Tales From Makpigat

Zachariah Gillam’s hands went numb so he wriggled them up underneath his sleeves and flapped his arms until hands and arms were inside the zone between sweatshirt and T-shirt.  His hands found his armpits for ten seconds and his arms journeyed back through two sets of wrist cuffs.  He rubbed his hands together and cupped them around his face and blew into them.  They were still numb and now his fingertips smelled like antiperspirant.  He was doomed to the cold.  “Fuck the Arctic,” he said.  “Fuck it so fucking much.  I can’t fucking stand how cold it is today, fuck.”

In reply, the wind dusted snow right down the back of his neck.   He shivered and flipped up his fake fox fur hood, pulling the drawstrings tight.  He let out one more loud scream: “Fuuuuuck!”

DC, who felt no ill effects from the weather, said.  “I know the wind is pretty strong today, but let’s remember we chose this location for its discretion.”

They could have better sheltered themselves with all the other students and teachers waiting for the situation in room B104 to resolve itself, or for a pickup game of hockey to break out, on the other side of the portable buildings, but when the fire alarm went off Zach put his thumb and index finger together at his mouth and inhaled in the International Sign Language for Let’s Smoke A Joint, and DC nodded in reply.  They met at their pre-determined joint-smoking spot, far enough away to be undetected under the prevailing smell of septic waste.

Zach patted his chest pockets, side pockets, and pantscoat pockets, but whatever he searched for eluded him.  “I knew I should’ve grabbed my fucking balaclava,” he said.  “I think my hands are fine, but the part of the brain that monitors limbic functioning that is frozen fucking solid.”

“I have extra gloves in my bag,” DC said.

“Whatever, I’m just gonna have to take them off again.”

“You’re the one that wanted to smoke outside when it was negative forty.  I said let’s go to the back of the co-op, but no.”  DC felt the wind move through his T-shirt, but unlike Zach, who was cold no matter how many layers Zach threw on in the morning, DC was comfortable in the elements.

“It’s not just that it’s cold, but that it’s fucking boring too,” Zach gestured vaguely around him to indicate his lack of excitement with the proceedings, even though only moments ago a polar bear had entered one of the science labs of the Makpigat Primary and Secondary School and caused quite the commotion.  “I mean, we’re practically a fucking doomsday cult up here.  I can deal with cold if I’m like, keeping busy or something, but here there’s no worry about food or shelter.  Sure there’s no TV but the CBC, no ‘Net except for the goddamn library…”

“No hockey but the Ottawa Senators,” spat DC, who remained loyal to the Leafs, his original home team.

“Don’t change the subject and start Sens-bashing,” Zach said.  “We quibble about the little things, but we have it made up here.  Anywhere else in the Arctic, things are different as fuck.  We’d learn to hunt and survive for real out there, not just have everything provided for us by the benevolent fucking taxpayers.  If I fucking somehow got lost out there, I’d just spend four days dying a slow fucking death.  I could probably dig a fucking hole in the snow to hide in until I died, but if I tried to make a proper fucking iglu it’d probably collapse on me.  Living in the real Arctic would be a million times harder, but at least it’d be more interesting than this, the coldest fucking gated community in the world.  I’m gonna get the Arctic Madness if I gotta stay here after I graduate.”

“You applied anywhere yet?”  DC asked.

“Fuck no, and here’s why: I don’t know where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing six months from now?  For our whole lives up to now, when have you never not known what’s going to happen?  It’s fucking destabilizing.  Which brings me to this point: Ever wonder how come there’s not one real Inuit in this fucking city?”

“Tag and Roch combined adds up to one whole Inuit,” DC said, “A unit of Inuit.”

“Anything goes wrong,” Zach ignored his friend as he struggled to turn his pockets inside-out with his clumsy, numb fingers, “They want cut us off, run us out of supplies, and from there we’ll all die out, because we don’t have the knowledge of the Inuit.  Until then they just make our lives this good because they feel guilty for knowing they’ll have to kill all of us to save their own asses one day.  But then I think, we have an airplane and anyone can leave at any time, so that’s not really a possibility, unless, of course the Fleurrys are in on the scam.  It’s thoughts like those that make me think I might get the fucking Arctic Madness, and it’s why I haven’t done my application yet.  What if by expressing a desire to leave this place, it sets off some alarm, and before I know it I’m going in for a reprogramming?  And if I apply, and put my hopes on leaving, and don’t get in, does that turn this town, this boring yet accommodating village, into my de-facto prison?  Am I trapped here either way?”

Zach didn’t give DC a chance to answer, because he finally patted the left shoulder pocket of his coat and finally found what he was looking for.

“Fuck yeah!”  He produced a bright green plastic tube that once held miniature candy-coated chocolates but, being waterproof and nearly indestructible, was the perfect size for the safe transport of seven or eight joints.  Before the tube, he just used his cigarette packs until he crushed every last one of them when he bailed and rolled end-over-end for fifty metres on a snowboarding trip that resulted in a very sober afternoon.

DC flicked his Bic under the twist of paper at the end of the joint and Zach hauled.  It didn’t canoe, because Zach rolled perfect joints every time.  Zach ashed the tip and the grey clump blew right into DC and left a grey smudge right in the middle of his white cotton V-neck.  Granted, DC was the only person in Makpigat in danger of getting an ash stain on his T-shirt when smoking outside in the middle of Arctic winter.  In a medical mystery, he did not get hypothermia, and he did not get frostbite.  It’s a startling sight to see a lanky teenager walking around dressed like that where most people wear gloves under mittens and double up on coats.  Make the image on the shirt a chainsaw impaling a skull full of maggots and add a couple of spiked accessories, and the sight becomes doubly scary, like Death has come to give you a lift to Purgatory in his restored Trans-Am while it blasts classic Slayer.  Perhaps it is unexpected, then, that DC is the one of the quietest teenagers in Makpigat, and definitely the most agreeable of his bandmates, most likely due to these magical powers.

His rare condition was discovered in the winter of the third grade, when he decided to take a swim in the duck pond near his house in the suburbs of Toronto, discouraged for water purity reasons alone, even more dangerous when the surface of the water is frozen because it is January.  He walked out onto the ice and stomped and jumped on the thinnest part until he fell through.  He treaded water for a few minutes, did some somersaults, and hung out in the hole with elbows up on the edge like a hot tub, until a pair of joggers made a human chain across the pond and put a stop to his fun.  DC knocked their hands away a few times and kept yelling Stop as they dragged him out, but they mistook his hostility for the frenzied tremors of hypothermic shock.  The ambulance was called for DC but used by his rescuers; they had a pair of heart attacks each when he cannonballed right back in and, with his middle fingers, invited the joggers to double fuck themselves.

Freezing cold temperatures were of no concern for his stubborn body.  It refused to let the cold in.  Nobody at the Children’s Hospital could explain why DC didn’t die, and the child psychologist concluded his swim was not a result of wanting to die, so he was released under the condition that he return if they come up with another testable theory on what was wrong with him.  It took about a week for the local news channel to do a story on him, and suddenly DC was known at school as The Never Cold Kid, a moniker invented by a SunMedia reporter that stuck despite being stupid.  His parents probably made money every time the newspaper used it.

By age eleven he was giving inspirational speeches at other area public schools, mostly about the importance of believing in your goals.  Afterwards he sat off to the side in a bucket of ice during the other performances.  There was a pretty good yo-yo act, and a skit about how to tell a trustworthy adult about being molested.  At the end of the show he would answer questions from the audience like, “How are you not dead?” and he smiled and told them to dream big.  The girl in the sketch was totally dating the dude that played her uncle and it always ended the shows on a really weird note, and DC rarely played the same school twice.  He spent two years doing that, another two being studied in the Hypothermia Lab at the University of Manitoba, and then moved to Makpigat when he was fifteen, emancipating himself from his parents who stole his school tour money and sold his story to the checkout-line magazines, where his name occasionally appeared on the covers, next to the pictures of dying celebrities or the babies of celebrities.

There was even a movie made about him for Canadian television around the turn of the century, the last dime his folks ever made off him, but liberties were taken with the story and much of the third act was devoted to his character joining up with a group of extreme snowboarding paramedics on an avalanche rescue mission in Whistler.  The ratings were dismal; it was pulled from the airwaves before the last half-hour could air and replaced with a rerun of The New Red Green Show.  For the record, his character pulled all the buried skiers to safety, and they a song by Gob played over the credits.

DC does not like to talk about his condition or the movie of the week.  As far as he knows, there is only one other person in the world who can do the things he does; but that man is Dutch and DC has never tried contacting him because he does not speak Dutch.  He is much happier living on his own in Makpigat, where they run tests on him less frequently and less invasively than at the U of M.

DC and Zach were nearly done by the time Tag and Guy found their hiding spot.  “I don’t think we’re gonna get back in the school for third period,” Tag told them as Guy took a long puff to make up for the amount he missed.  “She’s asleep on the floor.”

“See?”  Zach said.  “Even the predators are bored as fuck in this town.”

Male polar bears were considered the more aggressive, but a male polar bear would never be able to fit through the school windows all the way because they are fat, clumsy oafs.  UMFs, or Ursa Major Females, will rampage if they feel that their family is in danger, and were more dangerous than the males in the way that a Soviet Defence Missile with Computer Guidance System is more frightening than a water gun filled with grape juice.  Whatever had motivated her rage must have subsided, because now it looked rather bored, sitting in the middle of the floor staring at the shredded projector screen as if waiting for the start of the filmstrip on mitosis.

As he considered getting a jumpstart on filling out another E-DM-12(b) form (an Official Recognition of Fire Alarm Discharge for Non-Fire Related Purposes), Tom Orville pulled up on his snowmobile. “It’s not the zebra bear, is it?”

“Of course not, Tom, there’s no such thing.”  The legend of the zebra bear is a popular tale around Makpigat but Mehran depended on things like empirical evidence and statistical significance.  Even though three people have sworn up and down to seeing it, and many more believe in the phenomenon, he has always said that he will believe it when its fur is turned into a rug for the lobby of the hotel and bar.  For starters, it was anatomically impossible for a polar bear to have intimate relations with a zebra to create a hybrid offspring.  Of course, a blonde bear that split the difference between polar and brown species was just caught in the Western Arctic, but the idea of a black and white striped bear was absurd, and from an evolutionary standpoint was simply not going to camouflage with its surroundings well enough to thrive.  Sometimes Mehran felt frustrated that his scepticism wasn’t shared, or that a permanently-tippled Quebecois pilot held more swing in town than an academic and educator.

“The important thing is that nobody got eaten,” said Tom, steering the conversation away from matters of faith.  “I just thought we had better windows than that.  Have that E-DM-12(b) on my desk in the morning, please.  Have you seen Zachariah Gillam around?”

“You know Zach,” said Mehran, who kept one eye on the bear as she got to her feet and sniffed at the islands of sinks and natural gas spouts.  “He’s not sticking around.  I’d be surprised if he was in class this morning.  Speaking of which, where’s Guy?  I asked him for CDs like three weeks ago.  He says the song’s pixels are messed up.”

“If I’d known that an hour ago, I could have asked Gordon if that was a real thing,” said Tom.  They were both watching as the bear took care of an itch by slowly mounting the island and positioning herself overtop an upside-down J-shaped spout.  After a few seconds, it became clear she no longer had an itch, but was going to continue her course of action anyway.  Tom looked over at Mehran just as the bear started to grunt in regular intervals.  There had been a silence long enough for Tom to know that he wasn’t the only one who had been entranced by the sight of a polar bear self-pleasuring on a sink faucet.

Mehran shrugged.  “No big deal.  Tried the coffee shop yet?  The whole band’s probably there.  Remind him to hand in his application portfolio.”  Guy and Zach and DC had been stalling and avoiding him for days now.  Only Tag had handed his in, and Mehran has left it sitting on his desk for the last week.  His only responsibility as Acting Principal was deciding whether or not he would mail it off to the universities.

He earned his Masters of Education by mail in 1990, just in time to teach the first batch of Makpigat babies from the Great Snowstorm 1985.  Since Makpigat is much closer to being a part of Ottawa than a part of Nunavut, he taught from the curriculum of the Ottawa-Carleton Board of Education, which in turn answered to the province of Ontario.  Funding had been cut with abandon by provincial Conservatives for the last decade, and for a handful of years the minister of Education himself was a high school dropout.  Ever since that very public embarrassment tried to slip through, the PCs have staged attacks against the institution of education like the coldest of revenges; a personal vendetta settled like the nerd beating up the jock at the end of a Jack Lelane comic book ad, only both nerd and jock don’t have any extracurricular activities because their teachers are on a work-to-rule strike.

Perhaps a grade nine English teacher failed to recognize the genius of the future Minister of Education writing in defiance of the sandwich method of essay structure, which sent him dropping out of school, but society as well, living in exile in the abandoned subway tunnels underneath Toronto for decades, never wavering from his quest to take hold of the pursestrings of the system that had wronged him so, and tighten them until teachers were buying their own paper for the copy machine they already paid for by the page.

The position of Principal was cut, and now the school made do with only a VP.  He still threatened to send kids to the principal’s office, which had been re-appropriated as a dusty junk closet, full of chairs with three legs and desks covered in stains that did not come out under the most caustic of custodian’s formulas.  Even the fluorescent light tubes had long been taken out of their grated ceiling fixtures for use in other classrooms.  It was an even better behaviour modifier than an occupied room.  He held out hope for a more desirable funding per student ratio next year, since half the school’s population was in grade twelve and would graduate in three months.  That is, if they complete the year, which for Zachariah Gillam and Guy Fleurry was still not guaranteed based on their marks for the year so far and the staggeringly large weight of the June exam season on final grades.

There were more things to do today before tackling the ethical conundrum of passing students he couldn’t afford to keep in school.  The Hunter brothers would soon be there with the tranquilizer guns and Mehran decided a long time ago that the presence of the Hunters was inappropriate for anyone under the age of fourteen.  He told the kids they could either go home for the day, but whoever wanted to stick around for the end of the pickup hockey game was welcome.  That meant the senior elementary-aged boys with overactive hypothalamuses, which resulted in hormonal imbalances, which resulted in erratic emotional states and energy surpluses, stuck around to play a damn exciting game of hockey inevitably full of bodychecks and lots of slashing, better than the Sens.  Mehran ducked into the auditorinasium, after double checking the bear was still humping the sink in the science lab, to grab his whistle and oversized referee singlet.

Tag flicked his cigarette into the snow and buried it with the heel of his boot, mushing it in with all the other soggy butts he’d smoked since November.  “Did you hear that?  Bear in school means we get a half-day.”  When the wind is dead, sound travels clear all the way from one side of the schoolyard to the other.  The school was the east-north-easternmost point in town and surrounded by tundra on three out of four sides, which meant word travels only a sliver faster at Makpigat Public than over the schoolyards of the southern parts of the country.

“Practise at my place for bit, I assume,” said DC, without bothering with the inflection to make it a question.

Zach shrugged a positive reply, and Guy asked if they could stop for coffee first.  He was fading fast, from having all those naps throughout the morning.  If they expected him to pound on the drums for a couple hours, he was going to need a couple of caffeine boosts to counter the second-hand high he was getting off Zach.

