The world is getting warmer, we’re going the other way: the submarine’s temperature gauge has been dropping a few degrees everyday for the last eighteen days. I started seeing the smog of my own breath last Tuesday, it’s now Tuesday again — almost three weeks since Captain Lake locked himself away. Three weeks now since I have left the crow’s nest’s warming faux blue glow. The monitors reflect off the metallic sheeting of my emergency poncho-blanket like suspicious lens flares in my glasses.
From this digital vantage point, I am all seeing: navigation, mess, Doc’s office, personnel cabins, all seeing besides Captain’s quarters, whose security cam’s wire was cut years ago in the name of loneliness undersea. Never before have I wanted to peer into his privates, I trust Cap, as much as one can trust a man who is both your warden and your superior.
But since he awoke in the night and re-directed all the central heat to his cabin, I can’t help but be curious about his condition. Plus, without his keycode we’ve been unable to change course or resurface for help. Care-in, the ship’s A.I. typically navigates us from roaming iceberg to iceberg, one’s deemed hazardous to shipping blockades, for us Scrims to calve in thrice or twain with the U.S.S. R. Walton’s thermal halite ray — but even her programming seems bugged out for we continue to drift back towards the Antarctic mainland’s southwestern edge.
Three weeks spent futilely hoping the Trans-Antarctic Reform Division takes our lackluster job performance as the distress beacon it truly is, instead of just adding time to our sentences. For total corporate transparency, in the wake of our probable re-sentencing, I tell this story here. The same story I told Doc last night when he brought up a microwave tray. The same way I told him: twitching eyes following his, still clutching the harpoon gun I brought up here with me three weeks ago.
Our last shore-leave on Alexander Island — the thawing gray rock, a place best known for its wetness. It’s in the air, it’s in the inhabitants; not much else to do out here but drip in its vices. That night we skipped the two-hour massage parlors, passed on the regret inducing Wem-stick vendors, even bypassed the poker tables, to head straight for the pub. Where Doc, Cap, and I proceeded with our leave tradition, getting loaded.
Once sufficiently booze blind, Captain Lake reads to us the classified wrap sheets of tomorrow’s new crew shift:
“Medical Malpractice. That’s you Doc.”
“You botch a few butt-jobs and it’s here, the hogs, or the wildfires.”
“Redacted. That’s you Talby. *burp* And don’t tell me, I like ya plenty already.”
If I were not already so flush, I might have blushed. We put back another shot, toasting our past delinquencies.
“Checkout tomorrow’s sickie, ten counts of impaired driving, five counts of destruction of property, and a J.D.”
“Maybe he can give us legal advice.”
“And this other guy is a wanna-be cubicle shooter.”
“Bad aim? He should be glad to be here.”
I joked. We laughed. We drank. Eventually venturing out into the pirate port-city for a piss. The rock I picked already thawed, yet it still sizzles at my release; its steam, the vapors, intoxicatingly offensive, like vinegar. Far to my right, the dirty dog Doc, kicks slush trying to entertain a few ladies of the night. On a close left, a drunk Captain Lake barely holds himself up with one arm against the icy glacial wall, the other holding together his unit; it draped just over his sturdy palm, its loud stream the color and smell of broth, left thirsting. I felt the deep need to show him how to hydrate.
Fixated in a shy glance, I watched as he, like our thermal ray, melted away at the ancient ice layers. But from within, something queer started to escape; first in a drip, then a wiggle. I don’t know what it was, a slime, a goop, some kind of primordial soup. All I knew, for I was left by etiquette, only to watch helplessly, was that when it slithered up into his member it was in pain, and the Captain too, for his primal yelp led straight to an apparent drunken pass-out.
Doc and I carried him back to bed, it was about morning light, time to ship off with the new crew anyway; mysterious Privates Joey Bombay and William ‘Bill’ Froog experienced only one day undersea with normal circumstance. I can’t blame them for their reclusive lack of comradery, for that night the heat turned and I came up here to the crow’s nest — just to keep an eye on things.
Everyone is cold now, and nobody trusts anyone yet. We all are wrapped in mirrored foil, public service issued defense against a frozen death. All only appearing as reflective shimmers in my monitors’ eye, so one must look hard in order to pry. A scream echoes, drowning out the drone of rotating metal cutting through the air. I scan my monitors. What could’ve happened? Could it be Captain?
My monitors, they lie, I start seeing feedback, or shimmers, running, climbing, everywhere. I lean in to focus but my breath fogs up my glasses. The power cuts, a black darkness engulfs me. My heart a bat, fluttering out my chest, trying to find its way in the night. It knows I must go down, to investigate.
