Archive of Our Own

Cathy left two of her dresses in a trunk at home.

Sol pulls them out one at a time; they haven’t gathered dust over the years, but there’s a stiffness even he can feel in the material that comes with disuse. He runs his fingers over the wool like it will tell him a story, but he’s never been particularly imaginative. The gowns stay silent.

Cathy is gone, Solomon concludes one more time, and she’s left her life behind her. She probably doesn’t even know that her brother is alive. Well, not so much, but alive.

The clothing will fetch a fair price; she took good care of them, and there’s hardly a tear in the seams even years after she probably acquired them. He can take these to market, pawn them off, trade the coin for soup. Survive until the Navy calls him back, because the Navy doesn’t care if he’d spent four days in the arctic or four years.

The wool is warm in his hands, but England’s winters aren’t so dominated by ice; even the Thames runs freely this year. England’s winters are the summers of the Canadian arctic, and now he is dressed down to his shirtsleeves in the middle of December, thin linen to cover his arms where the ladies and men of West Brom are bundled tightly in layers.

He doesn’t know any of those ladies, none of those men. Their faces are different, even if their names are the same. And most of the names are no longer the same, either. The streets are crowded and the world is smaller than he’d known before. The baker left for London, he’d been told, three years ago, fleeing poverty. The farmers have rotated out; God knows where the ones he’d known have gone. The city has modernized while he was away, and it’s only now in the midst of this growing city that he understands how fast the world changes and leaves people behind.

These dresses would earn him a pretty penny. He would survive in this new world with these new people and new contraptions and new rules so vastly different from the rules of the arctic.

Cathy’s mirror glints in the fading light of the dying sun (the sun always sets here, always comes back up). He turns and blinks in the bright flash, and when the spots clear from his eyes he’s staring at himself, the simple brown pattern bundled in his lap. The skirt drapes nicely over his lap, the bodice clutched almost desperately in his fists. The creeping English twilight threatens to take all the world with it, and he grips tighter to Cathy’s dress like it will take him back.

He holds it up to the last bits of light trickling through the grimy window, and then he holds it up to himself. In the mirror he sees the outline of a young girl, smiling and gay, long hair twisted up off her shoulders but clumsy in its fashion. He wonders where his sister is now. He wonders why she left her dresses.

With a deep sigh, he collects the endless yards of fabric in his arms and deposits them with much less grace and care back into the trunk.

Four days pass before he braves the trunk again. Something in him fears that trunk and what it implies; it wants to tell him something, and he does not want to know the truth. There is a finality in knowing, a certainty that can’t be undone. And so he keeps a wide berth from the trunk and the dresses in it because if he doesn’t look inside, then he can almost believe Cathy will still come home in the morning with a loaf of bread to split between them.

But after those four days the cool metal of the latches hiss against his fingers as he pops the trunk open and breathes in the stale air clinging to the dresses. No longer are they folded neatly, and Sol struggles to untangle them from one another. It is with concerted effort that he pulls the pink skirt out, a decision that feels more like hammering the nails of a coffin than it does admiring a pretty dress.

Its fabric is gathered and layered nicely, all bunched together at the waist and thick in his hands. He holds it in a rough, masculine grip and thinks about Cathy—her complexion would suit the pink of this fabric, girlish and youthful and sweet. He has no way of knowing if she’s a girl yet, if she’s blossomed into womanhood or if she lays in perpetual youth beneath the earth.

He is afraid to ask around. He is afraid to learn. And so he tells himself it is unknowable. He has grown more comfortable with the unknown than he ever was before the expedition, and now the known is the frightening thing. In his mind she is happy and hale, and she will return home to put on this skirt and Sol will remark my, how you’ve grown, and if he never knows, he can never be wrong.

He cannot say why he holds the skirt today, but there is a release of pressure in his mind that seems to anticipate something more. He has reached the next step in some grand design, but because he doesn’t know what that is he is unafraid of what comes next.

The mirror watches him as he turns the fabric over in his hands, the callus catching on the thread and pulling gently before letting him go as if to beckon him back. He glides his hand over the soft pink. The mirror watches him.

