The Effort

by Claire Holroyde

  “Charlie? It’s me, Maya.”

  Silence. Fluorescent light shone through the hole in the door. Charlie was very energy conscious and wouldn’t have left his room with the lights on.

  “Charlie, we crossed into the Arctic Circle.”

  Maya crouched down quietly and peeked through the hole with one eye. Charlie was seated at his desk along the far wall. Maya couldn’t see much beyond the slope of his round shoulders. Was he asleep, or was he lost in some kind of mental fog like she had witnessed in the other scientists?

  Maya slowly walked into the room calling his name, but Charlie didn’t stir. The stare from his watery-blue eyes was as level and empty as the ocean’s horizon. It raised the hair on Maya’s skin. What if he was dead?

  Maya reached out an unsteady hand and touched his thick neck, fearing cold flesh. Consciousness rose from some deep depth as his eyes came to life.

  “Mongolia this time,” Charlie said, like he was answering a question.

  Maya jumped back and nearly screamed. Charlie blinked up at her and further explained.

  “A new trajectory calculation puts the impact in Mongolia, not Siberia.”

  Maya sank to the floor and sat shaking. Charlie continued to draw her into the middle of his own conversation. An Argentinian scientist, he said, had calculated an alternate trajectory and posted his findings to his personal website. The Associated Press had gotten word of it before the site’s server crashed with an overload of traffic. The scientist said no one paid him for his research. He was acting alone and for the sole reason of serving truth.

  “Did anyone confirm it?” Maya asked, once she could speak again. “No one confirmed the last one.”

  Charlie shook his head and said he didn’t know. Maya hesitated. There were some questions you weren’t supposed to ask.

  “If there’s nothing we can do, Charlie, do you really want to know?”

  Again, he shook his head.

  “I was just asking myself those sorts of questions,” he admitted. “But I only came up with more questions instead of answers. Like, have you ever wondered about a single word and how it came to have meaning? You say it slowly to yourself and it sounds like babble. When you go to write out the letters, they look wrong even though you’ve spelled it the same way all your literate life. So what if…what if all the meaning that we’ve assigned to things comes undone all at once? I’m talking beyond language. All societal structures and the fictions we tell ourselves every day just come apart at the seams? What’s left of us when there are no rules and no future?”

  Maya saw his facial muscles twitch.

  “What happened to your door, Charlie? Charlie!”

  He looked at her, confused. She had to point backward until he muttered something about being distracted and not hearing the Coasties when they knocked on his door.

  “No one’s seen you at meals,” Maya said.

  She pulled a stolen turkey sandwich out of the front pouch of her sweatshirt. Hoarding food was against Healy’s rules and regulations, but Maya was worried about her avuncular old thesis advisor. He barely looked at the sandwich wrapped in a paper napkin as she placed it on his desk.

  “Not hungry?” she asked. “What about thirsty?”

  Maya presented the bottle of Bordeaux with the proud panache of a waiter at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Charlie finally remembered his manners and placed a hand on her arm.

  “Rain check?” he asked, with the kindest, saddest smile.

  * * *

  JACK RETURNED TO his stateroom after breakfast. Gustavo was seated at his desk with his hands in his lap.

  “Looks like we’re both in for the long haul,” Jack said, stating the obvious to fill the silence.

  Gustavo nodded and said, “I can’t go home to Brazil.”

  “What, are you dodging extradition out here?”

  Jack meant it as a joke. He kept trying and failing to get his bunkmate to smile. When Jack caught Gustavo’s meaningful stare, he thought, Oh shit. Me and my big mouth. He quickly changed the subject and asked if the Nobel laureate had written any poetry on their strange journey.

  “I haven’t the heart to speak,” Gustavo said. “Only listen.”

  Jack understood. He listened with his camera and took pictures of his surroundings: the choreography of dust motes in the light of a porthole; a photo of a Coastie’s baby daughter that was taped up by the wall next to the Java Hut; Maya’s expression as she looked to the sky.

