The Isle of Youth: Stories

by Laura van Den Berg

  ANTARCTICA

  In Antarctica, there was nothing to identify because there was nothing left. The Brazilian station at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula had burned to the ground. All that remained of my brother was a stainless steel watch. It was returned to me in a sealed plastic bag, the inside smudged with soot. The rescue crew had also uncovered an unidentified tibia, which might or might not have belonged to him. This was explained in a cold, windowless room at Belgrano II, the Argentinean station that had taken in the survivors of the explosion. Luiz Cardoso, the head researcher at the Brazilian base, had touched my shoulder as he spoke about the bone, as though this was information intended to bring comfort.

  Other explanations followed, less about the explosion and more about the land itself. Antarctica was a desert. There was little snowfall or rain. Much of it was still unexplored. There were no cities. The continent was ruled by no one; rather, it was an international research zone. My brother had been visiting from McMurdo, an American base on Ross Island, but since it was a Brazilian station that had exploded, the situation would be investigated according to their laws.

  “Where is the bone now? The tibia?” I’d lost track of how long it had been since I’d slept, or what time zone I was in. It felt very strange to not know where I was in time.

  “In Brazil.” His English was accented, but clear. It had been less than a week since the explosion. “It’s not as though you could have recognized it.”

  We stood next to an aluminum table and two chairs. The space reminded me of an interrogation room. I hadn’t wanted to sit down. I had never been to South America before, and as Luiz spoke, I pictured steamy Amazonian rivers and graveyards with huge stone crosses. It was hard to imagine their laws having sway over all this ice. It was equally hard to believe a place this big—an entire fucking continent, after all—had no ruler. I felt certain that it would only be a matter of time before there was a war over Antarctica.

  “It’s lucky the explosion happened in March.” Luiz was tall with deep-set eyes and the rough beginnings of a beard, a few clicks shy of handsome.

  “How’s that?” My brother was dead. Nothing about this situation seemed lucky.

  “Soon it will be winter,” he said. “It’s dark all the time. It would have been impossible for you to come.”

  “I don’t know how you stand it.” The spaces underneath my eyes ached.

  My husband hadn’t wanted me to come to Antarctica at all, and when our son saw where I was going on a map, he had cried. My husband had tried to convince me everything could be handled from afar. You’re a wife, he’d reminded me as I packed. A mother, too.

  “Did you know about your brother’s work?” Luiz said. “With the seismograph?”

  “Of course.” I listened to wind batter the building. “We were very close.”

  I couldn’t stop thinking about him as a boy, many years before everything went wrong: tending to his ant farms and catching snowflakes in his mouth during winter. Peering into a telescope and quizzing me on the stars. Saying tongue twisters—I wish to wish the wish you wish to wish—to help his stutter. We had not spoken in over a year.

  Luiz clapped his hands lightly. Even though we were indoors, he’d kept his gloves on. I had drifted away and was surprised to find myself still in the room.

  “You have collected your brother’s things, such as they are. There will be an official inquiry, but you shouldn’t trouble yourself with that.”

  “I’m booked on a flight that leaves in a week. I plan to stay until then.”

  “The explosion was an accident,” he said. “A leak in the machine room.”

  “I get it.” Exhaustion was sinking into me. My voice sounded like it was coming from underwater. “Nobody’s fault.”

  I had flown from JFK to New Zealand, where I picked up a charter plane to an airstrip in Coats Land. There had been gut-popping turbulence, and from the window I could see nothing but ice. Luiz had been the one to meet me on the tarmac and drive me to Belgrano II in a red snow tractor. I’d packed in a hurry and brought what would get me through winter in New Hampshire: a puffy coat that reached my knees, a knit hat with a tassel, leather gloves, suede hiking boots. I’d had to lobby hard to come to Antarctica; the stations weren’t keen on civilians hanging around. When I spoke with the director of McMurdo, I’d threatened to release a letter that said details of the explosion, the very information needed to properly grieve, were being kept from the victims’ families. I knew Luiz was looking me over and thinking that the best thing I could do for everyone, including my brother, including myself, was to just go on home.

