My Last Continent (12 page)

I open the door to see Keller, his rain jacket soaked, water dripping off the brim of his Antarctic Penguins Project baseball hat. He's close enough to touch, but I stand there, stunned, the rain breezing in, my heart beating in my ears. I haven't seen him since we parted ways in Ushuaia almost eight months ago. I try to speak, taking in the glitter of the porch light in his eyes, his breath in the cool evening air, and I only get as far as parting my lips.

“Hope it's not a bad time,” he says.

AS KELLER CHANGES
into dry clothes, I walk Nick to the back door, handing him the wine. The introductions had been quick and awkward.

“At least now I know he exists,” Nick says. He attempts a smile and reaches down to pick up Gatsby from his spot on the chair. I watch Nick walk across the yard and into his house; Gatsby looks back at me from over Nick's shoulder. I'm still staring out the window when I hear Keller's voice.

“Did I interrupt something?” he asks.

Keller's tone holds no jealousy, no reproach, as if he knows
there couldn't be anyone else for me but him. Still, I almost can't believe the sight of Keller in my living room, a vision I've imagined for so long but have given up on ever seeing.

He's looking around, as if scanning a penguin rookery, searching for clues about its welfare, its status, its future. He glimpses the emperor skull I keep on one of my bookshelves, and steps over for a closer look.

I'd salvaged the skull from the lab when a professor heading to another university was planning to toss it out. It's one of the few possessions I treasure, as morbid as that might seem. While a penguin's bones are solid, and the skull is heavier than you'd expect, there's something graceful and delicate about it: the narrow, three-inch-long beak, the wide eye sockets, the gentle curve of the head.

Keller picks it up, running a finger along the fine bones of the penguin's head. He seems lost in thought, and I'm silent until I can't take it anymore.

“I'd given up hope of ever seeing you on my doorstep,” I say.

He puts the penguin skull down and comes over to me. He gives me a tentative kiss, then pulls me close, holding me far longer than he ever does, and he whispers in my ear, “Sorry I didn't warn you. I didn't know I was coming myself until I went to the airport and got on standby.”

“What's going on? I thought you'd be teaching.”

He rests his chin on the top of my head. “Summer term was it. My contract didn't get renewed.”

I pull back and look at him. “Antarctica's only a couple months away. Just stay here until then.”

He releases me and says, “I'm going to Seattle, actually. See a friend who teaches at UW.”

He doesn't look me in the eye when he says this, and I think back to what I'd said during our last voyage, after he got into trouble with Glenn. We'd never really talked about it, but it had only been Keller's second season on board the
Cormorant,
and I worried it would hurt his chances of having a third.

“Keller, about last season—” I begin.

“Let's forget about that,” he says, meeting my eyes. “More important, I hope Glenn can.”

“So do I.”

He gives a half laugh and shakes his head. “I'm having bad luck all around. Soon I'll be back to dishwashing at McMurdo, if I'm lucky.”

“Don't worry,” I say. “You'll have a spot on the boat. Glenn needs you.”

“I hope so,” he says.

Suddenly I have an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. While we don't usually know when or where we'll see each other next, it's been understood that we'll meet in the Southern Hemisphere if nowhere else. Filling a cruise with knowledgeable and reliable naturalists, with a diversity of skills and expertise, can be a challenge—some, like Thom, have families; others have tenure-track jobs and teaching commitments. I'm assuming that people like Keller and me, for whom Antarctica comes first, will be guaranteed spots on the
Cormorant
. Perhaps I've assumed too much.

I try to put my thoughts aside as I toss Keller's wet clothes into the dryer. We order Thai food, and as we wait for it to arrive, I watch him open a bottle of wine, thinking that I've seen his hands do many things before, but never this. Never something so ordinary and domestic.

I think about Nick—
Don't you worry you
'll have regrets?
—and try to imagine Antarctica without Keller, or both of us here instead. How much I'd be willing to sacrifice if I needed to.

