Antarctica (10 page)

He had thought they had been having a good time. That was what hurt. They had talked in the galley, and
laughed; they had hiked up to Ob Hill together, and snuck into the greenhouse; they had made out; they had made love; they had even gone to New Zealand together on vacation, which in the Mac Town structure of feeling was serious stuff indeed, a kind of commitment. And X had thought they had had a good time there, a really good time. Of course he had not been able to climb mountains at Val’s level, that was impossible and scary even to contemplate, her casually pointing up at routes she had done that looked completely vertical or even distinctly overhung; when they had driven up to Mount Cook, for example, past the biggest most turquoise lake imaginable, she had mentioned climbing Cook the last time she was there, and X had gazed up at that distant white spire, like something out of a dream, and stared at her open-mouthed until she had laughed. It’s not that hard, she said, although it is crappy rock, wheatabix the Kiwis call it, which is a breakfast cereal; it cuts your hands all up and yet crumbles under your weight, actually last time we got avalanched up there, it was great….

X had listened and nodded, trying not to look frightened. And after many climbing stories from her, all terrifying, recounted as they hiked the steep trails in the area, he had confessed in turn that he had been pretty bad at sports, and at physical activity in general. Always a disappointment to his school’s coaches, naturally, as he had always been big, and therefore looked promising. But after his last spurt of growth he had lumbered around “like Frankenstein’s monster,” as he put it, which caused Val to look at him oddly; and she didn’t offer any similar stories about herself. Apparently she had been quite a jock in school, when she had bothered. Good at volleyball in particular.

But X had been plagued by sports as by a curse in a
fairy tale. In high school he had taken a swing at a pitch while the baseball coach was watching, and accidentally hit the ball 548 feet as later tape-measured by the coach; it had taken two years of baseball after that without X ever even hitting the ball again to convince the coach that that one shot had been a fluke. Then in the winters X had been talked onto the wrestling team, and had wrestled in the heavyweight division, and lost every match for three years, all by pin; and was also perhaps the only wrestler ever to be pinned by an opponent weighing a hundred pounds less than he did; no doubt also the only wrestler ever stupid enough to agree to such a no-win contest in the first place.

But worst of all had been basketball. He had caught the attention of the UCSD coach, who had talked him into joining the team, and trained him intensively for two years in hopes of making him their center. But it hadn’t worked. Everything about it had been against the grain, and although eventually X mastered some aspects of the game, he never could make the ball go through the hoop, despite hours of training by a coach who in every game chewed a white towel to ribbons. All that frustrated effort culminated somehow in a crucial grudge match against their archrivals the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs, a nightmarish affair in which everything X tried went wrong and everything the Banana Slug center tried went perfectly, until there came a moment when X was fed a pass in the key and all his baffled frustration with sports surged into a single moment of rage, and he whirled around and leaped by his opponent intending to slam dunk the ball right through the floorboards, but missed by a fraction and hammered the ball onto the back rim so that it shot up into the rafters of the building, lost to sight for seconds, and X’s wrist hit the front rim wrong, and he came down on
his ankle wrong, and in the agony of a double sprain he twisted and fell, not quickly but like some immense tree cut at ground level, turning and crashing to the floor with his whole body at once, a perfect faceplant, afterward watching stunned as his teammates and opponents gazelled over him in pursuit of the ball on its return from orbit. The college paper’s sportswriter had called it the greatest missed shot in the history of basketball. And an existential moment for X, a bifurcation point in his life; for after that he had given up sports for good.

And Val had laughed at that story too. And instead of trying to take him up Mount Cook, or anything like it, she had driven him into the Southern Alps on the road from Christchurch over Arthur’s Pass, and just short of Arthur’s Pass she had parked the car at a Bealey Hotel, overlooking a wide gray gravel riverbed seamed by the many intertwining braids of a silvery river; and she had led him on a hike up the Bealey Spur, a green ridge rising over the braided riverbed, giving them a more and more spectacular view of it, and of the snow-capped mountains standing in all directions around them. A glorious walk it had been, with the whole world seemingly to themselves, no one else in it at all.

