They smiled down at their city. They thought it was so stable. I’d watched ice sheets calf off the glacier that were five times the size of Qaanaaq. When one of those came drifting in our direction, the windscreen wouldn’t help us. The question was when, not if. I knew a truth they did not: how easy it is to lose something – everything – forever.
A Maoist Nepalese foreman, on one of my first ice ship runs, said white North Americans were the worst for adapting to the post-Arctic world, because we’d lived for centuries in a bubble of believing the world was way better than it actually was. Shielded by willful blindness and complex interlocking institutions of privilege, we mistook our uniqueness for universality.
I’d hated him for it. It took me fifteen years to see that he was right.
“What do you think of those two?” I asked, pointing with my chin at a pair of girls his age.
For a while he didn’t answer. Then he said, “I know you can’t help that you grew up in a backwards macho culture, but can’t you just keep that on the inside?”
My own father would have cuffed me if I talked to him like that, but I was too afraid of rupturing the tiny bit of affectionate credit I’d fought so hard to earn back.
His stance softened, then. He took a tiny step closer – the only apology I could hope for.
The pod began its descent. Halfway down he unzipped his jacket, smiling in the warmth of the heated pod while below-zero winds buffeted us. His T-shirt said The Last Calf, and showed the gangly sad-eyed hero of that depressing miserable movie all the kids adored.
“Where is it?” I asked. He’d proudly sported the NEW YORK F CKING CITY shirt on each of the five times I’d seen him since giving it to him.
His face darkened so fast I was frightened. His eyes welled up. He said, “Dad, I,” but his voice had the tremor that meant he could barely keep from crying. Shame was what I saw.
I couldn’t breathe, again, just like when I came home two weeks ago and he wasn’t happy to see me. Except seeing my son so unhappy hurt worse than fearing he hated me.
“Did somebody take it from you?” I asked, leaning in so no one else could hear me. “Someone at school? A bully?”
He looked up, startled. He shook his head. Then, he nodded.
“Tell me who did this?”
He shook his head again. “Just some guys, dad,” he said. “Please. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Guys. How many?”
He said nothing. I understood about snitching. I knew he’d never tell me who.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Okay? It’s just a shirt. I don’t care about it. I care about you. I care that you’re okay. Are you okay?”
Thede nodded. And smiled. And I knew he was telling the truth, even if I wasn’t, even if inside I was grieving the shirt, and the little boy who I once wrapped up inside it.
WHEN I WASN’T with Thede, I walked. For two weeks I’d gone out walking every day. Up and down Arm Eight, and sometimes into other Arms. Through shantytowns large and small, huddled miserable agglomerations of recent arrivals and folks who even after a couple generations in Qaanaaq had not been able to scrape their way up from the fish-stinking ice-slippery bottom.
I looked for sex, sometimes. It had been so long. Relationships were tough in my line of work, and I’d never been interested in paying for it. Throughout my twenties I could usually find a woman for something brief and fun and free of commitment, but that stage of my life seemed to have ended.
I wondered why I hadn’t tried harder, to make it work with Lajla. I think a small but vocal and terrible part of me had been glad to see her leave. Fatherhood was hard work. So was being married. Paying rent on a tiny shitty apartment way out on Arm Seven, where we smelled like scorched cooking oil and diaper lotion all the time. Selfishly, I had been glad to be alone. And only now, getting to know this stranger who was once my son, did I see what sweet and fitting punishments the universe had up its sleeve for selfishness.
My time with Thede was wonderful, and horrible. We could talk at length about movies and music, and he actually seemed halfway interested in my stories about old New York, but whenever I tried to talk about life or school or girls or his future he reverted to grunts and monosyllables. Something huge and heavy stood between me and him, a moon eclipsing the sun of me. I knew him, top to bottom and body and soul, but he still had no idea who I really was. How I felt about him. I had no way to show him. No way to open his eyes, make him see how much I loved him, and how I was really a good guy who’d gotten a bad deal in life.
Cityoke, it turned out, was like karaoke, except instead of singing a song you visited a city. XHD footage projection onto all four walls; temperature control; short storylines that responded to your verbal decisions – even actual smells uncorked by machines from secret stashes of Beijing taxi-seat leather or Ho Chi Minh City incense or Portland coffeeshop sawdust. I went there often, hoping maybe to see him. To watch him, with his friends. See what he was when I wasn’t around. But cityoke was expensive, and I could never have afforded to actually go in. Once, standing around outside the New York booth when a crew walked out, I caught a whiff of the acrid ugly beautiful stink of the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
And then, eventually, I walked without any reason at all. Because pretty soon I wouldn’t be able to. Because I had done it. I had booked a twelvemonth job. I was out of money and couldn’t afford to rent my bed for another month. Thede’s mom could have given it to me. But what if she told him about it? He’d think of me as more of a useless moocher deadbeat dad than he already did. I couldn’t take that chance.
Three days before my ship was set to load up and launch, I went back to the cityoke arcades. Men lurked in doorways and between shacks. Soakers, mostly. Looking for marks; men to mug and drunks to tip into the sea. Late at night; too late for Thede to come carousing through. I’d called him earlier, but Lajla said he was stuck inside for the night, studying for a test in a class where he wasn’t doing well. I had hoped maybe he’d sneak out, meet some friends, head for the arcade.
And that’s when I saw it. The shirt: NEW YORK F CKING CITY, absolutely unique and unmistakable. Worn by a stranger, a muscular young man sitting on the stoop of a skiff moor. I didn’t get a good glimpse of his face, as I hurried past with my head turned away from him.
I waited, two buildings down. My heart was alive and racing in my chest. I drew in deep gulps of cold air and tried to keep from shouting from joy. Here was my chance. Here was how I could show Thede what I really was.
I stuck my head out, risked a glance. He sat there, waiting for who knows what. In profile I could see that the man was Asian. Almost certainly Chinese, in Qaanaaq – most other Asian nations had their own grid cities -- although perhaps he was descended from Asian-diaspora nationals of some other country. I could see his smile, hungry and cold.
At first I planned to confront him, ask how he came to be wearing my shirt, demand justice, beat him up and take it back. But that would be stupid. Unless I planned to kill him – and I didn’t – it was too easy to imagine him gunning for Thede if he knew he’d been attacked for the shirt. I’d have to jump him, rob and strip and soak him. I rooted through a trash bin, but found nothing. Three trash bins later I found a short metal pipe with Hindi graffiti scribbled along its length. The man was still there when I went back. He was waiting for something. I could wait longer. I pulled my hood up, yanked the drawstring to tighten it around my face.