Camp zero a novel, p.9
Camp Zero: a Novel, page 9
“You mean he would have just chosen tuna?”
“No.” The Barber pauses and then says, “He wouldn’t have taken either of those sandwiches. He knows they taste like shit.” He lights a cigarette, and then passes the pack over to Grant, who declines. “Any plans for New Year’s?”
“None, to be honest.”
“Well, there’s a little party happening in the bowling alley down the street. You should come if you’re free.”
“Will Meyer be there? I need to talk to him about my classroom.”
The Barber nods. “All the clients will be there. And the Blooms, too.”
“The Blooms?”
“They’re the women who work in the brothel across the highway.”
Grant chooses his words carefully. “Are they willing participants?”
The Barber looks evenly at Grant. “Why do you ask?”
“It’s just surprising that Meyer would condone sex work in a campus environment.”
The Barber shakes his head. “Meyer has a lot of ideas, but he has a Bloom like all the other men who run the camp.”
“Do you meet with one, as well?”
“No. I’m considered low-level, like the Diggers. I’m surprised you’ve been left out. You’re more like us than I realized.” The Barber grinds the cigarette butt under his boot. “Will I see you at the party?”
Grant shrugs. “Sure, it’s not like I have a lot going on here.”
“Good. I should get going.” The Barber starts for the front door of the warehouse, then looks back and says, “Can you keep what I said between us?”
“About the tuna?”
“No. Meyer.” The Barber opens the door and steps out into the blinding white light.
WHITE ALICE
Everything changed during our second winter. One evening, before dinner, the meteorologist was preparing her weekly report for home base. Before she sent it off, she noticed something odd. A small manila envelope labeled ABSOLUTE ZERO appeared on the computer’s screen.
“Absolute zero” was a term used in the meteorology field to describe the lowest theoretical temperature possible on the thermodynamic scale.
Absolute zero was equivalent to –459.67°F, a temperature so low that it was considered nearly impossible to reach. The meteorologist knew only another member of her profession would use such a term. She clicked on the folder and saw that it contained a single document. When she tried to open the document, a series of unintelligible numbers and symbols unspooled on the screen. It was clearly code.
For the meteorologist, not understanding the mysterious file felt like a personal failure, since it was clearly intended for her. She wondered if it contained interesting data sets. Her findings since arriving in the station confirmed what her colleagues already knew—the troposphere was warming, which meant the change wasn’t limited to the Earth’s surface. Large patches of sea ice had disappeared, and animals were searching longer for food, causing their migration patterns to become erratic and dangerous. The South already suffered through these ecological changes in the form of blistering summers, less precipitation, and significant periods of drought. The changes would only accelerate and continue. Wildfires, unprecedented storms, crop failure, and pervasive heat would render large sections of our country uninhabitable.
Perhaps this file was something different, she justified. A glimmer of hope for the future.
The meteorologist had been instructed to transmit all her findings to home base directly. Instead, she did something she knew was unauthorized. Instead of reporting the file, she asked the programmer to help her.
“We’ll send everything later, once we know what it means,” she promised the programmer. “Home base will never know otherwise.”
The programmer had, admittedly, grown bored since arriving at White Alice. It wasn’t clear what her functionality was beyond overseeing what was, in her estimation, the outdated computing software. Every day she booted up the computers and ran tests and scans to ensure the software and applications were healthy. And every night, she uploaded the day’s data back to home base and into a backup hard drive. All the messages and signals we received through the radar were workmanlike and nonclassified. Dispatches from Russian icebreakers patrolling their marine borders. Chinese freights shipping containers over the Arctic Circle. Cruise ships filled with tourists snapping photos of icebergs.
A computer science freshman at a low-level technical college could have performed the same function, and the programmer often complained that she felt like her expertise was underutilized. The meteorologist’s proposition, though undeniably wrong and liable for punitive action, was the first opportunity the programmer had to use her skills.
“Let’s get started,” the programmer said immediately, and began to work on breaking the code.
The rest of us had no idea what was happening. We merely assumed the two had forged some romantic bond and were spending the evenings pushed up against the consoles. They soon stopped coming to dinner altogether, and spent their entire evenings holed up in the communications room, eating crackers and jerky.
Sal found this amusing and rolled her eyes when someone noticed that, yet again, the meteorologist’s and programmer’s chairs were empty at the table. “You don’t need to eat when you’re in love.”
