For now, their collective fantasizing would have to suffice, as Percy was in the middle of a factoid dump. “Antarctica’s bigger than China and India combined,” he said. “It accounts for sixty-one percent of the earth’s freshwater but technically it’s a desert with less than seven inches of annual precipitation. Cold and dry means nothing here ever decomposes.”

  “So this is the land of eternal youth?” joked the youngest dad.

  “Maybe,” said Percy. “In 2017, scientists found a hundred-year-old fruitcake in an explorer’s hut that they claim is still edible.”

  “I wouldn’t wanna be the intern charged with finding out,” said the middle dad.

  “It was still lying around because somebody was using it as a doorstop,” said Billy Bob.

  “If the magnetic pole is eighteen hundred miles from the geographic pole, will we get a chance to see it?” squeaked the Tech Titan hopefully. Striker could already envision next year’s Christmas card featuring Taylor and hubby dearest holding a handmade sign reading merry christmas from the ends of the earth.

  Percy shook his head. “The magnetic pole’s on the other side closer to Tasmania, plus it’s always shifting.”

  “What about the pole of inaccessibility?” asked Taylor, not ready to give up on her dream of the ultimate envy-inducing holiday card.

  “What does that mean?” yawned la Grande Dame.

  “It’s just the spot on the mainland furthest from the sea,” explained Percy. “And no, we’ll be nowhere near it.” He moved on to ice safety. Striker couldn’t believe there was so much to say. She found herself tuning out, trying to remember if she’d put film in the Holga, shut her refrigerator door tight. “And if the ice calves, you could get hit,” Percy concluded, wrapping up his spiel. “Or the wave action from the spray could tip you.” He made a low whistling noise. “It’d be game over before you could even think my bad, so just steer clear.” They nodded dutifully, the youngest dad practically crossing his heart and hoping to die if he strayed from doing exactly as directed. “Any questions?”

  “What time’s cocktail hour?” asked la Grande Dame.

  Percy laughed. “We haven’t even had lunch yet.”

  “Your point being?” said the Dame.

  Damn! Someone’s living her best life, Striker thought.

  “I don’t know what time you usually cheers,” Percy said, careful to keep his voice light and neutral, “but we’ll head back in a little after noon. Does that work?”

  The Dame nodded but retained her air of patrician skepticism.

  The Tech Titan raised her hand. “We have emergency plans in place in case of unforeseen variables, correct?” Each time Taylor spoke, her voice was higher than Striker anticipated, like she’d taken a hit off a helium balloon. No wonder her husband Kevin carried himself like a man who had ground his molars down to nubs. A voice that stratospheric could drive anyone nuts.

  “Correct,” said Percy. He left it at that, beaming his 240-watt smile at the group. Like the Dame, the Tech Titan also looked as if she wasn’t buying what Percy was selling, but Kevin managed to get her to stand down by signaling that mama’s little baby needed his neck seal rechecked. Taylor sighed and gave Kevin’s zipper a good, hard yank. As an extra bonus, she took off one of her gloves and licked her finger, wiped something imperceptible off his face.

  That is what a three-day waiting period gets you, Riley would’ve said.

  “But in case of emergency, Texans first, right Coach?” guffawed Billy Bob. Since nobody laughed, Striker could only conclude she’d just imagined him saying it.

  Soon it was her turn to shove off from the support boat. Getting in the kayak was a much easier process than it looked. Various beefy Russians held your boat tight against the zodiac. It was just a matter of stepping over and in. Once she sat down, someone handed her a paddle. He gave her a small salute, which might have been a signal for all clear or else was some sort of friendly detente between their countries.

  “One more point,” said Percy. “Anything goes down, you can survive a full fifteen minutes in a dry suit in water this cold.”

  “Is that supposed to be reassuring?” asked the youngest dad, feigning alarm.

  “All I’m saying is fifteen minutes is plenty of time for someone to get to you,” said Percy. “So don’t panic.”

  “Easier said than done,” mused Taylor, giving her husband a healthy dose of side-eye.

