This Time, I Walk

A lucky consequence of the pandemic is that, staying mostly home now, I have more time for my fiction writing. As The Providence Journal’s health reporter, I remain on the coronavirus strike team -- but after (and before) those long days, and on days off, I am indulging anew a passion with roots in elementary school, when I began scribbling tales of fantasy, perhaps as a way of momentarily escaping a rigid Irish-Catholic childhood.

I recently completed “Blue Hill,” a novel that will be published on October 6, and I am deep into writing another, due in 2021.

I also have had opportunity to open the proverbial writer’s trunk, where dozens of short stories and books, in varying degrees of completion, some promising, others worthy of immediate burial, have languished – some for decades. (Fellow writers, you know whereof I speak!)

One such piece is “This Time, I Walk,” a horror short I began in 1986 about a virus that was soon to cause a pandemic. If you haven’t guessed, it was inspired by reading my favorite author Stephen King’s “The Stand” – and by the many headlines about HIV/AIDS, which had reached wide public consciousness in 1985, when Rock Hudson announced he was infected. I interviewed King in 1986, in a session that remains one of my favorite encounters with creative giants. And I was writing “Thunder Rise,” my first published book.

In light of today, "This Time, I Walk" was prescient.

The idea came to me walking the streets of Manhattan back then, perhaps even that day I interviewed King, though my memory is not so precise. The mid- to-late 1980s was a heady period in horror writing, with King, Peter Straub, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker and others breaking into the mainstream with best-sellers that captivated mainstream audiences. I was on board, furiously penning horror (and sci-fi, mystery and thriller) stories and the novel “Thunder Rise,” published in 1989 by William Morrow and edited by the late Alan Williams, who was also editing King at the time. My agent then and for many years was Kay McCauley, who with her brother, the late Kirby McCauley, represented the man from Maine.

As I walked teeming Manhattan on that day, the idea for “This Time I Walk” materialized – I can think of no other way to phrase it, for the genesis of ideas remains a mystery still, although King’s answer one time to the question “Where do you get your ideas?” was “Utica,” as in the New York city, seems as good as any.

 OK. Reading “This Time I Walk” for the first time in many years, I discovered that I had not written the ending. Not even any notes.

So I had to write that ending, and I did.

For now, Parts One and Two of five parts.

 

 

This Time, I Walk

by G. Wayne Miller

 

Copyright 2020 gwaynemiller.com

 

This time, I walk.

I start early, in order to catch the commuters. So many busy people in the big city. So many pretty secretaries. So many hard-working mothers and fathers. So many big shots, major domos, people of substance and weight, the movers and shakers of society here in and around Boston, Massachusetts.

You see, I walk.

I begin where I sleep, the Park Street subway stop, and I walk down Tremont to Chinatown. Up Washington, past the hookers, the porn palaces, the stores where the magazines are wrapped in cellophane. Past City Hall, through Quincy Marketplace to the over-priced waterfront, back through the banking district, over to the mall in time for the midday shoppers.

All day and into the summer night, I walk.

I walk and I breath -- always breathing, deeply satisfying breaths, in-out, in-out, in-out, a healthy vigorous breathing even though I allow myself a smoke every now and then. When I breath, I can feel that familiar strange tickle in my lungs, and I smile. I know it can't hurt me, what's been waiting patiently inside there all these years.

So many thousands go by, an endless river, and I walk.

Scum, they say, those that speak.

Swine.

Bum.

You need a shave, bud. Whatcha got in the bag, arse-hole. Smoke? Stick it up your butt, dogbreath. Get lost. Get a job. Get outta my way. Get bent. Get stoked, stiff.

Lots of gets, courtesy the fine people of Boston.

I do not answer. I do not speak at all.

But it makes me grin, knowing what I know. Yes, I am a forbearing man.

 

It is good to be alive. In my own way, I am having a ball. You may find that difficult to believe, looking at my clothing, my beard, the shoes, the bundle I carry, but it is true. It is good to walk, to have that occasional cigarette, to drink heartily from that bottle and enjoy. It is good to be free, to have my health, such as it is, to be able to breathe.

It is good to be alone.

It is good to be in the city, surrounded by so many.

