The passing of time had no real logic. The clock on the mantle had not been working and yet it occasionally chimed which was a bit unnerving. I took long walks to clear my head that at times seemed to be spinning. I stayed grounded by revisiting favorite places: coffee at the Zoo Cafe, dinner at the Einstein, roaming the expansive though empty Dorotheenstadt Cemetery where Bertolt Brecht was laid to rest. Happily the dual angels at the cemeteries entrance that I had photographed some years back were still there. They did not suffer the mysterious fate of Our Lady of the Urban Fields who did not reappear as I had hoped. The angels remained, solemn and beautiful.
I awaited instructions from the Secretary, consisting of various reading, homework assignments and mental exercises. In the evenings I studied the materials left for me at the front desk or slipped under my door. Other than a monograph on Peter Kropotkin, most of the missives were focused on the young scientist. I all but memorized his vital statistics, research notes and recent itinerary, but the most intriguing were a number of pamphlets he had independently published, data-centric peppered with poetic regression. The more I read them the more familiar I became with his peculiar phraseology and the closer I felt to his frame of mind. He seemed a disenchanted poet-scientist, a pantheist haunted by visions of the end of the natural world. I was reminded of the abstract phrases written in blue on the back endpaper of the copy of Journey to the East given to me by the Secretary. These were not in her hand. I was certain he had written them.
He covered himself in glory. He rolled about in fields of glory. Yet still the idea was but an idea, a ghost, a ghost of an idea, concrete yet not an idea still an idea…
I found myself waking drenched in his visual vocabulary. I saw living things encased in cubes of ice spilling from the bottom of a glass then lifting into a hologram like space. Explanations and equations were scrawled on massive chalkboards in a mad attempt to preserve what was about to be extinguished- an unfathomable number of species. Bewildered polar bears drowning. Nightingales, jackrabbits, coyotes, low flying hawks and prehistoric trees all in the path of approaching flame. I recorded my dreams, studied, and occasionally took out the small white box containing the Emperor’s whistle, resisting the temptation to open the lid.
I wondered what the young scientist was seeking when he disappeared. I did not see him in my dreams amongst the floating cubes, but I thought of him endlessly, so much so that I sometimes could hear him wailing. I closed my eyes and saw a snow leopard caught up by a benevolent hand and encased in a protective cube that expanded and spun its way into a cosmic storage space. Perhaps the young scientist desired to be scooped up as well, so to await the rebirth of the New World- the kingdom of ice-as referred to in his notes.
I pictured him on his last venture to inner Siberia, measuring the same permafrost that had so troubled Kropotkin a century before. It is certain he recognized that humankind exists on the cusp of unspeakable change. After sending alarming dispatches he vanished within the vast terrain of the melting tundra. I imagined him wandering like the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein within the same Arctic frame. Perhaps they met up and recognized something of themselves in each other. Perhaps they met a whole slew of wanderers, the Thing, Alfred Wegener’s Inuit guide, or some of Shackleton’s lost tribe.
In the hotel library I found a copy of Mary Shelly’s masterpiece Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus. Flipping to the terrible end in the breaking ice it occurred to me that in James Whale’s beloved interpretation of Frankenstein there is no ice. There is marsh and wildflowers. The Monster picks them with a little girl whose body is later found in the shallows. But not a trace of ice can be found, as if melted in the heat generated by Whale’s genius.
What was it that drew the young Mary Shelley in her flounced skirts alone in her study with sheets of fool’s cap lit by candlelight to the farthest north? What drew this young girl, locked in a room in an Italian villa beneath a golden moon, to the cold blue regions of her arctic imagination?
Perhaps it was the same strange longing that drew the young scientist to a region so inhospitable that only a loveless monster could dwell with some measure of comfort. I again closed my eyes and concentrated on him, as the Secretary had instructed. Where are you? I whispered. After several tries I saw him, if only for an instant, in tryptic fashion. First with scientific fervor, second with visionary vigor, and lastly with immeasurable sorrow. I saw him with his sack and solid boot tramping an impossible terrain, sprouting wings felt but not seen.
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