We learned what had really transpired two weeks later, when the meteorologist and programmer emerged wild-eyed and underfed during the botanist’s birthday party.
Yes, the two had grown close, but in an intellectual, near-spiritual manner, where their minds and thoughts had become bonded. They seemed like they had taken drugs together, and while the trip had been momentous, it had also gutted them by breaking down the laws of the universe into depressing nothingness. Or so the botanist said when they opened the kitchen door, looked at us with a holy oblivion in their eyes, and quickly closed the door again. The botanist had taken ayahuasca on a research trip in the Amazon. There, she had pursued a side interest (“purely for research purposes”) in order to understand the ramifications of mind-expanding drugs.
“You’d better share whatever you’re growing in that greenhouse,” the geographer called to the botanist, which made us all laugh.
The botanist just smiled and downed a shot of vodka.
We like to think back on this moment because it’s the last time things felt simple in our world. All of us around the table, drinking vodka chilled in a bucket filled with ice, laughing about the botanist secretly growing psychedelics.
The door opened again, and the meteorologist and programmer stepped out. Neither of them spoke as they took their places at the table.
Their uncharacteristically somber moods shifted the feeling in the room. The temperature seemed to drop, as if someone had flipped a switch. Our pulses quickened.
“Your meals are there,” the engineer said, gesturing to two plates of food.
“We already ate,” the meteorologist said with a thread of mania in her voice.
The programmer nodded aggressively. “Actually, we’re thinking of going for a walk. Anyone care to join us?”
Sal laid down her fork and looked at them steadily. “You’re going for a walk. Right now?”
“I could really use some fresh air,” the programmer said with fake cheer. The programmer never willingly left the station unless it was for her mandatory night watch. We all knew this, but it was her tone that made us stand and start suiting up for the outdoors.
We pulled on our snow pants, parkas, gloves, hoods, and balaclavas. It was only –20 degrees, but we needed to be prepared. We stood in a line as Sal checked us up and down, nodding at each of us once she’d confirmed we were properly suited up. It was unprecedented for us to leave the station after we’d been drinking.
“Shouldn’t one of us stay behind?” the cartographer asked. She never liked to leave her maps unattended.
“We’re all going,” Sal said. The edge in her voice told us everything we needed to know.
Outside, the winter sun had set many hours ago. It was pitch-black and windy, and as we stepped beyond the station, we patted our snowsuits for the extra flashlight, transmitter, and compass we always kept in our pockets. We pointed our primary flashlight at the snow and followed Sal as she led us around the periphery of the station, over to where the greenhouse dome rose above the ground.
“Is this far enough?” Sal yelled, her voice flapping away into the wind.
“No,” the meteorologist yelled back. “We need to be out of sight of the station.”
“Are you sure?” Sal yelled again.
“Affirmative,” the meteorologist responded.
None of us had been to the moon, but as we followed Sal away from the station, we felt a galactic loneliness we’d never experienced before, like watching the curve of Earth blacken from view. Still, we kept trudging until the station was nothing but the center of a void. We felt breathless. Cut off. Untethered.
“We’ll find our way back through orientation,” Sal tried to reassure us. “We all know the coordinates.”
We knew the coordinates better than our own names. Just the week before, the cartographer had spent an evening tattooing the orientation on our bodies with blue ink, a needle, and a flame. Even in the dark, we could feel the numbers prickle and glow on our skin. We huddled in a circle and gripped each other’s arms.
“I discovered a report in code,” the meteorologist finally said.
“Everything that is saved in our station is encrypted into code,” the programmer explained, “which is why we didn’t understand it at first. But once we were able to break the code, we accessed the file and understood everything perfectly.”
“Was it a message from home base?” the biologist asked.
“No,” the programmer said. “It was a warning from the previous mission.”
We couldn’t see her face, but the terror in her voice was clear.
The programmer explained that the last mission from White Alice had never returned back south. The squad was dropped off here, as we had been, with two years of supplies, tasked with their mission of climate surveillance. But as the days grew closer to the squad’s return date, home base cut off contact and stopped responding to messages as the squad’s supplies were quickly depleted. “They never heard from home base again.”
“What happened?” we asked.
The programmer’s voice quivered, so the meteorologist took over and told us that the men did their best with what they could—they tracked and hunted game across the tundra and tried to maintain their crops from the seeds in the vault. But their crops failed, and they eventually ran out of ammunition for hunting. By then it was winter, and the station was running low on oil for the generator, so they started burning scavenged branches and pieces of furniture to keep warm. Eventually, they ran out of food.
