At the Edge of Waking Read online

  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.

  Glaciers (of which Atlantis was one) form in layers, one season’s snow falling on the last, so they are horizontally stratified. But glaciers also move, flowing down from the inland heights of the continent, and that movement over uneven ground breaks vertical fault lines like this crevasse all through the vast body of ice. So any glacial ice-face is going to bear a complex stratigraphy, a sculpting of horizontal and vertical lines. This is part of ice’s beauty, this sculptural richness of form, color, light, that can catch your heart and make you ache with wonder. And because it is the kind of harmony artists strive for, it’s easy to see the hand of an artist in what lies before you.

  But no. I’ve seen the wind-carved hoodoos in the American southwest and I’ve seen the vast stone heads of Rapa Nui, and I know the difference between the imagination that draws a figure out of natural shapes and the potent recognition of the artifact. These shapes [I zoom 20%, 40%] in the ice have all the mystery and meaning of Mayan glyphs, at once angular and organic, three-dimensional, fitting together as much like parts in a machine as words on a page. What are they? I’ve been on glaciers from the Rockies to the Andes and I’ve never seen anything like this. My hands itch for my rope and my axes. I want to see what’s really there.

  November 13:

  I wondered if Del would object to another climb—he came up from retrieving Cutter stunned and pale—but the big argument came from Miguel who talked about safety and responsibility to the group. I said, “Have you looked at the pictures?” and he said, “All I see is ice.” But Miguel’s a sailor, one of the around-the-world-in-a-tiny-boat-alone kind, and ice is what he keeps his daily catch in. Andy said he had a point about safety, if things go really wrong we’re going to need one another, but she kept giving my laptop uneasy looks, knowing she’d seen something inexplicable.

  I said, “Isn’t this why we’re here? To explore?”

  “What if it’s important?” Andy said, changing tack. “What if it really is something? The scientists should be studying it, not us.”

  “Ice formations,” Miguel said. “How important is that? It’s all going to melt in the end.”

  “Are we always going to argue like this?” This from Del. “If we’re going to quit, then let’s get on the satellite phone and get the helo back here to pick us up.”

  “I’m just saying,” Miguel said, but Del cut him off.

  “No. We knew why we were doing this when we started. I hate that Cutter’s dead, but I wouldn’t have come to begin with if we’d laid different ground rules, and if we’re going to change now I don’t want to be here. I’ve got other things to do.”

  I backed him up. This was supposed to be our big lawless adventure, colonizing a chunk of unreal estate that’s going to melt away to nothing in a couple of years—not for nationalism or wealth—maybe for fame a little—but mostly because we wanted to be outside the rules, on the far side of every border in the world. Which is, I said, where death lies, too.

  Taking it too far, as usual. Andy gave me another of those who-are-you looks, but I fixed her with a look of my own. “Get beyond it,” I said. “Get beyond it, or why the hell are we here?”

  And then I remembered why these people are my closest friends, my chosen family, because they did finally give up the good-citizen roles and tapped into that excitement that was charging the air. Most people would think us heartless, inhuman, but a real climber would understand: we loved Cutter more, not less, by moving on. Going beyond, as he has already done.

  So Del and I roped up again and went down.

  [The images come in scraps and fragments as the videographer starts and stops the camera.]

  The angle of light changes with the spinning of the iceberg in the circumpolar current. For this brief hour it slices into the depths of the crevasse, almost perfectly aligned with the break in the ice. So is the wind, the constant hard westerly that blows across the mic, a deep hollow blustering. Ice chips shine in the sunlight as they flee the climber’s crampons kicking into the crevasse wall. The tethered rope trails down into the broken depths. Everywhere is ice.

  [blip]

  The crevasse wall in close up. Too close. [The videographer leans out from a three-point anchor: one ax, two titanium-bladed feet.] Light gleams from the surface, ice coated in a molecule-thick skin of melt water, shining. All surface, no depth. Shit, the videographer [me] says. Look, the other climber [Del] says. The camera eye turns toward him, beard and shades and helmet. He points out of the frame. A dizzying turn, the bright gulf of the crevasse, the far wall. More shapes, and Christ they’re big. The crevasse is only three meters wide a
t this point, and measuring them against a climber’s length, they’re huge, on the order of cars and buses, great whites and orca whales.

