Something more than we anticipated is coming with the melt. What I know about it, what Len knows, starts with the minks.
I showed up early to the politician’s press conference intending to shake a sign and yell chants with the people, united, never to be defeated. Before the cameras and journalists arrived, a small crowd formed of the disgruntled and outraged: myself, my co-workers, our friends who were looking for something to do on a Friday afternoon. We were angry about the end of the earth. We wore cut-off jeans and t-shirts with band names and slogans: Rage Against the Machine, Bad Religion, Free Them All, No One Is Illegal. We held up a tapestry on cardboard of stickers from bike shops, tattoo parlors, and thrift stores. Someone called it the quilt of terror. When I yelled “murderer,” I didn’t intend for the politician to freak out, which he did, and spit at me, which he did.
The blob landed in my hair, and I raised my hand to touch it, felt the phlegm inside the honestly impressive amount of liquid, shocked but not really surprised. I had expected violence. Amari, another barista, snapped a photo and said, “Report him.” So I did. After the presser and some cathartic shouting (Whose energy? Our energy!), I walked to the Public Safety Building in downtown Frankfort, filled out the report, shared the photo. I had been truly scared to go into Public Safety, but I thought of Len for courage.
Unfortunately, I’m bad with names. I also had low blood sugar, and when the police officer looked at me and asked, “So who spit at you? Was it another antifa?” I became distracted by the question of whether or not I should explain to him what antifa was and wasn’t, and in the end, I gave the wrong name. I told the officer the name of our recently deceased racist senator, not the alive and alarmingly youthful racist congressman. The officer didn’t ask twice, and I only realized my mistake later that night, watching American Ninja Warrior. The name of the current congressman hit me as I saw a bald, muscled man run up and slip down the Warped Wall over and over until he gave up.
I was too embarrassed to tell Len about my failed direct action. Len is always my inspiration; I want to be the person that I am becoming because of her. She was 1,200 miles north anyway, working feverishly to solve a biological mystery. Len lives and works far from here in coastal Maine, in a series of buildings nestled in the pine trees and shrub grass with signs out in front warning visitors off. It is wolfish federal property, full of biohazards, clad in nondescript brown wood. She sometimes sleeps on a mattress near her desk. I’m not allowed inside, but many mornings I have brought her coffee and muffin at the back door of Building 9.
We met when she came into the café where I worked in Bar Harbor, after I had moved up from Frankfort. She ordered a redeye, and after I pulled the espresso with a perfect crema and added fresh brewed Colombian Supremo, she told me it was the best coffee she’d had in her life. Her pure joy and decency made me emotional, and I turned away and started wiping down the steamer wand. She kept coming.
We started up together when she invited me to go birdwatching. (Her friends laughed at me later over red wine in hand-thrown ceramic coffee mugs: you never heard that pick-up line?) When she said, “Do you want to see the largest raptor on earth?” at first I heard rapt her, and still I went. We stood on high rocks as the sea threw itself towards us. We craned our neck upwards to see this prehistoric creature fly back and forth, slashing its bright yellow beak against the gray sky and gray water. When she put her hand on the back of my neck, I felt like I was the bird.
Len dropped me at my bungalow and invited herself in. I’ll cut from that moment to three weeks later when her toothbrush joined mine on the bathroom sink. But I will say this: I gained new understanding of why my marriage had failed. She acts like she likes me, for one. Instead of telling me about something that should have happened in a certain way, like say, the dishes organized properly in the dishwasher, she does it the way she likes and lets me witness the glory, and I learn. She is usually right.
She is gorgeous. Dark hair, dark eyes, athlete’s build—she is the only person I’ve ever met who can make LL Bean jeans look like they fit right. And her mind: sharp and open, like seeing the ocean from cliffs. Her research is classified, but I suppose I can tell you. It’s relevant. Something more than we anticipated is coming with the melt. What I know about it, what Len knows, starts with the minks.
I am usually cooking or reading until she gets up and kisses me and tells me with a kind of crazy urgency that we have to find joy now.
