Fata Morgana

Lindsay Starck
| Fiction

 

Later that night, Sam calls Lizzie through an Internet application. He wants to tell her about the supposed polar bear sighting, but the connection is fuzzy and she’s got other things to say to him.
“You know that you’re not really an explorer, Sam,” she says, her voice fading in and out. “You’re a coward.”
“Oh yeah?” Sam tries to remain calm. What she wants is to needle him into anger or guilt. “What am I so afraid of?”
“Coming back here,” she snarls. Then she pauses, and he knows that she, too, is counting her breaths. They’d learned the technique from the shared family therapist: an owl-eyed, older woman in a plush, dark office that smelled of apple candles. She’d explained how rage can be passed through genes like hair color or height. How anger can be inherited.
Sam waits. When Lizzie speaks again, her tone is gentler, quieter, almost pleading, and he finds himself leaning toward the screen. “He can’t do any harm now, Sam,” she says. “He’s too old.”
For a few seconds, Sam casts desperately about for words. But then his father calls out from the background, the voice tinny and distant, thousands of miles away, and Lizzie has to go. Sam pictures the worst: his father crumpled on the floor, having fallen from his chair; purple bruises seeping across skin as fragile as tissue paper. He knows his father will ask Lizzie where he is. Has she told him that Sam will be there soon?

 

Over the course of their five days in the Antarctic, nearly everyone in the group reports seeing a polar bear. The sightings proliferate like bacteria, excitement spreading like a disease. When Sam asks for photographic evidence, they remind him that they haven’t been able to charge their phones or their cameras. Sam shivers in his parka and claps his mittened hands together and wishes he could remember more about the psychology of group delusions. What were the names he’d had to memorize in his cognitive science class in college? Folie à deux. That was one of them. Emotional contagion. He spends hours pacing around the rookery and gazing at the penguins.
On their final morning, the group paddles a fleet of neon-green kayaks across the strait to Béchervaise and then they disperse across the island, ignoring Sam’s attempts to keep them all together. This time, to his relief, they return to the kayaks on time. But his good mood evaporates when several of them begin describing, in fervent detail, where and when they spotted the great shaggy white beast. One time she was stretched out, sunning, on the edge of an ice floe; at another moment, she was pacing the perimeter of the penguin colony. They paint such a vivid portrait—the mournful black eyes; the white fur stained yellow, caked with mud; the scent of fish and salt and fresh snow—that for a minute even Sam can see the bear.
He squeezes his eyes shut and opens them again. He’s spent most of the week feigning indifference to their claims, but now he can’t take it anymore. Right there on the shore, standing between the kayaks with the icy water lapping at his boots, Sam informs them that they’ve all been duped by the Fata Morgana.
“I’ve read about those mirages, too,” the novelist announces. She has become the de facto spokesperson. “But here’s the thing. The light refracts images of objects that are already there. So you see a ship turned upside down, or a mountain range that’s been shifted. They’re not pure inventions.”
Sam pauses, disarmed. “That’s not quite true,” he says, without knowing whether it is or isn’t. Perry hadn’t gone into the specifics. “But,” he adds, grateful that he’s got another card to play, “mirages aside, polar bears never lived in Antarctica. They’re Arctic animals. Even if they still existed, somewhere in the wild, we are literally as far as we could possibly be from where they are.”
At this, one of the retired professors raises his hand. “I’m sorry,” he says, not looking very sorry at all. “Technically, you’re right about the Arctic/Antarctic distinction. But in the final years of the polar bears’ existence—”
Alleged final years,” the novelist interjects.
“—a group of Canadian conservationists lobbied for the transferral of the bears from the Arctic to the Antarctic. It was argued that the polar ice hadn’t receded as quickly down here. There was plenty to eat. Lots of space. They applied for government funding, and they were granted enough to move six adult bears. Three males and three females.”
Sam swallows. How had he forgotten this? His father had tracked and printed every single update, affixed the pages to the fridge.
“And?” someone asks from the back of the group. “What happened?”
In the brief silence that follows, Sam finds himself straining to hear the answer.
“Well—” Here, the professor looks a little embarrassed. “It didn’t work.”
Sam straightens up, shakes his head. Of course it didn’t. He knew that. What is wrong with him? Before anyone can say anything else, he instructs them to check their lifejackets and climb into their kayaks. Back on the water, he hangs at the rear of the group, paddling between chunks of ice and ducking his head to avoid the worst of the sea wind. Every now and again he glances over his shoulder at the island floating hushed and sharp beneath a sloping white sky.
He’s startled by a voice to his left. “We’re too far away, man,” one of the college students says. “You won’t be able to see one now.”
Sam doesn’t reply. He paddles harder, but the college student keeps up.
“You ever heard of the Many-Worlds theory?” the kid asks. Despite his better judgment, Sam engages. “What’s that?” “Branching universes. Infinite possible outcomes, all of them realized on their own timelines, in their own worlds.” The kid shrugs. His voice is muffled by his scarf. “Basically, it means that things turned out differently somewhere else.”
Suddenly Sam wants to feel the porcupine between his lungs. He aches for that rush of heat, of purpose. The kid paddles faster, outstripping him, while the water froths white as vanilla ice cream. He waits until the college student is several lengths ahead of him before he speaks again. “All the polar bears are gone,” he says. He’s repeated the phrase so many times over so many days that it’s begun to sound strange to his numb ears.
What’s been done can’t be undone, he reminds himself as the kayak slides between rafts of ice. That’s how history works.

 

Lindsay Starck is a writer, editor, and English professor. Her fiction has recently appeared in AGNI, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere, and her new Slenderman-inspired novel is forthcoming from Vintage/Anchor Books. She likes to stroll around the Minneapolis lakes with her husband and her very good dog, Cedar.

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