  “I spoke to Camila at breakfast,” Jack said. “She asked if I wanted a reassignment.”

  The partial evacuation had left many staterooms empty. Camila offered to pull strings for Jack. It was widely known that Gustavo was deeply troubled and that Jack avoided his room because of it. Camila could give him an out, if he wanted it.

  But he didn’t. Jack didn’t want to be alone with his spinning mind. He also didn’t want to abandon Gustavo to misery.

  “I could stay,” Jack offered. “I think we could both use the company.”

  Gustavo eventually nodded. Jack fixed him with a patient stare until some instinct of self-preservation finally forced his bunkmate to verbalize: “Yes. Please stay.”

  So it was settled. Jack said he was on his way to the science lounge and offered to take Gustavo with him.

  “You need to know what’s happening with the comet,” Jack said gently.

  He didn’t want to broach the topic of human extinction, but even the lesser outcomes included devastation beyond recorded history. It wouldn’t matter if UD3 struck Mongolia or Siberia or whatever site was named next; all of Asia would be SOLJWF—shit outta luck and jolly well fucked, as Ned the pilot would say.

  “If it hits, half a continent could be annihilated—”

  “Annihilation is nothing new to Indians,” Gustavo said sharply. “We’ve suffered genocide. Millions are dead and many tribes extinct. The few survivors are…shadows that stay silent or get shot.”

  Gustavo struggled to stop.

  “I know a priest who had an expression,” he said, more controlled. “He was Canadian. Maybe you have a similar expression in America…‘Welcome to the club.’”

  * * *

  WITH LESS THAN half of Healy’s scientists choosing to remain aboard, Jack didn’t have to wait for a computer in the science lounge. New emails from his father no longer dismissed the comet threat or the dangers that it caused. Stating the situation matter-of-factly, he wrote that locals were hoarding food, bottled water, batteries, and gasoline, leading to panic in their northern Virginia suburbs.

  Jack’s mother had also written several new emails that were all strangely fragmented. In some paragraphs, she talked only of the comet and its effects on her surroundings. There was a neighbor who used to make pecan pralines for Jack’s birthdays. Now an elderly widow, she was discovered in a catatonic state.

  Although, Jack’s mother conceded in her less than charitable way, Mrs. Allen was always a bit untethered.

  Other paragraphs veered back in time to memories that she described with a mix of love and sharp barbs:

  As a little child, you were in awe of the most ordinary things. You reached out to touch dogs, dandelion puffs, even dirty puddles with rainbow oil slicks. You made me see my world with your new eyes. I’d never have guessed how quickly you would grow bored of it…

  What could Jack say to that? A better son would have written something other than:

  Mom,

  I will be losing internet as we head north. I’ll still have access to email on the ship’s server. You can reach me at this address:

  Jack.Campbell@healy.polarscience.net

  PS. Hang in there.

  Jack wasn’t that better son, but two stillbirths kept his mother from trying for more. She had to cling to the memory of her smiling, towheaded toddler like a religion.

  * * *

  THE POSTED PLAN of the day listed satellite information in its margins. Healy was heading through fifty miles of ice drifts at 40 to 60 percent co
verage. Jack would have to work quickly in such harsh conditions. A spare lithium battery was taped to the warm skin of his chest, ready to go. The air was clear and frigid on deck with a staggering wind chill. Despite a bulky anti-exposure suit and the awkward face mask that looked like a fabric beard, Jack snapped photos with effortless coordination.

  Work wasn’t a means to life for him; it was life. In entering the full concentration and flow of a master practicing his craft, Jack found something close to joy. He traveled the perimeter of the ship, looking for different vantage points, and spotted Maya’s boots outside one of the ISO lab vans. Maybe she was lost in her own concentration and flow, measuring trace elements with utmost precision.

  The Arctic sky was pale blue with thin smears of cirrus clouds. When Jack focused his lens straight ahead, the white irregular shapes of ice floes alternated with dark water like white-and-black cowhide. Yet, when he looked down at the submerged ice, Jack saw gradations of some of the most beautiful blue-green colors nature had to offer.

