Archive of Our Own

Amundsen-Scott Station, Antarctica

April

When Shane woke there were two people in the hall quietly making plans for later that day, which seemed a construct too vague to grasp with the tongues of sleep still at the edges of his mind. He stood in the door, waiting for them to retreat back to their rooms, and rubbed his eyes with one hand. He knew their names, he had to—they had spent the whole summer together, surely he had met them at some point. Cycling through the usual pre-run stretches he and Ben had put together before he left he remembered them: Neela and Stan. He repeated them twice as he checked the windows in the common area. During the summer they’d been Dr. Saini and Dr. Brodzik, but such formalities had been quickly dropped when the station emptied out at the end of the season.

The sun was low, just over the horizon and a brilliant orange that did not reach the rest of the sky. Besides this it looked the same as it had the day he arrived in late August, on the plane dipping over vast sheets of ice that stretched on until they’d reached McMurdo like someone had taken an eraser to the world beyond.

There had been thousands of people then, scientists and engineers and their many assistants, worrying about funding and data collection. There had been a full kitchen staff, physicians and electricians, people whose only job was to organize the shipments from New Zealand. It had been hard to keep track of each new person he met in those months they seemed to be constantly rotating in and out of the base. At Amundsen-Scott Shane’s cohort of researchers was about thirty people—smaller than most considering the majority of the base were American, from American universities with American endowments. Ben, his supervisor and one of the more senior climatologists, had spent summers at the Pole and told him national ties hardly mattered unless you were Norwegian which of course spurred a perfunctory round of teasing. The only times such associations were brought to Shane’s attention were when he was asked if he had met the Russian yet.

The heavy latch on the door to the rear deck clicked open and he heaved it forward with one arm, bracing for the suction of air, but the winds were still that morning—again, morning was a distinction that many would not make in a month when the darkness set in. Some, perhaps Neela and Stan, had already surrendered their bodies to the deeper clock of sheer exhaustion: work until you can’t, sleep until you can’t, repeat until the sun rises again in three months.

In Toronto, at the university, he kept a stricter schedule than most even in the winter, perhaps owing to having grown up in Ottawa where if he hadn’t regimented at least an hour of sunlight every day he would have lost his mind. Things like that could be supplemented with vitamins and mood stabilizers and those fake light lamps, all of which had been made clear in the preliminary psychological evaluation and again during his training in Wisconsin, but the most effective way to stave off the unending dread seemed to be simply talking to other people. Pills, he thought, would be preferable.

Shane stepped onto the deck and the soles of his boots rang against the steel, the only sound save for a soft rhythm of mournful guitar coming from the smoking tent. Through the vinyl window he saw a figure inside and the dying ember of a cigarette.

To be explicit, Shane had not met the Russian. But it was impossible to spend the full year at Amundsen-Scott without coming to know every other person there eventually. And Ben had spoken to him a few times if he recalled correctly. He knew a few things, chief among them that he worked in the other wing of the station. He watched him through the tent briefly, leaning against the railing and deciding it would be proper to wait to introduce himself until he came out. It was still kind of unbelievable to Shane that anyone at the station smoked.

The music ended abruptly and with a small rustling the man stood and unzipped the door, stepping out in a puff of steam breath onto the deck across from him. Shane extended a gloved hand in his direction.

“Morning,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I’m, uh, I’m Shane. I don’t think we’ve met yet.”

“Mm.” His eyes flicked from Shane’s face to his hand and back again, lips pressed together thoughtfully. “Ilya Rozanov.”

They shook hands and through the padded layer of the gloves he felt his bare hand tightly around his own. His mom had always said a strong handshake was a sign of purpose. They would practice over breakfast at the kitchen counter over and over until he got it right. Handshaking, straight teeth, a clean shave—this was how you made a good first impression, which in turn was how you made your way in the world, she told him, and it would not be an option for him to lack any of these things. Ilya, as it appeared, only had the first. There was a smattering of stubble across his jaw and when he spoke Shane caught the jagged row of his bottom incisors. He realized they had been shaking hands for almost ten whole seconds when he pulled back.

“So, have you wintered-over before?” The question punched out in the air somewhat violently considering how utterly silent it was on the deck.

Ilya nodded, “Yes. You are Canadian?”

“You have a good ear for accents,” he laughed lightly, the air billowing out in front of his face with the sound in that unfortunate byproduct of the temperature. It died as soon as Ilya raised his hand to point at the flag patch on the breast of his coat. “Oh, yeah. Toronto—I mean, that’s where I live, the university.”

“We have something in common then,” he said, shoving both hands back in his pockets.

“What’s that, we’re not American?”

“No, I am American citizen.”

Shane blinked, “Oh, I thought—“

“Russian, yes, but American passport.” He shrugged exaggeratedly as he spoke as though this were self-evident by his being at the station at all, which Shane supposed maybe it was.

When it became apparent he was not going to say anything more, Shane said, “There are plenty of people from other countries here.”

“But they would not let big scary Russian physicist on American base.” Ilya was looking out over the ice, the corner of his mouth ticking up just barely.

