2. Garrett
Garrett
Waypoint Research Station
Antarctica Peninsula
I ran the machine through one final cycle. The ram descended with a low mechanical groan, paused, then rose smoothly without so much as a shudder.
I nodded to myself. “About damn time.”
My headset played an old rock playlist that had been looping for the better part of two hours. Between the music and the earmuffs built into the headset, the outside world may as well have ceased to exist.
I shut the press down and waited while the last of its momentum died away.
As soon as I removed my heavy earmuffs and work safety goggles, from outside came the distant cries of skuas circling the shoreline.
Bright Antarctic austral sunlight spilled across the concrete floor in a broad rectangle, glinting off steel and chrome before disappearing beneath the machines.
I cracked my neck and I peeled off my gloves. My workshop was a huge open space. Metal oil and sawdust hung in the air mixing with the sea spray smell from the ocean outside. A far cry from the arid soil of Texas where I had grown up.
Cutting stations lined the wall to my left, blades locked into their guides.
The bigger machines took up the center of the floor, housings thick and industrial under the shop lights.
My tool wall waited at the far end, chisels and clamps and hand planes hung in rows by size, curls of wood scattered across the concrete below them.
This was my comfort zone, my workplace, my kingdom.
“…Earth to Garrett?”
I blinked.
Dexter was grinning at me with his little computer balanced on his knees, perched atop a stack of overturned shipping crates near the open doors, the summer light outlining his hair. He’d apparently been there long enough to make himself comfortable.
“Hellooo…is civilization back online?”
I snorted. “How long have you been sitting there?”
He touched his cheek and sighed dramatically. “I’ve aged visibly.”
“I don’t see any new wrinkles.”
“I’m twenty-three. Give it another year.”
I hung the headset on its hook and crossed to the sink to wash the grease from my hands. “I’m thirty-two, where does that leave me?”
“I thought you didn’t care about such mortal things?” He puffed out his chest, dropped his voice an octave, and started doing an exaggerated impression of me. “I am da man. The real man. Real men—”
I threw a rag at him. He ducked and laughed. I loved seeing him laugh so freely. It wasn’t always like that. Dexter was my younger brother. He was a genius but also naive in some ways. It had been rough growing up on a Texas ranch. He never fit in until he arrived here.
I dried my hands on a towel and walked over to the coffee station. “You look extra happy this morning. New message from your pen pal?”
His grin widened. “Maybe.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.” I poured coffee for me and hot chocolate for him. He had lots of food sensitivities. Didn’t like coffee. Honestly he didn’t need caffeine. Science and his pen pal powered him enough. He was like an energizer bunny.
Dexter started bouncing one knee. “I’ve actually been waiting for you to finish.”
“That good, huh?”
Dexter had been receiving these messages for just about a year now, ever since the continent-wide celebration.
Last year, some fiftieth-anniversary science celebration had brought all the research stations on the continent together.
So many nationalities, so many interesting people. That’s where I had met Nate.
I sighed.
It had been a week since I’d handed that note off to our station Doctor Daniel Park to give it to Nate.
Daniel had later confirmed that he had indeed passed it on to Nate.
There had been no reply. I told myself I hadn’t expected one.
Told myself that the second the thought showed up, before it could sit there and turn into anything else.
I’d already spent the better part of last year asking around every station on this continent, casual as I could make it, whether anybody had crossed paths with a whale researcher named Nate Braddock.
Nobody had. Not one soul. I’d started wondering if he’d packed up and left Antarctica altogether, gone back to whatever life waited for him on the other side.
Then the penguin distress call had come through last week, and there was his voice on the radio, clear as anything. It took me some time, but I finally pieced it together.
Nate hadn’t been on land this whole time. He’d been out on a ship. That was why nobody at any station had a trace of him. People passed through the research stations all the time, but every one of them was land based. Nate never had been.
“Uh oh, signal lost. Again.”
I blinked. Shit. “Sorry.” I muttered and handed him his hot cocoa.
“Wow… you’ve been really distracted lately.
” Dexter was studying me with open curiosity.
“Unusual for you.” He accepted the mug and slurped happily, but he was studying me.