Tag didn’t even hear the question, but he wanted coffee even when he was thinking about what else he heard from Mehran across the schoolyard, how none of his friends have done their applications to university.  It was the Double Cohort in Ontario, an influx of three hundred thousand extra high-school graduates into the adult world, which translated into fewer chances and more applicants to some of the best programs.  To cover his bases, Tag applied to a wide range of schools for a wide range of majors, each the most lauded programs of the school.  He had three chances to go to Toronto with applications for Film and Video Production at York, Engineering at U of T, and, at Ryerson University, an Undeclared Arts major.  He applied to Pre-Med at McGill, Economics at Queens, and Environmental Science at Lakehead; Visual Art at UBC and Software Engineering at Waterloo.  He figured one of them would have to accept him, just like DC could for sure get in somewhere, and probably Guy too, and maybe Zach.

The other three also got lost in thought on their way to the coffee shop, but only Guy wasn’t thinking about how awesome it would be if they could smoke bowls in the middle of school, like right in the middle of a class.  In just seven days, Guy had finished reading the whole book he picked up at the Simon Attiak speech in Iqaluit.  He couldn’t wait to share his thoughts with Iyaroak, who had already sent him two e-mails that he still didn’t know about and wouldn’t get to read until later that night.

He self-consciously rubbed his own hair through his toque, felt it shift under the wool and matte down, forming new peaks and cowlicks.  Like snowflakes, every case of hat-head was unique.  Iyaroak had the same kind of hair as Penny: long, straight, black, strong hair.  Penny Chang was clearly of Asian descent (half-Chinese half-Korean for those keeping score) but basically white by experience, like a dubbed anime cartoon or Tandoori-flavoured potato chips.  She had hair like a Sailor Moon schoolgirl and sometimes talked dirty to him in Cantonese, which he liked because he didn’t understand.  There’s not exactly a lot of selection in Makpigat, and Guy always thought his parents would rather him date another French-Canadian girl, but the only other one in town was thirteen, and that would be way weird.  Guy wanted to feel connected to a genuine culture and way of life through Iyaroak, something he missed from Penny.

If Simon is like an Inuit chief, Guy thought, that meant she was like an Inuit Princess, or at least an Inuit of Notable Origins.  He crafted the whole story in his head based on what he knew about the Inuit already: how she’d been wandering the land for her entire life, searching for someone like him to take her away from there and protect her and care for her forever.  In his visage, she would remember her first crush, the Christian missionary who taught her English, or maybe it was a liaison from the Hudson’s Bay Company.  Maybe her father escaped from one of those schools that the white people forced them into, and if not him, it must have happened to somebody in her family a few generations back, and that’s probably why Simon was so pissed off with the government.  It had been a couple of years now since Guy had a proper Canadian history class, and his parents talk about Quebec like it’s the greatest place in the world, but Guy liked Makpigat better than tales of growing up in houses that had less rooms than children, and going to church every other day.

They all were surprised that they made it to the coffee shop, since on the way there they all forgot where they were going.  Guy hoped the new guy who just flew in with his dad would fix every networking problem on his first day, but by the time he wished that it was already noon, and the new guy was already three drinks into his welcoming party.

The Makpigat Public School was the only place in town with an Internet connection, for reasons nobody quite understood and few bothered to question until Gordon arrived.  The story begins in 1986, when Neil the Tech Guy dreamt up a plan to launch a satellite from Makpigat.

The entire set of schematics, from the wiring to the scaffolding, came to Neil in a dream, or so he told Tom.  Neil built the satellite to look for extraterrestrial life, because that’s what the aliens told him to do in the dream.  His satellite would be an important first step towards their eventual arrival on Earth in the year 2428.  Nobody thought it was all that weird, because Tom hid that particular piece of news from the general population, offering them an entertainment package greater than the eventual confirmation of life on other planets.

Mayor Tom promised MTV and HBO to his new electorate at a time when regular democratic elections were still expected, and the voting public could be expected to hold against him.  Like all Canadians, they salivated at the thought of American-made music videos and soft-core pornography, never once predicting that the distinctions that separated the two would erode until disappearing altogether a little over a decade later.  Tom thought it would be difficult to sway Neil into adding a television satellite broadcast dish to his immaculately conceived blueprints, but he didn’t need any convincing.  “It’s be nice to get PBS,” he suggested, “and HBO.”  Television didn’t interfere with Neil’s ultimate goal of interstellar communication; only the federal government could do a thing like that.

When the shadowy powers-that-be in Ottawa received the order Neil placed for the massive amounts of jet fuel the entire project was put on hold pending an official review, which was typically the death blow for any government funding proposal.  After all, American cable channels are known to have a corrosive effect on Canadian cultural heritage, which is why we superimpose the logos of Canadian networks over theirs in the bottom right hand corner of the screen when we watch all their shows.  Instead of all the TV they could snatch out of the sky, the town would now only be allowed to get the CBC.  Even fans of Radio-Canada were out of luck.

The town’s only real choice in the matter was which local CBC station the satellite feed would beam down.  The only real differences were the six o’clock news and the hockey games chosen for broadcast during Hockey Night In Canada.  Everyone requested their hometown channel, and none of those were taken into consideration when Makpigat was set to receive the Ottawa feed.  Since nobody in town was from the Ottawa area, nobody really objected to it.  It was hard to pretend to be especially upset.  The fans of the Maple Leafs were the least dissatisfied, at least until the 1992 hockey season started and Makpigat became the northernmost troop in the Sens army.

Neil finally launched his satellite the next year, but it was monitoring the Soviet presence in space, feeding CBC Ottawa to the receiver on top of the Federal Building, and searching the skies as a distant third.

Surprisingly enough, they were fine with the business about aliens, but they also demanded their own modifications.  It was still the tail end of the Cold War, at the peak of the worldwide craze of launching mysterious satellites into space.  Canada wanted to get a leg-up on the competition, and the best way to do that was to count all the mysterious satellites floating above the country.

Complications arose when Neil calculated that the satellite was lagging behind, geo-synchronously.  His calculations also explained why the TV signal went dead during the last few minutes of Coronation Street every Thursday evening, explaining why the middle-aged women of British heritage were always irrationally angry at him every Friday morning.  As soon as the telescope arrived by boat the following summer, Neil confirmed what his maps and research could not have planned: his satellite had collided with another satellite, mysteriously very close to Makpigat above Canada’s Arctic, and fallen out of proper orbit.  If only there had been a satellite up there already, the shadowy board agreed, then Neil would have known about the mystery satellite.

Nobody at either the Pentagon or the Kremlin confessed to owning the rogue bit of space junk above Makpigat, but both were angry with Canada when word got out that they were planning on shoot it out of the sky.  The United States military, instead of fessing up or denying ownership, got mad at Canada instead for launching a clandestine surveillance satellite, and traded three previously-owned fighter jets for the privilege of blowing Neil’s satellite out of the sky as well.  Oddly enough, the Americans never thought twice about how the Canadians launched a satellite in the first place.  They probably assumed that, being so close to the top of the world, the Canadian Space Program just underhand tossed them into orbit.

But when the town gathered together on New Years Eve of 1990 to watch the Hunter brothers nearly blow their damn heads off with homemade fireworks of empty soup cans stuffed with gunpowder, America was preparing to blast their television privileges out of the sky.  Tom didn’t know how to break the news, so he once again told them nothing, and was still working on the feigned look of surprise he would wear around the morning.

But nothing happened to the television connection in Makpigat.  The missile must have missed the target.  America never sent another expensive missile, so everyone involved in the whole thing must have got what they wanted (or at least assumed they did).

That is until the school started complaining that a handful of their hodgepodge of televisions, obsolete bug-eye screened models with dusty-wood coloured panels and knobs on the front for things like Vertical Hold, occasionally picked up signals from a strange Russian television station, most of it pornographic in nature., and none of it as classy as the kind HBO would have shown.  How the school’s televisions were acquired in the first place is a whole other story, much less exciting but no shorter than this one.  Needless to say that Russian-produced pornography is not suitable for developing Canadian minds.  Neil concluded that the satellite must have hit a Russian communications satellite while it was up there, and now the transmissions from both are all garbled.

His theory would only be totally confirmed in late 2001, long after the aged televisions were retired to the back corner of the A/V room, when the first wireless card arrived pre-installed in Guy Fleurry’s new laptop computer.  Upon turning the machine on, he instantly got a computer virus that changed all of his settings to Russian pornography.  His home page became Russian Pornography, his files became Russian pornography, he even played Solitare with Russian pornography.  After this lost its novelty, later than a reasonable person would expect, Guy installed an anti-virus program that effectively gave him the power to choose when and where he viewed Russian pornography.

And the rest, as they say, is history.  Guy began to reap the benefits of a bandwidth monopoly.  The only problem is what Guy calls The Bubble, how his connection dies as soon as he takes twenty paces outside the school.  Sometimes the connection disappears even as he sat in the library, likely caused by meteorites or some other fast-moving space junk.  But all that would change in early 2003, as Gordon assembled the tools he needed to connect the entire town to the Internet and everyone else in town gathered around their televisions to watch the Senators win the President’s Trophy for having the best overall record in the NHL for the season, despite having filed for bankruptcy at the beginning of the year.

“Euech!”

Gordon woke up to the sound of his newly acquired dog barfing a foamy orangish puddle on the floor and his new boss leaning on the horn of a snowmobile in his driveway.  He rolled over in bed and reached for the clock on the nightstand and knocked over the ashtray instead.   The roach of last night’s joint flying across the bedroom into the puddle of puppy puke and it rained ash over Gordon’s arm when he checked the time, which was later than he expected for it to be as dark as it was outside.  Nukiluk barked some more as Gordon got up and mopped up both messes with some toilet paper from the bathroom.

He opened the front door and let his puppy out into the snow room to do her business outside.  She took a leak on the floor before Gordon got one boot on to undo the latch to the outside door, so he decided to let the steaming yellow snow freeze up.  He could chip it out later, if he ever found the ice pick.  Stepping briskly over the cold floor in bare feet, he held a hand up to Mayor Tom in the international symbol for five minutes.

Mayor Tom took off his helmet.  “Dress warmly!  The tour bus is here!”  He waved his arms to indicate that he was the tour bus, and there was no enclosed, heated, actual tour bus.  Gordon waved back and turned to get dressed for the outdoors, nearly tripping over his puppy.  He took a quick shower in water that fluctuated from lukewarm to cold and added soap to his list after searching every bathroom cabinet.  He found dog food under the sink next to the industrial jug of dishwashing liquid, but no dog bowl.  Nukiluk ate his breakfast out of a frying pan as Gordon prepared for the elements: coat, gloves, toque, scarf, boots, and snowmobile helmet, all conveniently laid out in the front hall closet.

Although he had never driven a snowmobile before in his life, he found it pretty much intuitive.  Twisting the handle like a motorcycle controlled speed, braking was just like riding a bicycle.  He blocked out memories of every bike wipeout on Winnipeg’s Monkey Trails, but he still resisted gunning it fullspeed.  He let Tom keep the pace, since the Mayor knew better than him where they were going first.  They zipped right by the large Federal Building and hung a left towards the shoreline.

“Plenty of time to check out the downtown core later,” Tom yelled to Gordon, who couldn’t hear a word he said over two snowmobile engines.  “Or as we call it around here, the downtown core-ner!  First stop, the docks.”

They killed the engines at a place that looked as flat and ice-covered as the rest of the town, but Tom insisted they were at the docks.  “In a few months, when our channel unfreezes and we get open water again, you can actually see them.  There’s not a view more beautiful in the world, let me tell you.  The inky depths of the Arctic Ocean are beautiful and dangerous, full of hidden icebergs, Russian submarines and sea monsters.  Think Jacques Cartier, and George Simpson, those brave men from centuries ago freezing to death trying to find a passageway out of here.  Somewhere on these very waters, Henry Hudson was eaten alive by his own son.”

“I’m not sure that’s what happened to Henry Hudson,” Gordon said.

“Neither am I,” Tom said with a wink.  “Whoops,  I think we’re too far out.”

He stomped on the ground three times, squinted back in the direction of the town and yelped a weird guttural noise that Gordon thought sounded a lot like when his dog threw up hours before.   “Yep, that echo’s a bit slow.  This isn’t the docks, this is just solid ice under our feet.  The docks are about a hundred meters behind us, maybe more west of the boathouse.  We’re standing above open water.  I suppose you’ll get a better look at this place in the summertime.”

“What’s in there?”  Gordon pointed at the giant concrete building behind the boathouse.  The Federal Building was the tallest, but this was definitely the widest building in town by a long shot.  It had very few windows and a lot of industrial garage doors.  Gordon hadn’t seen it from the air because it had a white roof, slightly domed, and must have looked like a hill of snow.

“Oh, that’s the warehouse.  That’s where we store all the spare parts.  We’ve got to cover every contingency, after all.  We can’t go calling in the army every time it snows, so to speak.”

“It’s bigger than a Home Depot and a Wal-Mart put together,” Gordon said.  That was an understatement, it was bigger than even the parking lots of both stores.  Gordon wondered what mysterious and Machiavellian schemes were being accommodated by the ominous structure.

Tom asked Gordon if he wanted a tour of the warehouse while they were there and he passed on the opportunity for fear of looking too interested.  “I’m familiar with what seventy aisles of shelving looks like,” he said.

“Your loss,” Tom said, instantly confirming Gordon’s suspicions of grandiose ruses being carried out within the warehouse, its gargantuan storage capacity, impossibly large to accommodate merely innocent plans.  “I think it’s rather impressive in there, but it’s your tour.  Moving on!”

Tom slammed his helmet visor back down and the two of them hightailed it over to the sewage processing plant, this time driving a little more aggressively down the still-empty streets-slash-trails.  Gordon wasn’t sure he’d be able to fully appreciate this leg of the tour after the excitement and picaresque qualities of the dockyard and warehouse, and because the sewage plant smelled like an outhouse in August despite the freezing temperature.

“This is the main sewage facility,” Tom explained long after Gordon had figured it out.  “Totally eco-friendly waste processing, all new methods, patents still all pending, believe it or not.  Most everything’s septic up here, it would have been hard to properly dig that deep, permafrost and what have you.  Every once in a while, though, something gives.  That’s why the whole town smells like shit today.”

Tom was glib about the stench, but Gordon choked on a gag reflex.  It smelled like the result of a hangover shit crawling out of the john and going out on a night-long drinking bender, then taking another more concentrated shit the following morning.  “I didn’t notice,” he said to be polite.  He wondered if it was scientifically possible to get used to that smell.

They drove to the greenhouse next.  “Now, I know what you’re thinking: there’s no windows.  First of its kind.  We can grow anything indigenous to the continent above the Tropic of Cancer.  Not really sure how it works, other than the basic principles of hydroponics, but that’s why we keep scientists around.  We just heard of another one, a little better and a little bigger, that opened in Siberia last year.  This one’s still state of the art; somebody just went and changed what constituted the art.”

He thought about asking Tom if there was weed growing in there, and if there was, if there was also a subscription service that delivered it pre-rolled to his mailbox like the DVD service, and he had just been put on the week-long free trial list.  He held his questions, even when they were finally in the parking lot of the Federal Building and Tom asked if he had any.

“Well come on, everyone’s waiting.  It’s not like new people show up every day around here.”

