“Birdie found that taping over his specs . . .”
“All right, all right, Titus. But it’s like throwing dinner rolls at a charging rhino is all I’m saying.” So I tape over Victor’s glasses, doing as Birdie Bowers did ninety years ago to protect his eyes from scorching, leaving nothing but a pinprick-size hole to see through. Victor goes on using my snow goggles and I use the taped glasses. From any distance I must look as if I was born without eyes. Snow-blind leading the snow-blind. Ah well, I always preferred looking inward to looking out.
Unfortunately the sunblock is back on board the Hagglund, so my own skin is starting to blister and scab. What a joyous sight we would make for my mother now: two public monuments pocked by air pollution. Victims of polar shot peening. That’s what it is, you know, shot peening. It’s blasting things clean by bombarding them with . . . with what? My concentration is terrible up here. Whole sentences—whole thoughts go astray and wander off into the haze to be lost forever. No wonder gray and white are the colors of old age.
“What about Mum?” I asked, wondering if Victor has even given her a thought in all this, wondering if she will ever find out the circumstances of our death. I am perfectly sure he never e-mailed her that night long ago in Paris, never gained her blessing for this infernal trip. Just lied to me, as to everybody else.
“Don’t you fret on her account, Sym. Lillian and I have an understanding on that front.” And he crossed his middle finger over his index finger and gave a wink. Plainly he could see himself back in Croxley Green, after his triumphant return, feet up on the coffee table, my mother cooking his supper. “She’ll be right proud, lass. Don’t you fret. I’ll look after her. We go way back. We’ve always had an understanding, Lillian and I.”
No.
I am almost grateful to you, Victor. Tell me there are worlds-within-worlds. By all means. Who am I to argue? Tell me there are dragons in the sky. Tell me that space dust is the sperm of cosmic whales, that Man was made to walk on his hands, that money grows on trees. But the Fount of All Knowledge ran dry the moment you said my mother and you “have an understanding.” I’d laugh if I thought I could ever stop. Muster your data, Sym. Keep your eye on the ball. Verify your facts. Review your subject. Pursue your argument. Answer the question. Open your eyes. Use your noggin. Check your answers. Remember your manners. Do as you’re told. Tell the truth. The truth is, Victor, there are some things that are, and there are things that just ain’t so. Even if Mum never finds out that you stole her passport and emptied the bank, bankrupted the family business, kidnapped her daughter, and murdered her husband, she still thinks you are a pompous boor—a humorless, hectoring know-it-all and a bit of a bully. She is just too polite to say so, knowing how reliant we have been on you since Dad died. There are some things that don’t need learning; they just are, Victor. And there are some things that just ain’t so.
It wasn’t much of a blizzard:We should be grateful. It could have lasted days, but it was no more than a squall. We had to take shelter. The tent was gone and there wasn’t time to build a snow hole. Although I do know how, in theory. You pile up your belongings and pack snow around them, then pull the belongings out and crawl inside the hollow.
“I didn’t know that. That’s ripping. In our day it was just cutting ice blocks to build ice walls—or not letting your tent blow away in the first place, of course.”
“Thank you, Titus. All this useful knowledge, eh? If we keep this up, I may even find a use for the periodic table or the Knights of the Round Table.”
“Or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They’re my favorite.”
Maybe that’s how God made the Earth, do you think? He piled his snowsuit and backpack and giant Parisian suitcase together into a mound and packed snow around them, then plucked out the insides. Perhaps God’s curled up, even now, inside His giant hollow planet, sleeping out the blizzard that blew up on the Eighth Day.
Anyway, there wasn’t time—when the squall came, I mean—to build a snow hole. So Victor and I climbed into either end of the Nansen and wrapped ourselves in everything that came to hand, relaced the covers over us, and waited. The wind was shoving and shouldering the sled, moving it over the ice. I could imagine it picking up momentum, slipping faster and faster downhill toward crevasses, portals, sinkholes, plate-glass windows of ice that would shatter and spill out smiling albino aliens and stuffed dinosaurs. The wind howled and bayed on every side. I asked Titus to wrap me in his arms and keep me warm, but if he did, his body was even colder than mine.
