Antarctica Read online

  “Ah,” X said, amazed at what beakers came up with. It was really quite beautiful. Not so beautiful as to justify freezing to death, of course—not unless you were very obsessive-compulsive—but then again so many beakers were obsessive-compulsive. It was practically the definition of the type. So it could be said that Antarctica was an entire continent ruled by obsessive-compulsives—just like all the rest of them, now that he thought of it, but elsewhere not so cold-hardened by their obsessions. This Forbes was almost as bad as the mountaineers, who ran around the ice as ecstatic as dogs all the time, because these were just the kinds of dreadful conditions they craved and sought out all over the world; Antarctica gave them a continuous supply, so they loved Antarctica and were happy all the time, like Val. No, the beakers were more normal than that, even the cold-hardened ones like this guy. Just as normal and friendly and hard-working as anyone else. And the occasional high-handed snob—well, there were jerks in every job. Like Ron, for instance. No, jerks were scattered at every level up and down the hierarchy; but most people were not like that.

  And so, no guillotines. No revolution; no strike. Obviously. X shook his head, trying to rid it of that whole train of thought, and said, “What’s your field? What are you guys studying?”

  Forbes glanced at him, trying to judge the level of answer he should make. “I’m a glaciologist. A glacial sedimentologist.”

  This struck X as a bit fine; next he’d be saying that he was actually a lateral morainologist. But X let it pass.

  “We’re looking at sandstones in the Sirius group. They’re at the center of a controversy concerning the age of the big polar cap. The standard view had the polar cap being a stable feature about fourteen million years old, or older. But this group thinks the ice was mostly gone three million years ago, during a warm period in the Pliocene.”

  “You don’t agree?”

  “No no, I think they have a good case. They’ve identified marine microfossils in Sirius rock that date from the Pliocene, and biostratification is a well-established dating method. So there had to be liquid water, in places where now there’s only ice. Now they’re looking for other confirmation of this view, and so they’ve invited me to join them.”

  “And as a glaciologist, you …”

  “The Sirius group is fossil glacial till, that much is clear. So I’m looking for things that glacial sediment can tell us. How the sediment was laid, in what conditions—disconformities to show where things changed—that kind of thing.”

  In cold slow motion, X considered it. “Liquid water? Like sea level?”

  “Possibly. The dry valleys that open onto the sea are paleofjords, that much is clear.”

  “But aren’t we really high here? You aren’t saying that sea level was this high, are you?”

  Forbes glanced at him again. “No. The idea would be that these deposits were made when the land was much lower, and then the Transantarctics rose substantially.”

  “This far up in the last three million years?” X asked. “Isn’t that kind of fast for mountain uplift?”

  He had no idea, actually, but again Forbes glanced at him, eyebrows raised. “I’m not a geomorphologist,” he said at last.

  Now that was the pure beaker style. And the other scientists were closing on them as they all approached the helo rendezvous from different directions, converging at a flat spot on the empty brown valley floor. This guy would not want to talk about the group’s project to an amateur with the other members of the group there to hear; none of them liked to do that. So X shrugged and slouched down heavily in the lee of a rock. “Neither am I,” he said to Forbes, sharply enough to get yet another surprised look.

  Then the red dragon choppered out of the pale sky, and X was heloed back to Mac Town like a big side of frozen beef. And the next morning, still cold even after huddling all night in his thick blankets, he was back in the heavy shop on the floor, picking up nuts and bolts as if the Nevada freeze-drying had never happened. The pile of metal parts on the floor did not look any smaller than when he had started. It began to seem a kind of Sisyphean labor, and X wondered if Ron might be dumping new junk on the pile at night, in one of his awful practical jokes. The pile would never end. It was the Good For Anything’s nightmare job. He was Sisyphus; he was the Golem, made for dead work; he was Frankenstein’s monster, big and misshapen and clumsy. Call me X. It was interesting how many flaws there were in screw threading, and how few washers were truly flat. But not really.

