I. Long Shot
Dear Ice Master Samson Milrow,
This dispatch won’t arrive before you and the USS Jeanette leave Amchitka Island for the Far North. The Arctic. You set sail in July from San Francisco, months after I asked what you hoped you’d find up there; in our Hartford parlor, you said: “hope’s like ice, dearest Claire—the more you stand on it, the more it supports you.” You were a whaler for years, and whalers won’t admit wrongs. You won’t ever say hope is the worst kind of ice. Brittle, opaque. You stand on it until it breaks open. Swallows you down. This will (hopefully) not be a love letter.
Because you won’t be you anymore—because you, too, here in Hartford, will be falling into the unknown, staring at the mail slot and hoping for an answer.
You won’t know the pains that come cracking through your body after your husband’s decision to leave for the frontier. No day-long headaches that feel like icicles between your eyes. No cramps that bring you to your knees in the parlor. You also won’t know the freedoms that open after your husband’s departure—his desire to join the crew of a ship funded by a newspaper madman who wants to reach the North Pole in the name of discovery. When journalists inquired about the endeavor, your husband told them: “It’s a long shot.” From the paperweighted maps left on your husband’s desk, you won’t fathom how anything survives in a place that looks so impenetrably empty. The rivers will resemble veins that unravel in threads of blue pain. Alone in your parlor, you’ll worry you won’t know what failure will look like when it finally stands up before you, maybe a tree. In that way (how hope melts faster with each breath upon it), these new freedoms will be mistaken for sadness.
You won’t have been at the city apothecary that August day. You won’t see the man—his earth-brown overcoat, his fine leather boots, his way of walking down the aisle that sends the tincture bottles clinking. You won’t hear him say to you, “Those laudanum drops won’t work. Not by a long shot. I only trust herbs. They are excellent at removing pain. Are you in—” You won’t say, “Yes. Yes. Yes.” You won’t allow him to take you to dinner. You won’t admire his clean face, his hair glowing blueish in candlelight, his way of listening when you ask questions. You won’t order cake. You won’t laugh when he spills wine into his lap because he won’t stop looking at you. You won’t find yourself surprised at your own laughter joining his: as sharp as an ice pick. Cold, you won’t shiver.
But you will shiver. You’ll keep shivering, even after a quarter hour in your parlor, swallowed by his offered coat, you’ll feel as light as fog, and he’ll be there too, holding you in his bony fingers until your hands numb with joy, his soft kisses each a small, warm detonation down the hope of your throat. Over his shoulder, the door’s mail slot will gape blankly. You’ll wish: “Make it known. His answer. Now.” But doesn’t every answer first need a question to call it forth from the depths?
When nothing appears through the slot, in that second, you’ll feel the floorboards begin to separate until between your feet a dark crevasse opens, and instead of water at its bottom, there will be a vast blue nothing, so deep it’ll call back your headache threefold, your cramps now a closing vise, and you’ll wish, as you did before, for someone to remove the pain, because this test won’t be of fidelity or morals or pleasure. You’ll decide between stepping off the floorboards into this hole in the world and climbing the stairs with the man who makes you shiver, whom you have no reason to believe safe—only that his pressing against you feels as grounding as a paperweight.
So: you’ll decide to listen to the voice that answers. You’ll place your hopes in the unknown. You’ll stand on those hopes, even while falling, and you’ll continue to say what it isn’t (ice). Because then you’ll be Master. You’ll leave all this behind in the name of discovery.
Forever,
Claire M.
II. Milrow
00 : 00 : 60
I wish I could stop time. Truth is: I can—I can press the blue button. We’d abort the scheduled test. Instead of the loudspeaker countdown, we’d be listening to the radio playing “Bad Moon Rising.” This way, we’d let everything but the test continue on, even if what continues on is already ruined for all time.
00 : 00 : 59
The Amchitka test is codenamed Milrow. It’s an underground test. It’s a test of the island, not the nuclear calibration shot. This is a 1.2-megaton detonation. And I’m trapped in the middle of this very moment. My last name is Milrow.
00 : 00 : 56
We’d see it from our safehouse if not for the difficult fog. I like the fog. The other reason I like this island: no trees. Red bushes and scrubgrass, but no stands of pines, spruce, willow. If there were trees on this island, they’d all be pointing straight lines toward a heaven seemingly filled with smoke. If there were trees here, Milrow would make them all fallow, all fall.
00 : 00 : 51
The only woman on my team of engineers—me—is the only person watching from this safehouse room. I’m also the only person who didn’t receive a birthday card on their birthday. If I had, I would’ve pretended to read it, maybe smiled. Later, I would’ve deposited it into a waste room. Why do we bury things? Because we want the world to remain uncontaminated. Why do I want to stop time? The same reason.
00 : 00 : 50
Today is my birthday.
