Dissolution

I. 

The ice creaks. It groans and sighs. It is dreaming. 

 It settles, is quiet. And then, once again, it whispers.  

It sings in the night, but its song is obscure.  

It begins in darkness.  

He hears the wind first. And then, as he becomes aware of the pain on the side of the head a surge of panic rises within him. He tries to bring his hand up to feel it, but he is tightly bound, lying in a constricted darkness. Fear grips him hard, sending his heart into a drumroll. The darkness is absolute and just for a second, he believes he is blind. And then, for a terrible moment, he is certain he has been buried alive. But the wind rises again, and he is aware of the crashing of waves, somewhere close by. Working his hands free he understands he is in a sleeping bag. By painfully moving his head from side to side he is able to release his face from the closed hood. But still there is darkness. Eventually, with one hand he can touch the side of his head and finds there a wound that is crusted with what must be dried blood. He feels the tab of the zip and tugs downwards, slowly freeing himself. He pushes upwards and finds he is covered by heavy tarpaulin. Something weighs it down from above. Finally, he works his fingers to the edge of the tarp and with some difficulty pulls it to one side, to reveal the world. 

And is struck by the intense cold. He takes deep breaths but the air, filled with ice, stings his lungs. Everything is vague and grey. He rubs his eyes., to make things clearer, but there is only a pale glow.  

He is lying on a wooden platform. Next to him are dark shapes. He reaches out and determines they are wooden crates. He becomes aware of a slow pitching motion and knows that he is not on land. There are no lights. Everything is buried in grey snow. The cold is unbearable and the pain in his head is insistent. Carefully, he pulls the tarp back into its original position and tucks it under the lip of the pallet. Then, turning onto his side, he seals himself back inside the dark cocoon of the sleeping bag. He is unspeakably tired. He touches the side of his head one more time. It is very tender, and he thinks he can feel wetness there, as if it still bleeds. He does not know how it happened.  

Eventually, the pain wakes him. He frees his hands again and finds the tarp is stiff with the cold and heavy with a great weight of snow. Pushing it away with an effort, he sees a brightening of sorts has come. The snow has stopped, and the wind has died, and everything is illuminated by a pale grey light. With a great effort he sits up and takes in his situation fully for the first time. 

He is on a makeshift platform of two pallets placed end to end. Next to him are the crates. Snow has drifted against them, and they have protected him from the worst of the blizzard. He lies in a shallow depression below a high wall of ice. Snow slopes upwards and away from it. Carefully, he extricates himself from the sleeping bag, being sure to keep it dry and under the tarp, and finds that he is wearing boots, heavy trousers and a thick woollen jumper, navy blue. He stands up and stamps his feet, his breath clouding the air before him.  

He is on an iceberg, on a shelf perhaps one hundred paces across, elevated high above a dark sea, which fades to nothing before it reaches the horizon and which is dotted with blue, white and grey forms: an armada of icebergs. 

He remembers nothing. Only a name: Korner. 

He feels the side of his head again. There is dried blood on his fingertips. He has taken a bad knock to the head and that might explain many things. 

Who is Korner? he asks himself. Am I Korner? 

The cold is overwhelming, and he knows he must have a plan.  

He sweeps the snow off the tops of the crates. On each lid is a stencil: ARIEL. It means nothing to him, evokes no sense of recognition. The lids are nailed down and he cannot get any purchase with his fingers. But then he feels the buckle of his belt and taking that off can force it under the lip of the first crate and to lever it open enough to get his fingers into the gap and then to pull. The lid comes off with a sudden groan.  

The crates are packed with cardboard boxes. Each bears the stencilled name and sequences of letters and numbers. The first he opens contains folded blankets and clothing: socks, another jumper, a waxed coat, a woollen hat, but no gloves. The second contains cooking materials; a simple spirit stove, a lighter with spare flints, a couple of pans, two tin mugs, a knife. The next contains bottles of spirits for the stove. Then there are boxes containing food, tinned sardines, tinned apples, dry crackers, powdered soup, tins of processed cheese, tea bags and tubes of condensed milk. The plain labels make him think of military rations, though he knows not how or why. He has no memory of ever having been in the army, or the navy. 

