When Sam’s parents had taken him to see the last remaining polar bear, they’d sweated in line for hours. Lizzie had been there, too. In the parking lot their father had slapped sunscreen on their arms and faces distractedly, eyeing the mob at the ticket booth while Sam tried not to flinch at his touch. After only an hour in the sun, the cream was already melting down his skin. He shifted on his sneakered feet, squashing anthills beneath his toes until his sister noticed and yelled at him to stop. His mother doled out pretzel sticks to restore the peace. The crowd outside the enclosure was lively and loud, but once the line snaked inside, everybody hushed.
The same thing had happened when Sam had come on a field trip with his fourth-grade class two weeks earlier. As they descended into the manmade cave, his classmates and his teachers had gone silent. What was it about this place that snatched people’s words away? Sam couldn’t figure it out. He was gripped by the sudden urge to shout something, to fill up that stinking cave with noise, but instead he inched along behind Lizzie, trailing his fingertips over a bumpy wall that was sticky with gray paint and humidity. Every few steps, his hand hit a peeling information placard. The lighting was too poor to read the words, but nobody seemed to care. They’d been following the polar bear news online, listening to all the podcasts and watching all the documentaries, for many months now. What could the placards possibly tell them that they didn’t already know
Even Sam could recite the facts. He’d aced the quiz his teacher had assigned after the field trip and brought it home in an attempt to impress his father. White fur, black skin. Front paws shaped like paddles, like oars. A thick stripe of fat underneath. A diet of seals, sometimes whales. The vanishing ice in the Arctic. The last hundred bears, the final fifty. Twenty, ten. And now just Elsa, named for a cartoon ice queen, floating on her back in her tank right there in front of them. Though she lay perfectly still, the water rippling through her fur reminded Sam of the living coral reefs they’d studied in science class. Every one of Elsa’s coarse white hairs seemed to be dancing, waltzing with the current, like the brightly-colored polyps that were now, too, perilously rare.
Thirty years later, Sam is surprised by how frequently this memory surfaces. The cold-weather bear suspended in a lukewarm pool, the blue light of the tank glowing on the faces of everybody watching her—these ghostly images rise up in him again and again when he’s shuttling tourists around foreign cities, or when he’s watering the plants in his balcony garden, or even when he’s fighting with Lizzie. She calls him weekly from their parents’ place along the shores of Lake Superior, and every conversation is exactly like the one before.
“They never stop asking for you,” she tells him for the thousandth time. “You’re basically the shittiest son on the planet.”
Sam pictures his parents, knobby and bent, shuffling through the house that he grew up in. For the past two years his father’s memory has been flickering like a field of fireflies. Not that Sam himself has ever seen fireflies in the wild. No one under 40 has. He remembers how his father used to tell stories about capturing them in Mason jars and using them to light up his bedroom at night. As a kid, Sam had assumed that his father was making things up. He filed fireflies into the same category of creature as dragons, fairies, and trolls. But he knew better than to contradict his father, and so he pretended to believe him.
“Sam! Earth to Sam!” his sister says, as if the two of them were kids again. “Did you hear me? They can’t stay in that house anymore. I’ve scheduled movers for the first of next month, so find a way to get your ass out here. And don’t fucking tell me that you’ll be touring then. I don’t give a shit.”
He recognizes her anger and feels it, too: the burrowing of a hot porcupine between his lungs, sharp and searing, simultaneously part of his body and separate from it. He takes a few long, slow breaths until the porcupine relaxes and the words come more easily. “I’m leaving the country tomorrow morning,” he says. “I have to go pack.”
Lizzie snorts. “Where is it this time? The last patch of ice in the Alps? The last lion pride of the savannah? The last monarch butterfly in Mexico?”
Sam tenses. The year before, he’d spent several months following the migration route of a group of monarchs that were, indeed, rumored to be the last of their kind. He’d driven a bus of weepy lepidopterists from New York to Mexico, all of them blowing their noses into old-fashioned handkerchiefs and pressing their foreheads to the windows to catch glimpses of flickering orange wings. Finally they’d found themselves nestled deep in the Sierra Madre mountain range, standing in a tiny copse of oyamel firs, watching the butterflies—thirty, forty of them at most—alight on branches that used to hold thousands.
“Adélie penguins,” he says. “Antarctica.”