Adam Johnson - Emporium

Hygiene aside, Jacques and I sort of fell in together. True, he was a trapper, and I was a man who needed lots of small animals, but it was more than that. I didn’t know a dang word of French, yet we had an amazing ability to understand each other. We had both lived in the dark and cold, knew what it meant to be cut off from mankind, from warmth and companionship.

Ahead, Jacques’s snowshoes went still in the ice drifts.

He turned and beckoned me. “Bon soir, mon grand ami. Allons-y.”

Jacques handed me the bunny sack, and we set off into the dark, tromping side by side through snow so new it squeaked under us. How Jacques found his way, or even his traps in this absolute and featureless dark, I’ll never know, and tonight I didn’t even try. There was a beauty to this region of Canada that you came to know only through exile, and as we walked, I tried to look no further than the ghostly flicker of our little subjects struggling ahead. It was easier to focus on the little things — the rusty springs, the hempy smell to the burlap bag — because if you let yourself feel the shock of the snow around you, the depth of the black above, you’d be forced to consider the degree to which you truly belonged to this universe. Jacques, with his knotty arms and racked torso, would muscle open the iron hinges of a trap, I’d unwrap the bunny sack, and we’d stave our new guest home before moving on.

I needed to relax, but couldn’t. The thought that the Ruskies were up to some new monkey business really got my mind spinning. The deathray was about to take a great leap forward, and as the beam man, it all rested on my shoulders. The next step was to ditch our relatively weak thorium 232 fuel and begin processing the most theoretical of elements. We were going to push the edge of the periodic table. A demon lurked out past the end of row seven, beyond nobelium and lawrenciuim, beyond the mere unstable and volatile theoretical elements. We called this demon saturnium, and Q’s calculations showed it would burst into phenomenal radioactive decay the moment it was created. It would be my job to harness this bitch.

On certain nights, when the moon was full, Jacques would bait his traps with salt. This we did tonight, and the whole world appeared elemental: the driven snow was unbonded calcium, the sky was dark as manganese. Our shoe prints filled with somber cobalt the moment we moved on, and ahead, the moraines of receding glacier heads seemed to glow with the lithial blue of radium. We worked slow and sure, measuring our breath between traps, places where we’d chip the old, frozen blood from the pressure plate before Jacques trigger-set a chunk of rock salt that, in this platinum light, was ten shades whiter than snow.

Of course, Jacques got all the salt he wanted from our supply shed, but in years past, when he could scrape no sodium from the thermal vents around Terminal Geyser, he would ejaculate on his traps, letting the semen freeze to the trigger pan. With this sel d’homme, or “man salt,” he could catch any minx or fox, even the elusive arctic beaver — all specimens sure to carry nasty diseases, if you asked me.

Using my hands, I gestured to Jacques that, because of sodium’s single electron valance and limited oxidizing potential, it was impossible for it to produce a smell that might be detectable by an animal. How could an odorless element work as bait?

The old trappers, Jacques gestured, still say the moon is made of salt. He pulled a salt lick from his pack and held it aloft. Animals can live alone in the cold and dark, he continued, but this they need. This is what makes them howl for the moon.

It was difficult to understand him with those mittens on, but it didn’t take much to get across the idea of “need” to me. Love felt like some cruel Canadian joke. The bunnies were white. The icefields were white. The sky, endlessly aflurry, was blind with white. Through a kind of pantomime, I asked Jacques how the heck animals even found each other in such a place.

“Dans le froid absolu de l’Arctique, avec le cammoflage parfait?” He shrugged. “Je ne sait pas.”

I wondered, where was my casserole? Where was my slice of the Canadian pie? Wind howled through my parka. I shook my head. “Sorry, but no parlez, ” I told him.

It was a long walk home in the snow, and I arrived to find Q asleep in front of the thermal circulator. I felt the urge to sit with him in the warmth, imagine his dreams as I’d done on so many nights, but it was late. I spread a quilt over his lap, and with my little finger, wiped a faint line of dribble from his cheek.

Even Vu was snoring peacefully as I laid out my long johns for the morning and lined up my prebreakfast vitamins on the edge of the dresser. The last thing I saw before sleep was Jacques through my bunk window, half-naked out on the tundra, murmuring softly to the moon as he masturbated. His shoulders and chest, even through mats of hair, were perfectly defined. Neck craned, head back, he stroked himself in the lunar glow, a light just bright enough to illuminate the pearls of his semen, already half-frozen into globes, as they arced toward the snow.

In the morning, I decided it was best to ignore my feelings toward the studniks and get to work. Jacques could barely keep the hopper loaded. We were a dang fine team on average days, but now we were like mad robots. “Encore des lapins,” Dr. Q would yell to Jacques, as Scotty shaved for all he was worth.

Of course, it was hard to brag about the ray, considering we’d soon be needing human-sized targets. Privately, I saw the deathray as a necessary first step in the creation of a liferay. I had a theory about the true state of our universe, a theory so elegant and terrifying that I couldn’t even tell Dr. Q.

Basically, it goes like this, and stop me when you disagree: Matter doesn’t exist. “Things” are made of energy; atoms are really tiny packets of vibrating waves. The appearance of substance — of “weight” and “shape”—is simply a product of fluctuating frequency. Gravity also is a myth. Popular science would have us believe that bodies are magically attracted to each other by this invisible force. Don’t make me laugh. The real force at work here is something I call sympathy, an affinity between energies. In school, you may have been taught that love includes a rubbing of the genitals. Life, however, has hopefully proved this fleshy dance a lie. Love is our clearest manifestation of sympathy, a pulling of equal and opposite spirits. The moon is held in orbit by sympathy. The dancing poodle rolls a ball with sympathy. A man, finally, is only a beautiful, unwavering band of energy. If you could only harness this force.

That night, Secretary Mulroney was back.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “follow me.”

We tromped out to the Sno-Cat shed, a path Jacques shoveled by hand. The cold made me stiff and weary.

“Behold,” Mulroney said and rolled his eyes skyward. “What do you see?”

We turned our goggles toward the dark night above.

I didn’t get the point of the exercise. All I saw was our breath rolling upward in a column, my steam mingling with the others’, with Q’s.

“I don’t see a damn thing,” Scotty said.

“Ah,” Jacques said. “La lune.”

“Through these lenses,” Q said, “the moon glows a ghostly pink.”

The moon did seem pink. A shiver went through me.

Mulroney continued. “A communist moon looms, gentlemen. Our Yukon team believes the Reds are building giant engines in preparation for a moon launch. I don’t need to tell you the grave military implications of that.”

I pulled my collar up. There was no wind. A nameless feeling rose in me. Everything had changed, but I did not know how or why. The Canadian starscape above seemed foreign and strange.