Quickly to my knees, looking out with my hand for the crow’s nest’s hatch and its manual release. Fumbling down the ladder, harpoon in hand, descending into the darkness. I look back up at the safe perch I have left, when the hatch door slams behind me. The flashing red glow and the echoing message of Care-in’s Emergency Mode, informs me that I should’ve stolen Navigation’s and the crow’s nest’s keys from Captain’s belt looped ring as well.
Down is the only way to go, the flashing neon red illuminating every other ladder rung. I stop between middle and lower, just poking my head out of the narrow ladder tube. The mess sits empty. The connecting crew quarters hallway is quiet too. Do I dare make a run for Doc’s office at the end of the hall?
I shift the long harpoon dart out of my ladder trench, preparing myself to go over the top. But pots and pans rustle from the kitchen, someone else makes their move. A ducking glimmer sprints from the mess kitchen and heads down the hall. The riveting motorized buzz again rotates through the air. Then, from across the mess, I see him — ice auger in hand, metallic poncho splattered red, wearing a snout-nosed hooded gas-mask, its fogged visor concealing a killer’s face. I swear he looks right at me. I take my one shot. The harpoon spring’s kickback knocks me off my footholds, sending me tumbling down to lower, rung by rung.
I awake, no sense of how long I was knocked out for, but my hands are covered in blood. Frantic, I check myself for gashes, thankfully there are none. A body, bleeding through foil wrap like takeout, lies next to me at the ladder’s base — he must’ve broken my fall.
I turn down his hood, it’s a slacked-jawed Private Bombay, died wishing corporal punishment still consisted of coaching underprivileged youth hockey teams. His turned out guts, which I laid wading in, suggest he was the ice drill’s first victim. I’ve got to warn Doc.
Back up the ladder, limping, with only the flashing red gleam to guide me. I too now a hidden shimmer, with my injured ankle gimp down the cabin corridor. Doc’s door is open, I bumble in, fearing for the worst — but no, sweet elation there Doc sits, huffing a rag and clenching a scalpel.
The office appears thrashed in a struggle. I ask him what’s going on. He says he thought I’d still be with my precious monitors. Powers off is my excuse, deep in his rag he hardly seems to notice. Have you seen Private Froog, Doc? He could be dangerous, I found Bombay, he was gutted. Doc’s eyes widen, whatever he’s been huffing kicks in. He hops off the counter, almost closing in.
“Could our crazed Captain have finally ventured out of his room?”
Doc asks. A run of blood starts leaking out from under the closed door of his examination room. I try to back away.
“He couldn’t’ve Doc. I locked him in there. I have the key.”
”You have the key? Why not go turn on the damn heat?!”
“I trust Simon. If he needs to sweat it out, I’ll let him sweat it out.”
You’re crazy, he yells to me while lunging with the scalpel. I stumble back, falling out his office door, crawling quickly back up the ladder tube.
Talby… Talby… Doc calls out my name between the drill engine’s heavy revs. I limp my way across the upper to the State Room door. The door I’ve kept locked for three weeks, even while freezing, in hopes Cap knows what he’s doing in there.
I decide to open the locked door, slip through, and swiftly lock it behind me. The temperature jump again pollutes my glasses, the heat a sauna. I strip my shimmering snuggie. Above Cap’s bed, his curved multi-screen display still has Care-in’s combat jack mode active; personified and giant, she moans and gyrates, whispering sweet Simon, it’s good to hear Captain’s name.
I turn her off. The screen display turns to window mode. Revealing the sub moving along the underside of the glacial ice like a fly on the ceiling, for the glittering blue fangs of ice chip at each pass of our metal behemoth. The last thick ice under Thwaites Glacier, it must have somehow taken us this way. At the foot of the bed I find it.
A six-foot cluster of shimmering white calcite protruding from what was once Simon’s waist. Amorphously rounded near its base, with crystalline structure penetrating up through the air, almost beautiful bio-mineralization stretching out its tip, reaching out to the frozen Antarctic ice above. It too wants to go home.
Doc futilely bangs and drills the door outside. On Simon’s desk I find, handwritten, a note, more of a last scribble; an explanation? A warning? No. The only thing Captain… the only thing Simon had time to jot down before succumbing to the ancient microorganism’s hyphate, was my name — Talby.
— Phil Lamkin is a fifth generation Chicago mutt of Irish and Polish roots, who once referred to himself as a sub-urban Tom Sawyer (He meant Mark Twain). His tales reveal inspirations of pulp-Americana and his own orphaning. They range from slice of life absurdisms, to soft science fiction satire, to self and everything else deprecating poetry.