And then after lunch, on a kind of rock battlement near the high point of the spur, Val had leaned over and started unlacing a boot. And when X had understood why she was doing that, his heart had leaped in his chest. And though their lovemaking out in the sun on the mountaintop was wonderful, and though it was wonderful again to lie on yellow tufts of grass and watch Val walking around naked on the rock outcropping—just an animal checking things out, big and graceful, like an ibex become a woman in order to ravish
him with her mountain glory—still, that moment when he saw her untying her boot, and understood why—that was the moment which later made his hands shake, which made him moan in his bed at the magnitude of his loss. Because after their vacation was done she had gone back to the States to take care of some business concerning her grandmother’s empty place, and X had traveled some more, and visited home himself, and not seen her for the three months of the Antarctic off-season; and when they had both gotten back to Mac Town the following Winfly, she had dumped him. And without ever saying why. She had arrived two days before him and started up something immediately with one of the other mountaineers, he heard later; but obviously that wasn’t the whole story. No—she hadn’t had the same kind of time in New Zealand that he had had, that was clear, or else she wouldn’t have done it. He had racked his brains trying to remember anything he might have done wrong, in the wan hope of somehow making up for it.

And as he sat on the heavy shop floor, picking up nuts and bolts on automatic pilot, he racked his brains again, and cursed himself for talking to her about political philosophy, of all things. He cursed himself for making fun of his athletic career, what had he been thinking? To an obvious jock? And yet she had laughed at all that, she seemed to have been enjoying it. And the hike up Bealey Spur, looking around at those magnificent peaks, and the braided silver of the river below; he had done fine, he had enjoyed the climb and they had had a lot of fun. Of course at one particularly steep point in the trail, huffing and puffing, he had made some joke about being driven by such a hard taskmaster of a pro mountaineer, and her response had made it instantly clear that she didn’t think that line of humor
was funny at all; which made sense, and he had immediately apologized and backed off. So that couldn’t have been it, could it? Just one little bad joke? And if that had been it, and getting dumped was the penalty for one misbegotten remark, what then did that say about her? It didn’t make sense. She was a very easygoing person, she was always so cheerful, so casual. She never seemed worried about anything. Such fun, ah, God … he couldn’t think of it, it hurt too much. And yet he thought of it all the time. Like pushing a sore tooth with your tongue. Yes, it still hurts, you fool. You idiot. But what, what, what had he done?

So his poor racked brain spun, and his fingers picked up screws, nails, nuts, bolts, washers, and cotter pins, and put them in their bins. And slowly, slowly, he gave up all hope of getting back with Val; and, returning to his other unhappy track of thought, he gave up all hope of revolution bringing down the heartless aristocracy of the world; and when he slunk into the galley, starving and cold, Val’s gang laughed at their table, and the beaker girls smiled and passed him by, on the other side of an invisible spacetime discontinuity which was class.

After which, back to the heavy shop. The Sisyphean pile was of course as high as ever. This is work, X thought; this is what work is.

Ron appeared in the door. “Shit, X, are you still doing this?”

X glared at him.

“Tell you what, X. I got a proposal for you. Something completely different. It’ll still be work, hard work. But compared to this good-for-anything stuff you’re doing, it’ll be pure shits and giggles.”

Dulles to LAX, LAX to Auckland on the overnight, half watching two half movies, half eating two half meals; watching the face of a sleeping English nurse who worked in Australia, who had been very cheery until Wade had asked her about her job; three patients had died recently of melanoma; she slept dreaming of them, looking troubled. Wade wanted her for his nurse.

Later he woke to the insistent beep of his wrist phone. “Wade Norton,” he said blurrily into it.

“Wade it’s Phil. Where are you now?”

“Somewhere over the Pacific,” Wade said, trying not to wake up fully.

“What, you’re not there yet?”

“You just told me about this what, I don’t know.” Wade checked his watch, but could not remember what time zone it was keeping.