00 : 00 : 46
I hear hurricanes a-blowing. I know the end is coming soon.
00 : 00 : 43
Three knocks on the safehouse door. One of my team members, Samson, wheels in a cart. A sheet cake with a large number of unlit candles. They resemble limbless trees on a land of icing whiter than grief. I want to stop everything, light the candles, and then watch them all burn right down through the cake, the cart, the blue earth.
00 : 00 : 39
On the wall hangs a raised relief map of the island. It’s shaped like a bony finger. I’ve examined other maps of this new state long called Alaska. Mountain ranges. Military telegraph grids. Caribou-herding routes. The rivers and the communication lines and the dashed tracks all turn to veins. Every cerulean vein comes from another. It’s a state of continuation.
00 : 00 : 34
I remember fainting on my fifteenth birthday. All morning I’d felt like my body was dissolving into thirds: legs, vagina, heart. In my parents’ bathroom, I pulled down my underwear. The cotton had turned to the red aftermath of this new detonation inside me. Caught in the middle of a moment not under my control. My mother found me. Lying on the tile I knew I’d rather be swallowed whole than broken apart forever. She said, “It’s time we talk.”
00 : 00 : 33
Upon viewing the first test of a nuclear device, Robert Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” A more accurate translation of the Sanskrit reads: “Thou seest me as Time who kills, Time who brings all to doom.” I once told my team this. They laughed like it was a joke. This isn’t a pure world.
00 : 00 : 30
I hope you got your things together, I hope you are quite prepared to die.
00 : 00 : 27
When there’s no fog, you can see all of Amchitka. Birds. Ponds. The curve of the earth three miles away. No trees and no ruins.
00 : 00 : 25
Samson lights every last candle. He looks at me like I should be the one celebrating his life, his achievements. “I’m not singing,” he says. “But you can still make a wish.”
00 : 00 : 23
In Hiroshima, there are still places where people’s silhouettes are stained in the poses of their final second. Figure Walking with a Cane. Man Fallen on Bridge. Woman with Ladder. Sometimes just a hand, fingers reaching for what we’ll never know but we all assume was the light. They’re not the lasting shadows of human suffering. No. They’re the truest example of time becoming frozen, analyzed, saved.
00 : 00 : 20
I wish my father were proud of my achievements.
00 : 00 : 19
I wish my mother were alive to say: “It’s time we talk.”
00 : 00 : 17
My team’s wondered: What will happen to the island? This is another way of asking: How can we get away with this? I told them: “We’re not getting away with anything.” They think I mean nothing’s wrong. What they don’t want to hear is that over time we all fall into shadow. We stain the ground.
00 : 00 : 15
Oh don't go 'round tonight, it's bound to take your life.
00 : 00 : 14
The candles continue to burn down. I feel the countdown slow. Rolling his eyes, Samson blows out the candles. “I wish,” he says, “you were more grateful.” I think about dying as a series of stages: first you’re its victim, second you’re its wielder, third you’re its protector.
00 : 00 : 12
After Rocky Flats, the government reassigned me. I don’t love Alaska: “The Last Frontier”; I’m fascinated by its inability to conjure in me any love, as if both of us are already ruined. Not one day has gone by in twelve years that I don’t about think what we got away with, what I’m not allowed to talk about. The fire. The air. The contaminated ground.
00 : 00 : 11
The shadows of wishes continue on after we’re gone.
00 : 00 : 08
Frontier is a fancy way of saying Unknown, the way Crevasse is just a Hole or how Falling in Love is simply Losing Time. Alaska: The Last Unknown, which I’m about to test. To make the cold darkness of unknowing split apart into revealing the light of forever.
00 : 00 : 06
I tell Samson I didn’t know what to wish for. He says, “Use your imagination.” My answer: whatever I ask for vanishes before I know it’s there.
00 : 00 : 05
Several years ago, the Soviets tested a multi-stage thermonuclear weapon design. In the classified photograph of its impact crater, every single Siberian pine tree surrounding the crater is broken over perfectly at its base. Whenever the U.S. threatens to deploy its own nuclear arsenal, I don’t imagine shadow-burnt cities or loss of life or Woman with Ladder. I think of trees. They don’t wish for anything, except to stay standing.
00 : 00 : 03
The total light emitted by the detonation at Hiroshima equaled the total amount of light a single person witnesses in sixty years of living. If I detonate a nuclear device here in the earth, does it still emit as much light as I’ll see before my own death? If no one else knows what we’re doing here, is there anything to get away with? Is there a future where “Milrow” does not carry the body of burden? My name is a weapon. My name is a test. My name is our need to ruin an island until all that’s left is a name.
00 : 00 : 02
I ask what kind of cake. “My favorite,” he says as he cuts a slice, revealing layers of scarlet. “Red Velvet.” Now I understand why Oppenheimer said what he said, not the other way. If you don’t stop time, you become it.