“I don’t know about big and scary…” Shane trailed off, letting his eyes drop to the broad set of his shoulders. Ilya turned back to him, his face blank.

“What is not scary about physicist?”

Against his better judgement he scoffed. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“Physics does not scare you?”

“Not here, no.” He felt his ears grow hot, impossibly, underneath his hat. “Maybe if we were, like, on remote island or in the middle of the desert it would be scary.”

Ilya raised his eyebrows expectantly, staring at Shane until the implication landed. “Oh, I guess—okay I see what you’re saying. You’re not, uh, building a bomb or anything, are you?”

He shook his head. “No. But for a second you were scared I was, so. Nice to meet you, Shane.”

“You too,” he said, already cataloging the whole conversation as poorly executed junk to be forgotten with force later on. Ilya was halfway to the door and Shane was asking himself what kind of climatologist he was if he could forget Antarctica is a desert when he remembered—

“Wait—you didn’t say what we have in common.”

His own voice sounded hopelessly juvenile and he wondered absently if he had changed at all since his twenties. Sometimes it seemed like he hadn’t. Ilya looked back as the handle shifted noisily to the side.

“Ice hockey.”

Before Shane could reply he had disappeared inside the vestibule with the heavy thunk of metal to punctuate his leaving.

“Weird,” he muttered, scuffing the toe of his boot against the snowy railing. He peeled off his gloves and left them in the pockets of his coat, his hands nearly throbbing with warmth—his whole body, he realized, was warm.

May

After that first encounter on the deck Ilya began to appear everywhere Shane went. It was a small base with only about a hundred people on it, he reasoned, it made sense for anyone to run into each other. But then there was the slight tendency to lean a bit closer towards Ilya when he passed him in the hall, or let his gaze linger a few seconds too long on the back of his neck when he saw him by the kitchens, and this seemed to signal something altogether more serious than a simple coincidence of place. Potentially nothing. Probably something. And that was fine—they stocked antibiotics specifically in case of STI outbreaks, of which there had been none so far but usually, at least according to the physician, happened annually. The walls were paper thin, Shane was pretty sure he could list by now exactly how many sexual partners both of his neighbors had and how often they saw them. It was no secret that winterovers engaged in a kind of stringent fucking during free hours. One had to be precise, because one could not, evidently, survive a winter in Antarctica without sex.

He wondered who Ilya was sleeping with, and he wondered constantly. Presently he was thinking about it as he pulled a thin stack of papers off the printer in his office—formerly shared between five research teams, now a slim group of six—with Ilya’s name at the top.

“Anyone get this readout sent here,” he asked the half-empty room of researchers, all hunched over their computers or copying down data in a notebook. They mumbled a small chorus and shook their heads.

Ruby, the grantee at the desk adjoined to his, stuck her head up. “Are those from the HANDS lab?”

He squinted at the first page and reached aimlessly for his glasses on his desk. “Uh, yeah. I guess so.”

The acronym had been explained to him in the first weeks of summer but he’d forgotten most of it aside from ‘anomalous’ and ‘detection.’ Some kind of observatory run by the university in Madison. When it was light out you could see it just off the main deck.

“You should walk it over,” Ruby said, glancing back down at her laptop. “If it printed here it means whoever it belongs to is on the base and not in the external building. Probably got sent here by mistake.”

He chewed the inside of his cheek. In the summer there would have been some lackey around to go do this for him, even though he was nearly finished up for the day. “Why can’t they come get it.”

“Shane.”

“Fine, whatever.”

A few minutes later he was rounding the corner on the physics lab in the B-wing. The hall was quiet apart from the sound of his footsteps and the gentle penciling of notes. He expected the door to be closed but when he arrived he saw Ilya sitting with his back towards the open frame, one hand tangled in his hair as he worked.

“I think these are yours—“

Ilya pushed himself up off the desk in an instant, various instruments clattering to the floor. From the intensity of his voice he must have been swearing—that, and when he turned around he was clutching his ribs as he heaved like Shane had pulled a gun on him.

“What the hell,” he said, his eyes wide.

“Sorry,” Shane put his hands up, “should’ve knocked.”

Ilya’s face softened, but he let out another string of expletives Shane couldn’t understand when he looked back to the desk where a pool of white was spilling onto his notes.

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” Shane said again. “I hope that wasn’t important.”

He grabbed a roll of paper towels from one of the supply cupboards and tried to help him clean whatever was slowly spreading across the papers. “Is this—were you eating condensed milk out of a can?”

“What, is normal,” he shrugged, standing the little blue can back up. “You should try some.”

“I’m not gonna eat condensed milk off your desk.”

“Would not be all over my desk if you knocked.”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the gleam of his teeth as he smiled at Shane. It was entirely too long before either of them thought to get the spray bottle of disinfectant from the cupboard, which moved things along considerably.

“Maybe these—no, these are ruined,” Ilya rifled through the soaked pages one last time when they had finished the job before ripping them out of the binder.

“I’m really sorry man,” Shane apologized a third time and hoped this was embarrassing enough to put a full stop to his ceaseless wondering.