His tour through the Makpigat Federal Building was an onslaught of names and faces, people who worked in construction and labour and at the grocery co-op and at the sporting goods store and the guy who changes the streetlamp bulbs and any other light source over eight feet off the ground.  Gorodn learned that the cold makes streetlights go out rather often, and this is his only job until late May when the streetlights become unnecessary for a handful of weeks: all of that Gordon remembered, but not the guy’s name.  Kevin or Charlie or something boring like that.  There was also Glasses, Blondie, Mullet, Nice Legs, Left-Handed Mug Guy, White Guy With Dreads, Tallest Guy In Town, Chinese Guy With A Chinese Name, Eight-and-a-half-Fingers, Deaf Guy, Chinese Guy With A Normal Name, Oleg (no way was Gordon going to forget Oleg’s name), and dozens of others.  He was actually quite glad that Ronald Fleurry was memorable to warrant his name sticking in his head like chewing gum in sneaker tread, so he could always sidle up to him next time they met and ask him the names of the people with no defining characteristics whatsoever, the government men in white dress shirts and women in neutral coloured blouses, the engineers in short-sleeved dress shirts with novelty cartoon character ties that were all to familiar to him from back home.  Everyone was friendly and waved or shook his hand.  Gordon wondered when they were going to ask his robe size and offer him some Kool-Aid.

Tom took him on a tour through each level of the building.  Gordon was expecting a cross between a doomsday bunker and a mad scientist’s labratory, but the Federal Building was as boring as any old office from anywhere else in the country.  There were pictures of family members on the desks and inoffensive modern art on the walls.  The lobby was the nicest part of the place, with maroon leather couches and a security guy with a handlebar moustache, who from then on was called Handlebars.  The sniffling sounds of the one guy with a cold, the muted pat each footstep made on the industry-standard splatter-pattern carpet, even the plastic plants scattered in various coners reminded him that everything was the same, only colder.  People were doing their jobs like it was lame old Winnipeg outside instead of kilometres of barren, lifeless ice, although the two environments were strikingly similar.

The building was divided by branches of government: Federal on the first floor, Provincial matters like education, health care and snowmobile emission standards were on the second, and the third floor was supposedly Municipal affairs, but nobody appeared to be doing anything up there.  Tom’s office, the farthest door down the third floor hallway, had an elderly secretary who Gordon practically  predicted would be named Gladys before she introduced herself as such.  She had a dish of hard candies on her desk, and Gordon helped himself to one.  He crunched down on it and spent the rest of the day wrestling pieces of Humbug out of his molars with his tongue.

Tom only had one piece of advice that Gordon felt was essential to his future well-being.  Before entering the first floor typing pool room which doubled as a Canada Post office, he held Gordon by the shoulders, locked eyes, and said, “Do not.  Fuck.  With the typing pool.  If this building represents the brain of the town, the old ladies in that room is its eyes, ears, and mouth.  They control the paperwork, so they control your happiness.  All you have to do is remember their names and birthdays.  They like white wine, chocolate, and coffee.  If you don’t follow this advice, God help you: maybe every shirt you order in from then on is a size too small.  They are the only things I fear, and I mean that in an Old Testament, respectful way.  Now go say hello.”

He went inside, smiled and shook hands with each of them as they introduced themselves.  Gordon repeated their names over and over in his head until he was sure he would never, ever forget them: clockwise from the door, they were Marion, Elizabeth, Edie, and , the flight there, how it beat flying Air Canada.  They all smiled.  He asked politely whether or not his house came with a coffee grinder, because he found a bag of whole coffee beans but no grinder.  They said that the whole beans had been a shipping error, and they handed him an official form for the requisition of an electric appliance, subsection Kitchen, subsection medium-sized.  He thanked them all profusely for their help, and backed out of the room with palms soaking the corners of his requisition form.

Tom gave him a pat on the back when they left.  “Good job in there.  You’re safe from any clerical errors for a few months, at least.”

The last stop on the tour was the basement, where Tom said they kept all the computers.  “All the big noisy ones are down here, at least.  I can only assume that’s where you’ll want to start.  Do you think it’ll take long t oconvert this whole town to wireless?  I know many of us are quite excited at the prospect.”

“I really can’t say,” Gordon said. He still had no real idea what he was supposed to do, but he was getting the sneaking suspicion that nobody else knew what he was supposed to do either.  Tom was probably of the same mold as the people Gordon got stuck behind in check-out lines who could barely use their own debit cards, who would swipe it through the wrong way eight times and blank on their PIN number.  He bet the only other person with working knowledge of the town’s communications infrastructure was an acne-ridden thirteen year old with posters of Starship Troopers and Metal Gear Solid on the walls of his poorly-lit bedroom, stale with the smell of dank puberty and the door closed at all times.  His guess was only off by four years.  “I’ve gotta look at both the existing network and all the hardware before I can figure it out.  Best case, you’re gonna need to throw the signal pretty wide to cover the whole town, but you’re also going to need some serious encryption on everything outgoing.  How do you guys e-mail right now, anyway?”

“I’m sorry to say I leave most of that stuff to the younger residents.  Heck, the high school has more computer whizzes than this building does.  I have been living in the Arctic for two decades, which makes it hard to keep up with technology.  Is the rest of the country still using CD-ROMs?  I know that’s how movies come nowadays.”

“Not really.  Everything intangible is basically free on the Internet now.”

“That’s what Guy said too,” Tom said.  “I’m afraid we haven’t been keeping as cutting-edge up here as the borderlands have, but that’s why you’re here.  Anyway, there’s all the boring work stuff to go over, security protocols, probably some more forms the typing pool needs you to fill out, but I’ll just introduce you to our other computer whiz.  You two’ll—”

Tom was interrupted by a beep from the walkie-talkie he carried around clipped to his belt.  “Tom, we got a situation at the school.  UMF, B wing.  You better get down here quick.”

Tom went pale.  Gordon asked if it was bad.  “No, everything’s fine,” Tom said as he ran towards the elevator doors again.  “Just a polar bear.”  He pushed the elevator call button about a dozen times.  “Find Emma, she’s in Room C.  She’s good at all that computer nonsense.  Good luck, have a great first day, dress warmly and if you take the last of the coffee please make another pot.  Bye!”

The elevator doors closed and Gordon was left standing in the hallway, still holding onto his snowmobile helmet in his left hand because nobody gave him a place to put it the whole damn time.  He knocked on the door of Room C and heard a grunt form the other side, but it was a friendly and feminine grunt.

The room was lit exclusively by blinking green lights and computer screens, with mazes of wires.  Gordon’s heart sunk a bit, and he knew it would be a lot of work before he got this place into the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first.

“You must be the Gordon, wizard of the Internet.”  Emma introduced herself and adjusted her Janeane Garofalo glasses, which Gordon knew from experience to never call Janeane Garofalo glasses.  It had been four years since anyone had mentioned that actress in a favourable context.  Gordon peeked at her monitor and saw she had been playing a game of Minesweeper before he showed up.

“I’m a Consulting Retired V.P., Tech Division,” she said.  “What title did they let you give yourself?”

It was extremely hot in that little room, just shy of stifling.  He started to shed his outer shell until he was down to his semi-tucked-in short-sleeved work shirt.

“I’m the senior executive networking specialist,” he said.

“Sounds like I outrank you,” she said.  “So better get to work.”

The idea of working was like going to Disneyworld and being told you had to spend the entire time at EPCOT.  But a career with the federal government taught him that not only was life unfair, but he was to shut up and take the cruelties of his circumstances with an exasperated sigh and an excuse to pass the buck always at the ready.  He was about to start wandering around the servers when Emma blocked him with an arm.

“You know I’m kidding, right?”  There’s not much to do around here, that is, until you really figure out the situation.  I’m a glorified maintenance guy, I’m afraid.  Neil, he was the first tech guy before you, he networked every computer in the building.  I just field calls to help somebody who accidentally went into Safe Mode or figure out why Freecell stopped working.”

“So where’s Neil?”

“Dead,” Emma said.  “That’s why you’re here.”

Dealing with bad news, even this belatedly, always resulted in an awkward moment where Gordon failed to think of an appropriate reply.  People who are used to delivering that sort of news recognize how insincere it sounded to say sorry, and though Gordon was sympathetic towards the untimely (was it?) and tragic (was it?) death of a complete stranger, an apology would only be for his own misfortune of broaching the topic, akin to strolling onto an unmarked mine field.  If anything, Gordon was the one who deserved an apology for being blindsided by such bad news.  How dare the dead man for piling all that guilt on an innocent question.  Saying “there there” was worse than saying he was sorry, and he certainly couldn’t just give here a hug for sympathy’s sake, so Gordon simply said, “Shit.”

“It happens,” Emma already had one arm down her parka.  “You coming or what?”

“What?”  Gordon was still stuck on the news of his predecessor’s demise.  It had to have been this very building, there wasn’t another building around tall enough for a fatal self-immolation.  He wondered if it would be morbid to ask which side of the building he jumped from.  He just wanted to know which side of the building should give him the heebie-jeebies.

“We’re going to the bar,” Emma said.  “Practically the whole town’ll be there tonight to get a peek at the new guy.  More names to forget.  First round’s on me.”

“Shouldn’t I start working today?”

“It’s not like they’re gonna fire you for slacking off.  Consider it orientation week, like college.  I think you should start with meeting real people first and get acquainted with your computer screen at a later date.”

“You’re the boss,” Gordon proceeded to layer up for outside again.  “Can I just check my e-mail and stuff first, real quick?”

“Ooh, so nobody’s told you?”

No matter what time he set his alarm for, Guy Fleurry woke up ten minutes before it went off.  This particular morning his alarm was set for six, so the clock showed five-fifty when he flicked the switch to off.  He disliked the EE-EE-EE-EE sound so much that his subconscious worked to stop him from hearing it even when it meant jumping out of bed at ten to six.  He crept past his parent’s bedroom on the way to the bathroom.  His dad spent all of yesterday in the air and would be zonked out until the early afternoon, but his mom woke up at the sound of a cotton ball rubbed against a swatch of felt from forty paces.  Guy was well-versed in the art of sneaking around.

After quick brushings of teeth and frizzy hair, Guy got dressed for the trip to school.  He threw a black toque over his frizzy hair and rummaged through a pile of black band T-shirts until he found the band he felt like wearing that day.  He put on his pre-distressed black denim jacket with the flannel inner lining over the Anthrax T with Judge Dredd on it, and zipped his black puffy parka up to the neck.  Then he put on a pair of black bum gloves, the kind made out of stretchy fabric that come five for a dollar at the co-op, over the pair of bum gloves with the fingers cut off that he always wore.  Another pair of padded gloves went over those.

He grabbed the keys to his dad’s snowmobile instead of his mom’s; the MXZ-700cc ran smoother and quieter than the boat of a Ski-Doo his mom owned.  He wore a full-head helmet, a precaution he took since the time he hit a weird bump out by the dockyards last year and nearly flipped over.  He looked behind him at his house one last time to make sure his parent’s bedroom light was still off.  His silent getaway had been successful, so he leaned over the handlebars and flew out the driveway, leaving a thick puff of diesel exhaust hanging in the chilly air like laundry drying on the line.

He needed the headlights to navigate the empty road at predawn.  The regular working day people wouldn’t start for another hour or two, but Guy’s job, like most part-time jobs for high school students, had terrible hours.  This was frustrating, but a lot of things frustrated Guy.  Most of this frustration was legitimate, since an Arctic life was full of hardships not normally expected by a seventeen-year old Anglophone French-Canadian, even in a place as all-accommodating at Makpigat.  He was quite frustrated, for example, at the new guy being brought in to make his job obsolete.  He wanted to be able to play more shows with his band like any other aspiring heavy metal drummer, but going on tour was expressly prohibited.  It had been a bad year for young Guy Fleurry, ever since the break-up, and he figured it was only going to get worse.

Guy was born on the day before Hallowe’en in the autumn of 1985, part of the town’s first baby boom caused by the town’s first really bad snowstorm that occurred the previous winter.  There were twelve people currently in his grade twelve class, and ten of them celebrated their birthdays between the second week of September and the beginning of November.  His friends Zach and DC were born down in the provinces and only moved in the 1993 expansion, but Tag was born three days after Guy on the same bed in Doctor Chang’s office.  Tag even shares his birthday with Doctor Chang’s daughter Penny, whom Guy had been dating up until exactly a month ago and avoiding since the split.  All their parents still compare the Snowstorm of ‘85 to every snowstorm since, none of which have returned quite as high a yield of babies.

The high school was silent as a funeral home at night.  None of the teachers at the high school were awake, let alone at work, when Guy let himself in through the door Bob the custodian kept unlocked for him.  Guy found silence uncomfortable, like the blue plastic chairs in the science lab with the shape of nobody’s ass in particular stamped into the seat.  He headed straight to the library, hopped over the counter and used the circuit box to turn on the lights and the row of Apple computers.  There was another row of IBM-and-compatible desktops with a lower median age, since Macs got fixed when they broke and PCs just got replaced, but Guy needed to recharge his iPod.  He plunked himself down at the last PowerMac in the Apple aisle arranged from oldest to newest by the possibly obsessive-compulsive librarian.  It looked like an Evolution of the Species poster for twentieth century robot designs, starting with primordial grey boxes moving into more streamlined and organic design work, more like what the robots would choose to look like, if they ever took over.  The new iMacs were translucent glowing orbs of various tropical colours and the PowerMac Guy used was just a giant monitor that bobbed and weaved on a stalk.

He logged onto his user profile and pulled a spindle of writeable discs and his list of requests from his bookbag while the music player synced.  He used his USB wireless card to grab the school’s signal and opened up his peer-to-peer file sharing programs.  As soon as the music player came up Guy chose Shuffle and Play, then skipped the first six songs until he found one he wanted.  He turned the speakers up and got to work.

Everything on the request list was easy to find on the first try, all he had to do was wait for them to finish.  While he waited he checked out rumours for the new iPod and was disappointed with the new design with the row of buttons, a serious step down from his second-gen and an argument against Apple’s aesthetic evolution, but at least it would be finally be compatible with PCs and stop making that clicking sound all the time.  As far as searching for music went, Guy felt like he had already listened to a fair amount of everything he was interested in; radically different types of heavy metal from old-school thrash to nü-industrial.  Now his sights were set on World Cinema, or at least every possible movie guaranteed to have at least a handful of cool murders in it.  This mega-genre included black- or kungsploitation films from the seventies, sloppy Italian private school gore-and-tit parades, the technophobic Little Asian Ghost Girl Movies from Asia (not the weak American remakes), those not-really-real violent death clip-reels strung together without a plot for their own argued entertainment value, the endlessly-numeraled American horror sequels where the iconic murderer goes through the same co-ed killing motions but this time in space, and those even weirder Asian Non-Ghost horror movies where the DVD cover art was a girl holding  a bunch of syringes, or a guy with safety pins stuck in his hands, or a bare foot about to step on a floor covered in thumbtacks.

His only difficulty was coming from the complete concert film of Metallica’s first visit to Russia, which was a personal selection.  It had been on the go for what felt like forever, but only because he started downloading it the day before Penny Chang broke up with him.  The file was at 17% when the speed dropped to 0.1kb/s for two weeks.  It shot up to 46% when he wasn’t looking one morning, but now there were zero seeders sharing the file, and no download speed at all.  The column where time counted down changed from ten weeks to the sideways-eight symbol for infinity, and has been at that ever since.  He decided to give it another week.

