How High We Go in the Dark and Denying Closure
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu is about climate change, a worldwide pandemic, and a whole lot of death. The book chronicles multiple generations and includes robot pets, space travel, and a suicide theme park. But it's also a novel about grief and the devastating struggle to deal with loss.
In the opening chapter, a man travels to an outpost in Siberia, where his daughter has just died. The scientists there are studying an ancient virus, which has been released by melting glaciers. They don't yet know how serious the virus is, and folks seem hopeful at first, but that hope quickly dwindles.
The chapter ends on an open note. The character is still alive, but we are made to feel that he will die soon. I'm interested in both the how and the why of this feeling.
First, the how.
This passage is probably too long to quote in this space, but I want to do it anyway, because I think the pacing matters. I won't talk about every sentence, but you should see the space between the ones I address.
Lately, I can't help but think about all the times the team was covered in mud and water from the crater, of the jury-rigged clean lab, the respirators that probably need their air filter cartridges replaced. I question Dave's decision to inject the virus into a rat, one of history's most notorious vectors for disease. We're told the quarantine is to be extended and to expect supply drops every two weeks. We're told biohazard medical teams will be sent if necessary. I fall asleep every night video-chatting with my family, telling fairy tales to Yumi: And they all lived happily ever after. I wake up half expecting to find something wrong--a fever, a stiff neck, a rash. I examine every inch of my body in a mirror. We are all waiting for nothing or everything. I dream of going home and holding my family, telling Yumi that her mother has saved her. I dream of the last trip Clara took with us, flying over the Arctic National Refuge, watching the last remaining wild caribou migrate. When Dave tells me he has a splitting headache, I tell him to take his own advice and not jump to any conclusions. But I tell him this while standing across the room. When Yulia says she has a stomachache, I tell her to drink tea. We'll be okay, I say, but I see the fear in her eyes. Dave tests positive for the new virus with both saliva and blood samples. I don't know if there's anything I can do to help Yulia. In the real world, people comfort themselves with ignorance, politics, and faith, but here in the domes only hard numbers matter. She has stopped running, her portrait of the research team left unfinished. We keep telling ourselves we're going to complete our work and go home--some days I even believe this. I put on my daughter's snow gear, take the dogū figurine with me, and walk out onto the tundra, picture Clara there beside me beneath the aurora. I don't take the ATV. I walk the mile to the crater's edge. I imagine the virus and anything else the ice has kept hidden from us being sucked into the figurine, its stone belly filled with all that can harm us. I tell my daughter I love her and throw the dogū in the crater, waiting for all that has been unburied to be retaken into the earth. I walk back to the outpost. I can barely breathe.
There's meaning in that dogū, of course. It's a memento of the narrator's daughter, and so his flinging it away seems like a last act before his own death. However, it has already been explained that a dogū's purpose is to soak up evil. Therefore, flinging the dogū could be lifesaving—or even earth saving. Whether or not the narrator believes in the dogū's power (he's a scientist too), it must be interpreted as not just an act of despair but one of hope.
The way this single gesture contains both hope and despair is exiting to me as a reader. The whole passage—and perhaps the whole book—pulses with these conflicting emotions.
But despite the paradox contained in the dogū, and despite the still-living narrator, by the chapter's end, I am certain he will die. Or at the very least, I am certain conditions are much worse than he's admitting.
This happens through careful use of language and what I call "negation." Sometimes pointedly not telling something inspires the reader to guess the real truth. The repeated opening phrase “We’re told” makes us wonder what we’re not told. “I dream” makes us think of what we can only dream of but never have. A bit later, we get “I tell,” and again we are made to wonder what the narrator is not telling. "I don’t know" and "I imagine" make appearances to the same effect. All of this creates the foreboding sense of something too awful to name. But we can guess what the secret is.
Okay, so that's how. What about why?
First, the narrator's death would close the chapter very neatly. But a refusal to resolve creates a sort of reaching sensation in the text. It's an assertion that there is more to this story, an invitation to connect this chapter to the next. And this is important because the chapters don't connect in an expected way. The world and the problem are the same, but new characters appear in each chapter, with only fleetingly mentioned connections to the people we've already met.
Denying closure not only holds the stories together but layers one atop another for a depth of experience. If the trajectory of the first chapter has begun but not finished, the next chapter will begin, but the first will extend beneath it in my brain. Had the earlier chapter fully resolved, this would not happen. I might think about it, but it wouldn't feel as alive.
But more than this connection and depth created by the refusal to resolve, the open chapter resists catharsis.
In many ways, How High We Go in the Dark reads like an elegy for this planet and this civilization. And yet it stops short of giving closure—that's crucial.
If we got as far as the death and then successfully grieved the death (other chapters are about unsuccessful or unfinished attempts at grieving), maybe we could put the death away. But if we did, would we also look away from the problem that caused it?
Maybe I'm naive, but if I read a book about climate change, I want it to also be a call to action—at least on some level. If we only mourn the world, we let it keep dying. If we're denied closure, however, we might still try to save it.