Growing Things and Other Stories, page 25
We are
a woman
a man
a child
There is a sharp pain behind my left eye and numbness in my extremities; when will it stop?
What is the cultural value of oppression?
When will I stop being scared of the dark?
When will I feel better?
Is society a madman?
When will I lose my last baby tooth, and what will my mouth taste like then?
How come the walls are so thin in my bedroom that I can hear my parents talking, but it sounds like whispers, like it’s nothing but secrets in their room?
Will I hear their whispers and crying, and if so, for how long will I hear them?
What will we do if there is another war?
Do all moral concepts collapse?
Will I be surrounded by strangers in mask and gloves or left alone in a white room?
How many times can I blink my eyes before the lids stop working?
Who will lead us, we who cannot be led?
Will I know where I am?
Will it be you?
Am I strong enough to break through my bedroom walls with my hands?
How will they go on without me?
Is there more space between our walls than I think?
Can I please sleep like you?
Will they be relieved?
Is it strange that when I’m alone in my room I hear noises in my walls, and when I knock the noises stop and do not return until the following night, although I suppose it’s possible the noises return when I’m asleep or when I’m not there at all, and it’s frustrating because if I could only figure out who or what is making the noises then I wouldn’t feel the need to ask you any questions?
What will the world be like when I’m gone?
Will there be enough room for me, even when I’m getting bigger?
What happens to the small old me when I’m the big new me?
Will anyone remember me?
Why can’t I describe what the noises sound like exactly as they are, not scratches or bangs or groans or creaks, though perhaps that’s what gentle but consistent pressure upon a barrier sounds like?
Will the old me be put in a drawer like a crayon drawing?
Will they still love me and tell me that they are proud of the things I do?
Why do I then imagine a lost child navigating the space within my walls?
When will the last person who remembers me die?
If I make a hole big enough to crawl into the walls, will I be able to see them through the cracks?
For whom or what is the child searching?
Will anyone notice?
Will she find it?
Will they know that I am there above their heads?
What if she gets lost in a vast network of passages?
Are they telling the truth when I’m listening to them?
What if the space between my walls was folded and curled in and around itself, like a maze, and if unfolded or unspooled the space was equivalent to all Germany, all Europe?
Will people know and say my name, but the name will have come to no longer be associated with me or any other person but will have taken on a new meaning, something else, something funny, pathetic, wondrous, something horrible?
When I look down at them sleeping or doing their secret things and keeping their secrets, why will I be afraid of them?
What if, like my name, a photograph of my body becomes an avatar for something else?
Is she trapped and am I her captor?
Will someone use my bones as instruments or tools for a purpose not yet imagined?
What if she were to light lamps to mark all the places in the walls she’d been?
Why will they look different, like strangers, like other people who aren’t the ones who belong to me?
What if she watches me for the rest of my life, from inside the walls?
Why am I always afraid?
If I ask her these same questions, will she answer me?
Will someone contemplate those artifacts of an identity that has been lost forever and speculate upon its original existence, its original purpose?
If I crawl into the wall, will I ever be able to get out, will I be there forever?
When will the lamps go out everywhere?
Must I become?
How long do I have to live?
How long do I have to live?
How long do I have to live?
“Till dawn. Tomorrow.”
The Ice Tower
(The Climbers)
The sun doesn’t go down here. It moves and dips in the sky, like it’s floating along a blue river. We know it’s a new morning only because of our watches.
Roger and Mike the cameraman are the first to climb the ice tower. They are supposed to be the first.
The rest of us ice climbers ring the tower’s base and cheer even though some of us are envious because we’re not as talented and accomplished as Roger. We think we can almost see the top of the ice tower as they start the climb. The weather and visibility are as good as they have been since we made camp. The temperature has climbed to fourteen degrees Fahrenheit, which is within the range of favorable ice-climbing conditions. Our guide, Liz, tells us the temperature is likely a record high for this sector of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet.
We lose sight of Roger and Mike in the gray-blue sky at around two hundred feet, and then soon after, a nasty squall bullies in and we can’t see our own gloved fingers in front of our faces. The temperature drops without a parachute. Neither climber answers when we attempt contact on the two-way radios. We try yelling and our desperate cries freeze and lodge painfully in our throats.
We wait for Roger and Mike to rappel down. We try to wait longer. Liz forces us to retreat to our tents. She pushes and pulls some of us away from the ice tower.
Liz tells us that because of the storm it might be days before someone from any of the other main camps can get to us. Liz buzzes around her tent, fiddles with the two-way radio and other equipment like she doesn’t know how to use it, and that’s not fair but we all think this. We want her to fix everything.
