HELLO EARTH by Jess Arndt

HELLO EARTH

JESS ARNDT

BIRTH

In my Los Angeles bedroom my girlfriend who is also my wife is asleep and so is our new son. Late light spouts from the western window across the suddenly too-small bed. He arrived exactly two weeks ago. Osa — “she-bear,” or bear constellation. Adrift in the Glendale hospital that we never meant to go to, our three bodies in some kind of shared existential shock, I carved into my iPhone notepad:

“My kid has battle marks on his face, wild fuzzy ears, drag queen length nails, wisps of dried blood in his hair, huge lavender hands.”

Now to keep him asleep, I have the sound machine blasting a 12-hour loop of oceanic swell. Te sea mammal blaaaats make me jump. Our astrologer friend texts us: “this is an extremely happy time wearing a mustache as a disguise. Let yourselves feel the way you foat in water. Your whole family is in amniotic fuid.”

Amniotic. Relating to the membrane around a fetus. Or, from the Ancient Greek, amnion: bowl in which the blood of victims was caught. But being born in the sac or caul is lucky. Witchy to be that tucked away in an extra hibernation. How bears — before their last-ditch PR makeover as “charismatic megafauna” — were once seen as totemic line-walkers, spirit transformers going dead every winter only to be reborn.

RESIDENCY

My frst two days in the territory of Svalbard (an archipelago midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole) I was staying at a mining hotel called Mary-Ann’s Polarrigen by myself. By myself — but only partway, due to the large number of taxidermied animals cohabitating with me. It was an old coal barracks, with emergency lights fashing down the long, otherwise unlit hallway. My sole human co-guest was a Russian man who seemed to have the same habits as I did but opposite. We had wordlessly agreed: we were completely and totally in each other’s psychic way.

Te far-fungness wasn’t entirely new. Before the High Arctic I’d groped around the Mojave Desert, also trying to be alone. Without severe geographical boundaries in place I stay attached to everyone I’ve ever touched or might, in some future moment, bump up against. Te mushy, undefned feeling keeps me safe. But — I had to erase it. At least I knew one thing: I was fnally going to try testosterone when having fnished “going polar,” I would return home.

Instead of resting, I stayed up all night drinking large cans of Arctic beer extricated from the deserted bar and gulping (this was new to me) glasses of water, trying to fnish a popular TV show a friend of mine had a cameo in, before my access to internet (and all life south) snufed out. Unsleeping, I often visited the giant male ursus maritimus who I’d by then made my familiar, i.e., completely soul-to-soul joined with, returning from my bed cubicle to wave fsts of unlit

sage around him. Press my forehead on his yellow chest. Hold his thick forepaw (that jutted from the claustrophobic wall). He was sleepless too. Polar bears, unlike the rest of their genus, try to live all the time.

By morning we were both red-eyed and exhausted.

I walked across the tundra to town. Dangled myself at places I might be seen — various outftters stores and the cafe — as if “cloaked.” Walked back across the scree. Snow salted the hills over the ford and the water and everything beyond it waited gauzily for winter. With fewer people than what Norway calls isbjørne, or ice bears, in the freezing, sprawling, archipelago, Longyearbyen is the northernmost permanent “settlement” in the world. I’d arrived early to secure this feeling of aloneness, to get a jump on things. By the time the other artists swept in, my armor would be in place and I could frmly resist being “known.”

Tat night I shufed around in the region’s footwear of choice, loaner Crocs I found, piled thoughtfully in every size, in Mary-Ann’s ample coat closet. Dined on canned chips — “tomato and shrimp.” Te snow was now raining, a new world fact that once started, wouldn’t let up. It was already the warmest October by any record. I sat in the dark bar texting my Brooklyn brother-in-law. He was always up. Earlier I’d seen a man walking away from me, toward the deep glacier valley, on the settlement’s only road. His baby was papoosed on his back and he had a rife (THE LAW HERE!) slung over his shoulder, I texted. Bears were everywhere, at least the possibility of them. I’d already written this on many postcards. I found it very moving: they (the adult/baby) seemed so contained.

I woke in the pitch black with my internal climate raging. In my dream, my unborn kid had emerged, emerald-ine, as a fascinating shape I’d never seen before. I stared at him. Since I wasn’t his biological anything, the doctors pulled him away. I’d known him only briefy, but felt a painful ripping sensation. Rousing, I padded to the toilet, past a display of miner’s pick-axes. We were embarking tomorrow, 30 artists in half as many shrinking cabins. I was one of three writers but it was already clear nothing would come out.