“And then?” Sal asked.
“They were starving,” the meteorologist said, “and desperate.” She paused for a long moment and her voice was uncharacteristically small when she spoke. “The last survivor was the mission’s meteorologist. He had committed unspeakable acts in order to survive, but now that he was alone in the station, he had no will to live. So he left the encrypted file as a warning for the next mission and said that he planned to walk out into the tundra and never return.”
The programmer’s voice broke. “Don’t you see? We’re a living experiment. Home base will desert us, and we’ll be forced to survive on our own.”
We had arrived in White Alice with the best of intentions. To work peacefully with each other in respect for our environment. But the meteorologist’s discovery presented a future as dark and cold as a distant planet. One day, we could be pitted against each other out of desperation.
Sal was the only one of us who didn’t seem shocked. “The moment I stepped foot in the station, I knew this mission was compromised. Why do you think I trained each of you so intensely? Why do you think I never rested? I feared we would someday meet a decision like this.” Then Sal said aloud what we had already begun to imagine. “Leave or be abandoned. The choice is still ours.”
Sal always led us back to the station, but that night we didn’t have to follow her. The sky was clear and crisp, and the North Star shone with an aching beauty. We thought of the coordinates pricked into our skin, guiding us back to the place where the axis of those numbers met. We walked in a line, our faces turned up to the brilliant light.
We would find a new home.
* * *
The oldest records from the radar missions were archived in a series of rolodexes in the library, typed on cardstock with handwritten annotations. Certificate of Competency. Physical Examinations. Medical History. Assessment of Maturity. Psychiatric Rating Scale.
We gathered in the library and opened the rolodexes together, carefully sorting through the yellowed paper, as the cartographer unrolled the maps. For the most part, the soldiers who had been stationed before us bore the old-fashioned names of the previous midcentury. Walt. Baxter. Alfie. Norman. Herb. Marcel. Rollie. Cecil.
We imagined them as men with sharp crew cuts and polished boots, blond wives tending to their blond children in cul-de-sacs in the Midwest. Stars and stripes on the front stoop, a dog asleep in a patch of sun. Family men, though some still looked like boys in their military headshots, drafted into protecting our country from nuclear annihilation.
Name: Clint (last name REDACTED)
Hometown: Akron, OH
Age: 25
Health record: Satisfactory
Assessment of Maturity: Well-adjusted
Reasons for Wishing to Enlist: Strong interest in aviation; father presently serving in armed forces; love of God and country.
In one of the boxes of paper ephemera, the botanist found a poster torn at the edges and faded with age. She showed us the poster, and we found the sequence of events, outlining in step-by-step instructions what to do if the radar ever picked up on an incoming attack:
1. SEND MESSAGE TO HOME BASE: WHITE ALICE IS HERE
2. TRACK COORDINATES OF ATTACK
3. DISPATCH COORDINATES TO HOME BASE; PENTAGON; CAPITOL
4. SHELTER IN PLACE AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS
“It wouldn’t have worked,” Sal said. “Even if the radar picked up on an attack, a ballistic missile would have reached the US in ten minutes.”
“Why build the stations if it was futile?” the geographer asked.
“Men will build lies if it makes them feel safe,” Sal responded. “Even a radar station that has no purpose.”
“Here it is,” the cartographer said, and motioned for us to join her at the drafting table. She unrolled a map that showed an aerial view of the region. “This is White Alice.” She pointed to a red dot in the center of the map. We felt our purpose and significance shrink as we saw how small we were against the vastness of the North. “This is First Nations treaty territory,” she said, and circled a large swath of land that included our station and the region to the south. “And over here is Dominion Lake.” She pointed south at a blue dot on the map. “It’s a two-day ride by snowmobile.”
The geographer said Dominion Lake was wealthy from the extraction of oil buried within the region’s mercurial sands. After the oil strike, thousands of workers arrived by the busload to the isolated region to claim their quick fortunes. They found work as administrators and foremen, pipe fitters and riggers, drivers and cleaners and cooks, and with their influx followed the sudden development of a new settlement. Townhouses with poorly insulated walls and leaky basements sprang up in cul-de-sacs where bears occasionally wandered, drive-through restaurants lined the only highway, and primary schools and hockey rinks and office buildings were built for the newly appointed officials who created and bent laws. A church for the vigilant believers. A bowling alley for the elderly and young. A liquor depot and a strip club and a brothel for everyone else.