  “Are there polar bears here?” I felt oddly comforted by the idea of a white bear lumbering across the ice.

  “A common mistake.” He drummed his fingers against the table. He had a little gray in his eyebrows and around his temples. “Polar bears are in the north pole.”

  “My brother and I were very close,” I said again.

  * * *

  There was a time when that statement would have been true. We had been close once. During our junior year of college, we rented a house in Davis Square, a blue two-story with a white front porch. Our parents had died in a car accident when we were in middle school—a late spring snowstorm, a collision on a bridge—leaving behind the grandparents who raised us and an inheritance. My brother was in the earth sciences department at MIT; I was studying astronomy at UMass Boston (I was a year older, but he was on an accelerated track). Back then I thought I would never grow tried of looking at the sky.

  When it was just the two of us, we did not rely on language. He would see me cleaning chicken breasts in the sink, and take out breadcrumbs and butter for chicken Kiev, our grandmother’s recipe. After dinner, we watched whatever movie was on TV. E.T. played two nights in a row and maybe it was an iguana became something we said when we didn’t know what else to do, because even though we had been close, we never really learned how to talk to each other. Sometimes we didn’t bother with clearing the table or washing dishes until morning. We went weeks without doing laundry. My brother wore the same striped polos and rumpled khakis. I showed up for class with unwashed hair and dirty socks. His interest in seismology was taking hold. He started talking about P-waves and S-waves. Fault lines and ruptures. He read biographies on Giuseppe Mercalli, who invented a scale for measuring volcanoes, and Frank Press, who had land named after him in Antarctica, a peak in the Ellsworth Mountains.

  It was at MIT that he met Eve. She was a theater arts major. They dated for a semester and wed the same week they graduated, in the Somerville courthouse. I was their only guest. Eve wore a tea-length white dress and a daffodil behind her ear. She was lithe and elegant, with straight blond hair and freckles on the bridge of her nose. When the justice of the peace said “man and wife,” she had called out “wife and man!” and laughed and then everyone started laughing, even the justice. I wasn’t sure why we were laughing, but I was glad that we were.

  There were three bedrooms in the house. It might have seemed strange, brother and sister and his new wife all living together, but it felt like the most natural thing. Our first summer, we painted the walls colors called Muslin and Stonebriar and bought rocking chairs for the porch. We pulled the weeds that had sprung up around the front steps. All the bedrooms were upstairs. When I was alone in my room, I played music to give them privacy. At dinner, I would watch my brother and Eve—their fingers intertwined under the table, oblivious—and wonder how long it would take them to have children. I liked the idea of the house slowly filling with people.

  That fall, my brother started his earth sciences PhD at MIT. He kept long hours in the labs, and when he was home, he was engrossed in textbooks. Eve and I spent more time together. She lived her life like an aria—jazz so loud, I could hear it from the sidewalk; phone conversations that sprawled on for hours, during which she often spoke different languages; heels and silk dresses to the weekend farmers’ market. She always wore a gold bracelet with a locket.
I would stare at the oval dangling from her wrist and wonder if there was a photo inside. I helped her rehearse for auditions in the living room, standing on a threadbare oriental rug. I got to be Williams’s Stanley Kowalski and Pinter’s Max, violent and dangerous men. I started carrying slim plays around in my purse, like Eve did, even though I had no plans to write or perform; the act alone felt purposeful. I learned that her father was an economics professor and she had majored in theater to enrage him, only to discover that she loved the stage. I’d never met anyone from her family before.

