Gene wanted to forget, and snow did not have memories. Any impressions made were wiped away by wind and storms, leaving nothing but an empty peace. It was this search for peaceful amnesia that led him to the Arctic research station, a forgotten building that smelled of rotting floorboards and neglect. The station looked like a half-buried Coke can turned on its side in the snow desert, which stretched unbroken to the horizons. Gene’s job, for the winter, was to babysit air monitors, retrieving and replacing the filters that collected windborne pollution. A grad student should have been there, not an aging professor, but Gene had insisted.