by Jean McNeil
“Don’t suppose you’d like some company?”
Instinct answered for me. “You know, it’s so hard to get any time away from people here; I’d just like to be with my own thoughts for a minute.”
It was true; since arriving on base the blare of activity had exhausted me. My thoughts fell as if they were slipping through my mind. If I tried to get hold of them they slid through my fingers, like fish. He had been walking in step with me, then, to the boot room, but he stopped in his tracks. “Sure,” he said. “I understand.”
Standing at the Cross that night on my own I watched the sun hover at the horizon once more, saw its orange flutes, as if a collection of church spires had been buried in the ice, just beyond the visible horizon, and were projecting themselves. Light was refracted upwards through them: rays of indigo, purple, saffron. If I closed my eyes, this all narrowed and started to look like an explosion — too violent, strictly speaking, to be beautiful.
I shivered. It was three thirty in the morning. I’d been at the Cross on my own all this time, not counting a lone insomniac skua who flew sorties nearby, looking at me out of the corner of its eye. If I stayed at the Cross for another hour, I would see the sun lever itself from its hiatus and climb once more into the sky, watch the cold pastel colours loosen and melt as they gave way to the golden orb of day.
My mother hands me an envelope. It is slightly crumpled, as if it has been shoved through the letterbox in haste. There is no address on it, just my name.
By the river. Come at eight o’clock in the evening on June 16.
He wants to meet somewhere open, I understand. Somewhere we can both walk away.
I walk through vacant streets. There is now an unspoken order in town, that women not walk alone. I don’t feel particularly vulnerable, I’ve decided. I don’t feel small, or like a victim or a target, even though I understand I am meant to fear being these things. I actually feel infinitely powerful. If I marshal my store of rage, I am sure I can fight anyone off.
I disobey the traffic lights because there is no traffic, while the few other pedestrians wait at the curb. I think how we spend so much of our lives waiting for an external signal, for something to tell us: Stop. Go.
I can smell the river four blocks away; the differential between its cool waters and the waning heat of the spring day gives its glaucousness an edge. I walk along the riverside path. It passes under the giant stanchions of the bridge. Above me the traffic is a muffled roar.
Ahead, I see a dark-haired man, hair cut close to his skull. He comes upon me like no other person in my life, he coheres out of the horizon, as if through a conspiracy of the landscape, the sky.
He stands with his back to me, overlooking the river. He looks neither short nor tall. Even from a distance I detect a posture of civility.
He turns around when he hears my steps. I see a version of my face, or rather half of it — my eyes, certainly, my forehead. The lower half is someone else’s. I had thought how my eyes were very slightly asymmetrical, the left narrower and longer than the right, was mine and mine alone. But I have been copied. Or I am myself a copy.
He wears jeans, a short leather jacket. He looks neither old nor young. His eyes are dark, like coal.
“I thought you wouldn’t come.” There is a rough note, a kind of shear, in his voice, which is also present in my voice.
“Why have you been following me?”
“I haven’t; I just had to get to talk to you somehow. I didn’t want to go to the house. Your mother wouldn’t tell me anything.”
It is there immediately: a hope, an indulgence. What some might call a parental tone, but I am not accustomed to it and recoil.
Who are you? The question in my mind seems wrong, so I don’t ask it.
“Why are you here?”
“To see you. Look —” a note of impatience, the first familiar thing about him, leaks through. “Can we go somewhere to talk?”
“We’re talking here.”
His mouth twitches.
He is tall — I settle for this, I decide. His eyes are unusually blue — midnight blue, Elin would say. She had an extensive vocabulary for colour, thanks to the myriad objects she sells. He is lithe, not coarse. From the side he has a strong profile. It reminds me of Abraham Lincoln’s, on American dimes.
“What have you been doing?”
“When?”
He smiles. “All these years.”
I shrug. “School. Life. Living. You look younger than I thought.”
“You pictured an old man?”
