Chapter 7 Bottomlands #6
One night in July, they pore through Skua for thermal layers.
After that, they walk to the dive locker.
PistenBullys wait outside, just like Nita said.
Each has a red cab and wheels wrapped in steel tracks.
A blade clears snow as it moves. Eli has offered to drive.
He examines the controls, checking them against the manual that Nita slid under his door.
As they walk to the door of the locker, the mood between them becomes tense. It feels like their first true transgression. If someone found them there, they would have no logical explanation. Laurel forces herself to reach for the handle.
“Thank God,” she says, after opening it. At this hour, the locker is empty.
Dry suits hang from metal bars. Round tanks lie in rows like sleeping seals.
Laurel tries on suit after suit (“It fits,” Nita told her, “if you can barely get it on”).
The one she chooses is snug enough that Eli has to pull it off her feet.
He yanks so hard, grunting, that Laurel slides across the ground, and then they’re laughing again, like they did at the gym.
Afterward, bundling the suit, she says, “Eli, I’ve been thinking. If time moves backward in the antiuniverse, how does that impact living things?”
Eli frowns. “It shouldn’t. When I say that time moves backward, I mean that entropy reverses on a macro scale. Instead of ending in heat death, the antiuniverse would form in some kind of cold birth.”
“But biological systems are a product of the cosmos. Doesn’t the macro exist in the micro?”
Eli throws up his hands. “All of this is theoretical. By the way,” he adds, “have you contacted the university?”
Laurel stuffs her dry suit into a cabinet. She hopes that no one else will need it first. “What about?”
“Well, you’re on leave, aren’t you? But if we can’t dive until October…”
“Shit.” Laurel was granted an entire academic year. This is unusual enough; she can’t reasonably ask for another. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
The full picture becomes clear: to stay in Antarctica, Laurel will have to leave the Rhizotron. If the basin is nothing more than rock, she will have traded her career—what’s left of it—for nothing more than a delusion.
How will she tell Gloria? After everything Gloria has done for her, will it feel like a betrayal?
Laurel doesn’t need her permission, but she still wants Gloria’s blessing.
The next day, she sits at the lounge computer, drafting an email.
It would be easier to lie, claim she wants to stay for other reasons, but Gloria and Laurel have always been honest with each other.
Still, it seems risky to put the truth online.
Miles glares from the couch. It’s his turn on the computer, and she’s already asked for extra time.
“At this point,” he says, “you might as well write a letter.”
It’s not a bad idea. Laurel begins to log out before she remembers that mail won’t leave the continent until October. She screws her face up in frustration, Miles eyeing her irritably. Her best option is to be instinctive.
There’s no good way to say this: I have to leave the university. At every step, you were my guardian. I hope you can forgive me.
You told me to make my own observations. I think I’ve found something, and I have to see it through.
Please tell my mom and Maisie that they shouldn’t worry. And neither should you. Eli is here—that’s part of what’s happening. Someday I’ll explain it. Or maybe you’ll figure it out before then.
All my love—
But the message feels incomplete. She must give Gloria a hint. If it weren’t winter, and she could send a letter, Laurel would enclose the drawing that she made for Eli—the one of the Arc and the basin, labeled like the Duoverse.
Miles drums his fingers on his knees.
Laurel thinks rapidly. Then, below her name, she adds two links. The first is one of Eli’s articles. The second is a picture from Google Images: the Arc, green as a neon sign in the winter night.
—
By August, whales have left for warmer water. Weddell seals—the only mammals, aside from humans, to winter over on the continent—spend their days below the ice. Emperor penguins huddle for heat, rotating to give each bird a turn in the middle.
Snow seeps into McMurdo’s buildings. Sometimes the galley doors open to a solid wall of white.
Matty forgets the chili recipe he’s used for years.
Laurel feels it, too, the pull of oblivion: without sun and decent sleep and novel stimuli, it’s easy to drift from the poles of your personhood.
When her watch stops working, it feels like the punch line of a joke.
“Remember,” says Jules, at galley rally, “keeping a schedule keeps you sane.”
Laurel obeys this maxim. She wakes early to work out and shower.
The regimen Nita recommended has already made her stronger: it’s easier to carry heavy buffet trays through the galley, and she doesn’t tire as easily after hours on her feet.
But any change in routine disturbs the balance of her psyche.
One day, she sleeps through her alarm. By the time she returns from the gym, the first-floor showers are full.
