>   73 6187N. 44 8775W

>   EQUIPMENT MISSING. FOUND HOLE IN SHEET. SHARP & CIRCULAR. HIGHLY UNUSUAL. ESTIMATE 500M WIDE & FAR DEEPER

>   REQUESTING AUX AIRCRAFT ASAP

>   OVER

Ida gave me my gloves, and I put them on and tucked my hands in my pockets. Failing to find words and too cautious to walk any farther, we stood next to each other in silence. We waited.

…

We had both taken off our skis and laid the poles on the ice. I felt the air on the exposed patch of my forehead and thought about the mountains speckled along Greenland’s coast as viewed from the helicopter, the last thing I saw that felt real. Then, a reply:

>   COPY. ALL SUPPORT GROUNDED BY SNOW. EARLIEST DEPARTURE TOMORROW 05:00 UTC-3. IN MEANTIME MAKE DOCUMENTATIONS OF IRREGULARITY AND ATTEMPT CONTINUANCE OF REPLACEMENT INSTALLATION. OVER.

I took my hands out of the gloves and responded:

>   COPY. URGENT REQUESTING ANY ALL SUPPORT. OVER

“They can’t give us anything,” Ida said. “I can’t believe they’re not able to depart from Ukkusissat or anywhere else.”

“We’re spending the night here, then?” I asked. I should have had a more meaningful question, but this was all I could ask.

“It looks like it.” Ida walked two steps closer to the edge and looked somewhere over its expanse. Her back was mostly turned to me. She probably had something more profound to say as well but wasn’t able to bring it into words.

“We should stay at this site, don’t you think?” I asked. “It wouldn’t be right to leave until support comes. I think we should get the emergency tent from the cargo hold.”

“Yeah. The only question then is how close we should camp to this site. We definitely need to stay near it so we can monitor the abnormality before support arrives, but we shouldn’t spend that much time close to it at this point.” Ida walked back toward me. “I’m not saying it’s going to swallow us or anything like that, but I’m not convinced we can call it benign based on what we know now.”

“I’d like to walk over to the helicopter so I can get the camp supplies. I’ll get the oven tent and food and whatever else is in the cargo hold. I’ll clear my mind a little bit on the walk. You can stay here.”

Ida hesitated, apparently thinking. “Alright,” she said. She had by now adopted the kind of nonchalance I would have expected from a conversation with her about the inner mechanisms of a barometer. My unease must have been visible to her, but she seemed increasingly apathetic. Perhaps she disliked my plan. Was it right to split up so I could get the tent? I wanted her to tell me.

I put on my skis. “Take your time on the walk,” Ida said. “We’ve got plenty of time until tomorrow.”

“Thanks. What are you going to do over here?”

“I’m not sure. I think I’m just going to wait around. I’ll probably write down some observations, and I’ll try looking for anything else noteworthy around here. Not that there’s much else to see.”

“I should be visible to you the whole time I’m walking.”

To the west, the helicopter was small but unmistakable on the horizon. Looking at the helicopter gave me a little safety. As did looking at Ida. I picked up my skip poles.

“You should keep the satellite messenger,” I said, and I lifted it from my pocket so I could pass it to Ida.

“Ah, thanks. We’re along an east-west parallel, so you should simply head due west to the helicopter and then due east to come back. And I’ll be here for visual confirmation.”

“Thanks.”

I pushed away from the hole in the direction of the helicopter, trekking along the same line on the ground I marked on my way toward the hole. Crossing the ice alone like this reminded me much more of cross-country skiing than when I did it with equipment and a colleague. I could see the endpoint straight ahead, and I moved at whatever pace I wanted. My mind had a pleasant emptiness.

…

Three quarters of the way to the helicopter I found a fish. Approaching it was like approaching the hole since I had seen it for a long time before I identified what it was. Arctic char spawn around this season in the coastal waters around Greenland, so the red ventral side of this male was no surprise. But hundreds of kilometers inland, and lying out in the open air—that surprised me. I was dumbfounded, but I had no way to express my dumbfoundedness in the utter void of the ice sheet.