  The heavy shop was nowhere near as bad, however, as running into Val. This painful event was unfortunately unavoidable, and happened time after time; Mac Town was just too small to avoid people. Even if he spent his off-hours skulking in the few spots where he knew Val did not go, he still ran into her; and each time it was as traumatic as ever, so that he would spend the rest of the day fulminating, sweating as he fantasized stinging denunciations arid/or revenge scenarios, which often involved saving her from death and then walking disdainfully away—sad wastes of his mental time, as he knew even while he was in the midst of them. But he couldn’t help it.

  And he kept running into her. Usually it happened in the galley; he would go in feeling perfectly equable, empty as a gourd, and then there would be Val, sitting at one of the big round tables with her women friends, the usual gang, a group of gals that was loud, boisterous, confident, a bit intimidating to walk past, giving off the faint whiff of xenophobia that all groups exude when their esprit de corps is pitched just a bit too high—but a good crowd nevertheless, in fact admirable in X’s view, given the situation in America—no shopping anorexics here, but skilled and tough people, just the kind of women he was attracted to in fact, and among them a fair number of his best friends in town—but with Val smack in the middle of them, the queen of the amazons, laughing at something and ignoring him. And another meal would turn to lead in his gut. He even tried spending the extra money to eat in the Erebus View, the private restaurant over the minimall on the docks (which did not have a view of Erebus, of course); but then she would appear there too, and it would be expensive lead in his gut. They seemed to be on the same eating wavelength, as they had been when they first started talking. It got to the point where X would rather go hungry than risk running into her. But of course he had to eat; he had a big appetite, and skipping meals only made him feel faint and irritable, so that he would rush down at midnight the moment the galley opened for mid rats, starving, and there she would be coming in from a late survival class at Happy Camper Camp, or an expedition or something, and he would go faint and feel like screaming Leave Me Alone! But of course it was just Oh hi, oh hi, and he would be doomed to another desperate gulping meal, hands shaking from hunger, followed by a sweat-chilled gut-twisted revenge fantasia, in his room or up on the peak of Ob Hill or on the floor of the heavy shop picking up nails.

  And no one to talk to about it. This after all was the group of acquaintances who had just recently been calling him the Earl of Sandwich. And even when he ventured to say something about it to Joyce, the sole friend he trusted enough to talk to about such matters, she only gave him a look from across the great crevasse of gender, a very complicated look, which seemed to be saying among other things that he was a fool to get so involved with a beauty like Val in the first place.

  Then, after more complicated looks, and some indirect mutterings, she finally said, “Oh come on, X. Just grow up and get over it. Men have been dumping women just like this for generations, I’ve got no patience with guys who come down here and find the situation is somewhat altered and start moaning about it. So there’s some buyer’s market behavior from some of the women, surprise surprise, but it’s no excuse for all the whining I hear, all the accusations and remonstrations concerning us terrible trolling ice women, and all from men who were doing the same kind of shit all their lives right up to the very moment they arrived in Mac Town.” She shook her head. “Come on, X. Get real. If you wanted a relationship to go well,” stressing the word like it was an archaic
silly concept to begin with, “then why did you come to Antarctica?”

  “Yeah yeah,” X said, and wandered back to the heavy shop, discouraged. Why indeed? Fingers picking up iron, without need for any help from the brain whatsoever: why indeed?

  At this point he could barely remember. He could not recall what his pre-arrival image of Antarctica had been. A place of adventure, surely. A place where even the humble jobs that a GFA could expect would be transformed. But even that quick disillusionment had been as nothing compared to the experience with Val. Even if love were nothing more than a bourgeois fabrication, outdated in Mac Town along with everywhere else, it was strange how much it could still hurt; and strange how many men in McMurdo were wandering around even more bitter than he was, burned by trolling ice women and swearing never to have anything to do with them ever again. Which would last right until the next time.

  But even structures of feeling were a social construct, as Raymond Williams had made clear. And the structure of feeling down here was clearly skewed by the disparity in number between men and women; there were about nine hundred men in town, and three hundred women; and that was the explanation right there, along with the fact that everyone in town had tested negative for sexual diseases. No doubt X had been lucky to have gotten even an extra word from Val, him a lowly GFA and a fingie to boot when he had first met her, and her the beauty of the town and one of the best known of the mountaineers, veteran of expeditions that people talked about in tones of amazement. And even though the mountaineers were ASL employees too, and caught in the same seasonal contract trap as the Carhartts, their job was one of the glamour jobs for sure, with about the same social status as the beakers.

