by John Yunker
He tried to listen for voices in the whiteness surrounding him, but the steady throbbing of the blades kept him deaf. He felt time slipping, fuel expiring. He debated shutting down the engine, but what if the ice began to break? What if the engine refused to start again? And what if Aeneas had fallen into the water trying to reach Noa?
He didn’t know how much time had passed, but it felt like too much. He began shouting their names. He walked to the edge of the ice floe, straining his eyes. He shouted again, then felt the ice pull out from under him like a rug.
He collapsed as the ice split in half, his toes on one piece, his hands on the other, holding his body above a widening pool of sub-zero water, frozen in a push-up position. He arched his back and slowly, steadily, carefully pulled the pieces back together, then rolled over onto a larger piece of ice.
Shaking, disoriented, he stood and searched the emptiness. He saw a shadow ahead and ran toward it. But it turned out to be a seal, poking its curious head out of the water. The sight of Robert scared it back under. But Robert, too, felt a jolt of fear, realizing that there were also polar bears out here, and they would not be nearly as easy to spot against the ice.
Following the sound of the engine, he made his way back to the helicopter, hoping to find both of them seated inside in the cockpit. But it was empty.
On the radio, he called to Noa, Aeneas, the ship. Nothing but silence. Was the radio broken, or were they ignoring him? He knew that if he waited much longer he would not have enough fuel to make it back to the ship. But he couldn’t bring himself to engage the throttle, to raise the helicopter from the ice.
If he could find her, if she could hang on a little while longer, he could make it to the ship, refuel, and return to her. Another minute more and there would be no return, no chance of rescue. He lifted off. Below him, everything was slush. The fog was beginning to clear as he left the ice behind, but as he backtracked—or thought he did—the ship was not where he left it. He flew farther, in broad circles, but the Eminence was nowhere to be found. And now the helicopter’s dashboard was beeping at him. Out of fuel, he had no choice but to return to the ice.
With the fog cleared, he found the overturned Zodiac. He landed as close to it as he could. The helicopter hit hard, piercing the ice, and Robert jumped out, scurrying away as the ice fell away under his feet. He heard the propellers slam into the ice and felt shards of glass and water rain on him from behind. He made his way to the Zodiac and struggled to turn it right side up. When he finally did, he pushed it into exposed water and scrambled in.
When his breathing calmed, he shouted for Noa. Then Aeneas. He shouted until his voice grew hoarse. Once, he thought he heard an engine, and he stopped and leaned into the mist, searching until his eyes blurred and the sound faded away.
Noa was gone. Aeneas, too, most likely. And Robert himself was soaked through, his fingers and face numb, a hundred miles from land. If he were to save himself, which was looking less and less likely, he had to start moving, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave. He would rather perish out here on the ice than be proscribed to some sterile office in Washington, to live out a half-life of bureaucracy and paperwork. To live without Noa.
In the end, that was why he started the engine and began to scrape his way back through the ice, forcing open a passage a few feet at time. To return alone, if he returned at all, would be his purgatory, a fitting punishment, exactly what he deserved. Eventually the cracks began to give way to rivers, then to slush, then to open water, as if the ice were spitting him back out into the ocean.
The blue sky had been replaced by high clouds, and the wind pushed the waves nearly seven feet high. Perhaps he would drown after all, he thought, and he began to welcome the idea all over again. Even if he did make it a hundred or so miles south of the ice cap, finding Svalbard would be no easy task. If he veered off only a few degrees in either direction, he would be out of fuel in the middle of the Polar Sea.
When he saw a plume of spray in the distance, just above the water, his ice-numbed mind focused on it, and he was surprised that with this sudden hope, his instinct to live was stronger than his desire to die.
But as he drew closer to the source, he saw a flipper slice the surface of the water and realized it wasn’t another Zodiac but a whale. As he watched it—a humpback, as Noa had taught him—he grew so mesmerized by its graceful meandering that he began to trail after it, following its long pectoral fins, their jagged edges breaching the water every now and then.
As Aeneas had once said, the whale was the only mammal that had emerged from the sea at one point in time, took a look around, and went back. And in that moment, Robert felt as though he, too, was turning his back on dry land forever.
He followed the whale until he could no longer see it through the ice on his eyelashes, until his frozen hands could no longer control the Zodiac. He didn’t remember losing consciousness; he only remembered waking much later, a Zodiac pulling up next to his, the crew of a tourist vessel helping him up, ushering him on board. A hot shower, a doctor, a private cabin.
He returned to the States, his mission a failure, as many missions were; agents learned to get past them and move on.
But Robert knew his failures went far beyond the mission, and there was no one he could tell. Aeneas, he learned, had survived; months later, the CDA announced a new mission, this one to Japan.
For more than a year, Robert looked for news about Noa—anything. She was no longer a part of the CDA, but she didn’t seem to be a part of any other organization either. There was no announcement of her death, no obituary—but Robert also knew that if she’d died on the ice, Aeneas would not want the bad publicity. His crew members, as he’d always said, came second to the cause, and no matter what happened, the CDA would persevere.
