“How about when you got older? Bigger? Seven years isn’t much of a physical difference when you’re sixteen or seventeen.”
He shrugged. “I guess. Yeah.”
“Did you hit her when she wasn’t expecting it? The way she hit you?”
“Once or twice.”
“When you were bigger and started to hit back, did you hurt her when you hit her?”
“No.”
The man said nothing.
“I told you, I didn’t.”
“A lot of people would want to get back at someone who had punished them so much. Are you saying you never felt the urge to dish out some retribution?”
He gave another shrug, provided from an endless supply. “I made myself head out to the fields when I felt that come on real strong. When it got to be too much. When I got the jumps.”
“And you listened to the wind?”
“Sure, if it was blowing.”
“Do you still feel them?”
“Feel what?”
“The jumps.”
“Sometimes.”
“What do you do when you feel them?”
“I take a walk outside.”
“Does the wind sound different here?”
“Yes.”
“How is it different?”
He grinned. “Hell of a lot colder’s all I know.”
The man smiled back at him. “Winter is coming and it’ll be dark all day, every day. That makes taking a stroll pretty hard. What are you going to do then?”
“I guess I’ll have to walk it off in the halls. Work out in the gym, maybe.”
Another nod. The man reached a long arm back to his desk and flipped through a stack of papers at the edge of his reach. He found what he was looking for, then studied the paper for a few moments, flipping it back and forth to check something. “Are you on any medications?”
“A few.”
“And you brought those with you? Enough for nine months?”
“Sure. I don’t need them all the time.”
The man nodded, thoughtful, then smiled again and stood. “I think that’s all I need for now. But I’d like to talk to you next week, if you don’t mind.”
“Why? Do you think I’m crazy, Doc?”
“Of course not. No more than any of us. But I get the jumps myself, sometimes. I find it helps to talk things out. What do you say?”
He thought about it. “Sure. But I can handle it. I’ll be fine.”
The other man smiled like his teeth had been painted onto his face. “I’m sure you will, Leroy.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cass sat backwards in a plastic chair, resting her chin on her forearms, savoring the peaceful moment now that she’d put the tour with Sikes and his crew behind her. She squinted into the morning sun, her face almost pressed against the glass of the library window like a three-year-old ogling a fish tank. The view swallowed her entire field of vision. For a thousand miles in that direction, there was not a single human habitation.
She felt a rush of gratitude for the architect or site planner who had decided that the east-facing view from Shackleton would be of a vast, pristine expanse of ice. The western and southern sides—marred by outbuildings, the airstrip, and the deep-ridged tracks of hundreds of industrial vehicles—seemed to her to be the worst kind of accumulation of people and their things. It couldn’t be an accident that there was nothing man-made visible on this side of the station. Someone had planned this view.
Interestingly, while the vista might be unblemished, it wasn’t uninterrupted or uninteresting. The base had been built on a plateau and the escarpment it capped ran for hundreds of meters in a half-moon shape to the right. If she leaned away from the window and used a little imagination, she could curve her arm so that it matched the proportions of the ridge exactly. Angular shadows cast by frozen cliffs broke up the landscape while subtle blue variations in the sastrugi made the whole look more like a choppy sea than an unending field of very solid ice.
In time, probably, the technology would improve and the number of residents at Shackleton would increase until today’s bustling research station would be merely the central building of a larger complex. Traffic and everyday commerce would compromise the land, and it would take a monumental effort to find a place where the past and present hadn’t infiltrated the panorama.
Cass lowered her forehead and rested it on the thin muscle of her forearm, closing her eyes to preserve the searing afterimage. She liked that every detail appeared in perfect, monochromatic detail to her inner eye, fading like an old photo or a memory, so that she had to invent the missing pieces as they disappeared. When nothing of the memory-image remained, she raised her head and opened her eyes.