Using the knife, he gets the second crate open and there are more boxes of tinned food and some coils of rope. 

With great effort, for his hands are numb with cold, he assembles the stove and, tucking it into the corner formed by pushing the two crates together, gets it lit. He fills a pan with snow and sets it on the stove. Using the knife, he prises open a tin of sardines and eats them quickly, skewering them with the point of the blade and sucking them into his mouth, barely chewing. They are stiff with the cold. He takes a tube of condensed milk and, unscrewing the cap, sucks it until no more of the thick, sweet, stuff will come out. And all the while his mind is racing hopelessly. He does not know how he came to be in this place, with these things. He does not know. 

When the water boils, he makes tea and, opening a second tube, sweetens it. The pain in his head is a kind of fog upon his thoughts. 

Korner? Ariel? Perhaps it is the name of the ship that carried me here? Or perhaps Korner is the one that did this to me? 

He climbs the incline and carefully approaches the edge, where the ice is flaked and broken. He is at the brink of a cliff which falls away below him to meet the black sea some sixty or seventy feet below. The sea is spotted with debris, shards and boulders of broken ice. Around him float many other icebergs, huge castles and cathedrals of ice. But there are no ships. He looks hard, squinting, but there are no ships. 

On one nearby iceberg he sees with a shock a figure moving. But no, it is a polar bear. It paces impatiently, occasionally raising its head to sniff the air. 

Fascinated, he watches the bear. After a while he returns to what he is already thinking of as his ‘camp.’ If the bear comes, he must have means to defend himself. He cracks a spar off one of the pallets. It is not much. 

He takes some of the cardboard boxes and breaks them down and folds them flat, laying them along the pallets beneath the tarp and bag for insulation. Then he takes the tarp and rope and secures it over the top of the crates and diagonally down to the opposite edge of the pallets, so it forms a low shelter. He uses the rope to make it as secure as possible. He puts on as many layers of the clothing as he can. 

He climbs into the narrow space and takes off his boots, and carefully gets inside the sleeping bag. He aches all over. His bones hurt. He is not young anymore, that much is certain, even if nothing else is. In the gloom he rubs his face with his hands and finds that he has thick stubble – several days’ worth at least – on his chin. His skin is dry and hard, rough, like bark. He must think but cannot. Thoughts will not come. And still there are no memories. Only a void. 

Given his circumstances, with the pallets, sleeping bag and supplies, he supposes that he has been placed here. But to what purpose? 

He wonders if he came of his own free will, or if he has been abandoned. Or if this might even be some form of punishment or incarceration?  

He cannot say one way or another. The notion that he is here as a penance haunts him. 

He imagines two possible scenarios. In the first a great grey ship lies stilled, surrounded by glistening icebergs. A boat is lowered and the crew rows towards the ice. They haul their cargo - crates and a swaddled form - up onto the ice. After, the ship moves off, and is lost in the snow that begins to fall, and then the darkness. 

In the second, alone, he rows away from the grey ship in the night. He has supplies in the boat and the weight makes his progress slow. He beaches the boat on the ice and hauls the crates up before the waves carry the boat away. It begins to snow as darkness descends. 

Or there is a third, he thinks, and imagines the grey ship, its hull breached by a massive spear of ice, going down. The scramble to get to the boats. 

But if the ship went down there would be debris, he thinks. There would have been signs on the water. But he saw nothing. 

He spends the rest of the day in the darkness, in a state of despair. He can form no definite conclusions as to his predicament. Only later, as the light fades to its strange half-state and snow starts to fall again does he rise to open the crate containing the food and pull out a tube of condensed milk, a box of dry crackers and a tin of cheese. He eats them quickly, for he is very hungry, and he has an ache in his belly. But then he returns to his darkness, doing his best to pull the tarp around the edges of the pallet to seal out the outside world. 

His sleep is fitful and broken by dreams which, on waking, he does not remember. They leave only a vague sense of dread, and he wonders if something in his head is broken. At some point in the night, he feels the weight of the tarp and knows that more snow has fallen. As it covers his shelter the sounds of the wind and the sea become muffled and then there is almost silence and that is of some small comfort. 

