Once, in Alaska, she’d flown a man out to a copper mine, a city guy, an executive from San Francisco come to make an inspection. They’d gotten caught in cloud, couldn’t get under or over, had to go through. After a while she noticed the guy kept pinching his earlobe between two fingers. When she asked him if his ears hurt, he admitted, in a dry whisper, that he was having the strangest feeling. He kept thinking they might have crashed and died and this shapeless droning white was purgatory. If he pinched himself, he said, he felt more confident he was still alive.
Now she understands. Where is the border between life and oblivion? Why should anyone presume to recognize it?
She makes a shallow turn, retreating in hope of better visibility. She thinks she catches a faint glimpse of the ice below, and then it is gone. They need to land soon and without wasting fuel. Nearly blindly, playing close to stall speed, she brings the plane lower. Wind buffets. The engines whine. A gust, and she sees the ice, pulls up. A horrible scrape and jolt, the plane slewing sideways.
* * *
—
Their tent floats in nothingness. The wind shrieks without resting, might tear apart the rattling canvas at any moment. Marian wants to call it merciless, but, here, mercy is an alien concept, irrelevant.
Outside, the blowing drift blinds and suffocates. All is white. She seems to hang suspended, as there is no way to tell the snow she stands on from the air around her. She can’t see the plane where it is dug in and tethered, can only hope it hasn’t blown away. She can’t go to it. If she were to take more than a few steps out into the white, she would never find her way back to the tent.
It is a miracle they’d survived the landing with only a bent prop blade and one damaged ski. She’d bent a million props in Alaska, knows how to whack them back with a sledgehammer and how to tape and tie and splint a ski. It is a miracle the blizzard had not yet reached full blast when they landed, that they’d been able （after a struggle） to secure the plane and erect their tent and light the stove so they might silently suffer the excruciating pain of thawing their feet and hands.
They sleep and wake inside their reindeer sleeping bags, sleep and wake, lie mostly in silence when they are awake. After two days, when the wind finally drops, Marian can think only of the plane. Quietly, trying not to wake Eddie, she crawls from the tent. There is only the faint shape of mounded snow where the plane had been. She begins to run, tromping in her heavy boots, and can’t have taken more than a dozen steps when the snow does something strange under her right foot.
She has instinctively thrown her weight to the left and dropped to her knees before she understands what has happened.
Black space where she’d stepped, as though she had kicked a foot-size aperture from this white world into a subterranean void. A few feet of vertical ice glow blue in the crevasse; below that is a familiar darkness. It has been following her since she first flew to Canada, perhaps since the Josephina went down. She is sitting on a thin membrane between a white void and a black one. Two halves of a sphere, each made of absence: the absence of color, the absence of light.
She crawls back to the tent on hands and knees. Eddie stirs when she enters, murmurs that the wind is dropping off. She can only make a guttural sound she hopes he will take as agreement. The chasm waits outside, submerged like a crocodile. The plane, assuming it’s still there, might be resting on a precipice. The tent might sit atop a snow bridge that could collapse at any moment. Thinking of the small black hole in the snow, she feels terror but also pity for her body—its hapless, clumsy vulnerability, its smallness, the dumb weight of it. She can do nothing for now. The wind is rising again. She retreats into sleep.
* * *
—
Drifting snow buries the tent, insulating them. They dig out the entrance every few hours to be sure they aren’t permanently entombed. Eddie, when Marian told him about her discovery of the crevasse, had remained the stalwart Antarctic version of himself. All they can do for now is be careful, he said, and when the storm abates, they will see what they see. If the plane is gone, then it is gone. He thinks, though, it is probably still there, just buried.
The weather must break. Even in this most hostile place, the sun and sky must return. Marian tells herself this but does not entirely believe it. She thinks again of her passenger in Alaska trying to convince himself he was not already dead. Could they be dead? Anything seems possible, but also nothing seems possible except white and cold. No, she thinks, oblivion must be pure, and their presence mars the purity of this place. They are the speck of imperfection that proves life.