The geographer was certain there would be jobs for us, as well. “Boomtowns always need fresh talent,” she said.
Sal leaned forward and kissed the geographer on the mouth, which made us all laugh.
We had never seen her so happy.
CHAPTER FIVE ROSE
The shuttered bowling alley has a handwritten sign posted on the front door, CLOSED FOR MY OWN DAMN REASONS. The squat beige building still has its faded awning printed with an image of the waves of Dominion Lake lapping against a bowling alley, a few pins floating with the breeze. Inside, above the bowling shoe rental counter, three stags with glossy marble eyes are mounted on wooden plaques. The names of their hunters are carved into the wood: TERRENCE, BIG RICK, OLD MO.
Rose heaps her parka by the door with the rest of the Blooms. New Year’s Eve. 2050. A year once used as a collective call to slow the warming of the earth. Yet no country has been able to fulfill their climate obligations, and now the second half of the century will be aimed at protection. What can be salvaged? Who will be saved?
The Floating City, perhaps. At least that’s what Damien promised Rose. Even if global temperatures spike another degree, the Floating City has the green technology and economic backing for the city’s children to see the future not as a dead end, or even a compromise, but an undulating road of shimmering possibility.
Right now, back south in the Loop, the toast will have just ended, and the hostesses will be leading their clients back to the suites. Rose can imagine Avalon walking by the koi pond, wearing her linen caftan, gold bangles clinking with each step. Round after round of fireworks light the sky on fire as the city’s citizens wish each other another year of the wealth and prosperity they know will be theirs.
It pains Rose to think about. The pull of wanting to be there. The relief of finally getting away. The knowledge that if things do not go well in camp there will be nothing to even return to. She thinks of her mother sitting alone at the edge of a steel cot. No kin to speak of. No one who even knows her Korean name.
But it’s still 2049 in camp, and the Blooms are growing weary. They’ve barely been in camp for two weeks, but their clients have been visiting them at all hours, driven by the animal need of a warm body next to theirs. Some are merely bored, and like how the Blooms are such “willing conversationalists,” as Meyer remarked to Rose the other night. Others see the Millennium as a place to pass through, the Blooms as a notch on their belt.
“No.” The Barber pauses and then says, “He wouldn’t have taken either of those sandwiches. He knows they taste like shit.” He lights a cigarette, and then passes the pack over to Grant, who declines. “Any plans for New Year’s?”
“None, to be honest.”
“Well, there’s a little party happening in the bowling alley down the street. You should come if you’re free.”
“Will Meyer be there? I need to talk to him about my classroom.”
The Barber nods. “All the clients will be there. And the Blooms, too.”
“The Blooms?”
“They’re the women who work in the brothel across the highway.”
Grant chooses his words carefully. “Are they willing participants?”
The Barber looks evenly at Grant. “Why do you ask?”
“It’s just surprising that Meyer would condone sex work in a campus environment.”
The Barber shakes his head. “Meyer has a lot of ideas, but he has a Bloom like all the other men who run the camp.”
“Do you meet with one, as well?”
“No. I’m considered low-level, like the Diggers. I’m surprised you’ve been left out. You’re more like us than I realized.” The Barber grinds the cigarette butt under his boot. “Will I see you at the party?”
Grant shrugs. “Sure, it’s not like I have a lot going on here.”
“Good. I should get going.” The Barber starts for the front door of the warehouse, then looks back and says, “Can you keep what I said between us?”
“About the tuna?”
“No. Meyer.” The Barber opens the door and steps out into the blinding white light.
WHITE ALICE
Everything changed during our second winter. One evening, before dinner, the meteorologist was preparing her weekly report for home base. Before she sent it off, she noticed something odd. A small manila envelope labeled ABSOLUTE ZERO appeared on the computer’s screen.
“Absolute zero” was a term used in the meteorology field to describe the lowest theoretical temperature possible on the thermodynamic scale.
Absolute zero was equivalent to –459.67°F, a temperature so low that it was considered nearly impossible to reach. The meteorologist knew only another member of her profession would use such a term. She clicked on the folder and saw that it contained a single document. When she tried to open the document, a series of unintelligible numbers and symbols unspooled on the screen. It was clearly code.