I would have noticed if the fish had been there when I crossed earlier. It was frozen stiff like a specimen you’d find in a market: I could see my reflection in its glossy, transparent eyes. A perfectly nice fish, but in the strangest place. I picked it up from atop the ice a few paces off from the line I was following. And, failing to find anything else to do with this irregularity, I kept walking.

Ida was visible as a dot on the horizon from the vantage point of the helicopter. From the cargo hold I removed the oven tent and the emergency bag containing a gas stove burner, five survival meals, some flashlights, flares, tape, and first-aid supplies. I thought that it was an inadequate kit for an arctic helicopter, and although it would work just fine for our purposes, it needed to be replaced with something more substantial. The oven tent would be essential for us to make a camp that night, since desert conditions of the ice sheet make for nights in which the cold air settles upon the land from above and fills it with a frozenness that comes as a shock even in comparison to the coldness of daytime.

I closed the cargo hold and started toward Ida and the hole. The sun was high enough in the sky that my shadow was still human in shape, more recognizable than the trails that spread over the flat ground as the sun dips to the horizon. The sky was still blue. Ahead in the western sky above Ida, the moon rose. It must have been rising for a while by the time I noticed since it sat comfortably above the horizon by then. Still occluded by the daytime sky, it was quite dim, but it was the only thing in the sky. It might have come out just for me. I’ve never actually been one to identify phases of the moon, but I know it was at the phase where it was almost full, missing just a slice. I was lucky that the moon rose even out here in this lifeless place.

The walk back was easier because I was eager to get it done. There was something concerning about carrying more equipment (as well as an Arctic char) toward the hole when, in truth, I felt that we should have been leaving, but my concern was vague enough that I could focus on the present weight of the bag looped on my shoulder and the tent in my arms. I thought that the ice sheet might have been a good place to revisit someday to think things through and sort things out, provided there were no more holes or surprise fish.

…

The sun was lower in the sky once I made it to the site. By then Ida had sat cross-legged on the ground and folded her hands in her lap.

“Maria! How was the journey?” she asked.

“Good.” I put the fish down, and Ida glanced at it. “Did you get any news—or, anything at all?” I asked.

“No. No messages. I could send them something if you want. To check if they’re still there. But no, they haven’t sent us any updates.”

I piled the supplies on the ground next to the sled. “I think we should update them again soon and let them know about our preparations for the camp here tonight, at the very least. And ideally we should have them land near our landing site since we can’t be sure about the ice over here.”

“Let’s send another message after we’ve set up the camp. Anyway, what was it like walking back to the helicopter? I want to know.” She still hadn’t asked about the fish. I didn’t want to bring it up.

“Not very demanding in terms of technical skills. You’ve done it, so you know. It’s all flat, luckily, so anyone with skis could do it. The ice is in the same condition as when we walked out here earlier, and I had a visual endpoint in both directions, which was handy. I’ll say, it is really strange to be in such an expanse and to be so exposed on a walk like this. It’s different when you’re not with a larger party. To be out there alone is obviously very isolating, but at the same time you get to retreat into yourself a little bit more and pretend you’re not there for a moment.”

“I see what you mean.” She nodded like she wanted me to keep talking.

A sentence that had been welling up inside me found its form. “Do you get the sense that out here nothing else exists?” I asked. “It’s like meditation. There’s so much distance from everything.” As I said the word “distance” I spread my arms with a motion that conveyed largeness.

“We have the satellite messenger, though.” Ida said. “I wonder what it must have been like during the early polar expeditions when there was no communication at all.”

“Yeah, I would never sign up for that,” I said. I took off my skis and sat down next to Ida, and then I looked out at the hole so I could see the ice on the opposite side. “I wonder what portion of the Greenland ice sheet anyone has laid eyes on. As in, what portion has actually been seen by someone on the ground here like us?”

“Someone has absolutely seen this part, when the first group set up the original weather equipment.”

“The hole definitely couldn’t have been here then.”

“Do you think there are other places like this on the ice sheet?”

“I’m not sure. Do you?”

