by Jean McNeil
Max’s life, from what I knew of it, was already at its apogee: a parade of skiing holidays, family birthdays, music festivals, and, lately, invitations to give papers at foreign colloquia on climatology. When I was Max’s age, twenty-three, two years after turning my back on my life in Canada, I had lost my parents, a job, and people I loved. I had panic attacks on London buses, forcing me to rush off the bus and sit on benches in unfamiliar neighbourhoods — Cricklewood, Willesden — kilometres short of my destination, breathing hard for hours before consulting my A–Z and taking a bus home. In my spare time, I underwent brain and MRI scans for a mysterious and debilitating illness.
I told him some of my story, in part because he asked with that jackhammer insistency of his: And then? Why did you do that? Who died next? What did you feel? He listened with his head slightly cocked to one side. I could see his intelligence weighing up factors of fate and probability, fractional sufficiency and velocity. He was turning me into an equation: stress + bad luck = moroseness. There was a detachment to his curiosity, but also a democracy. He subjected others, male and female, to the same scrutiny, I’d noticed.
Through the hours of ship-bound longueurs we talked: in the bar, at the breakfast table, out on deck when we both exited the cosseted air of the ship to revive ourselves by being blasted by the minus-five wind chill factor. Max and I discovered we shared a vision — mine imaginary, his actual, courtesy of computer modelling — of a cold, slumbering earth, trapped in a winter that would last ten thousand years.
On the bridge, we stared out into the sea, willing icebergs to appear. We had been on alert all day and now that we had crossed the Convergence the tell-tale yellow fragments were beginning to show on the radar, just up ahead.
“What is it you find so fascinating about ice ages?” I asked.
“That the planet was completely different, then. That there were no humans, or at least not until the latter chapters of the ice age. And because it’s a challenge, basically, to recreate the ice sheets. I need challenges.”
I had come all this way on the lure of just such a challenge. I wondered if I should say so. Max was astute; he would not like collusion of interests, a safe strategy for establishing common ground between people, as much as collision. It would be a complex manoeuvre, to be his friend.
“I’m changeable, essentially,” he had told me the night before, in one of our long discussions after breakfast, before he went on shift in the lab.
“We all are,” I replied. “We’re like the weather.”
“I mean I can’t seem to feel wholeheartedly one way or the other. Once I locate what I really feel, I’m always looking for a reason to turn away.”
The freedom to turn away from the love of God. That was how St. Augustine defined perversion — its original meaning had little to do with the sexual — as an instinct in one’s character to go against the grain of positivity or succour.
“I can see that. The question is why. What are you hoping to accomplish with so much contrariness?”
He looked troubled. His mouth swung downwards. “Do you want to go for dinner?”
“Sure.”
“Ok. Give me five to get suited and booted.”
I also got changed. Dinner on the ship was formal. It was a nightly conundrum, cobbling together a decent outfit from a wardrobe of mainly fleeces and jeans. “Oh, I wouldn’t presume to tell a woman what to wear, ever,” said Mike the purser, when I asked him for tips as to the dress code. I settled for black most nights. Black top, black skirt: a polar widow. It gave a sense of occasion to the evening meal. In our jackets and ties, we all looked much more competent and professional. On the other hand, a hint of the Titanic wafted through so much evening finery worn while icebergs lurked outside.
I waited five, then ten minutes. I wondered, did Max mean for me to wait here for him, or up in the bar? Did he mean for us to meet outside the saloon? I looked around the corner and saw that he was already seated at a table, eating. The table was full. I picked up my personal napkin with my name on the silver ring, and sat at another table with several of the ship’s officers.
I was subdued at dinner. Max could have been banking on the basic principle of being on a ship — eventually you will run into each other anyway, who needs to honour assignations? Or was this a power play of some sort?
I didn’t talk to Max at dinner, or later, in the bar. The dining choreography episode had depressed me and I couldn’t muster the requisite jollity for the evening bar banter, so I retreated to my cabin with a bottle of wine.
I thought again of our conversation the night before, when we’d lingered at the dinner table, Max and I, long after everyone else had retired to the bar or to their cabins.
“I never look back,” he’d said.
“What do you mean?”
“I never look behind me. I don’t do regret.”
“I don’t think it’s possible to run forward through life, with no reflection. How can you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been?”
His mouth was tight. “It’s not that I forget. I just never think about things once they’ve happened.”
“Thinking and remembering are one in the same.” I told him about Odin’s two birds, Huginn and Muninn, whose names translate as Thought and Memory. “They were ravens who flew around the world every day. On their return they told Odin all that they saw.”
He scowled. “It’s not possible to fly around the world in a single day. Not even an albatross can do that.”
“It’s an allegory. It’s symbolic. It means that for the Norse, thought and memory were one.”
He absorbed this. “Is that why you wanted to be writer?”
Since his comment in the Falklands I’d avoided the topic. But now I found myself opening up again. He invited confidences, despite his sternness, or perhaps because of it.
The ship hummed away underneath us. This was another detail we had become used to, so quickly, in being in constant motion. The vibration and murmur of the ship had become reassuring, amniotic, even.