And when the squall passed, the laces were frozen solid. My fingers were icy, without feeling. Claustrophobia and two feet of snow were pressing down on me like soil. I was buried alive. Help, somebody!
But there is no one within a thousand miles.
So what was there to do but tug at the canvas and lacings until the edges parted and let the snow cascade in on me?
I thought, as I emerged, that the blizzard had eaten us. There was nothing left above the surface but snow, and for a moment I thought we’d died and stopped existing, there was so little to show for us: just a white wilderness smoothed to the consistency of fluffy cappuccino by the new fall of snow.
“Where are you, Uncle Victor?!”
Frantically, I went looking for the other end of the sled, using mittened hands and my ice axe, digging and digging down through the snow until I hit the metal frame and the lacings showed through like surgical sutures in a belly, or a sailor’s shroud. It was just like opening a grave and Uncle Victor the corpse in it: his face blue with cold, rotten with snowburn; square, dark holes where his eyes should have been.
Tea bags.
I tossed them away into the snow. “Victor? Uncle Victor!”
“Any time now, lass. Any time now,” said the corpse, opening its eyes, rising from its resting place among the raincoats and corned beef, the foil blankets and the Primus fuel. “Just over the horizon, by my reckoning.”
But before we could reach his Shangri-La over the horizon (not that there was a horizon), we had to unearth the sled from its drift, and when it came to pulling, we sank to our knees, barely able to shift it through the deep, soft, wet porridge of new snow.
Actually, the snow’s not new. Nothing in this place is new. The wind grinds the surface off centuries of compacted snow and blows it about a bit, that’s all. Just the same old snow, recycled over and over. Just the same old snow going around and around. Like an astronaut drinking his own piss.
I said something to Uncle Victor just now about shot peening: how someone could use all this razor ice to peen dirt off stone, and rust off metal. It was a mistake. His shot-peening partner’s treachery must have been playing on his mind. Frostbite swells up in a hand or a foot like a great black boil; Dad’s desertion had swollen in the same way, into an obscene canker on Victor’s brain.
“Petty-minded, provincial little Luddite!” he spat, overspilling with venom. “I could have put up with him leaving all the spadework to me, idle lummock! I could’ve tolerated his losing interest! But when he started trying to interfere with my work . . .”
It seems it was the antibiotics that caused the final rift between Uncle Victor and my father: an experiment of crucial importance. Germs, bacteria, infections of the Overworld must on no account be allowed to pollute the Worlds Within: One look at the fate of the American Indians proved that. Terrestrial infections must not be passed on to the Insiders. And so naturally Uncle Victor experimented with ways of ridding the human organism of every contagion. A course of antibiotics—strong enough to exterminate the sludge in a drain let alone streptococci and scarlet fever. And whom did he use for this experiment? Well, his apprentice, of course. His right-hand girl. His trainee ambassador. He needed to see if, like a toilet or a scalpel, she could be made germ-free.
“Had to cut it short,” said Victor resentfully. “Your hearing started to go. But the science was valid enough! Anyone can see that! Even you can see that, can’t you, and you’re not the bright
est match in the box! Not him, though. Not that petty-minded Luddite, your father. He tried to stop the whole project!”
I could remember it, of course: swallowing huge numbers of little, chalky sweets suspended in spoonfuls of honey, hiding the treat from my father, because (Victor said) Dad begrudged the honey. It was to be our little secret: Victor’s and mine.
“So really . . . you took away my hearing, too,” I said.
“Say again?” said Victor.
When the White Darkness sets in, it’s such a kindness. All shadows disappear—the sky, the ground—leaving nothing but a milky, trembling nothingness. It’s a sweet light, a pleasant light, like lying under a sheet on a summer morning: the presence of light without any of the usual complications—like being able to see. Perfect ignorance was like this, I remember: a feeling of enlightenment without ever quite grasping what was really going on. They call it the White Darkness. A window opaque with condensation. A cataract over the eyeball. The White Darkness. With the tip of my ski I draw an eye in the snow—not as good as Nats could do, but an eye—just to prove to myself that I can see what I’ve drawn; that I’m not blind. When Odysseus entered the Underworld, the Dead pressed in on all sides, jostling for a glimpse of a living man. Maybe the White Darkness is woven out of rejected, leftover ghosts.