* 

The first thing he does in the morning is take the knife and carefully cut two small notches in the edge of the pallet. After some consideration, he cuts two more. 

He has risen in the grey light with a clear mind. He makes a mental inventory of the supplies he has. He has enough for several weeks but knows that if it comes to it, he can stretch that further. He knows he can go on a long time even without food, if he is able to stay hydrated. But there is limited fuel for the stove so he must use that very sparingly. 

The air is grey again and more snow has fallen, drifting up against the crates and the ice wall, rendering everything soft and diffuse. It has a strange beauty to it, he cannot deny. He kicks a trench up to his vantage point at the edge of the ice and looks out. The scene is as before. The dark grey sea is infinite and is dotted with icebergs of all sizes. It dawns upon him that they are moving, that this armada of ice is drawn forward by the ocean currents or pushed by the winds. The berg carrying the bear has kept pace with him and lies not far off. The bear is still, a dark point against the pale ice, perhaps sleeping. 

So, they are sailing, so to speak, but without the sun he cannot tell which way they go. His guts tell him it must be south. 

His only chance is to be picked up by a ship and so he must keep watch. And he must be ready to make a signal if he sees something. To that end he packs half the cardboard boxes back into one of the crates and seals it as best he can, so that they will stay dry. When he needs to, he can burn them to make smoke. 

To watch he must have the best vantage point. He kicks through the snow to the base of the ice wall, and then follows it, trying to find a way up. His ‘camp’ is below its highest point but where the wall meets the edge of the berg it is much lower and broken into a tumble of what looks like white rubble. From here it is possible to pick a route up.  

From the summit he can see that the berg is formed of two distinct structures. The summit is on the leading edge of a wedge-shaped mass of milky ice, and from where he stands it falls away at a steep angle to the water. The second structure is the lower platform where his ‘camp’ lies. It is almost the only level area on the iceberg. He supposes that at one time something caused it to split and shift. It occurs to him that this will almost certainly happen again. It is inevitable. The ice will break up, eventually. 

The surrounding water is dark. Any sense of movement on the sea is almost imperceptible. Nonetheless, a wake extends behind them, a smear across the sea like the trace left by a snail. 

He stays on the summit of the ice for a long time, watching and waiting. He can see the bear. After some time, it rises and takes again to pacing the ice. It is the only other living thing in the world, and he starts to feel almost companionable towards it. 

After many hours the light begins to fade but he sees that it never actually becomes dark. Somewhere the sun has failed to dip far enough below the horizon to let the night in. As the sky darkens it is licked by vast veils of soft green light, flickering and swaying. 

Eventually he can keep his eyes open no longer and he carefully retreats to his shelter, seals himself in, and sleeps. 

* 

Once again, the light is grey and pale as he makes his way carefully up the white staircase to his lookout. As always, the first thing he does is to search for the bear. For several days now their bergs have been drifting alongside each other, perhaps a hundred yards apart, and he knows that the bear is aware of his presence. He knows too it must be hungry, as he is. 

Today he cannot see it. The iceberg is there, but the bear has gone. He knew that at some point it would leave the ice and take to the sea, either to come for him, or to work its way back to pack ice. So, it has gone. Fear gives way to sadness. He feels strangely bereft. 

He scans the armada. It is increasingly dispersed and many of the smaller bergs have disappeared in recent days. He notes that the light has changed. The sea has taken on a definite blueness and the clouds are white instead of grey.  

The weather clears and he carefully carves more notches into the wood of the pallet. The nights, such as they are, don’t last long but are illuminated by dancing lights, a flickering green iridescence drawn across the heavens and shot through with waves and ripples of magenta and vermillion. Dawn is a mere brightening of the sky. By day the atmosphere is flat and grey, diffuse. The sea is dark, obscure. Only the icebergs are bright, points of white dotted across an even field of darkness like stars, shifting in ever changing constellations. 

He falls into a routine. He sleeps – or at least lies in the darkness of his shelter – for long periods and on rising tries to restrict himself to as little food as he can bear. Every tin consumed feels like a kind of failure. After, he ascends to the summit, where he has excavated a sort of bowl in the snow, so he can sit and watch, protected from the worst of the winds. And he watches for as long as he can. But being weak and always hungry, his attention often wanders, and his thoughts spiral away in endless loops.  