“Not old — just.”
He gives me a long bare look.
“Well you’ve seen me now. I don’t feel anything for you.” This is not strictly true. But I want him to think it is.
What I feel is a strange hum, located somewhere underneath my blood and my brain, as if I have tuned into a lost frequency. The familiar-but-not-familiar look and smell of him make me feel like throwing up. At one point I have to put my hand over my mouth to stop this from happening.
The evening has clouded over. The river behind him is a dull platinum. It’s the easiest thing to do. I turn around and leave. I can see my action, the potential finality of it, revolving in his head like a diamond, for all his future: she turned on her heel.
I don’t say goodbye. I think this is the last time I will ever see him.
He discovers me, by accident rather than design, working at Shades of Light. Elin witnesses our interaction.
“Who was that man?” she says, once he has left.
A solemn look falls over her long, serious face. “Oh, I thought you lived with your father.”
This time I meet him in the coffee shop, La Vie en Rose. Its walls are painted a hungry red. The café serves cake and coffee to sullen teenagers like me.
He sits across from me, that strange avid look on his face. It is as if he is imbibing me. I can feel myself slipping down his gullet.
I stare at him, looking for the clue to myself. When I close my eyes, an imprint of his face remains on my eyelids, like a photographic negative.
I think, You have nothing to do with me. A word installs itself on my fork, so when I pick up my piece of cake — which I can’t stomach anyway — I see it there: stranger. The stranger is the person unknown, unbidden, the person who comes and goes with the night.
“Why did you leave her?”
“Is that what she told you?”
“What do you mean?” It has never occurred to me that my mother would not tell the truth.
“I didn’t.” He says the words as if they contain something sour. “Leave her.” His mouth puckers. “It wasn’t — working out.”
He sits back in his chair. I wait for him to say more.
I am seized by a feeling. Something dizzying, a spiral. But also a sense of lightness. I have been wrong about the circumstance of their parting and this error frees me.
When we part our attitude is diffident. He is not so much in my power, now. We stand at right angles to each other on the sidewalk. He looks as if he has just chanced upon me on the street, a random girl, and offered to buy me a cake. He casts his eyes around the town, looking for something to spark his attention.
I am anxious not to let him think he has scored any kind of victory. On the other side of the street, just out of sight, the plasma of the river cools with the night.
“Well,” he says. “See you around.” This time he is the one to leave me standing in his wake.
4.
ICE BLUE
nilas
A thin elastic crust of ice, easily bending on waves and swell and under pressure, thrusting in a pattern of interlocking fingers.
January 10th
Steward slid his thin head around my office door at ten o’clock last night.
“You’re off base tomorrow.”
The magic words. I will fly with Tom and the chief pilot, Lanier, in the Dash down to the refuelling base. We will deliver fuel and supplies. Then, if all goes to plan, Tom will change places with Derek, another pilot, and Tom and I will travel onward to the Ellsworth Mountains in a Twin Otter to collect geological samples and radar data to send back to Cambridge.
This morning we hold a briefing while drinking tea in the pilot’s office in the lee of the hangar. Inside the hangar, the Dash and a Twin Otter gleam underneath the roof lights. Enclosed, they look larger, like reposing dragons.
At eight in the morning, we get the go-ahead from the met man. Tom, Lanier, and I have a mechanic, also named Tom, on the run with us. Tom the mechanic and I will sit in the seats flight attendants normally use, the ones which look backward with shoulder straps. We will face our passengers: sixteen drums of avtur fuel, strapped down where the seats would normally be.
I think of K, my friend who refers to planes as “bombs with wings” — not a reference to terrorism but to the kerosene-filled wings. Now we have a plane full of it. If we crash we won’t remember much.
We taxied out onto the runway and took off to the south. The Dash climbed steeply over the bay. When we’d reached cruising altitude, Lanier flipped open the cockpit door.