  Jack spotted a group of walruses all trying to clamor onto a wide, anemic floe. They used their tusks like pickaxes, but the ice was too weak and broke under their weight. A lone bull, farther in the distance, managed to find a small floe strong enough to support him. He sat atop it and watched Healy pass. Jack focused in on his blunt, whiskered snout and rolls of blubber. Never had such a cuddly animal looked so solemn.

  Are we all goners? Jack wanted to ask him.

  Of course humanity had to come to an end one day—everything did. Didn’t it?

  Two crewmen walked behind Jack as he snapped pictures.

  “Shoulda been more ice at this latitude,” one said to the other. “Least, that’s how I remember it.”

  FOURTEEN

  Crazy

  New York Boroughs

  August—September

  WHEN IT CAME to loving Love, there was no choice. From the moment Rivka first saw her, all she could think was—Good God! Love carried herself like a queen with soaring cheekbones and full, pouty lips that could smile wide when you least expected it. One day, she caught Rivka’s adoring stare on Columbia University’s urban campus.

  “Which languages can you speak?” Love asked, as a way of introduction.

  “English, French, and Spanish,” Rivka replied.

  Love laughed with a wide and flirtatious smile, revealing a charming gap in between her front two teeth.

  “Three? That’s it?”

  Rivka was a goner. Love taught a few classes in comparative literature and society but earned her reputation as a literary translator. The two women stayed awake into the early hours at Rivka’s apartment in Harlem. Love pulled papers from her satchel and read sections of novels from all over the world. She would pause and touch Rivka’s haze of hair, which spilled over her pillow in brown ringlets. When she continued, Love’s Russian was a thick staccato; her Italian, smooth and honeyed.

  Despite the intensity of their relationship, there was still an unsaid understanding that Love was exactly where she needed to be, doing exactly what she needed to do in order to survive in the long term. Or, as Love put it, “until a computer program can properly translate the beauty of a novel.” At twenty-nine, Rivka was younger than Love and in an earlier stage of her career. In order to launch, she would have to leave. Rivka stopped applying to postdocs. After defending her thesis, she took an underpaid adjunct position.

  Rivka’s parents couldn’t forgive a lapsed-Catholic lesbian lover from Kenya. Are you trying to put me in an early grave? her father shouted into the phone. Rivka was disowned and cut off emotionally and financially from her family. She sublet her Harlem apartment and moved into the South Bronx with Love. Colorful drapes, blankets, throw rugs, and pillows couldn’t warm the drafty rooms or muffle the traffic and shouting.

  Rivka could tell that Love didn’t put much faith in the longevity of their relationship. Through her Kenyan eyes, Rivka and her fellow Americans were spoiled, fickle, and untested. While there might be truth to that, it didn’t mean they were weak. Rivka vowed to prove herself as resourceful and strong. When their apartment was vandalized and all her grandmother’s jewelry stolen, Rivka said nothing. A decent chunk of her savings disappeared in exchange for a new deadbolt and floor guard.

  And she stayed. The sex was amazing; it was the intimacy that sucked. Rivka wanted a sense of ownership between them, but Love, an orphan and nomadic scholar, was never allowed to own anything. She was only allowed to learn the language of a given land before she had to pack up and move on. When a call came in the middle of the night—Love put it on mute and whispered that a rep from the United Nations was on the line—there was no hesitation in answering the call of duty, all despite Love’s claim to be finished with UN contract work. When the call ended, Love stood dumbstruck.

  “I thought it was Al-Shabaab,” she said, “or just more of the usual danger.”

  She recovered enough to wrestle her old, battered suitcase out from the back of their bedroom closet.

  “I have to go now,” Love said. “There’s a car outside waiting.”

  Rivka asked what the hell was going on, but Love said little as she packed up some clothes and essential toiletries. The UN needed expert interpreters, she said, and they needed them fast. Love stripped off her oversized T-shirt and pulled on underwear, a pair of straight-legged jeans, a cotton blouse with bright patterns, and her leather motorcycle boots, despite the August heat.