“I don’t know either. I don’t think so, but who’s to say?”

I thought for a moment. “There could be all kinds of holes like this and no one would really notice, I guess. While I was walking I was thinking about what could have caused this to form. What could have lifted such a huge mass out and dumped it somewhere else? Or what could have melted and vaporized so, so much ice? There’s no way to characterize this that is regular, strictly speaking. The best I can do to explain it is a big ‘I don’t know.’”

“I’m sure we’ll know more about it after support arrives and we’re able to prepare for some actual research.” Ida said. “Maybe it’s aliens, or an intergalactic portal or something, you never know. It would be fun if that were the case.” Ida had really been the first one to suggest it was aliens.

“What it feels like to me is some sort of drawn-out process of nature, though. Nature has so many secret paths. I’m thinking about how canyons are worn down over millennia by flowing water. Water is fluid and accepting, and at the same time it’s capable of taking shape through erosion. This, here, is not a product of erosion, but I think it’s analogous. It could have been worn out of the ice. Imagine if the ice slowly melted from the bottom up, and only at the very end did the hole open on the surface. It wouldn’t be that surprising if something like this came about slowly, over a very long time, in the background with no one there to notice.”

Ida tipped her chin upward so she entirely faced the sky. I crossed my legs, partly facing Ida and partly facing the hole. I imagine that under her goggles she had closed her eyes. She seemed to take in deep breaths. I looked in the direction of the hole.

“I’d like to think of it that way,” Ida said.

“Yeah.”

…

We pitched the tent when the sun was low in the sky. Sunsets on the ice sheet have none of the grandeur of the autumn sunsets that I knew as a child. Rather than spreading up and across the sky in a fire, the sunset over the ice in Greenland fades out just above the horizon because the air is so clear that there is nothing to flaunt the red waves of scattered light. Directly overhead, the sky merely darkened toward black. We took off our goggles now that the ice was dark. Once we zipped ourselves inside, the tent would be warm enough that we could take off some of the gear. Yet outside it would be so inhospitable that one might as well have been in outer space. As we prepared the camp site, the impending darkness and cold brought me into a feeling of desperation that must be common to all in the Arctic.

“I’ll send a message to base soon if that’s alright with you,” Ida said.

I was outside setting up the gas burner to heat our meal, and Ida was speaking to me through the tent’s flap while she folded the bag the tent came in. “Alright.”

“I’ll tell them what we talked about with the landing site, and I’ll let them know we’re camping. That’s everything, isn’t it?”

I thought we should have more to say, but I couldn’t think of anything. The fish incident was too difficult to express. “That’s all I can think of,” I said.

“I’m going to close the flap while I take off my gloves.”

“Okay. I’m right here,” I said. I was alone again.

I lit the burner and balanced the foil packet of beef stroganoff at the center of the heat. Once I was sure it was heating properly, I sat down and faced the hole, this time close enough that I could see the water at the bottom. I felt a strange stillness, a kind of quiet emptiness, now that I was again seeing the entire chasm of ice and the water at the bottom. It was the same as how I feel when I mistakenly look at an injury that someone comes back to the base with after falling into a crevasse or slipping on rocks and ice. When I look at a deep laceration, something in it is so vile that it draws me in and asks me to comprehend it entirely even when I hate it. Look at this horror, it says. Look, this is as much a part of the world as you are, as real as your body, something equally tangible and strange. Curiosity perverts itself, and it lures us downward, deeper into the core of the thing we can’t fathom, the thing that is consuming.

With little thought, I spread my arms upward as if in a stretch and then leaned backward so I could lie flat on the ground. My back arched. I spread myself as tall as possible. Hands up, beyond where I could see, I scraped at the ice lightly with my fingers, and I picked up a little and rubbed it through the fabric of my gloves, feeling for its texture in the deformation of the padding. Ice is as real as my body, too. I looked up at the sky, now showing only the last traces of daylight, and, terrified, I felt as if I might fall into this abyss, the new, darkened hole of the night sky that opened up and engulfed us.

