Geology
Geyserites. Black opal. Shale storm. Layers of rock covering the hot liquid core of the planet are more real to you than the ever-shifting human landscape. Once you had broken a bone. No, once a bone had been broken for you. Your step-father in a storm and drunk, breaking your arm so that the flash of white bone was visible for just a moment in the earth’s long flow of time. Bright white before blood and darkness overcame you.
“My sense of time is all messed up,” you say soon after we meet. We are at a party, a sprawling Alaskan affair with two bonfires, three kegs, and an edgy pack of dogs vying for salmon skin and dominance. You’ve explained that you are new to Alaska, brought up for a job, and that you hate everything here but the rocks.
The cold of freeze up has driven us into a cavernous garage, where a too-loud boy band forces you to yell your words into my ear. “Normal people think in terms of hours, days, weeks. I think in terms of millions of years.” You hand me a red plastic cup foaming with pilsner. “Do you know how old the earth is?”
I search for a plausible number. “Older than me?”
“What are you, thirty?”
“And then some.”
“The planet is a bit older than that.” You lean in close and when you speak, you put a hand to my hip. “Six billion years. Can you get your mind around that?”
“No.”
“Well, I can’t get my mind off of it.”
Your hand stays on me.
One word to define your teenage years: rage. It isn’t until your early twenties that you understand that your broken arm saved you. Finally, a visible wound. Your mother had no choice but to take action and leave your step-father.
At eighteen, you went away from home and threw yourself not into drugs but academics. Stirrings like love occurred when you immersed yourself in new knowledge, and it was science that drew you in. Your final year, curious, you took a geology course and your life changed when your professor cast away the syllabus and instead hefted a cracked in half stone. A private universe of bright sherbet lacework lay hidden within the thick gray husk, and at the very center, a hollow the size of a child’s fist.
“This is a geode,” your professor said, walking up and down the aisle with the cracked stone in his palms. He pointed to the blue crystal ring and said, “Quartz,” and to the spread of pink, “Dolomite.” Then, he smoothed his finger along the purple streaks of crystal and said, “Amethyst.”
When he returned to the podium, you followed, taking the seat before him. “And this?” you asked, indicating the empty core.
Your professor smiled. “Trapped air, perhaps? Or maybe the remains of a small animal burrow?” He looked at you and blinked, his shaggy gray eyebrows matching both the great mane on his head and the hair sprouting from his nostrils. “Imagine with me, miss. Millions of years ago, some minute amount of life found its way into this rock, perhaps a bacteria or just a mere trickle of water? And time pressed on and on and on, species of dinosaurs emerging and dying out, the shifting of continents, the birth of countless animal species, including our own. And through it all, there is this rock.” He paused, drew a long breath and stepped from the podium. He held the geode before you. “In Iceland they say the rocks are alive, that in fact, they have souls. Would you agree?”
“Yes,” you said. You didn’t hesitate.
Your professor regarded you over the tops of his bifocals, smiled, and then lowered the geode into your cupped palms. “Do you feel it? Millions of years right here in your hands,” he said.
Years later, when you’d completed your graduate thesis, he gifted the geode to you, wrapped in red ribbon with a card reading, A souvenir from the Miocene.
We are private people, you and I. I understand that when you hold your arm to me, a broken wing, it is an offering of compromised privacy. I smooth my hand over the calcified ridge. Some wounds heal. Your skin a pale scar under my fingertips, and I want to tell you that if you had been my child, I would have protected you.
“I figured,” you say. You put your hands in your jeans pockets. “You got married young, didn’t you?”
“I guess.”
“That’s good. Love is a good thing.”
I nod. But it’s not just him I’m thinking about, but my children too. I try to focus solely on my feelings for him, him alone, but what comes to mind is how the kids look when they laugh, the girl still missing her two front teeth, and I know I can’t separate him from them. “Love is a good thing,” I say. After a moment, I add, “I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“I just am.”
When you search for your coat in the pile of down and wool and fleece, mine falls to the floor. I don’t allow myself to think. One arm and then the next slip through the coat sleeves. When you walk out the door, so do I.
We are met with the stark autumn cold.
“It’s always like this before the snow comes,” I say as we walk to your car. “Freeze-up in Alaska is cruel.”
Under our feet, the brown chaff of birch leaves. This year a big Chinook stripped trees to bones in a matter of hours, and then the cold stomped down on the yellow leaves, quickly grinding them to mash on the frozen ground.
