The Blue (The Complete Novel) by Joseph Turkot

water. I start to go until Russell calls me back. He says to wait, but I tell him I’ll be careful—I know how to spot all the ice pockets. He tells me it’s not that. Look, he says. And when I turn around to see what it could be, unsure from his tone whether it’s good or bad, I see the most horrible thing I could ever imagine. The blue is slowly disappearing. Smothered by a new gray, much darker than normal daytime clouds. And all at once, I notice that rain has started up again—so soft you can barely feel it, but it’s rain, and I tell Russell. He’s already felt the first drops though, and he says what it is: storm’s coming in. And I know we have no way to stand up to a storm. I completely forget about the seal, and my stomach, and think about the churning ocean underneath of us. From my imagination or not, I can’t tell, I think I start to already feel the ice maneuvering up and down over a long, slow swell. And we’re riding its thin crust. The last few feet of fractured pancake. And as far as my eyes can see, the ice looks so strong still, so pure and white. Like it’s a hundred feet deep. But I know better. The darkness is real, and the strength of the pack is all an illusion.
                My eyes fall to the silver glint as it fades out, disappearing, now just a memory in the growing darkness. The long tendrils of the sunlight withdraw into the heavens and it becomes in only a few minutes like the eternal dusk that I’ve always known. The tug of a good place to die vanishes. We have nothing.
     
    I want to tell Russell that our plan’s over. We can’t even die the way we want to. But by his voice, I know he’s not in the mood to hear it. Because he starts to look around, frantically surveying every angle, trying to see if there’s anywhere we can hide. But the nearest pressure ridge looks like it’s three or four miles away. In the end, his stare breaks and it turns into a fast-paced walk toward the ridge. The spot off to the west, half into the wind, where a giant iceberg rises up and clashes with the low-lying pack shards of the Ice Pancake.
                How the hell do you plan on climbing that? I ask him as he leaves me. Come on boy, Russell says. Voley starts after him. And then he tells me, stopping to see that I haven’t started to follow: We’re not climbing anything. We’re getting behind it. Come on.
     
    For the life of me I can’t figure out why, because it seems like getting behind the enormous cliff will just put us under its weight, one side of it or the other. Either way, I see it collapsing on our heads after an enormous wave, or grinding down into the sea, carrying our low ice into the cold brown. But I don’t say anything else, because I don’t have a single better idea. Anything to not die in the waves. And all I have is my trust of Russell.
     
    We jump gap after gap, more quickly and recklessly now, like we’re in a race against time, and I learn to ignore my stomach. The wind kicks up more, blowing at our sides now, and I keep checking the sky, hoping the blue will miraculously return. But it doesn’t.
    After an hour on the ice, when I feel so raw that I almost beg Russell to stop so that we can put the stove on and rest, I realize the rain is slowing up and the wind hasn’t gotten any worse. I tell him I think it’s letting up, but he’s not so sure. He says it might be, but we shouldn’t change course yet. And so I march on, and look back, wondering how the seal is doing with the new weather. But he’s nowhere to be seen.
     
    When the night comes, we barely speak a word. Just plant the tent about thirty feet away from the ridge. It’s about ten feet higher than the pancake ice, and if it was somehow climbable, I’d convince Russell that we should try and make the effort. But its walls are like sheer mirrors, and as strong as it looks, and as much as I know it’s probably immune to the long, rolling swells, I crawl into the tent without