Without items, things , in it, the scene was empty, devoid of the meaning that objects and people would give it. And while it was comforting to stare into space for a time, to imagine unlimited potential, an empty canvas was a void if nothing was ever painted on it. At some point, potential had to be realized, or you simply ended where you began: a blank, empty, meaningless frame of white, waiting for effort to give it meaning.
She dropped her head to her forearm again. Each time she thought she’d found a place—a job, a relationship, a home—to begin the process of forgiving herself, some part of the memory would catch up with her and shove the past in her face. She’d move on to the next stop in the journey to rebuild herself, pushing out to more dangerous work in more remote locations, only to find her past had closed the gap after a few weeks, a month, a year.
Antarctica was different. She’d felt it the moment she’d touched down on that great snowy expanse. A place with no context, no limits, and with room to grow, to start over. She needed just a little more time. Time and a blank canvas, empty of the past, open to the future. A chance to start over. Again.
Cass savored the feeling a moment longer before quietly packing it away. One thing working at Shackleton was good for was keeping you too busy to make navel-gazing a habit. There was equipment to tend to in the VMF, tests to run, reports to file. She was pushing the chair away from the window when the door opened behind her. She turned to see Deb poking her head in and Cass’s heart sank. Maybe Sikes had been less impressed with his tour than she’d thought.
“Don’t tell me there’s another tour.”
“Not this season,” Deb said as she walked over. “Hanratty wants you to report to Keene’s office.”
Her stomach twisted. “Keene? Why?”
Deb hesitated. “Sorry, Cass. I didn’t ask.”
“Right now?”
“Afraid so. And I wouldn’t keep him waiting. I heard he puts that kind of thing in your profile.” She turned to go, then stopped. “Nice job this morning, by the way. Sikes couldn’t stop talking about you.”
Message delivered, Deb returned to the main hall and disappeared around a corner, off to ruin more of someone else’s day. Cass sat back down and put her forehead against the cool metal of the windowsill, the little bit of inner peace she’d achieved gone.
Cass stopped at the nameplate. GERALD KEENE. Just the name, no title, which was appropriate. Few people at Shackleton really had titles, at least none that could be tacked to a door frame. On the other hand, the station “morale officer” seemed to merit one if any of them did. Had he asked to have it removed, afraid a small thing like a title below his name would cause people to shy away? It wouldn’t have mattered. Everyone on base knew who the resident shrink was.
You’re stalling .
She reached out to open the door when the latch moved under her hand, startling her. Keene stood in the doorway, looking at her impassively.
He was a walking contradiction, she thought, both robust and professorial, like a fourth-generation lumberjack who’d stumbled into higher learning and kept going until he’d crashed through the other side with a PhD. A full, reddish-blond beard, a broad set of shoulders, and a pair of fleshy hands inherited from his grandfather meshed poorly with a wave of academic indiffe
rence.
“Cass? Come in.” Pale gray-green eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses sized her up from knees to chin before he turned back into his office, leaving it to her to catch the closing door and follow.
The room was something of a nonfunctional anomaly at the station. Bookshelves packed with manuals and academic journals lined the room wherever a soothing periwinkle-blue paint job didn’t peek through. Three of the only comfortable chairs on base were grouped in a chummy circle around a coffee table while prints of Antarctica’s landscape—Wilson’s watercolor of Cape Crozier, Hurley’s stark portraits of the Endurance trapped in pack ice—hung from the walls. And somehow, incredibly, Keene had smuggled in a small column aquarium that he’d placed on a narrow étagère. Cass watched as a flame-red Betta swam up and down its tiny cylindrical world.
Keene followed her gaze. “Not a bad metaphor for life here at Shackleton, is it? One-gallon personalities caught in a pint-sized environment.”
She smiled woodenly. Keene waved her to a seat, then rounded his desk to sink into an office chair. It squeaked like an old mattress as he leaned back. “Normally I’d say, I’m sure you’re wondering why I asked you here.”
Cass nodded.
“But I think, under the circumstances, to do so would be insulting to both of us.”
