The Atlas полностью

The next morning she slept until checkout time, and when he woke her up so that he wouldn't have to pay for another day she cried: Aaah! Doan' wake up me! I'm hot. I doan' like you.

Eureka Sound, Ellesmere Island, Northwest

Before he ever met Reepah he'd been farther north at summer's end where the ripples in the leads flowed like chevrons, like herringbones. At the edge of a gray ice-islet, slush crumbled steadily into the water with a hissing noise.

In the evening there was a pencil-thick line of clear sky across the fjord, and he could see the white streak of ice in the middle and the white and brown land to the south, amputated miraculously flat and even by the fog-knife, and a steady steam noise came from the weather station, the buildings and petrol towers standing silhouetted in the fog like a great city. A streetlight glowed in front of the dome of the H building, and other lights glowed behind it — as his joy would do in Inukjuak when she held him sleeping in the tent with the baby between them; when she actually loved and trusted him. A truck rolled across the red and blue pontoon bridge. It was the Inuk handyman again taking him and many friendly soldiers to the dump to feed slops to the wolves, but there was only one fox and one seagull and the soldiers stood with their cameras dangling in disappointment. They were scheduled to fly to Alert on the thirteenth and back to Ottawa on the fifteenth. They worried about the pastries, wishing that they could lose twenty pounds. (Shivering in his tent, he wished that he could gain twenty pounds. It was very gray in there and he could see his breath and his iron-frozen boots hurt to touch.)

He was at the end of a long journey, waiting for the supply plane to come and take him home. He'd been far from the soldiers in a country that began with a lake which was a gray mirror the color of the sky, with nothing else but a low ridge-horizon. From this lake he'd walked up the ridge that was very snowy and white and gently treacherous because he could not see the top of it in the fog (although he kept thinking that he could), and half-frozen tussocks burst out of it, half-soft, but crushed hard and slippery so that his feet glided off and fell hard in an ankle-deep snowhole, over and over, every few steps. Reepah never fell when she was sober. A low ridge of cloud circumnavigated him. Pastel-white mountains pulsed in the yellow light. It was 26° F. Half a month later he'd come back and the gray lake was frozen. He'd wanted to drink from it before. It was supper-time, and he was thirsty so he chopped a piece out and melted it on his stove. It tasted like burned desolation. He was lonely but not yet thinking of Reepah because he didn't know her, and he wasn't thinking of the lake in Inukjuak because he hadn't been there; later he'd say to himself: those two lakes were the same. They were one lake, the lake of my wrongdoing. What did I do wrong?

I love my Reepah.

I love you, too. I want more beer, please. Thanks for beer. I want boyfriend in Montréal.

I'm your boyfriend in Montréal.

I want it.

The night before she went back home she sat with him on the hotel balcony gazing down into nothing and when he asked her if she liked the parade that was going on below them she worked her lower lip and nodded and that was all; she'd virtually given up speaking. Only in the middle of the night when she woke up drunk would she say anything; usually she'd laugh and say: I want to kill myself. — Why? he'd say. — Because I hate myself. — Why? — I don't know. — Then they had another fight because she wanted him to buy a bottle of vodka for her to take back and he'd said OK but since it was Sunday all the Sociétés des alcools were closed and the grocery stores didn't have it. She didn't understand, and blamed him. He'd bought her a sixpack of beer as a consolation prize but that wasn't good enough anymore although she'd been drinking nothing else the whole time except for ginger ale; every night at about two or three she'd wake him up by tickling him and then demand one beer, one cigarette and one ginger ale; all she'd enjoyed doing was going to more sex clubs, getting drunk and wishing she were beautiful enough to be a stripper, too. No, the sixpack wasn't good enough. She kept saying in that new hard and angry voice: You stupid. You stupid. — For the first time in the yean he'd known her he felt rage. He opened one of the bottles and poured it down the toilet. — Don't call me stupid anymore, he said.

You stupid.

He poured out the second bottle. So it went with the third, the fourth, and the fifth. She looked at the last bottle and her thirsty greed momentarily overmastered her pride, so she said: OK. I'm sorry OK.

Then a moment later she looked him full in the face and said: You stupid. I hate you.

He poured the bottle out.