At the Edge of Waking (3 page)

Ruy wandered off, limbered up with a series of long lunges. After a while the soft kiss and whine of steel filled the air.

By noon they were disposed under the awning in Corredo’s courtyard, drinking beer and playing cards. Santiago, with a workingman’s sense of time, was hungry, but no one else seemed to be thinking about food. Also, the stakes were getting higher. Santiago dropped a good hand on the discard pile and excused himself. He would save his money and find a tavern that would sell him a bushel of flautas along with a few bottles of beer. Not that he could afford to feed them any more than he could afford to gamble with them, but he had heard them talk about spongers. He would rather be welcomed when they did see him, even if he could not see them often.

And then again, the holiday atmosphere of the streets made it easy to spend money if you had it to spend. In the masculine quiet of Corredo’s atelier he had actually forgotten for a little while what day it was. The vote, the vote. Red and green handbills not yet faded by the angry sun fluttered from every doorjamb and drifted like lazy pigeons from underfoot. Radios squawked and rattled, noise becoming music only when Santiago passed a window or a door, and people were still abroad in the heat. One did not often see a crowd by daylight and it was strange how the sun seemed to mask faces just as effectively as evening shadows did, shuttering the eyes, gilding brown skin with sweat and dust. Santiago walked farther than he had meant to, sharing the excitement, yet feeling separate from the crowd, as if he were excited about a different thing, or as if he had been marked out by Sandoval, set aside for something other than this. Life, he thought: Sandoval’s creed. But wasn’t this life out here in the streets, in these conversations between strangers, in this shared fear for the future, for the world? Didn’t blood beat through these hearts too?

The heat finally brought Santiago to rest by the shaded window of a hole-in-the-wall restaurant. Standing with his elbows on the outside counter, waiting for his order, he ate a skewer of spicy pork that made him sweat, and then cooled his mouth with a beer. The restaurant’s owner seemed to have filled the long, narrow room with his closest friends. Santiago, peering through the hatch at the interior darkness, heard the same argument that ran everywhere today, a turbulent stream like the flash flood from a sudden rain. Life’s no good here anymore, but will it be any better in the crowded hills, by the poisoned sea, down in the south where the mud and rain was all there was?

“But life
is
good.” No one heard, though Santiago spoke aloud. Perhaps they chose not to hear. His order came in a paper box already half-transparent with oil stains and he carried it carefully in his arms. The smell was so good it made him cheerful. All the same, when he returned to the atelier he found that as impatient as he had been with the worriers outside, he was almost as irritated by the abstainers within. They seemed so much like stubborn children sitting in a corner with folded arms. Like children, however, they greeted the food with extravagant delight, and Santiago found himself laughing at the accolades they heaped on his head, as if he had performed some mighty deed. It was better to eat, he thought, and enjoy the food as long as it was there.

Like normal people, they dozed through the siesta hours, stupefied by heat and food. Santiago slept deeply and woke to the dusky velvet of the evening shadows. With the sun resting on the far hills the bleached sky regained its color, a blue as deep and calm as a song of the past, a blue that seemed to have been drawn out of Santiago’s dreams. They went out together, yawning and still pleasantly numb with sleep, into the streets where a hundred radios stamped out the rhythm of an old salsa band. It was impossible not to sway a little as they walked, to bump their shoulders in thoughtless camaraderie, to spin out lines of poetry at the sight of a pretty face. “Oh, rose of the shadows, flower in bud, bloom for me . . . ” It was evening and the long, long shadows promised cool even as the city’s plaster and stone radiated the last heat of the day. It was evening, the day’s delight.

“So who is going to ask first?” Orlando muttered to Ruy. Ruy glanced over his shoulder at Santiago, his eyebrows raised. Santiago smiled and shook his head.

“We won’t need to ask,” Ruy said. “We’ll hear, whether we want to or not.”

But who in all the city would have thought they needed to be told? Holiday had given way to carnival, as the radios gave way to guitars in the plazas, singers on the balconies, dancers in the streets. It was a strange sort of carnival where no one needed to drink to be drunk. The people had innocent faces, Santiago thought, washed clean by shock, as if the world had not died so much as vanished, leaving them to stand on air. But was it the shock of being told to abandon their homes? Or was it the shock of being told to abandon themselves to the city’s slow death? Santiago listened to an old man singing on a flat roof high above the street, he listened to a woman sobbing by a window, and he wondered. But no, he didn’t ask.

