Bishop looked for a moment, and shook his head. “God damn it, Doc,” he said. “You’re really straining my patience. Come on.”
Bishop was about to turn away when Atka’s body jerked once—Garner saw it—and then again, almost imperceptibly. Reaching out, Garner seized Bishop’s sleeve. “What now, for Christ’s—” the other man started to say, his voice harsh with annoyance. Then the body was yanked into the surrounding darkness so quickly it seemed as though it had vanished into thin air. Only its blood, a smeared trail into shadow, testified to its ever having been there at all. That, and the jostled flashlight, which rolled in a lazy half circle, its unobstructed light spearing first into empty darkness and then into smooth cold stone before settling at last on what might have been a carven, clawed foot. The beam flickered and went out.
“What the fuck . . . ,” Bishop said. A scream erupted from the tent behind them. Faber.
Garner broke into a clumsy run, high-stepping through the piled snow. The other men shouted behind him, but their words were lost in the wind and in his own hard breathing. His body was moving according to its training but his mind was pinned like a writhing insect in the hole behind him, in the stark, burning image of what he had just seen. He was transported by fear and adrenaline and by something else, by some other emotion he had not felt in many years or perhaps ever in his life, some heart-filling glorious exaltation that threatened to snuff him out like a dying cinder.
Faber was sitting upright in the tent—it stank of sweat and urine and kerosene, eye-watering and sharp—his thick hair a dark corona around his head, his skin as pale as a cavefish. He was still trying to scream, but his voice had broken, and his utmost effort could now produce only a long, cracked wheeze, which seemed forced through his throat like steel wool. His leg stuck out of the blanket, still grossly swollen.
The warmth from the Nansen cooker was almost oppressive.
Garner dropped to his knees beside him and tried to ease him back down into his sleeping bag, but Faber resisted. He fixed his eyes on Garner, his painful wheeze trailing into silence. Hooking his fingers in Garner’s collar, he pulled him close, so close that Garner could smell the sour taint of his breath.
“Faber, relax, relax!”
“It—” Faber’s voice locked. He swallowed and tried again. “It laid an egg in me.”
Bishop and Connelly crowded through the tent flap, and Garner felt suddenly hemmed in, overwhelmed by the heat and the stink and the steam rising in wisps from their clothes as they pushed closer, staring down at Faber.
“What’s going on?” Bishop asked. “Is he all right?”
Faber eyed them wildly. Ignoring them, Garner placed his hands on Faber’s cheeks and turned his head toward him. “Look at me, Faber. Look at me. What do you mean?”
Faber found a way to smile. “In my dream. It put my head inside its body, and it laid an egg in me.”
Connelly said, “He’s delirious. See what happens when you leave him alone?”
Garner fished an ampule of morphine out of his bag. Faber saw what he was doing, and his body bucked.
“No!” he screamed, summoning his voice again. “No!” His leg thrashed out, knocking over the Nansen cooker. Cursing, Connelly dove at the overturned stove, but it was already too late. Kerosene splashed over the blankets and supplies, engulfing the tent in flames. The men moved in a sudden tangle of panic. Bishop stumbled back out of the tent, and Connelly shoved Garner aside—Garner rolled over on his back and came to rest there—as he lunged for Faber’s legs, dragging him backward. Screaming, Faber clutched at the ground to resist, but Connelly was too strong. A moment later, Faber was gone, dragging a smoldering rucksack with him.
Still inside the tent, Garner lay back, watching as the fire spread hungrily along the roof, dropping tongues of flame onto the ground, onto his own body. Garner closed his eyes as the heat gathered him up like a furnace-hearted lover.
What he felt, though, was not the fire’s heat, but the cool breath of underground earth, the silence of the deep tomb buried beneath the ice shelf. The stairs descended before him, and at the bottom he heard a noise again: A woman’s voice, calling for him. Wondering where he was.
Elizabeth, he called, his voice echoing off the stone. Are you there?
If only he’d gotten to see her, he thought. If only he’d gotten to bury her. To fill those beautiful eyes with dirt. To cover her in darkness.
Elizabeth, can you hear me?
Then Connelly’s big arms enveloped him, and he felt the heat again, searing bands of pain around his legs and chest. It was like being wrapped in a star. “I ought to let you burn, you stupid son of a bitch,” Connelly hissed, but he didn’t. He lugged Garner outside—Garner opened his eyes in time to see the canvas part in front of him, like fiery curtains—and dumped him in the snow instead. The pain went away, briefly, and Garner mourned its passing. He rolled over and lifted his head. Connelly stood over him, his face twisted in disgust. Behind him the tent flickered and burned like a dropped torch.
Faber’s quavering voice hung over it all, rising and falling like the wind.
Connelly tossed an ampule and a syringe onto the ground by Garner. “Faber’s leg’s opened up again,” he said. “Go and do your job.”
Garner climbed slowly to his feet, feeling the skin on his chest and legs tighten. He’d been burned; he’d have to wait until he’d tended to Faber to find out how badly.
“And then help us pack up,” Bishop called as he led the dogs to their harnesses, his voice harsh and strained. “We’re getting the hell out of here.”