We hunker in our tent, no one saying out loud what we already know. A few hours later there’s a brief lull in the storm. We venture out with safety tethers and Liz finds Mike’s rag doll body and his camera at the tower’s base. His belay lines are wrapped and knotted around his arms and legs.
We stare at him. His lower half is buried in a snowdrift, the purest snow we’ve ever seen. His face looks fake, and his eyes are dark rocks, the eyes of a doll. There is no sign of Roger.
(Liz)
A few hours before the climb, Roger was in my tent sharing my sleeping bag, both of us sleeping off the whiskey, or as he called it, “pre-climb courage.” Roger was an impulsive jerk. He had big hands and shoulders with topography as impressive as any mountain chain.
When Roger was dead-to-the-world asleep, I drew small cartoon eyes on the toes of his crampon boots with a Sharpie. I wonder if Roger saw the eyes when he dressed for the climb, or if he didn’t see them until he was up on the tower, daring to peek down at his feet and the metal spikes desperately digging into the ice. I wonder if he saw them before the squall hit. I wonder when he stopped seeing the eyes.
(The Climbers)
The storm cranks back up as we carry Mike’s body to camp. We wrap him in a cocoon of tarpaulin and anchor him next to our tent. We can’t go looking for Roger. We have no choice but to wait out the storm or wait for help to arrive.
We are somewhere between the American-run Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, which is at the geographic South Pole, and the newly restarted Byrd Station of western Antarctica. The ice tower was discovered by a transport helicopter flying to Amundsen-Scott from the city-sized McMurdo Station. We were at McMurdo before coming out here. It houses more than a thousand people and even has its own ATM. We didn’t sleep and partied it up for three days. Roger streaked on one of the landing strips after an Antarctic pub crawl.
Liz told us that they (they being other scientists) aren’t sure how a freestanding ice tower of even a fraction of its size could form, never mind go undetected for as long as it apparently had. The scientific community was spooked. Liz thought it might have something to do with the rapidly melting ice sheet and shifting glaciers acting like terraforming tectonic plates on speed. She said that ice spikes grew in birdbaths and shallow water containers, and reportedly on Lake Erie, but those spikes were measured in inches, not hundreds of feet. Consequently, there were whispers of a hoax, of one of the twenty-five countries with a base on the frozen continent secretly manufacturing an ice tower like the recreational ones in Maine and Switzerland. But to what purpose? Who could afford the trip to the most remote place on earth for an ice climb?
The ice tower gleams white, so bright in the sun, it fuzzes and blurs out if you stare at it too long. We think it’s shaped like a giant upside-down icicle. Liz said it reminded her of something else. The tower is roughly 750 feet tall, which is about half the size of the Empire State Building. The makers of Red Bull energy drink announced they would sponsor a temporary research camp at the base of the tower. When they sent a press release detailing how our merry band of half-assed King Kongs would be the first at the camp and our climbs would be filmed, many people concluded that the tower had indeed been manufactured. We played coy in interviews and let Roger speak for our group.
When we arrived at camp, the six of us shared two pyramid-shaped Scott tents, with Liz, our one-woman communications/scientist/keep-us-ice-climbers-alive Sherpa, staying alone in the smaller of the tents. We were supposed to be here for only three days. Five days tops, with emergency provisions that could last two weeks.
Roger has been stuck on the tower for two days now.
(Liz)
I’ve been on the radio all night and I can’t get anyone at McMurdo to commit to a time to come out here. They tell me it’s not safe.
I don’t know what to do, so I finally send the other climbers back to their tent. I can’t take their standing and staring at me, like a silent Greek chorus. None of this is my fault. They knew the risks of attempting such an extreme climb, extreme both in terms of height and environment. They knew that it can actually be too cold to climb, as the ice will turn brittle and break off in dinner-plate-sized slabs under the tips of their handheld ice tools.
When we first arrived, the climbers stood at the tower’s base; they hooted, whistled, bumped fists, and made penis jokes. Roger patted its side like the tower was a tired dog and called it the world’s biggest inverted icicle. I thought the ice tower looked like one of those giant termite mounds found in the Australian outback, its structure seemingly random and ready to fall apart, but in reality, its alien design was ingenious and infinitely complex.
The climbers argued about what type of ice had formed the tower: Was it water ice or hard-packed alpine ice, or a combination? Roger was the only one who seemed concerned at all, and he said its white color meant that the ice was likely full of air and would make anchoring the ice screws tricky.
