The Salt in the Ivory

That resin snapping against the ash is the only thing left alive in this shit hole. The makeshift wick floats in a puddle of rancid grease inside the dented King Oscar sardine tin, trembling like a drunkard's eyelid about to droop onto the counter. It barely gives enough light to see Nicolai's knees, two lumps covered by a burlap cloth that smells of a flooded warehouse and stale urine. Between them, upon the Swedish ammo crate we use for a table, the ribbed tusk doesn't shine; it's matte, milky, with that texture pork fat takes on when it cools at the edge of a plate. But the light isn't the worst part. The worst part is that the ivory has stopped throbbing. Ten minutes ago it was still transmitting that dull beat, a thick vibration that reminded you there was a boiler running on the other side, poorly and haltingly, but running. Now it's an ice stake driven straight into my right wrist. The cold doesn't come from outside, from the cracks in the embrasure where the blizzard whistles like an old kettle; it comes from him. It's sucking my warm blood like a starved calf suckling on dry, tugging at my very chest with a blind hunger that leaves my fingers stiff, hard as vine shoots.

I'm eighteen and I'm in the Bodø hostel kitchen in the middle of August, the windows wide open to the fjord and the midnight sun stuck to the glass like an egg yolk that refuses to break. The steam from the cod stew fogs my glasses every time I lift the zinc lid, a dense vapor smelling of dry bay leaf, melted lard, and onions sweated very slowly, so slowly it feels like a prayer. My uncle Olav slices the black bread on the pine table with a serrated knife that goes chop-chop-chop against the knobby wood, a rhythm that never changes, not even when the news of the strike arrives or when the old mare dies in the stable. "Patience, boy," the old man always says, in the Lofoten fisherman's accent he never lost. I run my thumb over the burn on my left forearm, the one from the ladle of lard on the Tromsø dock. It's warm. It's always warm, like a coal buried beneath the skin that nothing can put out.

Hands.

That burn I can't even feel now. The skin of my right arm is so taut from the graft that any brush against the wool sleeve digs into me like glass shards. Nicolai lets out a ragged rattle, a hiss that makes his teeth chatter with the dirty clatter of cracked porcelain.

"Voronin?" I tell him. The bastard doesn't move. His beard is full of grayish frost from his own breath freezing as it leaves his nose. "Voronin, wake up, you piece of animal."

"Smells like lard," he says suddenly, without opening his eyes, with a voice that seems to drag across a gravel bed.

"It's the tin's mutton tallow, you idiot. Shut your mouth."

"In Murmansk... my aunt used to cook turnips with seal fat on Sundays. Smelled just like it. Some garbage that glues your tongue to the roof of your mouth."

"Well don't eat your tongue just yet," I growl at him, and wiggle the toes of my right foot inside the boot, searching for the warmth that no longer exists, until the loose heel nail drives an inch into my soft flesh and wrenches a curse from between my teeth. "We have ten minutes of wick left. If you die on me now, you're going to freeze my arm before I can untie the strap."

Doktor Henrik Braaten's body remains slumped in the dark corner, seated against the pine planks that groan under tons of permafrost with a dull, spaced-out snap, like a giant's molars chewing splinters in the dark. He's as hard as a bale of dried cod. Frost has taken his sparse mustache and eyelashes, giving him the look of a storefront mannequin forgotten in an unswept back room. I still remember his mushy voice from two nights ago, when the bunker caved in on us and the man already had one pupil the size of a ten-øre coin and the other reduced to a pinhead from the beam's blow. He had sat on the floor with that heavy tranquility of surgeons who have seen too many opened bellies to be scared of their own blood, wiping his iodine-stained hands on his apron like someone flicking cigarette ash.

"The cold... corporal," the old man mumbled with a locked jaw, dragging the syllables as if chewing stones. "Doesn't forgive... if it slackens... squeeze the hand, lad... squeeze..."

Then he tucked his empty flask into his greatcoat pocket and closed his eyes never to open them again.

He didn't even finish the sentence. A broken stupidity of a dying drunk. But now, with the walrus conduit sucking the heat from my collarbone into Voronin's lifeless arm, that foolish murmur nails itself into my ribs with the persistence of a toothache. Nicolai weighs like a sack of soaked sand. His breathing has turned into a thin, barely perceptible thread, one of those that doesn't even move a blanket's fluff. If his pulse drops another fraction, the shared blood is going to clot inside the ivory like sour gooseberry mush, and then no God will save me from gangrene or a clot bursting my dry lungs.

I have to move. I don't want to move, but I have to.

I drag my ass across the rotting floorboards, pulling Nicolai with a dull groan. The Russian doesn't even blink; he's a piece of meat that weighs a ton and lets himself be led, sliding over blankets slimed with dry saltpeter. I reach the corner where Braaten sleeps. The stench of soaked cloth, urine, and rotting leather forces its way into my mouth like a spoonful of sour mud. I slip my left hand—the only one that still obeys me, even though my nails are purple from poor circulation—beneath the doctor's standard-issue greatcoat flap. The military cloth is rigid as papier-mâché. I rip two frozen seams with a snap that sounds like dry firewood to reach the inner pocket.

First I touch a graphite pencil chewed at both ends. Then, a dented brass tin of menthol lozenges that smell like nothing, pure chalk. And at the bottom, wrapped in a rag soaked in machine oil to keep rust off, something flat and cold.

A scalpel.

The handle is nickel-plated steel, ribbed with diagonal lines so it won't slip when fingers are greased with lard or blood. The blade is short, fine as a new razor blade, intact beneath its film of dense grease. A clean tool. Beautiful in its simplicity, like a trout-boning knife that has never touched a bone.

Saliva cut dry in my tongue.

I look at the ivory binding my flesh to his. If I cut the linen suture, if I slash the living skin over the arteriovenous graft and clamp the cannulation with the field wire I carry in my cartridge pouch, I lose the arm. Or half the arm. But the warm blood stays inside me. I won't gift it to this Moscow dog who doesn't even know where his feet are. I'd keep my heat. My own soup boiling in my stomach for twelve more hours, enough to wait out the storm or burst once and for all without having to haul a corpse glued to my waist. It's as easy as splitting a pig carcass at the slaughterhouse: a firm slash, separating tendon from bone, and letting the useless piece drop into the trough.

I press the spine of the scalpel into my palm, feeling the edge bite the hardened corner of my thumb.

"Matias..." Nicolai whispers.

The air chokes in my throat. I stay still, huddled over the boards like a vermin surprised by a lantern.

"Matias... let go... let go of the fucking rope..." the Russian murmurs with his mouth twisted to one side, drooling a dark thread onto the collar of his tunic.

He can't know. It's impossible for him to know. Nobody was on the Sørøya ledge when the blizzard split our rope team into three pieces. Nobody saw how Matias's palms slipped on the frozen hemp, carving grooves in my hands until strips of skin tore off, nor how the tug bent my vertebrae toward the black slate, centimeter by centimeter, until my tendons refused to close and I opened my hands. I opened my hands so I wouldn't go over with them.

I look at the scalpel blade in my left hand. I look at the ivory vibrating, slower and slower, pumping a thread of warm water turning to ash. It's exactly like leaving an iron skillet with warm lard out in the open: the oil looks golden and alive for a minute, but the cold of the air muddies it at the edges, turning it into a whitish paste, immobile and dead long before you realize it's no good for frying anything anymore.