For the meteorologist, not understanding the mysterious file felt like a personal failure, since it was clearly intended for her. She wondered if it contained interesting data sets. Her findings since arriving in the station confirmed what her colleagues already knew—the troposphere was warming, which meant the change wasn’t limited to the Earth’s surface. Large patches of sea ice had disappeared, and animals were searching longer for food, causing their migration patterns to become erratic and dangerous. The South already suffered through these ecological changes in the form of blistering summers, less precipitation, and significant periods of drought. The changes would only accelerate and continue. Wildfires, unprecedented storms, crop failure, and pervasive heat would render large sections of our country uninhabitable.
Perhaps this file was something different, she justified. A glimmer of hope for the future.
The meteorologist had been instructed to transmit all her findings to home base directly. Instead, she did something she knew was unauthorized. Instead of reporting the file, she asked the programmer to help her.
“We’ll send everything later, once we know what it means,” she promised the programmer. “Home base will never know otherwise.”
The programmer had, admittedly, grown bored since arriving at White Alice. It wasn’t clear what her functionality was beyond overseeing what was, in her estimation, the outdated computing software. Every day she booted up the computers and ran tests and scans to ensure the software and applications were healthy. And every night, she uploaded the day’s data back to home base and into a backup hard drive. All the messages and signals we received through the radar were workmanlike and nonclassified. Dispatches from Russian icebreakers patrolling their marine borders. Chinese freights shipping containers over the Arctic Circle. Cruise ships filled with tourists snapping photos of icebergs.
A computer science freshman at a low-level technical college could have performed the same function, and the programmer often complained that she felt like her expertise was underutilized. The meteorologist’s proposition, though undeniably wrong and liable for punitive action, was the first opportunity the programmer had to use her skills.
“Let’s get started,” the programmer said immediately, and began to work on breaking the code.
The rest of us had no idea what was happening. We merely assumed the two had forged some romantic bond and were spending the evenings pushed up against the consoles. They soon stopped coming to dinner altogether, and spent their entire evenings holed up in the communications room, eating crackers and jerky.
Sal found this amusing and rolled her eyes when someone noticed that, yet again, the meteorologist’s and programmer’s chairs were empty at the table. “You don’t need to eat when you’re in love.”
We learned what had really transpired two weeks later, when the meteorologist and programmer emerged wild-eyed and underfed during the botanist’s birthday party.
Yes, the two had grown close, but in an intellectual, near-spiritual manner, where their minds and thoughts had become bonded. They seemed like they had taken drugs together, and while the trip had been momentous, it had also gutted them by breaking down the laws of the universe into depressing nothingness. Or so the botanist said when they opened the kitchen door, looked at us with a holy oblivion in their eyes, and quickly closed the door again. The botanist had taken ayahuasca on a research trip in the Amazon. There, she had pursued a side interest (“purely for research purposes”) in order to understand the ramifications of mind-expanding drugs.
“You’d better share whatever you’re growing in that greenhouse,” the geographer called to the botanist, which made us all laugh.
The botanist just smiled and downed a shot of vodka.
We like to think back on this moment because it’s the last time things felt simple in our world. All of us around the table, drinking vodka chilled in a bucket filled with ice, laughing about the botanist secretly growing psychedelics.
The door opened again, and the meteorologist and programmer stepped out. Neither of them spoke as they took their places at the table.
Their uncharacteristically somber moods shifted the feeling in the room. The temperature seemed to drop, as if someone had flipped a switch. Our pulses quickened.
“Your meals are there,” the engineer said, gesturing to two plates of food.
“We already ate,” the meteorologist said with a thread of mania in her voice.
The programmer nodded aggressively. “Actually, we’re thinking of going for a walk. Anyone care to join us?”
Sal laid down her fork and looked at them steadily. “You’re going for a walk. Right now?”
“I could really use some fresh air,” the programmer said with fake cheer. The programmer never willingly left the station unless it was for her mandatory night watch. We all knew this, but it was her tone that made us stand and start suiting up for the outdoors.
We pulled on our snow pants, parkas, gloves, hoods, and balaclavas. It was only –20 degrees, but we needed to be prepared. We stood in a line as Sal checked us up and down, nodding at each of us once she’d confirmed we were properly suited up. It was unprecedented for us to leave the station after we’d been drinking.
“Shouldn’t one of us stay behind?” the cartographer asked. She never liked to leave her maps unattended.
“We’re all going,” Sal said. The edge in her voice told us everything we needed to know.