  One afternoon I went to see her perform in The Tempest at a community theater in Medford. My brother had been too busy to come. She was cast as Miranda. Onstage she wore a blue silk dress with long sleeves and gold slippers. In one scene, Miranda argued with her father during a storm; somewhere a sound machine simulated thunder. Everything about her carriage and voice worked to convey rage—“Had I been any great god of power, I would have sunk the sea within the earth…”—but for the first time, I noticed something was wrong with her eyes. Under the lights, they looked more gray than blue, and her gaze was cold and flat.

  Afterward, we drank at the Burren. The bar was bright and crowded. A band was unpacking instruments from black cases. We jammed ourselves into a small table in the back with glasses of red wine. Eve was depressed about the production: the turnout, the quality of the lighting and the costumes.

  “And the guy who played Prospero,” she moaned. She had left a perfect lip print on the rim of her wineglass. “I would’ve rather had my own father up there.”

  When the waitress came around, she ordered another drink, a martini this time. She took an eyebrow pencil out of her purse and drew hearts on a cocktail napkin.

  “What do squirrels give for Valentine’s Day?” she asked.

  I shook my head. My hands were wrapped around the stem of my glass.

  “Forget-me-nuts.” She twirled the pencil in her fingers and laughed the way she had during her wedding, only this time I caught the sadness in her voice that I’d missed before.

  She put down the pencil and leaned closer. At the table next to ours, a couple was arguing. The band tuned their guitars. When she spoke, her voice was syrupy and low.

  “Lee,” she said. “I have a secret.”

  * * *

  In Antarctica, I shared a bedroom with a meteorologist from Buenos Aires. Her name was Annabelle and she talked in her sleep. Every morning, I had a three-minute shower in the communal bathroom (it was important to conserve water). I took my meals in the mess hall, with its long tables and plastic trays and harsh overhead lights. I sat with the ten Argentinean scientists who worked at the base; we ate scrambled eggs and canned fruit and smoked fish. They spoke in Spanish, but I still nodded like I could follow. The five scientists from the Brazilian station always sat at their own table, isolated by their tragedy, which I understood. After my parents died, it took me months before I could carry on a conversation with someone who had not known them, who expected me to be young and sparkling and untouched by grief.

  Four of the Argentinean scientists were women. They had glossy dark hair and thick, rolling accents. In Antarctica, I’d found that personalities tended to match the landscape, chilly and coarse, but these women were kind. There was a warmth between them, an intimacy, that made me miss being with Eve. They lent me the right clothes. They let me watch the launch of their meteorology balloon from the observation room, a glass dome affixed to the top of the station. The balloon was white and round, a giant egg ascending into the sky. In broken English, they told me what it was like during the darkness of winter: The sun, they said. One day it’s just not there. There are no shadows. You have very strange dreams. They included me in their movie nights in the recreation room, which had a TV, a small library of DVDs, a computer, and a phone. Once it was Top Gun, another time E.T. Everything was dubbed in Spanish, and when I didn’t get to hear the iguana line, I started to cry. I didn’t make a sound, didn’t even realize it was happening until I felt the wetness on my cheeks. The women pretended not to notice.

  I started wearing my brother’s watch. No matter how much I cleaned the metal, it kept leaving black rings around my wrist. With my calling card, I phoned McMurdo, only to be told that the scientists who worked with my brother had departed in anticipation of winter; all they could offer was the date he left and that their reports indicated he’d been in good health. I started pestering Luiz for a meeting with everyone from the Brazilian station, with the hope that they had more to tell.

  “An interview?” he’d asked, frowning.

  “No.” By then I’d been in Antarctica for three days, though I felt it had been much longer. “A conversation.”

  The day of the meeting, I dressed in thermals, snow pants, wool socks, fleece-lined boots, a hooded parka, and thick red gloves that turned my hands into paddles. I added a white ski mask that covered everything but my eyes. From Annabelle, I’d learned it was called a balaclava. She had given me a laminated sheet with a drawing of a human body. Arrows pointed to what kind of layer should cover each part, to avoid frostbite.

