Ahead, we saw something in the dark, a mere white lump in a field of white. I downshifted the Sno-Cat and engaged the ice brake. Vu and I ran out into polar-driven winds to find Scotty, weak of breath, half buried in snow.
I checked Scotty’s thermos. It was almost empty.
“You nearly got yourself killed out here, you fool,” I told him.
Scotty’s only response was to lift his leg out of the snow and show us a large trap, grappling his mangled foot. Black frost lined the wound.
I turned to Vu. “Jacques is near,” I said. “I have to find him.”
“Are you crazy?” Vu asked. “You won’t last ten minutes out there without a thermos.”
“You can’t stop me,” I told him. “Now get Scotty back to safety.”
And so I stumbled out into the blast-freezer of the night, riven and keening with cold, in search of my old friend Jacques. My fingers thickened, my vision blurred, everything smelled like ethylene glycol. In my mind, I saw images of times when I had been petty and small — framing colleagues for my mistakes, reporting the sympathizers and sodomites in my infantry unit, borrowing phonograph records with little intention of returning them — and now, as a mere speck wandering the vast Arctic expanse, I was just as small, but it was somehow different. I felt different. Toward the horizon, I hallucinated mountains and frozen rivers. On them raced a hairy little man, lugeing up and down their steep banks. Then everything went white.
I woke in a snow cave, lit by an oil-fat lamp. I could not move my limbs.
I woke again, days later, and the numbness was gone. I focused, and there was Jacques, heating lichen soup over a small fire of dried tundra moss. I felt warm and safe, and there were no fears of Jacques pulling any funny business on me while I slept, like those guys back in the service.
“My old friend, Jacques. Where have you been?”
Looking tired and defeated, Jacques pointed in various directions, suggesting the longitudes of Kamchatski, the Bering Sea, the Klondike Plateau.
“Il n’y a pas du tigre de Siberia,” he said. “Je n’ai pas cherche les loups polaire.”
It was time I taught Jacques a lesson about life. I motioned for him to follow me. We donned our snowshoes and forged out into the bracing cold, covering our faces as we stumbled toward the edge of an ice shelf where one of Jacques’s traps sat empty. We stood over its open jaws, and I couldn’t help but observe how primitive and pointless this device appeared against the endless nothing of our world.
I began by explaining to Jacques that in the beginning, sixteen billion years ago, all the energy of the universe was, for a microsecond, a ball of pure sympathy. Perfect states cannot last, I continued, which is the definition of our existence. There was a bang, and as the universe expanded, energies grew dim and distant, separated by galactic cold and dark.
I spread my arms real wide.
Jacques scratched his chin.
At some point, in about three billion years, I continued, the universe will stop expanding. Then, all the energy will rush together again. The spirits of all men, animals, and things will be joined at the core. Men like us, I suggested, were just born on the wrong side of the universe.
It was like my flatworms, I thought to myself. I hated to see them tighten and curl as I introduced them to superchilled noble gasses, but then there was the moment they relaxed, when their energy left us for the great return. This was a moment of pure sympathy, the thing that thrilled and terrified me about the death-ray. Creation is fine — I’ll admit it’s a necessity — but its stinging backhand is felt every time one life is separated from another: child from mother, scout from troop, private from platoon. Sympathy, however, is a coming together of energies. When this was all over, they were probably going to kill us. We knew that. I just hoped I’d be able to stand next to Q, without blindfolds, so we could face the dark voyage home together.
Jacques still looked confused. I realized I had skipped the part about matter not existing, so I hit him with that, and then threw in the myth of gravity. Finally, I briefly summarized how all appearance of solidity and permanence is an illusion.
Jacques scooped up a mitten of snow. He held it out. “Il n’y a pas de neige?”
“Sorry, friend,” I told him.
“Et le grand et noble tigre?”
I swept my hand from the glaciers to the trap at our feet. “Nothing is real.”
Slowly, almost fearfully, Jacques pointed at the moon.
I shook my head.
Taking my little friend by the shoulder, I led him back to the world of men.
Sure, everyone was glad to see Jacques’s return, but we were simply too busy to throw a party or anything. Dr. Q was worried about finding a Canadanaut in time for the launch, and everything was behind schedule because of Scotty’s frostbite. It turned out that Q couldn’t save the foot, though he did fashion quite a replacement out of fiberglass and gypsum. You couldn’t tell the difference. Scotty donated the old foot to my reanimation project. I was pressed for time, but I hoped to defrost it soon, hook up a big battery, and get those toes wiggling again.
I got cracking on launch preparations. I took core samples, tuned the blast lens, and spent countless days inside a lead suit, squinting under the nuclear shed’s bad lighting, while my nights were eaten up by the old pencil and protractor.
Meanwhile, the completed and launch-ready command nodule sat ghostly under a sheet in the middle of the lab, and we all looked away whenever we passed it.
I was doing some charts in the rec room when Jacques wandered in. I think he felt a lack of purpose in all our commotion, so I showed him how the compass helped me draw perfect circles and let him give it a shot. Jacques didn’t recognize a map of Canada at first. Slowly, he realized it depicted his trapping range, and quite excited, he pointed at the red and yellow circles I’d drawn.
Those, I explained by drawing a saturnium isotope, were fallout zones. The red circle was the nucleic flash wave, the yellow circle showed the Rutherford zone of fuel-pile vaporization, and the dotted line represented the bombardment fallout cloud, which, depending on the jet stream, was variable.
Jacques took the pencil and drew a picture of a raccoon. Or maybe it was a skunk. I told him I was sorry, but there weren’t going to be animals in northern Canada for about twenty thousand years. The disappointment was clear on his face, and I reassured him that maybe, by sweet-talking Mulroney, we could get him some free vocational training. Through stick figures, I helped Jacques understand the concepts of duct work and siding installation.
Jacques disappeared for a day and a half. We searched everywhere for him — behind the radon tanks, down in the twin walk-in freezers. Finally, we found him sitting inside the command nodule, head reclined on a proton gyro.
When we opened the door, he spoke. “Le Canadanaut,” he said. “C’est moi.”
We liked his proposal, but it wasn’t so easy. When Mulroney did a background check and discovered Jacques had never paid taxes, he was dead against the idea.
“What kind of example would this set for the young people?” he asked us.