They wound down to Asuada’s esplanade where the dead trees were hung with lanterns that shone candy colors out into the dark. The sun was gone, the hills a black frieze, the sky a violet vault freckled with stars. The lakebed held onto the light, paler than the city and the sky, and it breathed a breath so hot and dry the lake’s dust might have been the fine white ash covering a barbecue’s coals. There were guitars down here too, and a trumpet that sang out into the darkness. Sandoval took off his sword and began to dance. Sweat drew his black hair across his face as he stamped and whirled and clapped with hollow hands. Ruy began to dance, and Orlando and the rest, their swords slung down by Santiago’s feet. He ached to watch them, wished he with his clumsy feet dared to join them, and was glad he had not when Luz spotted him through the crowd. She came and leaned against his side, muscular and soft, never quite still as the guitars thrummed out their rhythms. Santiago knew she was watching Sandoval, but he did not care. This was his. A paper lantern caught fire, and when no one leapt forward to douse it the whole tree burned, one branch at a time, the pretty lanterns swallowed up by the crueler light of naked flame. It was beautiful, the bare black branches clothed in feathers of molten glass, molten gold. The dance spread, a chain of men stamping and whirling down the lakeshore. In the shuffle of feet and the rustle of flames, in the brush of Luz’s hair against his sleeve, in the rush of air into his lungs, Santiago once again heard that phantom rain. It fell around him, bright as sparks in the light of the fire, it rang like music into the memory of the lake. It was sweet, sweet. Luz stirred against his arm.

“Are you going, Santiago? When they stop the pumps, are you going to go?”

He leaned back against the railing, and smiled into the empty sky, and shook his head, no.

Cold Water Survival

November 11:

Cutter is dead and I don’t know what to feel. Andy is crying and Miguel is making solemn noises about the tragedy, but I think they’re acting. Not their grief—that’s real—but their response to it. I think they’re just playing to what’s expected out there in the world. I can’t, and I don’t think Del can either. I’ve seen the shining in his eyes, and it isn’t tears. There’s a kind of excitement in the air, the thrill of big events, important times: death. It’s a first for all of us. For Cutter too.

[The viewer of the digital video camera is like a small window onto the past, shining blue in the dull red shade of my tent.]

There’s a sliver of indigo sky, and the white glare of snow, and the far horizon of ocean like a dark wall closing us in. There are the climbers, incongruous as candy wrappers in their red and yellow cold-weather gear. But they’re like old-time explorers too, breath frosting their new beards and snow shades hiding their eyes. [Only because I know them do I recognize Cutter in yellow, Del in red.] Their voices reach the small mic through gusts of wind so strong it sways the videographer [me], making the scene tilt as if the vast iceberg rose and fell like a ship to the ocean swells. It doesn’t. Bigger than Denmark, Atlantis takes the heavy Antarctic waves without a tremor. But this is summer, and we haven’t had any major storms yet.

I can hear them panting through my earbuds, Cutter and Del digging down to firm ice where they can anchor their ropes. Rock can be treacherous; ice more so; surface ice that’s had exposure to sun and wind most of all. They hack away with their axes, taking their time. Bored, the videographer turns away to film a slow circle: the dark line of the crevasse, the trampled snow, the colorful camp of snow tents, disassembled pre-fab huts, crated supplies, and floatation-bagged gear. I remember with distaste the dirty frontier mess of McMurdo Station, an embarrassment on the stark black-white-blue face of the continent, but I can sympathize, too. The blankness of this huge chunk of broken ice sheet is daunting. It’s nice to have something human around to rest your eyes on.

Full circle: the climbers are setting their screws. They aren’t roped together, the ice is too untrustworthy. The videographer approaches the near side of the crevasse as they come up to the far lip, ready to descend. Their crampons kick ice shards into the sunlight: the focus narrows: spike-clad boots, ice-spray, the white wall of ice descending into blue shadow. The climbers make the transition from the horizontal surface to the vertical, as graceless as penguins getting to the edge of the water, and then start the smooth bounding motion of the rappel. The lip of the crevasse cuts off the view. [A blip of blackness.] A better angle, almost straight down: the videographer has lain down to aim the camera over the edge. The climbers bound down, the fun of the descent yet to be paid for by the long vertical climb of the return. The playback is nothing but flickering light, but in it is encoded the smell of ancient ice, the sting of sunlight on the back of my neck. I must have sensed those things, but I didn’t notice them at the time. I didn’t notice, either, that I only watched the descent through the tiny window of the camera in my hand.

