Berit Ellingsen - Not Dark Yet

During their final lunch together in the cafeteria the candidates also organized shared transport to the airport and the train station. When the meal was over they picked up their luggage in the meeting room, and followed the representative one last time to the foyer.

“Best of luck to everyone and I hope to see you again for the next and final round of selections,” the representative said, smiling at them. “It’s been such a pleasure to meet you all and to get to know our future explorers.”

He traveled with the smallest group, which was headed to the central train station.

“Looking forward to going back to the mountains?” Wameeth asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Are you familiar with the place?”

“Passed through it once or twice on the way to my company’s ski cabin. It’s a beautiful place, but cold.”

“It’s gotten warmer,” he said. “It’s still beautiful, though.”

“Warmer?” Wameeth said. “Isn’t there a lot of snow?”

“No snow so far,” he said, “but it’s my first season there, so it might just be the strange weather this year.”

“Yes, the weather has been so weird,” Wameeth said. “I wonder when it’s going to turn back to normal. When I heard you lived up there I thought you were staying at the resorts.”

“No,” he smiled. He hadn’t seen any ski slopes or hotels. They must be further up in the mountains.

“So you’re not a ski bum? Why do you live there then?”

“I bought a cabin,” he said.

“And then the snow disappears. Isn’t that typical?”

“Yes,” he laughed and avoided mentioning that snow had had nothing to do with his moving there.

By the time he stepped onto the platform on the moor and started on the path to the cabin, it had been dark for hours and he had to put on his headlamp before he entered the heath. The densely quiet darkness closed around him and almost swallowed the faint beam. He imagined that he was traversing the bottom of the deep sea or the surface of a barren, distant world.

AFTER FOUR DAYS SURROUNDED BY PEOPLE, COMING back to the cabin was strange. He had expected that being among so many people would be hard after a long time in the mountains, but it seemed instead that it was solitary existence which required acclimatization. Clearly, humans were pack animals, not soloists like octopi, or even social by circumstance like tigers seemed to be, but true pack animals that not only wanted, but needed to be social. He’d read somewhere that if a person grew up without interacting with other people, she or he would not become a true human being, and lack language, empathy, and all other forms of social skills. He wondered about that. Kaye had said that empathy, the ability to sympathize with and care for another being, preceded humans, was older than humanity itself. It was a trait shared by many mammals, might even be the characteristic that defined mammalian behavior, caused by the need to rear the young for a long while, and to do it with great care, often inside a complex social structure.

“Did empathy evolve to strengthen the social structure, or was social structure a result of the empathy that evolved?” he had asked the assistant professor once.

“That, I nor anyone else can say with certainty,” Kaye said, smiling. “We don’t know which appeared first, empathy or complex social structure, perhaps they did so simultaneously. But after they first appeared, each affected the evolution of the other greatly, and today they may be inseparable.”

The silence in the cabin was interrupted only by the occasional whistle of wind from beneath the door, the gurgle of water when he opened the tap in the kitchen, and the crackling of fire as the logs burned in the hearth. The quiet filled his ears the same way the newly fallen snow had dampened all sounds in the restaurant at the last dinner during the testing. He welcomed the stillness and sat inside it while the residue of the other candidates’ presences and voices, the sights and smells of the past week, played themselves out in his mind and slowly faded.

As he had expected, it had been difficult to sleep well in a shared room, not to mention shared with someone who snored loudly for most of the night. The energy required to answer the tests accurately and quickly, to keep abreast of the multiple conversations that had been going on around him, and to connect the right names to the correct faces, had been considerable. The first night back in the cabin he slept for twelve hours, and for ten hours on the second night.

In his dreams he met Eloise and half expected her to provide him with a progress report about the project. Instead, he found himself describing a place high up in the mountains for her. As he did so, he remembered the site from earlier dreams and what he had done there the previous times. It was one of his recurring dream-places, although he rarely felt the need to see it again. But now the memory of that imaginary landscape pulled at him, even inside the ongoing dream, and he realized why he kept returning to it, like a bird on oneiric migration.

“Take the train north to the highest stop, cross the road, follow the trail past the houses and the grove, and you’re there,” he said. But as he registered his own words, he felt a sting of regret for having revealed the information of how to reach the location to someone else, even just the dream-representation of another person. He also recalled how worried he had been the first time he discovered the still, dark face of the lake, and the barren, crater-like sides that grew steeply out of it and rose to jagged crags. It was like the fountain in the park, a place in his dreams which upon discovery revealed itself as an often visited, but hidden memory. Perhaps that was what made the lake frightening: uncovering a recurring, but forgotten dream-location, and wondering how many more existed in his subconscious which he couldn’t remember.

“I can’t go there alone,” the dream version of Eloise said, looking too concerned and insecure to be the person he knew from his waking hours.

“It’s not that far,” he said, but agreed to visit the lake with her, as he yearned to see it himself.

He wasn’t certain when he last dreamed about the place, six months ago, a year, two years, but the journey there was more or less how he remembered it. A small train, its compartments more reminiscent of a funicular or a trolley in a city, climbed slowly upward. As the train ascended, the landscape changed abruptly from plains to mountains. One moment the windows were black, the next they were filled with tall white peaks.

Eloise and he disembarked at an empty platform by the road, where the rail tracks continued to who knew where in his dreaming mind. Then they followed the road which wound through the pass uphill and around a curve. There, on the other side of the narrow strip of asphalt was a parking lot, and above it a pale wooden building with unusual angles and a ribbed steel roof. That was the local tourist center, where he had bought stickers and key rings in earlier dreams. But this time they walked in the opposite direction, to a cluster of houses nestled in the mountain side, private homes which looked surprisingly suburban, surrounded by lawns and flowering hedges. His dream view tilted like a camera, revealing a bright, warm sun in the sky. That had not happened before; during his earlier visits it had been dusk or winter.

The lake was where he recalled it, its precipitous sides and looming cliffs the same as in earlier dreams. But when Eloise and he descended the graveled slope and reached the edge of the water, the lake had dried up and all that was left was an expanse of black mud.

“My god, where have all the fish gone?” Eloise said.