Outside, the winter sun had set many hours ago. It was pitch-black and windy, and as we stepped beyond the station, we patted our snowsuits for the extra flashlight, transmitter, and compass we always kept in our pockets. We pointed our primary flashlight at the snow and followed Sal as she led us around the periphery of the station, over to where the greenhouse dome rose above the ground.
“Is this far enough?” Sal yelled, her voice flapping away into the wind.
“No,” the meteorologist yelled back. “We need to be out of sight of the station.”
“Are you sure?” Sal yelled again.
“Affirmative,” the meteorologist responded.
None of us had been to the moon, but as we followed Sal away from the station, we felt a galactic loneliness we’d never experienced before, like watching the curve of Earth blacken from view. Still, we kept trudging until the station was nothing but the center of a void. We felt breathless. Cut off. Untethered.
“We’ll find our way back through orientation,” Sal tried to reassure us. “We all know the coordinates.”
We knew the coordinates better than our own names. Just the week before, the cartographer had spent an evening tattooing the orientation on our bodies with blue ink, a needle, and a flame. Even in the dark, we could feel the numbers prickle and glow on our skin. We huddled in a circle and gripped each other’s arms.
“I discovered a report in code,” the meteorologist finally said.
“Everything that is saved in our station is encrypted into code,” the programmer explained, “which is why we didn’t understand it at first. But once we were able to break the code, we accessed the file and understood everything perfectly.”
“Was it a message from home base?” the biologist asked.
“No,” the programmer said. “It was a warning from the previous mission.”
We couldn’t see her face, but the terror in her voice was clear.
The programmer explained that the last mission from White Alice had never returned back south. The squad was dropped off here, as we had been, with two years of supplies, tasked with their mission of climate surveillance. But as the days grew closer to the squad’s return date, home base cut off contact and stopped responding to messages as the squad’s supplies were quickly depleted. “They never heard from home base again.”
“What happened?” we asked.
The programmer’s voice quivered, so the meteorologist took over and told us that the men did their best with what they could—they tracked and hunted game across the tundra and tried to maintain their crops from the seeds in the vault. But their crops failed, and they eventually ran out of ammunition for hunting. By then it was winter, and the station was running low on oil for the generator, so they started burning scavenged branches and pieces of furniture to keep warm. Eventually, they ran out of food.
“And then?” Sal asked.
“They were starving,” the meteorologist said, “and desperate.” She paused for a long moment and her voice was uncharacteristically small when she spoke. “The last survivor was the mission’s meteorologist. He had committed unspeakable acts in order to survive, but now that he was alone in the station, he had no will to live. So he left the encrypted file as a warning for the next mission and said that he planned to walk out into the tundra and never return.”
The programmer’s voice broke. “Don’t you see? We’re a living experiment. Home base will desert us, and we’ll be forced to survive on our own.”
We had arrived in White Alice with the best of intentions. To work peacefully with each other in respect for our environment. But the meteorologist’s discovery presented a future as dark and cold as a distant planet. One day, we could be pitted against each other out of desperation.
Sal was the only one of us who didn’t seem shocked. “The moment I stepped foot in the station, I knew this mission was compromised. Why do you think I trained each of you so intensely? Why do you think I never rested? I feared we would someday meet a decision like this.” Then Sal said aloud what we had already begun to imagine. “Leave or be abandoned. The choice is still ours.”
Sal always led us back to the station, but that night we didn’t have to follow her. The sky was clear and crisp, and the North Star shone with an aching beauty. We thought of the coordinates pricked into our skin, guiding us back to the place where the axis of those numbers met. We walked in a line, our faces turned up to the brilliant light.
We would find a new home.
* * *
The oldest records from the radar missions were archived in a series of rolodexes in the library, typed on cardstock with handwritten annotations. Certificate of Competency. Physical Examinations. Medical History. Assessment of Maturity. Psychiatric Rating Scale.
We gathered in the library and opened the rolodexes together, carefully sorting through the yellowed paper, as the cartographer unrolled the maps. For the most part, the soldiers who had been stationed before us bore the old-fashioned names of the previous midcentury. Walt. Baxter. Alfie. Norman. Herb. Marcel. Rollie. Cecil.
We imagined them as men with sharp crew cuts and polished boots, blond wives tending to their blond children in cul-de-sacs in the Midwest. Stars and stripes on the front stoop, a dog asleep in a patch of sun. Family men, though some still looked like boys in their military headshots, drafted into protecting our country from nuclear annihilation.