Cass waited, but Keene didn’t say anything. He simply looked at her with an expectant expression.
She ducked her head. “Do you mean what happened to Sheryl?”
“Yes.” Keene nodded in encouragement. “And your role in it.”
“My role?” Cass blinked. “You mean helping Hanratty bring back her . . . body?”
“If that’s what you want to talk about.”
“I didn’t ask to talk,” she said, confused. “You did.”
“Certainly, but I’d think you’d want to talk out the circumstances.”
“I would?”
He shrugged. “It’s not a small thing, a dramatic death at the base, right before a winter-over. Reduced staff, increased tensions. We haven’t even shut the doors, officially, and we’re already off to a rocky start.”
“Rocky?” She stared at him. “Is that what you call Sheryl freezing to death?”
He waved a hand, like he was clearing smoke. “I apologize. A poor choice of words. Her accident has shaken the base to its core, is all I meant. Carrying on as if things were normal has been difficult for some people.”
“I thought Hanratty said it was to be kept under wraps?”
“Cass.” He gave her a look of profound disappointment. “Everyone on base knew about Sheryl before you were done taking your gloves off.”
“Oh.”
“Hanratty knew such a thing would be impossible to contain, so he told you to keep quiet in order to check a box, so to speak. Had he not done so, he could be accused of not maintaining decorum or enforcing protocol. But by making a show of telling you not to talk, he puts the onus on you and whoever knew about Sheryl when she was brought back.”
“I see.”
Keene nodded, apropos of nothing. “So, was it what you were expecting?”
“Was what what I was expecting?”
“How you felt? How the people you’ve spoken to about the accident felt?”
“I didn’t speak to anyone.”
The look of disappointment was back. “It’s statistically and intuitively impossible that you didn’t tell someone about Sheryl’s accident. Biddi, perhaps?”
Cass’s face flushed. She knew from experience that her color was especially noticeable around her hairline. Milk-white skin was nice except when it highlighted the slightest blush. “Well, if statistics say so, I guess I did.”
The wave again. “Ninety-nine out of a hundred people will unburden themselves to a friend or colleague after a traumatic event, especially in a confined stressor environment. It’s normal and, frankly, expected. You’re in the clear.”
Had she been in that much trouble? “Great.”
Keene tipped forward in his chair, putting his elbows on the desk. “Let’s forget that for a moment. Tell me what’s in your head.”
Cass hesitated, confused. “I’m not happy, naturally. Sheryl and I didn’t work together, but I liked her. And you don’t have to like someone to be horrified. To die out on the ice . . . alone, in a storm? It’s terrifying. It’s exactly what everyone fears the most down here.”
“Yes, of course,” Keene said. There was an impatient note in his voice. “But what were you thinking ?”
“I . . .” Cass struggled to understand what he wanted from her. His words technically made sense, but they didn’t fit the conversation. It was as if he were speaking to a third person in the room. “I was thinking how terrible it was to die like that, how much I didn’t want it to be me, how glad I was that it wasn’t me. If someone with her experience could die out there, then I could, too. Then I felt ashamed, I guess, because my second thought was that I wondered if we’d all be sent home even before we started and what a waste that would be . . .”
Cass trailed off. A change had come over Keene’s face as she spoke. It was subtle, a soft unwrinkling around his eyes and relaxation of his mouth. Now that he’d leaned closer, she could see a fine spray of perspiration along his forehead, glistening over his eyebrows. She had the strange sensation that the third person in the room had suddenly disappeared.
Keene cleared his throat, then reached for a stack of folders resting on a corner of his desk. “Of course. Those are all perfectly natural emotional reactions. Anger, fear. Frustration at the waste of life, of time and effort. Yours and everyone else’s. If you haven’t already, you may find yourself blaming her, as well. You’ll wonder why Sheryl wasn’t more careful. What was she doing out there, risking herself and others? And, lastly, there will be some survivor’s guilt, as well. You’ve had some experience with that, I believe?”
