by Jean McNeil
He had gone to school in a place called Zug. He spoke of white forests, ice on the lake. His school was so far up a mountain he had to take a tram, a kind of ski lift, to get there. “I think it might be the most high-altitude school in Europe, possibly in the world,” he said, with his detached, clinical air. There, he and his fellow students took school trips to ski, to see the Hellenic ruins of Crete, to kitesurf on the Kenyan coast. I envisaged Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a sanatorium turned into a school for the fabulously privileged, their watercolour easels staking out glacial lakes.
“Who were your friends, there?” I asked.
“Russians, mostly.”
“Why Russians?”
“They have a rawness that I liked. Plus they were always flying home on the weekends. They weren’t around enough to get tired of them.”
“It sounds international, your school.”
“Oh yes. People are from everywhere — London, Malaysia, Peru, Corsica, you name it.”
“Corsica?”
He shrugged. “Like I said, from everywhere. We had three daughters of African heads of state. They came to school with bodyguards. Man, those guys were bored. They were always on the phone to their three wives in the Congo. The heavies were all for show anyway. I guess no one told them they were living in Switzerland.”
Max did not leave conversations conventionally. He always leapt up, as if something had just occurred to him, and departed without a backward glance. Perhaps it was an adaptation for survival among the children of oligarchs.
I embarked on my own night missions. I sat in my cabin at one or two in the morning, watching the silver-tipped waves. How strange to feel alive again, and so suddenly, revived by hardship into a world of convergences, invisible boundaries where one world is left behind and another, unknown version embraced. At the same time I felt bested by something, or someone, outstripped already by a growing and familiar duet of uncertainty and fear. But fear of what? The ship was robust. It would not let us down.
I was used to spending long periods on my own, thinking and writing. I had perhaps lost the knack for relating easily to people — if I’d ever had it — or at least for talking in a random and objectiveless manner, instead of the competitive conversations of intellectuals.
Those sabre-sun days in the Falklands, then setting sail, learning to put out fires and how not to die of immersion shock, the novelty of constant company — all this stimulus had tilted me away from my normally ruminative self. But once accustomed to this vital new world my usual doubt had returned, like a hunched cloud on the horizon.
The ship’s motion had an effect on all our emotional states, too, with its rhythmic chaw through the sea, so much to me like the rhythm of thought. The sea fog came accompanied by a familiar voice. It was my internal chaperone, the keeper of shames. It spoke to me in the second person, the you, with its admonitory glint: How are you going to write a novel set in a place with no human history? How are you going to write something truly original, when better writers have failed? Why are you alone, at your age? What are you doing here?
December 8th
Four days out at sea. Stuart the deck engineer takes us on a tour of the ship. We encounter his fellow engineers in the duty mess in their grease-stained white overalls, a filthy gang of droogs making amiable cups of tea.
We move on to the labs. Here, giant tubs hold specimens dredged from the deep ocean — fish, octopus, squid, salps — a type of plankton which, Stuart tells us, is the rocket of the ocean, jet-propelling itself through the water. Clocks show GMT and local time. Urgent green signs lead us to our muster points.
Stuart is boyish; he might be forty, but his face is unlined, his eyes wide with marvel.
“You love it here, don’t you?” I say.
“You know, it’s strange. I’ve done seventeen seasons south, but each time I get excited. Each time it’s like I’ve never seen it before.”
Stuart and I are on the bridge, flanked by two able seamen with binoculars soldered to their eyes. Icebergs have begun to appear, even though we are still north of the Antarctic convergence. Those in advanced states of melt take on the pyramidal appearance of a sailboat with its spinnaker up.
Stuart and I squint into the horizon. Inside the grey light, a blue throbbing appears. We lean forward into its radiance. Is it sun filtered through clouds? It looks like sunlight reflected on pewter. The Antarctic is ripe with strange visual effects. Whatever it is, it shines with the panicked diligence of a substance about to be consumed by a vortex.
We were still seven days away from the continent, thanks to our stop-start oceanography studies. Yet we could feel its fortitude, even at that distance, its rebellion and its bulk. It makes sense that cartographers and navigators intuited its presence thousands of years before humans ever set eyes on it.
From the beginning, the polar regions have been central to the concept of climate. The word climate itself and the conception of changing zones of prevailing natural patterns comes from the Greeks. The word klima was first recorded by Parmenides, a disciple of Pythagoras. In the sixth century B.C. he posited that the earth had five zones. Even though it was not then known that the earth was a sphere, he assigned these zones to latitudes, dependent on the angle of the sun’s rays on the planetary surface. Parmenides thought that the klima to the north was cold, and to the south it was hot — hotter than the eastern Mediterranean. The notion of climate zones dependent on latitude is too rigid to reflect the actual reality; we now know climate reflects more than just temperature, and that patterns and tendencies of atmospheric conditions, topography, and weather work together to create climate.
