Days of Night

by Jonathan Stone

  All these scientists, these knowledge seekers, consigned to live in a world of not knowing. Of perpetual ignorance, of question, of rampant speculation, incessant whispering, undergirding every moment. As fascinating as it is unprecedented, and terrifying in being unprecedented, because you don’t know where it’s going to lead.

  Such thoughts are beginning to circle him, circle all of them.

  Sleep is fitful. Irregular. Always a challenge during winter-over. But now fractured, jagged, sometimes impossible. For Heller. For all of them. One hundred fifty-six people. Heading into the future together. Or into some final annihilation.

  “Meet us at the infirmary,” says Hobbes into the walkie-talkie that Heller now carries at Hobbes’s request. “We’ve got a new situation.” Sounding alert, urgent, but tired and resigned at the same time.

  “Be there in five minutes.”

  “Must have been last night,” says Calloway, showing them the empty medicine cabinets, pried open, bottles spilled, contents missing.

  “What’s gone?” says Heller.

  Calloway clicks it off on his fingers. “Xanax. Ativan. Antibiotics. It looks panicked, terrified, hasty. Grabbing everything to sort it out later.”

  “Maybe whoever it is just wanted to assure their own supply. Their own survival. No supply plane coming. Can you get me a list of who’s on these medications currently?”

  Calloway looks at Heller. Questioningly to Hobbes. “You know I can’t do that. That’s against the rules. That information is confidential.”

  “The rules?” says Hobbes. “What rules? We’re living in a new reality. We’re in survival mode. And survival mode says that you need those medicines to dispense as you see fit.”

  Heller is half listening. He is looking at a roomful of clues. A welcome abundance of them, for a change. The fire extinguisher that was used to smash the cabinet. Normally, it would have prints, but since the perpetrator came in from the cold, unfortunately he or she was likely wearing gloves. But his attention quickly shifts: There is the imprint of the sole of a boot. Large. Tread worn down on the left, indicating someone left-footed, and in old boots. That could narrow it very quickly. He squints and sees a thread, caught on the edge of the exam table. He leans in, looks closely, lifts it gingerly in his fingers. Purple thread. Purple gloves, grabbing as they rounded the corner? A purple parka? Either way, not many of those. That could narrow it down even further.

  A roomful of clues. An impulsive, panicked perpetrator.

  He has no idea who it was, but he knows who it wasn’t:

  It wasn’t the careful, methodical killer.

  43.

  It doesn’t take very long. Three days.

  Heller is waiting in line in the cafeteria, when he sees the purple gloves, two people ahead of him in the food line. Steve Goethals. Upstate New York. Maintenance.

  He looks down at Goethals’s boots. Huge and worn out.

  He watches Goethals reach for spaghetti. With his left hand. Left-handed. Left-footed.

  Heller stays silent. Ignores Goethals. Gets his food. Sits down with Hobbes.

  “It was Goethals,” he says quietly. Takes a bite. “He’s got the medicines.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely.” Heller continues eating. “I don’t think he’s had much opportunity to hide them anywhere but his own sleeping quarters. I’m pretty sure you’re going to find them there.”

  Hobbes smiles. “You mean, pretty sure that you’re going to find them there. This is part of your new job description.”

  They surprise him at night. Four men selected by Hobbes to help Heller. They toss the room. The stash is stowed randomly around it. Goethals, a big man, doesn’t resist. Weeps, in fact. “I need those drugs. I need them.”

  The base is as rattled by the recovery as by the initial theft.

  Goethals is reprimanded. In the end, a stern talking to, nothing more. Any further punishment is deemed to be counterproductive, pointlessly disruptive. He is reassured, gently, quietly, that the Xanax that he has relied on will be available for him, as before, from Dr. Calloway, always there as needed.

  All the infirmary’s medications go into a safe they bring over from Administration. Calloway begins a list of who is on what medication. He divides the medications equally, puts a plan in place for parceling out the medications over the coming months. The list is made public, accessible to all. These are new rules. No privacy; the old conventions are abandoned. This is a new world.

