TUNDRA

by HSG Correspondents

Day

 

I am sorry that I cannot be more specific, perhaps it is the cold.  I am not sure how long I have been on this tundra.  We have been on this tundra.  There are two others here.  I am not sure when they arrived.  I am not sure why I am here.  For some scientific reason I suppose.  The hut I built is made out of scraps of objects, perhaps from some past scientific exploration of this region.  We did not all arrive here at the same time.  I am sure of that, I think. 

 

The man who lives across from me, and to my left, is tall and bearded.  He smokes constantly and scribbles furiously in his notebooks.  I'm not sure how he came by so many of both.  Cigarettes and notebooks, I mean.  I call him The Writer.  To my right lives a man without a beard who constantly seems to be building odd contraptions.  He knows more than I of what this abandoned equipment may have been used for, or may be useful for.  I call him The Inventor.

 

We do not talk, though we exchange friendly glances (I think).  Perhaps we don't speak the same language. 

 

Between our three huts, set in a triangular pattern from each other, lies a hole for us to fish.  This is how we eat.  We take turns making sure the ice doesn't freeze over.  I've never been a fan of fish, such is my lot. 

 

Who am I?  I seem to spend my days wandering the landscape.  In fits of what I perceive to be madness, I roll around in the snow and laugh at times.  I invent games for myself to keep my brain from completely freezing over, like the fishing hole.  I've tried to teach the others these games, but often The Writer and The Inventor will grow frustrated and abandon the games halfway through.  Why didn't I bring playing cards?

 

I am able to remember back to being a Boy Scout.  It was exciting when we would go camping in the winter.  I was amazed how much I could sweat, sleeping in the snow.  Funny how this freezing insulates, makes warmth.  Is death hot?

 

Night

 

Record-Keeper's screaming again--howling, I want to say, like the arctic wind, because he likes to think he's on the tundra, he needs to think he's on a tundra; needs believe he's the last bred and beating hot spot on a vast, vast and furious, impervious plane of every name of snow. Rendered small not by man but by nature.

 

He wants his voice to bring on the distant, feral call of nightfall: wolf-song, wind-song, adgorpok, man-alone-against-anything-but-man--wind or wolf, no matter--but what he is, he's a sled dog, a fucking howling fucking pound dog, sledding. A man made mad not by circumstance but by invention.

 

Well, a sled is an invention, isn't it? A cage is an invention. Are zoos invented? If the zoo is an invention, what do you want to call the zoo-keeper?

 

You tell me.

 

Day

 

The Writer seems upset about something.  He is ranting outside his hut, but the wind is so strong I cannot make out if the words he forms are words that I can understand.  I would go over to comfort him, but what can I do?  How can I reassure a person if I myself do not know why I am here?

 

The Inventor works with a half smile.  Occasionally he shares a cigarette with The Writer and then heads back to his hut.  It looks well put together.  He helped me repair my roof at some point, and was able to use an abandoned window to allow a skylight in. 

 

I have books to keep me company here, though I have read them so many times at this point it is useless for me to read them again.  What was I thinking bringing Dostoevsky up here to this tundra?  In an environment like this I have nothing to do but think.  Dostoevsky is for those people who do not have the time to think for themselves.  Though I cannot remember much at this point.  Perhaps my memories are nothing but stories built up through these books of mine.  Are they mine? 

 

Was Dostoevsky a Boy Scout?

 

Night

 

Cold.

 

---

 

If things continue like this I may have to pull the plug. 

 

Subject A is incessantly re-reading the instructions like a religious person, rocking back and forth, transfixed.  It's as though he sees in it some profound allegorical truth.  His eyes are watery and unblinking. Occasionally, I hear him counting.  Is he keeping track of something?  Or is he merely comforted by the predictable flow of ordinal sequence?  Later, perhaps, a pattern will emerge.

 

Meanwhile, Subject B has developed something of a graphomaniacal compulsion.  The moment he awakens each day, he picks up his notebook, crouches in a shady spot beneath a cluster of rocks and begins scrawling feverishly. For hours at a time his pen will not leave the page.

It's a markedly different kind of fixation than that evinced by Subject A.  A seems benignly transported through the act of monothematic repetition whereas B appears morbidly compelled (tortured?) by his Sisyphean task.

 

When I asked him what he was up to, he simply muttered, "library," as if I was supposed to know what this meant.  I've taken to reading some of his notebooks while he is asleep.

 

It seems he is recreating what he can remember of all the books he's read through the course of his life.  He labels them accordingly:

 

The Lost Nightingale

 

Parlor Girls

 

The Impossible Garden, Volumes 1-9

 

Eddie Lipton and the Riddle of the Seven Clocks

 

Needlepoint

 

The Prophetic Braille

 

Most appear to be mystery books.  Crime stories and pulp novels of this and that variety. It's amazing what he's able to recall, though of course I can only guess as to their fidelity to the original texts.  Sometimes he only records fragments.  A series of descriptions with little continuity...

 

- True then, the visual organ proper is composed of water, yet vision appertains to it not because it is so composed, but because it is translucent--a property common alike to water and to air.

 

- When the eyes are no longer turned upon objects upon whose colours the light of day falls but that of the dim luminaries of night, their edge is blunted and they appear almost blind, as if pure vision did not dwell in them.

 

- ...of certain films coming from the things themselves, these films of outlines being of the same colour and shape as the external things themselves.

 

- From when, after our eyes have been closed, we open them and look up at the sky, no interval of time is required for the visual rays to reach the sky.  Indeed, we see the stars as soon as we look up, though the distance is, as we may say, infinite...

 

...sketches and graphs with no explanation:

 

--------
--- ----
--- -- -
 -- -- -
 -  -- -
 -   - -
 -   -
     -

 

...to say nothing of the many patches of dialogue without context, or the lists of characters without description.

 

At first I envied him.  Now I know better.