My Last Continent: A Novel(51)
The man rises to his feet. “I don’t appreciate your tone.”
“I’m sorry,” Keller says. “I guess I find it frustrating when people refuse to see what’s right in front of them.”
The man looks aghast. “You can’t speak to us like that.” He gives Keller a hard stare before he turns and walks out the door.
An uncomfortable silence fills the room, and through it Keller continues.
“The truth hurts, I know,” he says, “but it hurts the continent a lot more than it hurts any of us. I know you all came down here for the experience of a lifetime—but there’s just too many of you.”
Subtly, I reach for the mic.
“You don’t need a passport to visit Antarctica,” he goes on, “and now there’s a whole new breed of so-called adventurers who don’t care one bit about the continent. They just want to skydive or paraglide or water-ski in the coldest place on earth so they have something to brag about at the next cocktail party.”
This time, I wrest the mic from Keller’s hand.
“Who are you to tell them they can’t?” a voice calls out from the back. “You can’t pick and choose who comes here. It’s not a country club.”
“No,” Keller says, his voice naked and raw without the mic, “it’s more like a cemetery.”
Glenn seems to come out of nowhere—I don’t see him until he’s right next to me, holding his hand out for the microphone. A high-pitched whine is emitted by the speaker, and Glenn lets the noise die down before he says, in his usual smooth, calm voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our program. Thank you.”
Silently Keller and I begin unplugging the A/V equipment, and I zip my laptop away in its case. I’m hoping Glenn’s busy enough to go back to the bridge, but he hovers, and as soon as the last of the passengers has cleared out, he turns to us. He opens his mouth to speak, then simply shakes his head.
“Sorry, Glenn,” Keller says. “I got a little carried away.”
“This is getting old, Keller. I’m not warning you again.” Glenn looks as if he’s about to say something more, but instead he turns on his heel and leaves the room.
I look at Keller. As if he knows what I’m about to say, he holds up a hand before I can speak. “I don’t want to talk about it. I’m going to the gym.”
“What about dinner?”
“Fuck dinner.”
I sigh and gather the rest of our equipment. By the time I stow it away, dinner has begun, but I’m not in the mood either. I know this won’t sit well with Glenn, that Keller is in enough trouble already, and that, although I have no appetite now, I’ll probably be hungry later. But the head chef, Eugenio, likes Keller and me and always lets us sneak in after dining hours, while the galley staff is hanging out, cleaning up. Keller rinses dishes and scrubs pots, I grab a mop, and Eugenio fixes us a vegan version of whatever the galley staff had for dinner—always a Filipino dish, noodles or fried tofu or vegetable empanadas.
I change into running clothes and head to the gym, but Keller’s not there. I notice the light on in the ship’s tiny -sauna—a cedar-scented wooden room with a single long bench just wide enough to hold a human body. I take off my clothes and don a towel, and when I open the door, a gust of hot air blows out. Keller’s sitting on the bench, back against the wall, legs stretched out. I sit on the opposite end, and I just barely fit. My toes rest against the arches of his feet.
It’s our last voyage at the end of a long season, with two stints on Petermann and four shiploads of different passengers. We’re both spent. And I worry, at times like this, that Keller isn’t cut out for this type of work after all. He’s become an incredible naturalist, yet he doesn’t like being around people, especially those who know so little. You were once just like them, I reminded him a couple of weeks ago, when he got cranky with a passenger who’d stepped on a penguin trail. I was never that stubbornly ignorant, he replied, defensive. And I said, Well, you are stubbornly impatient. Give these people a break.
Now I shift on the hard wooden bench and say, “I’ve never seen Glenn that pissed off.”
Keller shrugs. “He’ll get over it.” He looks at me, then presses his feet forward, bending my toes slightly back. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “I’ll apologize to Glenn, once he’s cooled off a bit. And he knows you had nothing to do with it.”
“That’s not it at all. You know by now what you’re risking, and still you keep doing it.”
“Glenn’s more bark than bite,” he says, closing his eyes. “Don’t worry.”
“I do worry. I don’t know what I’d do without you on these trips.”
I feel as though Keller and I help each other stay sane during these journeys; we remind each other that we’ll soon have a couple nights together in Ushuaia, or two weeks alone among the penguins at Petermann.
We’re alike in so many ways, even in the way Keller had taken the mic from me after the slide show, and how I’d taken it again from him—both of us trying to save each other from ourselves and the consequences with Glenn. And with a sudden, sinking feeling, I wonder if what Keller and I have been doing isn’t keeping each other sane but something more like the opposite—a folie à deux born of our love for the continent, and for each other, that is steering us not closer to but further away from reality. It’s the passengers who reflect the real world, its opinions and habits, its denials and truths—and we’re more removed from this world all the time, maybe to the point where we’re unable to exist within it at all.