was possible. The very fact of its existence unmade all its desires.
“I’ll come out with you,” said Francis, gently this time, around an aching in his chest. “We’ll walk the lake loop. You can’t return to your men, but we can at least see something new.”
“Eighteen,” said the ghost.
Francis reached out a hand. He wished to take the ghost by the shoulders and induce it to stop, to warm it the way people must once, long ago, have warmed lost travelers. “Please.”
The ghost paused, halfway through the wall. Francis saw only the back of its sleeve; one boot. Its expression hid between the molecules of insulation that kept the lab warm in winter. Then it stepped back into the room. “Will that allow me greater distance?”
“You’ll feel different.” Francis stacked the rest of his trays and returned them to storage. He looked away as the ghost swiped tears from its eyes. “That’s nothing to dismiss.”
“I must return. Or you must take down a letter. I’ve attempted one, but I’m unable to move the pen. To their families.”
Their families are dead, Francis thought. There is no one to write to. But that wasn’t quite it. It was that their families had died not knowing, and that no bridge could now span the chasm of that not-knowing. “You can’t undo what’s done.”
“They trusted me.”
“None of you should have come.”
“I know,” said the ghost. Its eyes focused on something far away, distantly removed by time or space. “But we did.”
At the far end of the lake, the wind bent the grass double, in gusting waves that brought to mind the swells of the sea. “This is as far as we go,” said Francis.
“One,” said the ghost, setting off to the east once more. Then it stopped. “What’s he doing?”
On a small hump of earth, Edward Little huddled with a pair of binoculars, a notebook, and his two compatriots. He scribbled something before raising the binoculars again. To his right, one of his friends aimed a long-focus lens at a brilliant yellow Wilson’s Warbler, which let forth bursts of crescendoing chatter. “Beautiful,” said the other friend. “Did you know, Wilson originally named it the Green Black-capt Flycatcher? It’s not a flycatcher, of course, and in the movement away from honorific names, it’s been proposed to rename it the Black-Capped Flit Sprite, or the Brilliant Warbler.”
“If you’ve annotated my field guide without asking again—” said the photographer.
“I would never.”
“You would a half-dozen times.”
“Edward! Tell John I add only the most current thought from leaders in the field—”
“I’m not getting involved in this,” said Edward, his pencil flying over the page. “John, if after two years you still leave your field guides where George can get to them, you have only yourself to blame.”
“Dr. Crozier!” George shouted. Surely an ornithologist should exercise greater care not to startle the objects of his study. But the birds, as if they understood the exuberance of spring when they saw it, remained in place.
Francis approached warily, the ghost at his side. “The snow geese were just by overhead,” said George. “You should have seen them. Like darts across the sky. John took a marvelous series.”
“The photographs were all right,” said John, who looked unwillingly mollified.
“Tell us about the mushrooms,” said George. “That’s what you’re after?”
“Microfungi. Not mushrooms.”
George smiled politely. The ghost snorted. “Ah yes, a distinction with which many of us are familiar and in which many of us are interested.”
“Which is to say,” said Francis, ignoring an interruption only he had noticed, “they do not produce fruiting bodies. You’re likely familiar with the mildews—”
Edward made an anguished sound, and George said, hastily, “We are. Familiar.”
“Well then,” said Francis. “The microfungi are not appropriately appreciated. The saprotrophic microfungi in particular make life as we know it possible.”
“Rotten nourishment,” said George. “From the Greek.”
“George—” Edward said in a pained tone, but Francis said, “Yes. Something has to eat the dead. Otherwise we’d run out of the materials to make more life. We would wrap the planet in an inert collection of the past.” The ghost was staring at him. He met its eyes, and held them.
“In that case, a moment of gratitude for the decomposers, and for their long memories,” said George. The ghost blinked twice, hard. It hugged an arm across itself. Francis hunched into his jacket.
“It will be too late to be grateful, by then,” said Francis, and left the ornithologists to their work.
“It’s true, then,” said the ghost. “That I’m dead. That I never returned.”
“It’s true.”
“That none of us returned. That there is no more work to do.”
Francis nodded.
The ghost shimmered, as if whatever made it visible had briefly lost power. “Then why am I here?”
Francis shrugged. “I don’t know. You became part of the land. You’re part of what grows and moves and lives. But I don’t know why you take your form.”
