The Office of Icebergs

Here, we are accustomed to slippery immigrants, to changeable states and submerged anatomies. So at first, when we met Isca, we did not feel threatened. Regrettably there were looks—reactions of alarm and repulsion—because it was only later and in confidence that she filled us in on the deal with her face. But after the double-take we realised, it’s a woman! and we swivelled around in our chairs, raising our brows at one another as if to ask: but how did she get in? There had been no call forewarning us of her arrival, no intra-office memo, or email from our truant Director.

The woman put down her knapsack and introduced herself. Isca, the glaciologist. Isca, we thought, taking her hand in ours, is that Jewish? Do we know any Jewish glaciologists? ‘We’re all glaciologists!’ we exclaimed jumping up, because by now we wanted her to join with us in whatever game was being played, and, also, we felt really bad about her face. When we had been standing for a minute she said, ‘I’m from the Polar Ombudsman’s,’ and to make it clear that she was on our side she produced a business card. ‘Oh yes!’ we said, like it was no big thing, this tiny card. ‘Oh that Ombudsman, we know about him and his powers.’ We hung out our healthiest smiles. ‘So …’ Isca folded her hands into her armpits. ‘So where do you want me?’

The truth of the situation at the Office of Icebergs was that we had been spiralling out of control for months. The brakes were totally off. Back when we got started only a handful of bergs exited the polar sea nurseries every summer and we geotagged them so easily, using our glaciologist know-how. We even had betting pools—wagers on how long the bergs would survive on the high seas—with zany penalties for the loser. It was not so disappointing to see something the size of architecture thaw down to a glass fist, then wink and disappear, if you stood to make some money behind it! Occasionally someone would even be made to take the lift without pants. Yes, those were the salad days.

Now everything was very far away from those days, but we still had the illusion. ‘Here,’ we said, ‘this one is definitely the best one,’ and we shuffled Isca across to a console that had begun to glitch whenever anyone breathed on the screen. Somebody (and we all knew who) had knocked an energy drink into the top drawer and now a multi-coloured mould spread a broad stain like a star map behind the monitor, crocheting soft, disgusting sleeves over the cables. It might have been art, if it were not putrid. ‘This seat raises,’ we demonstrated, up and down, up again. We suspected Isca was short but we couldn’t bring ourselves to look her straight in the face to be sure. Or: we could do that, but that would not be the friendly thing because of our rebounding looks. Instead, we kept our eyes downcast. There were some charts that we rolled up quickly because they were lying. ‘We’ll get you fresh ones,’ we said, ‘crispy fresh charts. For now you should get yourself acquainted, spend a few days. And coffee! There’s coffee.’

In the kitchen we sank to our knees like professional athletes or priests defrocked. The bright ran right off us. We had been wondering when someone like Isca would appear—bringing credentials and two faces, come to change our ways—but we were expecting that person would be a man in bullet-proof clothes. Probably more than one man! We were psyched for the wretchedness—it was what we deserved. Confess, and next: the leg irons. What was she doing out there? Isca and her oversight authority. She was wearing cork sandals and a rain-jacket that rustled when she tapped on the monitor—that type of fabric would easily tear.

‘You shouldn’t do that,’ we called through the doorway, ‘it works best when you only look. Belt-tightening!’ She frowned and shook her head. Her hair shimmered like wet shale.

We would not be afraid of her. She was just another glaciologist, a small glaciologist, working the iceberg system like all of us, impeded by malfunctioning resources. Oh no, we confirmed it with nods, she could not bring us down! We poured the kettle and returned to our desks with resolve, and steaming drinks.

On Thursday the Limits of All Known Ice Report went out as usual, and we were on tenterhooks for the afternoon. Every time the phone rang we expected it to be the Maimed Sailors’ League calling to report a sunken fleet—listing the names of their dead and injured men. But as the day went by we loosened up a little. Our forgeries were very convincing! Besides, how were we supposed to explain that the Antarctic ice had stopped behaving like ice used to? That ice didn’t even seem to be ice any more? These were problems that were too complex for our computers. We called those machines ‘The Grunters’ because they were so overloaded and noisy. Did it really matter that there were more icebergs in the sea than there were in the report?

At five o’clock we exhaled. We brought out beers and the switchboard held our incoming messages. Even though it was only Thursday, we harboured some victorious sentiments.

‘Isca,’ we asked with sociable beckoning. ‘Hey Isca, where are you from?’ ‘Not as in, “the Ombudsman’s”, from in the world?’

Well, Isca was born on a boat! She was Australian, but her mother had been some kind of pioneer for science and Isca was delivered on a research vessel in the Pacific. Isca was two months old before she was put down and rolled in the sand.

‘Huh,’ we said. ‘Does that also make you a type of sea-nationality?’

