At the Edge of Waking (5 page)

[And I wake, sweating with terror, to see Del twitching in his dreams.]

November 18:

Cutter died again today. We sent the video file (lacking its final seconds) to our Australian sponsors, asking them to break the news to Cutter’s family. Andy wrote a beautiful letter from all of us, mostly a eulogy I guess, talking about Cutter and what it was like to be here now that he was dead. She did a brilliant job of making it clear that we were staying without making us sound too heartless or shallow. So this is us made honest again, and somehow I miss Cutter more now, as though until we told the outside world his death hadn’t quite been real. I keep thinking, I wish he was here—but then I remember that he is, outside in the cold. Maybe I’ll go keep him company for a while.

[The laptop screen is brighter than the plastic windows of the hut, the image perfectly clear.]

The camera jogs to the videographer’s footsteps, the mic picks up the styrofoam squeak of snowshoes. There’s the team on the move, two bearded men and a lanky woman taller than either, in red and blue and green parkas, gaudy against the drifting snow. The camera stops for a circle pan: gray sky, white surface broken into cracks and tilting slabs. Blown snow swirls and hisses; a line of orange flags snaps and shudders in the wind. The videographer [me] sways to the gusts, or the ice-island flexes as it spins across its watery dance floor. Full circle: the three explorers up ahead now, the one in green reaching into the snow-haze to plant more flags.

[blip]

Broken ice terrain, the sound of panting breath. Atlantis as a glacier once traveled some of the roughest volcanic plains on the planet, and these fault-lines show how rough it was, the ice all but shattered here. You have to wonder how long it’s going to hold together.
Hey!
The explorer in blue gives a sweeping wave.
You guys! You have to see this!
Shaky movement over tilted slabs of ice, a lurch—

[blip]

A crevasse, not so deep as the one near camp, with the shape of a squared-off comma. In the angle, ice pillars stand almost free of the walls. Blue-white ice rough with breakage. Slabs caught in the crevasse’s throat.

[Miguel, watching at my shoulder, says, “That’s not what we saw. You know that’s not what we saw!”]

November 20:

Miguel keeps playing the video of today’s trek. Over and over, his voice shouts
You have to see this!
through the laptop’s speakers. Over and over. Del’s so fed up with it he’s gone off to our hut and I’m tempted to join him, but it’s hard to tear myself away. Andy isn’t watching anymore, but she’s still in the main hut, listening to our voices—hushed, strained, hesitant with awe—talk about the structures (buildings? vehicles? Diving platforms, Andy’s voice speculates) that the camera stubbornly refused to record. At first I thought Miguel was trying to find what we saw in these images of raw ice, but now I wonder if what he’s really trying to do is erase his memory and replace it with the camera’s. I finally turned away and booted my own computer, opening the earlier files of the first ice-shapes I found. Still there? Yes. But now I wonder:
could
they be natural formations?

Could we be so shaken up by Cutter’s death that we’re building a shared fantasy of the bizarre?

I don’t believe that. We’ve all been tested, over and over, on mountains and deserts, in ocean deeps and tiny boats out in the vast Pacific. Miguel’s told his stories about the mind-companions he dreamed up in his long, lonely journey, about how important they became to him even though he always knew they were imaginary. I’ve been in whiteouts where the blowing snow deludes the eyes into seeing improbable things. Once, in the Andes, Cutter and I were huddled back-to-back, wrapped in survival blankets, waiting for the wind to die and the visibility to increase beyond 2 feet, and I saw a bus drive by, a big diesel city bus. I had to tell Cutter what I was laughing about. He thought I was nuts.

So we’ve all been there, and though we all know what kinds of crazy notions people get when they’re pushed to extremes—I’ve heard oxygen-starved climbers propose some truly lunatic ideas when they’re tired—we aren’t anything close to that state. Fed, rested, as warm as could be expected . . . No.

But if we all saw what we think we saw, then why didn’t the camera see it too?

[Bubbles rise past the camera’s lens. The mic catches the gurgle of the respirator, the groaning of the iceberg, the science fiction sound effects of Weddell seals.]

