When a freak accident involving an infallible gambler, a truck full of chickens and a gas pump leaves an easygoing young man named Iple deaf, he decides to travel to Antarctica. Tagging along with a team of contrary, often childish scientists, he is the sole member of the expedition to keep his head as the days stretch and the nights become non-existent.

While wandering the tundra trying to reconstruct his hearing and memory, Iple finds himself on top of an enormous sheet of translucent ice. Below the sheet, with her four legs in the air, is Isabella, a dinosaur and the last DNA repository of a wealth of human and pre-human knowledge.

What follows is a mesmerizing detour into our species� fear and wonder at the nature of prediction. Paul Fattaruso�s vision is a statistician�s wet dream and a mystic�s worst nightmare � or is it the other way around? As twin little girl physics vie for the future of the human race, we are drawn into a distant past that smells suspiciously like the future. In this harrowing and wildly funny novella, a wry and haunting new voice speaks to us from farther and farther away, casting a cool catlike eye towards strange things humans do, have done and will soon do again. Fattaruso, trained as a poet, spins a lyrical and highly visual modern day fable, a creation myth for the generation whose gods look more like dinosaurs than any monsters before or since.

Paul Fattaruso is just 26 years old. He received his MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts in 2003. Paul Fattaruso lives with his wife Kristin in Vermillion, South Dakota, where he is pursuing a PhD. He rides a silver bicycle. As a minister, he has performed one marriage.

One. Iple�s Memory

Iple walked and as he walked, having nothing specific to look at, only the vast abstract waves of ice and icy sky, he took unsystematic stock of his memories. He remembered standing at the window, the sun high, the sunlight with the worn-in gold of early afternoon, glowing, holy green lawns, cars driving past, though now he could pick out only one, a beige, preconscious BMW from the early 1980s, and evenly distributed, indeterminate pedestrians, and a vague, refreshed taste of water in his mouth and the back of his nose. Iple wasn�t sure what window he�d been standing at, though he had a feeling the floor he�d been standing on was carpeted in thick burgundy and the curtains royal blue with little white evenly distributed flowers, and he was unsure if he was remembering when he was six or when he was thirty, whether the car had maybe been from the late 1960s, whether it had driven past at all, or whether he was remembering an actual memory. What he remembered distinctly was the sense of fixity, brightness and inevitability, the slight sense of recognition that the moment would be remembered, unrecognizably.

Iple had thousands of memories like this one. They weren�t enough to make a single childhood story out of. He remembered being curled on a cool linoleum floor with abdominal pains, wearing black pajamas with white pinstripes, and a sudden, unexpected sympathy from the linoleum, and nothing else. He used to check his wardrobe for a remembered pair of pajamas, empty his desk in search of a beautiful quill pen he remembered holding in his teeth late one night, hoping that the pen might give up some clue where it came from, why Iple had been holding it the way he had, hungry, from what he remembered, for a taco.

Two. Iple�s Childhood

Iple walked and watched his breath curl out in long, momentary clouds, and tried to remember his childhood. He remembered his mother had worked wrapping chocolate bars to buy herself a beautiful purple bicycle when she was just a girl. He could still see her bicycle, which he knew he�d never seen, but could not remember the look of his mother, her alert eyes and her short tight curls of disorientingly black hair, her stewardess uniform in the far, dark corner of the closet, hanging over a pile of disused shoes, insinuating an invisible, unimaginable world folded into the actual one, or the gesture she used to flip a pancake.

He would test each memory by trying to imagine one of its opposites, his mother with her wild blonde pigtails, her calm, sleepy eyes, her closet of nothing but delicate nightgowns, too thin almost to touch, she who never wrapped a candy nor cared to own a bicycle, and each memory seemed as believable as the one before it. It was his sister who bought the bicycle, and the bicycle had been orange, if he�d had a sister.

Iple couldn�t isolate enough of a single certain detail of his personal history around which he might build some probable corollary memories, which he suspected might lead him to something else he could be sure of, a second certain detail, then a third, and so on; and after an initial panic, he wasn�t especially inclined to keep trying. The cold froze the inside of his nose hard like a flowerpot.

Iple decided to be glad not to know where or how he grew up. For almost a minute, he hoped he�d had a happy childhood, and then he hoped for fifteen seconds that he hadn�t, and then he lost interest in the question entirely.


Three. The Antarctica Decision

Iple can remember why he came to Antarctica. He was walking around his block to get an idea. The clouds hung fixed, dumpling-shaped, shadowlessly bright. An orange cat looked at Iple with the poker face of a cat refusing give Iple its idea. The birds laughed at Iple. Iple carried a wooden ball-and-cup game that he liked to play to make himself look casual, like he wasn�t looking for anything, and he used it now. A string joined the red wooden ball to the yellow wooden cup on its blue wooden handle. Iple held it by its blue handle and swung the red ball in an arc upward and tried to catch it on the way down in the yellow cup. The cup was just slightly too small for the ball to fit in.

I will tell you something that no one knows for sure. Time is discrete, like in movies, still moments in progression. For Iple to swing the red ball to when it bounced off the rim of the yellow cup took only about five thousand moments, still too many to notice individually, no matter how closely you watch. From when the red ball bounced off the yellow cup to when the truck touched the pump in front of the gas station Iple was walking past was just under a thousand moments. It�s hard to talk about just when the truck touched the pump, since unlike time, space is continuous, and the closer you look, the more difficult it is to tell exactly when a thing is touching another thing and when a thing is not.

It took about four hundred moments from when the truck first touched the pump to when it was a real big explosion. The explosion killed five people and badly burned two. It killed the orange cat. It takes five whole moments for a thing to go from living to dead. It took twenty-six moments for Iple�s hearing to go from normal human hearing to no hearing.

Iple should have been dead or badly burned. The bones in his ear felt burned and hot, like they would burn through his head, but he could still think. He looked unscathed and sat down on the curb across the street. He sat there a long time, and the clouds kept looking like dumplings and didn�t go anywhere or reshape themselves. Firefighters and paramedics came and did everything they could. Policemen came and asked questions. Iple pointed to his right ear and shook his head.

Iple watched the gas station and environs until everything was gone from it, and then watched until a bird landed for a minute and left again, which reminded him of how to leave, and he got up and went to a little traincar diner.

Iple pointed to the Monte Cristo on the menu. He didn�t want to try speaking. His ears felt less hot, and he could think more. He thought to walk around until morning. In the morning, he thought to turn everything he had into money. Then he thought to rent a little room in an old janitor�s attic and learn all he could about Antarctica and keep eating sandwiches.

Upon becoming an Antarctica expert, Iple still did not understand why people went there. He joined group of scientists and went there.