‘It’s my nose you want to know about, right?’ said Isca, turning around from her console. ‘And why I don’t have eyebrows?’ We each stared into the skylight above us or the brewery logos in our palms. Isca wasn’t hideous, but we all agreed: she had one face on top of another face. Her expressions stayed underneath like objects covered by a cloth. She made us think of the taut heads of those bog-men that are sometimes unearthed when glaciers melt. All Iron Age nasal cavity and sinew.

‘Frostbite’, she said, tearing a bottle from our six-pack. ‘I was an idiot. My eyebrows are probably still out on that ice-shelf, two cryogenic caterpillars.’

Was that humour or was that horrific? We experimented with laughing, with goading digs in the ribs. She told us how, after a time with lasers and creams, her face had healed scald-smooth—except that the new skin dragged her nose to the west and her eyebrows would never grow back. She didn’t tell that story to people straightaway, she said, because she was embarrassed at having been so feckless. And she would appreciate if we didn’t make a big deal out of it.

We had some new respect for Isca then. Not for being able to use the word ‘feckless’, but because none of us had actually been on an ice-shelf since university days. Some of us hadn’t even done Antarctic fieldwork back then. She pulled her hair over one shoulder like a pet. Everything we knew, we knew by satellites, but Isca’s hands knew real ice.

‘I’ve considered having them tattooed back on,’ Isca said after a moment of reflection, up-ending her beer. ‘The eyebrows. But I’d look like an alien, right?’ No, Isca, we thought, not right. You’d look like a prehistoric bog-man. With tattoos. But of course we didn’t say it out loud.

Frankly—and perhaps it was the beers, but all the same—the closer we got to her the more we wanted to press our fingers into her face. She had strange creases brinking her eye sockets, like punctuation marks from a language we couldn’t speak, while the sweeps of her cheekbones looked hard and cold. Would there be ticking undertows there, we wondered, little swells pushing up? Isca wasn’t so unattractive. Maybe she wouldn’t mind that. In fact, maybe she longed to have her face stroked. Slowly, with calm precision. It could be collegiate and team-building. We thought about folding in around her with our palms held out flat.

Isca threw her bottle into the wastepaper bin and checked in on her wristwatch. We snapped out of whatever it was we’d snapped into. What were we doing with such early alcohol in the office? This fine line was a high wire!

‘You don’t mind if I take my copy of the Limits Report home, no?’ she said, unzipping her knapsack. ‘You’ve all worked so hard.’ Isca appraised the cover page. ‘These graphs look impressive.’

Shock, gelid and sudden, flooded us. That sly quisling. Distracting us with stories of ship birth and frostbite, making us imagine the nap of her skin. She must have collected a copy of the report off the printer when we weren’t watching her.

‘Oh,’ we grasped for it but the report had already slid with a handful of other papers into her bag. We’d been so careless. ‘Oh’—in the most nonchalant tone, we told her—‘the Polar Ombudsman had his copy faxed already. It’s very boring,’ we said. ‘We’ll just send you the executive summary.’ Someone reached to take the report back, but she rebuffed them. Isca showed us some of her canines then and said in a sinister way: ‘Don’t undersell yourselves. I bet it’s really interesting.’ She collected her thin jacket and left before we could think of anything more to say.

Standing there in the office our frantic hearts pumped a chilly froth.

We couldn’t sleep that night. In bed we kicked our wives. They told us to just get up or lie still. Two of us who owned dogs took those dogs out to local parks. We listened to leaf math in the wind, or cars in the distance, or breath in the bedrooms. Rain eddied high above, but it didn’t fall down. Each of us wondered if the rest of us were awake too, and hearing the garden, or the highway, or some lungs.

The Ombudsman was who we were thinking of. The luminous Ombudsman. How he stood for transparency, for shining through. We had never seen him at the Office of Icebergs, but we felt sure he was foreign and back-lit with authority. Probably he was Canadian, or French-Canadian. But wasn’t the Ombudsman also connected to the Queen in some familial way, too? So, aristocratic and British then. He might own hounds for sport—dogs more fierce than our own. The Ombudsman was the light at the end of our tunnel. Coming to shackle our ankles. The baying of the pack. We were brimming with penitence.

Isca was a very convincing traitor. The next morning she didn’t say a single word about the report or what she had conveyed to the Ombudsman about us. She came in early and brewed a plunger of coffee in the kitchen.

‘TGIF,’ she called out as we arrived and sat down at our consoles. ‘What have you all got planned for the weekend?’

We didn’t know what that was a code for. Who was she talking to? We swung on our chairs, sleep-deprived and fretful, wearing our very best business socks and pumping our fists. Was she going to say nothing about the Limits of All Known Ice? No-one answered her. It was too much—there needed to be some reckoning. Where were the dogs and the men wearing Kevlar? Didn’t they know about the lives we’d put at risk? We were a public menace!

