“Yeah yeah,” X said, and wandered back to the heavy shop, discouraged. Why indeed? Fingers picking up iron, without need for any help from the brain whatsoever: why indeed?
At this point he could barely remember. He could not recall what his pre-arrival image of Antarctica had been. A place of adventure, surely. A place where even the humble jobs that a GFA could expect would be transformed. But even that quick disillusionment had been as nothing compared to the experience with Val. Even if love were nothing more than a bourgeois fabrication, outdated in Mac Town along with everywhere else, it was strange how much it could still hurt; and strange how many men in McMurdo were wandering around even more bitter than he was, burned by trolling ice women and swearing never to have anything to do with them ever again. Which would last right until the next time.
But even structures of feeling were a social construct, as Raymond Williams had made clear. And the structure of feeling down here was clearly skewed by the disparity in number between men and women; there were about nine hundred men in town, and three hundred women; and that was the explanation right there, along with the fact that everyone in town had tested negative for sexual diseases. No doubt X had been lucky to have gotten even an extra word from Val, him a lowly GFA and a fingie to boot when he had first met her, and her the beauty of the town and one of the best known of the mountaineers, veteran of expeditions that people talked about in tones of amazement. And even though the mountaineers were ASL employees too, and caught in the same seasonal contract trap as the Carhartts, their job was one of the glamour jobs for sure, with about the same social status as the beakers.
So it had been a mismatch from the start. She was the hotshot mountaineer who had climbed many of the world’s highest peaks, and repeated Shackleton’s impossible crossing of South Georgia Island; he was just a—he didn’t know what. A gypsy scholar. An overage college student, finished with college. He didn’t even know why she had paid attention to him at all; except for his size, no doubt. As she was six foot four inches tall, and therefore considerably taller than most men, he would have stood out in that sense. Someone she had to look up to, ha. And then he could talk, a little; he was a reader of books; and she had known an awful lot about the history of Antarctic exploration, and had been an interesting talker herself. No, they had had some good conversations! So good that it was painful to remember that period, when he had gone down to the galley three times every day hoping to run into her, timing his meals to match what seemed to be the likeliest times to meet her. And then eating big meals together, with big appetites both, and talking at length about all manner of things. She had told him about some of her climbs, and her admiration for Ernest Shackleton, and her grandmother who had died a couple years before; and he had told her about his reading, which in the absence of other leisure activities in McMurdo had become more voluminous than at any time of his life, even in college. He read mostly political philosophy and culture theory; that was what he liked; it was interesting, as he explained to her, to try to understand why the world was the way it was. And now in Antarctica, he said, he had begun to put together his reading and his life in a way that made sense; he was beginning to see patterns. In all the evenings he had with nothing else to do, he had begun to travel backward in the history of philosophy, trying to track his analysis to its source. Everything that impressed him turned out to be based on something that had come earlier. So that he had read The Götterdämmerung and become a devotee of Frank Bailey, like any number of grad students around the world; then he had sought out Bailey’s roots in prepostcapitalist theory, and so had read Deleuze and Speier, and become a neoleftist; then gone further back and read Jameson and Williams and then Sartre, and found it had all come from Sartre, and so become a Sartrean; then a Nietzschean, for really it all came from Nietzsche; and then he had read Marx and Engels, and become a Marxist. At that point he had recognized the retrograde pattern of his intellectual movement, and rather than go to the trouble of traveling further backward in the history of Western philosophy, which was soon going to lead him into the monstrosities of Kant and Hegel, he had simply skipped them all and gone right back to Heraclitus, becoming a confirmed student of that most Zenlike of the Greeks, a man whose extant body of work could be read in ten minutes, but then pondered over for the rest of one’s life. Yes, now he planned to meditate on fragments of Heraclitus and never read philosophy again, but start paying attention to the world instead!
And Val had laughed at his foolery. It had seemed to entertain her, at the time. But if you could never step in the same river twice, as Heraclitus had famously said, then why did he keep on running into Val in the galley? And why was he stuck in this same moment of pain? And how could he get to his food without going through that pain? And why had she inflicted that pain on him in the first place?
He had thought they had been having a good time. That was what hurt. They had talked in the galley, and laughed; they had hiked up to Ob Hill together, and snuck into the greenhouse; they had made out; they had made love; they had even gone to New Zealand together on vacation, which in the Mac Town structure of feeling was serious stuff indeed, a kind of commitment. And X had thought they had had a good time there, a really good time. Of course he had not been able to climb mountains at Val’s level, that was impossible and scary even to contemplate, her casually pointing up at routes she had done that looked completely vertical or even distinctly overhung; when they had driven up to Mount Cook, for example, past the biggest most turquoise lake imaginable, she had mentioned climbing Cook the last time she was there, and X had gazed up at that distant white spire, like something out of a dream, and stared at her open-mouthed until she had laughed. It’s not that hard, she said, although it is crappy rock, wheatabix the Kiwis call it, which is a breakfast cereal; it cuts your hands all up and yet crumbles under your weight, actually last time we got avalanched up there, it was great….
X had listened and nodded, trying not to look frightened. And after many climbing stories from her, all terrifying, recounted as they hiked the steep trails in the area, he had confessed in turn that he had been pretty bad at sports, and at physical activity in general. Always a disappointment to his school’s coaches, naturally, as he had always been big, and therefore looked promising. But after his last spurt of growth he had lumbered around “like Frankenstein’s monster,” as he put it, which caused Val to look at him oddly; and she didn’t offer any similar stories about herself. Apparently she had been quite a jock in school, when she had bothered. Good at volleyball in particular.
But X had been plagued by sports as by a curse in a fairy tale. In high school he had taken a swing at a pitch while the baseball coach was watching, and accidentally hit the ball 548 feet as later tape-measured by the coach; it had taken two years of baseball after that without X ever even hitting the ball again to convince the coach that that one shot had been a fluke. Then in the winters X had been talked onto the wrestling team, and had wrestled in the heavyweight division, and lost every match for three years, all by pin; and was also perhaps the only wrestler ever to be pinned by an opponent weighing a hundred pounds less than he did; no doubt also the only wrestler ever stupid enough to agree to such a no-win contest in the first place.
But worst of all had been basketball. He had caught the attention of the UCSD coach, who had talked him into joining the team, and trained him intensively for two years in hopes of making him their center. But it hadn’t worked. Everything about it had been against the grain, and although eventually X mastered some aspects of the game, he never could make the ball go through the hoop, despite hours of training by a coach who in every game chewed a white towel to ribbons. All that frustrated effort culminated somehow in a crucial grudge match against their archrivals the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs, a nightmarish affair in which everything X tried went wrong and everything the Banana Slug center tried went perfectly, until there came a moment when X was fed a pass in the key and all his baffled frustration with sports surged into a single moment of rage, and he whirled around and leaped by his opponent intending to slam dunk the ball right through the floorboards, but missed by a fraction and hammered the ball onto the back rim so that it shot up into the rafters of the building, lost to sight for seconds, and X’s wrist hit the front rim wrong, and he came down on his ankle wrong, and in the agony of a double sprain he twisted and fell, not quickly but like some immense tree cut at ground level, turning and crashing to the floor with his whole body at once, a perfect faceplant, afterward watching stunned as his teammates and opponents gazelled over him in pursuit of the ball on its return from orbit. The college paper’s sportswriter had called it the greatest missed shot in the history of basketball. And an existential moment for X, a bifurcation point in his life; for after that he had given up sports for good.