Cathy will come home, he tells himself. His family, surely, has not left him behind the way the rest of the world has. She is on a trip, he fancies, perhaps recovering from the ills of the city on a farm out east, or sitting by the ocean imagining herself aboard an ice-bound ship hundreds of miles to the north.

Before he knows it, and better that it’s so, he has one foot in the skirt. It’s hiked up to his knee when his other foot catches on the hem and the seam nearly tears. It’s enough of a shock for him to look up into himself, the mirror staring back at him with wide eyes and a slack jaw. His beard is full and unkempt; there are still scars on his face and neck from the arctic. His shoulders are wide and his hands are mangled with work.

He shoves his other foot into the skirt and pulls it up over his trousers. The bodice hangs limply behind him, folding almost imperceptibly into the skirt if it weren’t for the ugly bulge on his backside. He stares at himself as he holds the ends of the skirt in both hands, unsure how to proceed. His trousers are a visible reminder of the world outside this room, and he doesn’t want to remember so he pulls hard on the skirt until the button manages to fasten at the waistband, the hole pulling desperately against the strain. Sol tries to breathe from his chest so it doesn’t pop off entirely and carefully turns the fabric around.

And when his pants are hidden he feels a way he hasn’t in months. He is hidden beneath the rippling fabric, and so he is free.

In a fit of excitement that has become foreign to him, he grabs the bodice and pulls the sleeves over his arms, his hands catching as the tubes narrow. But he pushes through and they pop out on the other side, and the tightness is snug and comforting. He reaches back and fumbles at the buttons, but his arms can’t stretch enough; his fingers lack the finesse. He tries again to no avail, then gives up.

Besides, he wonders to his mirror self, he can’t see the open flaps behind him anyway. Instead he is faced with a pretty dress, loose at the top. His linen shirt bunches at the neckline and spills over unattractively, but if he ignores that it’s almost perfect.

The skirt has no volume to it, not like the ladies in town, but its gathering hides what’s underneath. His socks poke out from underneath; the bodice hangs awkwardly on his shoulders; the chest area is baggy. But when he looks in the mirror he sees Cathy, giggling and sweet with her soft brown hair and thin lips.

His chest seizes painfully; his face crumples in the mirror. Cathy is home, he thinks, she’s with me and she’s home.

The pain eases into a blossom of warmth, something light and filled with notes of spring, and for the first time since 1845 he feels right with the world. He can hear her heels echo on the hardwood, the birdsong of her laughter, and she beckons him to lunch—nothing fancy, she reminds him, but it’s still better than anything he can make for himself. Looks nicer, at least.

Sol falls to the ground and the skirts puff up around him like it ought to. He can’t see his feet any longer and it strengthens the fantasy. Chewing his lip, he frowns at the mirror and tugs on his hair, curling it up around his ears like he sees all the ladies do. He doesn’t know if Cathy ever wears her hair like this—it’s more mature than she was in 1845—but it suits the dress, and it’s what he knows.

But he doesn’t have any pins, or he doesn’t know where Cathy keeps them, so when he lets go the hair falls limp around his face, tickling his beard. And with a sigh, he falls backward and stares up at the ceiling and hears Cathy scold him that the dress is going to get dirty.

He does it again. His second time, he strips down and puts the dress against his naked skin, and the waistband buttons much more easily. There’s no awkward bunching at his chest, and he almost looks like a girl. Cathy tells him he’s beautiful, but it’s laced with a mocking sing-song, good-natured but telling, and he rips off the dress with only a few minutes of hesitation.

The next morning, Sol goes out and buys pins, takes them home, and shaves his beard.

He keeps it trimmed nicely so that the third time his face is baby-smooth. He does up his hair before he attempts the dress, but it’s a mess of locks and strands sticking out awkwardly and pins plinking against the floor. If he had more courage he might ask Cathy how she does hers, but the question escapes him even after he puts on the brown dress and she’s cooing compliments in his ear and whirling him around so she can see every curve his body is forced into.

The compliments are deserved, he thinks. He looks like the ladies now, if only a rugged approximation, a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s closet. The dress clings to him flatteringly—he didn’t know anything could flatter him. Even with the messy hairdo, it’s still an improvement from before, and he’s thinking he might learn how to braid when there’s a knock on his door.