Name: Clint (last name REDACTED)
Hometown: Akron, OH
Age: 25
Health record: Satisfactory
Assessment of Maturity: Well-adjusted
Reasons for Wishing to Enlist: Strong interest in aviation; father presently serving in armed forces; love of God and country.
In one of the boxes of paper ephemera, the botanist found a poster torn at the edges and faded with age. She showed us the poster, and we found the sequence of events, outlining in step-by-step instructions what to do if the radar ever picked up on an incoming attack:
1. SEND MESSAGE TO HOME BASE: WHITE ALICE IS HERE
2. TRACK COORDINATES OF ATTACK
3. DISPATCH COORDINATES TO HOME BASE; PENTAGON; CAPITOL
4. SHELTER IN PLACE AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS
“It wouldn’t have worked,” Sal said. “Even if the radar picked up on an attack, a ballistic missile would have reached the US in ten minutes.”
“Why build the stations if it was futile?” the geographer asked.
“Men will build lies if it makes them feel safe,” Sal responded. “Even a radar station that has no purpose.”
“Here it is,” the cartographer said, and motioned for us to join her at the drafting table. She unrolled a map that showed an aerial view of the region. “This is White Alice.” She pointed to a red dot in the center of the map. We felt our purpose and significance shrink as we saw how small we were against the vastness of the North. “This is First Nations treaty territory,” she said, and circled a large swath of land that included our station and the region to the south. “And over here is Dominion Lake.” She pointed south at a blue dot on the map. “It’s a two-day ride by snowmobile.”
The geographer said Dominion Lake was wealthy from the extraction of oil buried within the region’s mercurial sands. After the oil strike, thousands of workers arrived by the busload to the isolated region to claim their quick fortunes. They found work as administrators and foremen, pipe fitters and riggers, drivers and cleaners and cooks, and with their influx followed the sudden development of a new settlement. Townhouses with poorly insulated walls and leaky basements sprang up in cul-de-sacs where bears occasionally wandered, drive-through restaurants lined the only highway, and primary schools and hockey rinks and office buildings were built for the newly appointed officials who created and bent laws. A church for the vigilant believers. A bowling alley for the elderly and young. A liquor depot and a strip club and a brothel for everyone else.
The geographer was certain there would be jobs for us, as well. “Boomtowns always need fresh talent,” she said.
Sal leaned forward and kissed the geographer on the mouth, which made us all laugh.
We had never seen her so happy.
CHAPTER FIVE ROSE
The shuttered bowling alley has a handwritten sign posted on the front door, CLOSED FOR MY OWN DAMN REASONS. The squat beige building still has its faded awning printed with an image of the waves of Dominion Lake lapping against a bowling alley, a few pins floating with the breeze. Inside, above the bowling shoe rental counter, three stags with glossy marble eyes are mounted on wooden plaques. The names of their hunters are carved into the wood: TERRENCE, BIG RICK, OLD MO.
Rose heaps her parka by the door with the rest of the Blooms. New Year’s Eve. 2050. A year once used as a collective call to slow the warming of the earth. Yet no country has been able to fulfill their climate obligations, and now the second half of the century will be aimed at protection. What can be salvaged? Who will be saved?
The Floating City, perhaps. At least that’s what Damien promised Rose. Even if global temperatures spike another degree, the Floating City has the green technology and economic backing for the city’s children to see the future not as a dead end, or even a compromise, but an undulating road of shimmering possibility.
Right now, back south in the Loop, the toast will have just ended, and the hostesses will be leading their clients back to the suites. Rose can imagine Avalon walking by the koi pond, wearing her linen caftan, gold bangles clinking with each step. Round after round of fireworks light the sky on fire as the city’s citizens wish each other another year of the wealth and prosperity they know will be theirs.
It pains Rose to think about. The pull of wanting to be there. The relief of finally getting away. The knowledge that if things do not go well in camp there will be nothing to even return to. She thinks of her mother sitting alone at the edge of a steel cot. No kin to speak of. No one who even knows her Korean name.
But it’s still 2049 in camp, and the Blooms are growing weary. They’ve barely been in camp for two weeks, but their clients have been visiting them at all hours, driven by the animal need of a warm body next to theirs. Some are merely bored, and like how the Blooms are such “willing conversationalists,” as Meyer remarked to Rose the other night. Others see the Millennium as a place to pass through, the Blooms as a notch on their belt.