Ethan
In Puerto Madryn, while most of the passengers were off at Punta Verde taking pictures of penguins, Ethan was in his stateroom lacing his shoes. He needed to take a jog, to clear his head, to get back to his old rituals. He needed to prepare for a life without Annie.
He’d been on the ship for more than ten days, and Annie had not shown up. And Ethan had not seen the Arctic Tern at any of their ports of call. Despite this, his mind had been relentlessly occupied with Annie, and he was now making an effort to empty the cache. He had to, if he was ever going to move on. He stopped checking email, stopping using the search engines. He picked up a book on programming to give his mind something else to process.
There were still two hours before the ship was scheduled to leave. He didn’t bother with stretching. He was anxious to escape the masses of people milling about on the pier, browsing the tourist stalls. He swiped his I.D. card and began jogging down the gangplank. The street was an obstacle course of tourists—cameras, a child on a leash screaming wildly, strollers, pedicabs, bicycles. Two miles later, Ethan reached the end of the Puerto Madryn harbor, stopped, and turned around. Even from a distance, the cruise ship loomed over the harbor. The thought of boarding it again made him cringe.
He made his way back to the ship, unintentionally scanning the face of every young woman he passed. As he neared the ship he began dodging people again. It wasn’t just the passengers lining the sidewalk but people walking dogs, riding skateboards. It reminded him of the coastline back home—wherever water joined land, it seemed, humans fled toward it, as if there were some inexorable pull toward the water’s edge.
Or maybe, Ethan wondered, it wasn’t that people were drawn toward the water but that the water was holding them in. After all, they reached the edge, then stopped. At least, most people did.
Ethan’s mind drifted back to a frigid day in January, when he was thirteen and his dad had taken him to the St. Louis riverfront. The wind off the water was brutal, but he’d been young enough not to care. Back then, the riverfront was little more than cobblestones and mud, along with the skeleton of a tug boat that had sunk a long
time ago. Ethan used to scan the shoreline for gold doubloons, remnants of the old riverboats that went down regularly in the 1800s. The old Eads bridge stretched overhead, thick with brown stones and rusting iron. Casinos and condos were a good thirty years away still.
That day, Ethan noticed an old lady in a black overcoat and purse walking slowly to the water’s edge. But this lady did not stop. Ethan watched her descend into the water as if walking down a flight of stairs, until her coat floated up around her like a lily pad. She continued down the stairs until her head disappeared in the brown water. Ethan looked over at his dad, who had just realized what was happening. His father ran into the water, dove down after her, and pulled her ashore.
People emerged from cars and the steps of the Gateway Arch. The lady was crying and shivering. The ambulance driver gave his dad a blue blanket with a red cross on it that ended up in their family room. His dad’s picture was in the paper the next day.
It turned out that the lady had lost her husband three months before and was trying to join him. Ethan spent days and months wondering how she overcame her body’s instincts to stay safe and warm and dry. How she stepped into that water so casually and with such purpose. He never had more respect for his father than that day—his father having thrown himself into the water to save an old lady, without hesitation, without fear. Yet it was the lady herself Ethan could not stop thinking about. The way she’d just kept going.
Now, his t-shirt drenched with sweat, Ethan approached the Emperor of the Seas. The lines to reboard were so long that he walked along the pier to stretch. He noticed a much smaller ship docked at the far end of the pier, a ship that seemed familiar. As he looked more closely, he felt his pulse quicken, as if he were still running.
He had seen this ship before. In the magazine Annie had left behind. Its picture on Web sites and brochures and news articles. Ethan had tracked it for months over the Internet but had never seen it in person.
The Arctic Tern. A three-story ship painted white. Antennas all over, like thorns from a cactus. A quietly spinning radar dish. A blue-and-white mural of a whale on each side. And a long ramp that reached down to him, inviting him in. People his age and younger rushed up and down the ramp, ferrying boxes and plastic cartons of vegetables. It was a chaotic scene, as if they were trying to beat a deadline.
He looked for Annie. She was not on the pier, nor on any part of the deck he could see. But there was so much he couldn’t see. He would have to go inside. There was no such thing as randomness in computers, no such thing as luck—but life was a different matter. Was this where luck ended and destiny began?
Ethan picked up a crate of potatoes. He took a first step, without hesitation, without fear. Then another. His mind flashed back to that day on the banks of the Mississippi. Up the ramp he walked. Onto the deck. Into the ship. With purpose, like that old lady, like his father.
He just kept going.
Part III: Convergence
Sometimes I stumble into history
the way a small animal, a rabbit or a fox,
stumbles into a passing car’s beam of light.
Sometimes I am the driver.
— Yehuda Amichai
Angela
The waves came to her in a dream. She felt her body, buoyant and lithe, pulled over them, floating just above the water, like a wandering albatross, her wings spread wide. Then she felt herself lifted up high on a burst of air until she was riding in the crow’s nest of an ancient schooner. Dark clouds obscured the sky and sank so low she could almost touch them. She looked down and watched waves breaching the deck of her boat, until it was consumed entirely, the mast disappearing into black water. Penguins porpoised over the waves surrounding her, hundreds of them, circling in formation. She could feel them watching her. She wanted to dive in, to follow them to wherever they went when they left her shores. She was not afraid of the darkness, not afraid of drowning. She was ready to be with them, at last in their world, just below the water line.
