The Terror

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The only paths left now are surrender or death. Or both.

All of his life, the boy and man he was and has been for fifty years would rather die than surrender. The man he is now would rather die than surrender.

But what is death itself other than the ultimate surrender? The blue flame in his chest will accept neither choice.

In their snow-house the past weeks, under their sleeping robes, he has learned about another type of surrender. A sort of death. A change from being one to being something else that is neither self nor not-self.

If two such different people who have no words at all in common can dream the same dreams, then perhaps — even with all dreams set aside and all other beliefs ignored — other realities can merge as well.

He is very frightened.

They leave the tent wearing only their boots, shorts, leggings, and the thin caribou-skin shirts they sometimes wear under their parkas. It is very cold tonight, but the wind has died down since the day’s brief glimpse of midday sun.

He has no idea what time it is. The sun has been set for many hours, and they have not slept yet.

The ice breaks under pressure with the steady beat of drums. New leads are opening nearby.

The aurora casts curtains of light from the starry zenith to the whiteice horizon, sending shimmers to the north, to the east, to the south, and to the west. All things, including the white man and brown woman, are tinted alternately in crimson, violet, yellow, and blue.

He goes to his knees and raises his face.

She stands over him, bending slightly as if watching a breathing hole for a seal.

As taught, he keeps his arms at his side, but she grips him firmly by his upper arms. Her hands are bare in the cold.

She lowers her head and opens her mouth wide. He opens his. Their lips are almost touching.

She inhales deeply, seals her mouth over his, and begins blowing into his open mouth, down his throat.

This is where — in their practice during the long winter darkness — he had so much trouble. Breathing in another person’s breath is like drowning.

His body tense, he concentrates fiercely on not gagging, on not pulling away. He thinks — surrender.

Kattajjaq. Pirkusirtuk. Nipaquhiit. All clack-clack names he half remembers from his dreams. All names the Real People around the world’s circle of northern ice have for what they are doing now.

She begins with a short rhythmic series of notes.

She is playing his vocal cords like a bank of woodwinds’ reeds.

The low notes rise out over the ice and blend with the pressure-cracking and the pulsing aurora light.

She repeats the rhythmic motif but this time leaves a short gap of silence between the notes.

He takes her breath from his lungs, adds his own, and blows back into her open mouth.

She has no tongue, but her vocal cords are intact. The notes they produce with his breath fluttering them are high and pure.

She blows music from his throat. He brings music from hers. The opening rhythmic motif quickens, overlaps, hurries itself. The range of notes becomes more complex — as much flute as oboe, as distinctly human as any voice, the throat-song can be heard for miles across the aurora-painted ice.

Every three minutes or so in the first half hour, they pause and gasp for breath. Many times in practice they have broken up in laughter here — he understands through her string-signs that this was part of the fun when it was only a woman’s game, making the other throat-singer laugh — but there can be no laughter tonight.

The notes begin again.

The song takes on the quality of a single human voice singing, simultaneously bass-deep and flute-high. They can shape words by breathing through each other’s vocal cords like this and now she does — speaking words in song through the night; she plays his throat and vocal cords like a complex instrument and the words take shape.

They improvise. When one changes rhythm, the other must always follow. In that sense, he knows now, it is very much like making love.

He finds the secret space to breathe in between sounds so that they can go longer and make deeper, purer notes. The rhythm quickens toward an almost climactic point, then slows, then quickens again. It is follow the leader, back and forth, one changing the tempo and rhythm, the other following like a lover responding, then the other taking the lead. They throat-sing each other this way for an hour, then two hours, sometimes going twenty minutes and more without stopping for a breath.

The muscles of his diaphragm hurt. His throat is on fire. The notes and rhythm now are as complicated as those created by any dozen instruments, as interlaced, complex, and ascending as the crescendo of a sonata or symphony.

He lets her lead. The single voice the two of them make, the sounds and words the two of them speak, are hers, through him. He surrenders.

Eventually she stops and falls to her knees next to him. They are both too exhausted to hold their heads up. They pant and wheeze like dogs after a six-mile run.

The ice has stopped its noises. The wind has ceased its hum. The aurora pulses more slowly overhead.

She touches his face, gets to her feet, and goes away from him, pulling the tent flap shut behind her.

He finds enough strength to stand and to shed the rest of his clothes. Naked, he does not feel the cold.

A lead has opened to within thirty feet of where they made their music, and now he walks toward this. His heart will not slow its pounding.

Six feet from the edge of the water he goes to both knees again and raises his face to the sky and closes his eyes.

He hears the thing rising from the water not five feet from him and hears the scraping of its claws on ice and the huff of its breath as it pulls itself out of the sea onto the ice and hears the ice groaning under its weight, but he does not lower his head nor open his eyes to look. Not yet.

Water from its coming out of the sea laps against his bare knees and threatens to freeze him to the ice he kneels on. He does not move.

He smells the wet fur, the wet flesh, the bottom-of-the- ocean stink of it, and senses its aurora shadow falling over him, but he does not open his eyes to look. Not yet.

Only when his skin prickles and goose bumps rise at the heavy-mass presence seeming to surround him and only when its meat-eater’s breath envelops him does he open his eyes.

Fur dripping like a priest’s wet and clinging white vestments. Burn scars raw amid the white. Teeth. Black eyes not three feet from his own and looking deep into him, predator’s eyes searching for his soul… searching to see if he has a soul. The massive triangular head bobs lower and blots out the throbbing sky.

Surrendering only to the human being he wants to be with and to the human being he wants to become — never to the Tuunbaq or to the universe that would extinguish the blue flame in his chest — he closes his eyes again, tilts back his head, opens his mouth, and extends his tongue exactly as Memo Moira taught him to do for Holy Communion.