A thought—an experience—he’s not relishing.
Wintering-over.
Returning to the scene of the crime.
Restaging it in a way. In time, mood, temperament, surrounding players, surrounding personalities. Creating the circumstances for it to be reenacted. And comprehended.
Experience tells him that’s what’s required.
That’s the problem with experience. That’s the bear, the burden of it, thinks Heller. You just know too damn much. Way more than a person should have to.
A serial killer, just getting started. Heller tries to tell himself otherwise, but he knows it in his bones.
He does not look forward to the second body that will prove his thesis right.
Please, please make me wrong.
19.
After the interviews, before dinner, he always compares notes with Trish. It’s always disappointing, because he has found nothing, accomplished nothing, and he can tell that she feels the same way. They are doing it to be dutiful and thorough and also, he can tell, to be with each other, and to let the conversation drift naturally away from the interviews themselves, to how Trish, the Southern Californian, the girl of freeways and malls and sunshine and bright concrete and urban sprawl, finds something so soothing, so powerful in Antarctica’s stark, natural beauty. And how Joe Heller, the Northern Vermonter, a real Vermonter, finds something of his love of Northern Vermont rekindled here, something of his youth, although he has not been back there in, well, a lifetime.
One night, after their debriefing, as Trish puts on her puffy red parka, Heller finally notices.
The observer, the detective.
“Hey,” he says, startled by it.
“Hey what?”
“That parka.”
“Yeah?”
He pauses. He smiles. A warmth of recognition runs through him. A sense of fate. “It was you I saw the first day I came here. You were a tiny figure way out at the edge of McMurdo, standing at the ocean looking out.”
She looks up at him. Surprised, flattered that he recalls.
“I wondered what you were thinking about. Whether you were happy or sad or distraught or contemplative. I couldn’t tell from that distance.”
She smiles, teases. “You can’t tell from this distance either, Heller.”
“Do you remember?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“So what was it? Happy? Sad? Contemplative? Awestruck?”
“All of the above,” she says.
Looking at him harder, and then smiling, she adds, “But accent on the happy, Joe. Right now, accent on the happy.”
And she zips up her parka and heads to the cafeteria.
20.
“Manny?”
“Yes, come on in. How’s it going?”
“Well . . . it’s going . . .”
“Well, if it’s going, then I guess it’s not going as well as you or I want, is it? ‘Going well’ would mean done with going. ‘Going well’ would mean coming to an end, not just going.”
Heller is silent in the face of this.
“Manny . . .”
And Heller then shares his intuition. His experience. He sees Manny Hobbes flinch at the first use of the term “serial killer” and look at him dismissively and skeptically, and then, as Heller continues to speak, to explain, he sees Manny Hobbes listening more intently—a scientist, endemically curious, open. He sees the bureaucrat, the administrator give way to the scientist . . .
“It’s going to require returning to the scene of the crime,” says Heller finally.
“But this is the scene of the crime.”
“No, the scene of the crime is wintering-over. The scene of the crime is the conditions of the crime.”
Reconstructing the scene of the crime. Following in the criminal’s footsteps.
“Ah, the conditions of the crime.” Manny Hobbes, the scientist, leans back, as if to literally settle into the idea of the scientific experiment, creating the control conditions for the experiment.
“And speaking of the conditions of the crime, I want to ask you a little about T3,” says Heller.
Hobbes smiles. “Of course. I figured. A fascinating topic.”
“I know the basics. What the Internet says. But anything more you can tell me about it?”
“Initially NASA was here researching T3,” says Hobbes. “They were very interested in studying it because of planning manned flights to Mars. The isolation, the sameness and invariability of vision and routine and sensory deprivation and social disengagement—a lot was analogous. They had a whole team here. Monitoring almost all of us over a couple of winters. But then funding for the manned space program was cut, and there was no reason to do the research, and they abandoned it.” He shakes his head in a mix of frustration and resignation that Heller has seen in Hobbes before. “So no one else was doing it ’cause NASA was doing it, and then NASA suddenly abandons it with budget cuts, so as a result, we don’t really know anything about it. No findings available. No suggestions on what to be looking for as far as susceptibility, or how to diagnose or treat it. It remains as weird as ever.”