I consider all of you to be my friends. I hate you with a passion that does not abate, yet you are my friends. A paradox, you say? The world is full of them. The sun that rises in the morning must sink in the evening. From the dead earth of winter blossom the living flowers of springtime. In the eye of a storm, the calm. Paradox, my friends, the natural order of things. Or are you so blind that you cannot see?

The young ones, most frequently, spit.

I have been robbed, beaten, rolled, mugged, preyed upon, chased, cornered, locked up, sent away. I have been kicked, pounded, pummeled, struck across the back of the head, and once, while I slumbered, urinated on. I have fought back, but in my own way and on my own terms.

Ah, humanity.

I admit I am not a pretty sight. I have plans to clean things up.

Still, I know what I am, the nasty side of mankind still living in caves. I myself lived cave-like once, in the not-too-distant past.

And yet, that is not the half of it.

Has it always been this way, you silently ask yourselves as you pass me by, the signature of disdain and disgust written unmistakably on your faces, in the way you will cross streets or step off the curb to avoid me. You should know better than that. You with the stylish clothes, the kids and Volvo station wagons at home, the golf courses and Cape Cod weekends, the neat ordered lives that are about to be ripped asunder and destroyed -- you, my friends, should know better than that.

No one is always this way, or any way. Motion is inevitable. Change is eternal. Didn't Hegel teach us that? Marx? And Darwin? Everyone is born. Everyone is a baby once. Everyone crawls before walking, burbles before speaking, scribbles before writing. Everyone loves, and in turn feels love, somewhere, no matter how faint or how brief. Everyone has a past, and there is good in that past, and there is bad, too, not always in equal proportions. No matter how many storms have ravaged.

 

I walk.

I walk because I want to be with you, because I have something for you. I walk because of what you, this species called homo sapiens, have done for me. I want to pay you back.

Not necessary, you protest? What was due has been paid?

Oh, but I insist.

So I walk, always on the move. I especially like to walk past the tourist hotels and the convention centers, of which there are a growing number in Boston. I especially like to mingle with the out-of-towners, the Midwest teachers on vacation, the busloads of schoolkids from New Hampshire and Maine, the businessmen hoping to strike it lucky in the hotel bars, the company outings here for an afternoon at Fenway Park. They will go home, all of these out-of-towners. They will not know it, not today or tomorrow or the next day even, but with them they will carry the lasting memory of me.

Let me tell you a little story.

It is my story, all I have. I think there are things you should know, the next time you push on past me, through the heavy stench of my breath.

The story begins, as many do, in the long-ago and far-away. I was a much younger man then, a far more respected man, if I may be immodest. I was, in fact, a scientist, and I was called a doctor for the PhD I carried after my name. Specifically, I was a climatologist, a well-published and scientifically daring one, and my specialty was the conditions of weather and astronomy that produce glaciers. My theories of orbital inclination (that is, the changing angles with which the earth over the millennia have faced the sun) had revolutionized our basic understanding of the Ice Ages and I had recently co-authored what was then the definitive text on the subject.

Therefore I was honored, but not surprised, when I was invited to join Polar '62.

Chances are you have never heard of the Polar '62 expedition. There is no good reason that you should have. Kennedy was in Berlin when the undertaking was announced, the news was all bluster and the fate of mankind, and we rated only a small mention as a wire story on an inside page of the New York Times. This bothered none of the 17 scientists who formed our party, and I sincerely doubt it made any difference to the 26 seamen and officers who manned our ship, the RV Arctic Maiden, either. Almost without exception, the most significant work in science is conducted in a methodical and decidedly non-romantic fashion, hardly the stuff of front-page headlines, unless it happens to be polio or cancer or something or someone shot into outer space.

Whatever the scientific fascination, ice and snow, I need not remind you, fit none of these categories.

Do not imagine, however, that this was your run-of-the-mill scientific junket. This was a million-dollar effort, years in the planning, supported by private funds and a congressional grant, and it would be many more years before our best universities and scholarly institutions would sift and sort their way through the incredible wealth of data with which we expected to return. Never had there been such an assault planned on the Arctic. Byrd and Peary could only have dreamed of what we were determined to do. The spectrum of interests was, perhaps, for a single mission, unique. There were scientists with expertise in glaciation, zoology, ultraviolet radiation, meteorology, geology, microbiology, internal medicine, immunology -- yes, the explorers themselves were to be subjects of unprecedented research. The eventual result, we were confident, would be not only a deeper understanding of that God-forsaken region, the Arctic, but also of the globe and mankind itself.

