“And this is what you bring to dinner?” Charlotte said as she snapped her napkin open.
“It’s fascinating stuff,” Darryl said, but when he started to elaborate on the sources of the putrefaction, Charlotte stuck a sourdough roll in his mouth.
“Didn’t your mama tell you not to talk about certain things at the table?”
Michael laughed, and once the roll was removed from his mouth, so did Darryl. “But, really, you would not believe the blood-cell ratios,” he said, starting up all over again, which Charlotte put a stop to by saying, “Michael, why don’t you tell us about what you did today?”
Darryl gave up, broke open the warm bread and began to ladle in scoops of butter, while Michael regaled them with tales of the Norwegian station and piloting the dogsled back to camp.
“Danzig let you do that?” Darryl said.
Michael nodded, swallowing a particularly tough morsel of stew. “In fact, I thought I saw you coming back from the dive hut on a snowmobile.”
Darryl admitted that he’d been there. “But nothing I brought up in the traps was worth keeping this time. I’ll try again tomorrow.”
They ate in silence for a few minutes—at pole, every meal was a sort of communion, a way to tell your body what time it was, a break in the unending day. There were many times when you had to stop and ask yourself whether it was lunch or dinner you were sitting down to, but Uncle Barney tried to make that easier for you by providing lots of sandwiches at lunch, and big hot entrees, like stew or spaghetti or chili con carne, for dinner. Betty and Tina had suggested candles be put out for the evening meal, but the grunts had overwhelmingly rejected that idea, in colorful language attached to the bulletin board outside Murphy’s office.
Michael had tried to be patient, but before Darryl had quite finished with his hot peach cobbler, he said, “You are planning to go back to the lab tonight, aren’t you?”
Darryl nodded, as he chased an errant slice of peach around his plate.
“Because I could always go on ahead of you,” Michael said, “if you don’t mind.”
Darryl scooped up the peach, ate it, and said, “Gimme a break. I’m coming.” He crumpled up his napkin and tossed it on the plate. “I want to see what’s up just as much as you do.”
Charlotte, sipping the last of her latte, said, “I’m in, too.”
After donning their coats and goggles and gloves, they were all barely identifiable, even to each other. In the Antarctic, people tended to recognize other people based on something simple—a colorful scarf, a stocking hat, a way of walking—because apart from that, everyone looked like big fat bundles of down padding and rubber and wool.
The night was uncommonly still, and the sun was veiled by a thin scrim of wispy clouds—all betokening serious weather to come. Their boots crunched on the ice and snow as they walked by the glaciology lab—they could hear the buzzing of a drill from inside the core bin—and approached the sled shed. Off in the distance, the botany lab, where the grow lights were always on, beckoned. It all reminded Michael of Christmas nights as a kid, when his parents would take him to midnight mass, and there was such an air of anticipation hanging over everything. Back then, he knew that something wonderful was waiting for him in the morning, and now he knew that something amazing was waiting for him in that low dark module just around the bend.
Darryl trotted ahead of them and up the ramp. So as not to keep the door open any longer than he had to, he waited for them to catch up before opening it—no one ever locked a lab at Point Adélie; it was a safety point laid down as law by the Chief—and the three of them ducked inside all at once.
The first thing Michael noticed, even before he’d unzipped his coat, was the wet floor. The marine lab often had spills—that was why the floor was a slab of concrete, with drains at regular intervals—but it was a lot wetter than usual. His rubber boots made a sucking noise as he stepped around the lab counter, where the microscope and monitor sat, and followed Darryl over to the side of the central aquarium tank.
Water was still dripping over its sides, the PVC pipes were still operating, as far as he could tell, but apart from the seawater, the tank was otherwise empty. There was no block of ice, and certainly no floating bodies. Chunks of ice drifted around like tiny bergs on the gently moving water, and the whole lab had a strong, briny odor. But Michael was puzzled—and frankly, a little pissed. Was this Darryl’s idea of a joke? Because if it was, he wasn’t laughing. He, Michael, should have been consulted if the bodies were going to be relocated again.
“Okay—what gives?” he asked Darryl. “Did you tell someone to move them?” But from the stunned look he now saw on Darryl’s face, he already knew the answer to that.
“Where are they?” Charlotte innocently asked, unwinding a long scarf from around her neck.