Arctic

V Mag at UVA

In Antarctica, the sun shines almost twenty-four hours a day in the summer. This is the hardest thing to adjust to, the way time warps and buckles into something that feels like swimming through a half-frozen lake, your circadian rhythms regulated by false sunsets in the tent and time zones that don’t exist anywhere else in the world. It is a fickle thing, the way time works in the Arctic. 

The cold — the cold is bearable. 

He didn’t think it would be. The night before he shipped out, he lay in his bed cocooned in a comforter and his wife’s arms and was sure he’d never feel warm again, imagining this was his last day on earth before rocketing off to a strange, alien world. 

But the body adjusts, adapts, and then your bones go numb. Warmth becomes a lukewarm cup of coffee in the morning and socks that aren’t completely frozen into crunchy layers of fabric. 

In the mornings, when his team takes the TIGER out to Law Dome, he lets himself feel the chill of the biting wind, inhales deeply and smells layers of sunscreen and sweat and fish from little tins. He stares out the window at the frozen expanse before him and forgets to breathe. For a second he is back in the plane that brought him here on that first day, nothing but endless white below him, above him, that strange out-of-body feeling and the cold. Then he flexes his toes in his boots, inhales, and it is time to work. 

Just south of Cape Poinsett, Law Dome is really nothing remarkable — yet another hill of crisp snow and ice in a desert full of the stuff. What’s underneath layers and layers of hard ground is what his team is after, sheets of ice timestamped neatly by the amount of historical

oxygen trapped in tiny little air pockets, air with infinitely valuable information. His team will melt cores of ice in a vacuum chamber so they aren’t contaminated by today’s air, and then they’ll analyze the water for CO2levels, hunting for tiny little hydroxyl radicals in charge of scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere that will tell the team how many degrees the world has heated since the 1800s. 

“This is the stuff that will change the world,” his supervisor had told him, eyes bright, when he first applied for this job, fresh out of grad school, copies of geology journals where his name had been printed stacked neatly on his bedside table, Mark Hadley contributed to this research. He remembers those late nights at the kitchen table, Lena bringing him cups of coffee and dozing off on the couch as he slogged through his dissertation, anxious to get out of that tiny house and into the real world, the opportunity of a lifetime. This is what he repeats to himself in the mornings, as he pulls on six layers of half-frozen clothes, shoves his feet into a pair of boots, reminds himself that this is what he wants, what he’s worked for. 

In a large tent right on top of the dome, the team of seven drills, melts, packs, analyzes. Most of the time it is too cold or too loud to talk, so they work in silence, moving up and down the drill trench where the ice cores are carefully inspected and wrapped in netting for protection. He does not let his mind wander off course from bell curves and hydrogen bonds, and today the manual work is comforting, repetitive, nothing unexpected. 

“Mark!” someone shouts, and he jerks up from the winch he’s been monitoring to find Lee, a junior chemist and the youngest member of the team who had come back from a vacation a few weeks ago, waving him down with a gloved hand. His cheeks are bright red from the cold, his blonde hair sticking up in every direction, and Mark has the sudden urge to offer him a comb, to smooth his hair down like a child’s.

“What?” He has to shout to be heard over the drill, and his voice cracks from the cold. “We’re going to base tonight and you’re on rotation if you need to check emails or something. Still want to come?” 

Amundsen-Scott Station is the base camp all the field teams report to, one of the only places on the continent where you can get internet. If the iridium satellites are lined up correctly, you can even get a phone call, the only place you can connect back to reality. “Sure,” he says. 

He hates Scott Station. 

When it’s his turn to use the computer that weekend, there’s an email from his wife with the subject line “lawyer needs this back ASAP.” He knew it would be there, and yet he does not want to open it. He wraps his hands around his mug of coffee, exhales and watches his breath dissipate in front of him — you can see your breath even at Scott Station, where the generators are considerably stronger than those at the Law Dome camp. He thinks of his cells, of his diaphragm, the bronchioles in his lungs, of the oxygen and the CO2 he pumps back into the world. 

In, out. 

He opens the email, stares at a PDF of a document fifteen-pages long titled “Settlement Agreement.” He doesn’t read it. He stares at a small chip in the mug he’s holding, a crack edging its way down the side. The gold band on his left hand that he can’t bring himself to take off. 

When he was a child, his mother had forbidden him and his brother to play in the dining room, where she kept a variety of nice china, plates they weren’t allowed to eat on or touch or do anything you’d normally do with plates. Of course, it was only a matter of time before he and his

brother, prone to disobeying any direction not to do something, had dropped a plate, breaking it into six jagged pieces. 

He remembers the way his brother, brow furrowed with concentration, had carefully glued each piece back together, at the end inspecting his handiwork. 

“Perfect,” his brother had declared, but of course it wasn’t. The evidence was there, hairline fractures that were perfectly obvious if you looked closely enough, and when his mother pulled out the set for Christmas that year the plate had fallen apart in her hands. 

The first time he came home to Lena, after six months of relentless cold, he watched his daughter lose her first tooth and taught his son how to ride a bike. They miss you, she’d said, leaning against the doorframe of their bathroom one day while he shaved, watching his hand shake. I know, I know, he replied, and he felt himself bracing for what he could see was coming next. Come home, she said, come back to us, and he had to explain, again, that he couldn’t, that they needed him there, that he was going to change the world. 

What about us? We need you here, please, she said, and he could see something twisting in the air in front of them, something icy and delicate, and then their daughter ran in crying because she’d skinned her knee on the pavement outside. Lena put a bright pink bandage over the wound and warmth returned to Mark’s body. 