The sea minks swam among the rocks off the Maine coast, pulling themselves up between tides to sniff out gull and eagle eggs among the briny weeds, then retreating to their caves inside the rock crevices. They have been extinct for more than a hundred years—except in Len’s lab, where a trapper from up north found a carcass in the melt of two warm winters ago. Everything was intact, the animal’s lips still pulled back in a snarl, its left leg in the complicated teeth of a trap made of sharpened boughs. The current trapper guessed his forebearer in labor, maybe drunk, lost track of his own traps, and the animal froze years, maybe centuries ago.
Our trapper got sick two days later. His body swelled internally and pushed against his own skin. Small cracks opened between his fingers and toes and pus seeped out. He died before it got worse. The doctors thought it was an autoimmune reaction. Both his body and the mink’s were riddled with a bacteria that Len couldn’t identify but that dated the mink as much, much older than they’d thought. The lab had taken its precautions, handling the body with leaded gloves, putting the body in a sealed vitrine, and now Len was centrifuging and DNA-mapping and using her expensive equipment to find out if all that bacteria is coming from us as the ice melts more.
Maybe this is not interesting to you. Maybe I’m more interesting with my guns and tattoos. But I’m fascinated by Len, her mind, her silences. When Len comes home, she says nothing for an hour. She showers and sits in a chair by the bay window and is quiet. I am usually cooking or reading until she gets up and kisses me and tells me with a kind of crazy urgency that we have to find joy now. It makes me feel like a teenager, like I want to save the world or dance with strangers or make out with her in unlikely public places—the front yard, the roof, the freeway median, the café window. I touch her arm in the car, I watch her profile as we walk along bluffs, each of us stopping by a trail to share an eruption of purple lupine under a stand of aspen. We have paradise right here.
Her friends took me in quickly, which is how I knew she said good things about me when I wasn’t there. That had not been the case with Cal, my ex-husband. Cal and I had loved each other with a passion for two years, senior year of high school and the one after, and eloped to the justice of the peace under the withering stare of my dad who said, “Well I’m not coming anyway, good luck making a home.” We were the youngest married people we knew, and this meant that at least we lived in our own place. We had thought it would be fun, I think, figuring out together how to cook and clean and save. It turns out I was the one who did all the figuring.
After work, me at the coffee shop, him at the body shop, we often met up with his old school friends: the bassist who lived with his parents, the tattooist who did great work before noon, the former girlfriend who showed up on college breaks, every time with a new hair color and canvas tote bag stamped with a logo of some obscure magazine.
One time I remember so clearly. Cal and his friends and I sat in a bar re-carving our initials into our table, drinking.
“You guys want to go to the quarry?” the bassist asked.
“I’m betting on boring married love later,” Cal said.
“What’s so boring?” I asked.
“Don’t be stupid,” said Cal. “It’s just a thing people say.”
Cal’s idea of exciting was shooting sitting ducks. He’d go to these manmade ponds and first do the clay pigeons. Then he would switch guns the way some people do golf clubs and go for the live ducks. His bird dog would flush them out, scare them good, and he’d methodically pick the birds off one by one as they flew up away from the dog. Ten dead ducks. One time the dog brought him a dead duck body, and he hit the dog on the nose, even though it was doing what it thought he wanted. I understood that dog.
The duck club manager came out and told him he was done for the day. “She wants to play,” Cal told the manager, who waved us on for a round. After I shot five and hit three, he took my gun from my hands and took out the last five. He had beads of sweat on his brow by the end.
“That was hot shit,” he said. I agreed because it was true, he had taken out all he wanted. In the truck, he turned up the air conditioning and drove fast home to make boring married love, turned on by all the shooting.
She was going to save the world, given enough time. I could give her that time.
I had ended up in Maine after I left Cal, not on a whim but because my skin positively needed to come off if I stayed any longer. It felt like I was itching to scrape it off, become new. I was so uncomfortable staying a minute longer. So I drove north until I-95 turned away from the Maine coast, and paid $40 a night to live in a motel off Route 9 until I ran out of cash.
At least there’s no kid, Dad texted me when I told him I was in Maine. My own mother had left us when I was four. She had met someone new, who lived far away. It was complicated. That’s what she told me when I went to visit her in summers through school, after which we stopped trying. She sends me cards and cash on holidays and on my birthday.
I didn’t want to hurt anyone, I wrote back to my father.
I know, kiddo, he wrote.