  The resulting new rules of medication dispensing and transparency are disconcerting to Heller, though, in a new way. The list of people on various medications is a lot more extensive than Heller would have ever thought. Almost two dozen people are on serious psychoactive prescriptions. A cornucopia of medicines that Heller knows of, and many new to him, several that he can’t even pronounce. Xanax, lithium, Benzedrine, Ambutol, Ativan, duloxetine, citalopram, fluoxetine. And lots of people consistently using heavy sleep aids, of course. Ambien, Lunesta. Understandable in a world of endless, featureless night. But it’s well documented that such aids cause disruptions, hallucinations, and he highly doubts that the FDA’s clinical trials have ever been conducted in Antarctica’s endless-night conditions, so who knows what the local effect might be? Is the killer—only half-aware, or fully delusional—among them?

  He’s initially shocked that so many of these scientists and support staff, these hardy, pioneering sorts, are reliant on such an array of medications. Day in, day out, part of their body chemistry, part of their lives. Then again, they have fully experienced the stresses of the long night, and Heller has not. It’s a community of science, which turns naturally (or unnaturally) to scientific solutions and trusts—feels comfortable with—chemistry and biology. It’s like doctors who come to rely on a shelfful (or pocketful) of medications to keep going, keep doing their jobs, keep performing the work of angels, and who simply and privately manage their addictions, for the greater good, until they can’t, until something happens . . .

  In the short term, according to Calloway, there’s enough medication for everyone’s specific current needs. He’s charting them. But in the long term, they can’t manufacture any of this stuff, of course. In the longer term, everyone is coming off their meds. Their Xanax and lithium. But also their asthma and allergy and heart medicines. In the longer term, there’s no medicine at all. No antibiotics. It’s a reality that beats at the back of Heller’s consciousness and of everyone else’s too.

  44.

  Night settles deeper over them. The days and days of Antarctic night, the deep night that the human biometric clock and circadian rhythms are unprepared for, are tested by. Our physical systems, thinks Heller, are geared since time immemorial for a cycle of daylight and night, since the rise of the species in the savanna, at the equator, bred in our blood and bones and DNA, so that nothing could be so deeply unnatural to our senses, to our core, to our physical functioning as the Antarctic night.

  The annual deep night—which brings with each return a profound sense of isolation and disconnection that is intense enough every winter at McMurdo—is now compounded, amplified, to an untested, uncharted level. They are all suddenly explorers again. Suddenly all Shackletons and Admiral Byrds. But this time, the uncharted terrain is their own rampant imaginations, a new kind of terror, as they try to see the depth of what they have missed, what catastrophic thing has gone on in the world above them.

  Heller realizes that every one of them, in his or her own way, is forced to become a philosopher. Is forced to think about existence. About one’s own individual purpose, and the larger human purpose as well. It is an exercise that, in the course of their elite educations, many of them have occasionally, voluntarily chosen to contemplate or found temporarily fascinating. It’s also an exercise that many have avoided in life—too uncomfortable, too “soft” for scientists, and now forced upon them. Life’s meaning is now front and center, the only topic, in a way.

  They’re forced sudden
ly into the incessant consideration of life’s biggest questions, of existence, meaning, purpose, and that leads in many cases to desperation, to a defeated search for meaning, a defeated psychological expedition that cannot turn back now—it’s too late to turn back, we must dig in, team, and make a stand right here in the snow and ice, right here in the vast cold nothingness of our interior lives—and it is simply too much for some people, and in many cases, he knows, there is a resulting psychological collapse. Some can quietly handle the philosophy, inhabit the metaphysical. But others who go deeper, too deep, into the disorienting whiteness, do not emerge. It’s a tenet of mental illness and social adaptation: if you think too clearly about life, you’ll go crazy. And this is, unfortunately, a situation in which they’re all forced to think. Deeply, individually, alone.