  Rivka grabbed Love by the shoulders.

  “This is crazy—”

  “I have to go,” Love insisted, wresting herself from Rivka’s frightened grip. “I don’t have a choice.”

  “Everyone has a choice,” Rivka shot back.

  She was a hypocrite and didn’t care. Love finally looked her in the eyes.

  “Stock up on food and water,” she said.

  “What?”

  A car horn blared from the street outside.

  “Food, water, supplies—and cash,” Love said. “Empty your bank accounts. There’s some kind of natural disaster on the way. Something big.”

  She strode over to their bed and leaned across the mattress to reach Rivka’s pillow.

  “You need to prepare,” she called over her shoulder.

  That was it. That was goodbye. Rivka listened to Love’s unlaced boots travel down the stairwell.

  “You know your name?” Rivka asked the walls. “Love? In America, we call that false advertising.”

  She had saved that great line only to waste it on a closed door. When Rivka returned to bed, she saw Love’s switchblade resting on her pillow. Love never left the apartment without it concealed on her person. Here she had left it for Rivka. If the switchblade could talk, it would say, Stay alive.

  * * *

  RIVKA SCOURED THE news the next day. No one seemed particularly concerned about the discovery of comet UD3, so Rivka thought the “something big” was still unannounced and looming. Then she got a text from Love:

  Landed safe. Remember what I told you.

  Rivka did remember. She immediately liquidated her meager bank account into fifty-dollar bills and rode the subway back, clutching Love’s switchblade. At the local market, Rivka stocked up on cases of bottled water and foods like canned soup, rice, beans, granola, nuts, and dried fruits. She even hit up the fancy camping stores in Manhattan and wandered the aisles, tossing freeze-dried food packets into her cart along with a hand-crank flashlight. She tried to look inconspicuous but, as a born and bred New Yorker, Rivka’s idea of nature was the man-made slopes and lakes of Central Park; her idea of “roughing it” was Yonkers.

  Rivka returned to the Bronx lugging three large shopping bags. She saw her neighbor Lamar from 1B dash in front of her and hold open the door to their apartment building.

  “Wait,” he said, frowning. “You still a Mets fan?”

  With that, he shut the door on her. Rivka waited outside until Lamar opened the door and stepped out with a shit-eating grin. She laughed and grinned
back, always a fan of the goofy, friendly giant from the first floor.

  “Hey, Lamar, have you seen anything big on the news lately? I feel like I’m missing something.”

  He cocked his head, thinking.

  “You mean, like the robbery four blocks down?”

  “No, like the national news? International even?”

  Lamar shook his head and shrugged, already losing interest but gaining curiosity about her shopping bags and such conspicuous consumption. He stuck a finger into the lip of one and tried to peek inside, but Rivka told him not to bother.

  “I just spent more than two hundred dollars on shit for camping,” she admitted with self-disgust.

  Lamar shook his head sadly.

  “White people be crazy,” he observed.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Yes, we are.”

  And life continued. Everything seemed normal except that Rivka was heartbroken without Love. And then the media released the initial trajectory of UD3 in late August, and the world flipped upside down. Rivka saw change manifest on the bustling sidewalks of New York City. People slowed to a standstill because they couldn’t walk and think about a cosmic impact of this magnitude at the same time. It left the sidewalks crowded with slack-jawed, motionless people.

  Students stopped attending classes. Rivka’s vice provost sent an email that the campus would be closing so that students, faculty, and administration could all process the news with their loved ones. Rivka stopped by the university’s administrative offices to try to change the man’s mind and keep the doors open. She needed the routine and socialization that her job provided, because she didn’t have loved ones, not anymore.

  The vice provost wasn’t in, so his secretary took down a message. Half of the desks around her were empty.

  “Where is everybody?” Rivka whispered. “We haven’t closed yet.”