My Last Continent (3 page)

He crumples on the tent floor, and I strip off his parka and his boots and socks. Water spills over Thom's sleeping bag and onto his books. “Take off your clothes,” I say, turning away to rummage through Thom's things. I toss the man a pair of sweats, the only thing of Thom's that will stretch to fit his tall frame, and two pairs of thick socks. I also find a couple of T-shirts and an oversize sweater, and by the time I turn back to him, the man has put on the sweats and is feebly attempting the socks. His hands are shaking so badly he can hardly control them. Impatiently, I reach over to help, yanking the socks onto his feet.

“What the hell were you thinking?” I demand. I hardly look at him as I take off his shirt and help him squeeze into Thom's sweater. I turn on a battery-powered blanket and unzip Thom's sleeping bag. “Get in,” I say. “You need to warm up.”

His whole body shudders. He climbs in and pulls the blanket up to cover his shoulders.

“What are you doing here?” I, too, am shaking from the cold. “What the hell happened?”

He lifts his eyes, briefly. “The boat—it left me behind.”

“That's impossible.” I stare at him, but he won't look at me. “The
Cormorant
always does head counts. No one's ever been left behind.”

He shrugs. “Until now.”

I think about the chaos of earlier that day. It's conceivable that this stranger could have slipped through the cracks. And it would be just my luck.

“I'm calling Palmer. Someone will have to come out to take you back.” I rise to my knees, eager to go first to my tent for dry clothes, then to the supply tent, where we keep the radio.

I feel his hand on my arm. “Do you have to do that just yet?” He smiles, awkwardly, his teeth knocking together. “It's just that—I've been here so long already, and I'm not ready to face the ship. It's embarrassing, to be honest with you.”

“Don't you have someone who knows you're missing?” I regard him for the first time as a man rather than an alien in my world. His face is pale and clammy, its lines suggesting he is older than I am, perhaps in his mid-forties. I glance down to look for a wedding band, but his fingers are bare. Following my gaze, he tucks his hands under the blanket. Then he shakes his head. “I'm traveling alone.”

“Have you taken any medication? For seasickness?”

“No,” he says. “I don't get seasick.”

“Well,” I say, “we need to get someone out here to take you back to the
Cormorant
.”

He looks at me directly for the first time. “Don't,” he says.

I'm still kneeling on the floor of the tent. “What do you expect to do, stay here?” I ask. “You think no one will figure out you're missing?”

He doesn't answer. “Look,” I tell him, “it was an accident. No one's going to blame you for getting left behind.”

“It wasn't an accident,” he says. “I saw that other guy fall. I watched everything. I knew that if I stayed they wouldn't notice me missing.”

So he is crazy after all.

I stand up. “I'll be right back.”

He reaches up and grasps my wrist so fast I don't have time
to pull away. I'm surprised by how quickly his strength has returned. I ease back down to my knees, and he loosens his grip. He looks at me through tired, heavy eyes—a silent plea. He's not scary, I realize then, but scared.

“In another month,” I tell him, as gently as I can manage, “the ocean will freeze solid, and so will everything else, including you.”

“What about you?”

“In a couple weeks, I'm leaving, too. Everyone leaves.”

“Even the penguins?” The question, spoken through clattering teeth, lends him an innocence that almost makes me forgive his intrusions.

“Yes,” I say. “Even they go north.”

He doesn't respond. I stand up and head straight to the radio in our supply tent, hardly thinking about my wet clothes. Just as I'm contacting Palmer, I realize that I don't know the man's name. I go back and poke my head inside. “Dennis Marshall,” he says.

The dispatcher at Palmer tells me that they'll pick Dennis up in the morning, when they bring Thom back. “Unless it's an emergency,” he says. “Everything okay?”

I want to tell him it's not okay, that this man could be crazy, dangerous, sick. Instead I pause, then say, “We're fine. Tell Thom we'll see him in the morning.”

I return to the tent. Dennis has not moved.

“What were you doing in the water?” I ask.

