Page 4 of Under Story

“So you’ve been here before?” Laurel asks. “I thought I saw you at orientation.”

“Seven times since 2010, including three winters,” Louis says, a little proudly. “But they still make me go to the goddamn orientation.”

“Why’s that?” Charlie asks.

“Because I’m a disaster,” says Louis, grinning, and Laurel decides she likes him.

—

Laurel and Charlie are assigned to the afternoon shift. Usually, they’ll start at ten in the morning, but today they’re due at eight thirty. The galley has the atmosphere of a high school cafeteria. On one side are the food stations: the main buffet, the deli, the appliances, and a grab-and-go refrigerator. On the other, round tables extend to the windows, which look out on Observation Hill. The new stewards huddle below a black-and-white photograph of the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton’s ship. They all wear the same uniform: a blue polo shirt, black pants, nonslip shoes, and an optional baseball cap. Laurel and Charlie sidle in next to Louis, who is yawning, his cap cockeyed.

“All right, everyone, gather round,” says a tall man with a clipboard. His blond hair, short at the sides, curves into a longer, teased wave on top. High cheekbones, sharp eyes, a softness to the mouth: Laurel recognizes his features, even if it takes her brain a moment to bridge the difference between this version of Jules and the neat, tomboyish girl she grew up with.

“Afternoon stewards! I’m Jules Javurek—he/him pronouns—and I’ll be your lead this summer. If no one’s said it yet, let me be the first: Welcome to Antarctica. Maybe you’re here because you wanted to see this chunk of rock and ice, or maybe you’re running from something; I recommend the presidential election”—scattered noises of assent; Charlie sighs—“but look around: the galley is where you’ll spend ten hours a day, six days a week, serving food or cleaning Frosty Boy or dodging slime from our dishwasher, Bertha. What I’m saying is that you’ll be in here much more than you’ll be out exploring, so for all you aspiring Shackletons, the first rule of the galley is this: McMurdo only functions when we work together. We all have our reasons for being here, and no one is better than anyone else.” He casts them a wry glance. “Including the scientists.”

Jules tips his head, and the group follows as he leads them, walking backward, along the room’s perimeter. When he sees Laurel, he does a double take, then waves. Laurel wrote to say that she was coming, but given how long it took for Jules to respond to her first email, she suspects that he doesn’t use much of his allotted computer time.

“The second rule of the galley? Get used to busy. There are twelve hundred people on station, and this is the only place they get their meals. We make four every day: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a midnight one for the night shift. We also put out any leftovers from the day before, which brings me to the third rule of the galley: waste nothing. Anything we toss has to be shipped off the continent, and that costs money. Fresh food arrives by cargo plane, but infrequently. Almost everything we eat has been dried or frozen, and no one’s died yet.”

“Last year,” Louis whispers, “we had to go nearly three months without freshies—even garlic and parsley.”

“Imagine,” Charlie says, in Louis’s emphatic tone. “Life without parsley.”

Louis sniffs. “Trust me. By February, you’ll be dreaming about lemons.”

“Food service is free,” Jules continues. “Take as much as you want, so long as you eat as much as you take. But at the bars—there are two—you’re on the hook for drinks and snacks, in cash.”

He shows them through a pair of swinging doors. After the relative calm of the dining area, where sound is diffused by the size of the space, the kitchen is a physical experience. A Tribe Called Quest plays through a corner speaker as cooks move between stainless steel counters and industrial ovens. Stewards feed plates into a dishwasher the width of a king bed.

Jules whistles, and someone turns the music down. Still, he has to shout to be heard over the sizzling and clanging, the suction sound of the refrigerators and the metallic scrape of spatulas on stovetops.

“Our production cooks, heroes all: Ingrid, Chester, Paz, and Stanley,” he says as they raise their hands in turn. “Our pastry chef, Diego—you’ll never taste a more decadent soufflé without eggs or a fluffier biscuit sans butter. Miles is our sous chef, the best man to have on your right. And now, if someone will grant me a drumroll, I’ll introduce our head chef.” Ingrid pounds on her knees. “His Midwinter Feasts? Iconic. His man bun: resplendent. People, I give you Matty Chen. Matty, tell the people what you’ve got for them today.”

