She seemed to lose patience. “You can’t take on the whole world’s troubles. No one should try to do that.”
“It happens without trying.”
“Maybe you should stop reading the news. Stop watching the screens.”
“I’m reading Moll Flanders. It was the same for her.”
“Who’s she again?”
“A character in Defoe. Sister to Robinson Crusoe.”
“Oh yeah. I sort of remember.” She smiled briefly. “A survivor.”
“For sure. They didn’t worry like we do. They faced up to Nartsuk. There was no such thing as post-traumatic stress disorder.”
“Or else it was everywhere. Just the water they swam in.”
“That’s still a difference.”
“Maybe. But Moll Flanders didn’t try to take on the whole world’s trauma, as I recall. People weren’t so worried about other people.”
“But we should be, right? For them, people dropped dead all the time. You had to move on. Could be your partner, your kid. Now it feels different. You and yours probably won’t drop dead, not today.”
“Mine did,” Mary said shortly.
That startled him, and he looked at her more closely. She watched her drink. He recalled a moment that first night, when he had asked her about her life, how she had flared up at him. Angrier at a personal question than being kidnapped, almost. “Okay,” he said, “but still somehow it’s different. Maybe what we know now. We know we all live in a village of eight billion neighbors. That’s our now. It’s all of us succeed or none of us is safe. So we take an interest in how the others are doing.”
“If that’s all true.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I think a lot of people don’t do the global village part. Janus Athena says village is the wrong idea. And nationalism has come back big time. Your language is your family. Pull in the perimeter like that and it gets easier. You still get to have your us and them.”
“But it’s wrong.”
“Maybe.”
He felt a little jolt of irritation. “Of course it’s wrong. Why do you say that, are you trying to tweak me?”
“Maybe.”
He glared at her.
She relented a bit. “What is it they say about us only really knowing a few score people? Like back in the ice ages?”
“It’s different now,” he insisted. “We know more now. Those people in the caves, they only knew there were a few hundred people alive. Now we know better, and we feel it.”
She nodded. “I suppose it could be. Eight billion people, all stuffed in here.” She tapped her chest. “No wonder if feels so crowded. All smashed into one big mass. The everything feeling.”
Frank nodded, trying that on. That feeling of pressure in his chest. The headaches. Call it the everything feeling. A new feeling, or a new blend of feelings, bitter and dark. Caffeine and alcohol. Uppers and downers. Lots of everything. The everything feeling. Made sense that it resembled being somewhat stunned. Not unlike despair.
“Maybe,” he said, mimicking her.
She grimaced, acknowledging that she had been annoying. “Oceans of clouds in my chest. Some poet said that. So, say we feel the global village, but in a mixed-up way. Is that what you’re saying you are, mixed up? Mashed together?”
“No. Yes.” He glanced at her, looked down again. “Maybe.”
She was regarding him with a very curious look. “You should go up to the Alps, have a walk around. I found it very clarifying, even though I was up there for bad reasons. It could be a day trip from here, you could be home by curfew.”
“Maybe.”
Later he considered what she had said. That he was not all there: true. That he was mashed together into a thing he couldn’t grasp: true. The everything feeling. But the project was to face up to Nartsuk. That wasn’t just acceptance, but defiance. You had to laugh at whatever the world threw at you, that was good Inuit style.
He took the train to Luzern, a bus to the forest under Pilatus. Hiked up one of the trails through a strange parklike forest, then up onto the big clean grassy alp above the forest and below the gray peak. Cable car high above, swinging up and down across a giant gap of air. He ignored it and contoured around the peak until he couldn’t see it anymore. He only had a couple hours before he would have to head back, so it was kind of an exercise in getting as high as possible on this trail and then turning back.
Still mid-alp, crossing a tilted rumpled lawn of immense size, he came over a small vertical ridge in the trail and there was an animal standing there. Ah— four of them. Chamois or ibex, he didn’t know, he was just guessing. He had heard they were up here. This group was maybe a male and female, and two youngsters, but not too young; he couldn’t really tell.
They didn’t seem disturbed by his presence. They were aware of him, alert, heads up, sniffing; but they were chewing their cuds, it looked like. Slow and regular chewing, a lump inside their cheeks, had to be a cud being chewed, or so it seemed.
Their bodies were rounded and full, they looked well-fed. If they ate grass, he could see why that would be so. Their heads looked like goats’ heads. They had short horns, slightly curved back but mainly straight. Horizontal ridges ringed the horns, possibly annual growth; looked like that made for strong horns, could really stick you if they tilted their head down. Although they’d have to be looking back between their forelegs to have their horns pointing forward, so that was a mystery. Short brown hair over most of their bodies, but finer beige hair, like fur, on their bellies, with a dark band separating brown from beige.
The biggest one was looking at him. Then Frank saw it: the creature’s irises were rectangular. Like a goat, then? It gave him a little shock to see it. Rectangular irises, how could that be? Why? Was it really looking at him?
Seemed like it was. Steady regard of another animal, chewing