Around 330 B.C. Aristotle speculated in Meteorology that the earth was a sphere, divided into northern and southern zones, each identical, but opposite. There, he suggested, a land of cold might lurk in the furthest reaches of the oikoumene, the known world, which at the time extended no further than the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
Something had to be there, the cartographers believed; it did not seem possible that the world could be ballasted by empty ocean. But how many of these cartographers would have believed that what was actually in residence at the bottom of the planet was a continent-sized sarcophagus of ice, impervious to almost all life forms and hostile to habitation? On Hellenic maps it was drawn in, sometimes with painstakingly rendered coastlines dating back as far as Ptolemy, whose “terra australis incognita” appeared on world maps for the next 1,700 years, before being replaced by the land first sighted by James Cook and others in the nineteenth century.
The Greeks had achieved a remarkable feat of topographical observation and imagination. That the fiery realms at the equator were countermanded by frigid realms at the axles of the spinning globe was more or less correct. Until the nineteenth century, the polar regions remained frozen possible apocalypses, unmapped and feared.
The word apocalypse comes from the Greek apokalupsis, a derivative of the verb to uncover, to reveal. The apocalypse is not only God’s judgment, the sudden annihilation of everything, but also a revelation. In Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the Antarctic destroys his maps, his instruments — the ways of understanding and moving through space and time — but it also unmasks the true spiritual nature of life.
As in Coleridge’s seminal poem, terra australis incognita was a blank page which excited the imagination, but was also the perfect surface on which to project humanity’s phobias and terrors. The Hereford Map, drawn by Richard of Haldingham and Lafford in the 1280s and which still hangs in Hereford Cathedral, shows eleven types of Antarctic monsters lurking at the southern tip of the world. Among these are a one-legged species which hold their feet above their heads, like an umbrella; men with the heads of dogs; and a species that has such a small mouth it must suck food through a reed. Finally, there are the Philli, who tested the chastity of their wives by exposing babies to snakes. The Philli
thought this an accurate DNA test, believing that the legitimate offspring would remain unbitten while the bastards died from snakebite.
The Antarctic was a lair of monsters, but also of magic. I noticed how many words in the ship’s officers’ and able seamen’s vocabulary point to a place where reality and unreality intertwine, where weather and terrain might be indistinguishable: ice blink, the reflection of distant pack ice on the sky; sun dogs, or parhelia, multiple suns, radiating around the one true sun, refracted by ice crystals. I could see for myself out of the JCR’s windows how we were entering a land of mirages and refractions, of whiteouts and vanishing horizons.
Vision is confounded by the Antarctic landmass and its seas, and this is one of the many reasons why the continent is so dangerous for humans. Our vision anchors us in reality; our eyes seek lines, definitions, perimeters, contrast, separations, in order to judge whether a surface will permit us to engage with it. When these are absent we are so disoriented we begin to hallucinate them. On a visual level we imagine into being what we need to see in order to orient ourselves in the world, just as our consciousnesses rely on a similar wishful manufacture to guide us through the unruly reality of our lives.
What to make of our destination, this void masquerading as a continent, a place endowed with such powerful energy that it was able to map the idea of itself onto the greatest cartographers and thinkers of our civilization before it was discovered? It is still less a destination than an idea. We will dock at no town or city; there will be no shops, cafés, offices, comfortable dwellings. Standing on the bridge with Stuart, I can already feel how helpless we will be in that nullius, that place where absence and emptiness rule. It is a zone of poetic force, a seemingly colourless place, yet home to the most alluring chromatic phenomena on the planet. The only place in the world that is nobody’s country. A utopia, an apocryphal vision, a conundrum. A hoax.
My shifts at Shades of Light begin just after school lets out at three thirty and end at seven, when the store shuts.
Before Elin bought the house and turned it into a store, it was someone’s home. Long windows leer onto a purple-lit garden. Every inch of what would have been the living room is covered in objects for sale: rows of soapstone seals from Labrador, homemade tapers joined by a single wick which must be severed, rotating carousels festooned with earrings and necklaces and greeting cards. In the window stained-glass ornaments and crystals broadcast prisms. I have bought a few of these for myself; they now dangle in front of my bedroom window.
“Don’t spend all your pay on these objects,” my mother has warned me. “Or there’ll be nothing left for school.” She uses the word school but in fact it is university I will be paying for in the fall, thousands of dollars. The prospect of the money I have saved from three jobs leaving my bank account makes my head swim. I have a year’s money saved, but it is a four-year-long degree.
My high school exams are just over a month away, and then, if I do well, I will be free. I feel the weight of it pressing down upon me, my future. I have been waiting for five years to be free of this place, since I came to live with my mother and her husband. No five years in my life will ever feel longer.
My mother and her husband have two babies, both boys. I try to close the screen door to my mother’s house quietly, so as not to wake the children. Its squeak gives me away.
“Where have you been?”
“At work.”
The house my mother and her husband, Mark, have bought is typical of this town, a wide-girthed clapboard house with a bay window and green shutters. It has an actual white picket fence. There is something vaguely shaming about these houses, with their stern windows and wooden eyebrows — those shutters again — their backyards waiting to be pummelled by children, their clotheslines and garages. Family houses, they have no other function. Unstocked by children they become mausoleums in the long blue hours of summer, the permafrost of winter.
