I heave myself out of the darkness slowly, painfully. And there I am, and there he is… —JEAN RHYS
WHEN THE SUN finally returned to the Arctic Circle and stained the gray sky with blazing streaks of pink, Augustine was outside, waiting. He hadn’t felt natural light on his face in months. The rosy glow spilled over the horizon and seeped into the icy blue of the tundra, casting indigo shadows across the snow. The dawn climbed like a wall of hungry fire, delicate pink deepening to orange, then crimson, consuming the thick layers of cloud one at a time until the entire sky was burning. He basked in its muted glow, his skin tingling.
On his best days the blank canvas of the landscape set him at ease; on his worst he contemplated madness.
The less earthly interference there was, the better. It had always been this way for Augustine. - P147
It wasn’t success he craved, or even fame, it was history: he wanted to crack the universe open like a ripe watermelon, to arrange the mess of pulpy seeds before his dumbfounded colleagues. He wanted to take the dripping red fruit in his hands and quantify the guts of infinity, to look back into the dawn of time and glimpse the very beginning. He wanted to be remembered.
Yet here he was, seventy-eight years old, at the top of the Arctic archipelago, on the rind of civilization—and, having come to the terminus of his life’s work, all he could do was stare into the bleak face of his own ignorance.
No thoughts—just instincts. Just hunger and sleepiness. And desire, if it was the right time of year, but never love, never guilt, never hope. An animal built for survival, not reflection.
He’d felt a warm spark for the idea of their baby when she told him the news, like the flicker of a newborn star six billion light-years away.
As if she were empty: a hollow girl with wild hair and solemn eyes and no voice. - P14
He fed her when he fed himself. Talked to her when he felt like talking. Took her for walks. - P14
"How long till morning?" she said. It was the first time he’d heard her make a sound, other than the eerie humming he’d grown accustomed to—that aria of long, trembling notes deep in her throat as she looked out the control tower windows, as if she were narrating the subtle movements of their barren landscape in another tongue. - P14
"Iris," she said, without turning away from the darkened window. - P15
While the long night blanketed their mountaintop, the only question that mattered was the one she’d asked: how long would this darkness last. - P15
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