Guy was the premier bootlegger in Makpigat.  Students stopped him in the halls during school hours, told him what they were looking for, and he could usually deliver by the next day.  Adults got their requests in when Guy went to his dad’s hockey league games, and he took a bit more time and overcharged them a little, but they paid it since it was still cheaper and faster than waiting on a hard copy to arrive.  Guy still cut a small profit that mostly went towards his drum kit and metal band T-shirts.

He had fallen into the business when he burned a couple of compilations of obscure heavy metal he found back when he used the original Napster for all his downloading needs.  Guy burned some albums with the CDs he had leftover, and kids bought them off him for five bucks a pop.  His methods were still the same, only now he charged eight-fifty and alternated between three different P2P programs to keep up with the demand.  It was still all free for him minus the cost of blank CDs, only now he came into school early on most days to use all the bandwidth he can on getting videos, as well as albums and discographies that came pre-foldered, an improvement over the days when Napster never failed to find eleven out of twelve songs from any given album.  These were still the good old days, before Napster was sued into bankruptcy, then bought up by the same music companies that lobbied against it, then gambled on a subscription-based service that must have cornered the rich idiot market.

The catalogue available to him now was comprehensive, with less dead links and corrupted files, but by no means was it complete; availability was basically proportional to how many other people in the world own a hard copy over the odds that one of them has digital transfer equipment.  It was easy enough to find major-label acts, but some obscure folk artist’s obscure country duets album with another obscure blues artist recorded in Obscurity, Texas was going to take more time and energy.  Guy recognized this extra effort with different pricing packages, like charging more for new releases and rarities, and making all rates subject to change without notice.

Guy knew he would only find fake files and viruses when he searched for the new Metallica album, since all the rumour sites still said it was under wraps, but he tried it anyway, not just because he could charge more either.  His love of metal began and ended with Metallica: Guy owned at least a dozen of their T-shirts, most of which had cost him a lot more money than the suggested retail price of their tossed-off album of cover songs.  When the whole Napster fiasco happened, he had to try creative misspellings like mettalica or metallika to get results before he gave up on the program altogether.  Guy took a small amount of comfort in knowing that it didn’t work perfectly for Metallica either, since he could still find their entire discography, lyrics, guitar tabs, and music videos online for free somewhere, if he didn’t already have it all on his computer and iPod and on CDs both purchased and burned.  Only things missing were the upcoming album and the Russian concert that wouldn’t be done downloading when the universe eventually collapses in on itself.

Guy stared at the screen and watched all the download progress bars change from white to blue.  He was operating on five hours of sleep and no coffee.  He put his head down on his desk and closed his eyes.  Even with Sepultura yelling in his ear, he had no trouble knocking out a power nap.

—-

A week before Gordon landed in Makpigat, Guy Fleurry flew to Iqaluit for a new snare drum.  He recently stabbed clean through the skin of his old snare drum with the pointy end of a broken drumstick the week before, but he had wanted a new one for ages and if he ordered one from the south it would take a million years to get to him.  He convinced his dad to get him out of school that day in exchange for another one of his flying lessons that only frustrated them both and educated neither.

Guy appreciated the privilege of a flight out of town, so he took Ronald up on the deal.  Getting to visit Iqaluit was like a day at that place in the wizard books where all the wizard kids went to buy candy and fireworks and generally fuck off on their one day to forget about the constantly-looming threat of danger.  Not everybody got to leave Makpigat whenever they wanted, and those that could if they wanted to rarely found reason to.  His dad had it in his mind that Guy would take over the family business whenever he felt like retiring; flying lessons had taken place with some regularity over the last year with little enthusiasm.  Ronald let him run through the take-off checklist and switch it to autopilot when they were up in the air, but didn’t trust him to try landing the plane just yet.  Guy would rather be a passenger anyway.

He promised his dad he would make a quick visit to the music shop, in and out before he was ready for take-off.  Ronald had to stick around the hanger to fill out paperwork as a customs official inspected the delivery.  Most of Makpigat’s budget is generously handed to them, but the town contributes to the local economy by producing barrels of Authentic Inuit Art sculptures for sale in souvenir shops in Iqaluit and all over the world.  There’s a machine housed in the warehouse that makes the pieces of Authentic Inuit Art at a rate of seven-point-three an hour.   A bucket of limestone gets dumped into one end of the machine and lasers analyze each piece for imperfections to determine the best piece of Authentic Inuit Art to carve based on the dimensions.  Then another more powerful laser cuts and polishes the stones until they resemble beluga whales, or sunbathing walruses, or a polar bear eating a seal, depending on the shape of the rock.  The federal government ruled it could be called Authentic as long as the piece is made with a real Nunavutian rock.  The amount of Authentic Inuit Art in the world is disproportionately huge in comparison to the number of Authentic Inuit Artists, but nobody ever questions the supply and demand remains constant.  Since the forgeries were carried out with the best of entrepreneurial intentions, made for people who really didn’t care one way or another where their art came from as long as it went with the coffee table, it was a victimless crime.

He strained to open the door to the music store against a sudden gust of wind in the opposite direction of the hinges.  The wind chimes hanging above the cash register clanged with more resonance than appeared possible.  After knocking the snow out of his boots on the snow room floor he ran past the rows of hanging guitars and amplifiers towards the drum section.  The store was mostly full of traditional, Inuit-designed stuff but Guy knew there were some Peavey kits hiding in the back corner.  He resisted the urge to do a wicked-cool solo on the display kit, a gorgeous twenty-piece setup with eight cymbals and a pair of cowbells, but he knew he would just fuck up on the double kick-pedal at some point and give up after a descent into off-beat noise.  He picked out a snare and paid in cash, strict orders from his dad following stricter orders from Mayor Tom, and zipped up before heading back outside and down the stairs into the basement, the Northernmost subterranean counterculture shop in the world, to pick up those clear rolling papers made out of corn for Zach.

He was headed straight back the airport when his ears picked up at the beat of drums in the air, a steady thump-thump that mingled with the noise of a crowd, even though there was nothing in the briefing about a gathering going on that day.  He followed the sounds to the town’s main drag, where there stood the gigantic Legislative Assembly Building built after territorial confederation in 1999.  It still had a big poster up along one side of the building to advertise the Queen’s appearance there on her cross-Canadian tour from a couple of months ago.  Guy had seen it on the CBC; Her Majesty smiled the whole time but clearly was freezing Her Royal Ass off, wondering what her inbreeding ancestors ever saw in this frozen wasteland in the first place.   Most of the colour from her picture had drained from half a winter’s wind and sun and snow; it looked less like a photograph than a Warhol print.  The banner was ripped across one of her eyes so she winked in the breeze.  By any account it should have been taken down ages ago, but the Queen’s visit was the most memorable event to have happened there since the first new line was drawn on the map of Canada in half a century, the anniversary of which was similarly being celebrated with smaller banners hanging from the streetlights.  If it weren’t for the Legislative Assembly, Iqaluit would have been just like any other of the territory’s twenty-two communities, cold and partially accessible.  Instead it is cold and mostly accessible, by air and sea, nearly all year long.  In the colder months, Iqaluit was accessible by land as well.

There was a drum circle all right, a few dozen Inuit in their ceremonial parkas tapping and dancing with handmade caribou-skin qiluat, giving the crowd a shared pulse with which to vent their collected rage.  One-tenth of the entire population of the town must have showed up for the event, and they all appeared to be waiting for someone to occupy the space behind the podium already set up at the top of the stairs at the front entrance.  It was the same haphazard collection of unfocused left-wing anti-war types that Guy had seen all on TV from all around the world, the kind with all the sound and fury of a riot with none of the catharsis or property damage.   Protestors demanding change mingled with homeless people who only requested some.  Picket signs were in an almost one-to-one ratio with interviewers sticking a microphone into the face of anyone who had a face.  About as many signs as expected were scrawled with anti-war slogans, but there were a fair share of anti-oil-specific slogans, anti-government slogans, website addresses, and demands for elected representatives to vote one way or another on some recently introduced and completely unrelated bill in the House of Commons.  It’s not that Guy didn’t care, but he doubted the effectiveness of any of it.  You can’t do anything right in this world without pissing somebody off, and although the situation has regrettably never occurred Guy still highly doubted that watching an effigy of himself burned by strangers on television would affect his decision-making one way or another.

It wasn’t long before a padded microphone was shoved in Guy’s fac.  A man with an impeccably trimmed chinstrap line-beard and a trenchcoat too thin and too long for the stiff breeze, clearly off the plane from Toronto, shouted questions at him.  “Are you here in support or opposition to Simon Attiak and the Nunamiut?”

“Who?  What?”  Guy had only vaguely heard of the Nunamiut through thirty second news-bites and what Mayor Tom had told them in grade ten Civics class, and neither review was positive.  He had written a couple of books, animal fable stories that Guy didn’t have any interest in reading.  The Nunamiut were a weird political fringe group sprung from his philosophies, mostly hippie stuff like being nice to the environment and caring about other people.

Or as his interviewer put it, “Simon Attiak is the influential cultural commentator who’s making a secret announcement today.  The Nunamiut embrace his views for an alternative spiritual and ecological framework.”

“So it’s a cult,” Guy said, speaking directly into the microphone.

“He encourages spirituality of all kinds, but he also shuns big oil, big fishing and big mining in favour of a more harmonious view of man’s relationship with the natural world.”

“That sounds like a cult to me.  It’s Amish-lite with a quirky Canadian spin, awe-shucks with a bit of new-wave pseudo-Scientology thrown in after a while for good measure?  Look, you tell this basket-weaving stress-blasting psyche-viking that the natural world is asking for it.  If people are here to do anything, it’s to go around being real loud and burning shit and tearing this fucking earth up because that’s what we’re good at, and that’s all we’re good for, too.  So Fuck the Earth.  I mean, if you lived in a place like this, you’d do anything to warm it up too.  Heavy metal rules!  Let’s actually get out there and do some real fucking damage instead of pissing out your face all over the television, huh?”

Guy was struggling to retain control of the microphone long after the interviewer decided to cut the interview short.  He would have kept going, but out of the corner of his eye he caught an Inuit girl giving him the once-over from up near the front.  She must have been a part of the Nunamiut, because she was about sixty years younger than the normal age of people wearing a traditional parka made out of caribou skin instead of something more wind resistant, like a Canada Goose down-stuffed jacket or at least a black North Face.  It reminded Guy of the times he had to wear his retarded Cub Scout uniform outside the confines of Wednesday nights in the school gymnasium.

Guy hopped over the chains connecting two demonstrators dressed as Guantanamo Bay prisoners and ran into the fray to find the girl attached to the cocked eyebrow of amorous interest.  The chinstrapped reporter rewound the digital tape in his camera and went to try his luck with the guy dressed inexplicably in an orange Guantanamo jumpsuit and a Bill Clinton mask, or one of the many dreadlocked white kids who smelled like magic mushrooms.

Guy kept a wide berth and tried to circle around her just in case she wasn’t interested.  He kept looking for openings in case he had to dart away in the opposite direction.  She found him first though, spotted him right as he emerged into the clearing on the opposite side of the drum circle.  She sat down and gestured with her hand, join me over here.

Guy did a thing with his arms that said, who, me?  She nodded, yea you, and even mimed carrying the drum under one arm.

He cut through the circle and sat down next to her.  “Guy,” he said, like ghee, not like guy.

“Iyaroak,” she said.

Guy garbled the pronunciation. “Ee-yah-row-ack.”

“No,” she said, “Ee-yahr-oh-ack.”

“Iyaroak,” he said.  He was still getting it wrong.

She didn’t seem to mind.  “You play the drum?”

“Yea, multiple drums,” Guy said.  Simon Attiak walked out the front door of the Legislative Assembly to mostly wild applause, and a drowned-out rumble of booing heard from a healthy portion of dissenters.  He had to shout in her ear for her to hear.  “So you’re one of the Nunamuit?  What’s this guy’s beef?”

She shushed him.  The drums stopped and the leader of the Nunamiut appealed for the crowd to bring it down.  He cleared his throat away from the microphone and took a long, serious look at his notes as he waited for the last of the shouting to die.

“Before I begin,” he began, “I would like to address some rumours that the southern provincial media have been alluding to and perpetuating for some time.  The idea that my writings are the work of some committee, and that the perceived lack of sole authorship somehow legitimizes vindictive personal attacks on my own authenticity and sincerity, is simply a blatant falsehood.  The texts of the Nunamiut are my own intellectual property, the distillation of my own experiences and my education, both spiritual and academic.  I implore my critics to look at my actions as well as my words.  I never said that these books contained the secrets of the universe, nor did I ever imply that my teachings were in contrast with any other religious text.  I cannot fathom the ignorance and close-mindedness of such a statement.  My books are stories; rich in parable, but stories all the same.  I can only teach a lesson if a reader is willing to learn one.  So to my attackers, I implore them to seek out whatever religious text they feel speaks to them, if it isn’t any of mine, and adhere to it the way they see fit, just like the Nunamiut are free to interact with my works with some degree of personal interpretation.  All I ask is that they think for themselves, and not stir the pot of controversy just because they can’t understand how my writings have helped people ever since the first Book of the Owl was first printed eight years ago.  All of which, conveniently enough, are available for purchase over to the side of the stage.  And don’t forget to pre-order your copies of the Book of the Wolf, too.  Free shipping before April tenth.”

That earned mild chuckles from the audience, and even Simon had to raise a hand to his mouth to hide his smile.  His ability to cross-promote amused even him.  “This brings me to the topic at hand.   I’d like to open with a quick prayer. Please listen well.”

Guy did not listen well.  He watched Iyaroak watch Simon Attiak.  Her parka was heavy and shapeless and left too much to Guy’s imagination.  Picturing a girl naked was hardwired into every Quebecer’s genetic code, but Nunavut was like everywhere else in the country when wintertime rolled around, and everyone ran around looking like giant bean bags.  He looked at her face in profile instead, rode his eyeballs down her forehead like the first dip of a rollercoaster, curved around the gentle bridge of her nose, rolled up and felt weightless at the apex of the philtrum only to drag across the dual speed bumps of her tightly-pressed lips at speeds that made his teeth mash together.  No, reading her profile was not as good as picturing her naked, but Guy was still intrigued by her shapelessness.  She was probably a little brainwashed, and that was fine with him, everyone was a little crazy.  He would ask her to accompany him on a walk to the merchandise table, he’d buy a book, and she’d believe he was the second coming.

“Land and sea,
Sky and rain,
Thanks again,
Seriously.
What I want,
you provide,
what I don’t need,
you withhold.

to all the animals,
who I have forgotten,
owl and rabbit,
wolf and walrus,
moose and squirrel,
I am very, very,
sorry.”

Guy rolled his eyes and made sure Iyaroak didn’t catch him doing it.  Simon shuffled his notes while waiting again for the crowd to stop.  This time he didn’t settle them with feigned modesty.

