My Last Continent: A Novel(19)
He lifts his shoulders in a shrug. “Britt and I tried to make the marriage work. She couldn’t move on—or didn’t want to. We didn’t last much more than a year. After she left, I tried to immerse myself in work.” He looks down into his beer. “When we were together, when Ally was alive, the days always seemed too short—there was never enough time to fit it all in. Then, all of a sudden, every day was endless. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. I wanted to escape—like Britt had, I guess. But she only went as far as Vermont.”
He takes in a breath. “I started reading about the explorers, you know, wondering whether there was any uncharted territory left. Even by the time I decided to leave the country, I didn’t really know where I would go. I didn’t have a plan.” He pauses, and a small, sad smile emerges on his face. “Looking back, I guess I did know. I remember the day I went into my boss’s office and handed over my resignation,” he says. “I told him, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ ”
I know, of course, that these were the last words of Captain Lawrence Oates, who died along with Robert Scott and the rest of the expedition team on their return from the South Pole. Knowing he was near death anyhow and a liability to his party, Oates walked out of his tent and onto the ice. No one ever saw him again.
Eventually I tell Keller about Dennis, and he’s not surprised; he’d known all along. “I remember reading about it,” he says, “and seeing your picture. I thought about how alike we were, even though I’d never met you before.”
“Alike how?”
“Abandoned,” he says.
Antarctica gets her icy claws into a certain type of person, I’ve realized over the years, and I can see now that Keller is one of them. Now that he’s caught, he’ll return again and again, and he’ll learn that no one back home can quite understand what brings him here—the impulse to return to the ice; to these waddling, tuxedo-feathered creatures; to the hours-long fiery sunsets; to the soothing wild peace of this place—and he’ll eventually build his life around Antarctica because he’ll feel unfit to live anywhere else.
That night, we leave the bar as usual, and my heartbeat stutters as we’re about to part because I notice the way his eyes are latched to mine. But though his gaze lingers for a moment, he offers only his usual good-bye: a quick wave and a quicker smile.
The next afternoon, we hike up to a ridge overlooking the Ross Ice Shelf—a massive, flat blanket of ice stretching out into the ocean. Though it’s the size of France and hundreds of feet thick, it looks as thin as a wafer from high up, and about as fragile. From here we have a good view of a large Adélie colony. I watch a smile spread across Keller’s face as he studies them through the binoculars. “I love their faces,” he says. “Those eyes.”
Adélies have completely black heads, and the tiny white feathers surrounding their glossy black eyes give them a wide-eyed, startled look. Compared to the emperors, the Adélies are tiny; making little huffing noises, they walk with their wings sticking out, feet wide, heads high, looking almost comical, whereas the emperors always look so serious, their wings down at their sides, their heads lowered.
“They might be my favorite species,” I admit, “if I had to choose.”
He lowers his binoculars, then reaches out to touch my sunburned cheek, and that’s when he kisses me. It happens quickly—his hand at the back of my neck, the spontaneous meeting of lips—and then time slows and nearly stops, and suddenly my body feels as wet and limpid as melting ice.
Sex at McMurdo happens in stolen moments; it’s furtive and quiet, thanks to too-close living quarters, roommates, thin walls. I don’t know how many days blur together between that first kiss and the first night we spend in my dorm, but finally, after an aeon of helpless and constantly rising desire, we sneak out of an all-staff party and crowd into the narrow bunk in my room, ravishing each other like sex-starved teenagers, which is also typical of McMurdo residents.
Afterwards, as the bass traveling on the wind from a distant building echoes the thumping of our hearts, in the arid heat of the room, sweat evaporating from our skin, it seems we could be anywhere—but at the same time, I realize this is the only place where our sudden relationship could feel as familiar to me as the icy, moonlike terrain surrounding us outside the room’s tiny windows.
In the weeks that follow, we steal time whenever we can—when my roommate is in the field, when Keller’s is at work; it becomes difficult, at other times, to think of anything else. When we come in from the field, we have to peel off so many layers I think we’ll never find skin, until there it is, burning under our hands, dry and hot, two deserts finding water.
Under the days’ perpetual sunlight, we compile data, we eat and talk, we pack up and hurry back for his shift in the galley. Late one afternoon, when he has the day off, we stretch out in the blinding light, hands folded together, my head on his shoulder, and we listen to the whistling of the wind across the ice and the cries of the birds. I savor the utter silence under those sounds; there is nothing else to hear—none of the usual white noise of life on other continents, no human sounds at all—and Keller and I, too, are silent. It feels as if our own humanness has dissolved, as if we have no need to communicate other than by breath and touch. And I feel the chill that has always seemed a constant and necessary part of me finally begin to thaw.