Stars faintly emerged in the dark sky as I gazed at it indistinctly. So close to the time of a full moon, not all the stars could break through to my eyes. I stared upward for some time. This sky, at least, was the same as the sky of my childhood. And now I was looking at the sky the same way I did when I, having recently learned of the planets and stars, really looked at it for the first time, comprehending its height and breadth and unknowability. In this too I was drawn in, curiously, becoming consumed. Everything repeats itself. I had for the first time circled back and looked at the few distant stars with the same desperate isolation from them, and from everything, that I felt as a child. I am living, I am here, I am flesh, I am alone, I am seeing all.

I could hear the beef stroganoff boiling. These prepackaged meals were resilient things, but they would always become unappetizing when cooked for too long. I tried to look at the moon, but there was no use in looking at the moon if the food was getting overcooked while I was on the ground. Sitting up, I oriented myself again to the landscape: the hole and the tent to one side and the gas burner on the other. I took the foil packet off the flame and, resting it on the ground, opened the seal so that a plume of steam, exaggerated by the cold and dry air, hit my face and invited me with the aroma of sub-par rehydrated beef. I would bring the meal to Ida—this I would accomplish.

I opened the tent and stepped in, leaving my boots outside. Little air escaped, and so the inside was noticeably warmer than outside.

 “Hi. I’m still waiting on a response,” Ida said, looking at the messenger.

I crouched down next to Ida with the beef stroganoff packet in my hand.

“Finally some of the food is ready,” I said. “You must be as hungry as I am. Here, have some.”

I handed it to her. She picked at it with the stirring stick that was already wet in the package. And then, as though by an inexorable pressure that only then descended onto my shoulders, I cried.

Ida looked me in the eyes for the first time. “Maria.”

I knew she could see how I felt. “It’s just cold out there, and I got a little scared of the hole when I was out there all alone.”

Ida shifted to face me directly. She was sitting with her legs crossed and her hands in her lap, head tilted. I have never been looked at so earnestly. She was not so much perceiving me as divining me, the truth of me, through some process of reaching inside my body and fumbling for the piece of me that had always been inside pulling me insistently toward this night and the ice sheet.

“Maria,” she repeated.

I steadied myself. Only a few tears had made it out of my eyes and onto my cheeks. “I’m tired, really.” I said. “I could eat just about anything right now. Can I have some of the beef stroganoff?”

She handed the packet to me. “I understand Maria,” she said, looking into my eyes. “More than you could ever know.” She wiped a tear from my cheek with the back of her hand.

I sat against the tarp wall of the tent and hurriedly ate while I let the steam swell over my face. We sat together in silence for a long time.

…

I returned to the gas burner. With the flame set to high, I could only see the reflections of orange light that broke through the gaps in the burner’s windproof housing. The packet I chose purported to be full of high-protein mashed potatoes. The flame was strong, at least judging by the light I could see, but the packet was slow to heat. Perhaps the potatoes truly were hearty and fortified. I crouched next to the burner and watched the packet.

Now to my side, the hole was lit only by moonlight. It looked the same as it had all along—just as deep and as wide, but now illuminated from a different source. I recalled images from the towns and cities I have inhabited on the nights when fresh snow flattens on the ground and shines undisturbed. The stillness of a street right after nighttime snow was here. The ice sheet was silent in the same way, too. And while fresh snow was fragile, the ice here was unyielding. Some part of the images remained the same.

I turned so I could sit and overlook the hole. The packet was quiet owing to the viscosity of the potatoes. I looked at the ice sheet, the horizon, and the moon, holding nothing in particular in my mind. Most of what had been in my mind had been purged with the tears.

The packet was done heating, so I brought it inside the tent. Ida had a message from the base that dryly confirmed the support departure for the morning. I ate the mashed potatoes because Ida had finished off the beef stroganoff in spite of its flavor, texture, and general disagreeability. We both stretched out on the tent’s floor, and I switched off the flashlight.

…

I woke up when it was still dark, and I took care not to wake Ida. Though there were plenty of things to occupy my mind, all I could think of was how lying on the hard ground had hurt my spine, and I made a mental commitment to one day put proper sleeping pads in the helicopter’s cargo hold for the next people who would have the misfortune of camping out on ice.