“Can you give me, I don’t know, a flavor of how you’ve seen it manifest itself?”
“Oh, anecdotal evidence galore. Look around online. You’ll see lots of people writing it up in their blogs, their online journals, because its effect can be so wacky—and so individualized. A guy puts one earbud in one ear, puts the other in his mouth and swallows it. A woman reads an entire novel cover to cover and realizes only later she has read it backwards.” He pauses. “Or, you’re standing talking to someone, and suddenly you have no idea who it is.” And it is clear, with this last anecdote, Hobbes is talking about himself.
Heller knows the possible corollary. The eerie possible ancillary fact. That in some way, the killer doesn’t know he or she is a killer. That the murder took place in a fugue state, an altered condition of consciousness. Through some mental filter that may prove impenetrable. If the criminal at some level doesn’t know, then confession is pretty unlikely. (And if the criminal doesn’t know, maybe he or she won’t strike again. Leaving the community safe—and leaving the killer beyond justice forever.) And if T3 is a factor, who will determine—how will it be determined—how much personal and or legal responsibility there will be?
T3. Short for triiodothyronine. The complex, poorly understood chemical compound in the thyroid that just goes suddenly crazy. An organ Heller has never thought about for a moment, before his trip to Antarctica. The brain, the heart—these are the organs of center stage, where we live or die, succeed or fail. But now, he muses, the thyroid—strange, mysterious, opaque—will take center stage for the season.
For those who winter over, time bends, sunrise and sunset deform. He has asked Pritchard and Dolan about Polar T3. Pritchard had pretty good analogies. Like smoking pot, he said, or, better yet, like riding a rollercoaster or some other amusement park ride. Some people can’t get used to it, fight it, are ill. Others love it, relish it, swim in its effects, look forward to it. Earth’s high. The cosmos’s high. God fooling with night and day on you.
He’s even looked into getting hold of the NASA studies, as far as they go, but the space agency bureaucrats he reached were unwilling and unapproved to release partial findings, sorry. Typical government bullshit and runaround and ass covering. So his knowledge is stuck in anecdotal.
T3. Antarctic stare. And what would be his own susceptibility to it? Who knows? Everyone is different. Before seeing the Texan’s carvings, he couldn’t have told you the first thing about the thyroid. No idea about its size or weight or where it is in the body, and certainly not its function. The strange, misunderstood, mysterious organ. After an existence as an unknown, most misunderstood, least glamorous human gland, in Antarctica it takes center stage.
21.
The last of the summer crew boards the last supply plane of the season.
Joe Heller, Manny Hobbes, and Trish Wong stand toget
her and watch. Waving goodbye, raising a beer or a shot of vodka or a glass of champagne, along with roughly 150 others. The toast, the send-off, is a McMurdo tradition.
The last of the summer crew scrambles up the cargo ramp, scurrying like tiny fleas into the butt of the plane, thinks Heller, as the cargo ramp is raised. The huge gray beast, its engines singing in gleeful harmony, lumbers across the ice to the beginning of the landing strip and takes off.
It is a perfectly clear day. Heller, nevertheless, feels the darkness begin to close around him. Feels the darkness at the edges of his consciousness. Sees it begin to rise from behind the distant mountains, come up from beneath the sea. An anticipatory darkness. Not literally there yet, but quite inevitably coming. An encompassing darkness. Because the literal darkness will overlap, interact with the psychological darkness. They are cut off, isolated; there are no two ways about it now. It is already echoing for him with loss, with confinement, with narrowness, with a sense of imprisonment. Reverberating with a sense of isolation that he has always felt, that is part of his nature. That he has always fought for fear of where it will take him. He has a vague, passing sense that T3 may prove especially troublesome for him.