  [blip]

  A lower angle. [Pause, zoom in, zoom out.] These shapes swirl through the ice like bubbles in an ice cube, subtle in the depths. Ice formations, Miguel said. Ice of a different consistency, a different density? Ice is ice, water molecules shaped into a lattice of extraordinary strength and beauty. The lattice under pressure doesn’t change. Deep ice is only different because air has been forced out, leaving the lattice pristine. So what is this? The camera’s focus draws back. They’re still there, vast shapes in the ice. The wind blusters against the mic.

  [blip]

  The floor of the crevasse—not that a berg crevasse has a floor. There’s no mountain down there, only water 3 degrees above freezing. But the crack narrows and is choked with chunks of ice and packed drifts of snow, making a kind of bottom, though a miserable one to negotiate on foot. The camera swings wildly as the videographer flails to keep her balance. Blue ice walls, white ice rubble, a flash of red—Cutter’s frozen blood on an ice tusk not too far away.

  [blip]

  A still shot at last. A smooth shard of ice as big as a man, snow-caked except where Del is sweeping it clear with his ax handle. It could be, he says panting, or part of one. My own voice, sounding strange as it always does on the wrong side of my eardrums: So it broke out when the crevasse formed? Del polishes the ice with his mitts. The camera closes in on his hands, the clear ice underneath his palms. It is ice. The videographer’s hand reaches into the frame to touch the surface. Ice, impossibly coiled like an angular ammonite shell.

  November 15:

  Del and I hauled the ice-shape up in the rescue sled as if it was another body, but by the time we had it at the surface the constant westerly, always strong, was getting stronger, and Miguel was urgent about battening down the camp. We’d been lazy, seduced by the rare summer sun, and now, with clouds piling up into the blue sky, we had to cut snow blocks and pile them into wind breaks—and never mind the bloody huts that should have been set up first thing. Saw blocks of styrofoam-like snow, pry them out of the quarry, stack them around the tents and gear, all the time with the wind heaving you toward the east, burning your face through your balaclava, slicing through every gap in your clothes. The snow that cloaks the upper surface of the berg blows like a hallucinatory haze, a Dracula mist that races, hissing in fury, toward the east. It scours your weather gear, would scour your flesh off your bones if you were mad enough to strip down.

  The bright tents bob and shiver. McMurdo’s satellite relay station on its strut-and-wire tower whines and howls and thrums—Christ, that’s going to drive me mad. Clouds swallow the sun, the distant water goes a dreadful shade of gray. And this isn’t a spell of bad weather, this is the norm. Cherish those first sunny days, we tell each other, huddled in the big tent with our mugs of instant cocoa. Summer or not, this gray howling beast of a wind is here to stay. Andy uplinks on her laptop, downloads the shipping advisories, such as they are for this empty bit of sea. There are deep-sea fishing boats out here, a couple of research vessels, the odd navy ship, but the Southern Ocean is huge and traffic is sparse. We joke about sending a Mayday—engine failure! we’re adrift!—but in fact we’re a navigation hazard, and the sobering truth is that if it came down to rescue, we could only be picked up by helicopter: there’s no disembarking from the tall rough ice-cliffs that form our berg-ship’s hull. And land-based helos have a very short flight range indeed.

  Like most sobering truths, this one failed to sober us. Castaways on our drifting island, we turned the music up loud, played a few hands of poker, told outrageous stories, and went early to bed, worn out with the hard work, the cold, the wind. And for absolutely no reason I thought, with Del puffing his silent snores in my ear, We’re too few, we’re going to hate each other by the end. And then I thought of Cutter lying cold and lonesome in the snow.

  November 16:

  Another work day, getting the huts up in the teeth of the wind. Miguel, sailor to his bones, is a fanatic for organization. I’m not, except for my climbing gear, but I know he’s right. We need to be able to find things in an emergency. More than that, we need to keep sane and civilized, we need our private spaces and our occupations. We also need to keep on top of the observations we promised McMurdo if we want to keep their good will—more important than ever with Cutter dead—which was my excuse for dragging Andy away from camp while the men argued about how to stash the crates. Visibility wasn’t bad and we laid our first line of flags from the camp to the berg’s nearest edge. Waist-high orange beacons, they snapped and chattered in our wake.

  Berg cliffs are insanely dangerous because bergs don’t mildly dwindle like ice cubes in a G&T. They break up as they melt, softened chunks dropping away from the chilled core, mini-bergs calving off the wallowing parent. All the same, the temptation to look off the edge was too powerful, so we sidled up to it and peered down to where the blue-white cliff descended into the water and became a brighter, sleeker blue. The water was clearer than you might suppose, and since we were on the lee edge there wasn’t much surf. We looked down a long way. Andy grabbed my arm. “Look!” she said, but I was already pulling out the camera.