By the time they reached the depot, Faber was dead. Connelly spat into the snow and turned away to unhitch the dogs, while Garner and Bishop went inside and started a fire. Bishop started water boiling for coffee. Garner unpacked their bedclothes and dressed the cots, moving gingerly. Once the place was warm enough he undressed and surveyed the burn damage. It would leave scars.
The next morning they wrapped Faber’s body and packed it in an ice locker.
After that they settled in to wait.
The ship would not return for a month yet, and though McReady’s expedition was due back before then, the vagaries of Antarctic experience made that a tenuous proposition at best. In any case, they were stuck with each other for some time yet, and not even the generous stocks of the depot—a relative wealth of food and medical supplies, playing cards and books—could fully distract them from their grievances.
In the days that followed, Connelly managed to bank his anger at Garner, but it would not take much to set it off again; so Garner tried to keep a low profile. As with the trenches in France, corpses were easy to explain in Antarctica.
A couple of weeks into that empty expanse of time, while Connelly dozed on his cot and Bishop read through an old natural history magazine, Garner decided to risk broaching the subject of what had happened in the crevasse.
“You saw it,” he said, quietly, so as not to wake Connelly.
Bishop took a moment to acknowledge that he’d heard him. Finally he tilted the magazine away, and sighed. “Saw what?” he said.
“You know what.”
Bishop shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Something was there.”
Bishop said nothing. He lifted the magazine again, but his eyes were still.
“Something was down there,” Garner said.
“No there wasn’t.”
“It pulled Atka. I know you saw it.”
Bishop refused to look at him. “There’s nothing there,” he said, after a long silence. “Nothing. This is an empty place.” He blinked, and turned a page in the magazine.
Garner leaned back onto his cot, looking at the ceiling. Although the long Antarctic day had not yet finished, it was sh
ading into dusk, the sun hovering over the horizon like a great boiling eye. It cast long shadows, and the lamp Bishop had lit to read by set them dancing. Garner watched them caper across the ceiling. Some time later, Bishop snuffed out the lamp and dragged the curtains over the windows, consigning them all to darkness. With it, Garner felt something like peace stir inside him. He let it move through him in waves, he felt it ebb and flow with each slow pulse of his heart.
A gust of wind scattered fine crystals of snow against the window, and he found himself wondering what the night would be like in this cold country. He imagined the sky dissolving to reveal the hard vault of stars, the galaxy turning above him like a cog in a vast, unknowable engine. And behind it all, the emptiness into which men cast their prayers. It occurred to him that he could leave now, walk out into the long twilight and keep going until the earth opened beneath him and he found himself descending strange stairs, while the world around him broke silently into snow, and into night.
Garner closed his eyes.
The Monsters of Heaven
For a long time, Brian imagined reunions with his son. In the early days, these fantasies were defined by spectacular violence. He would find the man who stole him and open his head with a claw hammer. The more blood he spilled, the further removed he became from his own guilt. The location would often change: a roach-haunted tenement building; an abandoned warehouse along the Tchoupitoulas wharf; a pre-fab bungalow with an American flag out front and a two-door hatchback parked in the driveway.
Sometimes the man lived alone, sometimes he had his own family. On these latter occasions Brian would cast himself as a moral executioner, spraying the walls with the kidnapper’s blood but sparing his wife and child—freeing them, he imagined, from his tyranny. No matter the scenario, Toby was always there, always intact; Brian would feel his face pressed into his shoulders as he carried him away, feel the heat of his tears bleed into his shirt. You’re safe now, he would say. Daddy’s got you. Daddy’s here.
After some months passed, he deferred the heroics to the police. This marked his first concession to reality. He spent his time beached in the living room, drinking more, working less, until the owner of the auto shop told him to take time off, a lot of time off, as much as he needed. Brian barely noticed. He waited for the red and blue disco lights of a police cruiser to illuminate the darkness outside, to give some shape and measure to the night. He waited for the phone to ring with a glad summons to the station. He played out scenarios, tried on different outcomes, guessed at his own reactions. He gained weight and lost time.
Sometimes he would get out of bed in the middle of the night, careful not to wake his wife, and get into the car. He would drive at dangerous speeds through the city, staring into the empty sockets of unlighted windows. He would get out of the car and stand in front of some of these houses, looking and listening for signs. Often, the police were called. When the officers realized who he was, they were usually as courteous as they were adamant. He’d wonder if it had been the kidnapper who called the police. He would imagine returning to those houses with a gun.
This was in the early days of what became known as the Lamentation. At this stage, most people did not know anything unusual was happening. What they heard, if they heard anything, was larded with rumor and embellishment. Fogs of gossip in the barrooms and churches. This was before the bloodshed. Before their pleas to Christ clotted in their throats.
Amy never told Brian that she blamed him. She elected, rather, to avoid the topic of the actual abduction, and any question of her husband’s negligence. Once the police abandoned them as suspects, the matter of their own involvement ceased to be a subject of discussion. Brian was unconsciously grateful, because it allowed him to focus instead on the maintenance of grief. Silence spread between them like a glacier. In a few months, entire days passed with nothing said between them.