“Mm, is fine. My English can be harsh, I think. These—“ he waved the papers around “—were just for me.”

“Oh, right, I still have your readout that went to our office.” He’d set it down on one of the other tables earlier and while his back was turned he added, for reasons beyond him, “And your English is great, I mean, you’re doing doctoral physics research in a second language, that’s pretty impressive.”

When he faced Ilya again his gaze had fallen and he looked suddenly very young. “I don’t do the writing, and is Russian science—not that hard. I knew it before.”

Something in him stirred—curiosity, sympathy perhaps—and he sat down on the edge of the desk, attempting to parse through the writing on the papers in his hands. “What part of it?”

He thought of the brief time in undergrad when he’d wanted to study this: the thermal physics classes, stuff to do with tensors and theoretical models. None of it had made sense to him even then. The first paragraph on the page was something about blazars.

“Cherenkov radiation.”

That didn’t need much explanation apparently, because they fell back into sustained silence. Shane looked up at him from behind the papers and motioned for him to continue.

“You need to me to say how Cherenkov radiation is Russian—?”

“—no, just tell me what it is!”

“Okay, fuck.” Ilya sat back down in the office chair, rolling it across the floor to where Shane was and taking the papers from him. With them back on the desk he flipped one over and started drawing on the back—a circle with a few blobs on it, a sun in the corner with a smiling face in it.

“This is Earth, the sun,” he tapped them with his pen as he went, and made a few random dashes around them, “those are stars.”

Shane nodded along, watching the side of his face from above; there was an eyelash on the high of his cheek.

“One day a star explodes,” Ilya drew a series of lines coming from the patch of dashes on the paper towards the earth, “or maybe gamma ray burst, and it sends whole bunch of stuff at us, here.”

“Stuff?”

Ilya looked up at him, the skin under his eyes a gentle purple like horizon at dawn. “Yes, stuff. You know, stuff?”

He gestured with his hands like this could not possibly be made any clearer.

“Like debris,” Shane said.

“No, no. Not at all.“ He flipped another page over and started drawing again, two diagonal lines forming a cone, a third through the center of it. “Tiny, tiny stuff called neutrino.”

“What’s a neutrino.” Shane knew he was being difficult but he liked the sound of their voices overlapping. He’d read about neutrinos before in some article, so long ago now it was practically meaningless.

“Can you—“ Ilya put his hand up as Shane tried not to laugh. “Fucking let me say. Neutrino is particle so small it passes through everything, and is fast—faster than light.”

“That’s impossible, nothing’s faster than light.”

“Yes, in vacuum. Not in something else. Neutrino will pass through anything, will pass through you, even.” For emphasis he poked Shane’s leg with the end of the pen.

“Okay, so, the neutrinos are coming down from space, and then what?”

“Then it passes through water—or ice—which makes light slow, and then makes Cherenkov radiation,” Ilya was flicking the pen back and forth like a baton as he spoke. “Is just blue light.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said, and eyed the diagrams Ilya was now labeling in looping Cyrillic.

“It makes sense.”

“Why is it blue?”

“Because water particles are happy, or something. I don’t know how to say in English, does not matter.”

“So,” Shane started again, “you’re measuring the Cherenkov light.”

“Sometimes,” Ilya swiveled his chair until their knees were touching, “the rest is neutrino radio pulses coming from…”

He gestured with the pen, pointing below their feet at the floor.

“Below the ice?”

“Mhm.”

The whole conversation was beginning to make the palms of his hands itch, and they were still touching which itself seemed like the kind of anomaly that should set off an alarm. “But you said they came from space, from an explosion.”

“Mhm.”

“So how—“

“—I don’t know. Nobody knows yet. Could be something big, probably is nothing.”

Shane imagined what could be under the ice strong enough to generate the same amount of energy as a supernova. “When you say big, you mean like, scary physics.”

Ilya drew a breath, nodding once. “But, probably is nothing,” he repeated.

When this made Shane’s eyes widen several degrees Ilya tapped his ankle with the toe of his shoe, like the only thing he knew how to do was test various waters for signs of a reaction, radioactive light. Shane rubbed his hands together to get them to stop tingling.

In grad school, the first time he’d found himself actively seeing other people in a capacity that could be defined as dating, the only flirting he had mastered was the strategic deployment of phrases like ‘oh, really?’ and ‘is that so?’ It was brought to his attention by one of his more regular hookups—Scott, a PhD candidate from New York, because the scene at the university was constantly self-cannibalizing—in the kitchen of his apartment while they were cooking dinner, and he had said whenever Shane wanted to fuck he started talking like a coastal elite college girl who’d never had to ask for it outright. Now, in this strange point of contact with Ilya where it was obvious something vaguely carnal had passed between them, he thought about emulating Scott’s particular brand of assured charm. Whatever ideas he’d concocted devolved rather quickly into his own unintentional directness, and he said, “Does it scare you?”

“Does climatology scare you?” Ilya’s face was measured and calm, his foot still pressed against the curved joint above Shane’s heel.

