My Last Continent: A Novel(78)
When we board the icebreaker, they take us into a room. Richard’s body lies stretched on a makeshift table. He wears a life jacket stamped with the tour company’s logo. His face is a whitish blue, his skin slick and waxy. Kate reaches out to touch his face. “At last,” she murmurs to me, “he looks almost relaxed.”
In the Zodiac on the way back to the Cormorant, she asks Glenn the question I’m not able to ask myself: “What about Keller?”
“Nothing yet,” Glenn says.
“But you’ll keep looking?”
“We need to head back soon,” Glenn says, his eyes meeting mine. “But the others are going to keep looking, yes.” For the first time, I hear Glenn’s voice waver, on the edge of breaking.
“Then I’m staying, too,” I hear myself say. Glenn doesn’t answer, but I feel his hand on my shoulder, and he keeps it there until we return to the Cormorant.
Back on board, Kate brings me a bowl of soup, which I can’t eat. Amy comes by to see me, but I can’t talk. I press my face to the glass of the porthole, where I continue to stare out at the water—dirty with brash ice and with debris from the wreck, from the rescue operations—and think of all it has taken.
Nigel, Amy, and a few crew members will remain with the other rescue teams—more bodies need recovering; the Australis is leaking fuel. The recovery work has only just begun.
I look over at a nearby ice floe. An Adélie has just leapt onto it and turned his head to the side, considering the ship. I want to call out to him, warn him to get away—that soon he will be covered in oil; he will lose his body heat, his ability to swim and mate and feed his chicks. But Adélies are territorial. They don’t know how to leave.
THE PAIN AND nausea get worse, and it’s only when I notice the bleeding that I realize I’ve neglected what’s happening inside my own body, where a part of Keller is still alive.
Susan doesn’t have the equipment on board to offer the reassurances I need, but she instructs me to stay in bed. “The body will take care of itself,” she tells me, and this is an odd source of comfort, this reminder that we’re all just bodies in the end, like all other animals.
I sleep fitfully, waking from nightmares of broken eggs, of skuas scavenging dead penguins, of baby chicks drowning in meltwater. I think of the penguins I’ve observed over the years, those who’ve lost their young to predators or bad weather or bad timing. They move on, I remind myself; they can’t afford to stop.
But this doesn’t mean they don’t mourn. When I close my eyes, I can see the Magellanic penguin watching over her mate’s lifeless body at Punta Tombo. I see Adélies wander their colonies, searching for mates that never return; I see chinstraps sitting dejected on empty nests. And, perhaps most clearly of all, I see the grieving of the emperors. The female returns, searching, her head poised for the ecstatic cry. When her calls go unanswered, she lowers her beak to the icy ground. When she locates her chick, frozen in death, she assumes the hunched posture of sorrow as she wanders across the ice. And then, when it’s time, she’ll let the sea take her far away, as I’m doing now.
The Drake Passage
(58°22'S, 61°05'W)
One thing the animal kingdom had not yet taught me is that hope is more punishing than grief.
We don’t know much about animals’ capacity for hope. We do know that they grieve, that they are joyful and playful and mischievous and clever. We’ve seen animals work together toward a common goal, and we’ve seen them use tools to get what they want. Despite what many believe, they are not so different from us.
Yet we can’t know their hearts and minds; we can only watch their behaviors. One winter, I watched an Adélie penguin minding her nest during an unexpected snowstorm. Soon covered with snow herself, she didn’t move. Her eggs would never hatch, and even if they did, her newborn chicks would freeze, or drown—but still she didn’t leave them. Was this instinct? Or was it hope? Did she wish, as I’m wishing now, for something that by all accounts would be nothing short of miraculous?
During the journey home, I remain confined to my bunk. I don’t sleep, though I need the rest, and with every sway and dip through the Drake, I cling to the sturdy wooden slats of the bunk and dare to hope—even as part of me wonders whether hope is only a blind instinct as well.
And, with nothing but time to think, I try to piece together what happened to Keller.
Richard must have still had medication in his system, and he was apparently suffering from some mad, misplaced belief that he was helping the rescuers—whatever the reason, he decided to go back into the water to search for that elusive person he’d been obsessed with rescuing. Kate said he seemed desperate to assist, to prove he could do something good, perhaps to make up for his rock-climbing stunt on Deception Island, which he still felt bad about.
She’d seen Richard getting into a Zodiac with Keller, and she’d shouted after him, but they were too far away to hear. She saw Keller and Richard arguing, Keller pointing back toward the Cormorant several times, then finally tossing up his hands, as if he realized he couldn’t argue with Richard anymore. Then they took off in the Zodiac. That was the last Kate saw of them.
They must’ve been heading for the Australis, looking for more victims, dodging the pack ice, their path steadily growing narrower. From what Glenn told us, the ice had closed in after the Cormorant retreated to Detaille, making rescue efforts nearly impossible. At that point, only one other small cruise ship had arrived to help.