When Angela opened her eyes, she was in a dark room, alone in a single bed. She turned her head to the side. The bed across the narrow aisle was empty, the sheets twisted in knots, remnants of her first night aboard. The night before, Aeneas had paraded her through the ship’s hallways, lined with crew members greeting him like a hero returned from battle. Angela felt like Aeneas’s trophy, or his captive; all eyes were upon her, curious and probing. Back at Punta Verde, she’d always dressed to blend into the landscape; here, there was no blending in. As she watched the crew members study her, she realized how difficult it would be to fit into shoes that she’d rarely worn—she wasn’t accustomed to the role of girlfriend or lover, let alone the girlfriend or lover of an eco-terrorist. And yet by association she had now become one of them—an activist and a pirate, on a wave-tossed descent to the bottom of the planet.
They had lingered in the galley after dinner, celebrating Aeneas’s return over glasses of vodka. Angela sat next to D. J., the second mate and ship navigator. A clean-cut man in his thirties, he spoke quietly about coordinates and dates, and Aeneas assured him they would make up for lost time.
But it clearly wasn’t meant to be a working evening. By his third glass of vodka, Aeneas’s voice and mannerisms amplified; he grew more animated, holding up his penguin-scarred hands up for all to see, standing to recite a poem:
Will ye come down the water-side,
To see the fishes sweetly glide
Beneath the hazels spreading wide,
And the moon that shines full clearly.
As his words segued into song, members of the crew joined in, as if this were a longtime family ritual. Eventually the entire room echoed with melancholy voices, and Angela was the only silent one, made even more self-conscious by Aeneas’s eyes on her as he sang.
While waters wimple to the sea,
While day blinks in the sky so high,
Till clay-cold death shall blind my eye,
Ye I shall be thy dearie.
Song had followed song until the bottle was empty, and Aeneas led her again through the maze of narrow hallways, rooms, and stairways to his cabin—to their cabin, he called it.
“I don’t even know your real name,” Angela said.
“It’s Neil Cameron,” he replied. “But few of us go by our real names, particularly those of us with names on wanted lists. It’s safer that way, for everyone.”
“What about my name?”
“How about we call you Pingüina?”
Just then she’d wondered what she’d gotten herself into, and the fear must have shown in her eyes because Aeneas pulled her to him and hugged her tight. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You are safe here, and I am not leaving you. We’re a team.”
When he kissed her, she could forget the chaos and doubts of the last twelve hours, the momentary panic attacks about having abandoned her one and only career. His lips were warm and they relaxed her, and she had not felt relaxed for many years. How could she when a half million penguins needed to be protected? How could she waste a moment on a kiss when there was tagging to be done, data to gather? The few old friends who visited her at Punta Verde used to tell her how they envied her simple life, as if it were a vacation. But not once in her fifteen years at Punta Verde had she ever taken time off to read a book or spend the day in town or sleep in. Maybe if she had, she wouldn’t be here now.
The bed was small, but they made the most of it. His back against the wall, sideways across the bed, feet propped against the other bed across the aisle. Her straddling him. Their noises camouflaged by the engine below. The movement of the ship bringing them together, then apart, then together again, in a slow rocking unison that made her forget everything else.
But this morning, the waves were no longer so generous. Angela sat up and looked out the small window and saw a clear sky, wind-blown waves—no land. Suddenly the boat dropped beneath her, and she
fell back into bed and pressed her eyes shut.
Humans may have come from the sea, Angela reflected, but that was a long time ago, and bodies have a short-term memory. It wasn’t her first time on open ocean, and she knew her body would resist the motion, in vain, before finally adapting. But this time, it was not only her body that would have to adapt. She found herself listening for the sound of penguins calling out to one another, for the gentle scratching of wings against the floor below her feet, for the steady drumbeat of wind against the single-paned window of her trailer. Now she could hear only the straining roar of the ship’s engine somewhere far below.
She stood, uneasily at first, and emerged from her room, arms held up to brace herself against the door frame. She squeezed past a large cluttered map table and an array of radios and terminals. Maps carpeted the linoleum floor. She stepped over them and through a doorway, them pulled herself up a flight of stairs to the bridge.
In the middle of the room was a chest-high control console, and to its left stood Aeneas, his face pressed to the glass. He seemed lost in the tempest of white-capped waves ahead of him.
D. J. stood behind the controls at the wheel. To his right, another crew member, a young man wearing a baseball cap and a tattoo of a skull and crossbones on the back of his neck, studied a radar screen. Angela considered introducing herself, but she didn’t want to break their concentration.
“Steady one five,” Aeneas mumbled.
D. J. repeated the command rapid-fire, hands loose on the small wooden wheel, so tiny in comparison to the ship that it looked almost ornamental.
Angela took a few tentative steps toward Aeneas, not wanting to disrupt the quiet, the sense of peace that filled this warm windowed room overlooking a wild sea. “Morning,” she said softly.