Len’s friends were smart and decent. They had plenty to do and chose to spend time with us. The feeling of being part of something is exquisite; it feels like camping with my dad, sitting in silence looking at the pines in the wind. I realize that these simple longings might make Cal seem right, might make me seem stupid—but what is so smart about being cruel?
Len’s main group consisted of Sasha, Amaya, and Alex. Sasha worked with Len, Amaya studied harbor seals, and Alex was a technologist, which meant he worked in tech help for the local university but had big ideas about a new app he was working on. Sasha had multiple degrees related to encryption and privacy, which I didn’t know was possible. She was a baller coder but also had thoughts about what that meant and how human intentions showed up in seemingly neutral code. I loved to hear her talk.
“I have to warn you about Alex,” Sasha said as the two of us sat at Len’s Formica dining table, making vegan risotto, with mushrooms and spinach, before the first big dinner party we hosted with her friends. Another person warning me, I thought.
“He admires Elon Musk. He thinks entrepreneurship will save us.”
“So he’s a capitalist?” I said. “We’re surrounded.”
“Sharp,” she said. She continued to compliment me in ways that embarrassed me. Len had told Sasha my powers and now they were inalienable. I considered my long fingers, my square toes, my quick passion, my small stature, my clear eyes, my inattentiveness and digressions, my improvisatory meals—all beloved.
The risotto turned out brilliant, and when everyone left, Len called me her personal Alice Waters. I asked who’s that, and she said, don’t worry about it, just a lady who monetized cooking local and healthy.
I loved cooking for her. There was more I could do, though. She was going to save the world, given enough time. I could give her that time.
First, though, I had to leave Len to help my father die. His COPD finally got bad enough that he let me know he was sick, and I moved back in to fix his meals and watch his diet and help him get to the bathroom before he shit himself. I didn’t know if it would be ten days or ten years, but in the end, it was ten weeks.
The night before I left, I went to pick up Len from work. She needed a few more minutes but didn’t want me to go. Len emerged from a door from the side of the brown building and let me in the lab, even though I didn’t have clearance.
“I have to finish up,” she said. “Wait quietly right here.”
I stood near her desk as she typed into a giant chart. As she leaned over her notes, a strand of hair fell out of her ponytail, and I pushed it behind her ear. She took my hand and looked at me with a love that shocked me. Who was I to deserve this?
I leaned in to kiss her but stopped short. Something seemed to move in my peripheral vision. We both turned to look at the vitrine. The mink lay still, an inert pelt. Then we saw the left leg twitch, shoot out quickly, then tremor itself to stillness, like that of a dreaming dog. It or something in it remained animate. Len muttered, could be the gasses. No fantasy can compete with what is happening in real time. As she double-checked all the seals, I touched the vials on her desk, imagined the care she lavished on each one. Then we left for the night. What else could we do.
It’s too late for us, I feel that deeply. But it may not be too late for the lupine and aspens, the eagles and rodents.
At home, before I left, I showed Len the texts from my dad; they were nearly two years old.
“This is the sum total of our correspondence.” I wanted her to know the kind of people I came from. We weren’t big on words.
“He loves you,” she said. Len is a healer by temperament, and a visionary professionally. She looks back into the biomes of the past to tell us about our future. Let me tell you, though, no one is listening. It drives me nuts. It drove me nuts, arguably, which is why I’m telling you about it now.
After my father died, I sat in his small kitchen alone and read the newspapers that kept piling up on his lawn. Of the many things I needed to do, canceling the paper and selling his home were beyond me. I was capable of getting up, showering, reading, sitting, walking in the park on some days—that was about it for a few weeks. I took a pile of his shirts and put them in a plastic bag and moved that to the basement. I ignored his accordion folders of old bills, his closet of hunting rifles, his folded up metal walker.
A month or so into reading the daily paper, I saw an article announcing our congressman would be in town from D.C. to give a speech focused on jobs. He wanted to invest in those we have, not invent ones that don’t exist. Our congressman was also a significant hold out on the energy bill. He was youngish, which matters because he would see the impact of his greed, given even a late 20th-century longevity, which was going down for us all, thanks to the same. We all know the consequences of this recalcitrance: aside from the heat, there’s the melt, the thaw, the release of gasses, germs, vermin. There’s also the wind, the rain, the fire.