“Yeah,” the word came out like a laugh, “it does, actually. A lot.”

Ilya never answered his question. It dissipated in the air with the faint electrical hum of the generators.

“Thank you for bringing these,” he swept the readout pages into a pile, “but you should have taken them to the file closet.”

“Uh,” Shane glanced around at the various metal cabinets, “I didn’t know there was a separate room for files.”

“I’ll take you.”

He motioned towards the door and Shane followed him out into the hall, still empty as far as he could see on either side. Ilya started in the direction of the common areas.

“Okay, your turn,” he said with a perfunctory glance over his shoulder. “Tell me about your research.”

“Well, nothing’s active right now.” This was true for most people staying the full year. Any work that required daylight paused until the summer, and winterovers mostly just manned the station to make sure nothing blew apart in a storm. “But when it is, it’s—I won’t lie, it’s pretty depressing.”

They passed through the hall decorated with framed photos of all the past winter crews, decked in snow gear and goggles. Ilya was probably up there in all the rows of faces. Sometimes it felt acutely like they were all here at the end of the world and he wished he knew if everyone felt that way when they stuck around through roughly twenty weeks of darkness.

“Is that why climate scientists are so sad,” Ilya hummed.

“No, yeah, we’re not that much fun to be around. You only have to see how fast the Thwaites Glacier is melting once to understand how fucked we are, I guess.”

Indeed his anxiety had become so bad the first year in Toronto, when spent his days tracing flagged pieces of the ice wall drifting into the sea, that he’d been prescribed a steady diet of Klonopin in addition to his usual SSRIs which caused him to spend a week in bed before it registered that something else besides the massive hole in the atmosphere was horribly awry.

“Sorry, that was—I don’t know why I said that,” Shane added after a beat of silence. “I’ve seen some amazing stuff here.”

“I saw penguin get eaten by the orcas in summer,” Ilya said, like this was among the more life-affirming things that happened in Antarctica.

“Yeah, not like that.”

They pushed through the central bridge that connected the two wings of the station and then made a sharp right. Past the kitchens Shane continued, “Actually, um, I write, too.”

This he did not mention to many people when they asked about his work, even if it was somewhat common to have a side project going through the winter.

When Ilya turned around he was smiling, sort of crooked and with a surety that was hard to mistake for anything else. “Like books?”

“Maybe, if it ends up being that long. Not what you’re thinking, though. Nonfiction, essays, that sort of thing. I don’t have much yet,” he said as Ilya stopped and punched in the code to a door. “There used to be an artist grant for North Americans, but obviously the US pulled all the funding for it this year, so, it’s kind of defunct now.”

It took him a second for his eyes to adjust to the total darkness of the room on the other side—the standard rack, the window by the bed, the heavy boots beside the entryway.

“Ilya, this is your room,” he laughed, his voice a little weaker than he’d hoped.

In front of him Ilya was peeling off his thermal, standing past the threshold in a t-shirt with his eyes fixed on Shane, who was trying very hard to get his brain to cooperate.

“Wow, you are like that detective.”

“Sherlock Holmes?”

“See, you did it again.”

He opened his arms to the side as if to say, it’s now or never. In one of his hands he still held the readout from the lab, and Shane felt something tug deep within him. It would be a long winter with or without whatever this was, he supposed as he stepped through the doorway. And Ilya’s hands were warm.

June

Dr. Saini and Dr. Brodzik were making plans again in the hall. Without having to check Shane assumed it must be somewhere between five and six in the morning—there was that feeling in his limbs like gravity weighed heavier. He had taped cardboard over the windows to keep out the constant light coming off the snow even though it was always falling back and letting in slants of sun like an errant spotlight. Ben would be waiting for him in his running gear out by the deck soon, probably with news from home about the department proceedings or so-and-so’s quest for tenure despite the undoubtedly dire state of their chosen field.

Of course when he opened his eyes the room was black, because it was the dead of winter and there had not been sun for weeks. As he felt around in the dark he was reminded of an installation at the university museum consisting of several boxes into which visitors would reach and feel blindly for the household items inside—the crank used to open a window, a handheld juicer, a wall outlet sheath made of clay. Each one transformed into a barrage of textures and temperatures and new feelings to be mapped out internally. Everything was like this now. It was a constant game of guessing at the shape of things, the meaning of the data, what could be done about it, what couldn’t.

At home Shane ran the outreach committee for the department which was mostly an opportunity for undergrads to tool around on the university Instagram and pad out their resume with lines about digital marketing and graphic design skills. He hated what the gig seemed to prove about higher education and the future of his research, like it would only matter if it could be digested in twenty seconds on a phone, and even then it was still beholden to the abyssal vacuum of the internet. But those kids on the committee were so terrified of real life and of the unsoundness of the choices they had made up to that point it was the least he could do to let them be weird and anxious within the safety of a spare room of the Environmental Science office.

