Marie Byrd Land

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

So I don't scream at the night sky, though the heat chokes my throat, and the dark red and purple of its permanent smog covering drowns me in a boiling sludge of humidity.

I imagine myself encircling Earth from above, watching the poison Sun pierce across the Earth's surface. Feeling my mouth fall open but nothing come out.

Lately, I've been spending most evenings watching the Sunset from my rood. From time to time, when the light pollution fades a bit and the smog cover dissipates just enough, I can occasionally catch sight of passing satellites as they cross through Earth's orbit. Most of them are unmanned telecoms, of course. But a few must be Space Force. I wonder what those people are thinking, watching us burning down here from above.

I wonder if they're trying to scream.

But, most nights I see nothing. I usually end up staring into the burning night sky regardless, staying up well past midnight, watching the heat lightning on the horizon, and hoping in a dim hope for the slightest of night breezes to blow by and offer me even the hint of cool air.

But on the night of the drawing, mom wants me to be next to her in the living room. For good luck, though what luck I'm supposed to be I never figured out.

“What number did you get?” Mom asked into her phone. The voice on the other end was audible in the distorted whine of cheap smartphone speakers. I had just descended from the roof as the last entrails of the sun disappeared below the horizon. I was already drenched with sweat, but the living room was even hotter.

“4587,” Cynthia said on the other line. I cringed slightly at the shrill interpretation of her voice. Mom, as always, seemed oblivious to our discomfort.

“Oh, that’s a good number,” she said. “It’s symmetrical. Probably lucky”

Cynthia laughed. “Well, symmetry or not, I’ll take any luck I can get!”

Mom chuckled back, then the two shared the obligatory, awkward silence as they recalled the implications if one of their numbers actually were to be called.

I had no particular desire to eavesdrop, even unintentionally, on their conversation. But the small closet space under the main stairwell was one of the cooler spots in the house. That week we were down to two days of authorized air conditioning, and even that was capped at no more than six hours each day. Though it was then in the upper nineties outside, even that late in the evening, the weather was predicting temperatures to exceed 110 later in the week. We all more or less agreed that it would be best to suffer now and save our week’s meager air conditioning rations for the worst to come.

“What was your number again?” Cynthia asked. “I know you just told me, but I swear my brain’s melting in this heat.”

Mom gave a brief snort. “Believe me, in a day or two you’re probably going to have to remind me of my own name!” As if to demonstrate this, she took a second to recollect what Cynthia has asked her. “Oh…my number was 6913. I was a bit perturbed by the 13 at the end, potentially bad omen. I never really did believe in those kinds of things before, but nowadays, you can’t help but be a little superstitious.”

“Don’t I know…” Cynthia said.

“Devon, of course,” mom continued, “was quite smitten by the 69. He found nothing funnier all week. I mean, he is a teenager, after all. But, still, a bit juvenile, given the circumstances…”

“Well,” Cynthia said. “Might as well let people find happiness wherever they can. Besides, as I said, any luck we can get…”

“…any luck we can get,” mom repeated.

I wiped a wave of sweat off of my forehead and, instinctively, moved my fingers to my heart-shaped locket. It was meant to hang farther down over the actual heart, but it was also meant for younger children, and so remained more of a collar than a necklace around my own post-adolescent neck. The locket was made out of a cheap aluminum alloy, vaguely imitating silver. Though, despite the heat, it somehow managed to retain a coolness that was pleasing to the touch of sweaty fingers, through some kind of secret mass-produced alchemy. Nolan had given it to me several weeks ago. Where he got it from I never asked, though I liked to imagine a secret, trinket store, somewhere found only by a peculiar kind of wanderer and dreamer. I popped the locket open and removed the single folded paper that Nolan had placed inside. It had been torn from the top page of a paper book, something that mom had told me may have been called an encyclopedia, though she couldn’t quite recall. The image that was displayed was clearly once part of a large infographic, but whatever the entire page had displayed was less relevant than the single image that Nolan had managed to confiscate from the remains of a public library, or wherever.