She climbs to the second floor in her towel and flip-flops.
Three women wait in line outside the bathroom with their arms crossed.
Laurel stalks to the galley. Memories of Silas intrude throughout her shift: the soft hair she didn’t cut until he asked for it, the hands she held across a thousand streets.
Laurel is carrying a vat of minestrone when she hears his voice in her head—When I was an egg in your stomach, did I eat egg salad?
—and trips. Soup scalds her legs and pools beneath the hot dog roller station.
“What’s wrong with you?” asks Ingrid, storming toward her with a mop.
Charlie squeezes Laurel’s shoulder. “Everyone’s on edge.”
“And it isn’t even Stabby September,” says Louis.
When Laurel finishes her shift, all she wants to do is stand under hot water, but the showers are occupied again.
She screeches—“Cool it!” someone barks—and returns to her room, where she paces.
Residents are forbidden to leave the base without a buddy and a radio, but she feels like she’ll implode without fresh air.
Laurel grabs her Big Red and walks outside.
Along the road, streetlamps cast pools of orange light.
They recede as she veers toward the ice shelf.
The cold is a violation. Laurel scrabbles in her pockets for gloves before she realizes that she left them in the dorm.
Still, she continues toward the Arc. In constant darkness, it is a brilliant green.
The color swirls with a psychedelic quality.
Video footage has made its way to YouTube.
The more I look at it, someone wrote, the more I feel like I’m gonna fall in.
In July, members of a fringe religious sect died by suicide in Elko, Nevada, believing the Arc to be a sign of end-times.
She might have kept walking if not for the sound: a useless roar, a rasping croak. A seal is jerking toward her. It must be lost. She’s never seen one come this close to the station. The small flippers are useless; its neck reaches like an arm.
How can Laurel not be a mother? Arms outstretched, she rushes forward—but something rams into her, hard.
“What the fuck are you doing?” asks Louis.
“What are you doing? The seal is dying. I’m trying to help.”
He holds her down. “You aren’t allowed.”
“What do you mean?”
“Anything we see here, any life—we can’t interfere. It’s part of the treaty. Didn’t you read the handbook?”
She forgot. That rule, noble on a global scale, seems senseless when applied to the animal in front of her.
“I can’t—?” Her voice is small.
“No, darling,” says Louis. “You can’t.”
He sits to let her go. The seal pulses on its belly.
“It’s brutal,” says Louis, “I know. Nature is brutal sometimes.” He nods toward the station’s concrete buildings. “Let’s go and get you warm.”
She shudders. “I can’t leave it.”
“But you can,” he says, helping her up. As he guides her toward the dorms, his compassion hurts more than cruelty.
“How did you find me?” Laurel asks.
“I was nicking a sandwich when I saw you leave. You aren’t the only one who’s done a runner.”
“Did you?”
“My fourth season. All those years, and I hadn’t been asked to be a lead. Patrick still wasn’t my boyfriend. I kept dreaming I was back in Yuma.”
“Yuma?”
Louis smiles, though it comes out like a grimace.
“It’s my mum who’s British. She met my father after her first year of uni.
He was deployed by the Air Force, and she was backpacking in Italy.
Whirlwind courtship and all that; Mum never finished school.
She’d been a student at Cambridge, and then she was a military wife in Arizona.
It didn’t suit her. I would have been depressed, too. ”
Louis holds his hands under Laurel’s arms like crutches. She’s never heard him speak about his life before Antarctica.
“My father is an alpha type,” he says. “But Mum managed to convince him to move to England. He took a job at the base in Lakenheath, and that’s where she had me.”
“What was she like?” Laurel asks.
“When she was happy, no one was happier. We’d put on Madonna and dance. I went through a llama phase, and if no one was looking, she’d chuck me over the fence at the zoo. But when she was sad, nothing helped. There was a phrase she used to use—down at the bottom of the well.”
Laurel tries to speak again but finds she can’t: her mouth is frozen shut. But Louis’s story is a rope. She can keep going if she holds on to it.
“My father was always telling her to get herself together, like it was a matter of will. When I was ten, she sent me to farm camp, because there were llamas. It sounded manly, which meant she could convince my father. He came to get me one day early. I knew something had happened as soon as I saw him. Mum had used one of his guns. He’d found her in the garden. ”
Laurel pries her mouth open. Cold air rushes into her throat.