As he found his phone on the floor beside his bed he thought maybe he missed how straightforward life had been in Toronto. There had been the expectation that living in Antarctica would narrow the scope of his concerns to bare survival for some reason—not like they didn’t have heating and a personal chef on the base. Instead he was thinking that the world back home was simpler because of its web of distractions to obfuscate whatever existential uncertainty he felt looming over him at all times now. Without trips to the grocery store, unloading the dishwasher, grading barely legible student work, or Scott trimming his beard over the sink and not cleaning up the hair there was a lot more room to ask himself what he was going to do. About anything. After everything.

He wanted the faulty tap in his apartment, and the dryer that barely worked, and the icy slush on the side of the road when it snowed. Things to complain about that were small and not indicative of the immeasurable jungle of life that lay ahead.

When he made it to his desk there was a note taped to his computer: a drawing of what looked like a mouse with ears the size of its head and a little thought bubble that read, I wonder what Shane is doing tonight. I know what I am going to do. Stay here. Get drunk! I hope Shane is free…

It made him laugh. It made him want things other than his place in Toronto and the feeling of real sunlight for the rest of the day while he worked. By dinner he’d been sidetracked by the rather alarmist news article being sent around which claimed the radio waves detected in the HANDS lab were coming from a parallel universe pressed up against their own. It was the kind of flashy, exaggerated headline the tabloids loved even if it was clearly a stretch of the truth. Shane knew this and still it struck a fissure of panic in his chest.

The whole base had gone similarly stir-crazy and with Midwinter still a week away there was nothing else to do but hole up with what was left of their stores of whiskey. Ilya had vodka, which Shane preferred anyway. He also had one hand shoved up the back of Shane’s shirt and the other teasing at the waist of his pants.

“I thought you were trying to get drunk,” he said, moving the latter hand further down towards his knee. He knew he wasn’t up for it after the day he’d had.

“What?” Ilya’s mouth was just under his ear now, and the sound made him shiver.

“Your note. It didn’t say anything about—you know. This.” At least, Shane thought he remembered it that way. Certainly it had implied sex but he didn’t much feel like saying he wouldn’t be able to get hard because he was worried about how resolutely doomed they all were and how pointless it was to try and make the science communicable when they were already on the verge of total ecological collapse. Because he was worried about the rapidly declining Antarctic fur seal population! Or something.

“Okay,” Ilya pulled away, frowning for a second before he could conceal his disappointment, “okay. Another time.”

Shane felt like he had ruined a potentially very nice and very comforting evening, and then he thought perhaps he was meant to leave even though that was the opposite of what he wanted.

“I liked your drawing. The mouse—it was cute,” he said.

“That was not mouse,” Ilya shook his head, falling back against the meager stack of pillows, “that was Cheburashka.”

He seemed genuinely pained by the fact that Shane didn’t know what that meant, and he got sort of far away like he did when everyone was talking about home. From his pocket he produced the vape he’d been relying on since smoking outside had become truly untenable after the temperature dropped—it smelled like fake apple and one side was inlaid with the kind of squishy toy that behavioral specialists handed out to hyperactive kids.

Ilya was mid-hit when Shane asked, “Is that like Mickey Mouse?”

“Ugh, no.” He covered his face with both hands, a cloud of vapor escaping from between his fingers. “Is not mouse. You do not know him like do.”

Though it was muffled Shane could tell he was laughing. Feeling brave again he leaned over and kissed the inside of Ilya’s thigh where it was raised on the bed. He had this theory that all the problems you had when you were twenty came back in your early thirties, much like how his old paranoia about the world ending and it all being for nought had reared up once more—but here in Ilya’s room he wondered if the same was true about desires from that age, because he wanted nothing more than to make out with him for hours and hours which seemed like an option that was maybe not allowed anymore.

Finally Ilya moved his hands so that Shane could see his face and when he did he was blushing. Everyone at the station had grown ghastly pale and he knew on himself it looked like he might actually be dying—Ilya’s features were more pronounced because of it. His hair was a mess and he tipped one knee to the side like some kind of an invitation upon seeing how Shane was watching him.

He wanted to thank him for the note and the stupid mouse thing, which had stopped him from spiraling for long enough to actually get some work done. He wanted to thank him for not making him go, and for making room for him in his bed anyway. He wanted to stay like this for longer than the time they had.

July

Because of the perpetual blackness outside which seemed to color everything with the same flavor of unending, that night in May began a habit that stretched on into the empty like all other things. Into this poured a host of new information—the feeling of Ilya’s hair between Shane’s fingers, the noises he made when he pulled. On the shelf above his bed he kept no less than five cans of condensed milk he was trying and failing to ration.

As it turned out, the HANDS crew had more work to do than any other scientists on the base. On a particularly slow day for the rest of them a small party made the trek to the external observatory for a tour to pass the time before dinner—the chef had pulled some new ingredients from deep freeze which sounded promising despite possibly having been in there for a decade. Quickly the excursion turned into swapping stories over a case of beer, sitting in a circle on the floor of the lower lab. Shane tagged along because he knew Ilya would be there, and now he sat quietly behind him as he answered emails at his desk, occasionally calling his co-technician Molly over to proofread them while the others were talking about past winters at McMurdo or time they’d spent in the arctic.