Keller twists the cork from the corkscrew and lays it on the kitchen table. He fills our glasses. We talk about the
APP
staff, the other researchers we know. We talk about the next phase of our study, which we'll begin during this upcoming trip, after the
Cormorant
drops us off at Petermann. As usual, we don't talk about us.

But later, when I lead him to the bedroom, he follows as if he's glad to leave everything else behind. It's the first time we've been together so far north of the equator, so far away from what first brought us together, and even as I feel his hands on my body, as I become immersed in the full presence of his skin, I also feel an absence, as though he is not entirely here, as I suppose he's never entirely anywhere anymore—as maybe I'm not either.

OVER THE NEXT
few days it surprises me every time I see Keller sitting on my couch, one hand balancing a glass on his knee, the other hand scratching the ears of Gatsby, who usually settles down between us when he's here. I can't help but envision Keller's past life—the chaos of dinner with a toddler, bath time, story time. This vision bears less resemblance to the man in front of me than to Nick, or who Nick might've been if he'd ever settled down, perhaps who he still is, deep down.

I wonder who the real Keller is—whether he has become who he was always meant to be, or whether he's simply
adapted, like the penguins, out of necessity. And I wonder whether he'd return to the way things used to be if he could, and where that would leave me if he did.

We coexist much the way we do down south, each doing our own work, coming together now and then by day and always at night. Instead of the crew lounge, it's my kitchen table; instead of sleeping bags on the rocks of Petermann, it's the lumpy mattress on my queen-size bed. It takes me a while to get used to another presence; I'll glimpse Keller's toothbrush and do a double take; I'll hear a door shut and remember that it's not just me in the cottage anymore. If I go to bed while Keller is still awake, reading or working on his laptop, I like knowing that, sometime in the night, he'll slip into bed next to me, and I won't wake up alone.

One day, he meets me after my afternoon bio lecture, and we walk through the university's verdant campus, red brick and ivy all around. It had rained while I was in class; water drips off orange- and red-hued leaves, and cyclists spray up mist as they bike past us on the walkways.

I tell Keller about my class, how I'm certain that half the students slept through it.

“No way,” he says. “You're a natural teacher.”

“One on one, maybe,” I say. “Like with you—that was easy. Not so much in front of a class full of restless freshmen.”

We move aside as a student, walking backward as she gives a tour, heads in our direction. “What was your class like in Boston? Did you enjoy teaching?”

“I did,” he says. “It felt a little like being in a courtroom, only I was talking about things I'm actually excited about.”

“You weren't passionate about your cases?”

“Yes and no,” he says. “I've always been fascinated with the law itself—building an argument, making it sound, thinking about opposing counsel's next move. It's like chess. But the corporate cases our firm handled . . .” He trails off. “It was a relief to quit, actually.”

It's starting to rain—fat, heavy drops that splash up from the shallow puddles on the blacktop. I pull the hood of my rain jacket over my head.

“Where to?” Keller asks.

I think for a moment, the rain splatting against my hood. We're not far from a pub where I often meet Jill, other colleagues, and grad students from the biology department—but when I think about showing up with Keller, I hesitate. While there are plenty of people on the periphery of my everyday life—the ones who know me as an underpaid adjunct professor who's constantly flying south to be with penguins—those who know me best are usually the ones I'm with for those few weeks a year. And I'm not quite ready to merge these two worlds.

Keller's still waiting.

“I know a place,” I say, and we head west on Eleventh Avenue. The restaurant is farther away than I'd remembered, and half an hour later we leave our dripping jackets on a coatrack near the door as we slide into a booth whose vinyl seats are patched with duct tape.

I know it was worth the long, wet walk as Keller looks around, smiling at the brightly colored walls, the long bar with its teal-green barstools, the black-and-white checkered floor. “I love a real diner,” he says when a heavily tattooed server comes by with menus—vegan comfort food—and jelly-­jar glasses of water.

