Lily Brooks-Dalton - Good Morning, Midnight

Augustine had adored her when he was young, before he began to understand that she wasn’t like the other mothers on his street. He was caught up with her excitement and brought down by her sadness—following her moods with fervent loyalty, like an eager dog. He closed his eyes and saw her frizzy brown hair shot with strands of gray, the sloppy line of her burgundy lipstick, applied without a mirror, the awestruck glow in her eyes as she pointed toward the brightest star, hovering above their Michigan neighborhood.

If that good, smart boy had found himself in this inhospitable place, alone except for an ancient, unfamiliar caretaker, he might have cried or screamed or stamped his feet. Augustine had never been a particularly brave child. He might have made a halfhearted attempt to run away—gathered some supplies and marched off into the desolate distance, headed for home, only to return in a few hours. And if little Augie had been told there was no home for him to return to, no mother to soothe his tantrum, no one else in the world left for him, what would he have done then?

Augustine considered his young companion carefully. Now, in his old age, he was trapped in memories. He never used to think of the past, but somehow the tundra brought it all back to him—experiences he thought he’d left behind long ago. He recalled the tropical observatories he’d worked in, women he’d held in his arms, papers he’d written, speeches he’d given. There had been a time when his lectures drew hundreds of people. Afterward, there would be a cluster of admirers waiting around to ask him for his autograph— his autograph! His accomplishments haunted him, specters of sex and triumph and discovery, all the things that had seemed so meaningful at the time. None of it mattered anymore. The world beyond the observatory was quiet, empty. The women were probably dead, the papers burned to ash, the auditoriums and observatories in ruins. He had always imagined his discoveries being taught in universities after he was gone, written about by generations of scholars not yet born. He’d imagined that what he left behind would endure for centuries. In this way his own mortality had seemed inconsequential.

He wondered if Iris thought about her earlier life. If she missed it. If she understood that it was gone. A house somewhere, maybe a brother or a sister, maybe both. Parents. Friends. School. He wondered what she missed the most. Toward the end of the long night they walked around the perimeter of the outpost together, shuffling through a layer of new powder that swirled on top of the hard-packed snow. A low moon lit their path. They were both wrapped in their warmest clothes, bundled into the thick folds of their parkas like snails in their shells. The scarf tied across her nose and mouth hid Iris’s expression. Icicles had formed on Augustine’s eyebrows and eyelashes, framing his view with a glittering blur. Iris stopped in her tracks suddenly and pointed an oversized mitten up at the sky, directly above their heads, where the North Star glimmered. He followed her gaze.

“Polaris,” she said, her voice muffled by the fabric.

He nodded, but she had already moved on. It wasn’t a question; it was a statement. After a moment he joined her. For the first time, he was truly glad of her company.

THE WORK HAD seemed so important when Augie chose to stay behind at the observatory—keeping track of the data, logging the sequences of stars. After the exodus and the subsequent radio silence, he felt it was more vital than ever to continue observing, cataloging, cross-referencing. It was all that had stood between him and madness, a thin membrane of usefulness and importance. He struggled to keep his mind whirring in its accustomed track. The immensity of a civilization’s end impressed upon his brain—a brain trained to absorb immensity—was almost too much for him. It was stranger and more colossal than anything he’d contemplated before. The demise of humanity. The erasure of his life’s work. A recalibration of his own importance. He devoted himself instead to the cosmological data that continued rushing in from outer space. The world outside the observatory was silent, but the universe wasn’t. In the beginning it was the technical upkeep of the telescope, the maintenance of the data archive programs, and the calm, indifferent anchor of Iris’s presence that kept him from going mad. Iris seemed unaffected, easily lost in a book, a meal, the landscape. She was immune to his panic. Eventually he came to grips with the state of things and grew calmer. Accepted futility, then moved beyond it.

He paced himself—there was no deadline, no end in sight. The data was steady, unaffected. He reprogrammed the telescope’s eye for his own curiosity and began to spend more time outdoors, wandering around the abandoned outpost buildings in the deep blue of the long night. He relocated everything he had use for to the top floor of the control building, one piece at a time. He dragged the mattresses through the snow, one by one, and up the stairs, one by one. Iris trailed behind him with a crate of cooking utensils. When he stopped for breath and looked back, he noticed that she carried it well. She was a strong little thing, and tough. Together they moved the essentials out of the dormitories and up to the third floor, where there were only desks, computers, and filing cabinets full of paper. They brought up stores of canned and freeze-dried food, bottled water, generator fuel, batteries. Iris pocketed a deck of playing cards. Augustine salvaged a sepia-tinted globe from one of the dorms and tucked it under his arm, the brass axis digging into his ribs through the thick down of his parka.

The third floor was plenty big for the two of them, but there was a shocking amount of clutter when they moved in: useless, anachronistic machines, outdated papers stating hypotheses that had long been disproved, dog-eared back issues of Sky & Telescope. Searching for an empty surface to display his new globe and finding none, Augustine set it on the floor, opened a heavy window with some difficulty, and unceremoniously shoved out an old, dusty computer monitor. Iris ran over from where she was plumping sleeping bags and regarded its remains below, a few dark pieces scattered across the bright snow, some still rolling down the mountain. She looked at him with a silent question in her eyes.

“Junk,” Augie said, and set his sepia globe down in the space the monitor had occupied. It looked elegant there, a thing of beauty among the detritus of science. He would go out later, after the moon had risen, and collect the debris, but it felt good to send the monitor sailing out the window. A small release. He took the keyboard that went with it, the mouse cable coiled around it, and handed it to Iris. Without missing a beat, she threw it into the night like a Frisbee, and together they leaned their heads into the bitterly cold air and watched it disappear, spinning out into the dark.

AFTER THE SUN returned, the two of them began walking down beyond the outbuildings to watch it rise and set. In the beginning this didn’t take long. The sun would well up from beneath the horizon, casting a soft orange arc to herald its arrival, flooding the tundra with fiery pink, and as soon as it cleared the snowy peaks it would begin to sink again, sending sheets of violet and rose and cool blue into the sky like a pastel layer cake. In one of the nearby valleys, Augustine and Iris observed a herd of musk oxen returning daily, nuzzling the snow-covered ground. The grass they were eating was invisible from where he and Iris sat, but Augie knew it was there, strawlike stalks pushing up out of the snow, perhaps trapped just beneath it. The musk oxen were enormous, their shaggy coats riddled with thick dreadlocks that nearly brushed the ground. Their long, curved horns pointed skyward. They looked ancient, almost prehistoric—as if they’d been grazing here long before humans had stood on two legs and would continue to graze long after the cities built by men and women crumbled back into the earth. Iris was transfixed by the herd. She persuaded Augustine to sit closer and closer as the days passed, tugging him silently forward.