“Thought I'd try to catch up to the boat,” he says.

“Very funny. I'm serious.”

He doesn't reply. A moment later, he asks, “What are
you
doing here?”

“Research, obviously.”

“I know,” he says. “But why come here, to the end of the earth?”

It's always been hard to explain why a place like Antarctica is perfect for me. Before you can sign on to overwinter at McMurdo, they give you psych tests to make sure you can live for months in darkness and near isolation without going crazy—and the idea of this has always amused me. It's not the isolation that threatens to drive me insane; it's civilization.

“What kind of question is that?” I ask Dennis.

“You know what I mean,” he says. “You have to be a real loner to enjoy being down here.” He rubs the fingers of his left hand.

I catch his hand to examine his fingers. “Where do they hurt?”

“It's not that,” he says.

“Then what?”

He hesitates. “I dropped my ring,” he says. “My wedding band.”

“Where? In the water?”

He nods.

“For God's sake.” I duck out of the tent before he can stop me. I hear his voice behind me, asking me where I'm going, and I shout back, “Stay there.”

I rush toward the water's edge, shivering in my still-damp clothes. The penguins purr as I go past, and a few of them scatter. I shine my flashlight down through the calm, clear water to the rocks at the bottom. I don't know where he might have dropped the ring, so I wade in, and within minutes my feet feel like blocks of ice. I follow what I think was his path
into the water, sweeping the flashlight back and forth in front of me.

I'm in up to my knees when I see it, a few feet down—a flash of gold against the slate-colored rocks. I reach in, the water up to my shoulder, so cold it feels as if my arm will snap off and sink.

I manage to grasp the ring with fingers that now barely move, then shuffle back to shore on leaden feet. I hobble back to my own tent, where I strip off my clothes and don as many dry things as I can. My skin is moist and wrinkled from being wet for so long. I hear a noise and look up to see Dennis, blanket still wrapped around his shoulders, crouched at the opening to my tent.

“What are you staring at?” I snap. Then I look down to what he sees—a thin, faded T-shirt, no bra, my nipples pressing against the fabric, my arm flushed red from the cold. I pull his ring off my thumb, where I'd put it so it wouldn't fall again, and throw it at him.

He picks it up off the floor. He holds it but doesn't put it on. “I wish you'd just left it,” he says, almost to himself.

“A penguin could have choked on it,” I say. “But no one ever thinks about that. We're all tourists here, you know. This is their home, not ours.”

“I'm sorry,” he says. “What can I do?”

I shake my head.

He comes in and sits down, then pulls the blanket off his shoulders and places it around mine. He finds a fleece pullover in a pile of clothing and wraps it around my reddened arm.

“How cold is that water, anyway?” he asks.

“About thirty degrees, give or take.” I watch him carefully.

“How long can someone survive in there?”

“A matter of minutes, usually,” I say, remembering an expedition guide who'd drowned. He'd been trapped under his flipped Zodiac for only a few moments but had lost consciousness, with rescuers only a hundred yards away. “Most people go into shock. It's too cold to swim, even to breathe.”

He unwraps my arm. “Does it feel better?”

“A little.” Pain prickles my skin from the inside, somewhere deep down, and I feel an ache stemming from my bones. “You still haven't told me what you were doing out there.”

He reaches over and begins massaging my arm. I'm not sure I want him to, but I know the warmth, the circulation, is good. “Like I said, I lost my ring.”

“You were out much farther than where I found your ring.”

“I must have missed it.” He doesn't look at me as he speaks. I watch his fingers on my arm, and I am reminded of the night before, when only Thom and I were here, and Thom had helped me wash my hair. The feel of his hands on my scalp, on my neck, had run through my entire body, tightening into a coil of desire that never fully vanished. But nothing has ever happened between Thom and me, other than unconsummated rituals: As we approach the end of our stays, we begin doing things for each other—he'll braid my long hair; I'll rub his feet—because after a while touch becomes necessary.

