Stranger in Paradise

Strangers in Paradise.

Over the hills and down it blundered, no slope hindered it, no chill
reached beneath its coat.
As unstoppable, unspeakable and abominable as it was green; it avoided
its own kind and shunned the world before finally entering mine. Then
across the ice it charged and upon the planet's very edge our eyes met
before it suddenly disappeared. And on a snowflake I flew home to tell
you this tale.

Seventy miles north of Murmansk, the frost-tinted sunlight finally
begins to pour over the skyline towards the end of midday. Despite the
fact that it's now late spring, it's still snowing and the mercury
refuses to climb beyond -17c. A flurry of tiny flakes pile against the
concrete exterior of the bunker with the downy weight of a white fox
coat. Inside, Dmitri leans against the hissing gas heater for balance,
takes another swig from the half bottle of Moskovskaya vodka in his
hand and nods at the aged record player. His comrade Stanislav drops
the needle onto the record and sends it crackling like an icebreaker
towards the first song. On cue, the two Russian soldiers burst into a
tangle of frantic dancing arms, legs and banging boots across the floor
- for the umpteenth time in what has been a very long and noisy
night.

Life in a bunker, embedded in perpetual permafrost quickly becomes
predictable. Dmitri and Stanislav have been stationed in this region,
north of the Arctic Circle, known in military terms as the 'Ice
Curtain' since 1981. Long ago they realised that they need know only
three things to maintain their sanity - if there is going to be a war
they'll be the first to go, if there isn't going to be a war then their
jobs will be the first to go, and if they had new jobs then they'd
probably go pretty soon too. Besides, the people in power who used to
look after them can't even look after themselves anymore, it's snowing
outside (again) and this is the eighth time they've danced to 'Over and
over,' by Nana Mouskouri. Maybe it's the ninth, maybe that's more than
three things - even Russian minds start to lose count after too much
drink. By now, the mischievous spirit of Moskovskaya (their vodka of
choice) has ceased to reside quietly in her bottle. She's there for all
to see hopping and skipping playfully around the bunker, tripping
Dmitri and Stanislav up, sticking fingers into their mouths to make
them slur their words and sometimes, seemingly, moving chairs just as
they're about to sit down. Returning to Dmitri and Stanislav's
knowledge - the only thing they really know for certain is that their
old world has forgotten them so they've discovered a new one.

The record stops and Stanislav drains his glass, sways and slides to
the floor. A dimly lit radar screen, to his right, echoes his thoughts
and flickers then becomes dimmer still. He opens his mouth and a stream
of words decide of their own accord to pour haphazardly from between
his lips. 'It's like the difference between the man who drinks a lot
and the man who doesn't. If the two of them are sitting in a strange
bar, the man who drinks regularly understands his surroundings - he
knows things. I don't mean life or death survival stuff; I mean little
things, little subtleties that elude other people. It's like - he knows
how people walk. You think he's in a stupor, you think he's not seeing
beyond the glass in his hand but he is, something inside him is taking
everything in and he is inside everything. That's how he can tell the
difference between a man on his way to piss and a man on his way back.
Every drinking person is his identical telepathic twin. It means he
always knows where the toilet is or the best place to be served at the
bar. The other man, the casual, part-time drinker is left looking
around stupidly until he asks someone nearby. He is the fool not the
drunkard. Do you understand what I mean? Dmitri nodded wearily and as
he did so, he realised that all this talk about lavatories had reminded
him that his own bladder actually felt quite swollen too.

The trick-some spirit of Moskovskaya finally relented and stopped
wobbling the piss pot in the corner of the bunker as Dmitri tried to
fill it. There was a separate latrine outside but it was unheated and
both Dmitri and Stanislav, together with the rest of the 73rd Soviet
Northern Frontier Forces, were fully aware of the dangers of frostbite.
Stanislav suddenly finished his bottle and slammed it down on a table.
Dmitri's left eye slid shut then twitched open as though its tiny
muscles were reacting to an electric shock. There was a slight
fish-like quality to him now, in the flickering, phosphorous glow from
the radar screens. He remembered something he had meant to say earlier
and gurgled, 'Hey, if you take the rubbish out tonight, I have a
present for our little visitor.' As he said this he waved an army issue
marker flare in the air. Stanislav seemed to ignore him and merely
replied with a belch that took twenty seconds to emanate from the
tangled depths of his intestines. Finally he said, 'Well planned but I
forbid you to waste our limited supplies that way. That is an order
Private Dmitri Nikolov, now pass me another drink.' Dmitri shrugged,
reached behind him and rolled a full bottle of vodka across the floor.
It looked like it might overshoot but Moskovskaya herself intervened
and trapped it under her foot barely six inches beyond Stanislav's
right hand. She giggled at the success of her footwork and performed a
perfect gymnastic cartwheel across the room towards Dmitri. Not that he
saw her pants or anything else for that matter. Moskovskaya did it
simply to break the quiet monotony that was settling over the room like
soggy snow but before she could get up to any real mischief Stanislav
began to talk again.