Towards the end of the third day of clear weather he sees something on the horizon. He cannot be sure that it is not an iceberg but feels it may be a ship. Something about the shape of it. He thinks hard. He does not have the means to light many fires, so must be careful. But this might be his first and only chance. Perhaps they are even looking for him. This thought comes as something of a surprise, as it is not something he has hitherto considered. 

He clears a patch of snow and carefully piles cardboard into a neat little pyramid. Then he takes the lighter and puts it to the corners of the card, watching as it slowly catches and curls and orange flames appear. Fanned by the wind the pyre soon catches. He watches as grey smoke is whisked away by the wind, dispersing. Not enough smoke, he thinks, not enough. Nonetheless, if they are watching there is a chance. The cardboard quickly burns down and fragments of black carbon and flakes of grey ash spiral through the air. He climbs quickly up to his lookout and stares hard into the distance. But now he cannot even see the ship, or at least he cannot distinguish it from the bergs that drift across the sea. And then he cannot see anything, for tears are in his eyes. 

Next time, he knows, if he is to make smoke, he must burn wood. And he must hope that the wind is not so strong as to disperse his signal. 

Sometimes when he sleeps, he dreams. It is always the same dream, though with subtle variations. 

He is in a garden. The air is light and warm. He is on the grass and can feel the soft blades between his fingers and as he breathes in, he is almost overwhelmed by all the scents; the sweetness of flowers, the vivid freshness of cut grass, warm earth, all of it so familiar. Birds sing somewhere above and there are bees and insects whirring and clicking all around him. He lies on his back and looks happily up through the vast canopy of a tree – the backlit leaves the most brilliant green - into fragments of deep blue sky. And it is warm, so warm. The air is soft and although he is asleep and dreaming, he even feels sleepy within the dream. He is at ease with everything that surrounds him. 

And then a shadow blocks the sunlight. A figure leans over him, making sounds that he can’t quite understand, but which he knows are giving, comforting, loving, warming sounds, and suddenly he is raised up and held close and he feels the solid bulk of her, so reassuring, and the warm skin of her neck and his face is buried in the soft curls of her hair. He briefly wonders if this is Korner. 

A second voice calls from nearby and they turn – now everything is blurred and out of focus – and he sees a second figure emerging from the mist and then there is movement and as they move everything fades. 

For a time, this dream comes every night, and he comes to look forward to it, to wait for it impatiently, for while he knows not if it is fantasy or a memory, it seems to him to be the only link he has back into his past. 

II. 

There are many notches on the palette when the storm comes. He is sitting at his lookout, daydreaming, when he notices that a huge wall of dark cloud has built up along the horizon, lit from within by flashes of light. No sound reaches him yet, but the wind picks up and the sea begins to form great troughs and waves which smash against the ice as if to break it into pieces. The iceberg rolls and sways in slow motion. Soon it feels as if he is deep within the storm and, crawling almost, he climbs back down and retreats to the camp.  The ice bucks and rocks and emits painful groans and the tarp flaps and beats like a dying creature. He fears it will be torn away and piles blocks of ice upon it to weigh it down. Soon it becomes darker and starts to snow, snowing so hard and thickly that the air before his eyes is nothing but a shifting zone of white points of pale light. Explosions fill the sky. 

He digs into the drift that is building up around the crates, shivering uncontrollably. He climbs under the tarp, but not into the bag; he must not let it become wet. He realises that he has slipped into a sort of complacency in recent days, that the tiredness and hunger and relentless cold have drugged him, and he curses himself for not preparing better for what was of course inevitable. 

For two days he is pinned beneath the tarp as the snow builds up around him, only occasionally digging out to take supplies from the crate, and to urinate painfully and sparingly. He cannot light the stove because of the wind and so cannot drink. After some time, he puts snow into his mouth and even though it makes his teeth jangle and hurts his throat and gives him cramps from the cold, it is a relief to feel it slowly wetting his sandpaper mouth and shrivelled tongue. 

And then, after perhaps two days of being battered by the storm, he hears the breaking. 

