The Warmth of Our Socks
三島和希
Kazuki Mishima

At this cold latitude, human civilization (or any semblance thereof) is most deeply indebted to the warmth of our socks. A man just doesn’t feel so capable of kindness or art or civil engineering when his toes are becoming numb enough to make walking to the kitchen difficult. I assume the same would hold true for a woman, but I can’t be sure as I’ve never been one and my wife sleeps in socks.

One night not too long ago I awoke to the ringing of the phone on our bedside table. Some fellow from the university was calling to let me know the anemometer was down. I never got his name. I’ve given up chatting with the university folks; I’ve run out of interesting things to say to them.

I certainly could have used my wife’s help with the repair work, and, had I woken her at that moment, she certainly would have prepared for an outdoor excursion in the silence and urgency that so often characterized her movements these long antarctic summer days, but I couldn’t wake her. That sad look on her face, though it had long been her neutral expression, inhibited any impulse to seek her assistance. Sometimes, I ask her what’s bothering her, just to be sure, and she tells me everything’s fine. I judge just how fine things actually are from the tone of her voice.

I have often wondered whether it is wrong that I find romance in the moments I spend alone in the winds of the ice-desert, apart from my wife. When I walk through the drifting snow, I try to track the movements of every muscle and imagine them as the movements of near-perfect, lubricated pistons in an elegant machine. I develop a fantasy of growing all my own food. This, of course, is an absurd idea, and within minutes of its arousal in my mind it is always defeated. I fall down, and any images of my imagined physical grace vanish. I remember the simple infeasibility of subsistence agriculture in this place.

She was standing by the entryway offering me a cup of tea when I returned carrying the crippled anemometer. I wanted to hear her voice, so I told her I’d worn through my last pair of socks.

“Should I order some for you, too?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I don’t need anything.”

I could hear that troubling vibrato in her voice. She had been looking through the old ultrasound images again. She told me she didn’t care whether it was a boy or a girl anymore.

“I never really cared,” she said, not to me but to herself as she looked out a window at the horizon where the nearly empty sky met the emptier plain of snow and ice. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders, and she fell into them without intention, her will defeated by gravity.

My wife had shown not one genuine smile when the day of the balloon’s appearance arrived. She did not smile when she spotted the foil blossom in the pure-cream sky, and I felt her thoughts lay in the same place as mine. I was most dolefully aware that day that for each voyage of the balloon upon the steady circumpolar wind, events at our post could be described in a series of numbers without significant fluctuations – some kilograms of food consumed, some atmospheric measurements recorded.

“Do you ever feel like we’re not worth it?” she asked me the day we received a shipment of rations, socks, and a few books. I don’t remember my answer. I don’t remember whether I answered at all.

Winter was closing in on us when I found a lone, injured seal pup as I ran an errand outside the station. For weeks my wife tended to it, scrupulously measuring ingredients for homemade seal milk replacement as she solicited advice from the faculty of the Department of Marine Biology. For a time the seal seemed quite healthy, and I saw my wife grin in a way she hadn’t for a very long time. I could see the pain in her eyes the night the seal very suddenly died; it was a pain I’d seen before and one from which I strongly wanted to look away.

The sunlight hours were so fleeting that, although days had passed, it was to us still the night of the seal’s death when I woke up alone in the bedroom. I’ve no idea how much time elapsed before I finally found my wife in the silent snows.

When she could speak again, she said “I couldn’t even do that right. What can I do?”

“You can hold me,” I said, “and I can hold you.”