Finally all that is left is to crack the last of the snow from the cowlings and wait, fearfully, while the engines warm under their hoods. They want nothing more than to sleep, but there is no reason another blizzard shouldn’t come in and undo all their work.
The propellers spin feebly, stop. Marian tinkers with the booster. The fuel lines cough; the engines growl to life; the props spin, keep spinning. When the time comes, she has to throttle up hard to break the skis free of the ice, her weary arm aching just at that. The snow passes faster and faster out the cockpit windows. They bounce and jostle, and she prays not to hit any big sastrugi or a crevasse. They hover; they’re ascending. The patch of ice that had held them and the hidden crevasse under it vanish immediately, indistinguishable from the rest of the white.
Eddie takes a sight, shows her on the chart where they had been. A blank spot, like all the others. Her adrenaline sputters as the flying lulls her. Sleep presses on her. Her head drops, snaps up.
The Transantarctic Mountains burst through the continent’s white hide: pyramidal peaks and black serrated ridges and blue fields of shattered ice. Marian flies at thirteen thousand feet, steering among the passes. She tries to use oxygen, thinking it might wake her up, but a valve is frozen shut. Charles Lindbergh was awake for more than fifty hours when he flew across the Atlantic, she reminds herself. But, a self-pitying part of her counters, he hadn’t had to dig a plane out of the snow.
The fuel is dropping too quickly. She peers around, spots an opalescent spray fanning out behind the wing. In her drowsiness, she had not noticed when it started, but now there is nothing to be done except hope the leak doesn’t get worse. Settling down to fix it is out of the question. Maybe some line had been wrenched loose in their hard landing or some seal had cracked in the cold.
They come to the Axel Heiberg glacier. Beyond, below, a layer of cloud extends to the horizon. Alarm revives her. Eddie passes her a course adjustment, and they exchange solemn glances. What can be said? Under the cloud, the glacier descends more than nine thousand feet from the mountains to the Ross Ice Shelf, a floating sheet of ice bigger than Spain. They see only a low blanket of gray.
To overshoot the ice edge is their best chance. They fly on and on, fuel draining down to nothing, until they must be over open water. At Eddie’s signal, she drops into the cloud. Lower and lower through the blind white. Then, finally, a rapid darkening rising up from underneath, and they are in clear air, low over black water hazed with sea smoke. Not far away, a massive tabular iceberg reaches nearly to the bottom of the cloud. She turns the airplane, and there is the edge of the ice shelf, the barrier, a sheer blue wall emerging from the sea. Eddie has put them precisely on their target.
Here is where Roald Amundsen built his base Framheim before striking out on skis for the South Pole. Here is where Richard E. Byrd’s camps, Little Americas I through IV, are sunken in the snow, subterranean mazes of living spaces and laboratories and workshops with caches of fuel and supplies. Marian had written to men who’d been on the expeditions; Eddie had made a map of the bases’ relative locations. They’d formed guesses on what might still be protruding from the snow, what they should look for.
But the ice is always moving, pushed outward by the heaped-up mass of itself in the continent’s interior, always sliding down to the sea, breaking off, floating away. She sees the remnants of Little America IV near the ice edge, closer than she expected, precipitously close, the tops of Quonset huts erected in 1947 for a navy operation of forty-seven hundred men, thirteen ships, seventeen airplanes. She aims instead for a cluster of ventilators and masts a few miles to the northeast: Little America III.
* * *
—
Strange to be warm. They had been so surprised when the generator came alive they had sprung back in terror and then laughed, teary and exhausted, collapsed on the floor of an ice tunnel. Eddie had cranked it as an experiment, almost a joke, but Admiral Byrd’s men must have left kerosene in the hardy machine because it rattled and roared and set grumblingly to work. The main structure is designed so the generator blows warm air between two layers of a double floor, and quickly the chill had lost its harshness. Camped on the plateau, Marian had begun to regard even the slightest lessening of cold as warmth, but this, as she lies in a bunk after interminable sleep, is the real thing. There is no sense of struggle.
She had felt as vaporous as sea smoke while they anchored the plane and covered the engines, made their best guess at where to dig. She hopes never to dig snow again. Her hands resemble bloody beef, frozen then thawed. One veteran of the Byrd expeditions had sent her a sketched diagram of the base, and using that, they had dug and chiseled down into the subterranean lair of huts and ice tunnels, found the generator, melted snow for water, found bunks, collapsed in their sleeping bags.
She wakes in total darkness. Slowly, deprived of all other senses, she becomes aware first of the intense soreness in her arms and back and the stinging of her hands, then of her thirst and the fullness of her bladder, and then of a faint, nearly imperceptible rocking: the ice shelf flexing, floating on the swell. She lights a kerosene lantern. Her wristwatch reads four o’clock, but she doesn’t know if it is night or day. “Good afternoon,” Eddie says from somewhere nearby.
“Is it afternoon? What was it when we went to sleep?”
“I think it was yesterday evening,” he says.