I pull away. I regard the stranger in my tent: his dark hair, streaked with silver; his sad, heavy eyes; his ringless hands, still outstretched.

“What's the matter?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“I was just trying to help.” The tent's small lamp casts deep shadows under his eyes. “I'm sorry,” he says. “I know you don't want me here.”

Something in his voice softens the knot in my chest. I sigh. “I'm just not a people person, that's all.”

For the first time, he smiles, barely. “I can see why you come here. Talk about getting away from it all.”

“At least I leave when I'm supposed to,” I say, offering a tiny smile of my own.

He glances down at Thom's clothing, pulled tight across his body. “So when do I have to leave?” he asks.

“They'll be here in the morning.”

Then he says, “How's he doing? The guy who fell?”

It takes me a moment to realize what he's talking about. “I don't know,” I confess. “I forgot to ask.”

He leans forward, then whispers, “I know something about him.”

“What's that?”

“He was messing around with that blond woman,” he says. “The one who was right there when it happened. I saw you talking to her.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw them. They had a rendezvous every night, on the deck, after his wife went to bed. The blonde was traveling with her sister. They even ate lunch together once, the four of them. The wife had no idea.”

“Do you think they planned it?” I ask. “Or did they just meet on the boat?”

“I don't know.”

I look away, disappointed. “She seemed too young. For him.”

“You didn't see her hands,” he says. “My wife taught me that. You always know a woman's age by her hands. She may have had the face of a thirty-five-year-old, but she had the hands of a sixty-year-old.”

“If you're married, why are you traveling alone?”

He pauses. “Long story.”

“Well, we've got all night,” I say.

“She decided not to come,” he says.

“Why?”

“She left, a month ago. She's living with someone else.”

“Oh.” I don't know what more to say. Dennis is quiet, and I make another trip to the supply tent, returning with a six-pack of beer. His tired eyes brighten a bit.

He drinks before speaking again. “She was seeing him for a long time,” he says, “but I think it was this trip that set her off. She didn't want to spend three weeks on a boat with me. Or without him.”

“I'm sorry.” A moment later, I ask, “Do you have kids?”

He nods. “Twin girls, in college. They don't call home much. I don't know if she's told them or not.”

“Why did you decide to come anyway?”

“This trip was for our anniversary.” He turns his head and gives me a cheerless half smile. “Pathetic, isn't it?”

I roll my beer can between my hands. “How did you lose the ring?”

“The ring?” He looks startled. “It fell off during the landing, I guess.”

“It was thirty degrees today. Weren't you wearing gloves?”

“I guess I wasn't.”

I look at him, knowing there is more to the story and that
neither of us wants to acknowledge it. And then he lowers his gaze to my arm. “How does it feel?” he asks.

“It's okay.”

“Let me work on it some more.” He begins to rub my arm again. This time he slips his fingers inside the long sleeve of my shirt, and the sudden heat on my skin seems to heighten my other senses: I hear the murmur of the penguins, feel the wind rippling the tent. At the same time, it's all drowned out by the feel of his hands.

I lean back and pull him with me until his head hovers just above mine. The lines sculpting his face look deeper in the tent's shadowy light, and his lazy eyelids lift as if to see me more clearly. He blinks, slowly, languidly, as I imagine he might touch me, and in the next moment he does.

I hear a pair of gentoos reunite outside, their rattling voices rising above the night's ambient sound. Inside, Dennis and I move under and around our clothing, our own voices muted, whispered, breathless, and in the sudden humid heat of the tent we've recognized each other in the same way, by instinct, and, as with the birds, it's all we know.

DURING THE ANTARCTIC
night, tens of thousands of male emperors huddle together through months of total darkness, in temperatures reaching seventy degrees below zero, as they incubate their eggs. By the time the females return to the colony, four months after they left, the males have lost half their body weight and are near starvation. Yet they wait. It's what they're programmed to do.

Dennis does not wait for me. I wake up alone in my tent, the gray light of dawn nudging my eyelids. When I look at my watch, I see that it's later than I thought.