Antarctica
As Mason Wilt first stepped through our research station’s door, he cried, “Hey hey ho ho, who’s ready to get cold?” His words fluttered out through the matted mess of his beard and mustache. Some of my colleagues rolled their eyes, but I thought it was funny. I liked him in those early days, before he took up with Caroline: when he’d roam the hallway, his belly pushing against his stained white undershirts, talking to anyone who would listen. “I want to be the Tarzan of the Antarctic,” he told me. I told him I didn’t know what that meant but it sounded all right. He let out a yawp as an answer.
I’d been here three dark months then. Now it’s my fourth. The sky is starting to lighten, and he and Caroline are inseparable. I’ll see them in the distance sometimes, and their blue parkas melt into the blue sky. Their voices bounce back across the ice. I can’t make out the words, just the joy. When she told me about her and him, I’d just nodded and tugged at my gloves. I didn’t want to cry, because my tears would freeze to my cheeks.
Back home, they all thought I was crazy to come here. At least my folks did, and my older brother Joel did — when he could look up from his video game, that is. “You’ll just be cold and lonely,” they’d say, which turned out to be true, though I never minded either one particularly. I remember being in my car one night, stopped at a red light when it was well below zero. I can still picture the road’s dark pavement, the cold metal of the street signs. All seemed brittle and shatterable. A white van in front of me secreted plumes of exhaust across the red of the brake lights. The white clouds floated upwards, blurring the stoplight. You could almost see the molecules slowing, nearly still. I’d never felt so peaceful. Even now, I like the Zen of hearing nothing but the crunch of my boots and my heavy breath and the feeling of my nose pinkening.
When I first arrived, it was always dark, even in the middle of the day, and you felt like a ghost walking in shadows. I wasn’t part of any research team then. I’d been removed from the Russian-led Lake Vostok squad — not for anything to do with me, but because of some political thing. My advisor, Dr. Shem, told me these sorts of things happened all the time; it would all be cleared up soon. It hasn’t been cleared up yet.
I was fourteen when I first read in the back of my science textbook about Lake Vostok: the secret, underground lake beneath the heart of the continent. Mr. Stevens, my physics teacher, had never even heard of it. Buried beneath the ice for fifteen million years — the same conditions as Jupiter’s moon Europa. There, there could be life like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Prehistoric species evolving in their own hidden gene pool. I used to sit in study hall and sketch hypothetical creatures of various combinations. The pointed cornucopia cones of the giant Baculite, the giant sword-teeth of the Enchodus, the massive swollen girth of the giant squid. When I was born, they weren’t even sure giant squids existed. They’d never seen one.
Our research station is a small collection of dingy buildings; really not much more than the work trailers on a construction site. In the dark months, the residents laid out glowing lamps outside the dorms: will-o’-the-wisps in a long path down to a cluster of people around an evening bonfire. It was warm enough even then by the flames that we could sit without even our coats: just sweater, hat, snow pants. “This is all new,” Dr. Shem would say. “It was never like this before.”
I first met Caroline at the bonfire. I’d had a whiskey or two — which is the perfect Antarctic drink — and I remember seeing her first as I shuffled down between the glowlights. She sat next to another girl, both of their faces painted red in the firelight. They were busy talking to a couple of guys in parkas, one with a cleft chin; the other was Dr. Shem. Someone had just said something funny. They were all laughing. The other girl’s smile faded quickly, and she stared glumly into the fire. I’d later learn her name was Laurie and her husband was still in Phoenix and he was having an affair. There aren’t enough people here. We all know everything about everyone. Laurie’s hood blanketed her head; she sat crunched like a marshmallow. I could see Caroline in profile. She looked elven to me, skin pale and pink. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all if, under her hat, her ears had points. Behind her loomed jagged ice mountains, white and faded like a cloud over the moon. When she saw me, she smiled and said, “Someone new, thank god someone new.” I was terrified of talking, and my heart seized up. But with Caroline, there’s never really a moment where you meet her. You’re just suddenly friends before you even realize you’re not the shy version of yourself anymore but the regular version.
One night, she and I walked by flashlight and lantern out into the North Zero where the penguins gathered. It felt like they were waiting for us. All short, squat dark shapes in the low late winter light. It reminded me of Valhalla where all the Vikings who fell in battle gathered and waited until…until what?
We watched them waddle about: slump-shouldered, sometimes spreading their little wings to keep balance on the slippery ice. Caroline knew them all. “That one over there. He always stands over here. Watch him. I call him ‘Eric.’”
“Why ‘Eric’?”
“I don’t know. He seems like an Eric. But it isn’t like a penguin to sit by himself. They’re social birds.” She smiled and pushed my arm, “He’s kind of like you.”
“I talk to people!”
She made a face.
“Well,” I said. “I guess that one is like you.” I pointed to the penguin that seemed to be in the middle of everything.
“Matilda? The matriarch? That’s not me! I don’t run shit.”
It’s hard now to think about how happy and light I was in those early days. I remember standing up on the giant hill, Hill 42, just south of Zero Point, looking down into the crashing waves, ice floes bouncing in the gray, and feeling a rush of freedom like nothing I’d ever felt at home. It had nothing to do with Caroline and everything to do with Caroline.
The dormitories are tiny, like cruise ship staterooms. You have your own bathroom, but it’s so small the shower hangs from the middle of the ceiling and splatters into a grate on the floor. The bed is nearly as wide as the room. In those days when the sun never rose, it was easy for Caroline to sneak in. Or better, I liked her room, where it smelled so pretty. Nothing perfumey — just her essence as a girl. Scotch-taped photographs of penguins covered every inch of the white-painted brick. There were dozens, probably hundreds. A typed description, heavily annotated with red pen, accompanied each bird. She used to be so tired in the evening, she’d fall asleep before anything happened and I’d lay awake. Without my glasses and without much light, the penguin sketches blurred, and I imagined them in every stage of evolutionary mutation. Penguins with lion’s manes. Penguins with noses. Penguins with unicorn horns. It was only in the morning, when it was still dark because it was always dark. The touching of each other’s bodies seemed to be some kind of light.
She slept in flannel pajama bottoms and tank tops with skinny straps and I liked to kiss her shoulders and tug down the bottoms. The contrast between the fuzz of the flannels and the smoothness of her thighs. I’ve never believed in God, but that may have been as close as I’ve come. That or maybe the icescapes when the sun started rising after all that time. Every color trapped in the frozen water, bouncing off the floating shoals. It was light before you’d ever seen the sun. It seemed to promise something. The bottom of the world is a construct; Antarctica could just as easily be at the top of a globe.
Caroline drew a penguin-squid mix with a longer beak and different wing-tentacles for me. It’s still taped to the wall over my dorm bed, as pathetic as that is. The first thing I see when I open my eyes is Caroline’s Cthulhu Penguin in the hazy sunlight. It makes me feel kind of okay again — then not so much.
I close my eyes sometimes and try to picture the cloudy, frigid depths of the lake. The generations mutate and some die and some live. It takes centuries; it takes geological time. Dr. Shem likes to tell us the continent will break apart, and they’ll all be free. “The different pieces will each float off in their own directions and melt,” he says. “The seas will rise, and we’ll all drown.”