We order plates of southern-fried tofu with crinkly fries, coleslaw, vegan mac-and-cheese, and corn bread. I use my napkin to pat dry the ends of my hair, dribbling rain onto the table.

As I reach for another napkin, I notice, next to the ketchup, a little box filled with Trivial Pursuit–style cards. I shuffle through the cards, pulling one out to ask Keller a question from the nature category:
The diet of which bird creates its pink plumage?

“Flamingo,” he says. “Too easy.”

I draw another few cards, yet these are different, posing what-if types of questions. I hold up the first one. “New game. Here we go. ‘Would you rather lose the conveniences of e-mail and cell phones, or lose one of your limbs?' ”

He laughs. “Really?”

“Right. No moral quandary for you there.” I move on to the next card.

“Wait,” he says. “What about you?”

I think for a second. “I do like e-mail as an alternative to talking on the phone. But I'd give it all up. Especially since you hardly use either anyway.” I read from the next card. “ ‘If you were to get amnesia, would you want to lose your long-term memory or your ability to form new memories?' ” I catch Keller's eyes and wish I'd read the question to myself before reading it aloud.

“That's a tough one.” He looks out the window, the rain on the glass turning the cars in the parking lot into wavy lines of color. “You'd think it would be easy for me,” he says. “Forget the past, live in the moment, enjoy the new memories. But forgetting would change everything.”

“How's that?”

“I wouldn't understand my own life,” he says. “How I got here. Why I'm here with you. Where we'll be in a few months, why it all matters.” He looks back to me. “Which would you choose?”

“Easy. Erase the past. Focus on the here and now.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“What if part of what you erase is McMurdo, four years ago?” he says. “What if it meant looking at me and asking yourself, ‘Who the hell is this guy?' ”

“But I'd still have the ability to create new memories, so I'd just fall in love with you all over again.”

“Even if we met here, in Eugene, instead of in Antarctica?” he asks. “Would that have changed anything?”

“Not a chance.”

Our food arrives, and as our conversation turns to the article Keller is writing for
Outside
magazine, to a documentary we might see over the weekend, in the back of my mind I'm still thinking of his question, of how things might've been different if we'd met anywhere but Antarctica. Even now, his being here in Eugene is an adjustment, and I feel myself taking a mental step backward, looking at this scene from a pace away—Keller and me, sitting in a diner, talking about the weekend like any normal couple—and yet to me it's as strangely exotic as crossing the Antarctic Circle is for the rest of the world. As we eat, I feel time shift and stall while I try to preserve these moments, to commit them to permanent storage in my brain—Keller holding a crinkly fry to my lips, the clink of his fork as it slips from the edge of his plate, the
skin of his hand in the diner's yellowish light as he slides the check across the table and picks it up.

AFTER I TAKE
Keller to the airport for his flight to Seattle, I return home, and the vacancy of my cottage, which would usually feel normal, suddenly seems too quiet. Even Gatsby's disappeared on me—through my kitchen window I can see him across the yard, in the window of Nick's house, looking back at me. I wonder if Nick has called him home as a way to call me there, too.

I find myself looking over at the house all afternoon, and as evening falls I finally cross the yard. As I step up onto the porch, through the window Gatsby sees me first; his mouth opens in a silent pink meow, and then Nick looks up and sees me, too. He opens the door, motioning me in, then looks past me. “Is he gone already?”

“Just for a couple days,” I say. I pick Gatsby up off the kitchen counter, and he digs both paws into my shoulder before resting his chin on them, as if I'm a place to nap. I lean my ear against his rib cage, feeling the comforting vibrations of his purr. “I wasn't expecting him here.”

“I could tell,” Nick says. “So how's it going?”

“Fine,” I say. “Weird,” I add. “Different. Being together here instead of there. But it's good.”

Nick smiles. “Who knew? This is starting to sound almost like a real relationship.”

I laugh. “Maybe.”

He looks at me for a moment. “Love suits you,” he says
at last. “Just promise not to elope to Argentina or anything. Gatsby and I would miss you.”