“Often writers have lives that make them think too much, from an early age.”
“About what?”
“About —” I couldn’t think, suddenly. “Error, morality, chance, and happenstance. How much we are just biological marionettes, convinced we have a conscious life, which gives us a right to life, or so we think. But this is a delusion.”
He was silent for a minute. “I haven’t read many novels, but the ones I have read have been very —” He paused. “Sobering. As if they bring to life all the things I normally try to avoid thinking. Things seem to go so wrong for people in novels, as if it’s required of writers, to put their characters through terrible … ordeals.”
“Novels are about things going wrong mostly,” I agreed. “If they went well the story wouldn’t be very interesting.”
I sat back in my chair and fell into a silence. I had written these books myself, ones that puzzled over how things had gone so badly wrong. This frequency of melancholy was so natural to me I’d hardly ever given it thought. Now, though, I found myself exasperated by my insistence on wading in the undertow of regret. Usually people did not lure me beyond the boundaries of my commitments to myself, but somehow Max was able to draw me out, on almost every topic.
“Now here’s a mathematical equation,” I said. “Fear attracts fear, and optimism attracts luck.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I’ve seen proof of it, over and over again. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard to recover from episodes of fear or despair, particularly when you’re young. They take the luck energy out of you. And you might never get it back.”
He gave me a stark, unreadable look. As with many looks I received from him, I still remember its charge, its complexity. For Max I might be a taboo generator. Someone who says things he has n
ever thought before, never wanted to. I was not sure I wanted to play this role of dank Sibyl.
I have always preferred people who were smart, well-spoken but cold over people who were slightly less astute but kind. I didn’t approve of this tendency in myself and was trying to rewire this instinct. You don’t know him, I told myself. It’s only an illusion of friendship, or even intimacy, because you have been thrown together in this way, because it has been so intense. I couldn’t believe this life began only less than three weeks before. It felt illicit, like a drug addiction or an obsessive disorder. Perhaps it was our isolation, the fact that we were cut off from the world, from friends, that made what took place on the ship feel so all-consuming.
I felt more alert and alive with Max than I did with anyone else on the ship, but he also ignited a small burning unhappiness at the centre of my being. Something within us was so similar it recoiled from recognizing itself, like a cat facing its visage in a mirror.
I was aware, too, of a vertigo instinct in myself: I am prone to throwing myself into experience as you would jump into a swimming pool, just to see what happens. In Antarctica, hurling yourself into friendships carried a danger that would normally apply to love affairs. You needed to have the right friends at the end of the world. Away from your home, your family and dominion — your sphere of power, to use the phrase that occurred to me earlier that day — the smallest disharmonies could knock you off balance. And there was nowhere to run away to, nowhere to go.
I remembered the warnings of the Antarctic veterans at Conference: People just lose it. Their amazed delight that stolid citizens, people with PhDs and mortgages and families, could be so undone. The propensity of the Antarctic world to provoke recklessness and bad judgment had something to do with our lack of protection, I reasoned. There was no search and rescue cover in these seas: the radar screens on the bridge showed a tundra of water and ice. “The nearest ship is five hundred kilometres away, presently,” Captain David informed me when I went up to the bridge later, as if on cue.
To want to experience intimacy — whether of friendship or of love — in a place so hostile to human existence is only natural, although the Antarctic is not so much hostile as aloof. Aloofness in places as much as people elicits in me a restless quiver to animate them to feel something. Anything. Also to exercise dominion over happenstance, to declare to the rough indifference of experience that we are alive. Love ought to be a mirror and a riposte to the Antarctic. To discover love, or even mere affinity, would honour the thrill and illogic of moving across space with an empty continent as a destination. Here, love would not be only human but also planetary; it would ignite this vortex and flourish in its barren heart.
Every day I went up to Monkey Island, the observation deck above the bridge. The deck bristled with spires and aerials for the radar and the anemometer and a giant revolving egg which turned out to be the satellite transmitter.
“It’s not good to spend too much time up there,” Roger the communications officer told me when he spotted me coming down the metal ladder to the deck. “The VSAT emits serious microwaves. You might get scrambled.”
If the microwaves didn’t kill me the cold might. We had left the sun behind just south of the Falklands. For the past three days we had sailed under overcast skies. The sea responded in kind: suet-grey, whitecaps foaming, jostling toward the horizon with a serene urgency, as if they had important business to conduct just over the lip of the world.
Waves — the word promises a tidy progression, a steady undulation of sea far into the horizon. But the sea is anything but metronomic. In reality the sea surface is a coil of opposing forces, a writhing, as if a thousand snakes were spun into each other, all determined to go in different directions. In rough weather particularly the sea ceases to be a single entity but a series of vortices and eddies, a succession of varying intents.