  Striker took a deep breath. Tomorrow she’d be forty. It was true. There was a lot of living under this belt. She was about to push off into the unending blue. Then the lead Russian holding her boat in place reached out and tucked the small gold cross hanging around her neck back inside her dry suit.

  “It’s just an old keepsake,” she explained. “Doesn’t mean a thing.”

  He grinned and winked conspiratorially. “Scared?” he asked.

  She was pretty sure this one was named Vadim. During the pre-launch orientation, she had watched as he introduced himself to la Grande Dame as the crew member who would be piloting her kayak. The old woman had barely acknowledged him. Too bad for her, Striker thought. The guy looked like a serious player, what the youngs called DTF. Down To Fuck. He sported a shaved head and had the half-lidded eyes of someone who’d seen it all. The flirtation was obvious in his voice. Striker shot him a long, cool look. Back home everyone had told her to enjoy herself on this trip of a lifetime. Well, almost everyone. Riley had brought it up one night while out with friends after Striker had announced she was heading to Antarctica.

  “Is it just me or do y’all think that’s crazy?” Riley had asked the group. When nobody took up the gauntlet, she charged ahead. “Personally? I’m a hard hell to the no on everything polar,” she said. “I mean, who do you think a polar bear’s gonna go for first?” She raised an eyebrow and peered around the table.

  “There are no polar bears in Antarctica,” said Striker. “No walruses either.”

  “Whatever,” said Riley. “I’m just telling you for your own good. Cold, ice, white people as far as the eye can see? Hands down, that’s my worst nightmare.”

  Everyone laughed, including their two white friends, Scarlett and Casey. Then the group got into it, each sharing what scared them the most. At first there were the usual suspects—the dark, spiders, clowns with big feet, the city after 2 a.m. Three drinks in their answers became more interesting. One person talked about the time she got lost coming home from the grocery store, a place she came and went from almost daily, yet suddenly nothing seemed familiar, her heart racing as she tried to make sense of it, relocate herself in time and space. Casey said she had a fear of not knowing why certain things happened. She named a movie filled with inexplicable moments, a series of bizarre occurrences.

  “Lame,” pronounced Riley.

  “Hear me out. It’s deeper than a fear of the unknown,” Casey insisted. “It’s a fear of not having answers.”

  Scarlett tried backing her up. “I remember as a kid being scared shitless by ‘The Lottery,’” she said.

  “You were scared of Powerball?” said Riley, raising both eyebrows in disbelief.

  “No, the short story by Shirley Jackson,” Scarlett clarified. “You never find out where the town is or why they started stoning people once a year just for kicks.”

  “Exactly,” said Casey. “If you knew why they did it, it might not be so creepy.”

  “Like that woman last year who stabbed her three-year-old out of the blue,” said Scarlett. “There were no signs of psychosis or anything. She had a nanny, for Chrissake. They still don’t know why she did it.”

  “No offense but that all sounds like some white people bullshit, needing answers and stuff,” yawned Riley. “Note to self: you are not entitled to reasons. When Job asked God why He was picking on him, didn’t God tell him to go fuck himself?”

  “I’m terrified of hurting someone,” offered a woman at one end of the table.

  “Girl, you broke that man’s heart,” Riley said.

  “I mean physically.” She explained that a friend of a friend of her sister’s had killed someone in a car accident. “She hit a child,” the woman said. “A child. How do you keep living after that?” A silence fell over the table.

  “What about you?” Riley finally asked.

  “Me?” said Striker. She found herself ransacking her brain for something to say, something easy, like choking to death while eating junk food alone in her apartment. “I dunno,” she said. “How about squirrels?”

  “Squirrels?” Riley said.

  “Ever seen one loose in a house?”

  Around the table people nodded, similarly creeped out by the thought.

  The group moved on. Striker felt herself relax. Why put it into words if you didn’t have to?