‘What about you, Bill?’ Isca waved a mug through the doorway. ‘Are you going to the game, Bill? You’re a supporter, yes?’

Supporter? We looked at one another. ‘I’m a supporter,’ Bill said quickly. ‘Definitely, I’m a supporter.’

‘We’re all supporters,’ we shouted. ‘It’s not a game! We support it all.’

It was hard to tell what Isca thought of that, but she didn’t say anything else. She took her mug to her desk and stared into her screen with a scarf wound around her ghastly face to suppress the dank smell. Exactly what she knew was unclear, but until she had amassed the evidence it seemed that she was going to keep quiet. She was in league with the higher forces of the Ombudsman—they were keeping a file, building a case, planting monitoring devices. Or: Had she in fact not figured it out yet?

For most of the morning we did our best work, tagging and monitoring the sea-ices as they moved across the great blank table of the Southern Ocean. Around eleven Bill’s biggest berg broke up and sent out snarlers—bits of ice that travel in a flotilla and make a gnashing noise as they rub against each other. The snarlers entered a rubbish vortex and started to cause trouble. If we had still been gambling then, Bill might have had to ride the lift in his underpants. He was always lucking out, that Bill. He wore his superstitious boxers every day, and he was always lucking out. Of course, we were not going to gamble with Isca around.

We rang the guys in the Office of Shipping Routes and told them to warn their fishing trawlers about the snarlers. Sometimes, when the bergs went into a rubbish patch, they would take up plastic waste and refreeze it into blocks of ice-locked trash. This was becoming more frequent. Shipping Routes emailed through some photographs taken from the deck of a bulk carrier last week, of icebergs full of crisp packets and shopping bags. It’s completely normal, we wrote back, for this time of year. Just try not to hit those ones. Try not to disperse the rubbish.

What was normal any more? The guys in Shipping Routes didn’t know! They relied on us, and we were off the deep end, out of line, flying blind. We had stopped tagging all the bergs because there were too many for us to keep track of. Even the bergs we did follow were behaving in ways we couldn’t predict. How they picked up sea trash was not the half of it! The circumpolar currents were nearly always off course now, and tomato-coloured tides had started to appear in water that was supposed to be too cold for that. We suspected that there were large blood-bergs in those tides: ice dyed haemoglobin-red by the bad plankton in the sea. But how could we pick them out from the satellite images? Who could see a red thing in a red sea?

It wasn’t that we were afraid of losing our jobs. We knew that was the end that was coming to us, and we would be relieved when it arrived. We would be penitent, like bankers, then. But right then we weren’t bankers, we were glaciologists. We were scientists. We couldn’t just say that we didn’t understand the things that were going on with the icebergs. There were our grant applications to think of. And Isca—the mole, our infiltrator—had begun to compile records. We didn’t know how long we could wait, but the end, the end had to be close.

After lunch Isca suddenly stood up and her chair tipped over backwards onto the ground. She made a loud gurgling noise and pointed at her console. At first with caution, and then some shuddering anticipation, we gathered around. One huge megaberg lurched across her screen, newly splintered from the Ross Ice Shelf. The berg was flanked by a navy of inferior sea-ices, as if it had been dropped from a great height to break there. Whitescrap (wave-caps, wreckage and wakes) seethed along its perimeter, and a plume of sea-soil rose up behind it, showing where it had dragged its thick root along the ocean floor. This berg was far bigger than anything we’d ever seen at the Office—it had the dimensions of a small continent, and it was ploughing an unnaturally straight line in the sea. Isca plotted its trajectory while we watched. She amended her estimate for the curvature of the Earth, then replotted it thrice to confirm. Bill seemed crestfallen and delighted all at once, as if he’d finally won a bet that he never knew he’d made.

The megaberg was coming, the megaberg was seeking landfall. It was headed directly for the peninsula on which the Office of Icebergs, the Office of Shipping Routes and all the other Offices of the Atmospheres, Grounds and Oceans were located: as punctual as an omen.

When Isca turned her two faces to us, we understood perfectly what needed to happen next. There was a moment when everything was very still and sharp, and every one of us noticed that the rain had begun to drum its many fingers on the skylight. Then we felt something flip over to its shining side within us, and suddenly Isca’s knapsack was on the ground being stamped on. Someone had her by the lapels, demanding her allegiances, the jacket sliding all around, and someone else was tearing all the cables out from all the grunting machines. ‘Shhhh,’ we said, ‘shhhh.’ Sit down. Shut up.

We were all glaciologists, and we knew exactly how things should end.

Copyright Rebecca Giggs 2011

Copyright Rebecca Giggs 2011