“Have you made it past the international date line? Or am I still calling you from tomorrow.”

“I don’t know. I was asleep.”

“So was I, Wade. But then I woke up and turned on
CNN, and saw Winston being interviewed, and I was so pissed off that I couldn’t get back to sleep.”

“So you called me.”

“As always.”

Wade pulled his phone headset from his briefcase and put it on, then plugged it into his wrist.

“—he did today? It’s not enough to block your Antarctic Treaty, and my debt-for-population reduction package—now he’s making noises about the CO
₂
joint implementation deal, knowing that any noise and the Chinese will throw a tantrum and run. Invasion of national sovereignty, he called it. We can’t be paying for their trouble! As if global warming was their trouble! Didn’t he notice Hurricane Velma? His own damn state about a hundred miles
skinnier
than it used to be, and him on CNN saying it’s a Chinese problem? Where do they
find
these guys? They must be breaking the cloning laws down there, they keep electing the same guy over and over.”

“He’s popular,” Wade said, leaning his head against the cool smooth jet window.

“Yes but why, Wade, why? How do these people win elections? I have never understood why so many decent hardworking Americans will loyally and you have to say even pigheadedly continue to vote for people whose explicit declared project is to rip them off.”

“People don’t see it that way,” Wade said, beginning to doze again.

“But it’s so obvious! Cutting jobs, reducing wages, increasing hours, shaving benefits and retirements—all this downsizing is the downsizing of labor costs, meaning less of what companies make is given to the employees and more to the owners and shareholders. And this is the Republican program! They advocate this transfer of profits! They write and pass the laws that allow it,
and oppose the laws that try to stop it! So why do people vote for them, why? Nobody making less than about seventy grand a year should ever even think of voting for them! And even the people who make more should reconsider their priorities.”

“You’re a true Democrat, Phil.” Though he had been a Green in his first term, and an independent in his second.

“That’s true, but still, how do they do it?”

“They tell people it’s Democrats ripping them off, with taxes. People see business paying them and government taking it away.”

“But business takes it away too! They take it first and they take more and then they run off with it! People are just squeaking by while their employers are zillionaires! At least if the government rips you off then they use the money to build roads and schools and airports and jails and all, they build the whole damn infrastructure! No, taxing and spending is good, that’s what I say—tax big and spend big, I say that right on the floor of the Senate.”

“We know, Phil. We watch in the office and we weep.”

“Yes you do, because government is the people! The owners just take the money and build castles in Barbados. How can they justify that, how can they
sell
that program?”

“Ideology is powerful.”

“I guess so. You must be right. Although I’ve never understood why you can’t just look the situation in the face and see what’s going on.”

“An imaginary relationship to a real situation.”

“Very
imaginary. But we’ve got to be even more imaginative than they are, Phil. Our imaginations are stronger than theirs!”

“Maybe. They seem to have the upper hand right now.”

“Do you think so? Don’t you think we’re gaining on them?”

“Do you?”

“Sure I do! I know it looks slow. But there are lots of people out there sick of being downsized. Give them half a chance and they’ll go for it. They don’t want revolution, but if they see a reform process leading to a desirable goal then they’ll walk away from these
Götterdämmerung
cowboys and they’ll all start up their own co-ops.”

“Capitalization trouble.”

“Yeah, but it’s legal, that’s the thing. It’s like a kind of progressive’s loophole in the law. And there’s so much of it happening already, under the radar. It’s like there are two sides battling for which fork of the path history is gonna take.”

“Your teeter-totter teleology.”

“What’s that? Sure, ecology’s on our side. It’s a good angel bad angel kind of thing. Co-opification versus the Götterdämmerung. But you know, everything’s going down in flames—ordinary people with kids can’t possibly like that, can they Wade? They’ll have to choose co-opification.”

“You would think so.”

“We have to make sure. Oh, man. I’m getting tired. I think the nightcap has finally done its thing, Wade. I’m gonna crash I think. I’m in Kashmir, try not to call me in the middle of the night, okay? But give me another report when you get there.”