In Fond Remembrance of Me Read Free Page A

beings— this one —not an hour’s walk from the village. The ice may crack open and the hunter plummet after his dogs into a fissure. The arctic hosts a vast repertoire of spirits, some benevolent, others who would readily half-orphan the children of that hunter at whim. Most often the hunter makes it out and back and lives to tell the tale. Still, it is always a good idea to say, “Don’t forget me.”
    Each journey, as Buddhists say, begins with the first step, such as Billy Umiaq’s step into the Hudson’s Bay Company store. It is not paranoia to say that life is unpredictable; unpredictability is part of quotidian life. You temper it with a shrug, “Hey, how you been?” You acknowledge it and move
on. Neither the actual amount of time that has passed nor the distance traveled points to the central meaning. It was that Billy Umiaq had disappeared from view, and now he was back. Life had worked out for the best.
    Helen could not afford to catch a cold or, worse, pneumonia; she had had pneumonia twice in eighteen months. We should have gone directly back to the motel. For some reason, however, I began a disquisition, replete with halfbaked theories, about the movie’s larger themes and implications. Being someone who had difficulty disguising her immediate responses to almost anything, Helen grimaced slightly. “Where did this come from?” she said. “What are you talking about?” Helen was of small physical stature and yet responses registered on her face in big ways—I equated it to the outsized expressions required by background characters in an opera, as if the audience is keenly observing only them. Her face could fall into solemn disappointment, it could squinch up in disgust, it could submit to a rubbery pout as if gravity itself were forcing a clownish frown. There was a huge full moon flooding the tundra. I just kept talking—“ … I mean, the way she just knew from the beginning her boss didn’t kill anybody. Plus, there were no—what? normal people in that movie. I guess it’s all about how sinister life is, huh?”—until Helen finally interrupted me. “Howard Norman,” she said—she always used my full name—“you’ve taken a simple plot and …” She stopped, exasperated, scarcely able to catch her breath. We stood in silence a moment, breaths pluming ghostily into the night air. Perhaps from a distance we seemed to be squaring off. We heard a burst of laughter from near the store. “That’s all,”
Helen said. “That’s all. I guess I’m not up to discussing this now. I really enjoyed the movie, that’s all.”
    In memory it is a still life, “The Argument,” call it. Was it that, an argument? I think, yes, because our voices must have carried a certain pitch of annoyance. The Inuit teenagers kept looking over. Maybe they were expecting something more. They lit up cigarettes; they lit each other’s cigarettes. Helen and I escorted each other to our separate rooms in the Beluga Motel.
    Around 5 a.m. the next morning when I woke, I saw that a note had been slid under my door: The movie was about a woman who did not give up on love. Life’s gotten away from you—if you cannot see that!
    â€œLooking back on it”—this is from Helen’s letter of March 27, 1978—“I consider our friendship lovely, hermetic, difficult.” Helen had a way with words; besides which, I don’t contest her opinion.
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    NOAH BECOMES A GHOST
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    There’s different stories you hear about this fellow, Noah—in church and other places, you hear stories. Here’s what I know happened. It happened a long time ago. One day, a big wooden boat floated into Hudson Bay. People from the village nearby paddled out to it in kayaks. Ice was just forming along the edges—it was almost winter.
    They paddled out, and when