They are in a room tightly packed with bunks and jumbled supplies and gear, middens of discarded woolens and worn-out boots, the leavings of thirty-three men. Books lie open where they were left ten years ago. The walls and beams are carved with names and cryptic messages. Pinup girls laugh and point their toes. No catastrophe happened here, but there’s a haunted feeling. It’s the cold that does it, holds everything suspended, staves off decay. There’s no water to corrode anything, no pests to nibble and gnaw, no rot, nothing to mark the passage of time. One of the ice tunnels has caved in, and the roof sags some, but otherwise the place might have been abandoned yesterday.
She goes up to the surface and for once is pleased to see low cloud. They are still so desperately tired she doubts they could endure the task of getting ready to leave.
Underground, ice tunnels lead to outlying huts and igloos. They find the machine shop, the ski room, the radio shack. In the blubber room, a pile of eviscerated seal carcasses await chopping up. Crates of food and cans of kerosene line the tunnels. In the dog tunnel, when her lantern first passes over them, Marian takes the frozen turds for enormous, glossy brown toads.
From an abundance of perfectly preserved, deep-frozen ingredients they cook a meal of ham and corn on the cob (grown in 1938, the package says). Eddie keeps venturing off down the tunnels, returning with unexpected treasures. He finds a cigar, then a Victrola, plays Benny Goodman and Bing Crosby. The music echoes off the beams, the bare walls, reverberates out into the ice, is heard by seals swimming underneath.
* * *
—
The sky stays shut. Whenever she climbs up to check the weather, there is always cloud, sometimes blowing snow. It would be a lie to say she feels only disappointment. It is easy to forget, below, that this can’t last, that they must leap again. The ice creaks to remind her.
They have found gasoline barrels and fueled the plane. Every day they dig away whatever snow has drifted against it. They have checked every hose and valve and gasket, should have eliminated any possible leaks, but doubt nags at Marian. And Eddie is behaving oddly again. He spends more time above than she does, wandering in contemplation, but when he comes below, he bustles with great purpose, tidying the huts and checking the supplies.
Antarctica has a trickster’s spirit. In certain lights, a mountain a mile distant turns out to be a shoulder-high heap of snow fifty feet away. Dozens of tall, black figures marching toward them out of the fog turn out to be only five knee-high Adélie penguins, magnified and multiplied by some atmospheric i
llusion, stretched along an invisible horizon like an army.
* * *
—
They are inside the Peregrine when Eddie tells her he will not go with her. The weather has cleared, and they have just finished, again, shoveling out the snow that has blown in through the cracks. She isn’t really listening, is thinking through everything that must be done, must be checked.
“The thing is,” he says almost casually, “even if I did go, I don’t think we’d make it, and I don’t want to drown. The only thing I’ve ever been grateful for in the war was that I didn’t drown.”
Distracted, she thinks he is making a strange joke. “What?”
“I’m staying here,” he says again.
Disbelieving, puzzled, she tells him, no, of course he isn’t. She needs him. They will make it. There is no reason for them not to. They’ve patched the leak. They’ve come so far.
“No,” he says, calmly, “I don’t think we will. For me, it’s not worth the risk.”
“Are you talking about a premonition?”
“You could call it that.”
Still looking for the prank, the joke, she asks him why he’d bothered shoveling out the plane if he wasn’t going, and he says, still serene, that he thought she would still want to try, alone.
“But you don’t think I’ll make it. You think I’ll drown.”
“You could stay here.”
“I can’t. What are you talking about? Do you mean stay here and try to get a ship to rescue us? It’s too late in the season. We’d have to wait a year, and there’s no reason anyway.”
“No, I don’t mean that. I know you’ll go. But I don’t want to. If I stay here, I know what will happen to me.”
She is stunned, outraged, panicked. “You’ll freeze or starve, or you’ll fall in a crevasse and then freeze or starve.”
“Maybe,” he says. “Or I’ll wait until winter and then go out in the night, on a clear night, and lie down under the aurora.”
She shouts at him that he’s being irrational, crazy, that he’s breaking a promise, condemning her to death, and he lets her finish before he explains he doesn’t like the mess of the rest of the world, wants no part of it anymore.
“Is this revenge?” she says. “For what happened to Ruth?”
“Please don’t insult me,” he says quietly.
She calms herself, speaks carefully. “There’s a life for you after we finish,” she tells him. “You’ll find it. Antarctica isn’t going to make you less lonely.”
“But I’m not lonely here. That’s the whole point. And there’s not a life for me back there.” He gestures at the water, the northern bulk of the planet. “Not one I want. I’ve tried. Really, I have. I can’t find my way anymore.”
“You can. You’re a navigator.”
“That’s just a job,” he says. “A task.”
She tells him she can’t fly and navigate at the same time. Not on a flight like this. She won’t make it without him. “Is that what you want?” she asks.
“It doesn’t make any difference what I want.”
“What kind of thing is that to say?”
“We won’t make it. The end is the same, but I don’t want to be in the water.”
“We will make it. We have to try. Why can’t you finish this, think things over after? You could find a piece of land somewhere and live quietly, if it’s isolation you want.”
He looks at her with sympathy. “There won’t be an after. I’m sorry, Marian, I know this is hard on you, but I’m choosing the way I go. You can choose, too. And I want to know what it’s like, being here alone. I have a yearning for it.”