00 : 00 : 01
Secretly, I wish to become a tree. That way, I can see the brightest light, pause in its warm approval, and then fall—
00 : 00 : 00
There’s a bad moon on the rise.
III. Cannikin
Her first night on the island, the geologist had a nightmare. In the dream, she wound her way through a labyrinth of ice by following a crude map that led only to dead ends. And the whole time, she was dragging a large pine branch tied to a fishing line. She’d wake up, then fall right back into the dream. The next day, she walked down the cliffed coastline and still felt the weight of that broken branch behind her. She couldn’t trace back what might’ve inspired the dream’s details, except for the map the boatman, Milrow, had drawn for her. On her walk, she kept checking this map for the nearby test sites. With her other hand, she palmed a wine bottle, long empty of wine. The whole way, she hummed bits of “Long as I Can See the Light” while she classified rocks in her head: basalt, rhyolite, obsidian. Only her wife and Milrow knew she was here, on Amchitka, alone.
Reaching one cliff’s edge, she stared down at the white furrows of waves. Tucking away the map, she transferred the bottle to her other hand. She dared herself to miss, shatter, ruin this moment. It was always safer to be valuable than to be useless. That was the reason the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission had chosen Amchitka for their Cold War tests. Remote, severe, geologically miscellaneous; one report had called the Aleutian island “one of the least stable tectonic environments in the United States.” Once a supply cache stop-over for Arctic explorers before it was designated a nuclear site, the island could’ve easily escaped notice if anyone had considered it valuable. But if it’d been valuable, then she wouldn’t be here. In a year they’d turn this volcanic island into a wildlife preserve for endangered species. Her claim: radioactive traces of americium-241 in the ground were more than just traces. If she could prove this, she’d receive her grant, and if she received her grant, she could finally afford to pay the hospital bills.
Inside the screwcapped wine bottle: a letter. She’d written it that morning after the last of her nightmare. She’d first folded the letter into a square. But she couldn’t cram its mass into the bottle’s mouth. When she reopened the letter, her attention snagged on a word: dissolving. A cold word. Instead of the bone-deep truth she’d written down, she chose to think of the island: a dome, the subsidence crater, surface collapse features. Then she rolled up the page. Popped it down the neck. Screwed the bottle closed.
With no ceremony, she threw the bottle over the cliff edge, into the surf. Immediately the bottle looked dumb floating out there. She regretted the throw, her letter, this history. But she could only watch the current carry out her bobbing mistake. She remembered the CT scans and the MRIs and the Glasgow Scale—how every result felt like an answer to a question she hadn’t the mettle to voice.
Now she sang, “Put a candle in the window.” She’d played that song three hundred times in the hospital room, hoping for a response.
She left the cliffs, retraced her half-erased steps in the black sand, and crabbed into her dome tent. This place, she told herself, should only get emptier.
In 1971 on Amchitka Island, the U.S. military performed its third, final, and largest underground nuclear test. Upon detonation of the five-megaton device, at its epicenter a four-mile-wide dome of rock, soil, and vegetation rose twenty feet into the air. For longer than a second, the earth hovered there—as if presented with a choice—before it fell in vicious dissolution. It emitted more radiation than the Hiroshima discharge. Everyone knew about Amchitka but no one wanted to talk about it, like they knew the other histories of this frontier state: the Athabasca Tar Sands Spill of 2021, the clandestine deals over Arctic drill rights, the forced displacement of every indigenous person in Alaska. Few are lucky enough to choose their undoings, she’d learned, while the rest hope those few make the right choice.
Before she came here, she watched leaked videos of the test detonation. How the ground leaps ecstatically; in its absence, the soil breathes upward a circular cloud of perfect white. The opposite of a shadow, dense and original. The hole left behind? It’d become a lake. Watching these videos, she remembered the time she lit a smoke bomb and then buried the firework in a hole; seconds later, up through the pine straw whispered blue veins of smoke that folded around her before dissolving away to her great relief. She felt the same relief watching the video. She could empty herself of those other, ruined seconds: watching her medically comatose wife in that fogged oxygen mask as she breathed for the last time, then for the last time, then for the last time.
On the third day, as a wall of fog threatened to smother the island, she packed up her campsite, careful to leave it as she’d found it. Countdown to dusk when Milrow would return. She studied the map he’d drawn for her: “here and here and here—you’ll find what you’re looking for.” One of the spots was the nearby lake. She wound her way to it through the grass maze. The lake’s motionless surface resembled a layer of ice. From its edge she couldn’t quite hear the ocean. The scrubgrass trapped all sound in its windless fingers. What she could hear: her cracking knees, her ¾ heartbeat, her sharp inhales.