  Her greatest fear was of losing her mind. One day just waking up and having no idea who or where or what anything was, the way the world worked, your mind wiped clean of its owner’s manual, reduced to static on a TV, the rainforest setting on a white noise machine. Yeah, mos def that was the winning ticket. Or was it? Striker let herself linger on the question a beat too long. Shizer. It was one thing to lose your mind, to become forgetful or not recognize people. It was a whole other level to go full frontal insane, for reality to turn topsy-turvy, your perception of the world suddenly unreliable. A small shiver rippled through her heart. Bingo! Becoming insane was hands down her biggest fear. For the past few decades, how many times had she secretly entertained the possibility that that ship had already sailed?

  She turned to the Russian holding her kayak in place and threw back her shoulders, squared herself. “Honey,” she said, stressing the word, which she coolly tossed in his lap not as a come-on but as a diminutive used when addressing a child. “It’s called tenacity.”

  Suddenly the world seemed to shift a few degrees, everything slightly unbalanced. Striker had the sensation she was floating in a tandem and that somebody was seated behind her. She could feel a ghostliness just over her shoulder, the heat of someone’s rancid breath soughing on her neck.

  But that was crazy. Nobody was watching her from beyond the veil. She had paid for a single boat, and a single boat was what she was floating in. There was no echo lingering in the air, no frisson left behind like the moment after a person exits a room. Just to be sure, she sat for a moment studying her surroundings.

  Straight ahead in the distance two icebergs bobbed along. There was something unsettling about their position relative to the horizon. Quickly she looked away.

  The things had been glaring at her, a pair of salt-white eyes.

  Told you so, Riley would’ve said. You don’t belong here.

  But this is the one place on earth where I shouldn’t have to deal with that, Striker thought. She was as far away from her life as a human being could physically get. Isn’t that why we stay in motion, she mused. So we don’t have to mess with all the junk orbiting around inside our heads?

  She was at the start of a journey costing tens of thousands of dollars. Happily, someone else was footing the bill. She let that lucky fact bolster her. Yeah, not today, Satan. She gripped her paddle and pushed off into the icy unknown.

  The Yegorov floated reassuringly in the distance. The two support boats hung back a few hundred yards, probably told to remain out of camera shot. Striker was surprised by how glassy and flat the ocean stayed, placid like water in the tropics. She wondered if this was a fluke or normal for this time of year. If this was the norm, it would make finding suitable locations for the movie she was scouting that much easier.

  Striker wasn’t the world’s greatest kayaker but today she didn’t need to be. Percy had said he’d only ever take them out in the good stuff, never anything too choppy. It made sense. There were kids in the mix.

  “And trust me,” he’d added. “We may be in Antarctica but there’s plenty of good stuff down here.”

  Two summers ago Striker had scouted for a Viking flick up in the Norwegian fjords. She’d learned the hard way that the key to kayaking for long periods of time was to relax, not grip the paddle too tightly. At the end of her first day of touring, she’d barely been able to open her hands.

  Today as she paddled away from the zodiac, she tried to employ proper technique like she’d learned in Norway. Inside the front of the boat, she nestled her toes on the foot pads. Gently pushing on something with your feet helped engage your core. Ideally that was where all the action took place. Making kayaking all about your arms spelled trouble. She also knew you should never just pull with the arm actively stroking the water but always push equally on the paddle with the opposite arm, pushing and pulling simultaneously. It made a big difference. Unfortunately she still hadn’t mastered how to keep her shoulders from aching. Probably it would help if she were taller and sitting further up above the water. This outing was only supposed to last an hour. She figured she could handle anything for that long, come what may.

  For the first ten minutes the group splashed sloppily about, drunk on beauty. In this alien realm, Striker was happy to let her Leica do the talking. The beauty was overpowering, like floating inside a sapphire. Every conceivable shade of blue on display, rendering the icebergs whiter than white.