“I’m honoured to be speaking to you today on the steps of the Nunavut Legislative Building.  This temple of glass and steel represents all the hard work and struggle of generations of Inuit, your ancestors and mine.  It was a battle that occurred for a place to call home, a land we had a connection to, that we deserved.  The battle occurred not on a field soaked in blood but on paper, and you know what, it’s not bad.  We finally took back the land that was taken from our ancestors.  But now, we’ve got to work on taking back our souls.”

“This land has come into our hands, and our own country vowed to protect our interests, just in time to watch the whole world contribute to the destruction of our way of life through global warming, water pollution, and mishandling our resources in a wasteful manner.  We have lost our connection with nature.  It’s one of the reasons I created the Nunamiut, which has grown to include chapters in all ten provinces and three territories, not to mention our international members as far away as Northern Russia.  They come from all walks of life and their causes are many.  The official governments of both this territory and country continue to deny the Nunamiut people the same courtesies and exemptions afforded to other religions, religion being a word defined by the same people who thought exploiting the ways of our ancestors in exchange for economic enslavement was a fair trade.  This building proves that change is not only possible, but that embracing new values and ideas can be in harmony with everyone’s best interests.  It is a combination of the old with the new, like how we built this sleek, modern government building to uphold centuries of traditional values.  It looks like a basketball stadium more than a Legislative Assembly, really super design job.   So today, on these historic and attractive steps, I would like to announce my latest project.

“I am going on a walk.  And not just any walk, although I do not intend to undermine the pleasures of walking for the sake of walking.  I will be examining the state of the Canadian Arctic, reconnecting with my nomadic tendencies, and promoting moderate physical activity to combat the obesity epidemic.  This journey is also a symbol, everyone is free to attach their own reasons, and live our successes as their own.  The environment, the Western world’s dependence on oil, our government’s involvement with the continuing unplanned and underfunded war in Afghanistan, human injustice of all kinds in developing world, hungry children in the first world, and battered women in both; cancers of various body parts and other diseases, both mental and physical, deadly to mildly debilitating, and any one of a hundred more causes have all used walking to promote public awareness.  We will walk clear across the Canadian Arctic, for all these reasons, and because it is there.  There will not be another press conference until my team and I reach Whitehorse, Yukon.  I will take one question.”

Over the cacophony, he picked one and answered it into the microphone without recapping the question.  “We will leave in the morning with the packs on our backs and a handful of dogsleds to carry provisions, mostly first aid and safety supplies as per my lawyer’s wishes and for the sake of my insurers.  And just because I heard it shouted somewhere from the back, yes we may occasionally break into a jog, and maybe even sprint briefly, for the vast majority of the time we will be walking.  If you have any more questions, please refer to the press release.  Before I leave, I’d like to end with one more prayer for the journey.”

The audience had bowed their heads again and Simon requested that everyone briefly remove their hats, like they would for the national anthem at a hockey game.  Unlike when the anthem was sung at a hockey game, however, Simon recited his closing prayer entirely in English.

“Spirits of the sky,
where everything begins,
stay clear, and stay clean,
so we may see the obstacles
of the path ahead of us.”

Guy was annoyed that he had both began and ended with a prayer, and thought about making a joke, something about how spring was just around the corner and they better hope they can walk on water at this rate, because all the ice will have melted by the time they start.  Guy could not effectively arrange those words for maximum humour, so he kept quiet instead of starting a fight.  He imagined it was a phrase that sounded better in French, he just didn’t know how to say it.

“Spirits of the land,
where everything is,
stay fertile and stay fallow
provide us with what we need
and neglect us of the things we need not.”

Iyaroak pulled Guy’s toque off and stuffed it into the pocket of his parka for him.  She left her hand in there, and Guy wriggled his own hand in there, and found her hand under his toque.  English was Guy’s first language, and French was a distant second.  His parents both spoke Quebecois French fluently, his dad with a patios that marks him as an obvious West-North-Western Quebecer, but they only slipped into it when they were angry with him, so he wouldn’t understand what they were saying.  Since his parents worked with mostly unilingual English-Canadians and the school only had two accredited teachers and they both only spoke English, they picked up the habit of using English at home before Guy said his first word.  He took French classes in school starting in grade four, since Makpigat is controlled by Ottawa, which defers education to the provincial government.  He dropped it after grade nine when it stopped being mandatory, since the provincial government of Ontario thought just as highly of the language as a fourteen year-old who was forced for six years to learn a language that reminded him of all the times his folks was yelled at him.  Inside his coat pocket, his hand was getting sweaty.

“Spirits of the sea,
where everything returns,
stay murky and stay mysterious.
We will tread lightly upon winter’s bridge
and we will definitely stop killing the whales.
We swear this time.”

Guy was never taught anything useful for conversing in French the entire time, just the nouns of different carnival rides and types of shirts and the present tenses of etre and avoir rammed into his head so he would always be able to list exactly who he was and what he had.  Guy took an elective half-credit of basic Inuktitut in grade ten, but he forgot most of the syntax rules right after the final exam and, like most of his class, only remembered a handful of useful terms, all types of snow.

“Spirit of the snow,
blanket our faults and mistakes
with uqalurait and ice shelves
so that we may forget our burdens.
Bring it on, spirit of the snow,
we can shovel as much as you can dish out.”

Simon said, “See you later,” and disappeared into the building to applause from the crowd and drums from the Nunamiut.

Guy had not been paying attention again.  He realized he was now very late for take-off, and he didn’t want to get left behind like that time the two of them accidentally left him in Alert when he was five.  “Some speech,” he said.  “Want to take a walk to the merch table?”

She nodded, and they weaved around the retreating supporters.  Only the anti-Nunamiut protestors were still shouting, but they were a minority.  Guy chose The Book of The Owl, first in the series, since he should pretend to have at least as much respect for this book series as he had for the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  If he never made it more than halfway through the first one (like The Fellowship of the Ring) at least he wouldn’t have to spring for the other ones, only this one book cost almost as much as getting the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Iyaroak smiled at him, and stuck her hand into his pocket again.  She put his toque back on his head.  “Call me later?” she said.  “I’ve gotta get going before my dad wonders where I am.”

“I was going to say the same thing,” Guy said.  “But, umm, I kind of got into a fight with my phone company, and they’ve cut off my phone.  Can I give you my e-mail address instead?”

“That’s not the same as the phone,” she said.

Guy could not explain the real circumstances behind having no phone number.  “You’re right, and I’ll fix it for sure.  But for now, here’s my e-mail, write me whenever and I’ll write you right back.  I promise, as soon as I get the message.  If I’m on the computer when you’re on the computer, it’ll be just like talking to me on the phone.”  He was lucky she didn’t ask him where he lived.

She promised to e-mail him as soon as possible, and he made her a double promise on a prompt reply.  For that, and the rest of his efforts that day, Guy received a peck on the cheek and stood there, dumbstruck, holding a drum under one arm and a forty dollar paperback in the other, as he watched Iyaroak disappear into the dispersing crowd.  He ran all the way back to the airport and tried to pass it off as a long line-up at the music store checkout.  His dad clearly didn’t buy but didn’t want to waste time arguing about it.  The flight home was mostly quiet and Guy did not get another flying lesson, which suited both of them just fine.

Guy was all smiles when he went to band practice that night but the guys chalked it up to the new snare.  He wasn’t about to tell them about his good fortune, or they might jinx the whole thing with their bad advice.  But now an entire week had gone by and he was still waiting for her e-mail, and he knew that usually wasn’t a good sign.

—-

Tag Mason exploded through the door of the library.  “Bear Alarm!”

He jumped the entrance turnstile and found Guy asleep under the blue glow of the giant PowerMac screen.  “Guy Fleurry, this is your bear alarm.  Get up, before you are killed by a bear.”

“What time is it?”

“Nine oh-five.  No first period today, there’s a bear in the school.  Let’s go!”

Guy’s head stayed down on the desk.  “Bullshit.”

“It’s the Zebra Bear.”

That got him up.  “You for real?”

“Okay, that’s bullshit, it’s a regular polar bear but it’s tearing apart the chemistry lab.  They’re evacuating the school silently so she doesn’t freak out, but the alarms would scare it even more.  And DC and Zach are already out there.  Are you coming or what?”

“How’d you know I was here?”

“You’re always here, you’ve been in front of that computer for like a week.  You might as well take it home.”

“You know I can’t do that Tag,” Guy said.  He got up from his chair and stretched out the arm he was sleeping on.  “No Internet at home yet.”  Guy ejected his iPod, closed his browser windows, packed up and signed out.  He missed the e-mail by five minutes.

The information kiosk in the Cambridge Bay Regional Airport was made out of fake logs in the shape of a fake log cabin, a simulacrum of something warm and cozy.  The kiosk was also incorrectly named, for it lacked any information on any flight leaving or going into Cambridge Bay Regional Airport.  What little information that escaped from the information kiosk was either unnecessary or just wrong, like when Gordon and the heavy-set lady behind the counter got into an argument over the arrival time of Flight 730.  She was adamant that the flight would be arriving any minute now, but Gordon, having just disembarked Flight 730 into the Cambridge Bay Regional Airport, was patiently explaining that it had arrived several minutes ago.

Gordon was only two-thirds of the way to Makpigat and already he regretted accepting the job offer.  He almost wished he chosen the concussion option, it would be better than his headache driving him to the brink of insanity, like a steel drum band playing on the inside his skull.  Perhaps it was the stresses of air travel, which at the beginning of the 21^st century became draining and exhausting, much more than it ever was in the nineties, or maybe it was Gordon’s hangover, a line graph with a similar slope to air travel when plotted over the same timeframe.  His teenage years of inexhaustibility gradually morphed into sedentary late twenties, so finishing a six-pack without falling asleep with the lights on was called a challenge and no longer called a Thursday.

Gordon spent his last night in Winnipeg with friends who conspired to get him as drunk as possible before he left them for a mostly teetotal territory.  He assumes they could have only succeeded, because he can only remember up until the end of the second period of the Coyotes-Canucks game, two-zip for the Coyotes but Ron came through during the break with some nice words about Edmonton’s third line.

.  The next thing he can remember is waking up in his hotel suite at six-thirty in the morning, approximately twenty-five minutes before his flight to Yellowknife left from the Winnipeg International Airport.  He had slept through his alarm clock, his watch alarm, a wake-up call, and two minutes of violent shaking from a pair of maids and a bellhop before cold water on his face finally did the trick.  Fortunately, everything in the city of Winnipeg is only a ten minute drive from the airport, and even with Gordon’s trouble with his shoelaces when removing his shoes for the x-ray machine, it only took him another ten minutes to check in.  Gordon was at his gate four minutes before takeoff, and somehow he even managed to scoop up a T-Ho’s and a copy of Maclean’s without breaking a sweat.  He also learned from the Sun’s front page that the Canucks pulled an amazing 3-2 victory in the third.

Any experienced drinker knows that there are rules to enduring the next morning just like there are rules for avoiding them in the first place, like beer before liquor, never been sicker, or never buy a box of white wine for less than four people.  Whiskey hangovers are cured with bacon but wine just needed a litre of water or 950 millilitres of Gatorade.  A beer hangover required a bunch of heavy breads in the morning, because it was best to fight fibre with fibre.  A gin hangover rolled over and went back to sleep, but a vodka hangover barged into the room in the early morning and wanted to roll a joint.  Rum was not intended for human consumption, ever.  The wrong treatment could make him feel even worse, although he doubted he could experience any sensation worse than his current state.

Since Gordon didn’t follow the rules the night before, he was left with a heightened sensitivity to all unpleasant noises, tastes, smells, and changes in atmospheric pressure.  His brain felt like it was being ripped to shreds by the talons of rabid peregrine falcons.  The thought of food had become abject, as if food could not possibly exist in a world where Gordon’s body felt so strongly against the concept of eating.  If any solid food was spotted in the vicinity, it was not be consumed under any circumstances, and ideally, removed from sight.

When he sat down for the first time that morning for the first of three flights, he knew he was going to throw up at some point in the day.  He hoped he could get it over with on the first one, because if ever an airline deserved it, Air Canada deserved his vomit, but his stomach was playing stubborn.  He tried to make himself sick by taking deep mouth breaths of re-circulated air simultaneously smelling everybody on the plane at once.  The flight attendant aptly summed up Gordon’s appearance when she rolled the drink cart past and said, “I’m surprised they even let you on the plane smelling like that.  Usually I’m not supposed to say something, but still, wow.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have some really sugary juice on board, would you?  I’m trying to throw up all over the place.”

“Are you some sort of comedian?”

“No,” Gordon said, and stumbled for a better comeback.  “Are you?”

“No, I write for an indie music website,” she said.  “It’s only a little blog right now, but our ad revenue is catching up to our server fees.”  Gordon couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not.  For all he knew, she wrote for the websites he read.

“Well I’m sorry to offend your well-tuned senses,” he said.  “But I drank a heroic amount of liquor.  I can set up camp in the washroom if you want.”

“No, you stay the hell seated,” she said.  “Don’t even go to the washroom.  If you start to spread your scent around, I’ll spray you with the stuff we use on the pillows.  It doesn’t work well either so I’ll have to use a lot of it.  You’re not the only one who got too drunk last night, you big baby. And unless you’re the best tattoo laser removal guy in Edmonton, I have no desire to hear a word from you today.”

He tried to barf on her shoes, but his stomach held off.  It was only a matter of time at this point, but it could happen in two minutes or he could be waiting all day for it in a repeat of The Time Gordon Swore Off Rum.

He drank another large coffee and a whole bottle of water in the Yellowknife airport.  Hoping to be inspired by a public washroom, he went into a stall and braced himself for the worst.  Unfortunately, the Yellowknife airport has the cleanest public washrooms of any airport in the whole country, a fact Gordon would have known if he read the better travel guides.  His toilet bowl was sparkling white and there were three-ply paper towels of a generous cut in the dispenser.  The liquid soap smelled like peach cobbler.  What a disappointment.

By the time he boarded his second, much smaller plane to Cambridge Bay, he was trying to make himself sick using his mind, if only to feel a little better for the rest of the day.  He thought about the smell of garbage juice left in front of his house by the garbage truck on summer garbage days, and police photos of drinking and driving accidents from the website that specializes in horrible pictures, and the time he tried to eat a whole triple cheeseburger at Wendy’s the day after Dave Thomas died.  He felt himself go pale just after take-off, but the pilot noticed and invited him up to sit in the co-pilots seat.  He was Ukranian, and when Gordon mentioned he was from Winnipeg he yelled over the roar of the engine, “Winnipeg like the Guess Who!  I love the Guess Who!  No shookhar tonight in my coffee!  No shookhar tonight in my tea!” Gordon’s headache worsened as the karaoke continued, but the indescribable joy of no longer being on an Air Canada flight temporarily relieved his overall suffering.  He thanked the pilot for letting him take the airsick bag, a plastic bag from the Dollar-Rama that still had a receipt in the bottom for four dollars sixty cents.  He was still clutching it with one hand as he argued with the heavy-set lady behind the Cambridge Bay Regional Airport Information Kiosk about the existence of his last flight, and he hated that he had to wait to try again until he got what he needed from the quixotically named information booth.