 

On an unusually hot, steamy day in late June, we left Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod. We departed with considerable fanfare including attention from the local press and the tears of wives and children, of which I, a 32-year-old with dreams of a Nobel Prize, had neither.

The irony the weather presented did not, of course, escape us. In another week we were to be plunged into one of the harshest environments on earth, the northern extremes of Greenland, that most misnamed of lands. True, it would be summer there when we arrived, with daylight around the clock, and afternoon temperatures rising well into the balmy 50s -- but Arctic summers are notoriously short, as fleeting and ultimately disappointing as a mistress's midnight kiss, if I may be so poetic. Within two months of our arrival, along toward the end of August, the mercury would begin to plummet, the snow would begin its relentless siege, and we would be locked into the Siberian vice-grip of an Arctic winter. We planned to stay almost a year, returning in May, when the ice had released what would then have become our captive ship.

From Woods Hole, we put in at St. John's, then continued on to Godthaab, Greenland, where we took on board a handful of bearded and bespectacled Danish scientists who were to make the journey with us. From Godthaab, we steamed north, along the shore of Baffin Island, where we observed the icebergs to be multiplying in both number and size. We put in a day and a night in Thule, a truly tiny and dreary outpost of mankind, then proceeded north again, until our captain found suitable moorage in a magnificent fjord extending like a skeletal finger off Kane Basin. The ice had grown even thicker, and the fog was nearly impenetrable at times. We would safely go not further, our captain informed us, and there was universal assent that Kane Basin suited our various needs to a T.

It took the better part of two days to unload our supplies and equipment and establish our base camp on a solid sheet of rock overlooking the sea end of a tired and dirty glacier. Ours was not so much a travel expedition -- the vastness of Greenland by then, of course, had long since been charted and mapped -- but an exercise in information-gathering and experimentation that could, for the most part, be conducted from a single camp. Naturally, there would be out camps and selected journeys inland, of two or three week's duration. For these, we had along two dozen Huskies and traditional Eskimo sleds -- this at the insistence of our Danish hosts who, for reasons we did not attempt to fathom, were soured on mechanized means of over-snow locomotion that were then becoming popular.

The first weeks were a period of industry and good cheer amongst our party, which had taken residence in a series of tents erected behind the comparative shelter of a series of house-size boulders. There is a certain savage beauty to the Arctic summer, and that beauty, combined with the endless day, was like a tonic for all of us. For it is summer when the wildflowers bloom, the lemmings and ermine and arctic hare are on the prowl, when whatever other limited flora and fauna there is in this unforgiving territory explodes in one fleeting celebration of life and reproduction. Then, too, there was the almost daily display of aurora borealis, or northern lights, which paints its ghostly rainbow across the sky like the backdrop to some wildly haunted dream.

As for me, I was intent on rainfall collection, pollen analysis, color spectrometry, ice coring -- especially the latter. An entire history of weather is captured in the layers of ice that comprise a glacier, and a simple hand-auger-driven core, although time-consuming and sweat-inducing and muscle-tiring, is worth its proverbial weight in gold. My colleagues were plunged into their various and sundry labors, and there was the unspoken but certain feeling that what we had successfully embarked upon was an expedition bound for inclusion in the ranks of all-time great Arctic ventures, if such is the way to describe a hardy legacy that predates Eric the Red.

Winter's arrival did nothing to disturb the enviable camaraderie that had developed amongst us. If anything, it only served to strengthen the bonds that had grown and which now joined us together like the close-knit family we had in fact become. The snow was virtually without stop, as those of us who were newcomers to this land had been told to anticipate. The wind was a harsh master and the temperatures were soon similarly uncooperative, and by the beginning of October, it was rare indeed the day when the mercury could be coaxed above zero degrees Centigrade.