“Not the beautiful season you’re used to in the East, huh?” I say.
“Nope.”
“This is the far north. Winter drops down hard on us. Like a hoof.”
“When do you think it’ll snow?” you ask.
“Soon, I hope. It’s better when it does,” I say. “Warmer. Brighter.”
“I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it here.”
“It takes three winters,” I say. “If you make it three winters, you stay. You’re Alaskan.”
“Like you?”
“I was born here. I had no choice.”
You stand back on your heels and regard me.
“What’s your deal?” you say.
“What do you mean?”
You smile, patient, and I see the scientist in you. White lab coat hunching over a microscope.
“I don’t know that I have a deal,” I say.
The scientist waits.
I blow on my fingers.
“I can always tell,” you say.
“Tell what?”
“About women,” you say. “It’s like identifying a mineral. You don’t go by the color, you go by the fracture.”
“What fracture? What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about you.”
I look at her, startled. “What do you mean?”
“Suffering. That’s what I mean.”
I blow on my fingers. I can’t think of a response. And then I say, “Everybody suffers.”
You nod, smile at your data. “And?”
“And so what?”
Now in graduate school, mentored by your professor, favored above all of his other students. When you talked about rocks, it was as though the two of you were in love with the same woman. But where there might have been jealousy, there was only passion. He sent you daily emails, and when you stopped to chat in the university’s long echoing hallways, minutes ticked into hours while you and he were lost in events that occurred two billion years ago.
Once, late at night, you stopped by the lab to collect a forgotten scarf. Your professor was standing at the rows of rock specimen, his hands on the counter, and you could tell by his caved in expression that he was not looking outward, but inward, to a different time.
You meant to leave quickly, to not disturb him, but he turned and said, “My wife had a strange habit. Whenever faculty would come for dinner, she would polish the baseboards and banisters, all the wood in the whole house. Always, that was that day she chose. I hated the smell of Murphy’s Oil, and it would last through dinner, overpowering whatever good smells were coming from the kitchen.” He laid a hand on the counter, tapped a finger. “I see now that she did it simply for something to do. She was nervous, having the university crowd over. She never felt worthy of the conversation. Rocks. Always about rocks.”
"I’m sorry,” you said, because you know that his wife has been dead many years.
“And yet the parties were always her idea. I never would have thought of feeding people. She took care of me in that way, you know.”
“You must have loved her a lot.”
He smiled, turned back to the dusty rows. “I still do. Be careful with your tenses, my dear.”
“I should go,” you say, a glance to your car.
“You should.” I take your hand in mine. It’s cold as concrete. “You know, you remind me of a woman I loved. A long time ago.”
“Did she love you back?”
“No.”
You smile, and then so do I.
You laugh, and then so do I.
“Are you sorry the way things turned out?” you ask.
“No.” I look down at the frost on my thick rubber boots. I’m thinking about my children. When I turn back to you, I study each feature of your face. I want to remember you exactly as you are: eyes the blue of glacier ice, sweeping cheekbones, a wide mouth with chapped lips. You are nothing like the woman from so long ago. What is the same, though, is the feeling I have for you, and the word that comes to mind is: blooming.
Your hands are back in your pockets. “I should go.” You draw in a breath, and when you release it into the cold, still night, the steam remains a cloud just above your head. “There is no institution that I respect more than marriage. Marriage and family,” you say. “I’ve never experienced it, family I mean, but I’ve seen how it can be . . . in other people’s lives. There’s nothing more fundamental.”
“That’s true.”
“And I’m not an asshole.”
“Neither am I.”
We’ve been standing out here too long. The cold heaves up from the leafy chaff under our feet and drops down from the stark bones of trees overhead. I reach for you, a hug goodbye, but the blooming within me grows, the fast motion shots of a tulip unfurling, and I won’t let go.
Your kiss is surprising. A scientist’s kiss. You are searching me with a particular purpose in mind, anticipating my reaction to your every movement. You are well trained. When you kiss me deeply, pressing the small of my back, your hands so precise, a scientist’s hands, I feel discovered.
There is just us. And we are private people, you and I.
Your professor decided to take a trip to the Canadian Shield. He invited just three students, but cared only whether you went. On the plane, you and he drank vodka tonics and discussed different qualities of granite and gneiss, giddy with anticipation of setting foot on Precambrian rock. He told you there was amethyst between the Proterozoic and Archean layers, and you told him that you would like nothing more than to touch your fingers to it, even just for a moment, and his eyes flashed under their shaggy brows and he laid his age-freckled hand lightly over yours.
