Prologue
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.
