At the Top of the World
I met her years ago when I was trapped on a raft woven of bamboo, asea amid glacial outcroppings, greenhouse gases seething off the water and chopping the ice, the Inuits left holding their spears in a desperate search for food, and polar bears roaring on small islands that bobbled away on the waves.
I had been a geologist, employed by an oil company to seek new drilling sites. Anywhere a platform could fit, we made it do so, deflowering all of nature if we could with our crude, black spunk.
She lay asleep on a glacier as clear as a mirror, her skin blue like death, though she was quite visibly alive, water instead of blood inside her body.
I had retained my camera on a rope around my neck, and I shot the remainder of my film with her inside the lens, reduced to the size of a pebble and equally malleable to the flutter of my fingers. Afterward, I draped my arms over either side of the raft and paddled toward her; my clothes and flesh quickly froze, objects to be removed from the water and beaten against my legs until sensation returned, only to be plopped back in the water once more to paddle farther, a scent of silver salmon growing on my skin.
Upon arriving at the glacier, I stepped off the raft. My hair was a mat of ice and fish bones. My entire body ached with the added weight of the cold, and my face must have been as blue as my hands, my fingers, my ankles. I was skeletal and feverish, seeing great translucent galleons in the chop of waves before me, the air a salt that filled my mouth and ground against the fillings of my teeth.
With this burden, I bent down for a kiss, imagining that I might literally fall apart with that tiny application of pressure, lip to lip. Instead, I actually warmed, my body restoring its ordinary heat against the cold insistence of her lips. The latter manifested quickly. For despite her cold exterior temperature, her emotional climate was quite tropical. We wrapped arms around each other, and I quickly felt her skin dissolve beneath the heat of desire, an audible crackle escaping with each second of embrace.
Afterward, I pulled away and looked into her eyes, which were as bright as leaves of frost. We were buffeted by slaps of water, bright spume spitting through the air where herons dove for food only to be captured by a sudden freezing, stuck bill-first in the water as if in perpetual plummet. She laughed when she saw that, which might have been cruel but wasn’t. She connected so implicitly with the nature that lived around her, so closely that she might have experienced the sensation of that same bird’s beak buried deep inside her belly, bleeding snowflakes until she died, crystalline.
She walked with the heaviness of ice, her steps sinking into the glacier, leading me to place my feet where hers had trod, in an effort to remain invisible to any civilized visitor, any other petroleum junkie, any other man so sodden with oil that his skin turned a horrible purple. I had eaten with such men. Their teeth crumbled into their food as they bit, even with something as soft as toast. Their tongues didn’t fork but triangulated so that all their words were covered in sputum. Their lips bloomed with blood clots on the surface. When they slept they whimpered like hounds in a thunderstorm.
The raft sank as soon as I set foot on it.
Her body remained amazingly buoyant, the same material as glaciers and ice cubes in a summer drink, so she grasped me by the collar and I too floated, only more like a fly in the drink. Together we bobbled toward a distant shore.
Time wove on despite no movement of the sun, which bored down all day long upon the arctic surfaces, whittling golden holes in my eyes if I stared too long.
When we finally arrived on the sheets of ice the Inuits made home, I slept. I knew, even in that unconscious state, that she was watching over me, her icy skin rendered silver by the sun’s movement, a flickering lantern.
Later, I found her rubbing against me and swore she had become feline. A sliver of night had fallen to interrupt the daylight. This seemed to spook her, raising her temperature so that the water visibly rolled off her back. Where were we? My eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the sudden dark so I groped around and accidentally knocked my camera away.
The raft lay nearby, sighing and trembling under pressure of the wind. A bear howled, distant.
Another waft of salmon tumbled from the sky.
We rested in a cave. Inside, the wind rustled and picked up a voice, deep and forlorn, a man strangled at sea and dropped overboard in a heap of chains. The cave acted as a kind of cooler and kept her from melting.
Water flowed on the floor and from that I drank, filling my palms with its nourishment, even the soot and sediment seeming a boon. She did not drink or eat. The air itself sustained her, as did the carbon in my breath. The way she pressed close and sealed her mouth over mine—it was as if we were both born of the same organism, me breathing oxygen, she breathing carbon, self-contained.
Somewhere in these hours a moon filled her belly. Not the moon in the sky, but a moon of blue crystal. This will replenish the human race, I thought at first.
Then it occurred to me that it wouldn’t. It would only realize her kind. How much of the globe was already populated with creatures of her icy aspect?
And did I want to propagate more? I wasn’t even sure I had a role to play, though I suspected that the shared breath may have been enough to conjure, as if by magic, some new manifestation of the two of us. Maybe in my breath, amidst the deadlier chemicals, she consumed a vital pollen. Or maybe a particular reduction in my basal body temperature rendered my breath ripe for procreation in the manner of the ice-bound creatures.
Already she had become a creature.
I soon obsessed with the prospect of this new soul, the bluish luminosity increasing with each day until she lit the growing hours of darkness. A sailor might have set his compass by the blue stains she left upon the sky.
When it came time for birth I held out the raft, already in tatters from the ever-burgeoning winds, to capture the new figure. She didn’t spread her legs apart as a human mother would, but simply closed her eyes and exhaled. I had never seen her exhale before. There was something positively lurid about the yellowish breath that escaped from between her lips. I inhaled that breath and it choked me. The cough that it imparted was nonetheless enjoyable, exquisite, even erotically stirring.
The child emerged from that yellowish breath. I gave it birth. I didn’t spread my legs either but opened my mouth as wide as possible and out it came, inflated like a balloon, gold and blue patterned, heavy as an anchor, smelling of salt and lobster, freezing my fingers when I touched it. I might have taken a pick to it to break up the calamity I knew that it would cause, but it was far too late. I had committed myself; I loved the woman, or her manifestation, or the image I imposed upon her, and her child, no matter how much a rent in the fabric of things, was nonetheless a sliver of that reverence, and deserving of a reverence all its own.
I kissed the child on the mouth, and by instinct, it immediately sealed its mouth over mine. The mother lay down and to my surprise, melted completely. I ran over to save her, but in seconds she was trickling off into the sea, leaving only an odd scorched area in remembrance. The child crawled like any other child and again sought my mouth, and I allowed it to suck my breath away. This child would far outlive me, I thought, and perhaps to the good, given the state of my own and my kind’s dissolution.
Copyright © 2008 by Michael Fontana