But it was not weather, or the onset of the Arctic night (which, as you may know, lasts 24 hours a day) that began to change the temperament of our party toward the beginning of January.

No, it was not that. Christmas had come, and we had joyously celebrated it with an evening of old-fashioned caroling and a rare dinner of reindeer steak with gravy, a Danish custom on this largest of Denmark's islands. Those of us who so desired had chatted fleetingly with our families by short-wave radio, and that personal contact with loved ones and kin would be enough to sustain us for many weeks to come.

No, it was the discovery at Outcamp 3 that would eventually bring ugly turmoil to Polar '62.

Outcamp 3 had been set up some four kilometers inland by the microbiology folks, who were in pursuit of various strains of bacteria known only to this region and its equally inhospitable twin, Antarctica. It was little more than a single tent, this particular Outcamp, and it was not manned on a continual basis, but only as the dictates of microbiology demanded. Dave Heddon was the head of the microbiology contingent, which numbered exactly three, including Dave. He was a subdued man, introspective yet not glum, a powerful, broad-shouldered father of two young boys who looked for all the world like a starting defensive lineman for a professional football team. Had he been less clumsy, or more aggressive, I think that sport indeed would have suited him.

But he was a scientist -- tops in his field, or so was the glow of his reputation -- and he possessed that deliberate and calm way of speaking, so wonderfully rare, that is immediately soothing and almost therapeutic to those who hear it.

And that's how I knew something was up the evening of January 24, when he returned from three days at Outcamp 3.

I was alone in the chow tent, finishing off a cup of freeze-dried coffee, when Dave walked in, his beard twinkling with frost and his boots glazed with ice. In place of that calm voice was an imposter, a voice that fairly crackled with excitement. Remember, Dave Heddon was a man of unusual emotional maturity and control. I had learned that listening to him describe how much he missed his two young boys, but how sacrifices must sometimes be made in the name of science -- and now, now he was a man speaking with the control of a teenaged girl.

``Out there,'' he began, sipping on the steaming coffee I had brought him, ``I think we have discovered extraterrestrial life.''

``What?'' I asked.

``What we found by 3,'' he said. ``Frozen. And perfectly preserved, or so it would appear.''

``What?'' I repeated, persisting in my ignorance. ``What have you found?''

``Alien life. Twelve beings. From where, is anybody's guess. But definitely not of this world. You'll know that as soon as you see their... their heads.''

And then, his voice still tinged with an unusual excitement, he went on to relate the events of the last two days at Outcamp 3. How he and one of his party, Joanne White, one of the few women in our group, had set off the first day to gather samples on the agar plates they carried in special aluminum boxes. How they had wandered perhaps 200 meters north of the camp through an unusually strong, snowless wind when they happened upon... shall I call them beings, as Dave did?... and the wreckage of a vehicle they initially believed to be constructed of steel.

We had reached the peak of a slight rise and were descending the opposite side when our lights picked up what we first assumed was another rise, albeit one irregularly contoured. Thinking little of it, we moved closer, our lights stabbing the pitch. As we approached, the rise took on a distinctly different shape. Or shapes, I should say, for there were several.

The most prominent was a rockpile, roughly the size of a large automobile. It looked as if it may have been erected, however crudely, for purposes of shelter. Off to one side was a circle of blackened stones that appeared to have once enclosed a fire. Moving closer still, we got our first indistinct look at the... beings, four of them, sprawled in various contorted postures around the stones.

Of course, the term `beings' had not occurred to us then. Standing from the distance we were, and under such unsatisfactory light conditions, we assumed we had found the remains of earlier human explorers -- the frozen cadavers of the unfortunate members of whatever ill-fated party it had been. Many of the early European and American pioneers of this region, as you know, never came home and were never found. As recently as 1956, not 10 years ago, the Finnish expedition was last, as also you may recall.

And who would have thought otherwise? The forms we were surveying were of human size and appeared to have the human compliment of limbs -- two arms, two legs -- and they were clothed in mammalian fur not the least bit incongruous for this cruel environment. Arctic hare was my guess. Of the four forms, no faces were visible. Not then. It seemed that their heads were unusually large, but that was difficult to ascertain. They had died in the same position, on their stomachs, faces into the snow.

TO BE CONTINUED...