The ghost stood in silence for a long moment. Francis, his eyes on the distant, jagged horizon, waited for it to speak. “Is it punishment?” it said at last.
“I don’t know,” said Francis.
“What is it that you do know?” snarled the ghost.
Francis took a bracing lungful of fresh air. For as far as he could see, no human activity touched the landscape. Raptors wheeled overhead, drifting sharp-eyed toward the crystal moment of the dive. In the distance, the caribou nibbled north. “Little more than nothing,” he said.
“Evidently.” The ghost straightened its sleeves and cap. Its mouth curled with fury.
“A little more than nothing is not nothing,” Francis said softly.
The ghost whirled toward him. “A little more than nothing is often nothing.”
“It’s how we learn.”
“One step at a time. One life at a time. One hundred lives at a time. What did we learn? Nothing. We found nothing; we accomplished nothing. We were lost and then sick and then dead.”
“You were.”
“Some of them were boys,” whispered the ghost. Its voice wavered. “They had wives, and children. They had brothers and sisters who loved them.”
“We all have people who love us.”
“For nothing.”
Francis knelt and touched the soil, the surface of which had just begun to warm. Beneath it, within it, flourished endless invisible life. “You should not have come. The ones who came after should not have, either. But for a little more than nothing.”
The ghost folded over itself, as if something sharp and inerrant had found its vulnerable belly. It made a soft, distraught sound.
“I’m sorry,” Francis said. He wanted acutely to touch the ghost’s arm, to offer it an embrace. He ached with uselessness, and pressed the feeling to the earth.
“I’m sorry,” the ghost echoed. “I don’t know why I’m haunting you. You haven’t asked for this.”
Beneath Francis’s fingers, the soil crumbled apart. “Every day,” he said, “I ask the organisms here to tell me their story. I did not consider that there might be other stories to tell. Or that there might be other ways they remember.”
“You think I’ve been reanimated by a mushroom.” The ghost’s face reorganized itself from gutted to dubious in the span of a second.
“I think no such thing.”
“You think mushrooms gossiped me into existence.”
“I don’t study fungi with fruiting—”
“Please spare me.”
“I think there is a kind of memory that lives in a place,” Francis tried helplessly.
“Christ on the cross,” muttered the ghost. “Hold your noise.”
The ornithologists came and went. They were followed in turn by a gaggle of climatologists, and then a series of students, brought for coursework and overjoyed to spend a week trudging through the open spaces. Francis logged their observations in the naturalist journal, and cross-referenced their sightings with dates from the previous years. He checked the weather, and the wind direction, and the temperature. With the ghost, he walked the perimeter of the lake and watched for signs of spring life: flexible and small and, in the case of new chicks, cacophonous.
The ghost had given up on the counting, thought Francis noticed that he had not given up on testing his tether. With some frequency, he would pull away, and away, until he hit some invisible limit and returned with a gust of icy air. Each time he returned Francis fought down a ripple of relief.
The mosquitos have arrived in force, Francis wrote. Their swarming fills the air with a high whine. The muskrat that patrols the edge of the lake furthest from camp has made itself known again this morning, grooming itself on the bank before diving and swimming with just its head above water and barely disturbing the surface as it moves. Wildfires have started to the south after a band of thunderstorms approximately one week ago, today the first hint of smoke drifted north and into camp. We anticipate smoky conditions and poor air quality tomorrow so researchers whose work depends on visibility or fieldwork may have to delay.
The ghost, reading over his shoulder, frowned. “Smoke?”
“From the fires, in BC.”
“Before…Christ?”
Francis smiled despite himself. “British Columbia.”
“A new territory.”
“Well, a province. Of Canada.”
“We hadn’t yet mapped all of it,” said the ghost. “We thought we were doing such a service. The Passage is found?”
“Yes.” Francis posted the journal entry and closed his laptop.
“And traversed?”
That was a harder one to explain. How, Francis thought, to tell a ghost he had died for an essentially useless line on a map. How to explain that the descendants of the mills and steam engines chimneying James’s era were now prying open the very icebound passage he had died seeking. The cost of the thing, in lives and futures, in culture and language and disease, defied calculation. “Sometimes traversed,” said Francis. “We’ve found other ways.”
“But found,” said James. His voice held a note of wonder. “I am glad to know that. Perhaps when I find my men, I will tell them.”