After a while Ilya reached down and pulled one of Shane’s legs into his lap, looking up from the computer only to check if anyone was watching. Not that it mattered, really, when everyone else was half-drunk and homesick. The incoming storm had charged the air with an urgency that made everybody a bit more desperate than usual. His hand slipped below the thick hem of his pants; the lab was colder than any other building at Amundsen-Scott purely because of the number of data servers it housed, which were constantly running in a back room on the second floor.

“One more,” he said, squeezing Shane’s calf and nodding at the email on the screen. It had been like this—quiet, unassuming, gentle. Sometimes it just felt like friendship. They stayed like that for a minute before Molly’s footsteps approached from the other room, at which point Shane drew back and straightened in his chair.

“We’re gonna head back now,” she told them, “wind’s picking up.”

“I can close down,” Ilya said, glancing at Shane. “He wanted to see the servers.”

Molly gave him a polite smile and tapped the wall once before ducking out again. Naturally, in his period of intense despairing over who Ilya was sleeping with he had suspected her first, but upon some minor investigation he discovered she was definitely a lesbian and then felt rather stupid about the whole thing. It was even more unfair to question Ilya’s intentions now when he was being so sweet.

He heard the sounds of the rest of the crew suiting up to leave: zippers and button clasps closing, hushed deliberating over using the guide cables to get back.

“I wanted to see the servers?” Shane shoved him under the table and his chair rolled backwards until he caught it with his foot and reeled Ilya back in. “She’s gonna think I’m a nerd.”

“You are a nerd.” He was smiling at the computer as he typed.

By the time he was finished the others had left and Shane stood by the window watching them disappear from view in the snow past the lights at the edge of the observatory. Ilya led him up the stairs, pausing on the landing to push him against the rail with both hands on his waist and a kiss that was almost cloying. They got to the little cot that folded out from the wall and he was making some comment about trying to keep warm which didn’t land exactly how he intended, but it made Shane laugh, and so it worked anyway. Through the thin mattress they could feel each rung of the metal bed frame. Ilya complained until Shane was obliged to shut him up by pressing two fingers into his mouth.

Too soon after it was over they were cold again, and they went back downstairs to the kitchenette wrapped in the threadbare blanket, trying and failing to trap the heat between them. The crucifix that always hung from Ilya’s neck lay frigid against Shane’s back as they rifled through the pantry.

Outside the plateau was howling as if to portend the new message they would find in the inbox on the computer once they had dug out all the unexpired food, which read:

Just got to base, winds will be over 100mph by now. If you come back tonight please let me know and use cables but probably safest to wait it out. Should let up by tomorrow. Best of luck.

—M

“Fuck,” Shane said, without much weight to it. “So much for that fancy dinner.”

Ilya still had one arm draped over his shoulders and as he fired off a response to Molly he flattened his palm across Shane’s chest, directly above his heart. “Don’t worry.”

“I wasn’t.” It came out more defensive than he wanted, and Ilya turned to him, pulling the blanket tighter until they had stagger their legs to stand so close. In the moments they were alone together like this—he had lost count now, Shane realized with a jolt—they seemed content not to speak much. At first he’d assumed it was the language barrier, and often when they were fucking Ilya said things in Russian that slipped past him so fast he may as well be talking about the weather. But other times they would just stare at each other for as long as it took for one of them to break and even that was becoming an inordinate length. A minute went by or maybe several before Shane tipped his head back and closed his eyes to end the standoff.

The next time either of them spoke was a while later, back on the tiny bed with their limbs tangled for them both to fit. Every bed at Amundsen-Scott was a twin but their rooms on the base were so cramped it felt necessary. The upper room of the observatory had high ceilings and enough space that lying practically on top of each other was strikingly intimate even if it wasn’t new territory.

“What’s that,” Ilya said, and knocked the corners of their phones together where they were propped up inches apart.

Shane was switching back and forth between a translator app and a chat on the international messenger he used, trying to compose a text to his grandmother. She had moved back to Japan last year to be closer to her remaining siblings in one of the more economical elder-care facilities in the countryside, and none of them understood how to send an email which was by far the easiest way to communicate with Shane while he was here. Texting her always made him feel stupid. She would respond in seconds and he would take forever to understand it, even longer to reply.

He let the phone fall on his stomach and stared at Ilya’s jaw, the scattered marks there like points on a map. “My grandmother. She just moved into this fancy retirement home and she’s always fighting with the staff.”

“You two are close?”

Shane thought about it. They weren’t—not in any real way. She lived nearby in Ottawa when he was a kid, moved in with his parents after he left for college and her husband died, but it wasn’t like they ever talked much. He thought of the worn skin of her hands, soft but aged from the sun, always with her nails painted. How she seemed to shrink when she didn’t have anything to do. He’d been glad when she told them she wanted to move back, it was probably the first decision she’d made for herself in decades.

“Not really,” he said, “she’s old. And my Japanese sucks. I don’t get her life and she doesn’t get mine, or like, I don’t know how to tell her about it.”