He blinks once, and the knock comes again, so he rushes out of the room and to the entry. He throws it open and lo, before him is a ghost of his past, though no more than Cathy herself.

Lieutenant Irving stares at him, mouth agape and form rigid in the threshold, and this manages to shock Sol back into his senses. He tries and fails not to look down at himself, to take in the sight of him: dressed up in nothing but a woman’s dress, dainty stockinged feet poking out from the too-short hem, and his hair a right mess of tucks and pins. He looks back up at Irving. The man hasn’t moved.

“Lieutenant,” he says, and his voice is much sturdier than the rest of him. “What brings you here?”

“I…” Irving trails off, looks down, refuses to meet Sol’s eyes. He clears his throat and shuffles his feet and clears his throat again. “I am not your lieutenant. Currently.”

“Sorry,” Sol says, suddenly humiliated that he would make such a mistake. He forgets he’s in a dress again until his hands brush against the limp-hanging skirt and he remembers all that he seems in the moment. His verbal faux pas is left to the wayside.

“I was only in town,” Irving says abruptly, staring hard at the ground. “I knew you lived here, so I…”

“Checking in, Mr. Irving?” He tries the appellation on his tongue and finds it distasteful, even sour.

“I thought you might be around.”

“Here I am.” Not a complete truth, he chastises. The half-lie sits between them as if Irving is aware of all the falsehoods bloating it. Surely he wouldn’t, Sol thinks, but the chill that runs down his spine is no match for the arctic winds, and Cathy is still waiting by the mirror with ribbon in her hands and a nostalgic smile on her lips. Here he is in body—his spirit remains elsewhere, left behind on Terror, on the ice.

“Here you are,” Irving echoes with a smile that isn’t a smile. His eyes dart everywhere, constantly moving because there are few places he can look that don’t remind him of Sol’s current appearance. “And, well, here I—I am. And, um…”

Irving fumbles with his coat, fingers catching on the folds of fabric as he digs through his pocket. With a full-body jerk, he retrieves his fist from the pocket and pulls it straight to his face, far closer than need be.

“And, if you would look at the time—”

“I’m sure you’re busy,” Sol supplies, equally grateful for the excuse. A sigh racks down Irving’s spine and lets loose the watch from his hand, falling down until the gold chain pulls taut and swings about wildly in the span between the two of them. The shine of metal glints like the midnight sun and from the way Irving stares Sol guesses the likeness isn’t lost on him, either. The arctic had captured them both and then spit out their shells on the shores of great England, where the sun is too pale and too harsh all the same.

Sol watches Irving more than he does the timepiece, a fast-moving sun orbiting always out of the corner of his eye. Irving, though, is captured; he’s far away somewhere, caught in an ice storm or crawling over shale. Sol is there, too, always half in and half out. The unending sun circles overhead and his bones are so tired.

“I’m sure you’re busy,” Sol says again, and Irving startles out of his reverie.

He clears his throat and shakes his head and drops the watch into his pocket, nearly missing the hole. “Yes, er, yes, I am. Busy.”

Hickey told him once that Irving fears chaos.

“I ought to…” Irving stumbles backwards, then glances anxiously up and down the bustling city street. “Go. I am glad you’re well, Mr. Tozer.”

“The same for you, Mr. Irving.” Sol nods and ponders the meaning of chaos. Is it a pretty skirt or an empty expanse of wasteland? A city of strangers or a gurgling, rotting stomach?

Sol closes the door before Irving clears the stoop and finds it hard to breathe.

He should have stopped, after that. Solomon knows this, that he should have stopped, but he didn’t, and he doesn’t. He is careful, now, not to answer the door when he is made up and when Cathy is whispering in his ear. But he doesn’t stop.

He thinks his hair has gotten longer, but not by much. The split ends tickle his shoulders and sometimes it gets too much and he has to put it up, throwing ten or so of the pins Cathy left for him into his hair such that it sticks up in unnatural, unflattering ways. But they’re off his shoulders while he works, and when he puts on the dress he has the satisfaction of letting the pins drop to the floor and his hair fall down in scraggly waves that almost frame his face. It’s nothing impressive, objectively, but it’s his. And the more he looks, the more he sees Cathy in the mirror. They blend together, his hair covering up his hard edges, her blue eyes lighting up his face. They’re not so dissimilar; the familiar feels like home, like the frozen north wrapped around him.

