Adam Johnson - Emporium

Mulroney assured us the CIA would find our man, so there was nothing left to do but get back to work and trust in Canadian Intelligence.

Three nights later, Mulroney was back. I was shaken out of a dream about submarines: when I raised my periscope, I could see Jacques on the shoreline, racing his luge up and down the hills in a perfect sine wave.

“Gentlemen,” Mulroney announced. “I present your Canadanaut.”

“Canadanaut?” I asked. “What the heck are you talking about?”

“It means ‘Canada-voyager,’” Mulroney said. “The boys in PR cooked it up.”

Mulroney then pushed forward a tiny, emaciated man with a skin condition. He was blindfolded and probably drugged.

Dr. Q asked him his discipline. Aeronautics? Vector Analysis?

“I’m an English teacher from Edmonton,” he squeaked.

I nearly laughed up my cocoa.

Vu rushed him. “Did the Oilers make the Stanley Cup playoffs?” he asked.

Such was our seclusion. But this guy didn’t know anything.

I walked over and poked him in the chest. He almost fell down. What a puss. I didn’t even want to know his name. How were we going to beat those Communauts into space with a bookworm at the wheel? Did I have to remind everyone of the grave military implications of failure?

Dr. Q and I decided to get right to work, right there in our nightshirts. The first thing we did was irradiate our Canadian hero with uranium isotopes. I set the dial at 500. Q shrugged, so I cranked it up to 650 rads, a dose that made our subject turn pink and swelly. The procedure also loosened his teeth, and the diarrhea would not stop. As if you could fly to the moon with a case of the dribbles riding shotgun. On the master clipboard, Q marked his radiation tolerance as “moderate.”

Next, we stuck him in the centrifugal chamber, an event that pulled his arms out of his sockets, and that was it, we were back to scratch.

I was relieved that our so-called “Canadanaut” was gone, but something was still bothering me. All day, the numbers wouldn’t add up, and I kept spilling the hydroxinum crystals. What I wouldn’t have given for one rabbit to calm my nerves. This mission wasn’t about Canada. This flight was about one man, leaving the world of men, making a sacrifice for the love of mankind. It seemed to me that our pilot should be called a “man-voyager,” or Homonaut, a name that suggested fellowship and unity.

At dinner that night, it was Scotty who snapped. “I’m tired of all these military figures telling us what to do.” He slammed his fork down. “The whole point of this enterprise is exploration. I say our man is a Star Jockey and should be referred to as such. In a certain sense, we’re all Star Jockeys.”

“I’m partial to Empyreal Cosmoteer,” Q said, “but you can’t fight the boys in PR.”

“What about Sky Musher?” Vu asked.

We pretended not to hear him.

“If we’re being open, sirs,” Mansoor said, “I prefer the title ‘Qamar Musafir’ or perhaps ‘Kaukab Tayyar.’ ”

Steaming, I tore my bib off and blurted, “We’re Homonauts or nothing at all.”

Dr. Q waved his hand. “Pull yourselves together, men.”

Scotty, in a temper, grabbed his ferrets and stormed off in a Sno-Cat to hunt for possible launch sites. Vu wanted to go after him, but Q said no, “Let him cool down.”

Days passed, long and cold. When would I find someone special?

I was dreaming of submarines again when I felt something warm on my chest. Dr. Q suddenly joined the dream in a gold-braided hat. In a deep voice, he gave the torpedo coordinates. But then I felt that the warmth under my covers was furry, and it was Jacques, who entered my dreamy nocturnal vision. He wore a skin-tight wetsuit, complete with a diving helmet. Jacques stuck a breathing tube in his mouth, and then launched himself out of the sub’s conning tower on a secret mission to mine an enemy harbor.

I woke suddenly and found myself alone. When I came to my senses, I realized Chilly and Willy, Scotty’s snow ferrets, were under the covers with me. They had climbed in through a storm window that Vu had accidentally left open. I had a bad feeling. Scotty wasn’t in his bunk, so I woke Vu, who knelt down to the ferrets.

“Is something wrong?” he asked them. “Is Scotty in trouble?”

Chilly and Willy just gave us stupid chatter. I knew a couple ways of getting ferrets to talk, but that would take precious time, and we needed to find Scotty.

“This is no use,” I said. “Come on, Vu. Let’s mount a rescue.”

We hopped into the Sno-Cat and headed out to scour the frozen wastelands. The narrow cones of our headlights were the whole universe as we drove and drove. Vu picked up where he’d left off last time, a chronological listing of inductees into the Hockey Hall of Fame in Winnipeg. As the night wore on, Vu described the gear — the helmets, the shin guards, the supporters — and by the time he explained face-offs, checking, and that darned icing rule, I’d begun to develop a fondness for the sport. My favorite part was the penalty box. God, if that didn’t sum up life.

Ahead, we saw something in the dark, a mere white lump in a field of white. I downshifted the Sno-Cat and engaged the ice brake. Vu and I ran out into polar-driven winds to find Scotty, weak of breath, half buried in snow.

I checked Scotty’s thermos. It was almost empty.

“You nearly got yourself killed out here, you fool,” I told him.

Scotty’s only response was to lift his leg out of the snow and show us a large trap, grappling his mangled foot. Black frost lined the wound.

I turned to Vu. “Jacques is near,” I said. “I have to find him.”

“Are you crazy?” Vu asked. “You won’t last ten minutes out there without a thermos.”

“You can’t stop me,” I told him. “Now get Scotty back to safety.”

And so I stumbled out into the blast-freezer of the night, riven and keening with cold, in search of my old friend Jacques. My fingers thickened, my vision blurred, everything smelled like ethylene glycol. In my mind, I saw images of times when I had been petty and small — framing colleagues for my mistakes, reporting the sympathizers and sodomites in my infantry unit, borrowing phonograph records with little intention of returning them — and now, as a mere speck wandering the vast Arctic expanse, I was just as small, but it was somehow different. I felt different. Toward the horizon, I hallucinated mountains and frozen rivers. On them raced a hairy little man, lugeing up and down their steep banks. Then everything went white.

I woke in a snow cave, lit by an oil-fat lamp. I could not move my limbs.

I woke again, days later, and the numbness was gone. I focused, and there was Jacques, heating lichen soup over a small fire of dried tundra moss. I felt warm and safe, and there were no fears of Jacques pulling any funny business on me while I slept, like those guys back in the service.

“My old friend, Jacques. Where have you been?”

Looking tired and defeated, Jacques pointed in various directions, suggesting the longitudes of Kamchatski, the Bering Sea, the Klondike Plateau.

“Il n’y a pas du tigre de Siberia,” he said. “Je n’ai pas cherche les loups polaire.”

It was time I taught Jacques a lesson about life. I motioned for him to follow me. We donned our snowshoes and forged out into the bracing cold, covering our faces as we stumbled toward the edge of an ice shelf where one of Jacques’s traps sat empty. We stood over its open jaws, and I couldn’t help but observe how primitive and pointless this device appeared against the endless nothing of our world.

I began by explaining to Jacques that in the beginning, sixteen billion years ago, all the energy of the universe was, for a microsecond, a ball of pure sympathy. Perfect states cannot last, I continued, which is the definition of our existence. There was a bang, and as the universe expanded, energies grew dim and distant, separated by galactic cold and dark.