Minus Fifty Degrees — a short story
By: Mary Corbin
Tags: Fiction, Lonliness, Antarctica, Isolation, Short Story

awaiting the thaw

Photo courtesy of Andrew Miguel Fuller © 2020

Isolation. You think you know what it is by now. But have you been to Antarctica?

You’ve likely come as close to that frozen mass of barren continent as you would ever want to, enduring a year of lockdowns and losses, stone cold separations from other humans, predictable routines. Even as things begin to return to normal — hah, whatever that means — we have an embedded experience of isolation in our bloodstreams. We’re living in our own private Antarctica, if you will. But Andrew?

Well, Andrew actually had a lifelong dream of going to Antarctica for real. Even as a teenager living in the high desert at the outskirts of Los Angeles, he carried around a copy of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s, The Worst Journey in the World. The 800-page memoir was an account by one of the few surviving members of British explorer Robert Falcon Scott’s final 1910 Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole.

Andrew didn’t have the funds or desire to join one of the expensive Antarctic tours that sets off from the southern tip of Chile, but he had become thoroughly enchanted with the idea of visiting the vast white expanse someday. He didn’t really expect it to happen. It was more of an organizing principle than a real ambition. An impossible goal at the end of a road. An imaginary line to circle around an occasional profound sense of meaninglessness.

On the 100th anniversary of the Terra Nova crew’s return to England, Andrew wrote up his first application for a job in Antarctica. Ten years later, he got a phone call. Could he be ready to board a plane in three weeks for a two-month contract? He nodded silently before saying the word YES out loud.

McMurdo Station, though in the early stages of reconstruction, was never really a designed space so much as an organically grown outpost. Originally built in 1955, there are now well over 80 buildings patched together into a strange little town at the end of the world. Work can be stunningly monotonous, as each person’s job is highly specialized.

Five point five million square miles of frozen ice and unequivocal absolutes. That is the place. During summer in Antarctica, the sky is never dark. In September, the sun rises and doesn’t set again until March. For six winter months, the opposite occurs. Darkness. Pure, unadulterated darkness.

What was he thinking?

It was only supposed to be two months. Blink and you’ll miss it, right? Andrew, assigned to operate the heavy equipment required to move expensive, one-of-a-kind science equipment, looked for variation wherever he could find it. He joined the Search and Rescue Team. He tended bar at night. He didn’t allow himself to think any farther into the future than a week as each day became increasingly beige and undifferentiated with each passing moment of isolation from the outside world.

You chose this, he’d remind himself each morning.

When the news came, it was a moment he won’t ever forget. A virus was waging war on humanity across the globe. The death toll was climbing exponentially with no firm grasp of how to manage it. In some cities and countries, leaders were incapable of speaking honestly about it, doing anything about it, feeling anything tangible about it.

As time passed, Andrew realized he was protected from most of what was going on outside himself, existing inside his icy, dark bubble of atmosphere far from the panic and fear unfolding elsewhere. Yet, there was some part of him that regretted missing out on such a colossal event that everybody alive will share for the rest of their lives.

An isolation so different from his own. Like a benched player, he was somehow, improbably, sitting out on the sidelines. His routine existed somewhere apart from it all, day in and day out. Inside the deepest monotony, he would chant his mantra to himself, sometimes out loud for there was no one to hear it.

“I Am Full. I Am Full.”

He had come up with it the day he was signing all the legal documents and medical waivers to renew his contract, penning his name over and over on each piece of white paper, it jumped out at him. A brief amalgam of sorts. An abbreviated, spiritual moniker.

Andrew Michael Fullerton.

A. M. Fullerton.

A.M. Full.

I AM FULL.

“Oh!” he’d said suddenly when it came to him.

“What? Change your mind?” George, the administrative worker for the unit asked him in a monotone befitting of his station at the station.

“No. I mean, well, I just saw something amusing about myself,” Andrew answered.

George looked up from the paperwork, glanced blankly across the desk and over his smudged bifocals at Andrew.

“Hmpf. Thought maybe you came to your senses or something. Nothin’s final here until I fax these pages, ya know. Still time to change yer mind,” George said, blandly.

Andrew stood up with conviction.

“No, no. It’s all good. File away,” he said eagerly, shouldering his daypack as though going off for a hike around a glistening lake on an idyllic summer afternoon. “Go for it!”