“Amethyst. My dear wife’s birthstone,” he said.
You fell quiet.
He patted your knuckles and then produced a baby blue handkerchief from between several pencils in his shirtfront pocket, wiped each wet eye and then his cracked lips. “And what can you tell me about amethyst?”
You were used to these drills. “Silicon Dioxide,” you said. “Six-sided prism ending in six-sided pyramid. Conchoidal fracture. Insoluble.”
“Very good,” he said. He carefully folded the blue handkerchief and stowed it back between his pencils. “But did you know that medieval soldiers wore it round their necks during battle?” he asked. “They believed the crystal would keep them safe in the cold world of war. Such was their faith in Silicon Dioxide.”
And you understood that he was telling you something about love.
When you reached the Canadian Shield, your professor, donned in a white Panama hat, kid leather gloves, and brand new walking shoes, pulled his baby blue kerchief up over his mouth and nose. You told him he looked like a dapper terrorist, a description he rather liked. Soon the dust of the quartz pit stirred, and you had to hold your sleeve under your nose.
Quickly you descended through the millennia, the layers bold and easy to read. This part of the shield is a caldera, a region in which bedrock from the Earth’s most hidden, private and ancient recesses was at some point in history heaved up by a volcanic explosion. It didn’t take long before you were standing on rock that is 2.7 billion years old.
“We are merely tourists,” your professor said, grandly stamping his shellacked walking stick into the dust. “I’m sorry to say that we are not, in fact, time travelers. We can read the drama that took place here, but that is all. We missed the action by billions of years.”
The other students grew restless after a while, dust-choked and hungry. They shouldered their packs and climbed back to the present day. But you and your professor stayed in the mine, side by side, no longer talking or taking samples or photographs, but simply remaining together for a while.
In the deepest of night with you, darkness filled by talk and touch. It is as though we are taking great bites of a plum, you and I, eating our way down to the stone.
Later, you turn to the alarm clock beside me and laugh. “I’ve known you for seven hours and thirty-six minutes.”
“The average span of a human life?”
“Hardly the average,” you say. “Just what we’re stuck with.”
“Why?”
You lift my tired wrist and tap the gold band around my ring finger.
I lay in your arms bright with the morning moonlight. I am crying. You refuse to negotiate. Frozen stiff, you are a fountain statue, a piece of garden art. I continue to lie against you only because I don’t know what else to do. I think that I’ll never say another word to you. Not even goodbye. That will be your punishment.
I cast my gaze around your bedroom. The quarters of a bachelor: rented white walls, furnishings straight out of a big box store display, a navy blue bath towel slung over your bedpost. There is nothing in the room that shows a private side of you, or any side at all. But then my eyes take in the crusted lump on your dresser. In the moonlight, the crystalline shades of color and intricacy are undecipherable, and the geode, your souvenir from the Miocene, looks like nothing more than a chunk of concrete. My urge to hurt you falls away.
“In Iceland,” I say, “they believe rocks have souls.”
You move. You press your face against mine, and I can feel that you’re smiling.
I want to say something more to you, a compliment maybe, words of how beautiful you look in the icy flood of moonlight. Or perhaps I want to tell you that I love my family and that you’ve torn my life apart. But I know that what you want me to say is the one thing I can’t: you’ve had no effect on me at all.
My thoughts turn to leaving as the sky goes light. I peer out the window and study the empty yard. The grass is green with just a trace of frost. I open the window and the air feels wet and cool against my skin. Then I see the dark, low clouds moving in.
“You want to know when it will snow?”
You nod with the solemnity of a child.
“Soon,” I say.
"How do you know?”
I point to the gray mass plowing toward us.
“And it’ll be warmer when it snows?”
I don’t answer. Instead, I kiss you, and you kiss me back in that way of yours, a scientist’s kiss, and though I know that you won’t last three years in Alaska or even three months, when I release you, I smile. Then I take your hand and hold it to the gentled air coming through the window.
Martha Amore is an award-winning author and teaches writing at Alaska Pacific University and the University of Alaska Anchorage. She achieved her Masters of Fine Arts in Fiction from UAA, and currently resides in Anchorage with her husband and three daughters. Her first novella recently came out in the anthology Weathered Edge: Three Alaskan Novellas. Currently, she is working on an anthology of Alaskan LGBTQ short stories.