  When I first stepped onto the ice, I felt like an astronaut making contact with the surface of the moon. I wandered around the trio of heated research tents and the buzzing generators and the snow tractors. The sky was blue-black; the period of twilight, which seemed to grow smaller each day, would soon begin. By April, Antarctica would be deep into winter and there would be no relief from the dark.

  I found all five of the Brazilians in the middle research tent, standing by a long white table covered with black rocks. With the snowsuits and the balaclavas, it was hard to tell who was who, though I always recognized Luiz by his height. Some of the rocks on the table were the size of a fist; others the size of a grapefruit. One was as large as a basketball.

  “Meteorites,” Luiz said when he saw me looking. Apparently the ice in Antarctica preserved meteorites better than any climate in the world. His team had discovered ones that were thousands of years old.

  I touched the basketball-size rock—sand-colored and banded with black—and remembered how much my brother had loved the moon rock collection at MIT.

  “So what did you want to ask?” Luiz wore an orange snowsuit. His goggles rested on top of his forehead.

  I stopped touching the meteorite. Red heat lamps were clamped to the top of the tent. Standing before the other scientists, I suddenly felt like the one about to be questioned. It was hard to breathe through the balaclava.

  “What do you remember about him?”

  Not much, it turned out. One scientist volunteered that he often ate alone; another said he never participated in group activities like evening card games and Ping-Pong. He sang in the shower on occasion, an American song no one recognized. He had a stutter, though sometimes it was barely noticeable.

  “What about the other times?” I asked.

  “He could barely say his own name,” Luiz said.

  “How much longer was he supposed to stay with you?” I wished I had a notepad. I would remember everything, of course, but writing it down would have made me feel official and organized, like I was asking questions that might lead us somewhere.

  “Two more weeks,” Luiz said.

  “And when did you last see him?”

  There was silence, the shaking of heads. Someone thought they saw him the morning of the explosion, pouring a cup of coffee in the break room.

  “Nothing else?” These weren’t the questions I came with, not really, but maybe if we kept talking a door would open and I could ask something like Did you know he had a sister? Or, Did he seem happy? Or, What did he love about being here?

  “I crawled out of the station.” The words came from the woman in a sharp burst. The hood of her parka was down and auburn hair peeked through the top of her balaclava. Bianca, that was her name.

  “On my stomach, through fire, smoke. This is what I remember.” She swept her hand toward the group. “No one was thinking about your bro
ther. We barely knew him. We can’t understand what you’re doing here.”

  She pulled up her hood and walked out of the research tent. The other three scientists looked at Luiz, who shrugged and said something in Spanish, before following her.

  I watched them go. The tent flapped open, revealing a pale wedge of sky. Already I was failing as a detective.

  “I didn’t mean for it to go like that,” I said.

  “You want to know the truth?” Luiz said. “Your brother was a beaker.”

  “A what?”

  “A beaker. A scientist who can’t get along with the others. It wasn’t a privilege for him to be at our station. They were tired of him at McMurdo.”

  At breakfast, Annabelle had bragged that she could teach me to say “asshole” in any language. If you spent enough time in Antarctica, you learned a little of everything.

  “Ojete.” I picked up a meteorite the size of a grape and threw it at his feet. “Ojete, ojete.”

  Luiz looked down at the rock, unfazed. I left the tent and walked away from the station. I tried to run but kept slipping on the ice. When I finally stopped and looked back, the U-shaped building was minuscule against the vastness of the land. It was like standing in the middle of a white sea—ice in all directions, stretching into infinity. I pulled at the balaclava. I wanted to take it off, but couldn’t figure out how. The thought of venturing any farther was suddenly terrifying.

  Annabelle had explained that most researchers came for short stints, a handful of weeks or months. Few stayed as long as a year, like my brother had. There was the feeling that nothing but the elements could touch you out here, and I understood that was something he would have appreciated. Since we had been close, I could make these kinds of calculations.