And then later that night Lena sat at their tiny kitchen table and sobbed, saying again and again that he needed to come home. He was crying, too, and then they shouted at each other the way people do when there are children asleep in the next room and she threw a plate into the sink so hard it shattered. 

They hadn’t bothered gluing it back together — it wasn’t worth the trouble. Mark takes a deep

breath and types his name on the dotted line, emails it back to Lena.

She called him last week on the satellite phone, begging him to respond to her messages about the kids, about the life insurance policy, about how much he needs to pay in alimony. He sat, listening to her voice, thinking about the Earth heating up two degrees in the past year and the declining ratio of hydroxyl atoms and what that’ll mean for his kids, if the planet will even be fucking habitable in the next twenty years, alimony or no, and then Lena started to cry. 

He pretended to have a bad connection when this happened and then he hung up and went to stand outside and unzipped his jacket so his chest and everything underneath it went numb. The team eats dinner together at the station, enjoying fresh vegetables grown in the tiny greenhouse a few rooms down from the mess hall. Someone has drawn the blackout curtains over the windows, and the lights are dim now, a semblance of evening settling over the cramped room. 

Lee arrives at the table a few minutes late grinning like a madman, running his hands through his hair so it sticks up and tapping his foot relentlessly against his chair. He doesn’t say anything, just shovels green beans into his mouth and darts his gaze around the table until Dan, their supervisor, cracks. 

“What is wrong with you?” 

Lee takes a breath and sets his fork on his plate. “Celia is pregnant.” 

For a second there is silence as the group takes in this news, and then they erupt with congratulations, pats on the back, whooping. 

Mark has never met Celia, but he remembers suddenly the homemade birthday cake Lee brought to the base after he had been home a few months, easily the best cake Mark had ever eaten. He remembers the swirls of pink frosting along the edges, the way Lee had eaten three

pieces and settled back into a chair and declared, this is the woman I’m going to spend the rest of my life with. 

Lee beams proudly as the group chatters on and Mark forces the corners of his mouth up, coughs out a “congratulations,” and then his chest starts to ache and he has to get up. He stumbles outside and takes in a stinging breath, standing under the glaring sun and hoping his nose won’t get sunburnt even though it’s eight at night, remembering a day in March almost six years ago where Lena met him at a restaurant, her eyes bright and cheeks flushed, and declined a glass of wine with her hand settled over her stomach. He didn’t notice, took far too long to realize, and when he finally did they both cried, right there in the restaurant. 

He is alarmed to realize that he’s not sure what happened next, if he kissed her or told her he loved her. Standing there, he can’t even remember what her face looks like. He’s twisting the band on his finger before he even realizes he’s doing it, the metal so cold it feels like it’s burning. 

Back in the mess hall, Lee is talking about clothes and saving for college and nurseries. Someone has procured a bottle of champagne, one of the few hidden away for special events like this. The room shimmers. Mark watches as Lee bounces from person to person, talking so animatedly with his hands that he knocks over a glass and has to sop it up with a handful of paper towels. 

Later, in his bunk at Law Dome, Mark lies awake and breathes, wondering if in a few years scientists will study the air rushing out of his lungs for information that will change the world, and then Lee rolls over in his bunk, eyes brimming and cheeks red, and whispers to Mark that he is afraid for what comes next. 

“You won’t ever not be afraid,” Mark says, and Lee stretches out in his bunk and laughs quietly. His hope is blinding.

In two weeks, Lee and a few others on the team will take a routine helicopter flight past the McMurdo Ice Shelf to Ross Island to deliver an important set of samples to the New Zealand research team. Mark will sit in his bunk, pouring over a thick sheaf of paper about cosmic rays and radiocarbon atoms while chewing on a dried piece of beef jerky, and the helicopter will not make it back to Law Dome. 

A search and rescue team will be sent out, and they will find the wreckage of the Sikorsky S76 in a heap forty miles south of the tent. Dan will deliver this news with a strange hollowness, and Mark will remember the way the tears burn on his cheeks, the way the salt tastes in his mouth. Dan and Mark and those who remain will watch as the search and rescue helicopter whirs past them, carrying what none of them will dare think about. 

Mark will call his wife and they will both cry, something irreversible and irretrievable stretching between his continent and hers, and he will take off his wedding band and push it down into his coat pocket. He will remember going fishing with his grandfather, a tiny pontoon boat in Louisiana where he spent the summers as a kid. He was always sticky there, always sweating and nauseous, and he will remember being told to train his eyes on the horizon. Your body will adjust, it will orient, his grandfather said. It will figure out where it is in relation to the rest of the world. 

After, he will stand out in the cold and take his gloves off under that perpetual sun and wait until his hands and body are no longer connected. 

This is the sort of thing that will make a real difference. 

He will stand until snot and tears freeze on his cheeks, staring at the horizon until he remembers the shape of his wife’s face, until breathing stops hurting. 

The team needs you here. You’re an essential piece.

He will see his name in print again, see his research published. He will see the way the world reacts, see the way they resist change. 

I need you here, Mark, please, come home. 

        He will remember Louisiana heat, tomato sandwiches, his grandfather’s wrinkled hands and a sharp, small knife removing scales from flesh. Mosquitoes and sweat, now bracing winds, piles of snow, food in shiny tins. 

Time spirals, splinters. Mark will feel, he feels, the weight of his life pressing into the tops of his shoulders. An aching in his spine. Before this sunrise Lee was alive. Now he is not. He will feel stupidly lucky and nauseatingly guilty, and he will breathe again, and that is the way the world will turn.