The camera moves beneath a cathedral ceiling of ice. Great blue vaults and glassy pillars hang above the cold black deeps, sanctuary for the alien life forms of this bitter sea. Fringed jellies and jellies like winged cucumbers, huge red shrimp and tiny white ones, skates and spiders and boney fish with plated jaws. Algae paints the ice with living glyphs in murky green and brown, like lichen graffiti scrawled on a ruin’s walls. Air, the alien element, puddles on the ceiling, trapped. The water seems clear, filled with the haunting light that filters through the ice, but out in the farther reaches of the cathedral the light turns opaquely blue, the color of a winter dusk, and below there is no light at all. Bubbles spiral upward, beads of mercury that pool in the hollows of the cathedral ceiling, forming a fluid air-body that glides along the water-smoothed ice. It moves with all the determination of a living thing, seeking the highest point. [The camera follows; bubbles rise; the air-creature grows.] The ceiling vault soars upwards, smeared with algae [zoom in; does it shape pictures, words?] and full of strange swimming life [are there shadows coiling at the farthest edges of the frame?], and it narrows as it rises to a rough chimney. Water has smoothed this icy passage, sculpted it into a flute, a flower stem . . . a birth canal. The air-body takes on speed, rising unencumbered into brighter and brighter light. The upward passage branches into tunnels and more air-bodies appear, as shapeless and fluid as the first. Walls of clear ice are like windows into another frozen sea where other creatures hang suspended, clearer than jellyfish and more strange. And then the camera [lens streaked and running with droplets] rises from the water [how?], ascending a rough crevice in the ice. The air-bodies, skinned in water—or have they been water all along?—are still rising too, sliding with fluid grace through the ice-choked cracks in the widening passage. [The videographer sliding through too: how?] The host seeks out the highest places and at last comes up into the open air—ice still rising in towering walls but with nothing but the sky above. Gray sky, blue-white ice, a splash of red. What is this? Fluid, many-limbed, curious, the water-beings flow weightlessly toward the splash of scarlet [blood]. They taste [blood], absorb [blood], until each glassy creature is tinted with the merest thread of red.

[And I close the file, my hands shaking as if with deadly cold, because these images are impossible. I’m awake, and my camera shows battery drain, and none of us, not even Andy, came prepared to dive in this deadly sea.]

November 22:

Miguel watched the impossible video and then walked out of the tent without a word. Andy sat staring at the blank screen, arms wrapped tight around her chest. And after a long silence, Del said calmly, “Nice effects.” I knew what he meant—that I was hoaxing them, or someone was hoaxing me—but I can’t buy it. Even if any of us had the will we don’t have the expertise. We’re explorers, not CG fucking animators. And who made us see what we saw in that inland crevasse? Who’s going to make the evidence of that disappear on the one hand, and then fake a school of aliens on the other?

“Aliens,” Andy said, her face blank and her eyes still fixed on the screen. “Aliens? No. They belong here. They’re the ones that belong.”

“Hey,” I said, not liking the deadness in her tone. “Andy.”

“Screw this,” Del said, and he left too.

Miguel’s not in camp. It took us far too long to realize it, but we spent most of the day apart, Andy in her hut, Del in ours, me in the big one brooding over my video files. We left the tents up for extra retreat/storage/work spaces and Miguel could have been in one of them—Andy assumed he was, since he wasn’t in the hut they share—but when Del finally pulled us together for a meal we couldn’t find him. And the wind is rising, howling through the satellite relay station’s struts and wires—wires that are growing white with ice. The wind has brought us a freezing fog that reeks of brine. If it were Del out there I could trust him to hunker down and wait for the visibility to clear, but does Miguel the sailor have that kind of knowledge? We all did the basic survival course at McMurdo, but the instructors knew as well as Del and I that there’s a world of difference between knowing the rules and living them. The instinct in bad weather is to seek shelter, and god knows it’s hard to trust to a reflective blanket thin enough to carry in your pocket. But it’s worse not to be able to trust your comrade to do the smart thing. We’re all angry at Miguel, even Andy. He’s put us all at risk. Because of course we have to go and find him.

November 24:

We’re back. McMurdo’s relay station is an ice sculpture and our sat phone, even with its own antenna, isn’t working. I don’t know what we’re going to do.