  So it had been a mismatch from the start. She was the hotshot mountaineer who had climbed many of the world’s highest peaks, and repeated Shackleton’s impossible crossing of South Georgia Island; he was just a—he didn’t know what. A gypsy scholar. An overage college student, finished with college. He didn’t even know why she had paid attention to him at all; except for his size, no doubt. As she was six foot four inches tall, and therefore considerably taller than most men, he would have stood out in that sense. Someone she had to look up to, ha. And then he could talk, a little; he was a reader of books; and she had known an awful lot about the history of Antarctic exploration, and had been an interesting talker herself. No, they had had some good conversations! So good that it was painful to remember that period, when he had gone down to the galley three times every day hoping to run into her, timing his meals to match what seemed to be the likeliest times to meet her. And then eating big meals together, with big appetites both, and talking at length about all manner of things. She had told him about some of her climbs, and her admiration for Ernest Shackleton, and her grandmother who had died a couple years before; and he had told her about his reading, which in the absence of other leisure activities in McMurdo had become more voluminous than at any time of his life, even in college. He read mostly political philosophy and culture theory; that was what he liked; it was interesting, as he explained to her, to try to understand why the world was the way it was. And now in Antarctica, he said, he had begun to put together his reading and his life in a way that made sense; he was beginning to see patterns. In all the evenings he had with nothing else to do, he had begun to travel backward in the history of philosophy, trying to track his analysis to its source. Everything that impressed him turned out to be based on something that had come earlier. So that he had read The Götterdämmerung and become a devotee of Frank Bailey, like any number of grad students around the world; then he had sought out Bailey’s roots in prepostcapitalist theory, and so had read Deleuze and Speier, and become a neoleftist; then gone further back and read Jameson and Williams and then Sartre, and found it had all come from Sartre, and so become a Sartrean; then a Nietzschean, for really it all came from Nietzsche; and then he had read Marx and Engels, and become a Marxist. At that point he had recognized the retrograde pattern of his intellectual movement, and rather than go to the trouble of traveling further backward in the history of Western philosophy, which was soon going to lead him into the monstrosities of Kant and Hegel, he had simply skipped them all and gone right back to Heraclitus, becoming a confirmed student of that most Zenlike of the Greeks, a man whose extant body of work could be read in ten minutes, but then pondered over for the rest of one’s life. Yes, now he planned to meditate on fragments of Heraclitus and never read philosophy again, but start paying attention to the world instead!

  And Val had laughed at his foolery. It had seemed to entertain her, at the time. But if you could never step in the same river twice, as Heraclitus had famously said, then why did he keep on running into Val in the galley? And why was he stuck in this same moment of pain? And how could he get to his food without going through that pain? And why had she inflicted that pain on him in the first place?

  He had thought they had been having a good time. That was what hurt. They had talked in the galley, and laughed; they had hiked up to Ob Hill together, and snuck into the greenhouse; they had made out; they had made love; they had even gone to New Zealand together on vacation, which in the Mac Town structure of feeling was serious stuff indeed, a kind of commitment. And X had thought they had had a good time there, a really good time. Of course he had not been able to climb mountains at Val’s level, that was impossible and scary even to contemplate, her casually pointing up at routes she had done that looked completely vertical or even distinctly overhung; when they had driven up to Mount Cook, for example, past the biggest most turquoise lake imaginable, she had mentioned climbing Cook the last time she was there, and X had gazed up at that distant white spire, like something out of a dream, and stared at her open-mouthed until she had laughed. It’s not that hard, she said, although it is crappy rock, wheatabix the Kiwis call it, which is a breakfast cereal; it cuts your hands all up and yet crumbles under your weight, actually last time we got avalanched up there, it was great….

