Fault Lines. Nicolas Billon

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СКАЧАТЬ it was frostbitten, and I was extremely lucky that I didn’t lose the whole thing.

       Takes a sip from his glass.

      Since word’s gotten out about the island, I’ve been getting phone calls from journalists – lots and lots of journalists – who want to hear about the newly discovered Thomas Morrissey Island, baptized after my nephew.

      The first few interviews were … difficult.

      I would start with, ‘I’m a glaciologist.’ And they would ask,

      ‘What’s that?’

      So I’d explain: ‘Well, uh, it’s complicated in the sense that it’s an interdisciplinary branch of science that pulls together aspects of geology, geophysics, climatology, geography, et cetera, to examine the natural phenomena of ice in general and glaciers in particular and … ’

      Are you bored yet?

       Jonathan smiles.

      Judith once said to me, ‘The only thing you’re good at communicating is your passion for things no one else understands.’

       Jonathan shrugs.

      The next question, invariably: ‘Oh. And how did you get into that line of work?’

      ‘Ah!’ I would answer, ‘Well, that’s an interesting story, because I initially wanted to be a physicist, you see, but I discovered that glaciers provide a kind of unified object to explain – in a simple way – many of the complex properties of physics … ’

      By this time, most interviewers are ready to hang up the phone. I could tell, mostly, from their breathing and the way they’d ask questions with a kind of fatalism, that they weren’t going to like the answer. They knew what I discovered was important, but they didn’t understand why.

      This one guy, though, from the New York Times, got what I was talking about; his background was in science. At the end of the interview, he said, ‘Dr. Fahey, can I be straight with you? You’re selling the science, not the story. And journalists want you to give them a story. Don’t talk to me about glaciology in terms of geophysics and geology; I don’t know what that means. Tell me you’re the Ice Whisperer. And I don’t care about carbon dioxide levels in the ice. I want you to tell me that ice is saying to us, to humanity, that we’re royally fucked. That’s a story, that’s a story I can sell. I need the, the … ’

      ‘Mythology.’

      ‘Yes! You give me that, and your message’ll get across to people.’

      I confess, my first thought was, ‘Americans!’ But he was right. Mythology was the thing that, until then, I’d not understood. So my next interview …

      ‘I’m a glaciologist.’

      ‘Can you explain to our readers what that is, Dr. Fahey?’

      ‘Certainly. In the same way that each of us is the product of our history – where we’ve come from, our life experience, our social context, et cetera – ice is the product of its history. It has a story to tell, and that’s my job. To figure out what ice can tell us about its past, a hundred or even a thousand years ago. Where did it come from, why is it here, how long has it been here, what’s happening to it now? Ice, like us, has its own mythology, and we can learn a lot about our past from it.’

      ‘What is the ice telling us, Dr. Fahey?’

      ‘That we’re in trouble.’

      Now that’s glaciology done sexy.

       Jonathan smiles, then sniffs the air.

      Do you smell that?

       He realizes what it is.

      The crazy thing about Greenland is that in summer, it’s light twenty-four hours a day. Sleep is hard, sometimes, and one thing that started happening was that I had waking dreams … There’s one, one in particular … It was more like a fantasy, I suppose … I thought I’d meet a woman – Danish, perhaps, tall, not necessarily beautiful but pretty, buxom, bookish. She, too, would be a stranger to Greenland, a visitor. Perhaps she’s an ethnographer, or a linguist studying Greenlandic. She’d be married, or maybe have a serious boyfriend back in Copenhagen. But she’d fall in love with the landscape, with the ice, and wouldn’t want to go home. We’d talk about it – we’d commiserate – until finally we both had the courage to stay, forget our creature comforts back home and live there, on my island, and spend the evenings reading together and have children who’d sleep in our bed, raise them as Greenlanders … She and I would grow old together, until one evening I’d return home and find her dead – peacefully, of old age – and I’d take her outside, but not to bury her, no, I’d set her there to freeze so that I could bring her back in every evening, to share a meal and read to her and pray …

      Registers his word choice.

      … no, wish that it would be my turn soon. And when I’d feel Death nearby, I’d take my lover to the edge of the island and bind her to me – like this, like a backpack, like an air tank, and throw myself into the Arctic Ocean.

       Jonathan finishes his drink. He crunches an ice cube.

      I remember now. The title of that book. It was One Hundred Years of Solitude.

      JUDITH

       Judith takes a long drag on her cigarette. She savours the nicotine, then blows out the smoke.

       She takes in the audience.

      Fuck the polar bears.

      Fuck global warming, fuck the Kyoto Protocol, fuck seals and whales and penguins, okay? Fuck greenhouse gases and fuck Greenland, for that matter, and fuck you if you’re sitting there thinking, ‘Ever heard of cancer, bitch?’

       Takes a drag from her cigarette.

      I don’t really mean any of that. Well, except for the part about the smoking. Because if you think I don’t see the contempt in your eyes, well, actually, it glows in the fucking dark.

      Hey. Hey. I’m gonna let you in on a little secret.

      We know it’s bad for us.

      Is that what drives you crazy? That we smoke even though we know it’s killing us? Yeah, well, we’ve all eaten a doughnut and we’ve all had fast food and we’ve all had questionable unprotected sex. So let’s consider before casting the first stone, okay?

       Takes a long drag from her cigarette.

      To answer your question: yes, I’m in a foul mood.

       Stands the cigarette up on its end and presents it to the audience.

      This was my wedding gift to Jonathan: that I would stop smoking. His to me was to start drinking.

       She shakes her head.

      The СКАЧАТЬ