  The group spread out but even a hundred feet apart you could easily hear your neighbor talking. Striker put her paddle down for whole minutes at a time to shoot the landscape. There was no wind or current to carry her elsewhere. Percy explained they were at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula and that the peninsula was part of a chain of volcanic islands that stretched north across the tempestuous four-hundred-mile-wide Drake Passage all the way up to the Andes in Tierra del Fuego.

  “Enjoy the day, folks,” he called out to the group. “It’s Christmas Eve, and the support team tells me it’s a balmy fifty-two degrees out here.”

  “Unbelievable,” squealed Taylor.

  “Yeah but unbelievable is bad, isn’t it,” said Anders. When Percy gave the teen a small nod, the kid turned to their mom. “See, I told you,” they hissed, but Bobbi Sue ignored whatever her teenager was getting at and paddled on ahead.

  “Take good care of your sunnies,” Percy said, using the British expression. “After a season down here, the early explorers would often go sun blind.” He explained that the men wore smoked pieces of glass tied into cloth goggles. Little did they know the dark glass caused their pupils to dilate, letting in more UV radiation, the men slowly losing their sight. The unfortunates without goggles could become temporarily blind in a single afternoon from the light reflecting off the ice and burning their retina.

  Striker sat studying a bergy bit the size of a garage. “The Formation of Ice” had been one of the numerous onboard lectures the Yegorov offered as a way to pass the time between Argentina and the peninsula. Striker had attended most of them. Back in New York, she’d need to show she’d done her homework.

  During the lecture, the ice expert had looked a little green. Striker couldn’t tell if it was the lighting or the previous night’s crossing of the Drake. It took him a while to get the AV running. Once it was up, he explained that when ice first forms on the ocean, it’s called grease ice because it looks like grease on the water. “Grease ice forms pancake ice,” he said, pulling up a video. The water did indeed appear oily, a slick film glossing its surface as gelid circles of water jostled about like human cells. “Pancake ice forms field ice. Field ice looks like the crushed stuff you get in a drink.” He rattled off a list: black ice, brash ice, jade ice, young ice, pack ice, all the way up to bergy bits, which, despite the name, were the size of houses. Growlers were among the most ancient, some hundreds, even thousands of years old. They formed at the base of icebergs when the weight of the ice compressed on itself, squeezing out all of the oxygen and absorbing the red end of the spectrum until the ice turned a brilliant translucent blue and broke off. Most growlers were the size of cars.

  His final video was so beautiful, Striker pulled out her phone and began recording. “When the part under the water gets eroded enough, the iceberg becomes top-heavy. Eventually it flips over. The bottom becomes the top,” he said. “Then you can see what was below the waterline.” In the video the blue thing drifted merrily along, its top fluted and scalloped, hand-crafted by the waters of time, the ice delicate yet frilly like icing on a wedding cake.

  Now surrounded by it, the ice reminded Striker of summer clouds. The way each piece slowly revealed its true self to the eye of the beholder—that one a horse, that one a barn, that one a man in a rowboat lost and desperate on the Southern Sea. And the water surrounding each berg was a brilliant aquamarine as the sunlight reflected off the ice submerged below the waterline, the water ringing each iceberg the coolest blue like the jeweled waters of the Caribbean.

  You had to admit: that would look good on film. Damn good. Maybe even award-season good. Everywhere, this blue mise-en-scene as if strangled, deprived of air. Already she was imagining the arguments she’d make to the producer for assembling a polar crew. Audiences had a right to see this place before it melted. If you wanted to get the best performances out of the actors, you had to bring them to the source. Think DiCaprio in that angry bear movie. You couldn’t make a biopic about Shackleton, one of the greatest leaders of men in the twentieth century, in a water tank on a soundstage in Burbank. Plus, think of the press they’d get. They’d barely need to run an Oscar campaign.

  Back home she’d need to keep researching, writing up reports on everything from weather, transport, and energy sources to shelter, food, and insurance. What it would cost to fly down an entire shooting unit, or if it was more efficient to go with a few folks and a handheld. There would be long, involved talks with the financiers about how much the film would have to gross to make it all worthwhile. Fortunately those conversations were above her pay grade.