I sat up slowly to avoid making noise and crawled to the plastic window on the back end of the tent so I could look outside. The clear strip was about the width of my head and the thickness of two fingers, so it must have only been intended for quick peeks outside. The entire view through the window was a uniform gray like newly laid asphalt. It wasn’t the pitch dark of nighttime, but an impenetrable gray. I tried to remember if there was something that could have been on top of the tent obscuring the window. Failing to remember, I slid the zipper on the tent’s flap open slightly so that I was able to look outside with one eye while keeping our warm air inside. As I put my eye to the hole, I understood that the grayness was coming from fog. The ground immediately before the tent was visible, and it progressively disappeared into the mist. The sun must have been rising somewhere beyond the fog, but I couldn’t tell where the horizon was.

I closed the zipper again and lay back down with my eyes open. I could see that the fabric of the tent was getting marginally lighter as the morning sunlight made its way to us through the fog. It was comforting to think that I was probably the only person for hundreds of kilometers who was conscious and observing the world at that moment. I had heard that some flights from the western United States to eastern Europe had optimal routes that passed over Greenland by some trick of spherical geometry, so there was a chance that my estimate was far off and there was a cabin full of very conscious people just a few kilometers overhead. Could they have understood what it was like to be on the ground here, directly beneath their plane? And then there was Ida. How conscious was she really when she was sleeping, and what if she was simply pretending to sleep in a very elaborate and well-acted scheme? I could never be sure, but it absolutely felt like I was the sole emissary of mankind working on this vast stretch of land for a moment. It was lonely work, but I knew other people must have felt the same way.

The morning was brightening. I could see the inside of the tent now that the walls were transmitting the light from the outside like the reverse of a lantern. I started thinking about what packet I would cook once Ida woke up. Then I heard helicopter blades. I had forgotten it would arrive so early. They were distant, probably near where we had landed the day before, but the sound was unmistakable.

“Ida, wake up.”

“What?”

“Hear the helicopter?”

Ida sighed deeply. “I’m happy.”

We each put our heaviest gear back on. My boots were frozen because I had left them out of the tent.

“Shit!”

“Ha! How’d you leave them outside?” Ida said.

“I swear, I do this kind of thing all the time. My feet aren’t going to like this!” I truly thought I had taken them inside before I had shut off the flashlight.

“At least we’re on our way out.”

Ida didn’t bring up the fog as we proceeded out of the tent, but she of all people would have known how strange fog was for the location. It was fully light out, so the sky was the same color as the ground. We deconstructed the tent and crammed it into its bag, and I piled all the supplies next to the sled.

“Hello,” a Scandinavian accent called out.

“Haugen!” I called back.

A group of orange parkas with sleds approached us from the west.

“I am excited to view what you have at this site,” Haugen said.

“What do you make of the fog?” Ida asked.

“I have never seen fog in this area.”

“I haven’t either, nothing like it,” another man in the group agreed.

“When did the fog start?” Haugen asked

“It must’ve started while we were sleeping,” I said. “It was totally clear last night.”

“I suppose that fog is consistent with the moisture we have recorded with equipment that is located at other sites. However, fog is still very strange.” He analyzed the landscape. He wasn’t wearing goggles. “Shall we look at the irregularity?”

We walked in the direction of the precipice. The hole appeared to have less depth because of the fog filling its expanse.

“How unusual,” Haugen said. “I see why you were so alarmed. Considering the perfect, sharp edges, I do not believe this is a natural feature of the ice. It is as you described over the messenger, except, as I remember it, you said that it was deep.”

“It is deep,” I said.

“I don’t think it is.” Haugen moved toward the hole and maneuvered his skis parallel to the edge. He reached down with his ski pole. “See, it’s about twenty centimeters deep and then there’s more ice.”

I walked to the edge. Haugen was right. The new brightness in the hole was not fog but ice.

“Don’t put weight on that. It is — or, it might be, or it was — much deeper yesterday.”