Diamond ice twinkling in the white haze stirs memories of those gilt-mirrored changing rooms back in chic Paris. Get out your credit card, Uncle Victor: We’ve reached the ultimate Changing Room. In the smoke-filled mirrors stands my true reflection: what I’ll look like when I’m gone. Nothing! Zippo! Nobody!
“I believe your pemmican must have disagreed with you at breakfast this morning.”
“Oh. Am I whining?”
“Just a little, perhaps. This place does lower the spirits.”
“I’m sorry. How’s your leg?”
“Which one?”
“The one with the bullet hole.”
“Oh, pff, that. It was never a very big hole in the first place. Watch out.”
The weight of the sled brings me to a dead stop. Uncle Victor has stopped pulling. The looming whiteness has elongated into a corridor, and standing at its far end, veiled by the drifting mist, are four—five—figures shapeless in their voluminous robes. It is a sight so unnerving that I drop my ice axe, and the thud, as it hits the ground, reverberates like thunder. The ground is hollow.
I would run toward the motionless strangers but for that hollow wowing under my feet. We are standing on a drumskin of ice. How thick? A yard? A handspan? “Uncle Victor. Keep perfectly still!” I say.
I don’t believe Victor could move his feet if he wanted to. He is standing staring at the shapes in the mist. One hand creeps tentatively into the air, and he waves like a little child, mittens folding over at the knuckles, a big grin cracking open his face, water vapor sobbing from his mouth. “Hello?”
I retrace my steps toward the sled, trying to place my feet exactly where I placed them before. Two steps. Three steps . . . Boom. Boom. Boom. I tug the skis out from under the covers. “Put these on, Uncle Victor. They’ll spread your weight.” Rather than add to my own body weight by carrying Victor’s skis, I kick them ahead of mine, over the ice. “Put those on, Uncle Victor.” He ignores me, eyes fixed on the deputation of aliens standing stock-still in the white haze. Like a dog, I want to hunker down, stretch myself out along the ice, make myself weightless and invisible. Every noise is magnified by the huge sounding board beneath our feet. But this is no place to stand still and stare. We ought to go back, get off this bone-china plate of ice. Instead, we scuff forward—I on my skis, Victor on legs that buckle and totter—until we ought to be face-to-face with the strangers.
As usual, size and distance have deluded us. The figures aren’t human. They aren’t even human in scale. They’re bigger and farther off. They’re three yards, four, five yards tall. And they’re not robed guards or placid ambassadors from another world; they’re bulgy outcrops of craggy ice rising like termite hills out of the ice sheet. They are twisted blisters of deformed ice pushed up by the same massive forces that suspended this glass roof magically over a cavernous Nothing.
“I know where we are,” I say, though I say it very quietly in case the weight of decibels is enough to shatter the glass. “This is the Devil’s Ballroom.” Such an unscientific name; Victor will think I’m being melodramatic—“This place is Hell on Earth; this place is the Devil’s Ballroom.” I wish I knew what else to call it, but I don’t. The name is in my head—the Devil’s Ballroom, the Devil’s Ballroom—and it doesn’t leave room for anything else. “Amundsen came here, Uncle. This is not a good place to be. There’s nothing underneath us.” In a desperate effort to make him understand, I stamp my ski twice. Boom, boom. “Listen, Uncle. Hollow!”
Victor turns on me a face so agitated that I think the figures in the fog, the tantalizing illusion of life, must have finally broken his heart. But then he crouches down and begins hacking at the ground with his axe. Boom. Boom. I wait for the floor to shatter under me like a car windshield. “Help me, lass! Look sharp! Got to see!”
Nothing I say or do stops him except snatching the axe out of his hands and starting to hack at one of the anthills instead. If he has to see what’s underneath us, let him at least do it this way! I have to take off my skis to get close enough, smashing my way into a monstrous knobbly egg of vuggy ice, filling my face with needles of flying sharpness. The impact runs back up my arms and sets off explosions of pain in my elbows and shoulders, in my neck and spine. If this were a person, I would be hacking off its head. If it were Victor, I’d be glad!