Francis, who had begun to think of James as a kind of scar, faded but permanent, felt a strange pang of loss. He pressed his hands firmly to the table. The table was a material reality. The land, too, and the people of and on it. The impossible stretch of the sky.
“You’ve made yourself a difficult man to track,” said Alex, appearing as if from nowhere. “Which is impressive on a research station currently home to a dozen residents.”
“I’ve been meaning—”
“Silna is about fifteen minutes from telling you to rotate out,” Alex continued cheerfully. “Apparently you’ve been talking to yourself, wandering around the lake, and neglecting your mushrooms.”
“They aren’t—”
“Which is to say, your wellness check is overdue.”
James, startled into silence by the intrusion, laughed. Francis dug up a rueful smile in return. “I wasn’t avoiding you,” he said.
“You were absolutely avoiding me. Fortunately, I have access to clipboards and a good pair of boots. Your appointment starts now.” Alex clicked a pen closed, then open. “Over the past six months, how often have you felt down, depressed, or hopeless?”
“Isn’t this a private conversation?”
Alex made a sweeping gesture. “We’re alone, aren’t we?”
Francis glanced up, at where James stood loosely intersecting with a chair.
Alex’s eyes narrowed. “Aren’t we?”
“We’re alone,” said Francis. James’s shoulders dropped. A small, sad expression crossed his face. Then he faded into transparency.
“If you’re struggling,” Alex said kindly, “there’s no shame in it. You’ve been sober for—”
“Ten years.”
“You’ve been here almost that long. You’re among friends.”
Francis—who loved Alex, who loved Silna; who loved the great stretch of land and the aurora and the bitter winters and the first sunrise; who had perhaps, he thought, come to the kind of feeling that could grow into love for a ghost—knew the truth of this. But shame does not grow from a substrate of logic, and Francis knew that as well.
“I’m not sure what it is,” Francis said, slowly. “I think—”
Alex waited, his pen hovering.
“I think I’m tired. I think I’ve been tired a long time.”
The pen made no motion toward the paper. “There is no shame in that, either. Or in taking time to recover, or wanting companionship.”
“I know.”
“Do you need time away?”
The very thought of it tore at Francis like wind-whipped ice. With each year, the land changed. The birds arrived earlier; the green emerged sooner. Lakes pooled on the warming earth and birthed hordes of insects. What if he left, and when he returned did not recognize the place? What if it no longer recognized him? What if he left James behind? “No,” he managed. “That’s not it.”
“You know what I’m going to recommend.”
“Eight hours of sleep, on a regular schedule.”
“You’ve got it. Blackout curtains and a meal diary.”
“Multivitamin.”
Alex grinned. “You’ll have my job next.” The smile faded as suddenly as it had appeared. “It’s not just a checklist, Francis. It’s taking care of yourself, so we can take care of what’s within our purview.”
“Within our purview.”
“Not much, when it comes down to it. But this: our bodies, our minds. We can care for them.”
Francis’s mind, or perhaps his mind’s work, had brought him a ghost. He could care for that, in whatever way one could care for ghosts, until it was ready to move on. “I will,” he said.
The end of the season saw off the researchers and the fresh-faced university students, and brought in the first of the snow. For two whiteout days, Francis played cards with Alex and read with Silna; made dubious sandwiches in the dining hall; monitored the conditions for the log. In the evenings, he had wandering conversations with James, who, resigned to his new time, hurtled into a fascination with modernity. Francis, having never considering the scope of what James might not know, explained germs and nutrition, advances in cold-weather clothing, plastics and cell phones. He narrated a history, and the changing language of self-determination.
James listened, asked, listened again. Without paper for notes or any way to manipulate his environment, he recited what he had learned to himself in small mnemonic bursts that Francis found impossibly endearing. He exclaimed over the existence of other galaxies, and spent long quiet moments of reverence before images of Earth from space.
The blizzard cleared and left behind a land washed white. The open water grew lacy ice that crept over and stilled the waves bucking in the wind. Francis walked the lake's perimeter again, with James at his side. At the far inlet, he paused. “How long do you plan to stay?”
James, his hair and coat unruffled by the wind, opened his mouth and closed it again. Then he said, “I hadn’t planned to do any of this.”
“That is,” said Francis, who could not look at him, in case his next words were not well received, “you are welcome to. Stay.”
A pinpoint of ice: James's finger at his temple, at his jaw. “I don't know that I can.”