“Come up here,” my mother commands. “I have something to tell you.”
I fight my way upstairs through unstable piles of baby detritus on the steps.
“Why do I have to come upstairs?”
“I don’t want to be overheard.”
I reach the threshold of the bedroom my mother shares with her husband. She speaks hastily, an unfamiliar sheen to her words.
“Your father — he’s here.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Your father. Are you dense?”
I do not say, as some seventeen-year-old girls might, My real father? My voice high and airy with fascination. Instead my voice sounds rusted, old. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because he might want to see you.”
“Why would he want to see me?”
“Because he’s your father.” My mother says faaather, with the elongated “a” so characteristic of our native island and which makes our speech sound Irish. We have both changed our accents to better fit in, but it emerges in certain words, when we are angry or under stress.
“I’ve got exams in a month.”
“I know. I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want to interrupt your concentration.”
I wonder if this can be true. My mother never asks about school. She does not help me write a personal statement for university applications, as my friends’ mothers do. She does not sign me up for correspondence exam cram courses. I could be planning to work in a bank, for all she knows. My mother doesn’t know I have applied to the top three universities in the country.
“I’ve told him he can’t come to the house. It’s not easy for me either, you know. I told Mark he was dead.”
“You what?”
“As God is my witness. I lied.” My mother thumps her breast. She is given to these gestures. She has learned them in her church group; they do a lot of thumping of the head and heart there.
My mother thrusts a piece of paper in her hand. “Call him, would you? Otherwise he might show up here and create a mess.”
“A mess for you, you mean.”
“Just do it. He’s your father, after all.”
I already have a father. Perhaps my mother doesn’t see it this way. But her parents brought me up — in a way her father is my father, too. I have grown up, like my mother before me, ten hours away by road in the adjacent province, on an island within an island.
But at twelve I had to leave my grandparents and come to live with my mother, whom I met when I was ten years old, and who remains a stranger to me. She and her husband live in this prosperous, sinister town next to a swollen river which floods each year, submerging the riverside dowager mansions.
These days I don’t see my real father, my grandfather, much. He went off the radar for a couple of years, and has only recently sidled back into my vision. Even so, he is a diminishing blip, fading further and further out of view.
5.
THE NINTH WAVE
breccia
Ice of different stages of development frozen together.
December 9th
Time closes like a vault behind us. The time before I boarded the JCR has been erased. I already can’t remember who I was, what I wanted, then.
The motion of the ship is a pleasant, grinding procession. We are doing eleven knots. If she pulls out all the stops, Captain David tells me, the JCR can do sixteen knots — roughly the speed a moderate cyclist manages, or a cart and horse. We are bicycling to the Antarctic.
Suddenly there is a new sting in the air. We are passing over, or through, the Antarctic Convergence, a ribbon of cold water that encircles the entire continent. The water temperature readout on the bridge shows a five-degree drop over ten minutes.
I seek out Nils to explain the Convergence to me. I find him in the lab with his feet up in front of a computer, drinking a cup of tea.
“The computer is doing
the hard work,” he says, pointing to his screen. There I see a graph of the water we are passing through, although the only indication of its substance is the helpful tub-shaped perimeter of the image. Otherwise a cascade of coloured numbers pours down the screen — turquoise for cold, amethyst for warm. Nils points to a sequence of purple digits, “That’s a spike in thermohaline temperature. They happen when there’s a freshwater current. We’re seeing a lot more of these now.”
I don’t know if he means now as in an age of global warming, or now that we are passing over the Convergence. Freshwater currents in these latitudes means melting icebergs.
I look at the torrent of numbers. “I wish I knew how to read these.”
Nils shrugs. “It’s easy.”
“For you, maybe. You’ve got a degree in physics.”
Nils gives me a puzzled look. I don’t think he’s been in the company of non-scientists often. He finds my ineptitude perplexing. I am not in my sphere of power here, I have to keep reminding myself — if such a place exists.
The Antarctic Convergence is the real border to the Antarctic. Formed as the warmer water of the temperate zones collides with a cold Antarctic current, the cold water triumphs, placing a cordon around the continent. Convergence water is five degrees colder than sub-Antarctic water; it is the gatekeeper to another threshold — the realm of icebergs. Full-blown bergs are less commonly seen beyond the Convergence’s perimeter; the water is too warm, although remnants of bergs have been known to venture as far north as the Falklands.
Later, Max appeared in my door. Just as he left abruptly, he never seemed to arrive; rather he materialized, like a spaceship. A dark spiral turned at the heart of his every manoeuvre. It was unusual, I thought, for someone so light and blond to have this saturnine quality.
Max, Nils, and Emilia were so much younger than me, but it didn’t seem to matter on the ship, in this new Antarctic world. My relative ignorance of the details of the science they were involved in had brought us to a level playing field, perhaps. More than the others, Max embodied the benefits of youth — optimism, curiosity, energy, confidence. I want to start again. The thought arrived like Max, unannounced. I batted it away; I wasn’t quite old enough to fall prey to mid-life crises.