“Come sit with us,” he said over the intercom. “It’s warmer here.”
Tom handed control of the plane to Lanier and went to the galley at the rear of the plane to make us all cups of tea. Lanier motioned me to take Tom’s seat. I sank into the comfortable pilot’s chair with its sheepskin rug. In front of me was a forest of dials; in the cockpit windows two wedges of blue sky.
I asked Lanier about our altitude, course, how the autopilot worked. We talked about trim, stabilizers, the yaw damper which makes a four-prop aircraft easier to manoeuvre.
“You seem to know quite a bit about flying,” Lanier said.
“I guess I’ve always wanted to learn to fly.”
“Well, now’s your chance.”
“What?”
“I’m going to disengage the autopilot, and you’re going to fly the plane.”
Lanier was smiling. He seemed to be willing me to refuse or demur.
I put my hands on the controls.
“Just keep the plane level and try to keep it to course,” Lanier instructed. “Watch the altimeter and the artificial horizon.”
As soon as the autopilot was disengaged I could feel the plane in my hands. It was amazingly responsive. Even small adjustments resulted in an immediate reflex from the plane. It felt like a delicate, flexible horse.
I flew for an hour; Lanier’s hands were not on the controls, but he never took his eyes off me and I felt completely certain that, were I to make a mistake, he would recover the situation immediately. He told me to hold the plane steady, and maintain our altitude. As for the plane, it had its own desires. After a while I could feel what it wanted to do, I could feel myself anticipating and correcting its intentions, even the flow of air underneath the wings. The sky was absolutely clear and the air smooth. The four propellers chawed gamely through the cold air.
Tom appeared behind me. “Oh, it’s you flying.”
I didn’t dare take my eyes off the sky in front of us. “I guess you’ll be wanting your job back?”
“No, carry on. You’re doing a great job. You’re a qualified Dash 7 pilot now.”
Tom took over and I stepped back into the fuselage. I sat down on top of the row of fuel drums. I was completely shocked that I had just flown a plane for an hour, and exhausted from the effort.
I looked at the land we were passing over. Our shadow followed us, a perfect silhouette of our plane, a cigar with whiskers — the propellers. We flew south, into the sun, over a secession of identical landscapes — nunatak, ridge, snowfield, nunatak, ridge, snowfield.
We were passing beyond the peninsula’s neck and into the bulk of the continent. Now there was only ice and more ice. All my life I had been travelling through or over landscapes where, sooner or later, some sign of habitation or human interference will appear, even in Canada. But here we were in an iterative world. Ice bred only more ice.
I returned to the cockpit with cups of tea for Tom and Lanier. They had a laminated chart spread out across their knees. Tom pointed to the map. On it, a small black dot amid grids of whiteness marked our destination.
At 74°51’ S, 71°34’ W in eastern Ellsworth Land, Ice Blue sounded like a place: of blue, and of ice. Officially it was a “logistics facility.” The runway was Ice Blue’s most spectacular feature, and the reason it existed at all: a groomed blue ice runway over a kilometre in length and fifty metres wide, marked by black triangular flags.
I remained in the jumpseat for the landing. We descended into a ceaseless plain of white. As we lowered into it a thin strip of blue emerged from the blank surface. The strip grew larger and larger in the windscreen. A glint of sun flashed within it as we descended.
The wheels hit the ice runway. For the first few seconds of contact the plane felt as if it had made a normal landing on gravel or asphalt. Tom and Lanier reversed the propeller thrust on the plane. The black triangle of the nunatak loomed larger and larger. Then we simply stopped.
I was awestruck by their skill. The plane had stopped as demure and unflustered as if it had landed at Heathrow. Later Tom explained the procedure for landing on ice. The brakes couldn’t be used, for fear of skid, so the pilots had to employ reverse propeller thrust, wherein the direction of the blades is changed to throw the thrust forward.
I yanked open the door and unfurled the plane’s short staircase. A different cold pawed its way into the plane: its edges sharp yet thinned by a constant sun.