It is well established amongst those who study wave dynamics that the progression of ocean waves conforms to a cycle. In particular, the ninth (some say the tenth) appears to have more power than those before or after. After hours of counting on Monkey Island I was amazed to discover there really was a pattern. The waves rolled in, identical; the ship punctured them; bow spray flew up; there was a dull thud as the hull dropped down to meet the surface of the water. The deck would disappear, leaving your feet to catch up. Vertigo in stomach, roller-coaster nosedive. Hoo! the ship said. But then, just as you were getting the hang of gripping the bar and bracing yourself against the ship’s declension, a larger wave would appear.
The ship would square itself to this aberration as you would face a reckoning. The hull knew what was coming. It levered itself higher than with the other waves. Then came a moment when a tug of war took place between the ship’s steel authority and gravity. The wave pulled away behind us, leaving its empty trough. A second of suspension, then the ship would lower itself, groaning, onto the space the wave had just vacated. Ahh — thump — crash — splash. Roar, the ship said, as spray crashed over the fo’c’sle then drained away, rushing back to its source. It didn’t sound like water at all, but as if a glass window had just shattered on deck. Then the cycle began again. This symphony was at a different pitch than the waves that came before, or the waves that came after. I took to counting these interregnums and found that they really were every ninth or tenth wave.
That evening the sea changed. It calmed, as if commanded.
“Icebergs,” Captain David said. “We can’t see them yet, but they’re on the radar.” He pointed to scattered yellow wedges on the blue radar screen. If they are big enough, icebergs buttress the waves, muting their rhythm and cyclical effect. Ice floes, pans, and pack ice can cancel the wave dynamics entirely.
David was flanked by two able seamen, or ABs, with binoculars snapped to their eyes. “Tabs!” George the AB shouted.
This was what we had been waiting for. Tabular icebergs are one of the sentries of the Antarctic. Once they are around, you know you are near the continent.
We had been seeing the odd berg since crossing the Convergence, but they were small. The officers and able seamen kept a twenty-four-hour watch for these bergs and growlers, stationed at the front of the bridge, peering at the waves through binoculars.
We saw pinnacle bergs first. Triangle-shaped, they looked like ghost ships, their spinnakers frozen into position. “These would have started out as tabs,” George explained. “They’re on their last legs now.” It was hard to believe, how icebergs began in grandeur only to end in these doomed scraps.
The first tabular berg was sighted at dusk, which came very late now, at eleven p.m. George handed me his binoculars. “Aft, starboard,” he commanded. It was too far away to see well with the naked eye. I saw a low white wedge, like a shelf soldered to the ocean, and behind it a rose sky.
We all trooped down to the laboratory at the back of the ship to get a better look. The berg was the least real thing I had ever seen in my life. I peered at it, and still some part of my mind refused to accept what it saw.
It was a shelf. It looked not unlike the White Cliffs of Dover. I could see waves lapping at its edges. But these cliffs were as white as teeth, and lit from within, as if a platinum lamp had been placed at their core.
We returned to the bridge. We opened the door and recoiled. Ice filled the windows where sea had been. Another tab stood in our way; a solid wall loomed not more than two or three kilometres from the bow. The berg towered over us, a frozen skyscraper. The ship kept a wary distance, skirting the perimeter of turquoise meltwater which hemmed the berg — freshwater, denser and colder than the sea. Radar, while competent above the surface, does not show the submerged bulk of the berg.
White was a more complex colour than I’d thought: there was the ivory of the old berg, which had been at sea for some time and lost the bleached phosphorus glare of the ice sheet. Then the transparent albumen of the soaked ice, dusky opal, a pinkish white, the me
tallic blue-white of an electric current or a lightning strike, a pale, dull jade. The sky was white, too, and streaked with icy clouds.
We passed the citadel of ice and suddenly the sea was covered with trapezoids and polygons, open leads snaking between them. On the edges of the floes were substances which I would soon learn were called granite ice, diamond ice, cloud ice. They looked like rubble, or porridge — small lumps of ice constructing themselves, metamorphosing from water into steel beams, termite mounds, petrified trees. Their shapes harassed me, demanding comparisons.
Martin the first officer told me the Antarctic bergs are often ship-shaped: broad at the bow and the stern, an optimal shape for being blown by wind. He mentioned an iceberg seen in 1927 which was reported to be 160 kilometres long. The largest iceberg in recent history was tracked in 1965; it was 140 kilometres long and had a surface of 7,000 square kilometres — roughly the size of Belgium.
No matter their size when they begin life, once adrift, icebergs’ disintegration is swift. The processes of melt and erosion are so relentless that once an iceberg breaks free of the pack ice, it fragments very quickly. When it leaves its only home and sets out on its reckless quest, its days are numbered. Within two months at sea all but the largest icebergs have disappeared.
At midnight my cabin filled with itinerant shadows. I turned off the fluorescent overhead light and watched them gather. Night seemed to know its time was up. Soon — within a day or two — we would pass beyond darkness. Would we miss it? Night is so much the realm of memory, of protection and concealment. We might feel released as it melts away over the curvature of the earth or we might feel fatally exposed. I realized that night is a dimension, an occult time of regroup and repair, necessary, perhaps, in order to face the scrutiny of day. Unceasing daylight might fray our edges to shredded jute. Soon we would live in a sunlit present tense. I would not see night again for nearly three months.