Trish raises her glass after the plane and smiles, bright eyed, with a sense of approaching adventure, it seems.
Heller and Hobbes do not raise their glasses. They merely exchange a brief, sober, wordless look. Hobbes too, perhaps, has a foreboding sense of the darkness, of the long night, already beginning its creep toward their existence and, more than that, into their consciousness.
They watch the takeoff of the last supply plane of the season.
They could hardly have guessed that it might be the last supply plane, ever.
BOOK TWO: NIGHT
22.
Joe Heller hunkers down.
Settles in for the long night.
On April 24, the sun sets at McMurdo and won’t rise again until August 20. A slight residual halo of light for a week or so—an echo, a memory—and then nothing. A night of several months. A night of more than a hundred days. Heller wonders: All the comforts and all the discomforts of night writ large? Elongated, expanded, in some disorienting way? A slumber, a hibernation, a time of dreams unleashed beyond previous borders? And what of the typical tremors of 2:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m., the acute anxious questions that keep you up before you are able to fall back asleep on a regular night. Do those get stretched? Exaggerated? Do they take hold of your soul even more? Unshakably? Since you can’t say at least it will be morning soon. It will not be morning soon.
But wintering over in this season soon becomes something entirely different.
The darkness soon enough becomes something else altogether. A different kind of night.
Every year the long night progresses from literal to psychological.
This year it will progress from psychological to existential.
Life always becomes different, wintering over in Antarctica. But in a predictable way. In a way that has rhythm, memory, from previous winters.
That is not what happens to Heller or Hobbes or any of the 155 others at McMurdo station.
This winter-over’s head count remains, coincidentally, at 157 people. “How ’bout that?” Hobbes says. “Same as last winter.” Hobbes shrugs at the coincidence. But Heller takes it more to heart. As if the number 157 is taunting him, haunting him, for his not yet being able to solve the murder. Taunting him with the fact that nothing has changed. That the murderer is still here, still hidden among 157 people.
One hundred fifty-seven suddenly very special people. One hundred fifty-seven suddenly very special existences.
A murder investigation in Antarctica. Antarctica’s first. Something seemingly unusual. Seemingly noteworthy.
It soon comes to seem like nothing. Tertiary. Distant. Forgotten.
Like nothing at all, in comparison.
23.
“Hey, wait a second,” says Trish. “You said you’re into astronomy, right?”
Heller nods, smiles. “You remember.”
His little hobby. That he’d started to distract himself from the earthly turmoil with Paul. Lift his mind, his attention, as far from it as possible. A hobby he was soon sharing with Amy as a little girl. The telescope on the back deck. Something they had had in common, did together. Until they no longer spent any time together.
Trish frowns, checks the notebooks. “But you haven’t been over to the observatory yet?”
Heller smiles, confesses. “I was saving it. I was told to wait. That viewing is the most dramatic in the winter dark. That’s when they do most of their experiments. That’s when the observatory is at its best.”
Many of McMurdo’s science experiments revolve around the extreme temperatures and conditions, but most of the important astronomy experiments proceeded—full speed—only when the Antarctic night sky finally enveloped them.
“Along with the telescope at Amundsen-Scott, it’s the only uncontaminated viewing on the planet,” Trish tells him. “There’s light and atmospheric distortion everywhere else on the globe. The observatory is just amazing,” she says. “Since you have to interview Dr. Green and his assistants anyway, I’ll make sure they give you the royal treatment.” She smiles. “They’ll give it to you anyway. They don’t get streams of visitors.”
“Want to come with me?” Heller asks.
Her answer is her wide smile.