Francis shifted from foot to foot. Loneliness weighted his bones. Time had slipped from beneath him. “I would feel your absence.”
James nodded. “I imagine you would.”
“I’ve come to—” There was no word for it. Admire. Care for. What is it to love someone who is long, long dead?
“Please,” said James. “Please don't ask me for something I cannot do.”
“I’m sorry,” said Francis. “It wasn’t my intention.”
“None of this was anyone’s intention.” James kicked at the dusty snow without disturbing its fine distribution, or the ermine tracks crossing it. “We do what we can with what we have. In this life or any existence we have been given. I am grateful in this existence to have had time with you.”
“I’m not ready to be alone again.”
James smiled faintly. He moved until Francis felt the cold of him from shoulder to heel. “We are all of us alone. And we are all of us together. Did you not examine the photograph? From just there—” he pointed at the sky “—we are too small to see.”
The sun set, and did not rise. Alex hounded Francis into an exercise schedule, a sleep schedule, a work schedule. As the dark weeks passed, James discovered music, spending an entranced day demanding the complete works of Tchaikovsky, and another entirely devoted to Queen. When Francis proved unconversant in the contemporary, James instructed him in no uncertain terms to consult Wikipedia. So Francis brought the music with him to the laboratory, cataloging and photographing the cultures to Lizzo and Olivia Rodrigo and Lil Nas X.
Silna caught him nodding to Leave the Door Open, even though James had gone for one of his long walks and Francis had no excuse. She smiled bemusedly at him before taking a seat at one of the lab tables. She had a sketchbook with her, and a micron pen. As the music played, she hatched the patterns of light and shade onto a bear’s round, alert face. Its one completed eye shone with inaccessible intelligence.
“The sun returns tomorrow,” she said.
“I know,” said Francis. The fungi had blossomed into thriving colonies. Francis suspected one of them was a new discovery. If continued observation confirmed the suspicion, he’d name it after James, which idea left him curiously bereft.
“I’ll extinguish and light the qulliq. Alex has prepared a meal.”
“I know.”
Though Silna did not look at him, Francis nevertheless felt examined. She drew the pen across the paper in fine sweeps to mimic fur. “Spring will come soon.”
He nodded, and opened his computer to attach the images of the new fungus in an email to Jopson. If it was known, he preferred to find out sooner than later. If it was new, then some tiny contribution to the sphere of human understanding awaited. A little more than nothing. That was usually, he thought, what a person could do.
“Alex claims he’ll recognize the yearling muskox this time.”
“He always claims that.”
Silna filled in the bear’s other eye, leaving space for the light. “I hope he does. I hope they all lived.”
Look at this, Francis wrote in the subject line, just before sending. “I hope so too.”
May brought familiar faces, with binoculars and annotated field guides in hand. “Welcome back,” said Francis. The ornithologists drew together into a little flock.
“Dr. Crozier!” said George. “I took the liberty of reading some of your work. If I may, I was curious about the implications of increased microfungal diversity in—”
“George,” said Edward. “Put your bags away first.”
“I’ll be here later.” Francis fixed Edward with a stern look. “Or in the lab.”
James, who had materialized behind them, grinned. “Look who’s back.”
“I’m happy to see you,” Francis said firmly. “We’re going out for a look around the lake later, if you’d like to join us.”
“That sounds wonderful,” said John, busily organizing his duffel. “Let us know when you’re leaving.”
The morning passed in busy, bright gore-tex-clad companionship: settling in and unpacking, the tour of changes. After lunch, Francis gathered a group and set off along the trail, James at his side. He thought that he wanted nothing more than to hold James’s hand. But you cannot hold a ghost. A ghost holds you, and then, when it is ready, lets go.
Around the bend and behind a slight rise in the land, Francis stopped abruptly, in instinctive silence. There, struggling up from the snow, wriggled a newborn muskox. Its mother waited patiently above it as it found first its front legs, then its back. It stumbled, wrongfooted by its own newness. With a lurch, it found its mother and tucked itself under her curtain of qiviut to nurse.
The ornithologists whispered to one another. Francis heard the click of a camera.
“Look at that,” James said. “Look at that.” The sun caught a shard of ice and shattered into a thousand colors. James smiled, his eyes shining. He raised a hand to Francis’s cheek, which registered a gust of cold. Then time moved and he was gone.