“She immigrated?”

“Yeah, to Vancouver, when she was young.” She had been a teenager when the war broke out, and in the internment camp that she never spoke about to anyone. He wondered how much Ilya knew, or if he could put it together without Shane having to say it out loud.

“It is hard,” was all he said. He looked distant.

Shane opened the chat again and hit send on the message. Part of him retreated thinking of how Ilya might understand his own grandmother better than him, even just what it was like to navigate the world in a language not your own. If they met they’d probably get along and that—that was a strange thought, Ilya meeting her. It blossomed and burned out just as quick.

“Hey,” he put his phone aside, trying to change the subject, “where’s your picture on the winterover wall? I tried to find you in last year’s photo but I couldn’t.”

Ilya, who had been running the backs of his knuckles along Shane’s arm, stilled before he answered, his face complicating for a second like he didn’t get the question.

“You said you stayed the year? Before?” Shane said, turning so he could look at him fully.

“Mm, not here,” he shook his head. “At Vostok.”

Right. Vostok was the Russian station located southeast of Amundsen-Scott in the part of the pole with the lowest recorded temperatures in the world.

“Oh. What was that like?”

“It was different,” Shane let his hands creep over his shoulders as Ilya spoke, “easier in some ways. Not as fun, not as many pretty climatologists.”

They almost fell into another silent staring contest when he pulled the blanket down and raised his right hip so Shane could see. “They took this—appendix—before I went. They don’t make you do that here.”

Perhaps he meant it as a joke but Shane had to blink a few times so he didn’t cry. He ran his thumb gently over the thin scar there, next to the crest of bone. It wasn’t unheard of and it was very likely that the doctors on the base had to have appendectomies as part of their prerequisite medical clearance, but it was hard to shake the image of Ilya in the coldest place on the planet, younger and different in ways Shane wouldn’t be able to make meaning of, with a part of him freshly excised so it wouldn’t kill him. Suddenly he felt as though Ilya’s body might break under his hands at any moment.

“I wish I met you earlier,” he said as he let his forehead fall on Ilya’s chest. He could feel him in his hair, breathing through it.

“In summer.”

In every place that came before that, Shane thought, but didn’t correct him. Deep below them blue light glowed as pieces of a fallen star collided with the ice and shot through the core of it. They had a month until McMurdo opened its doors to the early flights, then the station would fill steadily with new people and one day they would wake up and it would be time to leave. They hadn’t talked about it yet.

Ilya pressed his lips to the top of Shane’s head and when he spoke he could feel it like it had come from within his own skull, a second mind next to his. “Tell me about your writing.”

He groaned on his skin—the writing was barely anything at all. “I can’t do it.”

“Yes you can.”

“No.” It wasn’t firm enough to stop Ilya from wrapping his arms around him and shaking him back and forth, trying to rouse whatever conviction he had left in him. “I can’t write here. I have this really nice birch desk at my apartment just for writing and I can’t do it without the desk and there’s no real wood here. It makes me crazy.”

“No wood?”

“Yeah,” Shane looked up at him and ignored the lazy smile on his face. “Have you not noticed that everything here is made of steel or rubber?”

“What about pool table,” he asked, still smiling.

“I can’t write at a pool table. I’m not even writing anything real, it’s just—I don’t know. Words.”

Ilya pulled him closer with one hand on his jaw and kissed him. His fingertips lingered on the shell of Shane’s ear afterwards, a habit he’d noticed a while ago. “What is it about?”

“Nothing.”

“Is about me, then.”

Maybe for the way the storm had blown away any pretense of distance that remained between them or because Ilya had made him come twice in the past hour, he couldn’t summon the energy to be cavalier about it anymore.

“I want it to be,” he said, sitting up because the least he could do was look him squarely in the eye. “I want it to make me think of you.”

“Shane…”

Ilya’s arms loosened somewhat. He took the chance to lean in and catch his mouth again and coming away from it was like trying to take a breath at the bottom of the ocean.

“I don’t know what else to do,” Shane whispered like it might erase the lines on Ilya’s face from where his brow furrowed. Last week he’d sat down to write and when the only thought he could put to words was I think he’s real, he had stumbled out onto the nearest exterior deck and stood in the winds until his skin was raw. What else, really, was there to do?

The sensation of having wasted time was not one he was accustomed to, and so he felt it acutely each time it came with increasing intensity as the endless dark day went on for months. It had become so clear it was like looking through the ice itself when Ilya had told him about the greencard marriage to his friend back in Madison. All of it too late.

Shane wanted to be told not to think about how long the drive was between their universities. Ten hours—he’d already looked it up. Realistically it was insane of him to know, or to care, but it felt like a plan. It felt like putting pressure on the bleeding.

“Just come here,” Ilya said, and that too was a wound, so he bent down and tucked himself into the space beside his neck. There would be a time for honesty later, he told himself.

After a minute or so Ilya spoke again. “So, you miss your wooden desk.”

When Shane answered it was into the soft curve of his shoulder. “I miss my desk, yeah. What about you?”

“I miss the sound of cars.”