  It turns them into philosophers. And Heller senses that if they’re all turned into philosophers, there’ll be no one left to attend to the business of living. He knows that doesn’t make any literal sense, but it’s an instinct he has. Put another way: he has the sense that if they think too much, they’ll die. Death by thinking.

  Heller imagines that they all are doing their own version of what he is. Thinking first about what happened. Imagining every scenario, building every scenario around the scant and no doubt erroneous evidence they have.

  And the first question—was it fast or was it slow? Meaning, was it painless or was it painful? Because everyone in a postnuclear and weaponized world has had the thought: Well, okay, if I exist in one moment and am snapped out of existence in the next moment, then what’s the big deal? I’m never gonna know; I’m never going to know it or even (hopefully) feel it, and even if I do, so what, if the pain is ended in the next second? So I can live with that (meaning, die with that), if it’s so instantaneous and clean and antiseptic, snapped out of existence; that’s really okay.

  And it’s doubly okay if it happens to everyone else too. If we’re all snapped out of existence together—instant, presto, painless, one moment here, the next not—why, there’s technically no sadness or regret, no memory. There’s no feeling at all. It’s as if nothing has happened at all.

  But if there’s pain, foreknowledge, a consciousness of it, well, that is painful to contemplate. If they were not snapped out of existence but dragged out of existence, kicking and screaming. If they saw it coming, even for just a few last seconds—a flash of light, a brightly illuminated, holy meeting with your maker—or saw it for a few hours, the disease rolling like weather toward them, like a storm, unstoppable, a final mysterious, unstoppable gale force, a wall of hail. Or was it a few days? That would be worst of course—all that time to contemplate it, to desperately and uselessly try to fight it—or would it be best to get your affairs in order, to say and do what you needed to, to finish things, round things out, right wrongs, love those you love in a last and fully contemplated act of love and life and existence?

  And all of them at McMurdo thinking incessantly about their own families. Their own relationships. The arc of their own lives. What it could mean to be left here. The responsibilities. The purpose. Thinking about beliefs, or lack of them. Doubting God, as always, many outright dismissing the idea, but at least summoning up the God idea now too, for this is what humanity created it for: circumstances like this, when you might have nothing else.

  He thinks again, again, again of Ann. Images circling him, incessantly, a loop of memories, spinning, thickening. Of what happened between them, all the good, all the bad, all the petty and foolish and insubstantial, all the substantial and significant framed behind it, all the minutely but profoundly human. He thinks of all the regret, of chances missed. Assuming, knowing, that Ann would have thought of all they had together too. That her memories are different, of course; it’s always amazing how you remember events differently; part of your training in police work—the untrustworthiness, the stunning divergence in well-meaning eyewitness accounts—that you rediscover in your own relationships, and there’s a part of him that believes that women remember things differently anyway, that their memories work in a different way, driven more by the senses, but nevertheless there is a store of events that you do share, an arc of your lives, and despite the wedges that drove them apart at a certain point, there was so much shared—and is it gone if Ann is gone? Is it snapped away if she is, or is it actually more important if she is now gone, because that is what still exists of her? And for now it lives on in Heller, but if something happens to him, is it then gone forever? Or does it still exist, somehow, infinitely, in the universe, as important and unimportant as ever? These are the philosophical questions that surface, inexplicable, inextricable, relentless. And where was she when it happened, if it happened? Where exactly? Doing what? With whom? What did she see? What last earthly image? Thinking what? Is a last moment any different really from a previous moment, in quality or profundity or importance? Not if you don’t know it’s coming. It’s only one in a million moments, indistinguishable, so it means nothing greater, in its quality or essence, but there will be no more experience beyond it, so in that alone, it is unmatched; it stands alone in its content, no matter how mundane the moment or the view.

