Chapter 7: The Visitor from the Cold Zone

Have you ever met someone from a place so different from yours that you might as well be of a different species?

Not different in terms of skin color, body shape, or the language they speak when they’re dreaming. Different in terms of fundamentals. The things you assume about the world, the air on your skin, the sun on your face, the casual touch of strangers, they assume the opposite. Their normal is your nightmare. Your freedom is their exposure.

That was Eirik.

He came from the Cold Zone New Greenland Autonomous Zone, to be precise, though no one called it that except on official documents. It was the last place on the continent where clothing wasn’t just optional but necessary. Nine months of sub-zero darkness each year. Permafrost instead of soil. Cities built underground, connected by heated tunnels, their populations emerging only in the brief, desperate summer when the sun returned and the temperature climbed above freezing for a few precious weeks.

In New Greenland, you wore clothes, or you died.

Not from shame.

From the cold.

From the simple, brutal physics of a body exposed to air that could freeze your skin in minutes, could stop your heart in hours, could turn you into a statue of ice and memory.

Eirik had never seen a naked person in public until he stepped off the transit pod in Pacora.

He had never felt the sun on his genitals.

He had never been touched by a stranger without fabric between them.

He had never, in twenty-two years of life, experienced what I experienced every single day.

And now he was here.

For a whole semester.

And I was supposed to help him adjust.

The exchange program notification arrived at 04:13.

Waking me with a soft chime that vibrated against my wrist, the kind of gentle alert that doesn’t startle, just suggests. I rolled onto my back, skin sliding across cool sheets, nipples tightening in the pre-dawn air that drifted through the open balcony doors.

The message glowed pale blue above my palm.

Incoming Scholar: Eirik Haldorsen, New Greenland Autonomous Zone.
Age: 22. Discipline: Comparative Climatology & Cultural Adaptation.
Duration: One semester.
Host Assignment: Lira Voss, Cultural History Seminar.
Note: Subject has limited prior experience with mandatory public nudity protocols. Orientation required.

I smiled into the dark.

Limited prior experience.

That was putting it mildly.

I’d read about New Greenland in my cultural history classes. The last holdout of mandatory coverage, not because of modesty laws that had fallen decades ago, even there, but because of survival. You couldn’t walk outside in a New Greenland winter without multiple layers of thermal insulation. You couldn’t swim in the fjords without a drysuit. You couldn’t even sit in your own home without heated clothing during the worst months, when the geothermal systems sometimes failed, d and the cold crept in through the walls like a living thing.

People in New Greenland wore clothes the way people in Pacora breathed air.

Not as a choice.

As a condition of existence.

And now one of them is coming here.

To the land of permanent summer.

To the city where clothing was prohibited except in designated cold rooms.

To my seminar, where he would be required to strip naked on the first day and never put anything on again until he left.

I wondered if he knew what he was getting into.

I wondered if I knew.

By breakfast, the campus buzzed with it.

The arrival of a Cold Zone scholar was rare, maybe once every few years, usually researchers or diplomats, always accompanied by handlers and minders and people whose job it was to make sure they didn’t freeze or faint or have a breakdown from the sheer sensory overload of skin on air.

But Eirik was a student.

Our age.

Our cohort.

Our peers.

And he was coming to us.

“I heard he’s never been naked in public,” Talia said, sliding onto the bench beside me in the dining hall. She was eating a bowl of fresh fruit, the juice dripping down her chin, her breasts resting on the table because that was just how she sat.

“That’s what the notification said,” I agreed.

“I heard he’s never even seen a naked person in public. Like, ever. In his whole life.”

I considered this. “What about his family? His friends? Lovers?”

Talia shrugged. “Apparently, they have private spaces for that. Bathrooms. Bedrooms. Places where you close the door and no one sees.”

“Even with lovers?”

“Even with lovers.” She popped a grape into her mouth. “Can you imagine? Touching someone your whole life and never really seeing them? Never knowing what their bodies look like in the open air? Never watching the sun move across their skin?”

I couldn’t.

The thought was almost incomprehensible.

I’d seen everyone I knew naked. My parents, my grandparents, my friends, my teachers, my lovers. I’d seen strangers naked on the street, in the plaza, on the transit pods. I’d seen bodies of every age, every shape, every size, soft and hard, young and old, smooth and wrinkled and scarred and tattooed and beautiful and ordinary and human.

The idea of not seeing them, of hiding them behind fabric, of pretending they didn’t exist, felt like a kind of death.

A small death.

A daily death.

The death of the body is something real.

“He’s going to freak out,” Talia said.

“Probably.”

“Are you ready for that?”

I thought about it. About the responsibility of guiding someone through their first experience of public nudity. About the patience it would require, the gentleness, the willingness to answer questions that might seem obvious or absurd.