“Of course not. No more than any of us. But I get the jumps myself, sometimes. I find it helps to talk things out. What do you say?”
He thought about it. “Sure. But I can handle it. I’ll be fine.”
The other man smiled like his teeth had been painted onto his face. “I’m sure you will, Leroy.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cass sat backwards in a plastic chair, resting her chin on her forearms, savoring the peaceful moment now that she’d put the tour with Sikes and his crew behind her. She squinted into the morning sun, her face almost pressed against the glass of the library window like a three-year-old ogling a fish tank. The view swallowed her entire field of vision. For a thousand miles in that direction, there was not a single human habitation.
She felt a rush of gratitude for the architect or site planner who had decided that the east-facing view from Shackleton would be of a vast, pristine expanse of ice. The western and southern sides—marred by outbuildings, the airstrip, and the deep-ridged tracks of hundreds of industrial vehicles—seemed to her to be the worst kind of accumulation of people and their things. It couldn’t be an accident that there was nothing man-made visible on this side of the station. Someone had planned this view.
Interestingly, while the vista might be unblemished, it wasn’t uninterrupted or uninteresting. The base had been built on a plateau and the escarpment it capped ran for hundreds of meters in a half-moon shape to the right. If she leaned away from the window and used a little imagination, she could curve her arm so that it matched the proportions of the ridge exactly. Angular shadows cast by frozen cliffs broke up the landscape while subtle blue variations in the sastrugi made the whole look more like a choppy sea than an unending field of very solid ice.
In time, probably, the technology would improve and the number of residents at Shackleton would increase until today’s bustling research station would be merely the central building of a larger complex. Traffic and everyday commerce would compromise the land, and it would take a monumental effort to find a place where the past and present hadn’t infiltrated the panorama.
Cass lowered her forehead and rested it on the thin muscle of her forearm, closing her eyes to preserve the searing afterimage. She liked that every detail appeared in perfect, monochromatic detail to her inner eye, fading like an old photo or a memory, so that she had to invent the missing pieces as they disappeared. When nothing of the memory-image remained, she raised her head and opened her eyes.
Without items, things , in it, the scene was empty, devoid of the meaning that objects and people would give it. And while it was comforting to stare into space for a time, to imagine unlimited potential, an empty canvas was a void if nothing was ever painted on it. At some point, potential had to be realized, or you simply ended where you began: a blank, empty, meaningless frame of white, waiting for effort to give it meaning.
She dropped her head to her forearm again. Each time she thought she’d found a place—a job, a relationship, a home—to begin the process of forgiving herself, some part of the memory would catch up with her and shove the past in her face. She’d move on to the next stop in the journey to rebuild herself, pushing out to more dangerous work in more remote locations, only to find her past had closed the gap after a few weeks, a month, a year.
Antarctica was different. She’d felt it the moment she’d touched down on that great snowy expanse. A place with no context, no limits, and with room to grow, to start over. She needed just a little more time. Time and a blank canvas, empty of the past, open to the future. A chance to start over. Again.
Cass savored the feeling a moment longer before quietly packing it away. One thing working at Shackleton was good for was keeping you too busy to make navel-gazing a habit. There was equipment to tend to in the VMF, tests to run, reports to file. She was pushing the chair away from the window when the door opened behind her. She turned to see Deb poking her head in and Cass’s heart sank. Maybe Sikes had been less impressed with his tour than she’d thought.
“Don’t tell me there’s another tour.”
“Not this season,” Deb said as she walked over. “Hanratty wants you to report to Keene’s office.”
Her stomach twisted. “Keene? Why?”
Deb hesitated. “Sorry, Cass. I didn’t ask.”
“Right now?”
“Afraid so. And I wouldn’t keep him waiting. I heard he puts that kind of thing in your profile.” She turned to go, then stopped. “Nice job this morning, by the way. Sikes couldn’t stop talking about you.”
Message delivered, Deb returned to the main hall and disappeared around a corner, off to ruin more of someone else’s day. Cass sat back down and put her forehead against the cool metal of the windowsill, the little bit of inner peace she’d achieved gone.