They’re only twenty meters down when Cutter’s screws give way.
Shit,
he says,
Del—
And he takes a hack with his axes, but the ice is bad and the force of his blows tips him back, away from the wall—his crampons caught for another instant, so it’s like he’s standing on an icy floor where Del is bounding four-limbed like an ape, swinging left on his rope, dropping one ax to make a grab—and the camera catches the moment when the coiling rope slaps the failed screw into Cutter’s helmet, but he’s falling anyway by then. Del looses the brakes on his rope and falls beside him, above him, reaching, but there’s still friction on his rope and anyway, no one can fall faster than gravity.
Cutter,
says the videographer, and the camera view spins wide as she finally looks down with her own eyes. The camera doesn’t see it, and I don’t now except in memory. The conclusion happens off-screen, and we, the camera and I, are left staring at the crevasse wall across the way.

And so it’s only now, in my red tent that’s still bright in the polar absence of night, that I see it—them—the shapes in the ice.

November 12:

We spent the morning sawing out a temporary grave, and then we laid Cutter, shrouded in his sleeping bag, into the snow. It was a horrible job. Cutter, my friend, the first dead person I’d laid hands on. It should have been solemn, I know, and I have somewhere inside me a loving grief, but Christ, manhandling that stiff broken corpse into the rescue sled, limbs at all the wrong angles and that face with the staring eyes and gaping shatter-toothed mouth. Oh Cutter, I thought, stop, don’t do this to me. Stop being dead? Don’t inflict your death on me? On any of us, I guess, himself included. I hated to do it, but the others aren’t climbers, so it was Del and me, all too painfully conscious of how bad the ice could be. We made a painstaking axes-and-screws descent, crampons kicking in until they’ll bear your weight, not trusting the rope as you dig the axes in. In spite of everything, it was a good climb, no problems at all, but there was Cutter waiting at the bottom for us. His frozen blood was red as paint on the ice-boulders that choked the throat of the crevasse.

It was so blue. Ice like fossilized snow made as hard and clear as glass by the vast weight and the uncountable years. An eon of ice pressed from the heart of the continent, out into the enormous ice sheet that is breaking up now, possibly for the first time since humans have been around, and sending its huge fragments north to melt into the oceans of the world. Fragments of which Atlantis is only one, though the only inhabited one. Like a real country now, we have not only a population but a graveyard, a history, too.

And an argument. Andy made her case for withdrawal—playing the role, I thought, that began with her tears—but none of us, not even her, had thought to call in the fatality the day it happened. “Why not?” I asked, and nobody had an answer for me. “Why didn’t you?” said Miguel, but I hadn’t meant to accuse. I had wanted someone to give me an answer for my actions, my non-action. Not reporting the death will mean trouble and we’re already renegades, tolerated by the Antarctic policy-makers only because no one has ever staked a claim on an iceberg before. We set up McMurdo’s weather station and satellite tracking gear and promised them our observations, but we aren’t scientists, we’re just adventurers coming along for the ride. And now Cutter’s dead, out here in international waters, and though I guess the Australians will want some answers at some point—I know his parents will—Oz is a long way away. I almost said, Earth is a long way away. Earth is, dirt is, far from this land of ice and sea and sky.

[Camera plugged into laptop, laptop sucking juice from the solar panels staring blankly at the perpetual sun.]

I watch the fall, doing penance for my curiosity. My own recorded breath is loud in my earbuds. The camera’s view flings itself in a blurry arc and then automatically focuses on the far wall. Newer ice, that’s really compacted snow, is opaquely white, glistening as the fierce sun melts the molecular surface. Deeper, it begins to clarify, taking on a blue tone as the ice catches and bends the light. Deeper yet, it’s so dark a blue you could be forgiven for thinking it’s opaque again, but it’s even clearer now, all the air pressed out by millennia of snow falling one weightless flake at a time. Some light must filter through the upper ice because the shapes [I pause] are not merely surface shapes, but recede deep into the iceberg’s heart.