Winter Synth
by Jamey Toner
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
Greenland was a land of ice, and Neave loved it. Out on the fells, you could see the wind prowling across endless miles of frostswept plenitude. You could feel it ruffle and slice you through your coat, smell your own nose freezing over and taste the snow through your scarf and the bones of your cheeks. And, always and everywhere, you could hear the spirit and the breath of Greenland.
Neave Qaanaaq stood on the crags of Mt. Sermitsiaq, outside the capital city of Nuuk, offering her coldness to the landscape that waited hoarily for her. “We didn’t choose the winter, little narwhal,” her Inuit mother liked to say, “the winter chose us.” But Neave knew better. That was why she’d come back.
It was early December, and the sun was down by 4:30. She watched the ocean as it fell into shadow, waiting till the last shades of violet turned to a harshly twinkling black. Then she headed down the slope toward the fjord city, full of bright primary-colored houses and the only two traffic lights in the country. It was a ten-mile walk to the center of town, but at her frenetic pace, it took barely three hours to reach Sofie’s Café.
Sofie glanced up as she entered. “Hello, dear.” The old woman, tiny and wrinkled as a coffee bean, was a grandmother to all who entered.
“Hey, Sofie. Gimme the good stuff.”
“Coming up.”
The café was cozy, a trifle on the dim side, with a few dark blue tables and cave-painting-like pictures of narwhals on the walls. When Neave was little, her Danish father had told her she had an antenna for hearing the gods’ music, an antenna like a narwhal’s tusk. That was how, the moment she’d first set foot in here, she’d known it was the right place.
“Neave,” said a hoarse, manic voice. “Neavity Neave.”
She sighed good-naturedly and took a table next to his. “Hi, Tom.”
He nodded like a bobble-head. “Tommity Tom. How’s the cold?”
“Just how I like it: colder by the day.”
“You are the cold, man.” Tom no-last-name was a tall, mop-headed American who had taken peyote in Oregon, blacked out, and woken up five days later in Greenland. He was twenty-five, three years older than Neave, and claimed to have dropped out of school because someone had eaten his power. “What about the music, how’s the music?”
“Heading upstairs as soon as I get my coffee. Got a long night ahead of me.”
He hadn’t stopped nodding since she sat down, but the motion intensified. “Good stuff, man.”
“The coffee or the music?”
“Both, man, both. Whatever fuels the cold fusion.”
Her eyebrows went up. “That’s actually a pretty good song title, Thomas.”
“You can have that, that’s on me.”
Sofie came over with an extra-large mug, up from which the steam of inspiration slowly curled. “Here we are, my dear. Have a lovely night.”
“Thanks, Sofie. You, too.”
At the rear of the café, across from the lilac-scented restroom, was a locked pine door to which Neave had the key. With her mug in hand, she opened the door and headed up the narrow stairs to the room she’d been renting from Sofie for the past two months.
The tiny, windowless garret, hedged on either side by the angles of the sharp Greenlandic roof, was illuminated by a string of red, green, and blue Christmas lights. It contained a folding table and chair, a mattress on the floor, and a mini-fridge. It was her Spartan Arcadia.
The ritual was simple. Putting in her earbuds, Neave sank into the improbably comfortable chair, sipped her coffee, and listened to Snowspire: the artist who had been her introduction to Winter Synth. By the time she took her final sip, her mind was fixed in a state of energized tranquility. Smiling grimly, she opened her eyes and woke up her laptop. Time to get to work.
The synthesizer was a phantom orchestra, poised to pour forth whatever concatenation of melodies she could devise, but everything started with the wind. Every day, she recorded the howls and whispers of the countryside and, every night, she digitized them, searching for the perfect windsong to serve as the prologue to her latest tune. The Arctic had a breath, but it had no voice; it needed Neave to speak on its behalf. But not in words.
Winter Synth was still an emerging genre. The lineage went back as far as electronic music, but the name of this particular branch wasn’t coined until 2013. Cold, sparse, and static, its harmonies evoked night places, wolf places, pole places.
Neave had discovered it while studying classical piano at the University of Copenhagen and had plunged into love with the gelid purity of the form. In a sense, it went nowhere and did nothing. There were no words, no story, practically no human elements: it was simply the unchanging sonic vision of the snow, her snow.
Tonight she was working on a track inspired by the “two steps forward, two steps back” musical style of Aindulmedir. She toiled, both on the keyboard and in the battered, dog-eared notebook she’d carried since junior year, weighing every note against an integrated whole that wouldn’t exist until she finished weighing every note against it. The perennial Catch-22 of the digital artist.
She worked till 1:30, took a break to pace furiously in the cozily claustrophobic space, then flung herself back into the work.
At 3:00, there was a knock on the door.
Neave looked up, baffled. Who the hell? The café closed at 10:00, and Sofie lived five blocks away. No one had ever knocked on this door. Certainly not at three in the bloody morning. The smart play was to call the police immediately. So Neave picked up her ulu, the Inuit skinning knife she kept next to her pillow, and yanked the door open.
Standing on the top step was an average-looking man with brown eyes and a brown tie, holding a brown leather briefcase. “I’m Mr. Brown,” he said.
“I don’t care who you are. How did you get in here?”
“I have a working relationship with the proprietress.”
“I doubt that.”