He had tried yelling, flirting, and bribing the woman, all good ideas but probably wrong to attempt in that order.  He resorted to begging.  “I’m just trying to find a pilot, his name’s Ronald Fleurry.  I know I look bad, and smell bad, and might puke before the end of this sentence, but I’m not an Arctic homeless.  I’ve just had a very long day, and a missing last night, and it’s all been part of a seriously twisted week.  Look, I can relate to having a frustrating job.  When I write code,  it usually takes the first thousand runs just before I get it to stop crashing programs.  It must be frustrating to feel like you can’t give out any information, but I’m asking you to just ignore the rules, these silly new terrorist rules, just this once.  You’re literally the one person in this building I can talk to, and I need to know where I can find Ronald Fleurry.  He’s been chartered to fly me out.”

“And where are you flying today?”

“Uhh,” Gordon said.  “I can’t tell you that.”

“Well we can’t release the names of our pilots to passengers flying to unknown places,” she said.  The eraser on the back of her pencil squeaked as it rubbed out of her previous crossword puzzle answers.

“I don’t need his name, I need his location in this airport.  Is there someone else I can talk to in this log cabin?”

“That information is confidential for security purposes.”

“Is there anybody in here at all who can tell me where Ronald Fleurry is?”  Gordon had been inside funeral homes more hectic than the Cambridge Bay Regional Airport.  The airport was pin-drop silent, with only a handful of weather-stranded passengers milling around the bar with the sign that said Last Brand-Name Booze For A Hundred Miles in English and the Inuit symbol language. “Do you really think I’m a security risk?  Is this because I smell like an airplane pillow?”

She gave him a sharp shush with her pointer finger.  “Sir, I have not attended the required training course to determine whether or not you are a terrorist.  But ever since I went to the hour-long Taser seminar, I have permission to use this Taser I keep under my desk.”  She produced the device, the size of an electric razor with crackling blue lighting where the precision blades should be.  “And I was twenty minutes late to the seminar, so the question is, do you feel lucky?”

Gordon re-attended his luggage.  He did not need to end up in a Nunavutian prison, if such things existed.  Worst-case scenario, any crime committed up North was punishable by exile on an ice floe.  No, scratch that, worst case would probably be a maximum security detention facility made out of solid ice, where instead of solitary confinement, punishment was five minutes out in the yard.  The worst part was how the lady inside the Cambridge Bay Regional Airport log cabin was right; Gordon should have been keeping a closer eye on his carry-on, because he was transporting highly sensitive information in the form of a moderately-professional looking booklet titled “Welcome to Makpigat!”

Chimo! (Hello!) And Congratulations!   If you are reading this, you are in the process of moving to Makpigat, the Canadian Arctic’s best kept secret!  Please remember to keep this information PRIVATE.  While this booklet provides all the information you need to facilitate an easy transition into Makpigat, it is far from comprehensive.  Upon your arrival, feel free to ask any one of Makpigat’s three hundred residents any questions you may have about the unique technical, industrial and social challenges of living in a secret government town situated above the Arctic Circle.  Let’s begin with the significance of Makpigat in the long-term scientific and defensive plans of the nation as outlined by the 1984 Community Mission Statement:

1) While discreetly avoiding contact with the indigenous population, scientifically monitor and explore all aspects of the Arctic ecosystem, with an emphasis towards the feasibility of establishing and developing various forms of Arctic outpost and survivalist technology, specifically in the event of a post-apocalyptic disaster scenario.

2) While discreetly avoiding contact with the population of Canada [see page 8 for a list of recognized exceptions], and while still acting within all laws of the Dominion, fulfill all job requirements in accordance with the bureaucratic regulations of the Federal Government, and represent all work performed as quantifiable research performed under the supervision of a department of the Government of Canada.

3) While discreetly avoiding contact with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, monitor Soviet defence sites in the Arctic Circle region and defend Canada from and explore the feasibility of offensive initiatives possible in the highly unlikely event of a Soviet invasion of the Canadian Arctic Region, its subsequent implementations and defence stratagems.

Even though the second one didn’t make a lot of sense to him and the thing about Soviets should have been removed altogether by now, he figured it only meant the Canadian Government owned all of the work he did in exchange for providing him with the means to survive.  He was prepared to make that deal all along.  The handbook was full of bullet helpful tips in bullet point for Gordon’s upcoming stay in a top secret federal installation in the Arctic, a Cliffs Notes of the huge book on wilderness survival training he had to memorize in four days cooped up at the Ramada.  The handbook also gave tips on creating a fake job title and suggestions for alias town names and ways to dodge specific questions.  For a top secret town, the booklet sure said Makpigat a lot, but if someone were to lose this, they were stupid for losing the only thing they were specifically told not to lose.  They would have to be pretty careless and stupid and in a big rush that morning.  Gordon double-checked his bag just in case and it was there as it should be, not that he thought he had lost it.

Gordon hoped he didn’t spill the beans on Makpigat when he was hammered, but decided that he had practiced the pronunciation of Ikuligaarjuk in his hotel room for so long, that it must be in his head permanently by now.  He thought to himself that he was doing a good job so far, and if he didn’t die from his migraine or knocking his head off something when he inevitably erupted, he might even do a pretty good job.

Gordon found a crumpled up twenty in his pocket.  The only advantage of having other people buy the drinks bought for him and wandered into the airport bar to kill time before pestering her again.  There was one other patron nursing a mug of beer at the far side of the bar.  The bartender had his sleeves rolled up, possibly to show off his tattoo sleeves, more likely because he was wiping down the counters.

“Could I have a Caesar, please.” Gordon said.  If he couldn’t figure out the hair of the dog that bit him, the hair of some other dog was his only option, and the Caesar is really the only morning cocktail for people who hadn’t already moved on to pouring whiskey over their Weetabix at home.  A fresh and well-measured Caesar is a magically delicious drink, befitting of its Roman namesake.  This would not be one of those drinks.

“No clam juice,” the bartender said without looking up from his bar cloth, which he now used as a dish towel.  He seemed nice enough.

“A Bloody Mary, then.  I’ve got this hangover, and-”

“We don’t got celery,” he said.

“That’s fine.”

He spat into the sink.  “No vodka either.”

“What do you have?”

“Whiskey,” he said.  He threw the towel into the sink and gave the tap water one blast.

“Fine, a whiskey then,” Gordon said.  He was only almost sorry to have inconvenienced him, but then he said he was sorry anyway, only muffled into his coat sleeve.  It was his most insincere way of apologizing while still sounding sincere.

“Suit yourself, boss,” the bartender moved fast on making the drink, so fast that Gordon had not even registered the real extent of his surliness before he chucked a toxic concoction of Canadian whiskey and V8-from-a-can across the bar counter and made a run for the back room.

“There’s no way he thought I would actually drink this,” Gordon said out loud to no one, two seconds before he took a sip.  He grimaced at the taste, but it would do.  He could be hugging the porcelain in no time with this drink.

The man down at the other end of the counter shuffled over, plunked his mug down next to Gordon’s and tapped the glasses together.  “Could be worse,” he said in a thick Quebec accent.  “I’ve been in places that don’t even have whiskey, just a jug with a, you know,” he drew three Xs in the air with his finger, “one of those on it.  You’re lucky you can actually taste the whiskey.”

“I was looking for a classic hangover remedy,” Gordon said.  He swished it around with a Popsicle stick, a creative substitute for celery.  “It lost something in translation.”

“A Saskatchewan Breakfast, now dere’s a hangover remedy for you.  Half tomato juice and half a beer, throw some Tabasco in dere, fry up some Prairie Oysters on the side and you’ll be right as rain,” he said, his French accent fluctuating depending on choice of word.  “You from Ontario?”

“Nope, I’m from Winnipeg,” Gordon said.  He was pretty sure his uvula was twice its normal size, and talking hurt a lot; but it didn’t hurt as much as being mistaken for an Ontarian.  On a typical hangover-ridden day, Gordon would say that hanging out with people who are currently drunk was the worst thing he could do, but except for the accent, this one was speaking with moderate coherence.

“Ahh!  Manitobers!  You and I have one thing in common, then,” he said, “we both hate the hell outta Ontario.”  He let out another laugh, boisterous and genuinely contagious.  Gordon’s malaise rescinded a little.  “Keep an eye out for me?”

Gordon could smell the cigarette smoke wafting out from behind the Employees Only door.  “I think you’re safe,” he said, “Unless they have this place wired.”

“You never know,” the Quebecer said.  He leaned over the unattended bar and topped off his glass.  “Hey, you like Rush?”

“More than I like the Guess Who.”

The intercom at the airport information desk, which was actually a microphone hooked up to a portable guitar amplifier sitting on the counter of the information kiosk, buzzed to life.  Feedback crashed into the bar like a frat pub crawl, and a familiar voice elbowed Gordon in the face. “The storm has changed direction flights can resume now.  Remember to not leave your bags unattended.  And Passenger Gordon can meet his pilot in the airport bar and lounge.”

“Well, Allons’y!”

Gordon felt very sick, and very sick of air travel, when he finally put the pieces together.  It happened around the same time Ronald Fleurry turned his flannel jacket inside-out , turning it into a rightside-in pilot jacket with flannel lining.  “Hey!  Is dere a Gordon in the airport?”

Ronald Fleurry’s impossibly small four-seater airplane, like the final plane from the middle of all the other Russian doll airplanes, was the shortest trip of the day but also the most nerve-wracking.  Quickly after take-off, Gordon never wanted to fly again.  Right in the middle of take-off, his hatred of airplanes made air travel as abstract as food.  The entire idea of humans engaging in flight felt contrary to all logical reasoning.  He was struck dumbfounded at the physics behind this impossibility, and wanted nothing more than to jump out of the shotgun seat of this metal death chamber and take his chances at walking the rest of the way.  His life was in the hands of his pilot, who may or may not be drunk, while he flew at three hundred kilometres an hour over some sharp rocks and very cold bodies of water.

“You look about as pale as a polar bear in a snowstorm,” Ronald Fleurry said as he flicked switches right before take-off.  “It’s a joke.  You know why you cannot see the polar bear’s nose in a snowstorm, eh?”

He didn’t reply, and Ronald mistook that for giving up.

“Because the bear’s nose is buried in his balls.  No wait, it goes, never mind.  You look nervous, but you have nothing to worry about.  I can handle my liquor, and I’ve been flying longer than you have been doing your computer.  But let me tell you how lucky you are to be where you are.  Let me tell you, I’ve been living there since the beginning of everything, I got married up there, raised a son.  It’s the best place I’ve ever seen, you just gotta have the right way of looking at things.”

“Ronald, I’m gonna try to grab some shut-eye on this flight,” Gordon said, eyes already closed.  “Please don’t move my airsick bag.”

Gordon closed his eyes and fell into a nap or a small coma.  He dreamt about tobogganing, probably because of all the turbulence he slept through.  When he woke up, the plane dipping on its final descent, he clenched at his stomach and snapped back into his maladies.  If he didn’t die before arriving in Makpigat, Gordon wanted to go tobogganing.  The plane hit another air pocket and Gordon burped the taste of whiskey.  They dipped through a cloud and Gordon looked out the window in time to see the town materialize out of thin air.  Sunlight bounced off every corrugated metal rooftop and Gordon was blinded by the reflection off the only three-story building in town.  Covered more with glass than concrete and steel, it looked like a chandelier in a desert of sardine tins.

“Dere’s the Federal Building, you’ll be working dere.  You’re probably living in that house, and I’m right over there,” Ronald pointed, but Gordon could not see where he pointed.  “Over dere’s the docks.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“That’s cause the docks are still frozen over and covered in snow like most of everything else.  You’ll start to see more stuff in the summer.”

Streets sprouted off of the central square with the big Federal Building, each with identical rectangle houses in columns off the main laneways stretching away from the downtown core on an angle.  From above, the well-worn snowmobile tracks looked like the skeletal wings of a giant bird sketched with a dull pencil into the snow.  It wasn’t much but Gordon knew it was home for now and did his best to feel excited.

Right before the plane landed it shimmied weird and Ronald yanked on the controls.  Gordon’s face bonked the window, and he was unprepared for when the landing gear hit the ground hard.  The plane bounced and the upward shock acted as a catalyst for his stomach to finally get its act together and hand an eviction notice to last night’s food.

He didn’t want to throw up all over the inside of the plane of somebody who at least had better musical taste than the last pilot, who did get him there in one piece as promised, and who also could be his new neighbour.  He swallowed all the saliva he could muster and ran down the aisle to the door while the plane taxied down the runway.  He followed the three-step pictorial on how to open the door until the tears swelled up in his eyes.  Step one, pull handle out.  Step two, lift handle up.  Step three, push on door.  There was not a fourth step with a stick figure man who barfed out the door and watched it fall seven feet to the ground to steam up like a stir-fry, and there certainly wasn’t a step five where the stick figure man got dizzy and fell out of the plane before the stairs arrived, right into his own pile of frozen stick figure sick.  If those two extra steps were there on the inside of the door, though, Gordon got them both right.

“I’m okay!”  He got back to his feet quickly, to show how okay he was.  He didn’t even get any of it on his jacket, since it had frozen by the time he landed on it.  His headache had finally gone away, replaced with an extremely cold feeling, a numbness of his entire face and head.  It was cold.

A white blob of fur came into focus, and for a second Gordon thought he would be eaten by a polar bear the moment he stepped foot off the plane.  Instead it was just a man in a full-length parka made of polar bear fur, with a matching shock-white beard that didn’t quite cover up specks of permanent frostbite on the right cheek.

“Chimo!” he yelled over the still-roaring engines.  “I’m Tom Orville.  Welcome to my town.”

The first sight of Mayor Tom Orville brought back every childhood Christmas traumatic experience of the weird mall Santas with cigarette breath and a knee damp with the butt sweat of a million kids.   To Gordon, Tom was no cheery old patriarch who just wanted us to buy things adorned with his face, he was the real screaming deal, more like the frightening old-country Father Christmas who gave woodland berries and full hams to good children with barely enough Christ-like piety to hide the Paganism.  The results of a life lived Arctically showed in every thin white hair on his face and all the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes when he smiled.

“Thanks for having me,” Gordon said.  “I’m okay.  It’s a bit cold.”

Tom Orville slapped a furry hat over Gordon’s head.  “You better believe it’s cold out here.  Let’s get you inside before you get frostbite.  How did you get down from the plane?”

“Fell off it.  You didn’t see it?”

“I’m practically blind in my left eye without my glasses on, so can’t say I did.  Don’t feel like I’m judging you, I fell off a moving train once, in 1958.  Well, thrown off, same difference.  First of all, I’ve got good news and bad news for you.  When you’re working here, you can work at your own pace and your budget is practically unlimited.  And now for the good news,” he said.  “Just kidding.”

By the time Ronald caught up with them inside the hanger and away from the wind, Gordon had learned about his new snowmobile for transportation while in town, a placard with his name on it at his brand new work desk, and his fully-furnished, fully-detached, fully-modernized igloo.  “It’s just what we call them,” he explained.  “All the normal building materials instead of snow and ice, mind you.  We still like being reminded of home up here, although isn’t probably wasn’t negative thirty-five outside where you came from!”  Gordon didn’t laugh and Tom consulted a crumpled piece of notepaper that he produced from his pocket.  “I’m sorry, I forgot you’re from Winnipeg.”

Ronald walked into the hangar.  “Father Tundren, are you okay Gordo?  That was some fall.”  Gordon was already overloaded with information, and all he could do was nod that he was okay.