Stepping out, I shielded my eyes. The light was so searing it seemed to turn into its reverse and become a sultry, bluish night, like La nuit américaine, or Day for Night as it is called in English, the filmmaking term for shooting during the day and deliberately underexposing the film to make it look as if it had been shot in darkness.
The wind rustled over the ice runway. We had to shuffle to avoid slipping; we were wearing no crampons. I slid toward an orange structure and two snow mounds. A plastic chair sat outside the hut — the weather obs chair. Beside it two figures waited.
Given that we had just landed an aircraft on a plate of ice — even if I had nothing to do with the manoeuvre — I expected a hero’s welcome, or at least a visiting dignitary’s. But our reception was slightly resentful, as if we had encroached on a private party. Gigantic Jack the mechanical engineer was down for a couple of weeks’ refuelling and runway-clearing duty. He wore a T-shirt, shorts, and mukluks. The temperature was minus ten.
I looked back at the Dash, poised on the sheet of transparent ice, tied down with guy wires to stop a katabatic gust hurling it across the iced runway. Behind it the nunatak peered at us, like some overlord.
The Ice Blue refuelling team followed me back to the aircraft, where Tom and Lanier had positioned the ramp to allow us to roll out the fuel drums. We started to unload the plane, rolling drums that weighed over seventy kilograms each across the ice.
After a few hours of this we heard Steward on the VHF. “Easy life, guys!” He gave Tom and I the go-ahead to overnight in the melon hut, and continue on to the Ellsworths in the arriving Twin Otter the following day.
The midnight sun streamed through the melon hut’s portholes. The round windows and smooth geodesic walls made the hut feel like a space capsule. For supper that night there was vodka and chocolate, courtesy of us. We placed the bottle and glasses in a snowdrift outside the melon hut. Inside we sat in a ring on a sheepskin-covered bench, swaddled in sleeping bags. In the middle of the room two Primus stoves and a Tilley lamp hissed and hummed.
Apart from the runway crew, the other Ice Blue inmates that night were Oddvar, a Norwegian gla
ciologist, and Eric, his long-suffering field assistant, or “GA” as they were called on base. Oddvar and Eric had just spent four weeks together perched on the Rutford Ice Stream, a large moving ice sheet, their GPS showing them very slowly being carried from the Ellsworth Mountains into the Ronne Ice Shelf.
“Eight weeks, and we only saw one bird,” Eric was shaking his head as I entered the melon hut. “It was a skua, of course.”
Oddvar was pale, almost albino, his hair more white than blond. He had light blue eyes that appeared to fracture in their stare, not unlike a piece of ice shelf when it breaks from the continent.
He fixed me with this flinty look. “And who are you.” It was more statement than question.
“I’m the writer.”
We had a staring contest for what seemed like a long time. The three field assistants sitting round the table darted their eyes back and forth, as if watching a tennis match.
“It is a difficult place to be a woman, Base R,” Oddvar said, finally.
“It’s been fine so far.”
“Don’t you get any hassle?”
“Disappointingly little, actually.”
This provoked an especially intense stare. He turned to Eric. “As I was saying, female GAs are so unfeminine. I like women with a little” — here he made a bonbon gesture, like sucking on a lollipop or sweet, finished off with a little kiss. He grinned. Oddvar had one of those square smiles: his mouth opened up and down but did not go sideways. I saw he had small, wolfish teeth.
Eric rolled his eyes. He turned to us. “He has two topics of conversation: vodka and women. No, I forgot — Amundsen.”
Tom laughed. “Not him again.”
“Why is the Rutford Ice Stream speeding up?”
Oddvar flicked his eyes toward me. Eric looked away. I understood belatedly that work questions were not the thing to ask at that moment. I lost the attention of the others. I could hardly blame them; they’d just broken out of ice jail and the last thing they wanted to talk about was work.