The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 142

week, because he said he was anxious that my age, my health, might make me too vulnerable to false promise. This was disingenuous, of course, since the chief reason for his delay was that he was assessing what he had to gain in contrast to what he might lose should he violate the letter of the law.

Despite his condescension, I was touched by Gardiner’s pity and defensiveness, am now puzzling what changes might be in the future for our relationship. In one sense, we are closer than lovers, jailer and jailed: he rules me, while I represent his reason for being. He folded Diomedes’s letter, rose, shuffled. He might have been waiting to see if I might descend into a swoon, or worse. The medical officer here suspects my heart, says that it is too large for a healthy man. Gardiner’s pause was appropriate, for my blood raced, I was pallid and sweaty. I got control of my breathing and tried to show him that I would endure by offering him some of my Christmas fruit. I understood then that his reading of the letter was Gardiner’s Christmas present to me. I have his secret now. He is sentimental. We share a chink. The stern, disconsolate commandant of the ice prisoner’s keep has a hidden compassion. Gardiner started to speak in English, mumbled what seemed a prayer, or epigram, in an odd tongue. Was that American Indian? Is this a deeper confidence? He is Canadian, a career naval officer, a professional truce-keeper like Diomedes, and has mentioned to one of the sergeants of the guard—I overheard them—that he likes to hunt on the ice because it reminds him of the Elizabeth Islands. My map, hidden in the Fiddle Bible, the one book I am permitted in my own library, shows me the Elizabeth Islands are part of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Perhaps Gardiner is a halfbreed like me, part Eskimo, or with blood of a remnant of the fabled Iroquois nations. Gardiner has become a new mind for me to explore. Gardiner cleared his rich face and said, “Is all in order?”

Gardiner misunderstands my upset. All is not in order. I am fractured as the faults ripped the South, as New Benthamism ripped God’s children. I am in agony at the thought of a hope that is a curse. I find my strength has gone just now. I shall explain the more tomorrow. I wish myself and Helen a merry Christmas, and shall turn to reading from the Fiddle Bible—the Gospel of Matthew—to an old and patient she-wolf.

This new turn is more and worse than I could have supposed. My fever returned to pull me to bed five days ago, on Christmas night. This triggered nightmares that bathed me in sorrow. I have not mentioned before that it is a phenomenon of Antarctica that when conditions are physically worst, as they were in the ice camps, or on Anvers Island, as they can be for those unaccustomed to the six months of winter’s howling blackness, one does not have nightmares. One dreams grandiosely. An extreme example of this might be the berserker dreaming I re-created this past winter to speak to my ascendancy to kingship, a passage that might represent the last thoughtful work I shall manage on my manuscript. It has been one of my punishments in this prison, where I am physically well cared for, that my nightmares here suffuse my memory—awful fogs that I cannot reproduce when rational. This new threat has called up hideous images of the sleights of the hand of fate. I feel my body pulled inside out, as if a wizard had reached inside my mouth and pulled my soul onto the outside, with handwriting wrapped around and around my being for all to read. Surely this must be some bizarre transformation of Diomedes’s letter, my first letter in twenty-nine years of anathema, the first communication meant just for me since I found Grandfather’s stone marker on Mead’s Kiss thirty-six years ago. Diomedes’s words have seared my thoughts and burned my flesh.

I have promised that I would explain my upset at the news of the Reunionists. It is straightforward. I fear them. I reject them. It is the same. I have buried so many of my loved ones as well as my enemies; all my love may be in the coldest ground. I held myself also safely done, in the frozen ground, buried. Now these strangers, who do not love me, whom I can never know, intend to disinter a corpse. Yes, my heart races and my mind makes this confession. Yet I am dead to all that apostasy on “planet Earth.” I am exiled by law. I am condemned by mankind. A justly convened tribunal sent me into infamy. I accept my sentence by them as an act of genius. I deserve what has been done to me. I am guilty of crimes against humanity. I did make war, did murder countless numbers of God’s children. I can see and hear them die again and again. This is my due penance. I have served my time here without once looking toward or praying for release. This is meant to be, must be, my end.

What right have these strangers, the One World Reunion, to scratch an ice grave and bring forth the decay of a man wracked by his own guilt and haunted by his own ghosts? What right have they to drag a tormented soul back into a world that had no place for him in 2009, might not even have had a place for him at his birth in 1973? What right can they possibly claim to increase my punishment? This seems manifold jeopardy. They are trying me again. Mankind has done of me. Let mankind’s verdict stand. Let me be.

I do not want to mislead. I do not think the Reunionists do demon’s work, or angel’s work. They are men and women. What men have done wrong, men can do