There it was, the cannonball to the gut, the simple reminder that nothing would ever be normal for her. Cass fought to keep her voice steady. “Why am I here, Dr. Keene?”
But he’d already opened a manila folder stuffed with printouts and forms. It wasn’t difficult to read JENNINGS, CASSANDRA typed across the tab. Keene leafed through the dossier like a deck of cards. In the hands of the station’s psychologist, she could only assume he was looking at her psych evaluations, all of the comments and judgments and pronouncements that experts had made about her mental state. Maybe even from before she’d submitted her application for Antarctica.
He raised his head and held the folder up, giving her a smile that she supposed was meant to put her at ease. “Strange, isn’t it, seeing your mental and emotional makeup boiled down to a few sheets of paper? I’ve always despised my colleagues’ crude renderings of something so complicated as the human psyche, but what can you do?”
She stared at him.
Unperturbed, he carried on in a light, conversational tone. “Your SOAP scores are remarkable. Not to mention the other battery of tests you took. Your MMPI and 16PF are fine, although I have to admit, those two are of limited use. Would you believe that real estate agents and violent sociopaths score almost identically on the MMPI? Now, the FFI—sorry. I’m using a lot of lingo. The FFI is a personality survey—”
“I know what it is.”
The Five Factor Inventory was the psychologist’s scalpel, the tool with which they flensed a patient’s emotional core. It was the most popular of the tests that revealed where a subject landed in terms of the psychological Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. OCEAN, for those fond of acronyms.
Following the accident, when she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t hold on to a relationship, grew simultaneously bored and frantic at every job, she’d been subjected to a dozen different tests and batteries, many of which TransAnt had repeated. She’d managed to sneak a look at one of the summaries. Even now, she found herself remembering the words from the report. Closed to experience . . . chronically introverted . . . unwilling
to extend herself emotionally or intellectually . . . has turned to intense physical exercise as an emotional crutch . . . a classic neurotic .
She flushed again. Her lips had been moving, mouthing the words of that report, and Keene had been watching her. She needed to pull herself together or he’d stamp “NUTS” on her personnel file and she’d be thrown onto the last plane along with Sikes and his circus.
“I’ve read the literature, Dr. Keene,” she said, trying to reassert some control over the conversation. In her lap and out of Keene’s sight, Cass squeezed her hands together, feeling the fingers bend under the pressure. “The crew of some of the most successful Antarctic missions exhibited exactly my kind of characteristics . . . they often excelled because of traits usually thought of as antisocial, in fact. You can’t boil a person down to a five-point test or know how they’re going to behave under stress from a set of questions.”
“That’s technically correct,” Keene said slowly. “But those batteries are the best tools we have to predict emotional and mental behavior.”
“People find a way to cross hurdles, regardless of their personal handicaps.”
He shook his head. “Each year’s crew faces isolation, confinement, and an extreme physical environment. We’d all like to think that they made it through those nine months of winter regardless of the mental or emotional makeup of their staff, but that is a deeply dangerous presumption. We can’t let familiarity breed contempt. A winter-over at Shackleton is an almost unique human living situation and the margins for error are razor thin. What were manageable events for other crews might become a life-and-death crisis for this year’s staff. If I see behavior or even an attitude that threatens that, it’s my responsibility to call it out.”
“What are you suggesting, Dr. Keene? That I’m too mentally unstable to work on snowmobile engines? That I’m unfit to do my job as a janitor ?”
A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth and she realized she’d been baited. Would that go on her record? Quick to take offense, dissatisfied with her role on base . “Of course not, Cass. Nor do I think that your function as a . . . sanitation engineer should be looked down upon. I know all about the staffers versus the eggheads. If you think about it, I’m a staffer. I might have a PhD, but my work isn’t tied to deep space astrophysics or neutrino analysis. And I’ve got the stigma of being on staff and the base shrink. Nobody wants to sit at my lunch table, I can tell you.”
The Winter Over Page 6