It begins as a deep bass groan that penetrates even the constant whistling and wailing of the winds. But then it is joined by quick shards of noise, of cracking and splintering, becoming louder and more insistent, and he feels a shift beneath him, an almost imperceptible but definite tilting. 

Eventually the storm passes. Snow has drifted deeply over his camp and as he sets about clearing it, he looks up and sees that the ice wall is riven with a series of deep blue fissures. As he looks around, he realises that the shelf is reduced in size. When he climbs back up to his viewpoint, he sees that the berg has been pared away, is diminished. 

For the next several days he watches the horizon anxiously, expecting the ice to shatter beneath him at any moment. 

By now the skin of his face, neck and hands is raw and blistered. His hands are like claws; the skin is white and blue-grey but split by livid cracks that run through the soft tissue between his fingers, revealing raw flesh; pink and scarlet. When he runs his fingers over his face, he charts a cracked landscape that bears no correspondence to the vague image of a face he holds in his mind and thinks of as his own. His beard is grown longer and is crusted with ice. His hair is matted and stiff. His lips are swollen and pocked with sores, making eating, drinking or sucking the tubes of condensed milk almost impossible. Even the simplest tasks are an ordeal. He rarely defecates, and when he does, he no longer even attempts to clean himself. 

As the berg gets further south the pattern of the days and hours shifts. The nights become more definite. The colour of the water changes. There is a run of days when the sky is clear and the light is bright and it feels as if everything is in focus, absolutely clear. The icebergs are now widely dispersed and there are only a handful still within his field of vision. 

One day he sees a ship. He waits, watching carefully, trying to determine if it is coming closer or receding, but it is too far off.  Finally, he decides to act. He opens the crate and takes out the card and carefully builds a pyre. He kicks the crate to pieces and piles that on too, before lighting it. It quickly sets and for a moment he enjoys the almost forgotten sensation of heat; a vivid vibration running through his fingers and into his hands; he can’t resist crouching down to feel it upon his face. Dark grey smoke spirals up into the pale sky. As the wood burns down he huddles close, trying to absorb as much of the heat it gives as is possible. When the fire begins to dwindle, he thinks briefly about breaking up the second crate, and even the pallets too, and piling all on in one single mad gesture. But then reason tells him to be careful. He climbs back up to the lookout and watches. But the ship is receding. No doubt about it.   

His supplies begin to run low, and he starts to really restrict his intake. It is hard. There are many notches on the edge of the pallet, and he gives up on cutting new ones. As he drifts south the temperature slowly but definitively rises and the crust of snow that coats the ice begins to melt, forming pools of perfectly clear water from which he can drink. 

After a while all the snow has gone, and he can see the different types of ice that make up the berg. The platform where his camp lies is white and granular, like compacted sugar. The ice wall is hard and blue. Elsewhere it is dark and glassy. Clear like crystals, or a milky white. Every shade of blue and grey is there. Even a weird dark green down at the water line. 

The cracking and groaning continues. Splinters of ice fall from the wall. 

One day he emerges from the shelter to find a bird has landed close to his camp. He doesn’t know what kind it is but can see it is a sea-goer, made for the winds of the great oceans. When it stretches its wings, the span is vast, yet its body is compact. It is a dirty white, with patches of grey along the backs of its wings and a yellow stain on the back of its head. Its heavy brow makes it look as if it is frowning at him. It disapproves. It watches him with a curious intensity, unafraid. When he approaches it moves lazily away, waddling awkwardly, unaccustomed to not being on the air. He begins to talk to it, surprised at first to hear the sound of his broken voice. It is not something he recognises. He asks the bird questions. Where are they? Where are they going and how long will it take to get there? What is Ariel? Who is Korner? 

In a moment of madness, he throws it a scrap of sardine, though he can ill afford it. The bird picks it up in its powerful beak and, lifting its head, swallows it down. It watches him carefully, waiting. 

The bird travels with him for several days. He supposes it is conserving its energy before continuing its journey. He talks to it and sometimes thinks it talks back to him. They debate the direction in which the currents carry the ice, which supplies he should save until last, and the existence and purpose of Korner. He cannot help but share his sardines with it, for it is a kind of companion and he is glad of its presence. And then one day when he rises, he is alone again. 