The single picture, faded and obscured by low-resolution pixels that betrayed its origins several decades in the past (as if the subject in the picture did not do that already) portrayed a vast expanse of white, almost nothing more than a blank image. That is, one sees subtle hills and vales within the otherwise solid chunk of white, and then the rocky mountains made tiny by the great height at which the picture was taken. And then, just at the edge, a sudden intrusion of an impossible shade of blue, revealing a still-untouched ocean of a nature that would not seem possible in recent memory. Altogether, the image revealed itself to be a vast sheet of ice, rivaling in size the sunbaked mountains and great cliffs of garbage scouring the face of the known world today, whispering in the ever-mounting heat some dream of cool air to soothe one’s brow and remind one’s skin of its capacity to shiver.

Beneath the image, in the bland, academic font:

Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica

Cynthia, through the speakers on mom’s phone, said: “Speaking of 69, I heard that’s how cool it was down there today.”

“Really?” mom said.

“Most of the ice has melted, I think, but it’s still pretty cool most of the time, sometimes downright chilly!”

Mom laughed a bit too deliberately. “If they call our number I’ll have to remember to pack a sweater!” She flapped her fan across her sweaty, reddened face with a bit more desperation. “I mean if I still have any!”

"So," Cynthia said. I caught a slight change of tone in her voice. "Is that daughter of yours still thinking about venturing off into space?"

From the corner of my eye, I saw mom send me a sudden, alarmed glance. I pretended to ignore her.

"Oh, you know," mom began. She tried and failed to keep the same happy tone in her voice. "She's always talking about joining the space force. She's finishing her phlebotomy classes this semester. They do need medical tech up on those space stations. But, you know..." Her voice trailed off and I sensed her eyes burning into the back of my head. "I don't think it's going to happen. She'd be better off just staying right here on Earth."

"Well," Cynthia laughed on the other end of the line. "I assume it's cooler up there in space, at least."

"Yeah," mom said. "But I've been reading about all the radiation that you've got running around every which way up there. Outside of the Earth's, what's it called? Magnet-sphere? Something like that. Won't do you much good to escape the heat of Earth only to get microwaved from the inside out!"

"Yeah, I suppose that's true," Cynthia said.

"Besides," mom said a bit too quickly. "Knowing our luck I'd probably win the drawing the second she leaves the planet. Then we'd have to go to Antarctica without her! No, it'd be best if she just kept both feet on Earth and lets us all go down there together."

A slight pause.

"Assuming we win, of course."

"Of course," Cynthia said on the other end of the line.

Though the kitchen was hotter than the living room, I made my way in there anyway, until the rest of the conversation was just out of earshot.

For the most part, pictures of Antarctica as it exists today have been suppressed on the internet. Nolan made sure to highlight this fact when he first gave me the locket.

“I’ve seen pictures around,” I had said.

“Eh, probably fake,” he told me. “Most of them are just stock photos of the old Amazon rain forest, or what used to be California wine country. Honestly, Antarctica’s probably not even that pretty now, even with all the trees and stuff. They just don’t want any of us getting our hopes up, I suppose.”

“The government?” I asked.

Nolan shrugged. “Honestly probably the tech billionaires,” he said. “But, really, what’s the difference?”

My phone buzzed. Nolan, as if in synch with my thoughts, had texted me.

“Meet outside?” This, plus a moon emoji.

I texted back. “Mom wants me 2B here 4 the drawing.”

“Still have 30 minutes,” he wrote.

Really, more like 23, but that wouldn’t hurt. The lottery drawing usually didn’t start until after around fifteen minutes of sponsored content anyway.

Despite the sun already setting, outside was still an oven. Whatever moon and stars would have been seen among the light pollution were lost in the thick smoggy haze obscuring the sky, highlighted only by the abrupt flickers of heat lightning flaring on and off to the west.

Nolan was waiting in our usual spot beneath the palm tree, one of the few species of vegetation that proved hardy enough to survive the West Coast’s new climate. He was already drenched with sweat, though his house was closer than mine was.

“Jesus,” I said. “How long have you been here?”

He smiled as best he could manage. “God, who knows anymore? It’s only ‘too long’ in this kind of heat.”

He gave me a deep kiss on the lips. The salty-metallic aftertaste of his skin meshed with mine and burned a bitter singe of flavor on my tongue. Such things we had all adjusted to, of course, even in our more intimate moments.