He left something up there, he reckons. He comes to terms with it while he admires himself in the mirror, sits on the floor and plays with the hem of the skirt. Solomon Tozer is still in the arctic, must be, and here is only Catherine leading a dual life, a woman merely pretending to be a man. Yes, Solomon is wandering the desert north, feet broken by shale and lips split by cold. Stuck there, waiting, waiting for rescue.

When Irving comes by next, Sol isn’t in a dress. It’s his first reprieve in a long line of humiliations and transgressions.

Yet, he notices, Irving’s mouth curves down and his eyelids droop as he looks up, then down Sol’s body. “Mr. Tozer,” he says, stale and thin.

“Mr. Irving,” he responds, curious. “You’re in town again, I see.”

“I am.”

“Can I help you?”

There’s a pause during which Irving shuffles his feet and shoves his hands deeper into his pockets. He seems to get smaller, head all but disappearing into his coat, and Sol watches patiently as the man gathers himself, loses it, then recovers again. “No,” he finally says. “I was simply… passing through.”

He sounds disappointed, Sol conjectures. “Would you like to come in? I was about to eat.”

The last time they shared a meal it was from a rusting red can filled with lead. Even still if he runs his tongue across his teeth he can feel the sticky, slimy residue of the gravy; if he breathes out he can taste the same flavorless mystery meat he had eaten for years. There was a time he begrudged Irving and all the other officers for it. He wonders if that ever changed.

“It’s no Goldner’s, but…” He trails off, unsure what the punchline was supposed to be. Still, it causes Irving to look up, to meet his eyes, and there’s a moment of connection Sol hasn’t felt since he returned to England.

They’re both there still, Sol understands—trapped, wandering, lost in the wasteland of gray and blinding ice. Irving is not Irving, not here.

“Very well,” the man responds, biting on his lip before passing through the threshold into the dim cavern beyond. Sol watches him go and contemplates identity, tries to fit someone else into Irving’s skin. Does he have a sister?

When the door closes, the available light cuts in half. Light streams in through the window at a slant and through the open bedroom door glints off the mirror, casting golden light across the wall and beating against Irving’s coat.

“Can I take that?” he asks, and Irving shrugs out of it, looking around like he’s lost and trapped and scared, like he shouldn’t be here. Sol agrees, but he doesn’t turn him away. Instead he turns to the small table and rolls open the breadbox. “There’s bread,” he offers. Irving nods once and Sol breaks off a piece for him.

There’s a question in the air that neither of them voice; perhaps they are two different questions. Still, the bread is shared in silence, and Sol unwraps the cheese he brought home and divides that as well. There is no meat in this meal, one more difference from their last—the other, that they were on opposing ideological lines, enemies unknown to each other, unwittingly plotting and scheming each other’s demises. Himself, led down a path of destruction by Hickey; Irving, following a more righteous path, a path of God.

Sol asks himself: Is God here, in this place?

He saw God in the creature. Beyond that, he questions.

“Do you,” Irving begins suddenly, putting down the stub of cheese he has left, “have a sister?”

It’s an unexpected question, and Sol coughs around his premature swallow. From his room, Cathy guides his answer, her sweet voice soothing his anxiety. “I do. She’s, er, she’s not been here. For some time, actually.”

Irving hums, but does not look him in the eye. Instead, he looks over his shoulder toward the bedroom, where the door propped open reveals Cathy’s chest, and inside it the mounds of fabric.

“They’re hers,” he explains even though no question is raised. “I’m keeping them safe. For her.”

Irving continues to watch the chest. His hand flexes on the back of the chair, knuckles white, and Sol wants to reach out and turn him back around just so he can see his expression. “Why did you wear them?”

If Irving grips the chair any harder it will break. Sol has no answer for the man.

“Did you…” Irving faces the bedroom and speaks so softly Sol has to strain himself to hear. “Do you like it?”

Cathy brushes Sol’s hair back and beckons him with a smile. She is inside the bedroom and she is behind him, arms wrapped around his neck. “She’s in me, Mr. Irving,” he decides on, Cathy’s spirit in his voice.

