Page 9 of Under Story

On Sunday evening, though, he balks when Laurel and Charlie stay after work for the weekly presentation. The speaker is a climate scientist from Palmer, the US station farther north.

“I’ve had enough apocalypse for one week, thank you,” says Louis, moving backward through the swinging kitchen doors.

The climate scientist clicks through photo slides. In one, an iceberg as tall as a ten-story building floats in open water. In another, an ice sheet has fractured into innumerable squares, which jostle, as if queueing in line.

“If the West Antarctic ice sheet melted, water levels would rise worldwide by ten feet,” the scientist says. “At Palmer, supply vessels used to pull up to an ice pier, but now it isn’t cold enough to build one. Glaciers calve in front of our eyes.” She describes the decline of Adélie penguins, which only live on the Antarctic coast. “They return to the same place every year to nest, but now the snow melts and the nests collapse; the eggs drown. The adults have feathers that repel moisture, but the babies don’t. They can’t handle the precipitation. They freeze.”

The presentation doesn’t end until nine, but the sky is still light. As they leave the galley, Laurel scans the horizon. The Arc is the first thing she looks for each morning and the last one she seeks out at night. It changes every time, becoming more or less pigmented, the pink swinging from peachy to rose. In certain moments—like this one, Laurel notes, disappointed—she can’t see it at all. There is no pattern that she can discern; the Arc seems to be driven by its own unknowable logic.

Charlie suggests they walk to see the Adélies, which breed along the sea ice near the station. She and Laurel stop to stare, shocked by their proximity. At orientation, the administrator said that Antarctica had no native population, a comment that now strikes Laurel as untrue. In contrast to McMurdo’s human residents, who shiver in their Big Reds, the Adélies look at home. They totter on the rocks, wings akimbo, heads tilted conversationally; in the water, they leap like dolphins.

But an adolescent stands apart. It seems to be trying to shake the mud from its belly, mud the red-brown color of blood. The animal looks back with one oval eye, its pupil like an olive turned sideways.

Once, in second grade, Silas came home from school distraught. His teacher had told the class about the Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō: a Hawaiian bird with golden leg feathers and a curved beak, good for drinking honey. The species had existed for over fifteen million years, but by the 1960s, less than forty birds remained. In 1987, a naturalist came upon a male tending an empty nest. It was the last Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō ever seen. The naturalist recorded its song, a mating call that would never be answered.

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 Amazon. 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.