There is still food and kerosene, but after a week, death has started to seem near, not a leap but a small sideways step. The cold is always nibbling at Marian’s hands and feet, looking for a way in, a breach in her defenses. Numbness is not an absence of feeling but a felt absence. If they stay too long outside, frostbite turns their faces white as death masks. They rub at their cheeks and noses and toes, endure the pain of returning to life.
Condensation from their breathing accumulates as a flaky rime on the sleeping bags and tent walls that must be brushed off twice a day. Eddie leaves a damp sock on the floor of the tent, and when he picks it up, it breaks as crisply as chocolate.
The cold has found its way to the core of her and, once established, proves nearly impossible to evict. The crusted yellow patches on her nose and cheeks she can’t get rid of, the fogginess of her mind—death is curled and waiting within her; death is massed along her borders. She has wild, colorful dreams that feel like small, vivid rebellions against the shrouding nothingness.
Sometimes she still finds herself thinking that she will visit Jamie after the flight. Remembering the truth brings a small detonation of grief.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she says to Eddie from inside her sleeping bag, “but sometimes my brother’s death gives me courage. I catch myself thinking that if he could die, if he could endure it, so can I, though obviously I have no choice, and it’s not something anyone endures. In fact it’s the opposite.”
“I think you should take courage from wherever you can find it,” Eddie says. “What’s the harm?”
Her gratitude to Eddie knows no bounds, and yet there are moments when she wishes him gone. To find the essence of Antarctica, she has an instinct it must be confronted alone. Or maybe the essence of the place is too large and empty for anyone to grasp, no matter how stark a confrontation is made. Maybe that is the appeal of Antarctica, the itch of it. She thinks of Jamie painting infinite space, knowing infinite space could not be painted.
When they go outside during lulls in the wind, Eddie stands with his back to her, staring out across the white disk, and doesn’t seem to hear her when she speaks.
In the tent, he says he likes Antarctica because it hasn’t been touched by the war. He likes that there is nothing to rebuild. “The rebuilding depresses me almost as much as the destruction did,” he says. “At least the rubble was truthful.”
She remembers cities reduced to flat patches of pink-gray dust and jumbled heaps of masonry. She thinks he means that no matter what earnest promises of peace are made, what fragments are hauled up and glued back together, the dead will not return. A return to the world as it was is impossible; the only choice is to make a new world. But making a new world seems dreary and exhausting.
* * *
—
The sky is clear and they are digging, exhuming the bloodless silver body of the plane from a mound of snow. They’ve exposed a wing and most of the tail. The inside is full of snow, too. Their hands are already raw inside their mitts, but they must keep digging. Eddie has made a careful survey of the crevasse, probing with a tent pole, and marked a safe path. He thinks the ice ahead of the plane is solid. They dig in a fever, hoping the weather holds.
* * *
—
Clouds close in, part, close again. They dig for a full day, can’t stop without their sweaty clothes freezing solid. Once they get the body of the plane free, they dig out the inside, and they bang the propeller blade straight enough, patch the ski well enough.
Finally all that is left is to crack the last of the snow from the cowlings and wait, fearfully, while the engines warm under their hoods. They want nothing more than to sleep, but there is no reason another blizzard shouldn’t come in and undo all their work.
The propellers spin feebly, stop. Marian tinkers with the booster. The fuel lines cough; the engines growl to life; the props spin, keep spinning. When the time comes, she has to throttle up hard to break the skis free of the ice, her weary arm aching just at that. The snow passes faster and faster out the cockpit windows. They bounce and jostle, and she prays not to hit any big sastrugi or a crevasse. They hover; they’re ascending. The patch of ice that had held them and the hidden crevasse under it vanish immediately, indistinguishable from the rest of the white.
Eddie takes a sight, shows her on the chart where they had been. A blank spot, like all the others. Her adrenaline sputters as the flying lulls her. Sleep presses on her. Her head drops, snaps up.
The Transantarctic Mountains burst through the continent’s white hide: pyramidal peaks and black serrated ridges and blue fields of shattered ice. Marian flies at thirteen thousand feet, steering among the passes. She tries to use oxygen, thinking it might wake her up, but a valve is frozen shut. Charles Lindbergh was awake for more than fifty hours when he flew across the Atlantic, she reminds herself. But, a self-pitying part of her counters, he hadn’t had to dig a plane out of the snow.