We went after Miguel, the three of us roped up and carrying packs. Our best guess was that he’d gone back to the crevasse where we saw, or didn’t see, the buildings, structures, vehicles—whatever they were in the ice. So we followed the line of orange flags inland. Standing by one you could see the next, and barely discern the next after that, which put the visibility roughly at 6 meters. But with the icy fog blasting your face and your breath fogging up your goggles, the world contracts very quickly to within the reach of your arms. Walking point is hard, but it’s better than shuffling along at the end of the rope, fighting the temptation to put too much trust in a tiring leader. I was glad when Del let me up front after the first hour. Andy, who has the least experience with this kind of weather, stayed between us, roped to either end.

A long hike in bad weather. The sun, already buried behind ugly clouds, grazed the horizon, and the day contracted to a blue-white dusk. We huddled in a circle, knee-to-knee, with our packs as a feeble windbreak. I fell into a fugue state. The blued-out haze went deep and cold and still, like water chilled almost to the point of freezing. The wind was so constant it no longer registered; the hiss of it against our parkas became the hiss of water pressure on my ears. And the whiteout began to build its illusions. Walls rose in the haze, weirdly angled, impossibly over-hung. Strange voices mouthed heavy, bell-like, underwater sounds. Something massive seemed to pass behind me without footsteps, its movement only stirring the water-air like a submarine cutting a wake. No different than the bus I saw on that Andean mountain, except that Andy jerked against me while Del muttered a curse.

And then the ground moved.

Ground: the packed snow and ice we sat upon. It gave a small buoyant heave, making us all gasp, and then shuddered. A tremor, no worse than the one I’d sat through when I was visiting Andy in Wellington, but at that instant all illusion that Atlantis was an island died. This was an iceberg, already melting and flawed to its core, and there was nothing below it but the ocean. Another small heave. Stillness. And then a sound to drive you insane, a deep immense creaking moan that might have come from some behemoth’s throat. I grabbed for Del. Andy grabbed for me.

The ice went mad.

We were shaken like rats in a terrier’s mouth. The toe spikes on someone’s snowshoes, maybe my own, gouged me in the calf. I didn’t even notice it at the time. We lurched about, helpless as passengers in a falling plane, and all the time that ungodly noise, hugely bellowing, tugged at flesh and bone. I knew for a certainty that Atlantis was breaking up and that we were all already dead, just breathing by reflex for a few seconds more. I flashed on Cutter falling, knowing he was dead long before he hit the ground. I was glad we’d told his folks, glad Andy had sent that beautiful letter, eulogy for us all. And then the ice went still.

I lay a moment, hardly noticing the tangle we were in, my whole being focused on that silence. Quiet, quiet, like the final moment in free fall, the last timeless instant before the bottom. But it stretched on, and on, and finally we all picked ourselves up, still unable to believe we were alive. “Jesus,” Del said, and I had to laugh.

We went on, me in the middle this time because of my limp, with Andy bringing up the rear. Tossed around as we had been, none of us was sure of our directions, and because of the berg’s motion GPS and compass were both useless. Blown snow and fog-ice erased our footprints as well as Miguel’s. In the end all we could do was follow the line of flags in the direction of our best guess and resolve that if it led us back to camp, we would turn and head straight back out again. I was feeling Miguel’s absence very much by then, so much so that a fourth figure haunted the edges of my vision, teasing me with false presence. But maybe that was Cutter, not Miguel.

Flags lay scattered among huge tilted slabs of packed snow. We replanted the slender poles as best we could, and by this time I was starting to hope we
had
been turned around and were heading back to camp. If the berg-quake had scattered the whole line of flags they were likely to be buried by the time we turned around, and if they were, we were screwed. But we couldn’t do anything but what we were already doing. We clambered through the broken ice field, hampered by the rope between us and already tired from the wind. Del got impatient and Andy snapped that she was doing the best she could. “You’re fine,” I said. “Del, ease off.” He went silent. We re-roped and I took point, limp and all.

Spires of ice rose like jagged minarets above the broken terrain. Great pillars, crystalline arches, thin translucent walls. Scrambling with my eyes always on the next flag, I took the ice structures for figments of the whiteout at first, but then we were in among them and the wind died into fitful gusts. The line of flags ended, irredeemably scattered, unless this was its proper end and the former crevasse was utterly transformed. It was beautiful. Even exhausted and afraid I could see that, and while Andy shouted for Miguel and Del hunkered over our packs digging out the camp stove and food, I pulled out my camera.