It is a terrible moment. He digs deep inside himself, hoping to find something, to locate something he might cling to; if not a memory, then some scrap of belief or faith, something bigger and better than this ordeal. It seems he has some fleeting memories of going into a church as a child, so perhaps that is a part of me, he thinks. But there is nothing. He gets on his knees and tries to pray. But there is nothing.  

The aurora flickers across the sky and he imagines it is a sign, that it is trying to communicate something to him. But he lacks the means to decipher the message. 

The hunger does strange things to him. His dreams are very vivid. He no longer dreams only of the garden but also of a son. He sees his small face, smiling and laughing, haloed with blonde hair. They walk down a lane, and his son holds his hand; he vividly feels the soft fingers fidget within the firm embrace of his big hand. Or is he in fact the son? Suddenly he can no longer tell if he is the father or the son. They are talking, making a list of all their favourite meals. Fish and chips, says the boy, sausage and mash, roast chicken, apple pie, pork pie, beef and gravy and Yorkshire puddings, Christmas pudding, roast ham, chocolate cake. Asparagus, says the man. The boy grimaces and makes a noise, and they both laugh. 

At other times he dreams that he is sailing: he is in a small boat racing across a sparkling sunlit sea, a sea of the deepest and most resonant blue. 

Or sometimes, in a weird doubling of the ways in which he spends his days, he dreams he is watching and waiting, in a high tower, sometimes a lighthouse. 

As the iceberg wanes, so he is diminishing too. At night, lying on the pallet, he runs his hands down his body feeling every bone. He can put his thumb and forefinger around his upper arm. His strength is fading away. The berg is eroding and melting. It groans and creaks and every day pieces of ice fall off into the sea. Eventually massive cracks begin to appear, and larger chunks break off. The ice runs with meltwater. 

* 

The breaking, when it comes, takes him by surprise, although he has waited and expected it for weeks. For some time, the ice has emitted a constant refrain of moans and cries but now he notices a different register. And then suddenly there is a series of concussions, like rifle fire, very loud and close too, and he feels the blood drain from his face. The ice cliff shifts, distinctly. It drops by perhaps six inches and a curtain of fine flakes and crystals of ice is detached and falls with a sound like glass and tiny bells. A profound silence follows. And then there is an explosion deep within the body of the iceberg, a terrible shuddering which shakes everything. He falls to the ice as the platform lurches and twists and the wall falls, dropping vertically, plunging into the sea and pushing a huge flower of water and ice up into the sky.  

The iceberg has split in two and the larger section, where the summit was, has a new centre of gravity and rolls in the water, sending waves rushing away on every side and pitching over so that a great mass of translucent green ice, the unseen submarine part which has been sculpted into infinitely strange forms by the currents, is suddenly pointing up at the sky. 

The platform on which his camp lies also pitches and, as he shouts and curses, the crates and pallets tumble down what is suddenly a steep slope and skate off the edge into the foaming water. He wedges his arms into a crack that has opened across the ice and stops himself sliding. 

More crackings and splinterings keep coming, but it is great plates and slabs of ice calving off the sides of the berg rather than a more fundamental disintegration. After a time, it settles. Eventually, he is able to climb up to the new summit. There is a wide platform of hard, scalloped green ice. 

The water around the berg is milky with foam and he can see one of the pallets, and a blanket, floating amongst the thick scum of ice that the sundering has summoned. 

III. 

Now he has no choice but to lie directly upon the ice. At first it makes sleep almost impossible, as the cold water seeps through his heavy clothes and lowers his body temperature, but somehow, he becomes acclimatised to it. His heart beats slowly like a drum measuring a funeral march, its percussions echoing through the hollow chambers of his body. His bones feel like crystal. 

He has no food but the ice runs with meltwater and, like an animal, he laps it from the small pools that form. 

Now the days and nights are distinct. A huge full moon rises above the sea, pointing a sword of light at his heart. 

He no longer feels the cold. It is as if he has passed through into a new realm. 

The winds are insistent, and he has the notion that the iceberg is sailing south at great speed. Looking out across the vast sea he becomes certain he can see the curvature of the planet. 