It was on such a night that Amy rolled up against him and kissed the back of his neck. It froze Brian, filling him with a blast of terror and bewilderment; he felt the guilt move inside of him, huge but seemingly distant, like a whale passing beneath a boat. Her lips felt hot against his skin, sending warm waves rolling from his neck and shoulders all the way down to his legs, as though she had injected something lovely into him. She grew more ardent, nipping him with her teeth, breaking through his reservations. He turned and kissed her. He experienced a leaping arc of energy, a terrifying, violent impulse; he threw his weight onto her and crushed his mouth into hers, scraping his teeth against hers. But there immediately followed a cascade of unwelcome thought: Toby whimpering somewhere in the dark, waiting for his father to save him; Amy, dressed in her bedclothes in the middle of the day, staring like a corpse into the sunlight coming through the windows; the playground, and the receding line of kindergarteners. When she reached under the sheets she found him limp and unready. He opened his mouth to apologize but she shoved her tongue into it, her hand working at him with a rough urgency, as though more depended on this than he knew. Later he would learn that it did. Her teeth sliced his lip and blood eeled into his mouth. She was pulling at him too hard, and it was starting to hurt. He wrenched himself away.
“Jesus,” he said, wiping his lip. The blood felt like an oil slick in the back of his throat.
She turned her back to him and put her face into the pillow. For a moment he thought she was crying. But only for a moment.
“Honey,” he said. “Hey.” He put his fingers on her shoulder; she rolled it away from him.
“Go to sleep,” she said.
He stared at the landscape of her naked back, pale in the streetlight leaking through the blinds, feeling furious and ruined.
The next morning, when he came into the kitchen, Amy was already up. Coffee was made, filling the room with a fine toasted smell, and she was leaning against the counter with a cup in her hand, wearing her pink terrycloth robe. Her dark hair was still wet from the shower. She smiled and said, “Good morning.”
“Hey,” he said, feeling for a sense of her mood.
Dodger, Toby’s dog, cast him a devastated glance from his customary place beneath the kitchen table. Amy had wanted to get rid of him—she couldn’t bear the sight of him anymore, she’d said—but Brian wouldn’t allow it. When Toby comes back, he reasoned, he’ll wonder why we did it. What awful thing guided us. So Dodger remained, and his slumping, sorrowful presence tore into them both like a hungry animal.
“Hey boy,” Brian said, and rubbed his neck with his toe.
“I’m going out today,” Amy said.
“Okay. Where to?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. The hardware store. Maybe a nursery. I want to find myself a project.”
Brian looked at her. The sunlight made a corona around her body. This new resolve, coupled with her overture of the night before, struck him as a positive sign. “Okay,” he said.
He seated himself at the table. The newspaper had been placed there for him, still bound by a rubberband. He snapped it off and unfurled the front page. Already he felt the gravitational pull of the Jack Daniels in the cabinet, but when Amy leaned over his shoulder and placed a coffee cup in front of him, he managed to resist the whiskey’s call with an ease that surprised and gratified him. He ran his hand up her forearm, pushing back the soft pink sleeve, and he kissed the inside of her wrist. He felt a wild and incomprehensible hope. He breathed in the clean, scented smell of her. She stayed there for a moment, and then gently pulled away.
They remained that way in silence for some time—maybe fifteen minutes or more—until Brian found something in the paper he wanted to share with her. Something being described as “angelic”—“apparently not quite a human man,” as the writer put it—had been found down by the Gulf Coast, in Morgan City; it had been shedding a faint light from under two feet of water; whatever it was had died shortly after being taken into custody, under confu
sing circumstances. He turned in his chair to speak, a word already gathering on his tongue, and he caught her staring at him. She had a cadaverous, empty look, as though she had seen the worst thing in the world and died in the act. It occurred to him that she had been looking at him that way for whole minutes. He turned back to the table, his insides sliding, and stared at the suddenly indecipherable glyphs of the newspaper. After a moment he felt her hand on the back of his neck, rubbing him gently. She left the kitchen without a word.
This is how it happened:
They were taking Dodger for a walk. Toby liked to hold the leash—he was four years old, and gravely occupied with establishing his independence—and more often than not Brian would sort of half-trot behind them, one hand held partially outstretched should Dodger suddenly decide to break into a run, dragging his boy behind him like a string of tin cans. He probably bit off more profanities during those walks than he ever did changing a tire. He carried, as was their custom on Mondays, a blanket and a picnic lunch. He would lie back in the sun while Toby and the dog played, and enjoy not being hunched over an engine block. At some point they would have lunch. Brian believed these afternoons of easy camaraderie would be remembered by them both for years to come. They’d done it a hundred times.
A hundred times.
On that day a kindergarten class arrived shortly after they did. Toby ran up to his father and wrapped his arms around his neck, frightened by the sudden bright surge of humanity; the kids were a loud, brawling tumult, crashing over the swings and monkey bars in a gabbling surf. Brian pried Toby’s arms free and pointed at them.
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