He did not address her doubts. “Miss Settirsen, if I could have one moment of your time—”
Bristling instantly, she snapped, “That’s not my name.” Neave loved her dad, and had no quarrel with her Danish half. But when she’d chosen her path as a Winter Synth artist, she had legally taken her mother’s maiden name: Qaanaaq, which meant roughly, “carved out by icy winds.” Neave’s music connected her to her heritage, and her heritage deepened her connection to the music.
He shook his briefcase. “It was your name at the time you signed these documents.” Brown’s voice held no emotion, nor any identifiable accent. It was like a talking spreadsheet. “I’m here to discuss your donation to the UCL.”
“What donation?”
“On October 15th of last year, you signed a promissory note to donate the sum of 1.65 million U.S. dollars to the UCL.”
She hiccupped. “A sum of what now?”
“1.65 million. As of last month, you are in default.”
“That’s absurd. And what the bloody hell is the UCL?”
“The Unitary Confederation of Lepidopterists,” Brown said colorlessly. “We are prepared to negotiate a payment plan.”
“This is the most imbecilic scam I’ve ever heard of.”
“If you don’t co-operate, I’ll have no choice but to involve Mr. Green. Do you believe in Mr. Green?”
Neave just stared.
“He doesn’t believe in himself, but I’m afraid he’s more real than any of us.”
“Okay.” The ulu came up, glinting in the Christmas lights. “It’s time for you to leave, Mr. Brown.” She tried to slam the door in his face.
Brown’s free hand, which had hung inertly at his side a split second earlier, was abruptly straight out in front of him, and the door bounced off his palm, shuddering, as if it had struck a refrigerator. Despite the violent movement, his voice remained dull. “No one holds out on the Lepidopterists.”
Slowly, gaping, she backed away from the whole freakish scenario. As bafflement mounted into terror, she awoke from a vivid dream and found herself sitting alone in her chair. The clock said 3:05.
* * *
The next day was frigid and clear. The bright, ineffectual sun muttered to itself in a pale blue sky, and the wind seemed to pour straight down like a cataract, bursting into a chaos of whirls and eddies when it hit the ground. Neave could feel the chill revitalizing her as she walked rapidly through the downtown streets. This was why she was pursuing her cold art up here in the ultimate North, breaking with musical tradition, a fiddler on the roof of the world.
Shaking off that bizarre dream had taken longer than she liked to admit. Though she’d kept herself at the task till half past four, she hadn’t managed to write anything else of value. Nor had she managed to get much sleep when she did finally lie down. It was well shy of noon as she made her way to the Sikuaq General Store.
Neave had spent months saving up for this excursion to her icy homeland. This past summer, after graduation, she had simultaneously held two full-time jobs in Denmark, where her mother and father now lived, so as not to squander any of her precious time and energy worrying about finances once she came to Nuuk and got to work. She wasn’t wealthy, but she had enough to buy a vast supply of Ramen noodles.
Antlers adorned the bare wooden beams of the store. It was a large building, by local standards, but it still felt like a cabin out on the floes. Neave stuffed a shopping basket with dry goods and Twinkies, nodded to an acquaintance or two in the aisles, and headed for the incongruously state-of-the-art cash register at the front.
“Hello, Neave,” the owner said in his deep, quiet voice. He was a huge Inuit man in his forties, mountainously serene, who had reportedly once killed a mad stag with a broken tree branch. “Keeping warm?”
She smiled. “Hi, Atka. No warmer than I can help. Gotta keep the inner winter flowing, you know.”
“It’ll be winter when winter comes, my friend.”
“It’s always winter for me.” As he finished scanning her items, she tapped the pin pad with her debit card. “Anyway, have a good day.”
Atka pursed his lips. “Declined,” he said stoically.
“What? That’s impossible.” She tried again, with the same result. “What on earth. I just checked my balance this morning. I don’t even have any cash on me.”
“Don’t fret. You come back and pay when you sort it out.”
“Oh, thank you. I’m gonna drop this stuff off and go straight to the bank.”
Frowning, foreboding, Neave went back to Sofie’s to set down her groceries. As she passed by the front counter, she paused. “Hey, Sofie.”
“Yes?”
“You don’t know anybody called Mr. Brown, do you?”
The old lady blinked at her. “Mr. Brown? Not that I can think of. What’s his first name?”
“Dunno. ‘Mister,’ I guess.”
“Are you all right, dear? You don’t look well.”
Neave shook her head. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”
The Bank of Greenland actually looked like a bank. A modern concrete structure eight stories tall, it peered flatly down at the sharp-roofed houses below like a glacier on the Serengeti. When Neave walked in, she was instantly assailed by canned warmth and stately lighting. At least they had a free coffee station.
The teller at the front was a young lady, not much older than Neave, with her hair in a tight dark bun. She smiled automatically and jiggled her mousepad in anticipation. “Good morning, how can I help you today?”
“Hi, my card just got declined.”
They went through the ancient rites of identification and verification, and the teller pulled her up on the screen. “Yes... Yes, it looks like your account has been frozen.”
“Say what? Why? How?”
“Mmm-not sure, but it looks like you have a large outstanding debt?”
A spike of venom went from the back of her throat to the floor of her gut. “To whom?”
“Well, I don’t have that information here, but I can get my supervisor to... Oh, here she is now!”
Neave turned. A much older lady had come out from the back, with her hair in a tight grey bun. “Miss Qaanaaq?” she said in a very cheerful voice.
“Yeah?”
“I’m Helen Hawersaat, the branch manager. Would you care to step into my office?”
“Sure.”
Copyright © 2025 by Jamey Toner
