Chapter 2 The Orchard #3
Listening to Silas, Laurel wondered what world she would leave him.
Dystopian drought. Infectious disease. Poor nations destabilized by desperation; rich nations with outdoor air-conditioning and walls to keep out refugees.
Sometimes, the untenability of modern life struck her so deeply that she froze at the grocery store, consumed by awful clarity, while Silas hummed from the cart.
It occurred to her that this was the appropriate response, one that had perhaps been bred out of the species.
After all, Laurel shopped, however guiltily, at .
She drove a car. She’d wanted a child, who would increase the carbon in Earth’s atmosphere by sixteen tons each year.
“Sometimes I think we’re all under the same mass delusion,” Laurel says, as she and Charlie walk back to the dorms. “I mean, we know that the way we live is unsustainable. We know, deep down, that the changes we’re making aren’t sufficient.
So why are we going to work and having kids and reading magazines like the world as we know it isn’t ending? ”
“Little pleasures keep us going, though.” Charlie looks at Laurel from the side. “You still read magazines?”
Laurel laughs. “I find them weirdly comforting. No screens.”
“That’s why I like comics. They take me back,” says Charlie.
—
The next morning, they join Nita and her ice wife, Sam, for breakfast. A pair of duct-taped gloves sticks out of the bib of Sam’s overalls.
Today her team will transfer one hundred thousand gallons of fuel to Pegasus airfield.
Laurel has just finished eating when Louis zigzags toward the table, his rubber boots squeaking on the floor.
“Slept late.” Louis dodges a steward with a trolley. “I was up all night.”
Laurel finishes her Frosty Joe. The coffee at McMurdo is notoriously subpar, and dairy products are tightly rationed, so most residents add a dollop of soft serve ice cream from the Frosty Boy machine. When it breaks, there’s nearly mutiny.
“What were you doing?” she asks, as Louis drops into a chair.
“The same glaciologist I’ve been doing since 2014.”
“Patrick’s back?” Nita hands him her blueberry muffin. “I thought his grant only ran through last summer.”
Louis nods miserably. “He got another one.”
“Either way, you swore you’d stop seeing him. And now God will punish you,” Nita says, “with a night in a quinzee.”
Laurel, Charlie, and Louis aren’t wearing their steward uniforms. Today they’ll learn to survive outdoors in Happy Camper School.
They put their dishes in the bus bins and trudge toward the pickup site.
The other campers span a range of vocations: there are firefighters, sheet metal workers, engineers, astronomers, and postal workers, as well as a handful of other stewards and a lone ecologist.
The instructor, a twentysomething former surfer named Gavin, waves them into the Terra Bus.
They deboard three miles north, on the Ross Ice Shelf: a mass, two hundred feet thick, that stretches out over the ocean.
Distant mountains bracket the expanse. The weather is calm and, at ten degrees, warm by Antarctic standards. The campers marvel.
“It’s beautiful, yes,” Gavin says. “Beautiful and dangerous.”
The wind alone, he explains, can knock a person over.
Crevasses—cracks in glaciers—extend hundreds of feet deep; one swallowed a climatologist last summer.
In a storm, snow blows so thickly you can’t see your own hands, and exposed skin becomes frostbitten instantly.
Gavin shows them how to repair a snowmobile and use a camp stove.
Over lunch, he lectures on cold-weather survival and warns them of the screaming barfies, the pain that ensues when the body warms after extreme cold.
The Arc is as vibrant as Laurel has ever seen it: pink as cherry blossoms, with an iridescent film.
She knows that she should focus, but she can’t stop staring.
Many of the other campers are equally distracted.
The firefighters volley theories while they’re supposed to be pitching a mountain tent, and the ecologist keeps looking over his shoulder, as if to make sure that it isn’t advancing.
By midafternoon, Gavin is aggravated. He unloads a stack of buckets more forcibly than necessary. Next comes an armful of rope, knotted at regular intervals.
“Circle up,” he says. “Buckets on heads.”
The task is a whiteout simulation: the campers must find Gavin by the outhouse, wearing buckets to mimic the lack of visibility and holding rope to ensure that they don’t lose anyone else.
Each person receives a knot and a number.
Gavin tells them to spin, but Laurel feels disoriented as soon the bucket goes over her head.
Sound muffles, and setting disappears, leaving her alone with herself.