“Hey, Tom, I’m outta here, by the way.  My son came to pick me up.”

A surly teenager appeared from behind Ronald, hands in pockets and head half-hidden by the hood of his coat.  He rocked on his heels in Tom’s direction, acknowledging his presence in the room.  Tom waved at Ronald that it was okay as he explained to Gordon how the septic system worked.  Paper towel in the toilet was a capital-D Don’t.  Gordon waved at the kid.  The kid flipped Gordon off and walked away to start the snowmobile.

“Somebody else is excited to meet you!” Tom said.  “I can show you your new workspace now, if you want.  If you’re hungry, the coffee shop should still be open, and the general store’s probably still got a few roller hot-dogs.  Signup for the spring hockey league ended a week ago, but I’m sure we can squeeze you in somewhere if you like.  Oh jeez, I almost forgot!  Your best friend is here waiting for you too.”

“Eddie Rosenbaum is here?”

Tom bit down on the side of his glove and released his right hand.  He whistled with two fingers in his mouth, and in a flash a fuzzy bowling ball came rocketing out from the small terminal building, headed towards Tom’s feet, but broke stride and trotted over to investigate Gordon’s puke instead.

“Gordon, meet Nukiluk.  She’s fully housetrained, well, mostly housetrained.  Having dogs around isn’t as necessary as it was back when we started, but it’s a nice tradition to have, like when city police do crowd control on horseback.  You can always apply for more dogs, but you’ll need to ask Eileen for a form.  Isn’t that right, Nukiluk?”

“Arf,” Nukiluk agreed as she sniffed and licked at the frozen mess lodged in the packed snow.  She coughed: “Euech!”  It was cute.  She threw up a little bit, less cute, but a puppy could pull it off.

“Aww, she’s just like me,” Gordon said as a yawn crept up on him and stretched his words out.  “Even though I should probably stay up for an hour or so just in case I have a concussion.”

“You’ve probably had a long day, and here I am babbling away like I’m the only thing in the world.  We don’t get visitors every day around here.  It’s only four-thirty in the afternoon,” Tom said.  “The sun’ll be down in ten minutes.  We’ll save the tour for tomorrow then.”

It was pitch black by the Tom dropped Gordon off outside his new house, which bore some resemblance to the portable classrooms he had high school French classes in, the kind that made him yawn from remembering all the overhead projector lessons right after lunch.  Nukiluk was sandwiched between the two of them on Tom’s snowmobile.  She was happy to jump out of Gordon’s hands and even happier after she pissed on the front porch.  “Euech!”

Tom handed Gordon the key to his igloo and said his goodbyes as he kicked up snow down the street.  He put his signal on before he made a right turn at the stop sign.  Gordon unlocked his new home for the first time, booted the door to crack the icy build-up, tasted the stale air rush out.  Out of habit, Gordon checked the mailbox, and he found no mail or pizza delivery flyers but a small joint instead, a one-paper rolled with care and precision.

Gordon looked around; he saw nobody who could run up and identify the joint as theirs or give a clue to the whereabouts of its rightful owner.  He could think of no reason anyone would place a joint in his mailbox for malicious purposes, because he would have to be high already to come to that paranoid a conclusion.  He supposed it was a case of carelessness at worst.  When presented with the unexpected gift of a joint, he did what anybody would do.  He smoked it.

He explored his new igloo while he lit up, learning which light switch was the fan along the way.  It was a senior’s retirement bungalow in the worst retirement community in the world.  A tour could be conducted by standing in the middle of the living room and turning in a circle.  Bedroom bathroom, kitchen, TV, chairs, going counter-clockwise starting from the west.   It was clearly designed by committee to maximize utility, a place to put his stuff, less a place than a space with nothing to hate about it, but at the same time, perfect for nobody

Once he found the bedsheets, wrapped in a micron-thin dry cleaning bag to preserve the freshness from a long-ago laundering, he called it a night.  He kicked off his shoes and peeled his socks off with the opposite feet.  He lay in bed with everything else still on, too tired and high to try operating buttons or belt buckles.  He found the television remote and turned on the TV.  The CBC had some version of the news on, some reporter different from the two he could name off the top of his head.  The channels on either side of the CBC didn’t work.  He scrolled further down and couldn’t find another working TV station.  This was not mentioned in the pamphlet.

He had his shelter, clothing, food, and the knowledge that he would never be left wanting for the three, but Gordon came to the paranoid conclusion that he was going to die out here.  It felt like a place where death was instant and very possible with only one wrong move.  He could feel the weight of being buried in six feet of snow, heavy as dirt but bright enough to still see the smallest bit of sunlight.  Being suffocated under an avalanche was only one possibility.  Even if his death was not an astounding, odds-defying death like being mauled by animal or drowning in a puddle, his death would be cold.   Gordon got up and looked out his window for stability and a brief reality check; sometimes the pot can get to him and he knows this but allows the panic to race through him anyway.  Outside looked dark, colder than it looked, like being locked in a basement deep freezer, one that stretched into infinity.  He shivered, his teeth chattered.  He would figure out how to work the thermostat tomorrow.

Gordon put his socks back on and fell back into bed.  He slept for fourteen hours and when he woke up it was still dark outside.

Gordon sat and waited in the lobby outside of the office of a man powerful enough to have an entire lobby outside his office.  In his nine years of employment he had never known a federal government building to be this nice on the inside, which impressed and worried him at the same time.  The carpet had not charged him with enough static electricity to jump start his car battery.  The chair he was sitting in, upholstered in leather, had no gum stuck under the seat cushion, at least not until he deposited his flavourless piece there as soon as he was sure the stern-looking receptionist was not looking.  The copy of the Free Press on the coffee table was from that very morning, not like last Saturday’s paper collecting dust on the coffee table in his apartment.  There was real art on the walls, including one giant Group of Seven landscape taking up an entire wall, and a water cooler with both regular and extra-cold taps.  Gordon did not know why he was there.  He figured he could ask whoever he was there to see, but he didn’t know who that was either.  He became less calm.

He fiddled with his ugly tie and wondered why ties only became pleasant to look at when they cost more than he was willing to pay for them.  At least it covered up the coffee stain on his shirt.  His grey pants were notable for having a freshly-pressed crease down the side of each leg, even though he has never touched them with an iron.  He felt out of place in this lobby, which was bigger than his apartment, like he was an imposter to his own expectation, a man wearing sweatpants inside a fine jewellery shop.  If he was approached by a well-tailored man who asked him in a gentle whisper to leave the premises, he would have nodded and left without making a scene.  No one did, even when he accidentally slurped loudly from the side of his mug, not the flimsy conical paper cups shoved into a spring-loaded dispenser but a real mug.  He took advantage of this opulent water cooler right when he came in and went back for a refill ten minutes later.  Now he wanted a third, but he wondered if the receptionist noticed him drinking all that water before, and if she would relay that information to her boss.

Gordon first interrupted the privacy of the receptionist when he showed up for his job interview fifteen minutes early.  She had the air of a not-too strict Catholic upbringing, something Gordon trained himself to recognize early for the sake of time and pain.  Her eyes said she was well-read and icy.  Gordon thought about flirting with this imaginary version of the receptionist, but even in his head it didn’t go very well.  He was too antsy to develop a more fulfilling fantasy, so his eyes drifted over to the humongous Group of Seven landscape on the far wall.

Although he recognized that it was a Group of Seven, he knew nothing more about the Group of Seven.  He tried to remember any of their names and drew a blank even though he was pretty sure that there were really as many as eleven people in the Group at one time.  Gordon wished he knew more about them; he admired their works but found it difficult to tell the difference between the merely technically solid and true masters.  It was also how Gordon felt about soccer players.  Gordon knew more about the type of people who owned Group of Seven paintings, or at least thought he did, for more than his appreciation of art was his intense distrust of his own surroundings.  He needed more sleep, but another glass of water was the best his surroundings had to offer.

He ambled over to the other side of the room with the dual intentions of looking for the artist’s signature and sneaking a third mug of water while the receptionist’s head was turned.  He didn’t want to sabotage his chances at choosing what’s in the box, his mystery job, before the start of the game.  He had already filled out a hundred pages of personality tests and a thorough physical exam, with the lung capacity ball in a tube test, and the heartbeat sensor pads that had left two asymmetrical bare circles in the middle of his chest hair.  None of this was standard procedure when he was first hired by the federal government.  The amount of interest his employers had recently taken in his urine made him nervous.  He also had to phone his mom to ask for the maiden name of his grandmother, and that turned into fifteen minutes of listening to news about his brother and a reluctantly accepted and invitation to Friday dinner.  Hadn’t this screening process tortured him enough?  He briefly considered bailing on this bad scene altogether.

After all, this interview was just an address and time in his work e-mail account.  The e-mail was sent from an account named Admin Govt.  It would surprise him a lot if Admin Govt was the real name of the interviewer.  He put up with the secrecy after he asked his boss whether or not he knew anything about this and he hadn’t heard anything, meaning it was much better than both their jobs.  Even after the physical continued into Gordon’s lunch hour and he had done so much treadmill running that he could almost see the dangling carrot of a possibly amazing new job in front of him as he ran in place.  Whatever job it was, it demanded a lot of extra-curricular work from IT specialists.

He jumped when the phone on the receptionist’s desk broke the silence.  She answered the receiver with lightning reflexes and didn’t say a word before hanging up.  “You can go into the Brigadier-General’s office now.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Did you not catch that?  The Brigadier-General is ready for you.”

“No, I heard you,” Gordon wiped up the condensation left by his coffee mug on the finished wood surface with his shirt cuff before she could get to it.  He smiled politely and continued.  “Why am I being interviewed by a Brigadier-General?”

“He was promoted from Colonel last year, in January.”

“I don’t understand why the military wants a programmer.  I only applied for this job posting because it sounded interesting, then you made me fill out all those forms, and run in place and pee in a cup, and all I’m asking for is a little heads up on what’s behind that door.”

The secretary sighed and went back to typing.  “One, I don’t know why you’re here either.  When things are top secret like this job interview is top secret, it’s usually best when the parties in question, in this case you and the Brigadier-General, don’t tell anyone.  Two, his time is very valuable, and right now you are wasting it.  And three, I did not make you pee in a cup.  I do not deal with pee, at all, your pee is a whole other department.  So don’t ask me again.  Your pee is none of my business.”

“This isn’t an ambush, is it?  Tell me why you took my pee.”

“You can go into his office, now,” she used the electric pencil sharpener for punctuation.

“He didn’t even come in the door,” Gordon said.

“He uses a different entrance.  Please get in there, right now.”

Gordon approached the double doors with caution, unsure of which handle to try.

The receptionist read his mind and said, “The door on your right.”  The sound of typing filled the lobby and drowned out Gordon’s mumbled words of thanks.

Upon entering the Brigadier-General’s office and spying no other door in the room, he looked at the likely candidates for entrances to possible secret passageways.  Two bookcases on opposite sides of the room were the classic choices, with a yank on a certain book the whole thing could spin into the wall leaving the room minus a bookcase but up one fireplace.  That was too easy, of course, but he was left with few other options.  There were no giant one-way mirrors, or any fireplaces, or floor-to-ceiling paintings, just small framed pieces, maybe Group of Seven, bookshelves, and a large rug that Gordon suspected had a trap door under it.  There was a chair for visitors, wooden and unpadded, surely designed to be uncomfortable.  The imposing silhouette of the Brigadier-General sat behind his proportionally massive desk, backlit against the only window in the room.  He didn’t cast a shadow, he eclipsed the sun.

“Have a seat, son,” he said, a voice that shook the paintings crooked and turned Gordon’s stomach, too full of water.  He was a man in clear violation of mandatory retirement rules, but nobody would tell him to retire for the wholly legitimate fear of being defenestrated or disembowelled for their insolence.  He looked like he wrestled lions on the weekends to stay fit for his Monday night sparring sessions with silverback gorillas.  His human body was just the beta version for a future bronze statue in his likeness.  His shoulders were wide enough for half a dozen pigeons, each.

Since waking up ninety minutes ago, Gordon had two cups of water and coffee each.  His nerves pushed all that liquid through his system in record time, and he started to squirm in his seat.  He had ten minutes tops before a bathroom break.  Those hopes were dashed when the Brigadier-General produced a file folder stuffed to burst with paper in three different colours and annotated with at least five different colours of sticky notes.  The Brigadier-General flipped to the first page marked with translucent purple arrows and nodded.  “Some weather we’re having, huh,” he said, not looking up.

Outside, waves of snowflakes ran laps around office buildings and dinged off the window like bugs on a windshield.  This was all typical of a March morning in Winnipeg, a terrible city all year to be sure, but one that gets extra depressing in winter.  As soon as it gets too cold for mosquitoes, and the Prairie winds get real fierce, Winnipeg becomes a de facto hell-frozen-over.  The only thing he dreaded more than the interview itself was the walk back to his car across Portage and Main, scientifically documented by the government as the windiest intersection in all of Canada.  When he was nine, he swears the wind picked him up and moved him a foot and a half to the right, dropping him on the street and into oncoming traffic.  Now every time he crosses that intersection he darts full-speed across and hurdle jumps over the snow bank on the other side.  On the off chance that he slips and performs a vaudeville pratfall for his street corner audience, it’s too cold to laugh, because a deep breath of air is guaranteed to freeze the back of the throat and start a coughing fit.  Heaven help those who don’t plug their car heaters in at night.  Everybody is sore from shovelling out their driveways and tired from arriving at work when it’s still dark and leaving when just getting dark again, they all just mope and trudge through the snow like they’re on thought control pills in a futuristic dystopia movie, before masked vigilante gets around to defeating fascism by smashing all the TV screens.

“Yea, Winter in Winnipeg,” Gordon said.  He couldn’t tell if this was an off-hand comment or the start of the job interview.  If it was, he wished he had elaborated.

“So you’re pretty good with computers, eh?”

That was as vague as an interview question got, so Gordon decided to recite straight from the cover letter to his résumé.  “I know how to code for HTML, XML, a bunch of other languages you’re probably not interested in, but I assure you, I know my networks too.  I like to think I don’t just make computer programs, I build solutions.  I helped set up my building’s Intranet a few years back but that system got abandoned halfway through, actually, but after that I did some tinkering with the subnets over at-”

“Don’t bother,” the Brigadier-General waved the answer off.  “I don’t know a damn thing about computers, I let my grandkids figure it out for me.  Hate it when my kids hand the phone to the little brats.  I can hear them rolling their eyes through the damn phone line.”

Gordon thought his interviewer was starting to loosen up, so he slouched in his seat, an easy task when his seat had less friction than a wet Crocodile Mile.  “Kids these days.”

“Fucking kids talk down to me about the damn machines like they figured out how to make Helen Keller stop biting people.  I’m sorry I’m never learned how to forward an e-mail account, kids, by the way, how are the German lessons going?  What’s that, you’re not learning German in school?  You’re fucking welcome,” he sighed.  “Damn things give them all the attention span of houseflies.  They can’t see anything through to the end anymore.  But hey, not all of us can kill a man with two thumbs and a ring finger.”

Gordon sat straight up again.  “Can you really?”