He had stretched out his legs, and was now staring beyond the
frontiers of the toes of his boots, as though gazing across the barren
reaches of the world. He said, 'Dmitri, are you alright, just being
here doing the same old things everyday? I'm worried. I worry about
everything in life.' Dmitri ignored him and tried to turn a bottle top
over as he balanced it on the end of his tongue. It looked like an
awkward kind of beetle attempting to turn around at the end of a
slippery twig. Stanislav continued, 'Sometimes I try to imagine what
will happen in the future; where things will be, how things will go,
what things will be like for all the people alive then. There are so
many changes; it's like medicine or cloning sheep - nobody can keep up.
Soon they'll bring dodo's and mammoths back to life.' Stanislav waved
his arm like the trunk of an elephant and made a loud roaring noise
before continuing. 'Or people; I mean we could meet famous people from
the past. Imagine meeting John Lennon or Jesus. They could clone a
thousand Jesus's. It's like they could clone so many of someone that
they would be nothing, some of them might as well cease to exist,
they'd be completely disposable - you might as well just eat them.
Imagine if the whole world became cannibals because life became a
throwaway commodity? You could go to McDonalds and say, (Stanislav put
on an American accent that he had practised from Hollywood movies to
say his next sentence), Hey could I have a large Jesus and fries. A
Jesus Burger, that's what they'll call it - a Jesus Burger. Now that is
genius Dmitri.'

Stanislav's verbal flow was interrupted by a small clatter as the
bottle top finally dropped off Dmitri's tongue onto the floor. Dmitri
yawned and leant forwards to pick it up and try again. A noise from
outside froze his hand within its current space. He tilted his head
from one side to the other to listen and then rose quietly to his feet
with a finger to his mouth. 'Sshh, our little visitor is early!'
As he said that he snatched the marker flare from beside his seat and
ran to the door of the bunker. Tiny crystals of snow spun and whirled
into the radar light around him like wings of organza mesh, as he stood
in the open doorway of the bunker. Moskovskaya clutched her flimsy
dress to her body and shivered pathetically as she realised the party
was nearly over. Dmitri dived into the below zero wall of air outside
and slammed the door behind him. Outside, there was only white against
white, yet within this was a shapeless mass that remained invisible to
human eyes, its enormous bulk hidden in a whirling blur that enveloped
all things as it swallowed both shadows and form. Dmitri spun around
hopelessly until he suddenly located a gap of warmth in this seamless
oblivion, a hole where he knew the camouflaged shape of the waste bin
should have been. He ran to this spot as icing sugar plains fractured
beneath his feet like wedding cakes. His fingers tightened on the pin
of the flare. Suddenly a vast green shape was bitten out of the silent
whiteness by the hissing marker flare. The shape grew edges; it had
four legs, a head and within that head a pair of surprised amber, polar
bear eyes. Dmitri let out a whoop of drunken victory and then fell
ungracefully onto his back as the crazed animal ran over him in
sightless panic.

For a night and a day the beast ran on - an alien in its own home, an
abhorrent colour in a palette of white. It could find no place to hide.
High above the arctic clouds mocked, and turned in on themselves in
fantastic giggling shades of green and pearly blue, before slowly
unravelling across the infinite polar waste like a silent yawn. Dawn
broke on the second day and beneath its pale lips Astor - a native
Inuit Eskimo, crouched on a plateau of snow to set about his daily task
of cutting a fishing hole through the ice. A sigh whispered wearily
from his lips as he heard the splash of falling ice into what the
Russian soldiers called 'three-minute water', because that's how long
it takes to freeze the blood of a drowning man. Astor stood up and
stretched - it was hard work and despite the fact that he still needed
to catch three fish before it grew dark, he wasn't really in a hurry.
He rubbed his eyes and blinked as slowly as the setting sun. Upon
opening them he saw the beast. It was like a demon or else a god or
even something in between. He decided not to wait around long enough to
find out which it was and ran. Faster like the skimming snow across the
plain, and on he ran, back to his small village. Within the cosy safety
of the smoke-filled igloos he blurted out his tale. The other grown up
Eskimos ribbed and teased him. Yet when he told the Inuit children,
their eyes grew wide with wonder and they tugged at his furs as they
asked him to tell them yet again about, 'the day he saw the green polar
bear'.