  And Amy. Amy. Amy. The human expression of the love that he and Ann had shared. The very idea of Amy. The idea that she carries the spirit of Joe and Ann, the memory of them and the genetic expression and the proof of their love and union, into the next generation, carries Joe and Ann themselves into the future. Although that was never the idea of Amy for them. For them it was to have a fuller household, a fuller experience with each other, to see what it was like, to see how it expanded their daily experience of life. But once she arrived, he could see how Amy was an echo of each of them literally—in the shape of her eyes and mouth, in her lean limbs and in her uncannily reminiscent movements, and more subtly but unmistakably in her temperament, in her pouty frown, in her slow smile, and soon, more interestingly, she was a changing, dynamic echo—becoming more Ann at a certain stage and more Joe at a certain stage, as if they were watching the active interplay of their genes on the stage of life. At the same time, watching Amy draw away from both of them, becoming something of her own, something new entirely, and this was an accidental project for both Ann and Joe, one they didn’t ever discuss much, but one they both watched with fascination, and it created if not a deeper love between them (it didn’t), then a bond and connection that Heller would argue went beyond love, to something truer and more trustworthy. Truer and more trustworthy than love—he knows how strange that might sound and seem, and yet he honestly feels there is something to it.

  So is all that gone, in the teary and disappointed blink of God’s eye, in an instantaneous destruction of the species? Joe and Ann’s legacy, to say nothing of Amy’s unborn children—all six, eight, twelve of them!—and their children too?

  Heller thinks again, again, again about Amy’s final moments and of course has not the slightest idea who or where or how or what she would have seen or would have thought or would have felt. He has not the slightest picture of it; it is a blank. And lying alone in his McMurdo bunk he weeps, weeps more, as he knows—is already sure—that he will weep continually, until he is not around to weep. As he knows—is already sure—that he will go on and do what he can and function as well and as helpfully and as fully and as focused and as efficiently as he can despite the weeping.

  And he multiplies this, of course, by all the survivors on all the bunks in McMurdo, curled into the same brooding thoughts, the same waking nightmares, the same inescapable cursed visions of family, of existentially severed connections . . .

  Heller doesn’t believe in God, or any version of a hereafter or a beyond—never has, can’t see that he ever will, even now—but he can’t help but picture a few billion souls, of completely indeterminate size and composition, floating now above Earth, circling the planet, waiting for a safe place to land, to start again. A kind of substitute system of stars, as if the stars have waited for this metaphor for a billion y
ears, have been waiting for these souls, having at last an earthly purpose, as a representation of seven billion circling souls. This would be either the moment to start believing in God or the moment to firmly put any incipient belief to permanent rest, to crush it out of you. But despite his unbelief, Heller can’t help seeing the brilliant earthly ring, the shimmering circle of patiently waiting, displaced earthly souls. Taking on some unbodily, spiritual form—of radio waves or frequencies or an advanced form of matter—conveniently, efficiently, only temporarily waiting for safe touchdown, waiting for Earth to cool, for Earth to recover, to welcome them again.

  Personal pain. Personal memory. Multiplied by seven billion. Multiplied by humanity.

  Yes, he can see how the floating facts of it—the stresses of it—could turn them into philosophers or psychopaths, or some unprecedented combination of the two.

  And thinking always—beginning with, ending with, most humanly, most achingly, most bitterly, and always—about Trish.

  Trish, the frame of all this contemplation. Snapped out of existence not as speculation but as reality. Not as an act of imagination but here, a few yards away, a few days ago. Jesus. Reminding him that the conditions of existence—and of absence—are in the here and now. In a way that he can exercise some control. In a way that there is profound responsibility. In a way that there is a path forward.

  Does he feel some guilt—or some defiance, or some inner truth about himself—in making her equal to Ann and Amy?

  But it’s more connected, more integrated than that. She is the representation of their loss. She is their stand-in, their nameless sister on the front lines, in the battle of existence versus absence, of life versus death, in all that is versus all that isn’t, in light versus darkness. There is no grading, no judgment of one versus the other, of more loss versus less loss. Trish, Ann, Amy—they are all the same. They are all, equally, everything. And everything he must fight for, continue to think for, continue to reason for, continue to exist for, continue to survive for.