Irving dares a glance behind him, and whatever he sees makes his eyes widen.

“Her soul,” he clarifies. He has seen it, has felt the rush of it right before it was consumed. He knows souls, understands them better than most. Cathy’s is there with him, inside him, filling the empty hole that was consumed by the creature. “I feel it.”

“Is she deceased?” Irving asks, uncertain. There is a frown on his lips not unlike the one he greeted Sol with on his stoop.

“She’s alive,” and he says this with conviction. Cathy is alive.

Irving works his jaw, the muscles flexing near-imperceptibly beneath his finely trimmed beard. “Within you,” he clarifies uncertainly.

“And without.” Sol nods. There is a question in Irving’s eye that Sol doesn’t understand, but wants to answer nonetheless. He poses his own, hesitant and quiet, such that the man can pretend not to hear if he so wishes: “Would you like to see her?”

A breath escapes Irving, but not Sol. It sounds resolutely, unbelievably, like a yes.

Nary a moment passes before Sol is on his feet and marching in muscle-memory lockstep to Cathy’s room. She holds the door open for him and Irving follows on his heels, quiet but radiant with eagerness and anxiety. “Might you—Mr. Irving, sir…”

He turns to face the man, but can’t meet his eyes.

“Perhaps you’d prefer to stay outside,” he finishes, mumbled words almost unintelligible even to his own ear. Irving starts and swallows, fingers playing with his coat; he swallows again and clears his throat.

“Of course, that’s—that’s the proper thing to…” Irving glances at the doorway and the dining chair framed by it, small in the short distance. His eyes slide back toward Sol.

There is a moment where propriety meets ataxia, and neither of them move for want of something unsaid. Then, to defeat the demands of British decorum, Sol faces Irving and, with a stutter in his heart, tugs at his suspenders until they drop down around his arms and hang loose around his hips. The man before him jumps but makes no greater move than that, and so to hell with propriety.

Irving hesitates at the door, hovering nervously in his direction but not daring to come nearer. Sol takes charge, a familiar position and yet uncomfortable before someone he’s called his commanding officer; he tugs at his shirt until it’s free of his trousers, pulling up until his belly underneath is revealed and catches the slight draft in the room. Irving stares like he doesn’t know he’s staring, and Sol feels scrutinized by something larger than himself, like the whole of England bearing down on him at once.

The world is both smaller and wider here, vast and strangling with its crowded streets and tiny rooms. Sol is watched here, eyes following his hands as he picks at the hem of the shirt, delaying an inevitability he wanted to commit to mere moments ago. He has the impression of a performance, and he supposes that is what this is. Irving is the audience in this world away from the world. He has never felt the imposition of audience more strongly than here, with one man staring fixated on his hand with parted lips which quiver with every jerk of his fingertips. It is a prison, he feels, like the red cloth of the marines or the iron hull of a ship.

He sheds himself of the shirt, dingy and off-white from lack of proper laundering, and they are not in a ship but on land, a small land of them two where no one watches but each other. Sol dares not to look away, and Irving must feel the same. So he lifts the shirt above his head and lets it catch around his ears before tugging it free, and then he is laid bare for a man he barely knows. Irving suddenly knows him, the shape of him. Solomon is a man, with a solid chest and dark, curling hairs that trail down his belly and into his trousers. His heart stills as Irving watches him. What does he think?—a question that shatters him.

All at once his trousers and socks are off, before he’s even cognizant of his own hand moving. He is a performer; so let him perform. And naked and new he stands before Irving, who watches weary and wondering, eyes wide like he has never seen a sight like this. Were their roles reversed, he would feel the same way, perhaps.

He reaches for the dress, fist trembling as it clenches tight around the fabric.

“Wait,” he hears, and when Sol looks over his shoulder Irving’s hand is outstretched toward him, an arrested capture that gives Sol pause and causes him to drop the garment back into the trunk. “The, um…”

The hesitation is bright and innocent, like a boy who knows nothing of the world. Sol ponders this and then leaves it be.

“One would typically wear a corset,” Irving finally says, eyes lowering to the floor, “beneath her dress.”