“I lost my wedding ring twice that way,” he said.  “What’s the time, by the way?  Is it ten yet?  You want a scotch?  It’s Canadian, but at least it’s aged.”  The Brigadier-General didn’t wait for his answer and pulled two glasses from his desk drawer.

Drinking before noon was only something Gordon only did on Sundays.  Maybe he had to accept it, or maybe that rule doesn’t apply to civilians.  He decided he did not want to end up on the wrong end of the man’s ring finger.  He could smell the scotch the moment the bottle was cracked, and it made a shiver run through him.

The Brigadier-General handed him his glass.  “Your pee is clean, in case you were wondering.  Well, clean for the stuff we check for.”

“What kind of stuff don’t you check for?”

“Ice?  For the scotch?”  Gordon waved the offer off.  “Good man.  By the way, what’s your running long jump like?”

“I can make it over the snowbank on the curb outside,” Gordon said as he took a sip.  He coughed loudly, harshly, and tasted his own phlegm, still burning from the drink.

“That’s more of a high jump,” he said, making a note on a page with a translucent green plastic sticky.  He tipped his glass back and downed it without pulling whiskey face.  “Ever do any archival work?”

“I helped digitize and catalogue some Group of Seven stuff when I temped at the gallery.  I was just admiring the,” Gordon trailed off and gestured in the direction of the lobby.

“The Lawren Harris in the lobby,” he finished Gordon’s thought.  “Damn good painter.  Kept at it ‘til his ticker went bust.”  He tapped his own chest with one finger.  It made a dull thump that could have been a Kevlar vest, if Gordon hadn’t already supposed that the Brigadier-General had been born bulletproof.  “Next question, describe in detail any family history of schizophrenia.  Try to keep it under fifty words, I’ve only got three lines on the sheet here.”

Gordon  fidgeted in his seat.  Soon he’d be dancing in place just to hold it in.  He would have to run out into the lobby when this was all over and hope the receptionist was good at giving directions.  “None.  Look, I’m just going to go-”

“You’re not to type who likes getting the run-around.  I can see you’ve had just about enough, so I’ll cut maybe ninety percent of the bull straight out from here on out.  We just needed to assess if you were the right man for the job.  The post comes with unique physical and psychological challenges in a harsh and inhospitable environment.”

“Sounds like high school,” Gordon said.  He was standing up to a man who could undoubtedly kick his ass across the country in a cross-country marathon of ass-kicking.  All he knew was he needed to pee very badly, the symptoms were growing exponentially harder to ignore by the minute, and his interviewer had been giving him the run-around since he stepped foot into his Bond villain lair of an office.  Every reply from here on out would be direct and short, just like when the cops asked him  questions through the car window at a Checkstop program.

“You ever been up North?  We have a little town up in the territories that needs some work done, setting up the Internet and whatnot.  I can tell you that it’s cold as shit and they don’t get cable, but you get to ride a snowmobile to work in the winter, and all the seals you can club.  Order anything you need and it gets sent by priority mail.  I’m pretty sure they got a whole damn squad of computer geeks like you up there already, you’d fit in fine talking about your video games and dragon books, that sort of thing.  Of course, the government pays for the move, most of the cost of living, you’re won’t be on the hook for four dollar instant noodle bowls.  Your savings grow, you get to have an impressive sounding job title, and you get to work in one of the most special places on Earth.  I’m serious, Gordon.  There’s really nothing like it.  All you have to do is say yes and sign some confidentiality papers, and it’s a done deal.  It’s an easy decision.  The only caveat is the strict confidentiality.  As far as anyone outside of this room knows, this town, and your new job, they don’t exist.”

“What if I’d rather stay at my job now, in Winnipeg?”

“Both you and I know that nobody in the history of mankind has ever wanted to stay in Winnipeg.  Look son, I’m not some used-car dealer with a shit-eating grin come to sell you some rust bucket.”

Gordon braced for the inevitable discussion about undercoating.

“I know you’re going to accept the offer,” the Brigadier-General said, convincing because he has not broken eye contact with Gordon for the whole interview.  It’s like sonar reading Braille but the man has mastered it, and he believes everything he reads.  Gordon was going to say yes, of course.  That was the worst part, that he was right.  “Even before you said yes, you said yes.  Everything in this folder I have here points to you saying yes.  Your job history, your test scores, the notes the doctors made on your hospital chart when you got hit in the head with a stick on the playground in the winter of 1981 and needed three stitches.  Most people say yes as soon as we get to the part where the government flips the bill.  Of course, if you don’t say yes, we can forge your signature, put a burlap sack over your head, and next thing you know, you’re kicked out of an airplane, somebody tugs your parachute cord, and the story ends the same way.”

Then the Brigadier-General laughed like a burst of machine gun fire, quick and suppressive.   “I had you there for a second.  But the job is real, son.  All I need is to hear you say it.”

“Yes,” Gordon said.  “Let’s get going.”

“Well, you made the right choice!  You’ll love it in Makpigat.  I haven’t been up there in years.  Fucking freezing there.  You’ll be ready for it, though, after living in this hellhole all your life.  Another whiskey?”

“No thanks.  Gotta go.”

“Say hello to Tom for me when you get there.  And don’t forget to carry some rocks in your pocket, to throw at those goddamned dogs,” the Brigadier-General said.  He gave Gordon a bone-crunching handshake from across the desk.  “Thank you, Gordon, for doing this the easy way.”

Gordon fled the room and danced in place, leaning on the receptionist’s desk as she handed him form after form, each with little red sticky notes where he had to sign.  She would not confirm that the secret entrance was behind the bookshelf on the left, even when Gordon said, “Come on, it’s so obvious.”  She just clicked the back of a pen and handed it to Gordon, who skimmed and initialled the bottom of his confidentiality form and flipped it over onto the completed pile along with all the others.

She swiped her pen back and said, “Any questions?”

“Washroom?”

“Down the hall to the right,” she said.  “But you won’t make it, and you don’t actually have to go.  The extreme sensation of the need to relieve bladder contents is just one of the onset symptoms.  You’re gonna wake up tired, but some potassium will clear the clouds.”

“I knew you did something to my pee.”

And the next thing Gordon remembered was waking up in a nice (but budget-conscious) hotel room with a thumping headache and a fruit basket sitting on the desk.  The typewritten card stapled to the cellophane wrap told him to eat the bananas first, for the potassium.  PS: The drugs were in the water cooler.  The mugs must get everybody.  Gordon was pissed, as if everyone else paid attention during the Don’t Drink The Water lecture on the first day of spy school.  Another crazier part of him liked the secrecy, embraced the emboldening idea that acts of manifest destiny had converted into his good luck.  It was a crazy, stupid thought to have, maybe a side-effect of the knock-out drug, a feeling that would pass like the dizziness every time he stood up.

His schedule for the next week had been printed out on the hotel letterhead and placed in an envelope on the bed, a combination of basic survival training classes, arranging for the shipping of his personal items, his family dinner on Friday that he knows he can’t weasel out of now that it appeared on the schedule, and one last night as a free man in the provinces before leaving for his two year-long contract job “building solutions” in Makpigat, Nunavut.

This might even turn out to be a good idea.

A Prologue Regarding the Formation and Foundation of Makpigat, Nunavut, Canada

Makpigat is a place that does not exist.  If you look it up on a map, it will not be there.  Even if you tried to find it, you wouldn’t know where to start.  If you asked an Inuit to take you to Makpigat, he would laugh at you and say there is no such place, or he might take you to a library.  No book off the shelves will help you find Makpigat either, although one might teach you that your troublesome and unpronounceable word actually means ‘book’ in a dead language, and your Inuit guide was accidentally correct.  Despite the translation, you’d be hard pressed to find mention of the town outside of your current reading material.  It would probably be easier, albeit not by much, to find the town itself.   Only a lucky few of the most intrepid of outsiders have ever found the place, and even then it was mostly by accident.  All things considered, your odds of getting there are better than reading about it.

The canonical history of Canada’s Arctic makes no mention of the town.  No ethnographic report exists on the indigenous Esquimeaux, engaged in a life of noble savagery until the Hudson’s Bay Company introduced capitalism, and casual cultural obliteration.  This is mainly because unlike most other Canadian Arctic settlements, Makpigat has no people that qualify as Inuit.  Also, it was built from the ground up in eight days in 1984, which was long after the Hudson’s Bay Company had moved on to equally unsettling ‘Scratch & Save’ weekend sales.  The town holds about three hundred lucky Canadians drawn from every non-Inuit demographic division, all of whom are under the employment of the federal government, and all of whom are embargoed from talking about the place they call home.

Losing an entire town can be done without much effort in a place as big as Nunavut, just like a couple of million can slip through the cracks in the quarter-billion dollar annual budget that Ottawa gives to the territory.  The federal government not only skims off the top for Makpigat, but provides further research grants and subsidies, not to mention flipping the bill for resident relocation, annual salaries, and an entire department in the Federal Building devoted to creative accounting solutions, all at the great expense of the Canadian taxpayer.  Unsurprisingly, no published biography of any noteworthy political figure has claimed any credit for anything to do with it.  If anyone did, no one noteworthy was reading their biographies.

Someone had to have dreamt it up in the backrooms of Ottawa, most likely a shady dealmaker, the smoothest operator in a shadow cabinet so secretive that to the entrance to their backroom is inside another backroom, which is located inside a whole other backroom at the end of an especially meandering hallway in the labyrinthine corridors of power.  It’s hard to say if any Prime Minister was in the know, and even harder to pick which Prime Minister to ask first.  Canadian legislature has a tendency to bounce between the fuddle-duddles of the House of Commons and the old Liberals waiting to die in the Senate for so long that by the time the motion is carried, neither have a clue what they’re signing off on.  The idea could have been in development for up to a decade before becoming a fiscal reality.  Aside from a few high-ranking officials who are shadowy enough to navigate through the labyrinthine back corridors with their eyes shut, however, both the town and the backroom where it was conceived remain well-kept secrets.

As for the significance behind the name, there is none.  It’s hardly ever used in conversation and there is little demand for signage.  Down by the dockyards there is a sign for when Her Royal Majesty’s Decommissioned CCGS Northern Light Icebreaker makes her annual visit, but it says Welcome to Ikuligaarjuk.  The same name is written on the maps issued to the ship’s crew, and no one has ever bothered to check another map for the real location of Ikuligaarjuk.  The name sprung from the Inuit-English translation guide that Makpigat’s first mayor Tom Orville brought with him.  There were no Inuit in Makpigat when he arrived, so he never bothered to learn the language, but the town wanted to have a name that sounded Inuit enough.  Tom closed his eyes and flipped through the book and dropped his finger at random on Makpigat.  Only years later, when the school began teaching Inuktitut classes to the grade fours, did he learn that his translation guide was probably written based on research from a Victorian-era expedition.  The word was either dead, lost with the dialect of one of many tribes who have disappeared over the last century, or just mistranslated by an English buffoon.

There are many reasons for the town to exist, and even more reasons for wanting to keep it hidden from all but a statistically insignificant population.  In fact, only one written mention of Makpigat is rumoured to exist somewhere near the bottom of an official federal government document, somewhere in the middle of only copy of a six-hundred and ninety page binder, somewhere inside the Parliamentary Library.  Because certain laws demand some resemblance of transparency from the government, the binder must be available to the public at all times, but no one has ever found it.  A librarian, who has never once opened the binder himself, is charged with misplacing it on a different shelf in the library once a fortnight.  For treasure hunters, it is rumoured that this librarian stands at six foot five.  Your best bet is to look up.

For something non-existent, it sure is beautiful.  The Makpigat Hills roll off to the west and northwest, but from town they’re barely visible, hidden just over the near-perfect, almost uninterrupted horizon.  The southern shore of Makpigat Bay is a rocky beach suitable for a National Geographic cover, where walruses frequently gather for mating and to be killed and eaten.  The water is chilly when it is not completely frozen over.  If it weren’t for the northern perimeter of Soviet Missile Early Detection Defence System sites (SMEDDSs) sticking out of the ground to the north like satellite dish cornstalks, the landscape would be picture perfect, overlooking the other catch that every photograph taken in town is classified as a top secret document.

The first of these photos was taken nineteen and a half years ago, on a Thursday evening.  It is still bright as daytime in the shot, however, since it was taken on the last day of the midnight sun, and on the last day of the first phase of construction.  Forty-eight people and sixteen Canadian Inuit Dogs had officially broke ground on the project, and all of these people and most of these dogs made it into the photo, exhausted but smiling, proud of their many accomplishments, squinting into the sun and into their own shared future.  Once they built a darkroom several months later in construction phase three, the photo hung in the centre of the wall of photos in Mayor Tom Orville’s office for his entire tenure.  Tom was front and centre in the photo, forty-four at the time and the oldest man there by a handful and a couple of years.  All his friends are there, and even though his eyesight is starting to fail him he can still put names to all the faces.  They’ve all gotten a bit older in the new photo, but it’s strange how they still look exactly the same to him today.  Two decades can fly by when you’re having fun.

Christmastime had rolled around once again and caught Tom off-guard, but the plastic Christmas trees had once again been removed from the warehouse, dusted off, and strewn about the Federal Building right on time, the second Monday after the first Wednesday of December.  It was three months since his resignation, enough time for the necessary transition arrangements to be made and codified.  For the first time, Tom took the photo down from the wall.  The wall behind it was a rectangle of vivid colour in contrast with the sun-and-time faded paint on the exposed parts of the wall.  He ran a finger across the top, bulldozing a mound of dust off the ledge and onto the carpet.  He pried and fussed with the back of the picture frame until he popped it open with a loud snap.  The cold does not help his arthritis.  He muttered a curse at his own fingers, and picked at the corner of the old photo until it unstuck from the glass.

There’s a new group photo now, just developed yesterday but taken a few months ago on the same day Tom announced his retirement.  Most of Tom’s old friends are still there in the new photo, but now many are towered over by their children, who are all old enough to remind him of how their parents looked back in the day.  For nineteen years he’s shared in their successes and bore witness to their failures, and not a day goes by that he isn’t grateful for the ever-loving trust they have in him.  He was elected Mayor on the first day of construction by a vote of 39-9, his only opponent being Nuk-Nuk, his government-gifted Canadian Inuit Dog.  Tom voted for his opponent, as did several others who could care less about a civic duty they had never bothered to exercise before.  The plain truth is that nobody else wanted to be Mayor, they all had their own goals and duties to busy themselves with, and Tom never interfered with their work.  It could even be said that Tom had never actually done any real work at Mayor of Makpigat in nineteen and a half years, not that he can be faulted for it.

He placed his old picture in a file folder and tossed it onto his desk for filing later.  He sat down to put the new picture into the frame and became distracted by his more recent representation.  He would not have thought so a decade ago, but now he looked so much older than everybody else.  He stood in the front row still but off-centre this time, relegated one to the left of the middle spot reserved for a computer software engineer named Gordon, who was going to be Makpigat’s second mayor as of the minute after midnight on the first of January.  In the nine months since Gordon arrived in town, he built a new way of life with circuitry and code much like a modern-day paediatrician delivers a baby: with a lot of planning that amounted to nothing, too many people watching, some screaming, a few moments of mild hysteria, a handful of carefully selected drugs, and just a little bit of blood.

Tom knew it was all the experience his successor needed.