On this walk, she didn’t classify any rocks. She’d already collected plenty of samples. After enough time, rocks simply remained: rocks. The grass: grass. The history: shadows and wishes. Part of her wanted the fog to stop her, take her, save her. Another part of her wondered how someone could preserve something already ruined other than serving as a warning that death is as present as time is.
On her last trip around the lake, she felt her throat go dry. The reflection of a cloud the color of bone appeared to be rising from deep inside the earth. The wall of fog had been hanging back. She wanted to drink from the lake, despite its contamination, but she knew she’d regret it. And like that, the unfolding of one regret triggered the unfolding of all others. Her body became a map of guilt.
Every river: a river of pain.
Every blue: a blue she couldn’t name.
Every crease: a way to hide one burden inside another burden.
From a few feet behind her: “You do realize—” her wife’s frosty voice “—never asking means never getting what you want.”
She imagined her dead wife in the scrubgrass: no white hospital gown, only that too-large earth-brown coat she’d inherited, the one she refused to ever remove from her wardrobe.
The geologist kicked a nameless rock. It hit another rock and split open. She stared into the lake’s window. “I hate that coat.”
“Good news: you never have to see me wear it again.”
“That’s exactly what I hate.” She started walking away among the knee-high grasses. Sounds of her wife following. Each of her footsteps a muted breaking of reed, of breath.
A seabird exploded out of the fog before landing on the water. It asked what it’d done to deserve this. When it flew off, it dripped a line of circles on the lake’s surface in a daisy chain of detonations.
Still walking, the geologist said to her wife, “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“You told me you were coming.”
“You must want something.”
“Look at me,” she said. “There’s nothing I could possibly want right now.”
The geologist didn’t look. “You always wanted something. What now? Time? Ice water? An apology—that’s it, isn’t it? You want to hear me say it. Well, everything I had to say I already wrote down. And then I threw into the ocean. So there. You’re welcome.” Saying this aloud lent yesterday’s decision a glare of hopefulness, where before it only radiated regret. Her wife said, with a little rise in her voice: “You mean your letter. The one in the bottle.”
The geologist felt like she was again watching that video of the 1971 payload test: the weapon detonates successfully, yes, and the ground rises how they expected, yes, but what now lies beneath the surface of Amchitka is the new answer they want to get away with. She didn’t want to turn around and see her wife holding the bottle upside down with nothing dropping out. Emptiness upon more emptiness might have broken her on the spot.
She squeezed back tears. “You weren’t supposed to read that.”
“Then why’d you address it to me, Claire? You said our marriage was dissolving. You said it’d been doing that for the last five years. And then you left me at the worst possible second.”
“I didn’t leave,” she said, still facing the lake. “I was there when you died. I watched you.”
The fog was gathering all around them in a slow-motion exhalation. It felt like falling through the sky.
“I’m not talking about dying,” she said. “I’m talking about decisions. The one you authorized.”
The geologist made fists until her nails pinched her palms. She felt her wife come up behind her. Saw breath cloud over her shoulder. Felt coldness wrap itself over her ears, neck, heart.
Finally, she turned around. She went to grab her wife by the hand and tell her she wasn’t sorry at all. She wanted to explain how she felt split open by sadness but not over what she’d done. She’d made the right decision. Just as she’d made the right decision to come here. But to her surprise, her wife wasn’t there at all; in place of her voice, the briefest wind that goosepimpled her skin.
On a large flat rock, there stood the wine bottle.
She held it up to the fog as if a candle to the darkness. Unnerved, she unscrewed the top and stared down the mouth. Still empty. She didn’t know why. But she understood what she had to do next. She crouched at the lake’s edge. She filled the bottle. She swallowed as much as she could. She thought maybe. She thought time could prove her right. She thought she could change what couldn’t be changed. Apologies forgiven, wishes granted, tests failed.
The sudden blow of a boat’s foghorn froze her. Milrow was coming. She could already feel the rise and fall of the boat’s deck. She thought about not going. She could be valuable. Could die here on Amchitka. She tested this idea in her mind. They’d find her body, discover contamination, say sorry for everything. How did one remove pain—a pain that dooms us all—except with greater, deeper pain?
She’d keep this island empty and alive forever.
Having made her decision, she threw the bottle into the lake where it would float for a few seconds, then fill and sink to the bottom, then spend one million years becoming what it was before.
For more information about this piece, see this issue's legend.
Alexander Lumans was awarded a 2018 NEA Creative Writing Grant in Prose. He received a fellowship to The 2015 Arctic Circle Residency, and he was also the Spring 2014 Philip Roth Creative Writing Resident at Bucknell University. He lives and teaches in Denver, Colorado.
59.4554° N, 135.3153° W
I once visited the tiny town of Skagway, Alaska—it’s remained an indelible image of what Alaskan life looked like fifty years ago while also the picture of a contemporary stopover. I’ve been ever-fascinated by how our invasion of this pristine region shaped its future as well as our own.