One day he is surprised to see huge black shapes thronging the waters around the ice. As they break the surface, he sees it is a family of whales. They nudge and push at the iceberg and he wonders if they know he is there. He tries to call out to them, to ask them if they might somehow help him, but his throat is so blistered and sore that he can only make faint sounds that bear no resemblance to speech. 

At night, on the ice in the darkness, looking up at a million constellations spread across the night, he fancies he can hear the whales singing to each other, their whistles and keening calls resonating through the ice on which he lies. 

They stay with him for several days and then are gone. But for days after, lying listlessly on the ice, he hears echoes of their songs, faint tremors and vibrations that pass through him. 

Now he is far south, and the air is warm. The ice is changing. It has lost its opaque milky quality and become clear; a pale green like the glass of a bottle that he has a vague memory of drinking from. For the first time since the beginning, he takes off the heavy coat he wears, though he barely has the strength to do so. He rolls it into a ball and rests his head on it. Somehow, he no longer feels the cold. Some change has happened; it is as if his blood is now something else instead. He wonders if it is even still flowing through him. His nerves are no longer sensitive but are blunt and dumb. 

By day the sun shines down upon him, and it is like a revelation. He feels it on his face. It is a life force, caressing him, and it reminds him that he is a living being, not just something that is in the process of dying. 

He no longer dreams of the garden or of the son and the father. He is no longer able to distinguish between the state of waking and the state of sleep. So, as he lies on the ice in the sunlight, his skin puckering and blistering, it sometimes seems to him that this is the dream, and that at some point it will be over and he will wake to find himself, well, where? In a forest or among mountains or lost upon a sand dune in the midst of an endless desert? 

He is getting fainter. 

The air is warm, despite the chill that emanates from the ice. He takes off his clothes and lays them out to form a kind of matt on which to lie. The pale skin of his arms and legs and his torso, white and puffy like that of some subterranean creature, quickly burns and blisters in the sun. He lies on the ice and barely moves, sometimes only turning his head to lick at the water that gathers in pools around him. 

He becomes aware of thick dark clouds building at the edge of his vision. A storm is coming, and he thinks with relief that it must be the end. But when it does come it brings only rain, warm rain, which washes his charred limbs. There is no wind. Just an unceasing downpour. 

After, the sea is on fire as the sun rises and sets, so that the iceberg seems to be suspended on a cloud of drifting flame. 

In the ice there is a hole, an opening. He wonders how he has not seen it before. It is about three feet high and two wide and the shadows inside are the deepest blue, like indigo. He crouches and peers into it and sees that it opens upon a narrow passageway which runs down into the ice at an angle. The walls of the passage are like glass. He climbs inside and carefully descends into darkness. After some ten feet the passage begins to turn, still descending. As his eyes adjust to the darkness, he sees that, as well as some light making its way down from the entrance, the ice itself, through which the passage passes, emits a dim but distinct phosphorescent glow, which he cannot help but associate with the aurorae he sees in the skies. 

The passage turns three more times as he descends, and he thinks that he must be below the water line of the iceberg. And then he sees that a different kind of light, orange and warm, flickering, is coming up from below. After a further turn the passage opens into a small, rounded chamber, perhaps twenty feet across. The floor of the chamber is flat and even and in the centre are a chair and a small simple table. On the table is a candle. The flame is steady for the air is still. He approaches the table and sees that some sheets of paper are laid there, and a pencil too. 

He sits down and, after a moment's thought, starts to write: 

It begins in darkness.  

At what might be an ending, he is lying on a platform of clear ice, like a brilliant unfaceted diamond, completely clear, glittering with light, suspended on a perfectly still sea like a vast mirror. The ice is smaller and smaller. The sun is hot, and the sky is an angry orange, lit with flashes and bursts of purple and red. He is so thin; his body has wasted away to almost nothing. There is no sound, no movement. All is still. His skin is scorched and blistered by the relentless sun. His eyes are bloody, and his sight is failing. And yet he feels no pain, only a strange kind of ecstasy. As the ice melts, as the world dissolves and becomes insubstantial, so does he. 

First published in Dissolution, a limited edition chapbook published by The Aleph, 2021