It was June, still light when they landed after ten o’clock. The buildings of Iqaluit lay scattered like pebbles dropped from a casual hand, inconsequential to the vast expanse around them. Here and there in the landscape rose gray slabs of rock, half covered with moss, that looked like the backs of whales rising up from a choppy sea. The sky was a brilliant blue, untouched by clouds, and the air felt clear and thin. The other passengers, most of whom looked like they were coming home, filed silently across the tarmac into the small terminal.
He’d arranged for a taxi, and the drive was his first clue that he didn’t remember as much as he thought he did. It wasn’t that the place looked better or worse — the same prefab buildings balanced on their stilts, some of the rocky yards neat, others strewn with snowmobiles and assorted debris — but that his sense of direction and layout had diminished over a decade. Only the rough, bruise-colored expanse of Frobisher Bay oriented him, its white-crested waves crashing against the stubborn ice. The city had grown, and there were new neighborhoods he didn’t know. The taxi driver, an immigrant from Bosnia via Winnipeg, greeted his few questions with grunts. As the car drove slowly through the twisting gravel streets, children gazed at him with naked curiosity. The boys he had coached in basketball would be adults now, with families of their own, and Mitch knew he wouldn’t recognize them. He had made friends here, but most of them were whites like him, from Quebec and Ontario, here to work for a short duration and doubtless gone back south by now.
The taxi pulled up to the apartment that had been leased for him. They had said only that it was a duplex, but as he was paying the driver the front door opened and a tall, thin man with a shock of red hair stepped out.
“You must be the new man, then,” he said, extending a hand. “I’m Johnny.”
“Mitch.”
“We’re sharing quarters,” Johnny said, “but it’s a large house by local standards, so have no fear. You know how tight housing is up here.” His voice held the lilting, musical cadence of a Maritimer. He grabbed one of Mitch’s bags and waved cheerfully at the taxi driver, who ignored them both and drove away. Johnny looked to be in his thirties, ruddy-cheeked and leather-skinned, whether from liquor or exposure to the elements Mitch couldn’t tell. He led Mitch up to a bedroom with a bed and a desk, dumped the bag on it, then gestured down the hall.
“My room’s back there, then. Come by any time you need anything, I’m always up. Can’t sleep at all in the summer here. I get this nervous energy. In the winter I sleep fourteen hours a night and watch TV all afternoon if I can. That’s what this place does to you. Let’s have a drink. You’ve been here before, I heard.”
“It’s been over ten years,” Mitch said once they were in the kitchen, where Johnny poured him two fingers of whiskey in a smudged glass. He’d heard nothing about a roommate, but he actually didn’t mind. With someone to talk to, he’d be less likely to sit around brooding.
“I’m an engineer myself,” Johnny said. “From St. John’s, originally, but more than happy to be away from it. Here consulting on a new sewage plant. Got my hands in the shit, as they say.”
“Do they say that?”
“I say it,” Johnny said. “Cheers.”
They drank, sitting on red plastic-seated chairs around a Formica table, furniture that looked like it had been brought in forty years ago. At one end of the counter was a microwave splattered with sauces and grease, at the other a crowd of liquor bottles. Through the window Mitch could hear kids kicking a soccer ball around. It should’ve been past their bedtime, but it still felt like noon, and the Inuit weren’t big on nighttime rituals anyway, he remembered, believing their children would wind down naturally on their own. He drank the whiskey slowly, holding each sip for a moment on his tongue before swallowing; the combination of flying, the brightness, and the alcohol made him feel pleasantly light-headed and numb and far from home.
Johnny topped up his whiskey. When he’d introduced himself, Mitch was sure he was younger, but up close his face was deeply lined, with dark brown splotches on his cheeks and forehead, and his teeth were stained brown. It could be he was in his forties or fifties and maybe his rangy thinness was less a product of fitness than of a diet of whiskey and cigarettes, one of which he lit right now, exhaling the smoke in a broad stream. “So you’re a shrink, they say.”
“A therapist, actually,” Mitch said, remembering how quickly news traveled in a small place like this one. “I specialize in addict—”
“So no drugs, then. No prescriptions,” Johnny said, clearly disappointed.
“No.”
“No Xanax? No little helpers?”
“Cognitive behavioral therapy,” Mitch said, enunciating each syllable with slow annoyance.
Johnny made a flapping gesture with his left hand. “Talk, talk, talk. Give me the drugs, is what I say. In fact, if you want to see my behavior change, shoot me straight in the vein.”
Mitch stood up. “I guess I’ll hit the sack.”
Instantly Johnny sprang up and clapped his hand on Mitch’s bicep, the long ash of his cigarette falling on the table between them. “Christ on a stick,” he said, “I didn’t mean to insult your line of work or nothing like that. I just hoped to score a little extra in the way of supplies, eh? Had my hopes up for the medicine cabinet here.” He smiled at Mitch ingratiatingly, as if this were a natural explanation between friends. When Mitch didn’t say anything, he flushed, looking suddenly youthful again. “Forgive me,” he said. “I been up here too long.”
“Forget it,” Mitch said.
“Anyway, I’ve got other sources,” Johnny said philosophically, “so no harm done.”
Mitch left him lighting another cigarette, went to his room, and lay down on the single bed, the flimsy pink curtain doing nothing to block the sunlight. The smoky smell on his clothes reminded him of Martine, and he thought he should call to say he’d arrived safely; but as he was thinking it, his head swimming with whiskey, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.
After his first date with Martine, he should have let it go. Clearly this was what she expected; he was a prospect too lame to be considered for the long term, redeemed only by being just smart enough to recognize it. But he didn’t want to. For years he had occasionally gone out with some divorced woman, usually sticking with her long enough to have sex a couple of times, to be reminded of the existence and practice of sex, after which he would let things drop. He became the guy who didn’t call. The guy who met your kid and played catch with him one weekend, then never came around again. It wasn’t heartlessness so much as apathy, and if Grace, at one time, would have reminded him that one could easily arise from the other, well, she wasn’t around to do so now.
But with Martine he felt like he’d met a movie star. He didn’t have her phone number, and he’d forgotten, after their cursory introductions at the bar, her last name. But he remembered her small charming apartment building off a little allée in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve and took a chance, showing up there on a Friday night at six thirty with a bottle of wine and a cooler filled with food. One thing Mitch had going for him: he could cook. He figured he might as well play to his strengths.
The child who answered the door was lithe, blond, storybook cute, maybe seven years old. In French, Mitch asked him if his mother was home. The kid just stared at him, rhythmically biting his lower lip and then releasing it. Mitch asked what his name was and still got no response. Finally he crouched down and introduced himself, which accomplished nothing. The boy was rubbing his right toe against the hallway carpet in exactly the same rhythm as the lip biting. In his right hand, for some reason, was a twenty-dollar bill. He dropped it on the floor and ran away.