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To James Wall's next pieceBlack Sun in a White World
Our deep-core drillings in darkest Antarctica reveal very little of interest save enormous quantities of ice. Old ice, new ice, fossilized ice, petrified ice, ice laced with pollutants, ice laced with bacteria, ice laced with microscopic shells, blue ice, white ice, brown ice, even an odd substrata of red ice where a flock of penguins had been crushed, aeons ago, by a collapsing wall of yet more fucking ice. At one stage we have ten huge drills running day and night, sliding out mile-long pillars of ice and laying them side by side in the wasteland. Still nothing, and the landscape is becoming more perilous, riddled as it is with deep holes. Three dogs and a Canadian go missing, and I lose a sandwich. Fearing the worst, I find it days later in my hip pocket. We resolve to drill deeper, ever deeper, hoping to find something other than ice, but our efforts are ultimately futile, and we return to base, where we stand in front of the massive potbellied stove, blowing on our fingers and stamping our feet. I daydream often of home, warm mediocre suburbia. I keep trying to fool myself that there is a purpose to all this, that we are drilling these massive fucking holes for a reason, but nothing comes to me. One of us tries to crack a joke, but forgets the punchline, his brain addled with cold. We laugh anyway because we know how it ends. Sip whiskey. Piss our names in the endless snow. What else can we do?