I chant inside my head: You took my dad! You took my hearing! You brought me here! The blows of the axe no longer hurt. In fact I have the strength of ten and the rhythm of a pile driver: You stole, and you killed, and you lied, and you bullied, and you did us in. . . . The hollow head and shoulders of the frigid alien crumble, cave in, and drop down through its ugly hollow body, falling and falling into the space beneath. If the fragments touch bottom at all, I can’t hear it. The antibiotics Victor fed me made me deaf. And besides, the noise is drowned out by the thunderous, quaking bass percussion of echoes booming around the Devil’s Ballroom. I can feel the very ice trembling under my boots. My last blow nearly decapitates Victor, who is struggling to climb up the trunk of the ice chimney. “What the hell are you doing, you fool?” I scream at him.
He has hauled himself up, the heels of his hands resting, as it were, on the coping of the ice chimney, so as to peer down. And I can see that the look on his face isn’t pain at all, but manic delight. He rips off my snow goggles, the better to see, and throws them away. “We’re here, lass! We’re here! We’ve made it! Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I tell them all along no one believed me but I showed ’em I bloody showed ’em nobody else me I did it I found it I got here it’s mine!” Then he drops down with a crunch of boots that crazes the ice where he lands, and he drags the sled toward him by the ropes, so that the iron crossbar slams into his own legs. He needs to stand on the sled to gain height—“You first, lass! You first!” Crouching down to embrace my knees, he lifts me bodily toward the opening.
The pain in my cut thigh is momentarily bigger and blacker than the darkness below; I can’t lift a hand to help myself. A smell ten thousand years old comes up the chimney of ice—and a draft that blows stray hair into my mouth, as Victor attempts to feed me into the Underworld like a worm into some gross, petrified cuckoo. I kick him in the head and spread-eagle myself across the opening, so that he cannot force me down it.
His openmouthed smile is one of total bewilderment: a genius faced with the task of explaining quantum theory to a rather stupid dog. “Don’t you understand, lassie?” he says slowly and deliberately. “It’s Symmes’s Hole! There’s not one . . . there’s whole clusters!”
Then his generosity and patience are all spent, and he clambers up again, flings me aside, jealous of anyone reaching the Truth before him. Lifting first one leg, th
en the other, he slides his feet into the chimney—“Uncle, NO!”—and lifts his hands from the rim.
Inside his snowsuit he is a thing of skin and bone. But his chubby, puffy, outsize layers of thermal quilting wedge in the opening at the hip. He sticks up like a Victorian chimney sweep, writhing and swearing, his hood down, eyelids blown open and shut independently by the force of the wind, begging me to hand him the axe so that he can make the opening wider and climb down to the Inner Worlds.
I lie where he threw me, the axe within reach of my hand. And why not? Why shouldn’t I? Good riddance, I should say. Good riddance and damn you to Hell.
“Get down, Uncle! Please get down! You’re scaring me! Be careful! You’ll fall! There’s nothing there! Just a big nothing!”
He wriggles and strains, his clothing bunching up around his neck and face; a fat Santa stuck in the chimney top.
“Give me the bloody axe, you stupid child. God give me patience! I’m surrounded by fools and idiots!”
I grub up one of the dirty canvas hauling harnesses and thrust it up at him. “At least put this on. Look! Put this on, Uncle. You don’t want to fall, do you? You can lower yourself down! But it could be hundreds of—”
His hands flail over his head, with frustration and exertion, like a toddler in a tantrum. I try to suit my voice to the age of this demented child in front of me, wanting, wanting, wanting his own way, thwarted by a world that won’t do as it’s told.
“Whatever’s there is an awfully long way down, Victor. You don’t want to find out the hard way, do you? Why don’t you lower yourself down, at least? Put the harness on? You can lower yourself down then, can’t you? I’ll get the flashlight, look. You can have a—”
“Yes, yes,” he snaps, tormented by impatience, and struggles his arms into the harness without bothering to untwist it or distinguish front from back, all the while telling me to join him, giving me strict instructions to put on my own harness and follow him. The idea of harnesses is his now, of course. “Well? Look sharp! Get yours on! Think on!” And I have to go through the motions of putting on my pulling harness and stepping up onto the sled as if I will follow him—two trapeze artists in a death-defying act above an audience of watching aliens. “Jump to it, Sym! Pass me the axe. Jump to it!”
The White Darkness Page 20