February 13,1910
SANDERS LOOKED SKELETAL. THE sun had made deep pools of his cheeks and eyes. Behind him, O’Malley brought up fragments of the Iphigenia that had washed up on shore. His jacket was cinched around his waist, which was the size of a thigh. The caption cried out: Slow Death on Two Feet.
Snap.
Three shots left now. Last roll.
“Will you put that thing down?” Kennedy said. “You’re gettin’ on my nerves.”
The vest-pocket camera was junk, really. He missed his big Hasselblad, with its capacity for huge panoramas, its aperture and shutter-speed settings that allowed for resolution down to the individual grains of snow. But alas, no blank plates, no Hasselblad. Everything lost in the wreck of the Iphigenia.
Couldn’t agonize over spilled plates. Had to keep on.
The little camera did have its virtues. It caught candid, day-to-day life. People. Motion. Progress. It would be a record of what went on here.
Besides, it kept him busy.
And sane.
Sanity was precious. Already some of the men were cracking. O’Malley had tried to make soup out of snow, wood, and stones. (He had a theory about edible algae and sloughed-off seal nutrients. But the soup had tasted like wood and stones.) Talmadge was taking weather readings by the minute, recording the tiniest changes in temperature. Ruppenthal was picking fights. Cranston was writing notes in his journal, ripping them out, and tucking them into rocks in the cave. Kennedy had lost his sarcastic sense of humor. That was scariest of all.
Hunger had changed them all, turned them into scavengers. It was a constant companion, tearing at their insides until they thought of nothing else. It made walking cadavers of once-burly men.
It made good photography.
Windham, on lookout shift, had dug himself a deep, full-body indentation in the cliff, banking the sides to protect himself against the wind. But he had fallen asleep there, standing up, his soot-blackened face turned to the sun. His lips, thin and parched, had curled back over his teeth, and he looked like an Egyptian mummy unearthed in its sarcophagus.
Pharaoh of the Frozen South.
Snap.
Two shots left.
Rivera, pacing a figure eight, his footsteps wearing a path in the gravel. Dr. Riesman’s eyes, feral and desolate, peering from the shadow of the cave.
Eternity’s Limbo.
Frame, angle, composition.
Snap.
One left. Last shot.
It would have to be good. The best.
Ruskey began to shake.
He thought of the sign he’d painted over his studio door back home, the dying words of the poet Goethe: More light.
Light was life. It illuminated and nourished. If light died, life ended.
He imagined his finger pressing the shutter, the final image imprinting itself on the silver nitrate, the aperture snapping shut for good. Forever.
The camera vibrated as Ruskey lifted it to his eyes.
He couldn’t do it.
He couldn’t not do it.
If someone ever found this place, they would need to know what happened. They would see. And if they saw, they’d know. They had to know.
One shot left. No blanks aloud.
Take it while you’re able.
He slowly panned, taking it all in: men, boat, cliff, pathway, rocks, shore, sea, ship …
Ship?
He blinked.
It was impossible.