The natural leaders take control early, Number One claiming he remembers the way to the outhouse while Number Ten insists on the opposite direction.
Both routes dead-end in empty space. They trace their way back to base camp to regroup.
Number Six suggests that two volunteers venture out while the rest hang back, offering instructions, but the group is no better at directing the volunteers than they were in searching for Gavin themselves.
They set out for a third time, trying to find the flags that stretch from base camp to the outhouse.
An image interrupts Laurel in the way they always do, with callous indifference to her present circumstances.
She dried Silas with a towel. The towel had a hood that was shaped like a sheep’s head, and she used it to pat his curls, soft as cashmere.
On a slick patch of ice, she loses her balance, and the bucket slams into her face.
She puts out her hands to catch the ground.
It occurs to her—not for the first time, but more seriously—that she could die here.
Of the cold alone. Or like the climatologist, in a crevasse, her footing sure until it isn’t.
She is oddly indifferent to the thought. Eighteen months ago, she woke in darkness, wracked by misery. Eli was sleeping, so she took her laptop to the window seat and opened an email to Gloria. She did not bother with a salutation or a sign-off; they had long since abandoned such niceties.
What do you think happens when we die? Not to the body, I mean—Gloria had spent her career investigating that—but to the rest of us?
She couldn’t bring herself to write spirit, or soul; she was too much a scientist, bound by the imperative to appear rational. Gloria’s response arrived in minutes, as if she had known Laurel’s email was coming.
I think we rejoin that vast and dazzling universe of which we have always been part. E = mc2, etc. After we die, we’re still matter.
As for whether we see our loved ones again—I’m skeptical of anything so literal. Eyes belong to the body, and the body stays here. But if energy is matter, I suppose I think it’s not so much we see them as we are them.
Minutes later, Gloria sent a second email.
But Laurel, if you’re asking this for personal reasons—not for Silas, I mean, but for you—then promise you’ll come talk to me.
Laurel was, of course. Drunken nights slurred into morning headaches.
During the day, she maintained a sober, merciless self-judgment, as if that were the same as holding vigil.
Many times, she pondered the pills that sat on a shelf above the bathroom sink, sedatives her doctor had prescribed.
What stopped her was the thought of her own mother. Laurel had done enough damage already.
Voices carry from a distance: the campers are running roll call. Laurel’s hands are empty. She strains to listen, groping air.
“This is Number Five. Number Six?”
“Number Six, paging Number Seven.”
“Copy that. Number Seven here. Copy, Number Eight?”
Number Eight is Laurel. She clears her throat to shout.
“I’m here.” Her voice rebounds back. “But I can’t find my rope.”
“That’s okay, Number Eight. I’ve got you. Follow my voice,” says Number Seven, the sound muffled by the bucket but reaching for her all the same.
—
Unlike igloos, which are made of snow blocks, the quinzee—first built by Native people in the planet’s northern forests—is a mound of compacted snow with a chamber inside.
Gavin hands out duffel bags, each of which contains a sleep kit, and tells the campers to form small groups.
Laurel, Charlie, and Louis pile their duffels and pack snow on top.
While the quinzee hardens, they crowd over the camp stove to make freeze-dried chili and hot-water bottles.
After dinner, they extract the duffels and use shovels to enlarge the hollow.
Two hours later, wet and bone-tired, Laurel and Charlie admire their work.
“Don’t get too excited,” Louis says. “It feels like sleeping inside a refrigerator.”
They wriggle through the opening. Inside, the walls are wavy as meringue.
The ceiling is too low for them to sit, so they lie down to trade galley gossip.
Light leaches through the ice, bathing the quinzee in strange, perpetual dusk.
It reminds Laurel of a cave. Despite the refrigeration, heat spreads through her chest, and the walls feel even closer than they are.
“I’ll be back,” Laurel says, and then she crawls outside. She wants to be in open space. She needs to see the Arc.
She isn’t the only one. At least a dozen other campers have spread across the snow. Some lean against their quinzees; others sit cross-legged on the ground. Even the ecologist has joined them.
Rustling noises come from Laurel’s quinzee, followed by a thud.
“Owie,” Louis says, snaking through the hole with his hot-water bottle.
Charlie follows. “Claustrophobic?” she asks.
Laurel nods. That’s close enough. Charlie and Louis settle on either side of her, and together they look at the Arc.