I asked him if he thought the ice tower was hollow. I meant it as a joke.
He said no, but he said it with a question mark.
(The Climbers)
Liz asks that we leave her alone for a few hours as she attempts to arrange emergency rescue and early extraction. We take one of the two-ways with us to our tent and we sit and say Roger’s name and we listen. In the static, we hear things: a drone beneath the white noise, an impossible pattern that is both beyond rhythm and melody and is more about frequency, the kind we can feel inside our heads. We hear without hearing. But we are listening, learning, and we respond.
The Wall Street type, the business major who dropped out of Yale when he was a second semester senior to follow his Parkour-enthusiast boyfriend out to Portland, begins to put on his cold gear. He pauses to flex his hands, and then he puts his fingers in his ears and opens and closes his mouth. He’s crying, sobbing, drooling, and clearing his throat. He tries to talk, but he doesn’t make any sense. His words aren’t words, and we forget what he’s saying as soon as he says it.
The Vermonter shimmies into his marbled, Holstein cow snow pants. He doesn’t put on his anorak and has only a thermal undershirt on his torso. He plucks his ice tool from his belt and presses his tongue against the sharpened tip of the pick hard enough to draw blood. His other hand dives inside his pants and he begins screaming.
Our youngest ice climber is a twenty-two-year-old woman. She wears an upper bridge because she’d lost a handful of her front teeth playing rugby. She lashes crampons to her bare feet, using the nylon shoelaces from her boots to remake her feet into flesh and steel talons. She chews and crunches on her bridge, spitting out pieces of ceramic teeth.
The self-taught line cook, who grew up in four different foster homes in and around Atlanta before he ran away for good at the age of fifteen, carefully wraps a belay line around his neck. He attaches each end of the line to ten-centimeter ice screws. He attempts to twist one into place on his forearm. It won’t hold and the screw’s cutting teeth chew a ragged hole in his skin.
(Liz)
When we were drinking whiskey in my tent, Roger kept brushing his foot along the back of my calf. I hate other people’s feet, but I let it slide. The whiskey made everything warm.
He asked me why I would spend nine out of twelve months living in Antarctic outposts instead of—and he trailed off, letting the implications of better options elsewhere hang. I considered lying, making up a story about growing up off the grid and dirt poor in Alaska with drunk and indifferent parents, and that being in the snow and cold was all I deserved. Instead I told him about how when I was a kid I’d once found a dead rabbit in a snowdrift in our backyard. How I’d taken her inside, wrapped her in a blanket, and held her against my chest to try and warm her up and save her.
I went quiet after the rabbit story. We drank more. Then I teased him about me being the only person who could keep him alive out in the middle of Antarctica.
He asked me to save him if he got stuck in a snowdrift.
I told him to stop touching my leg with his nasty foot, and then I kissed him.
(The Climbers)
We go outside and it’s so cold it slows down our blood. We can’t see the tower, but we know where it is. We don’t need the radio to hear it. We hold hands until we bump into its base. We swing our axes blindly. The familiar vibrations go up our wrists and arms, and it feels right. The tower acquiesces to the hardened tips of our ice tools and the toothed claws of crampons. We pull ourselves up and off the surface of the frozen continent. The storm stops, or if it doesn’t stop, it blinks, and we look inside the tower, and we see something moving, swarming, or flowing; water in a stream, blood in veins.
We look up and we look up and we see the tower and its perfect white ice, so bright, shining into eternity, shining into the abyss.
(Liz)
I finally get word that two helicopters from a nearby Swiss base will attempt a rescue and extraction of our base camp sometime during the next twelve hours, as they anticipate a brief flying window in the surprise but dumbly persistent storm.
The window might already be open a crack. Weak sunlight pokes through the gray sky. I try the two-way radio but get no response from anyone in the climbers’ tent. I shouldn’t have left them alone for so long. I follow the safety line even though I can see fine, and shit, they’re not inside their tent. Blankets, empty bottles and food wrappers, clothes, and ice-climbing equipment are strewn about as though it were a messy teenager’s bedroom. I find spots of blood on the floor and walls.
I light a flare even though the sun is now full-on shining. I squint and fumble for my sunglasses in the unrelenting light. I leave the flare burning outside their tent. I hope against hope that the climbers will be waiting for me at the base of the tower, performing an ill-advised vigil for Roger. I have no idea when they left their tent, and visibility could’ve been poor enough that they missed the tower completely and have wandered miles from camp. I consider their self-imposed gulag a possibility, but as I get closer to the tower, I see them.
