2.
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 21st 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.