August

How to let your eyes adjust to not staring at endless white in every direction—what to expect from the process of reacclimating to your usual environment—how to talk about your experience on the base—where to send all of the content we asked you to make so we can post it online.

Shane marked the return instructions email as read and scrolled further to the response from his editor, who was not really his editor but more just an editor he happened to know. They’d met through the university and he helped get some of Shane’s writing out in the local paper he worked at. It was only a few articles here and there, occasionally he’d steer him the direction of the kind of stories they were looking for if it was up his alley, although that was rare and Shane thought his own area of expertise didn’t lend itself much to broader science journalism.

What Shane had sent him wasn’t for the paper this time. It was—well, it was whatever meager writing he’d managed to finish in the past four months, which wasn’t much. He sent the document with something along the lines of an apology and was met with actually helpful suggestions and more enthusiasm than he had ever expected to receive. Another reason to look forward to his departure from the base in two weeks, he supposed.

In lieu of a proper conversation about What Could Be Done about the impending separation he and Ilya had danced around the topic several times and once fought for a few boring minutes until they both agreed it was a waste of time. Ilya was usually busy these days training the new arrivals to use the lab equipment in the observatory—where he was now, while Shane sat with his computer in his lap and watched the sky change from the window of his bedroom. The sky was doing that now, changing. Ilya would be back within the hour.

It certainly felt like the walls were closing in on them, and it would be difficult to go back home to his life just the way it was before. He kept thinking of the sound his front door would make as the lock clicked open and revealed all his stuff exactly where he left it. The possibility that Shane could leave and Ilya could stay and there would not be a seismic event strong enough to at least knock over some of his furniture back home was strange and his mind seemed to buckle under the weight of it.

He had the same feeling he’d expressed to the student counselor his third year in undergrad, when nothing significant in his routine had changed—not his meds, not his roommates, not his coursework—and yet it felt like someone had knocked the wind out of him. The counselor had not been much help aside from telling him that just because these things worked for him in the past didn’t mean they always would, sometimes our systems fail for no reason, sometimes the axis shifts. His world in Toronto would probably be just as satisfactory as it was a year ago, and returning to it would bring about all the old desires and plans for the future that he had built because they were sensible and looked good on paper. But then again, maybe not. And maybe part of him was picturing Ilya in the stairwell of his apartment building, coming in with a bag full of takeout, wearing normal clothes because it wasn’t kill-you cold outside.

There would not be another season at the base for him, selfishly he hoped the same for Ilya. Even if they managed it the whole place would be different—smaller, diminished. Vanishing into the sea.

Shane opened a new untitled document, scrolling past the scraps of ideas that were barely alive and the bulleted lists that fizzled out into nothing. The cursor blinked at him like a horse bowing its head. Words would come eventually, as they always did—often he found they liked to be courted. He knew the words Ilya needed to hear, could anticipate what they’d feel like on his tongue and how they’d change the air. He tapped the spacebar with his thumbs as he waited.

There was a smudge on the ice growing into the suggestion of people coming from the direction of the observatory, little black ink spots slouching home with gaps of sunlight in between them, and an old idea came back to him.

December

The letter arrived in the second winter of the year for Shane, a winter he could at last say with certainty would thaw into spring. He was expecting it, so it felt less like a punch to the gut when he found it in his mailbox along with the weird lit mags left over from when Scott was subletting the place from him and transferred all his subscriptions to his address. Still, seeing it as he was sorting through the mail was enough to make him drop his key on the ground and when he picked it up his hand was wet with the remnants of the last snow. Fitting, he thought as he wiped it off on the back of his pants.

It was postmarked from New Zealand, complete with a little kiwi illustration on the stamp. He walked back to the small bank of stairs outside the front door and sat down, feeling his mouth twist as he suppressed a smile—not that it mattered, the evening joggers and whoever else passing by were preoccupied with thoughts of dinner and someplace warm. Shane found he could stand to be outside for longer than he used to, along with other uncommon and elemental changes that came back with him from Amundsen-Scott. Invisible souvenirs.

The adhesive on the envelope must have dried and separated by the time it was delivered, because it was already open when he turned it over. He read it there on the steps.

Shane,

We arrived in Christchurch yesterday. Molly’s family flew here and we are staying by the coast with them for now. It is nice to be with so many people for the holidays, even if they cannot cook.

I did not want to wait to write just like I do not want to wait to call, but I am being very patient! I am also using google translate to check everything so maybe there will be mistakes…imagine my very charming accent if that is true.

Something exciting happened after you left which was new data we sent to the lab in Madison that confirmed the signals being picked up at the observatory are just bouncing off ice. Same neutrinos from space. We have been thinking this for a while but it is better to know for sure than to suspect. There will be a paper soon I think, probably there are some articles online but not many because it is not as interesting as parallel universe or new physics.

Still, maybe there is another me and another you somewhere out there with not so much distance in between. And less ice, I hope.

I had a dream about you last night and we were in a place I have never seen before. I think it must be Canada.

Ten hours is not so long a drive.

Ilya