An Arrival at Pituffik
The mimic visits Greenland.
He had never seen anything quite like it. Through countless eons spent in an ancient wilderness, nothing like this. A white, jagged coastline tore through a tumultuous sea. On the horizon, rough, gray mountains pushed into the skyline.
Looking through the window of Air Force Two, he saw this odd floating landmass as a place where anything that wasn’t trying to consume was bound to be consumed. He could imagine lone strays – animal and human alike – sucked into the swirling snows, frozen and swallowed whole by the white void. This was a place that thrived on it. A place he understood.
And him? He wasn’t here to consume exactly. More to prepare the ground for a future feast. Possibly the most awesome he had ever taken part in.
Considering what was coming, he had to reflect on all he had achieved, and in such a short period of time. It was impressive enough that he had gotten this far without anyone discovering his true, inhuman form. But to have made it to possibly the second most powerful position on the planet (and with the “possibly” appended only because of the constant presence of that odd car man, who, he suspected, was likely another masquerading entity like him)? It was a magnificent ruse, proof that civilization was, ultimately, completely unable to outsmart deep time.
His ascent happened so fast that, truthfully, he still found it a bit awkward to refer to himself as a “he.” Let alone Vice President, let alone Senator, let alone best-selling author. Even after all this time, his emergence from wilderness, the years spent closely studying the movements of these strange beings. The military training, the time at Yale, the book tours, the media appearances, the campaign trails. It was “he” that he found most jarring.
“He…” “he…” “HE…” It was like scared laughter. It sent a tickle up his curled spine every time he heard it.
Nobody who had encountered him along the banks of what they called the Ohio River, whispering back at them in their voice from the woods, had ever called him “he.” Most of the time, they didn’t call him anything. They just froze, letting it dawn on them what they had just heard, and started walking again, picking up the pace – but never, never running – to put as much distance between them and him as they could.
At least, that’s what the locals did. The tourists, the visitors, those who didn’t know the woods were a place you survived? The ones who, occasionally, he even found whistling through the trees and hills? More often than not, they were his bounty. The trepidation and anxiety he provoked in the locals were enough to sustain him. But the reactions of the outsiders were truly a meal.
The confusion, the slow dawning fear, quickly turning to horror and panic, the adrenaline that wafted through the trees as they tried to run. He didn’t always need them to decay into the void of Appalachia. The kill wasn’t what drove him. Not by itself anyway.
It was the explosion of awe and extreme terror that took over the air when they finally saw his real face, before they rotted to dust in front of him – their eyes, fixed on him in utter disbelief, the last to dissolve into the void as it enveloped them.
The fear. The complete and all-consuming fear. That was what satisfied and nourished him. It gave him strength and allowed him to take new forms, eventually becoming strong enough to leave the woods after spending entire ages dwelling in the soil and stone and plant-life.
It allowed him to learn memory – though he found he could only apply it going back a few hundred thousand years at most. It also allowed him to form language, to become cunning and strategic. All the while, the hunger, the instinct to consume greater and greater terrors, grew in him. And as his hunger grew, so did the fear of those around him.
When his boss first told him that this place was in their sights, he was, admittedly, confused. Why here? Why this large mass of rock and ice, pushed by the cold winds toward the top of the world? He had been told all manner of things, all of which he had learned and practiced to repeat. “Geopolitically strategic.” “Necessary for national security.” “Protecting the world from Russia.” “Protecting the world from China.” And all the rest. He was good at repeating. Even if he didn’t really know what any of it meant. Repetition was, after all, how he had survived, how he had managed to get this far.
Still, he didn’t quite understand why here. Why Greenland? Then he learned. The deep histories of nomadic human people finding their way down the island through brutal winters and unforgiving seas. The legends and folklore. The violence that had torn through the lands. The Norse terrorizing the Inuit. The Inuit resisting. The arrival of the Danes. The years of extraction and exploitation and lives lived in the cold shadows of dashed hopes.
It all sent his hunger reeling, tearing through him. A land full of names and screams and cries he had not yet heard, had not yet learned to mimic? He had sensed similar despairs when he was in Iraq years before, and plenty of them, but he was far too removed, too inculpable to really feast. This was something new entirely, a meal beyond meals. Cities, towns and settlements full of people whose sense of dread and instability would provide him with new dimensions of wonder.
Thus the last-minute decision to join the human he called his wife on her trip to Greenland. The wife had been irked by his decision, and the subsequent news that she wouldn’t get to watch a dog sledding race after all. She knew better than to let her annoyance show, however, lest his feverish tastes be triggered, sapping her of what little will to live she still had left.
He needed to see it for himself, to breathe in the frozen air, to see if he could get a scent of anger and fear. To see if he could create the conditions to make a meal beyond the arbitrary borders he and his boss watched over. Why did his boss want Greenland? In the end, he still hadn’t a clue. But in the end, he didn’t care. He had his own reasons, his own bottomless hunger to satiate.
As the plane came to a stop on the runway, he realized he hadn’t yet decided what to say. Such absent-mindedness might tell him he was becoming something altogether more human, but it wasn’t that. At least he hoped it wasn’t. But in his years taking this form, he had learned that the best sounds to repeat were the most mundane. It was these that brought smiles to the faces of those around him while also spiking their deepest anxieties and frustrations. He hadn’t much time to conjure up something from the innumerable sounds that had imprinted on him through the millennia.
He and the wife disembarked. The base staff ushered them across the tarmac and he consciously stretched his adopted face into the rictus he had learned most people were able to look at. Their escorts – base staff, commanding officers – all rambled in his direction. He could make out tones and consonants, but he also knew that they could be tuned out without much in the way of consequence. He was too busy forming the things they called words in his head.
As they opened the door to the base’s interior, as he was greeted by the faces of soldiers and reporters alike, the sounds came to him. He knew these would be what they needed to hear. And so, with a learned twist of his jaw and the quivering anticipation of the feasts to come, he let himself speak.
“It’s cold as shit here.”
Perfect.