This she understands—in fact, he is giving her what she thought she wanted, to fly alone—but she says, “That’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard.”
Maybe, he says. But in Antarctica he feels in possession of himself because there’s nothing else. Or won’t be, once Marian is gone. He’s charted the route for her; she might be able to follow it alone. But, like he’s said, he believes they are at the end of the road. She can die either in Antarctica or in the Southern Ocean. “What you do is your choice,” he says, “but I’ve made up my mind.”
She demands to know why he’d agreed to come on this trip if he was only going to abandon her, sabotage her.
Because until now, he says, he’d believed they would make it, but he’d been afraid. Now he knows they won’t, and his fears are gone. Everything has been leading up to this. He’d had to be afraid so he would notice when he wasn’t anymore.
She tells him he will get her killed with his superstitious obstinacy, that it’s fine for him to have a death wish but she wants nothing to do with it. Ruth wouldn’t want him to do this, she says. She says, her voice cracking, that he can’t just abandon her.
“No,” he says. “You’re the one who’s going to abandon me.”
* * *
—
She writes one last entry in her logbook, breathless, scrawling. I have made a promise to myself: My last descent won’t be the tumbling helpless kind but a sharp gannet plunge. If she makes it to New Zealand, having left Eddie on the ice, she will have nothing to say about the flight, the finished circle, will not be able to bear anyone reading the words of a person who would do something so shameful.
She tells herself he is leaving her no choice, but she wonders if she is simply not good enough with people to figure out how to persuade him. I don’t regret anything, she writes, but I will if I let myself. I can think only about the plane, the wind, and the shore, so far away, where land begins again.
If she dies, though, she wants some version of the story to persist, fragmented and incomplete as it may be, even if the chances of anyone ever finding it are vanishingly small. We’ve fixed the leak as best we can. She hesitates, then finally writes an I, not a we. I will go soon.
Probably the ice will calve and carry Little America out to sea and her logbook with it.
What I have done is foolish; I had no choice but to do it.
Probably the snow will bury it too deeply to ever be found.
No one should ever read this. My life is my one possession.
Probably.
And yet, and yet, and yet.
She closes the book, wraps it in Eddie’s life preserver, leaves it in the bunk room of Little America III.
Until she dies, she will wonder if she could have persuaded him to come with her. Until she dies, she will remember Eddie’s small, dark figure on the ice, waving to her with both arms as she circles up. She will always be afraid that his valedictory gesture might have changed, at some moment when she was too far away to notice, into a plea for her to return.
Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly
Twenty
I knocked on the door of the blue house. Joey Kamaka opened it and burst out laughing. He laughed so hard he bent over with his hands on his thighs. “It’s really you,” he said when he’d recovered. “I thought for sure someone was messing with me.”
He was wiry and barefoot, around sixty, in board shorts and a T-shirt, with a short gray ponytail. A small girl, maybe eight, also ponytailed, had her arms locked around his waist from behind and was peeping at me with giant cartoon bunny-rabbit eyes.
“This is my granddaughter Kalani,” he said. “She’s only seen the first Archangel movie because the others got too scary, but she has all the Katie McGee DVDs. She loves Katie McGee.”
He waved me inside, and I stepped out of my flip-flops, added them to a pile by the door. The house was small but bright, with walls and ceilings of white-painted planks and beat-up dark ones for the floor. It was the first time I’d been in a room I knew Marian Graves had been in, too. Everywhere else had been sets and stand-ins. There was a toy-strewn living room with a braided rug and a sagging couch facing a big flat-screen TV, and through one door I gl
impsed a bathroom and through another a chaotic den of pink and purple, presumably Kalani’s room. Stairs led up through an open hatch, and a landscape painting hung slightly crooked on the wall: sharply angled mountains dense with trees and shadows. I moved to get a closer look.
“Is this…?” I asked.
“It’s by Jamie Graves,” Joey said. “Caleb brought it with him from the mainland. I know it’s worth a lot, and I should sell it or at least get a security system or something, but it’s just kind of always been there. I still feel like it’s Caleb’s and not mine.”
The night before, in a bigger, nicer version of this house some location scout had found, I’d filmed a scene where Marian and Eddie were staying with Caleb and there’s a storm in the night, and Marian betrays Eddie by going to Caleb, and they fuck while Eddie’s pretending to be asleep in the room below. So Actor Caleb and I, wearing little flesh-colored patches on our crotches, had feigned hot, hot passion while a bunch of people stood around holding booms and reflectors and the intimacy coordinator said things like Hadley, would you be comfortable if he had his hands on your waist instead of your hips? Bart had started to make noises about maybe the scene would be better, more authentic, if it showed my breasts, and I’d expected myself to say yes because that’s what I’ve always done, but instead I said, “No one needs to see Marian’s tits, Bart.” And that was the end of it.
Thank god I hadn’t read Adelaide Scott’s box of letters until we were almost done shooting, because now I had to act on two levels: (1) like Marian, in a way that was consistent with everything else we’d shot, and (2) like I didn’t know what I now knew, which was that Eddie had been gay and Marian had been in love with his wife.
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