Matty flashes the peace sign. He has a towel thrown over one shoulder and a hair net around his bun. “I’ve got a turkey chili, a veggie chili, a side of Diego’s famous cornbread, and green pea guacamole.”

“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” calls Miles, the sous chef. His head is shaved, and a tattoo peeks out of his shirtsleeve.

Jules walks them back into the galley and stops before the windows. The nearest building is no more than a faint outline, and the mountains are entirely obscured. Laurel can’t see a hint of the shape she noticed yesterday, that pink dome in the skyline.

“Look outside,” says Jules. “We use these windows as a safety gauge. On a clear day, you can see three things: Ob Hill, the medical building, and the firehouse. On a day like this one, when you can’t make out Medical, stay inside. Don’t push it—I’m serious. Your iPhone is useless. No one will hear you if you shout. If you can’t see Medical, we can’t see you.” The nearest diners—a group of men in long underwear and overalls—stop talking, and Louis fidgets. “All right, enough doom and gloom. No pun intended, but who’s up for an icebreaker?”

—

Soon Laurel has the rhythm of the workday in her body. She and Charlie wake up at eight and shower, passing a bath caddy back and forth through plastic curtains. They eat breakfast with Nita and Louis before the stewards gather for galley rally, when Jules and Matty detail the menu; then they head back to the dish pit to look at the tasking board. Working the floor is a social position, an opportunity to eavesdrop on geologists while filling the salt and pepper shakers or meet breakfasting astronomers soon to leave for the pole. A shift in the dish pit means heat and sound, hot water up to the elbows while singing to AC/DC. The busiest time is after dinner, when there are fewer stewards but the same number of tasks, and they hustle, focused, to avoid doing overtime.

Every day, the sky is lighter later, twenty or thirty minutes heaped back into the hourglass. After work, Laurel explores the base, but the more she tries to orient herself, the more confused she becomes. Storage containers, scattered throughout, peer at her with windowed eyes. Every building seems to have at least three names—the Carpenter Shop is Building 191, as well as the Foldaway—and many double as something else. The coffee shop, an old Quonset hut hung with upside-down sleds, turns into a wine bar after five p.m. Building 63, the station’s oldest, includes the weight room, the craft room, and a beloved basement bowling alley. Building 34 is a wooden structure with a staircase, only eight steps high, that leads to nothing at all.

Even now, in summer, temperatures sit in the single digits. After a particularly frigid trip from the loading dock, Laurel retrieves Olga’s fur hat from the pocket of her duffel. When tied, the fur flaps hug her neck and cheeks and chin. Silently Laurel thanks the animal it was made from, and she wears it most days thereafter.

On Saturday, Louis takes Laurel and Charlie to Skua, a recycling center named for the scavenger birds that lord over the station like gulls. The inventory changes as frequently as McMurdo’s residents, and everything is free. Books pile on peeling shelves; a bin of long underwear sits beside a coat tree hung with hats. Louis swings a fake lei around his neck. Laurel finds a box of string lights and an Ursula Le Guin collection. Charlie takes a stack of sudoku puzzles and two DVDs: Felicity and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

They return to Laurel and Charlie’s room. Louis sits against the wall, painting his nails with one of Nita’s purple polishes. Charlie stacks her graphic novels: Persepolis, Ghost World. Her parents are librarians. An only child who loved drawing and puzzles, Charlie went to school for design.

“Years of art classes,” she says, “and I wound up working for a pharmaceutical company.”

Nita winds the string lights around a curtain rod before passing the rest to Charlie. “What brought you to McMurdo?”

“It was kind of impulsive. I was stuck in this depressing job, plastering fine print over stock photos, and I thought: I’m not in a relationship. I don’t have kids. I can go anywhere. What do I want to see?”