Drop City

for light these days was just a fading gleam on the horizon, light in name only, a sorry pale tuned-down glow in the southern sky that was there to remind you of what you were missing. It was sunny in Miami Beach, dazzling in San Diego, and you couldn't put the light out in Patagonia or McMurdo Sound even if you wanted to--it was as if the whole globe had been tipped upside down and all you could shake out of it was a few shadows falling away into the grudging night of the universe. That was what Pan was thinking as the engine snarled out its dull, repetitive message--_all's well, all's well, all's well__--and the wingtips caught a glint from somewhere and the running lights pulsed out of sync till he was as tranced as he might have been in some dance club with the strobe going and the music so loud he couldn't have said what his own name was.
    He was cold. Freezing to death, actually. Outside, on the ground, it was approaching forty below, and here they were up at six thousand feet where the air was thinner--and colder. Joe had the heater going full blast, but it barely registered against the wind howling in through the cracks in the doorframe and around the window, and why couldn't they make these things airtight? Why couldn't they insulate them or rig up a heater that actually made some kind of difference? He couldn't feel his toes. Under his shirt, the beads were like separate little pellets of ice. A cold clear fluid dripped from his nostrils and dampened the backs of his gloves. In desperation, he wrapped his arms round his shoulders, shivering so hard he thought his fillings were going to come loose.
    Beside him, Joe was a rock. His shoulders filled the cockpit, the bulk of him made bulkier still with the puffed-up eiderdown lining of his parka. He kept a gloved finger on the yoke, stared off through the windscreen or gazed idly out one side or the other, no more concerned with the howling Arctic blast in his face than a polar bear curled up on an ice floe. He hadn't spoken--or shouted--a word for the past fifteen minutes, but then Pan didn't expect conversation, since you couldn't hear anything over the clamor of the engine anyway. So he suffered in silence, thinking only of the cabin now, of the gentle shush of the skis on the snowbound ice--of touching down and scrambling out of this torture box--and of the fire he was going to crank up in the stove. He let a long shiver work its way through him, then reached for his day pack in the backseat and extracted the silver flask.
    The flask was filled with Hudson Bay rum, the same shit basically as the Bacardi 151 they used to use for flambés at the Surf 'N' Turf--tasted godawful, like kerosene, but it got the job done. Warmed you. Burned you right on down from your palate to your rectum, and he still remembered Mr. Boscovich at the board diagramming the human digestive tract--_Nine meters long,__ he called out as if he were singing, _and can anybody tell me how many feet that is?__ Pan gave a little laugh at the memory, then unscrewed the cap. He held the flask to his lips as the plane jarred and settled, a little spillage soaking into his beard and pinning dark beads of moisture to the thighs of his jeans, but it did the trick--it burned till he had to pound his breastbone to keep from spewing it back up--and then he tapped Joe's arm and offered up the flask in pantomime. “You want a hit?” he shouted.
    Joe gave him a long, slow look, as if he were trying to place him, as if they hadn't lived in the same cabin for the past three and a half months and been airborne together for the better part of the day, and then he shook his head slowly and let a sad smile fill up the hole in the middle of his beard. “Not while I'm flying,” he shouted back.
    “Not even a nip?”
    “Don't tempt me.”
    They were on their way back from Ambler, on the Kobuk River, where they'd taxied up to a shack on an island just west of town and unloaded eight cases of bourbon, rum and vodka purchased three days ago in Fairbanks. The shack was listing to the left on the uncertain prop of its stilts, sad and abandoned-looking, but there were wall-to-wall people inside, having a party, and that was a surprise. They looked at him out of their retreating eyes--all of them, men and women, trading around the same face, the face Genghis Khan must have worn after he'd got done conquering an out-of-the-way village and raping all the women and eating the dogs and sucking down the last drop of