Outside the shared bathroom door, something in the tunnelish hall was breathing. Unable to pee: my persistently snickering bladder infection was back. I pulled up my heavyweight thermal base layer. Te whole region was psychologically infamed. I’d been taking a brew of mouthy, dead-tasting herbs that might slide my system over, away from the estrogenic. My suitcase was lined with plastic bottles, a month of doses rolling hopefully inside.

FEELINGS ABOUT WRITING

Computer on my L.A.-sweaty knee, sound machine crashing. Memoirs of a Polar Bear. Pub. Date November 8, 2016. I can’t click “yes” on my Amazon shopping cart I swore I’d quit, but what a great title. Yoko Tawada I’m so jealous of you!

(What do you do when someone’s just written your book?)

FIRST SIGHTING

Going north with Antigua was its own universe. Aboard her, I was stabbingly happy and stabbingly sad. For two weeks a gong punched my ribs fast and close. It felt kind of Duende-like, the way Lorca wrote it. To be: “in hand-to-hand combat,” or “on the rim of a well.” Anyway, I’d chosen to come in late fall, at the start of the accelerating tilt to sunless, 24-hour night. I must have been looking for “black sounds,” as he called them.

On deck, I plugged in my ear buds. Without internet, Kate Bush, “Hello Earth,” was the only track available, apparently, the only track I’d downloaded?

Had anyone ever played this so far north?!

All you sailors (Get out of the waves, get out of the water)[…] All you fshermen Head for home

It sounded fantastic. Melty bergs slushed past and snow spit against my frozen Gortex hood. I wasn’t sure why my pulse was hammering or why my organs felt like they’d been pasted on my outsides. Maybe it was the dolphins who fanked us, non-Arctic aberrations, sure harbingers of things we weren’t supposed to see. Every day we lost 45 minutes of light. It was a constancy I didn’t trust, I hoped it would get darker.

Go to sleep, little earth I was there at the birth Out of the cloudburst Te head of the tempest

Murderer

Murder of calm Why did I go?

Why did I go?

Our pregnancy incubating in California invaded every part of me — yet I was farther from it, geographically, technologically, even historically, than ever. Te donor had been my brother, but was now our Peruvian friend. Tat was fne, everything was! Except, as I was increasingly more aware, I was no longer genetically latched. At LAX my girlfriend and I had said a measured rather than passionate goodbye. To be north but thinking south, I mumbled frozenly into my memos app. South, but thinking north.

I undid my glove, warming my iPhone screen. Nothing was more potent, more portent than northness. Te clinking, perfectly frigid water. Te non-human-ness, felt from the deck, of land’s black rock teeth. Escaping myself meant no more “party feature” on high, no more “everybody like me” antics.

Suddenly, I missed the miner’s fusty hallway, my balding, very near friend. I scanned the distant snow patches. Ursus maritimus is one of only eight mammals durable enough to survive this annihilative climate, but the landscape, now (+ perhaps forever??), was blank. Te scale of distance matched me gruesomely.

A parka shape approached. I’d hidden myself at the bulwark. “Whatever you did to it, the disco ball’s on the fritz,” a sea-frosted arm held out a chunk of colored plastic.

I was so in sync my skin crawled. Finally alone enough and everywhere it hurt.

CIRCUMPOLAR

Tis present frontier is, as my girlfriend says, a “limit” experience. Te only way I can possibly fnish writing anything is to cram Osa in my arms, up the narrow street toward the end of our block. An ice-eyed husky lunges at us but otherwise it’s pure Los Angeles — jasmine hedges, gnarls of cactus, unkempt palms.

He’s a warrior, big headed, a claw-mark on his cheek from the forceps. Even his sobs are rugged. Wrapped in a hospital blanket, a quick exit from an exhausted house — I feel like I’ve stolen him and equally, I’m manically proud, waiting for someone to notice us.

A neighbor at the corner in brown Dickies smock and pants, spraying a verdant philodendron, complies. “Oh wow,” she says.

It’s a beautiful evening.

“He won’t sleep,” I say.

My frst book is coming out in a few days. All 144 desperate pages. Somewhere in the middle of it, a narrator very much like me worries about becoming a bear, then about doing something terrible, compelled by their girth — wasting, ruining the bodies they love.

I continue: “We think something’s wrong.”

Osa’s nodding sideways, his body snufing the length of my arm.

“He looks just like you,” the neighbor insists.

Te longer the nights were in the Arctic, the more pitched I was in total blackness, and thereby — impossibly — the closer I was to home, the more awake I became. We’d kicked past the Gulf Stream and were revolving on our own. I stared up at placental aurora, wondering.

“Yes,” she says resolutely eyeing us both, “it’s the shape of his nose.”