It’s a revelation Sol hadn’t considered before. He isn’t familiar with them, fangled contraptions with too many strings and pieces and curves to understand. He glances down into the trunk, and there at the bottom is a plain linen thing, cords of cloth cutting the fabric into valleys and hills. He nudges the dress out of the way and produces the thing, bulky and bulging in unnatural ways.

He holds it out for Irving to see. “This?”

Irving reaches out slowly and grazes his fingertips across the thick hemline, delicately like it would burn him. Then, with shaking hands, he pulls the corset from Sol’s hands and stares down at the ground, far and away from the man before him. “If you’ll allow me…”

Something stutters in Sol’s chest as he realizes what Irving is asking. And yet, he would be remiss to refuse: so he turns that his back faces the other man and waits, daring not to even breathe. It’s more intimate than he had expected, this game of waiting as Irving presumably gathers his bearings behind him; his back is exposed and vulnerable, more so in the nude, and he can’t see where Irving is looking, if at all.

He hopes—and it comes as a surprise to him—that Irving is looking.

Finally, two arms wrap around his torso and a fully clothed body presses against him. The corset is dangled before him, and his arms go out so that Irving can slide the thing up over them and settle over his shoulders. Sol tries to remember ever seeing Cathy in this state of undress and can’t produce a memory. He tries to remember ever being this close to another and only finds one man, pressed against him like a lover.

When Irving separates it leaves Sol disappointed, though he rationalizes it and tamps down on the catch in his throat. The separation doesn’t last long, for Irving’s fingers find his sides and dance along them, clumsily making their way toward his spine. The tugging begins frantically, then slows as the man works the string through the holes. Gradually the corset gets tighter, gets snug against him, as if Irving were still wrapped around him and holding him in an embrace.

Yet it sits awkwardly around him, clearly made for a body not his own. He shifts uncomfortably but tries not to make it obvious as Irving pulls and weaves and laces together the strands. “Is it too tight?”

Sol can only shake his head, words failing him. So Irving hums and runs his hands down Sol’s torso, over the cording that creates artificial planes upon his body.

Irving exhales. Sol doesn’t know what that means.

“The dress,” Irving says suddenly, and Sol spins back around to face him. “It’s…”

“Right, the dress,” Sol echoes. He sneaks glances at Irving as he scoops it off the floor, unwilling to look away for even a moment. It’s more cumbersome to move in the corset, the cords trying to will him into an upright posture, but he fights against it until he stands again, dress in hand.

It goes on smoothly and settles against his skin now that the fabric has stretched and warped for him. His arms punch through the holes and Irving watches, hands fidgeting at his side. “Might I…?”

When Sol turns his back to him again, he thinks, for a reason unknown to him, to brush his hair out of the way. It’s not long enough to make a difference, but Irving gasps nonetheless. He does up the buttons with clumsy hands, and Sol feels every pull of the fabric as it trembles against him.

There is something transformative about this moment: at the moment Irving finishes with the buttons, Sol is no longer in his room, and when he breathes out it’s hot and visible against the frozen air. He turns; the arctic is around them again, the two of them standing on the shale in wool socks and bare hands. Irving’s eyes are wide, and Sol imagines his own are a reflection of them.

A certain lightness comes upon them. The heaviness of English smog lifts and leaves the air so thinly woven as to feel like gossamer, like feathers, like nothing. They are alone, here. The arctic is theirs.

“You are beautiful,” Irving breathes visibly into the air. The man doesn’t seem even to be aware of it, his eyes fixed upon Sol. “A handsome lady.”

The word lady echoes in the silence of Nunavut. It disturbs the landscape, the rocks rattling to an unfelt earthquake that makes the thin air shimmer. Solomon can see for miles here, the vast expanse of white and gray in all directions. They stand here in the middle of it all, and the world is bright.

“Sir?”

“May… I?” Irving stares hard at him with watery, glassy eyes. The everlasting sun bleaches everything below it and chases away the shadows; Irving’s lips part desperately and he reaches out again so that he may touch.

Solomon lets him. The fingers pick at the skirt that hangs from his hips and drowns his muscles in frills and lace. For the first time in months he feels himself a man, whole and complete in the great white nothing. And when there is nothing, he must be everything.