George eyed the young man in front of him. Very handsome, fit, surely appealing to any gender. What the heck could have attracted him here? Keep him here? George was well past trying to figure anyone out, the motivations that compelled those who showed up at McMurdo, including himself. They were drifters of all ilk, sending tentacles out. Like astronauts landing on the moon, they were explorers. Solitary seekers of a unique and romanticized truth. Testers of faith and endurance, all.

“Ok, then,” was all George said, turning his swivel chair away from the desk to get up, shuffling to the fax machine without giving Andrew another glance. Or another chance.

Andrew’s roommate, Marden, an artist of elaborate conceptual cakes working as a hazardous waste technician barely spoke to him. Except for the one dull evening that Andrew announced to him that he had signed on for a whole year, that he would be wintering through. Explained the reasons for his abrupt decision to a man who barely gave him the time of day in a place where that’s all there was.

“Shelter-in-place, huh. You’ll see, kid. Even the initial excitement of living at the ragged edge of civilization will eventually become a drudge,” Marden said. “It doesn’t take long for fresh food supplies to run out. Other amenities and condiments start being rationed until those run out, too. Your social world begins to chafe. Your co-workers are also your housemates, are also your drinking partners, are also the same people who show up for the one piano recital at the tiny chapel. It will begin to feel like you took your once sharp mind and stored it in a rock tumbler for six months. That’s wintering over in Antarctica, kid.”

Marden left the room and closed the door, not interested in conversation, only declaration. Andrew stood silent. He opened the door and stuck his head out to look for signs of intelligent life. Marden was not in sight, though he could hear his distant footsteps echoing off the walls of the corridor. Feel his admonishment and warning roiling around deep in his gut. You Chose This, Andrew whispered aloud, slowly closing the door.

Approaching Midwinter’s Day, the long-held holiday marking the midway point of a four-month long Antarctic night, things had become pretty grim. At times, it was like a big, wet, heavy, gray blanket was being slowly dragged over his life. Marden was right. The few others who were left there with him were his entire world and all the members of his town. Despite the desolation, any semblance of privacy was desperately hard to find. Especially when it was minus 50 degrees Farenheit outside with a 100 mile per hour wind. There was nowhere to hide.

Winter darkness eventually turned to endless summer light. The lack of contrast in its new definition often left him breathless and ponderously apathetic. The hallways were dead quiet. Some nights, Andrew would only have a single other person sitting at the bar with him with hardly a word passing between them. “I arrived with big ideas and a lot of energy and was received by Antarctica like a flaming candle thrown into the ocean,” Andrew proclaimed out loud from behind the bar one night. No one heard. Only the hypnotic eternity of the midnight summer sun absorbed his words.

At a going away party for three mountain climbers-cum-engineers returning to Colorado after a year stint, a new angle was bandied about over rationed gin and chocolate. Would they be returning to a nation of traumatized people? Were loved ones who they had lost touch with even still there, still alive? Andrew considered what it must be like for these men to be on the verge of going home, knowing the anticipated hugs and kisses would be in short supply as the pandemic raged on.

“Gosh, we think we have the monopoly on isolation here, but we’re no different from anyone else, now,” Andrew blurted out. “I guess you’ll at least be on the same page. D’ya think the pandemic made what we’re doing less interesting to everyone back home?”

The table went silent as the group gathered around it contemplated that thought. Someone grabbed the diminishing bottle of gin and topped off shot glasses all around. Blake, one of the climbers due to leave the next day, lifted his up to his comrades, and while most were parsimoniously sipping to make pleasure last, he dropped it back in one fell swoop.

George cleared his throat and chimed in.

“You guys are about to become the very first group of humans in history to return from Antarctica and be greeted by the question: Why would you want to come back?” he said.

Soon enough, the darkness would creep back in and Andrew’s contract would be up and he would be faced with a decision, something that had become a foreign movement to him in a life enveloped in sameness. He had gathered up a quiet appreciation for the subtle uncertainties of life, nonetheless.

Though that obvious condition always exists for each one of us in every moment of every hour of every day, we deftly mask it, throw a blanket over it, hide it in a musty closet. We fill it in, that stark and undeniable truth, with a multitude of plans and events. We aim to forget the ineffable predicament of being human.

One day, when he finally leaves Antarctica, when he suddenly returns to the way things used to be, Andrew will put his fishing lines back out on the shore. He’ll keep an eye out for new things on the horizon. A horizon that is defined by a sun rising every morning and going down every day. With seasons that are distinct with hours that reflect a time and place in a specific way. He will repeat, I Am Full over and again. Or maybe he won’t need to anymore. Andrew will return to normal.

. . .

From the Sentences collection, © Mary Corbin 2021

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