The observatory is several hundred yards away, set off by itself. Trish arranges an ATV for them. Dr. Green greets them at the door. Like an elf or gremlin welcoming Heller and Trish to his magical dome-shaped home. Green fits the part perfectly. He has a white beard, he’s rotund, cherubic, but there’s something street tough about him too. A Southie Boston accent. Brains that elevated him from his circumstances. Astrophysics—a jet pack out of the Boston ghetto.
“Come in, come in.” As if he’s about to offer them a cup of chamomile tea.
Green’s eyes sparkle.
You, you with the stars in your eyes.
Astrophysics PhD, MIT labs, California Institute of Technology, hadron collider advisory team. Trish read Heller the bio binder before coming.
“For months, it’s calculations, computer modeling, simulations, discussion with colleagues all over the world via e-mail and Skype,” says Green, leading them down a short, low metal-and-riveted corridor—a tube really—something from a space station in a space movie. “But it’s all preparatory, all countdown. Really just a way of marking time, until we can get to the real business. Of looking. That’s all we’re doing here. A very advanced form of it. But in the end, just looking. Looking around us, to see what we see.”
The tube opens onto the amphitheater of the observatory. The big telescope sits at its center, its interlocking, stupendously wide white-and-silver cylinders gleaming, and gradually narrowing, to a reverse focal point—a scuffed leather seat.
A kind of throne, thinks Heller. A throne of science. A throne of observation. The universe, out one end of this impressive, gleaming device, and at its other end, a single human, a single set of eyes, and a single humming brain—at the nexus of all this technology.
Green motions Heller silently toward the telescope seat. He suddenly stops talking, and it seems symbolic, meaningful, in conscious deference to what is about to be experienced by his guest.
Heller ducks into and settles onto the throne. In fact, a beat-up jump seat. Green slides the viewing assembly—about a four-foot square—into place in front of Heller. Like preparing for a massive eye test. Green adjusts some dials, pushes some buttons, and there are faint accompanying whirs from elsewhere in the otherwise silent observatory.
“Light and atmospheric contamination are a factor everywhere else on the planet. It took mankind getting to Antarctica to finally see clearly. Like we had to be good girls and boys for several thousand years, to develop enough and not kill each other off or blow ourselves up, to earn the privilege of reaching this special vantage point. Like the gods
were testing us, or thought we needed a little more seasoning, before they could bestow this gift.” He giggles loosely.
The eyepiece that Heller has settled his eye against suddenly bursts alive—like a movie screen in a dark theater suddenly igniting. It is a stunning, startling density of stars, thick as stew, bright as fireworks, not the white of the Vermont night sky of Heller’s youth but a dazzle of blue, red, green, violet, orange, pink, and yellow, in a range of hues. There is hardly any black between the stars. It’s a night sky, yet night is effectively banished. The sky is alive is all Heller can think, all that occurs to him. The sky is alive. He is aware of his own startled intake of breath only after he inhales. Only as he recovers a little, grabs the edges of the seat to stabilize a little, after that first view.
“That’s our sky, Mr. Heller. The sky that’s out there every moment, above us, around us, has always been and will always be, and it’s just we haven’t been able to see it. Like the millions of microbes inside us, like the millions of atoms hanging around us.”
Heller says nothing. Words are immaterial and inadequate and interruptive at this particular moment. A little later. Not right now.
Green lets him look a little more in silence.
Before saying: “Strange thing to be at the very tip of our planet, searching for other ones. Trying to peer into the beginning and end of time, among other modest pursuits. Nothing but ice for a thousand miles in every direction and infinite space above you, and you’re nothing but a big eye, a huge eye, humanity’s appointed representative of pure observation and infinite sight. I sit here, and for minutes, hours, days, weeks, there is nothing else. There is no planet behind me or around me, there is no past or history, there is no technology, even, in a way—there’s just me and my highly advanced eye and the universe. That’s all. All focus. All forward. All possibility. A powerful Zen present. It’s a strange experience, Mr. Heller. As you can readily see.”
Days of Night Page 9