“Do you suppose the ice is hollow underneath?” Haugen stabbed the new ice with his pole.

“I wouldn’t strike it like that. If it is hollow, it might collapse. If it’s not hollow, I don’t think that makes it mean any less. It’s just that it’s changed.”

“I see. You have made me confused, Maria.”

“Would you like us to take it from here?” asked a woman in Haugen’s group I had never met before.

“I can’t stand this ice sheet any more. We were supposed to be out of here fifteen hours ago,” Ida said. As she finished speaking she looked toward me. I nodded.

“We’ll give you our preliminary documentation from yesterday,” I said to Haugen.

“You must take anything you recorded back to base with you, and we will sort all of the documents later.”

“You should know that we randomly found a fish out lying here on the ice sheet, too.” Ida said. She picked up its rigid body from our pile of supplies. “What kind of fish is it, Maria?”

“It looks like Atlantic char,” I said.

“Atlantic char,” Ida repeated. “We’ll take it back to base too.”

“Mm-hmm,” Haugen intoned. He had apparently not come here to deal with strange fish. “A very interesting addition to this case. Go and take it with you.”

“Will do,” Ida said.

Glancing at the group of us now standing near the dip in the ice, I counted six people in all. “What do you intend to do here to start your investigation?” I asked.

Haugen must have thought about this already. “We will send two people to walk the full perimeter of the irregularity and note anything of interest. Then another group member and I will examine the structure and composition of the ice in this area using the analytical tools we have brought in the rightmost sled. I suppose we may wait until the fog clears to begin these steps.”

“I’m glad you have it all handled. We’ll head out now. Stay safe, you all,” Ida said.

“Safe travels,” one of Haugen’s men sang in response.

…

As we walked, the fog lifted slowly but perceptibly. The helicopter was a few minutes away, visible faintly through the gauze set against the sky, when Ida broke the silence.

“I don’t think the intensity of these past days will go away.” She paused. “How well have I hidden it? There’s been so much intensity.”

I stopped walking and inhaled deeply.

“Please keep an efficient memory.” Ida said, as if continuing. “Be economical. You need to keep it safe. Keep it just out of reach of your vision, in the background, hidden under your fingers or just behind the moon in the evening sky. It’ll always be there.”

“Thank you.” I said. I tried to roll Ida’s words through my mind. Why had this just now come over her? And how much did I really know her? “Is that exactly what you intend to do, then?” I asked.

“Yes, I think I will. I’ll try my best to remember. I can’t forget what happened here.”

“Can I ask, how will you do that?”

“I’m not very sure how I’ll do that. I want to ask you the same question. How do you think you’ll do it?” She paused, and I waited watching her. “The first step is that we have to get in the helicopter. Then when I get home I’m going to finally wash myself and put on clean clothes. I will reimmerse myself in the cycles of my life. Everything comes in cycles, don’t you think? Anyway, I need to store my memory somewhere special. Some things you can talk about with everyone, and other things with only some people. This I think I can only talk about with myself. Not even with you. But please believe me, that quietness is what I want. I’m going to store my memory somewhere just out of reach of others where I know it will be safe.”

I nodded and stood still, thinking about the new tenderness that had burst forth from Ida at the same time that she was asking for distance. Ida pointed her head upward as if stretching, exposing her chin to the cold air, and then bringing her head down within a few seconds as she seemed to resolve to stand still like me.

We finished the walk to the helicopter and lifted off.

…

I traveled by plane from Ukkusissat to Montreal to Mississauga. Ida and I each transferred to different positions for our roles. In my vision she lives behind the moon, there behind and alongside everything else that carries on. The moon traces half-circles above and below the horizon in daylong cycles. In equal fractions of our time, I follow Ida, and she follows me.

>   COPY. FLIGHT IMPOSSIBLE FROM ALL PROXIMAL SITES. PLANNED HAUGEN EMERGENCY DEPARTURE TOMORROW FROM UKKUSISSAT 05:00 UTC-3. NECESSARY PREPARATIONS COMMENCED. OVER.

As before we waited, though this time the message came sooner. We both read it as it appeared:

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