The only thing I felt as passionate about as Len was that our fixation on accumulation was killing everything beautiful. The vote on the energy bill was the following week. I took my father’s shotgun out and practiced in the yard. I knew the local park across from the statehouse, its hills and sightways. I knew the best place to sit and watch, a light spring jacket over my knees and hands.
In the end, I didn’t bring the gun, I brought a sign. I provoked the congressman, for sure. I may have taunted him for being shortsighted, for being a poor shot himself. So he lost it and lobbed one at me. I was unlucky that the camera crews had not yet set up, that only Amari and his phone witnessed the long cloudy trail soar through the air, phlegm launching like a solid into my hair and on my head. After my mix-up with the police, I called them back and said the correct politician’s name. Sorry, I’m so sorry, I said. I’m bad with names. But he is violent, has a temper, should be arrested. Despite the video, they said I was not credible. There was nothing they could do.
In the end, the renewables package failed to pass in Congress, by one vote. I’m back here, alone, the way things started, at work, behind the marble bar. I do think about what I, or any single person, can do to push back against greed. It’s too late for us, I feel that deeply. But it may not be too late for the lupine and aspens, the eagles and rodents.
My ex-husband stopped by and ordered a coffee the other day. I made him a red-eye. He whistled and said, boy, that’s strong and took a sip. He told me he had a new job doing tech. “What kind of tech?” I asked.
“Computers.”
He asked me why I was back and working. Was I staying? I shrugged and was kind. Despite his puffy face, his growing paunch, his paleness, I told him he looked well. I told him it was nice to see him, that I had learned so much with him and was glad to have the chance to thank him. Through the front plate glass window, I watched him walk away to his car. He threw out the coffee on his way.
They seemed to be feeding one another somehow, as in the weeks since sentience the scientists had in fact not fed the creature, and here it was, circling its tail.
On break, sitting on a crate in the lot behind the café and drinking an extruded espresso, I opened a letter from Len, with a picture of her included. She had taken to sending actual letters through the post to try to make sure no one but me was reading. I wrote back time and again that I loved her and that I was still sorting through my father’s things. I told her I was trying to help in my own way, and despite all I wanted to say, I kept it at that. I did not tell her about the incident. She wrote and asked me to send a picture of me at work at the end of the day when no one was there, cleaning the machine. I took a shot of myself from above, wiping down the gleaming chrome, in a red flannel shirt and jean shorts, my hair around my face like a shroud, looking cute and hostile. I printed it at Walgreens and sent it.
She wrote that the mink was now fully mobile, inside its vitrine, and the scientists at the lab were deliberating whether to feed it and keep it alive for further study or to let it waste away inside the vitrine. When it wasn’t sleeping, it walked in tight circles and banged its head against the glass. It seemed intelligent for a marine weasel.
That was Len’s main argument for euthanization, among others. The other scientists were curious, though, about this intelligence and wanted to study the symbiotic relationship between the mink and the bacteria. They seemed to be feeding one another somehow, as in the weeks since sentience the scientists had in fact not fed the creature, and here it was, circling its tail.
Len wondered how much longer she would love this work. Her colleagues, normally so considerate, excited by the prospect of a night dive to find bioluminescent creatures or a morning bird walk, were talking about patents and applications. They mentioned closed nutrient systems that could be bottled and sold.
By the time you get this, Len wrote, we will have decided. If they choose to keep it and continue experiments for pharmacological applications, I will have to leave. Not out of concerns about my own safety, although those do exist but are irrelevant once this thing escapes, as it will when they start poking it more extensively, but because leaving is the only thing I can do to show this matters.
I finished my espresso and looked at the phone. Len had texted, I’ll be there soon.
Far north of here, three more minks rose from beneath the warm mud—unknowing, unseen—and slipped into the sea.
A writer and teacher based in Jersey City, New Jersey, Carly Berwick has published fiction in Parentheses Journal, Milk Candy Review, Subnivean, The Cincinnati Review, and other places. She has also contributed essays and journalism to a range of publications, including The New York Times, Next City, and The Atlantic.
Header photo by KinoMasterskaya, courtesy Shutterstock.