“Is this a socially appropriate time to quiz you why you’re distracted or do you need a reasonable time to deal with it yourself first?
Or is this going to be me-da-man-me-rock type of thing? ”
I punched him lightly on his shoulder before I sat down on another upturned crate next to him. “Shut up. Show me what you’ve got.”
“Hmmm.” He pursed his lips. “Okay, you have chosen avoidance I see. Fine. We will circle back to that later.”
During that mega celebration, the organizers had arranged lots of different games.
One of them involved strangers from different stations being paired together under anonymous call signs, encouraging them to exchange coded Christmas and New Year’s messages throughout the season.
It had been a clever way of making one of the loneliest places on Earth feel just a little smaller.
I didn’t sign up. I wasn’t a text or email type of person. I preferred meeting people in person, but my brother had been delirious with excitement. It was exactly the kind of thing he loved. Secret messages, anonymous, no face-to-face interactions.
For almost everyone, the game had ended when the decorations came down, but not for Dexter.
He and whoever sat behind a keyboard somewhere else on the continent, the messages had continued.
Twelve months later they still didn’t know each other’s names, faces or stations, but they knew more about each other than normal spouses did.
I worried in the beginning. My brother was super sharp.
IQ of some genius range, but he could be naive sometimes.
I didn’t like that I didn’t know who was the other person.
Dexter, though, had no secrets from me. He showed me all the messages anytime I asked.
It soon became apparent the other person was someone like Dexter.
Their emails were innocent in a way that made my heart ache.
He rotated the little computer toward me, tapping the screen with a finger. “It came through about twenty minutes ago.”
I sipped my coffee and looked. Dexter and his friend had set up some kind of private server for just the two of them.
There had to be hundreds of conversations by now.
Eventually, I stopped reading the messages.
It was their private space. Every now and then, though, a thought still crept into the back of my mind.
What if the other person was a woman?
Not because I thought there was anything romantic between them now. There wasn’t.
But people didn’t spend a year becoming this important to each other without the possibility lingering somewhere down the road.
We were both gay, but we experienced attraction differently.
I’d met Nate and the attraction had hit me like a hammer to the anvil.
Dexter had never been like that. I’d never seen him look at anyone that way.
As far as I knew, he’d never had a crush, never chased anyone, never even hinted at wanting sex.
If he ever did fall for someone, I doubted it’d happen all at once. It would probably happen exactly like this. Of course, I had no clue if any of this was true for Dexter. But the fear still sat unpleasantly in my stomach.
“Garrett.”
I blinked and looked up. Dexter was watching me over the rim of his mug, one eyebrow raised.
“Sorry. I’m being an asshole.”
He cocked his head to the side, not offended, but more curious. After a moment, his eyes widened. “Oh! Is it about that awful guy?”
I sighed and looked down at my coffee. “Yeah.” Dexter knew about Nate.
“I don’t understand how can you hate him and yet be attracted to him.”
“I know. I wish it wasn’t like that.”
There was a moment of silence while the cold air blew through the open doors of my workshop. I could hear the faraway voices of men and women working to launch a Zodiac.
“Is this a wrong time to share my findings? You seem preoccupied. But then again, you’ve been really distracted since last week. Since you learned about he-who-shall-not—be-named.”
I turned the screen toward me and shook my head. “No, not at all. Go ahead and show me what you’ve found.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
Recently, Dexter and his pen pal had started a new game. They were trying to identify each other without giving themselves away. Every message was scrutinized for accidental clues. Judging by the grin threatening to split Dexter’s face in half, he thought he’d finally found something.
He tapped a paragraph halfway down the newest message. “Read that sentence.”
I leaned closer.
"...and to make matters worse, our entire stock of tater tots got contaminated. The kitchen had to throw all of them away. No tater tots for the rest of the season..."
I frowned. Living in Antarctica meant living by the supply ship.
If something spoiled after the last delivery, that was it.
There wasn’t a grocery store a few miles down the road.
There wasn’t another shipment next week.
Whatever your station had was all you were getting until the next resupply, which was usually months away.
I looked back at Dexter. “This is a good one.”