Irving beholds him as if that is true.

His eyes regard him even as his body slips beneath the skirts, the fabric seeming to expand to accommodate a second man. Then comes the warmth, a foreign element of the frozen north: it spreads up his legs, naked and bare, like a coveted fire of ever-dwindling wood scraps. It rakes into his skin in sharp rows, and Solomon gasps. He stumbles back into something soft and firm and leans heavy on it as Irving comes down hard upon him, the weight of the other pressing indents into his flesh—stretching him, molding him into a worthy idol. He dizzies, head falling back toward the sky; the world spins around on its axis as the sun advances in tight circles overhead, always overhead.

A slick wetness suddenly accompanies the warmth, and Solomon’s gaze darts away from the cold sun to the fire below. Irving’s eyes have broken from him and disappeared beneath the fabric, and it stirs something within him. He tugs on the skirts and allows them to fall back across his belly. Irving’s tongue licks up his leg slowly, with the rapturous, trembling hesitation of a new convert.

He has found himself in the image of Man, the towering figure cracking shale beneath His feet. Irving finds himself in another image, eyes closed as he caresses Solomon’s leg with trembling hands, jaw slack and mouth open as one would sing a psalm. Solomon believes, then, with all his heart that true religion can be found only in the frozen north, among the godless savages. God is not in Britain, Irving tells him through kisses upon his thigh; God is farther, attainable only once everything has been discarded and lain out to be purified in the frozen summer sun.

When Irving takes him into his mouth Solomon feels himself stripped bare, bleached like bones and touched like the divine. He is the arctic, the nothing and the all-encompassing everything. God and Man, divine and everlasting—Solomon chokes out a raspy breath. The arctic enters him as it does Irving, and they find together what they have sought, what had been taken from them on that rescue ship and on that pier. They return to the state of knowing and discovery, the state of themselves which concludes all searching. As Irving teases up Solomon’s shaft they are whole, Man and devout, found and wanting no more.

The cold embraces him like a bed of ice when Solomon comes, Irving joining him not long after. They are wet and shaking, and the world races around them as the endless expanse of colorless rock and sky press down upon them, create imprints of them which will remain and which will keep their souls eternally trapped within the ice.

The summer is too hot; Sol had lost his skill to prepare for it. And still the sun sets at night, taking its murky light with it. It’s unnatural, he thinks; this world is unnatural. There is but one place he feels calm, sure, safe, and it is no longer here. Cathy is gone; his family is gone. Even when he dons her dress she is gone, disappeared and never returning.

He has stopped trying.

The dress sits in the trunk untouched, still with a tear in the skirt where he recalls Irving having torn it months ago. It is a reminder of something he cannot bear to think upon.

He thinks Irving has taken another commission north, or perhaps south. He thinks he shall never see it again, can’t, won’t. If he returns, he’ll surely never leave. He will die there on the ice where he ought to have a year ago.

Perhaps that is Irving’s design, he muses as he lets a window open in an effort to cool down his room. It is ineffective, and the draft does nothing but tantalize him, beckon him ever farther to a place he cannot reach.

He hides himself. He cannot leave, face the crowded streets and the people who only know what they’ve ever known, who have never seen a land devoid of life, who have never seen a desolate landscape simultaneously teeming with it. He does not belong here; yet he cannot go back.

The colors of England are dull and overpowering. The people are too loud, too scrutinizing, too present. The smells are manufactured and the sky is clouded. He does not want to be here. Yet he cannot go back.

He cannot go back.

Solomon takes a seat on Cathy’s trunk and stares at the dusty mirror across the room; it reflects the window back at him, and the street beyond it. Tiny blobs of movement track predefined pathways across the glass and disappear, only for more blobs to take their place. He sits unseeing, his mind in another place, because it is the only way he can ever get back to before.

He hopes Irving finds his God. He hopes Cathy is out there somewhere. And he hopes, against reason, that the sun will not set tonight. When he closes his eyes, he is the desert prophet wandering a frozen wasteland, and Cathy is at home, warm by the fire, waiting for his safe return.

Light shines off the mirror and then disappears beneath the world as the sun sets in the sky.