“Was there a particular reason you wanted to meet?” I asked. I kept a rogue eye on the lightning in the west, hoping in some dim, childish sense that it heralded a cooling rain coming our way. We had little reason for luck on that end, of course, as drought was predicted for the foreseeable future.

“What else was I going to do tonight?” he said. He managed a mischievous grin.

“Your mom no longer any fun?” I asked. I realized almost immediately that the statement, both in tone and content, could be taken the wrong way, even as well as Nolan and I knew each other. Still, he kept smiling.

“No less than usual,” he said. "You still thinking about joining up with those space marines, or whatever? Drawing blood in zero gravity?"

I gave him a smirk. "I'm thinking about it all the time. But I think about a lot of things, and they rarely come true, so..."

He nodded. "Yeah, same here." Something else glinted in his eyes. “But…there was something else I wanted to ask you.”

“Oh?” I said. I was well aware of how many spontaneous marriage proposals were popping up across the country by those who had grown tired of waiting for a change of fortune that was unlikely to come. Still, I never would have assumed that Nolan would be one for such things.

“My mom sent me out here to see you,” he said. “Ostensibly to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye?” I asked. He quickly moved to clarify.

“In her mind, of course. She’s convinced that we’re going to win the lottery tonight, and be off to Antarctica by the end of the week.”

“Oh.” This was both relieving and disappointing. Nolan’s mother’s eccentricities had become a meme unto themselves. “Is that something she saw in her cards?”

“Well, what else is she going to do?” Nolan said with a shrug. “She’s stuck in bed all day. Plus, they say the seventh time’s the charm.”

“I thought this was the eighth?” I said. I tried to match his smirk, though if he had any qualms about jokes at his mother’s expense, he didn’t show it. But his look grew more serious nonetheless, and I could tell he had something else on his mind.

“But I wanted to ask you something,” he said. “I know what the odds are. I know how much space is left down there, even packed in as tightly as they probably are. But, if we do win…my family, I mean…I want you to come with us.”

Without thinking I clutched the locket around my neck. It felt as cool as ever.

“Come with you?” As the scenario played out before me, I felt somehow that it had already happened. “But your family’s already maxed out at four?”

“Five now, actually,” he said. “Mom finally got approved for disability, so we can take a fifth. You’d have to be listed as her ‘caretaker,’ but I assume that’s better than staying here to burn.” He rubbed his sweat-drenched neck. “I told her I wouldn’t go if they don’t take you.”

From the houses surrounding us, in unison, came the official music of the beginning of the lottery broadcast. Within twenty minutes, one number would be drawn, and one family would be chosen from among millions, for the right to claim one of the few remaining spots in Marie Byrd Land, the chunk of Antarctica serendipitously claimed by the United States almost a hundred years ago. What was once the land of ice had turned temperate and warm as the rest of the world burned in the onset of climate change. Ice mountains are replaced by blossoming orchards and rich, green meadows. Or, so they say.

But the wealthiest have already claimed and carved up their vast chunks of land down there, their luxury and gluttony and lusts, while whatever few thousand square kilometers remain are of course to be filled as full as possible with the luckiest of the remaining 99%. Those whose numbers get called.

Back in my house, I know my mother and Cynthia are joking with each other about how, if they win, they take the other and forsake their husbands to the burning climate, as they do with each drawing. Elsewhere, families are praying, or cursing, or watching with bemused pessimism already succumbed.

I take Nolan’s sweaty hands. “I’ll go wherever you take me,” I say.

We kiss again. In the distance, I catch the dim flickers of heat lightning, only farther away. Closing my eyes, listening to the music and tension-held breaths around the TVs, I try to recall the last cool breeze I felt, imagine it rolling along with the lightning from the west, heralding the chilly breeze through Spring-green or Autumn-red trees, the warm but not scorching sun. The soft, cradling air.

The Earth only exists in the farthest corner of the planet, the once-land of ice. Marie Byrd Land.

“Anywhere,” I say against his cheek.

He squeezes my shoulder. “Even here?” he asks.

I scan the horizon again for lightning but see nothing.

“Yes,” I whisper. “Even here.”