  [Tight focus only seems to capture the water’s surface. As the angle widens the swimming shadows come into view.]

  Deep water is black, so the shapes aren’t silhouettes, they’re dim figures lit from above, their images refracted through swirling water. Algae grows on ice, krill eat the algae, fish eat the krill, sharks and whales and seals and squids and penguins and god knows what eat the fish. God knows what. The mic picks up me and Andy arguing over what we’re seeing. They move so fluidly they must be seals, I propose, seals being the acrobats of the sea. Could be dolphins, Andy counters, but when the camera lifts to the farther surface [when I, for once, take my eyes off the view screen and look unmediated] we see no mammal snouts lifting for air. Sharks, I say, but sharks don’t coil and turn and dive, smooth and fluid as silk scarves on the breeze, do they? Giant squid, Andy says, and the camera’s focus tightens, trying to discern tentacles and staring eyes. Gray water, blue-white ice. Refocus. The dim shapes are gone.

  November 17:

  The huts are up and we sent a ridiculously expensive email to our sponsors, thanking them for the luxuries they provided: chairs, tables, insulated floors—warm feet—bliss. Andy uploaded our carefully edited log to our website while she was online, saying that Cutter had been hurt in a climbing mishap and was resting. We’d agreed on this lie—having failed to report his death immediately, there seemed no meaningful difference between telling his folks days or months late—but once it was posted I realized, too late, what we were in for. Not just hiding his death, but faking his life, his doings, his messages to his family. “We can’t do this,” I said, and Andy met my eyes, agreeing.

  “Too late,” Del said.

  “No,” Andy said. “We’ll say he died tomorrow.”

  “We can’t leave now,” said Miguel. “We just got set up.”

  “We can’t do this,” I said again. “Him dying is one thing. Faking him being still alive is unforgivable. Andy’s right. We have to say he died tomorrow.”

  “They’ll pull us off,” said Del.

  “Who will?” I said, because we’re not really under anyone’s jurisdiction. “Listen, if his folks want to pay for a helo to come out from McMurdo—”

  “We’re too far,” Andy said, “it’d have to be a navy rescue.”

  “They can get his body now or wait until we’re in shouting distance of New Zealand,” I said. “If we upload the video—”

  “We can’t make a show of it!” Miguel said.

  “Why not?” Del said. “It’s what people want to see.”

  “We can send it to the Aussies,” I said, “to show how he died. It was a climbing accident, no crime, no blame. If they want the body, they can have it.”

  Del was convin
ced that someone—who? the UN?—was going to arrest us and drag us off for questioning, but I just couldn’t see it. Someone’s navy hauling a bunch of Commonwealth loonies off an iceberg at gunpoint because a climber died doing something rash? No. The Australians wouldn’t love us, god knows Cutter’s parents wouldn’t, but nobody was going to that kind of effort, expense, and risk for us.

  “So why the fuck didn’t you say so two days ago?” Del said to me.

  “Well,” I said, “my friend had just died and I wasn’t thinking straight. How about you?”

  [The camera’s light is on, enhancing the underwater glow of the blue four-man tent.]

  The coiled ice-shape gleams as if it were on the verge of melting, but the videographer’s breath steams in the cold. The videographer [me] is fully dressed in cold-weather gear, a parka sleeve moving in and out of view. The camera circles the ice-shape in a slow, uneven pan [me inching around on my knees] and you can see that the shape isn’t a snail-shell coil, it’s more like a 3D Celtic knot, where only one line is woven through so many volutions that the eye is deceived into thinking the one is many. The camera rises [me getting to my feet] and takes the overview. There, not quite at center, like a yoke in an egg: the heart of the knot. What? The camera’s focus narrows. In the gleaming glass-blue depths of the ice, an eye opens. An eye as big as my fist, translucent and alien as a squid’s. The camera’s view jolts back [me falling against the tent wall] and only the edge of the frame catches the fluid uncoiling of the ice shape, a motion so smooth and effortless it’s as though we’re underwater. The camera’s frame falls away, dissolves, and then there’s only me in the blue-lighted tent, me with this fluid alien thing swirling around me like an octopus in a too-small aquarium, opening its limbs for a swift, cold embrace—