  X had listened and nodded, trying not to look frightened. And after many climbing stories from her, all terrifying, recounted as they hiked the steep trails in the area, he had confessed in turn that he had been pretty bad at sports, and at physical activity in general. Always a disappointment to his school’s coaches, naturally, as he had always been big, and therefore looked promising. But after his last spurt of growth he had lumbered around “like Frankenstein’s monster,” as he put it, which caused Val to look at him oddly; and she didn’t offer any similar stories about herself. Apparently she had been quite a jock in school, when she had bothered. Good at volleyball in particular.

  But X had been plagued by sports as by a curse in a fairy tale. In high school he had taken a swing at a pitch while the baseball coach was watching, and accidentally hit the ball 548 feet as later tape-measured by the coach; it had taken two years of baseball after that without X ever even hitting the ball again to convince the coach that that one shot had been a fluke. Then in the winters X had been talked onto the wrestling team, and had wrestled in the heavyweight division, and lost every match for three years, all by pin; and was also perhaps the only wrestler ever to be pinned by an opponent weighing a hundred pounds less than he did; no doubt also the only wrestler ever stupid enough to agree to such a no-win contest in the first place.

  But worst of all had been basketball. He had caught the attention of the UCSD coach, who had talked him into joining the team, and trained him intensively for two years in hopes of making him their center. But it hadn’t worked. Everything about it had been against the grain, and although eventually X mastered some aspects of the game, he never could make the ball go through the hoop, despite hours of training by a coach who in every game chewed a white towel to ribbons. All that frustrated effort culminated somehow in a crucial grudge match against their archrivals the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs, a nightmarish affair in which everything X tried went wrong and everything the Banana Slug center tried went perfectly, until there came a moment when X was fed
a pass in the key and all his baffled frustration with sports surged into a single moment of rage, and he whirled around and leaped by his opponent intending to slam dunk the ball right through the floorboards, but missed by a fraction and hammered the ball onto the back rim so that it shot up into the rafters of the building, lost to sight for seconds, and X’s wrist hit the front rim wrong, and he came down on his ankle wrong, and in the agony of a double sprain he twisted and fell, not quickly but like some immense tree cut at ground level, turning and crashing to the floor with his whole body at once, a perfect faceplant, afterward watching stunned as his teammates and opponents gazelled over him in pursuit of the ball on its return from orbit. The college paper’s sportswriter had called it the greatest missed shot in the history of basketball. And an existential moment for X, a bifurcation point in his life; for after that he had given up sports for good.

  And Val had laughed at that story too. And instead of trying to take him up Mount Cook, or anything like it, she had driven him into the Southern Alps on the road from Christchurch over Arthur’s Pass, and just short of Arthur’s Pass she had parked the car at a Bealey Hotel, overlooking a wide gray gravel riverbed seamed by the many intertwining braids of a silvery river; and she had led him on a hike up the Bealey Spur, a green ridge rising over the braided riverbed, giving them a more and more spectacular view of it, and of the snow-capped mountains standing in all directions around them. A glorious walk it had been, with the whole world seemingly to themselves, no one else in it at all.

  And then after lunch, on a kind of rock battlement near the high point of the spur, Val had leaned over and started unlacing a boot. And when X had understood why she was doing that, his heart had leaped in his chest. And though their lovemaking out in the sun on the mountaintop was wonderful, and though it was wonderful again to lie on yellow tufts of grass and watch Val walking around naked on the rock outcropping—just an animal checking things out, big and graceful, like an ibex become a woman in order to ravish him with her mountain glory—still, that moment when he saw her untying her boot, and understood why—that was the moment which later made his hands shake, which made him moan in his bed at the magnitude of his loss. Because after their vacation was done she had gone back to the States to take care of some business concerning her grandmother’s empty place, and X had traveled some more, and visited home himself, and not seen her for the three months of the Antarctic off-season; and when they had both gotten back to Mac Town the following Winfly, she had dumped him. And without ever saying why. She had arrived two days before him and started up something immediately with one of the other mountaineers, he heard later; but obviously that wasn’t the whole story. No—she hadn’t had the same kind of time in New Zealand that he had had, that was clear, or else she wouldn’t have done it. He had racked his brains trying to remember anything he might have done wrong, in the wan hope of somehow making up for it.