The Big Bang Symphony: A Novel of Antarctica

19

117 19 Mikala stood at the exact geographic South Pole. A simple stake marked the spot. It had to be moved a few yards every year due to the shifting ice sheet. A sign, quoting the journals of the two men who had raced to be the first to stand in this place, announced the results of their competition. Roald Amundsen had won, and on December 14, 1911, he wrote, “So we arrived and were able to plant our flag at the geographic South Pole.” A devastated Robert Falcon Scott got there three weeks later, on January 7, 1912, and he wrote, “The Pole, yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected.” Now, nearly a hundred years later, Marcus Wright had come to plant not a flag but a telescope. Mikala had come to write music. The pursuits of humankind had evolved, maybe, but not the place. It was still a godforsaken frozen desert. Other than a small jumble of buildings, there was nothing for hundreds of miles but a field of ice topped by a field of sky. And endless silence. The awful kind of silence that accentuated noise. The syncopation of hammering. The hushed roar of generators. The searing mock violins of power tools. An underlay of that free South Pole wind, so liberated by space that it flowed by in silky sheets, making a sound too thin to be called a whisper. Now, insinuating itself into the cacophony came the grinding, soon to be bludgeoning, engine of the LC-130. A moment later, Mikala saw the day’s plane coming as a speck into the field of blue sky. The speck became a winged being, then a hard gray thing. And finally, its red fins sliced the sky like some kind of aerial fish. An orchestra might express the plane’s approach with growling tubas and an atonal harp. But why would she compose that? Music should transcend mere expression. It needed to be beautiful. Nothing about that approaching plane was beautiful. It filled Mikala with a cold fear. She knew that the crash landing of her first flight had been an aberration, a highly unusual event, but she still expected to see every plane break on the packed snow runway and burst into flames. She didn’t want her music to convey fear or devastation . She’d already written The Sarah Songs, her sonatas on grief, and she wanted to be done with that topic, too. So why had she thrown herself into this new vortex? The proximity of her father induced a kind of riotous confusion that merited nothing musical whatsoever. Coming to this place had been a vast miscalculation on her part. Days had passed and she hadn’t written a single note. Jeffrey, who did photorealistic paintings, did not have her problem . His project, called “Extreme Machine,” was already signed with a gallery in New York, with the exhibit scheduled for the fall. He was, at this very moment, out on the runway snapping pictures of the Air Force plane as it skied to a stop on the ice runway. He had been producing nearly a painting a day, setting his alarm for all hours to capture images in perfect light and then holing himself up to paint from the photographs. After sketching and laying down the first layer of color, he again visited “the living site of his subject ,” as he called it, and corrected for true light. The acuteness of his discipline, his stellar work ethic, was matched only by the intensity of his depression. Mikala watched him hopping from location to location, shooting dozens of pictures, hoping to get the harshest light, the sharpest angles, the dullest colors. He flopped onto his belly to shoot up from the ground. Now he was running—running!—as if he could beat an Air Force plane to the end of the runway. He gave up, slowed, slumped. Mikala watched him hit his forehead with the heel of his hand, imagined the muffled thump of that self-abuse. 118 She thought Jeffrey should be a choreographer for how expressively his body moved, except that there was no joy. Someone should put the guy on antidepressants. Mikala sighed. Who was she to talk? She began walking back toward the dome. She would get a plate of food for supper, so she could eat alone, and then, she promised herself, she’d...