I
At minus twenty chocolate doesn’t taste of much, even if she tongues it against the roof of her mouth. This low-horizoned place, she sees, is where the sky comes for a rest, letting the tundra take its weight. She’s been looking at it on the map for a long time, the Arctic Circle round its knees, fingers reaching for the North Pole. The countries stitched together by a circumpolar thread, she’s going to every one of them. She wants to stand on the flange of ice at each end of the rod of fire that burns through the Earth’s core, fixing one pole to the other. She snaps and sucks another square of chocolate. When she’s done, she’s going south to sail the ice desert’s watery rampart, the Antarctic circumpolar current, perhaps observe how chocolate tastes there.
II
First stop inside the Arctic Circle, she steps from the train. No one else gets off, no one embarks. It’s later than it looks. No use for towns, she walks, a backpack-tilted giant. Willow, spruce, birch: small trees, small leaves for a small summer. Northern paucity enriches; southern abundance impoverishes, and wearies; she’s tired of lying on beaches. Removing sunglasses, she dares the sun to touch the horizon. It won’t. Rolling out her sleeping bag on crow and cloud berry, she dares wolves and bears to scare her through a nightless night. They do. She returns to the station, unrolls again; lies on the platform, seven hours early for the next train. Perhaps reindeer will dip their muzzles as she sleeps, warm her with nostril-breath. But her eyes remain unshut. Sky-sheeted, she believes all night she’s watching some other planet’s sun.
III
Sixty-six degrees, he announces, thirty-three minutes, thirty-nine seconds. Parking, he tells her to take his camera, goes to the back of his van. Don’t look. When she does, he’s high-kneeing into black trousers. When she looks again he’s tuxedoed, in the tundra. Hold this. A friend, back in LA, he says. A composer. Just for fun. It’s a baton, white for a dark concert hall. Here, black would show up better. There is so much light, white dissolves into something brighter. An in-joke or she is missing something. But a man in a tuxedo, arms raised to conduct a symphony in gold and red of folded mountain, unfolded plain. He is orchestrating light and space, not music. The only sound, the wind, is too spirited to control, too confident to guide. It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t get it; she takes his photo, won’t tell him that conductors usually wear tails.
