“Nothing.”
“Oh X. She misses you, you know.”
“Right.”
“No, really. I think she’s done her trolling, you know, and found out that she made a mistake. That guy Mike was a jerk. She likes you better than the rest of the guys down here.”
X shrugged. “Too late now,” he said, trying to squash a tiny little hummingbird of hope that was now zooming around in his chest. Irritated, he held a poker face. Joyce stood up awkwardly, and came around her desk to give him a hug, her head just higher than his belly button. He accepted the hug gratefully, feeling like a beggar.
“What a mess,” she said.
“Yeah.”
She pulled back to look up at him. “You shouldn’t go, X. Not just because of Val. We’re working on trying to improve things here.”
“Uh huh.”
“No, really. Listen X, the service contract comes up for renewal at the end of this season, and ASL very well might lose it.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.”
“No, really!”
But Joyce had educated X on the history of the companies hired by NSF to run its Antarctic bases, so she was in large part responsible for X’s skepticism. The first company, Holmes and Narver, had won its bid during the height of the Cold War, and was rumored to have been a CIA front company. The second server, ITT, had just finished helping the CIA overthrow the Allende government in Chile, so there was no question about its CIA connection; and it had close ties with oil companies too.
The third company, Antarctic Support Associates, had been a great improvement over the previous two, Joyce had said. An ordinary and even good company—certainly the good people in it had made it as much of a home as they could, and they had been in the majority. Joyce and many other office heads still in McMurdo had started with ASA and still remembered it fondly. Its contract had been the usual ten-year deal, however, and NSF had required it to give potential competitors some subcontracts so that the competitors could learn enough to make truly competitive bids at contract time. ASA had dutifully done this, and in its third ten-year stint given a subcontract to a subsidiary of a multinational conglomerate, one of the most hardball in the new global economy. There were rumors that this subcontractor had conducted some cuckoo-in-the-nest type activities, subtly messing up ASA where it could; but in truth its aggressive downsizing had resulted in such low labor costs that it was able to make a very low bid simply by sweatshopping its McMurdo labor force, and counting on the attractions of the place and the tough times up north to keep positions filled. And as NSF was constrained by Congress to accept the lowest bid without judging labor practices for anything more than legal compliance, the new company had won easily, and ASA was gone. As they took over McMurdo the owners of the new company had rechristened it Antarctic Supply and Logistics, either because they had not looked closely at the resulting acronym or because they had and wanted to make it clear right away just what kind of tough lean no-nonsense 21st-century corporation they really were.
This of course had been a disaster for all the old ASA hands who wanted to stay on, who had had to reapply for the same jobs at a fraction of the old salary and benefits package, with all their seniority lost. And it had been a déjà vu disaster for Joyce, who had seen it all before in her first profession, nursing; there she had been downsized to “census-dependent full-time employment” early on, meaning that she was full time unless not enough beds in the hospital were filled, when she would be called and told to stay home without pay. She had gotten pissed off and decided that if taking care of sick people was going to be sweatshopped like everything else then she was going to quit and light out for the territory, in her case the white south.
So X’s skepticism concerning her hope for change only reflected what she had taught him. But now she held off all that bad history with an outstretched hand: “No, listen,” she said seriously. “We’ve got some plans, we’re really working on it. And you’d fit right in.”
“I’ve already resigned.”
“Shit.” She shook her head, disgusted. “Damn it, X, you should have talked to me first!”
“I want to go.”
She gave him a very hard look. He was taking things too far, the look said; he was being oversensitive, romanticizing the whole Val thing. Miserably he stared back at her, refusing to concede the point.
She shrugged, dismissed him with a wave of the hand. “Okay. But you remember what I said. It’s the truth you know! We’re going to change things!”
He nodded and clumped down the stairs. There at the turn in the stairwell was the big photo of Thomas Berg in the middle of a polar dip, grinning and wet, chest-deep in the subzero water of McMurdo Sound, in a hole hacked in the sea ice like a seal hole, the man like a big seal. It had always struck X as a poignant memorial, as Berg had soon after that died in a helicopter crash in the Dry Valleys. Now it struck him harder than ever, as some sort of general comment on what one’s happy moments really meant, on how long they lasted. He walked out into the slap of the wind feeling worse than ever.
So he was in no shape to talk to anybody, much less Val herself, and when she came out of the galley door and saw him and approached, he groaned. This town was just too damn small. And yet there was that little hummingbird whirring around inside him now, trying to flit out one of his pupils with his look at her—a very close inspection indeed—trying to judge the possible truth of what Joyce had told him, looking for signs of regret, or friendliness, or anything but the dismissive nonlooks he had gotten from her since she ended their friendship.
And indeed she had such a look on her face, and no sunglasses to hide it; there was no mistaking it, she was distressed. Or else mad at him. “Are you really going?” she said.
“Yes. I just finished resigning.”
“Oh X,” she said. “God damn it, those folks are breaking the Treaty, you don’t know what’s going to happen down here if the Treaty doesn’t hold, they’ll wreck everything!”
Of course he wouldn’t be doing this if they had stayed a couple. They both knew it, but they wouldn’t talk about it. And here she was ragging on him while they were standing alone out in the wasteland of pipelines and telephone wires; but up on Ob Hill she had pretended not to care in the slightest, unwilling to show anything in front of the DV, that politico with his fancy haircut and his parka worn like a camel-hair overcoat, talking on the wrist to Washington and to wherever his roving senator was now, a handsome guy with money and prospects and a career, onto whom Val had immediately glommed. Women were drawn to power like iron to a magnet; it was sociobiology in action, the gals looking to protect their little babies no doubt; but still it made X sick to see it.
So he glared at her and did not reply. He could not think what to say when he was so mad at her and yet at the same time that hummingbird was zipping around in him like an attack of angina.
“People have been breaking the Treaty for years,” he said finally. “Your tour groups are breaking the Treaty as they used to interpret it. The southern countries doing this exploration are using really safe technology. And it’s exploration only. It won’t be a problem. I’m looking forward to doing some real work for a change.”
She waved a hand angrily, swatting him without actually swatting him. “You’ll end up doing the same kind of thing you do here.”
“They’re going to train me to do more.”
“Right.”
He looked down at her. Not very far down, it was true; this was one of the things he had loved about her, she was a woman his size. And not just physically, but in her mind and spirit. He had loved her, and sure, he loved her still. But this was too much. If she wanted to ask him to stay, or berate him for not staying for personal reasons having to do with them, if she wanted to apologize for dumping him so brutally after their arrival, she could do it; here he was, this was her chance, her last chance for months at least, maybe her last chance ever; and here she was nattering on about the goddamned Antarctic Treaty, as if that mattered any more or was the real point between them.