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The photograph had nothing to do with Lucille. That was the first thing Mags liked about it. Somebody in administration had decided that the current station complement ought to be photographed before the next sequence of departures and arrivals rearranged the population again, and because the weather had already ruined two attempts at doing it outside, the community room had been claimed after supper instead. By the time Mags came in with coffee, half the furniture had been pushed against the walls, a card game had migrated unwillingly to a windowsill and a young mechanic was carrying dining chairs through the doorway two at a time while insisting that none of them belonged to the community room in the first place. Rosa Bell was near the noticeboard arguing that if the chairs had reached the room, then for the next half hour they belonged wherever they were least likely to trip someone. Elaine Barrett had been drafted to hold one end of a bench. June Ivers sat on the other end with the patience of a physician who had recognized that moving would only encourage people to give her a job. Lani Kaleo had come in directly from communications, still wearing the expression of someone whose work had technically ended but who expected to be called back to it at any moment. Nobody appeared dressed for a photograph. Several people were still in work trousers, two men had grease on their sleeves, one woman had damp hair from a hurried shower and Mags herself had forgotten about the whole thing until a note beside the galley coffee reminded her.
The man with the camera was called Peter Walsh, though his actual work had nothing to do with photography. He maintained mapping equipment, kept a camera because he enjoyed it and had made the mistake of producing competent photographs often enough that the station now considered him available whenever a camera was required. He had set up a tripod at the far end of the room and marked a rough boundary on the floor with two strips of pale tape. The lens faced the cleared wall where somebody had removed a calendar, a notice about fuel handling and a hand-lettered reminder concerning missing cutlery. A framed print of Mount Erebus remained in place because taking it down required a chair and nobody had yet volunteered. Walsh had already decided that the picture would contain three rows, perhaps four if he could persuade some of the taller people to stand behind the bench without leaning into one another. The difficulty was not yet Lucille. The difficulty was everybody else. One pilot insisted he had to leave in ten minutes. A geologist wanted to know whether the photograph required clean boots. A cook had been told that anybody currently on station counted but was certain someone would complain later that the galley had been left underrepresented. Mags watched Walsh attempt to convert the roomful of people into stable rows and was glad her own work rarely required several dozen adults to remain still at the same time.
She took a place against the wall rather than join the first arrangement. Nobody objected. The photograph could not be taken until Hensley returned from a meeting, and Lucille was with him somewhere else in the station, which gave Walsh time to solve several smaller problems. He put the shortest people on the bench and immediately discovered that the bench made them taller than the people standing behind. He moved them to chairs. The chair seats were different heights. Rosa found two matching ones in the galley and brought them in with a look that suggested she was lending state property under protest. Elaine asked whether the photograph could not simply show them as they actually lived, scattered around the room, and Walsh said it could if somebody could guarantee that forty people would all remain visible while behaving naturally. Elaine told him that sounded like his problem rather than hers. June, without moving from the bench, observed that visibility was already becoming theoretical because one of the mechanics had stationed himself directly behind a man with shoulders twice the width of his head. The mechanic shifted left. The man in front shifted left at the same moment. They remained perfectly aligned. Lani laughed, and Mags found herself doing the same before she had taken more than two mouthfuls of coffee.
The room gradually changed from a place people used into something temporarily made for the camera. Mugs accumulated on the windowsill. Someone rolled a small table into the corridor. A pair of mittens that had been drying near a heater was moved onto a shelf and then moved again after the owner objected that somebody had put them beneath a dripping scarf. The card players surrendered completely and stood around holding their hands of cards until Rosa told them they were going to have to put the game down eventually unless Walsh intended to photograph the evidence. One of them tucked the cards into his shirt pocket without folding them. Mags had seen photographs of Antarctic crews before coming south and had always regarded them as unusually composed evidence of an environment that was mostly not composed. People stood in rows outdoors or beside aircraft, bundled into clothing that erased half their differences, and the result suggested the entire station had paused together at an agreed moment. The room in front of her made the machinery behind that pause visible. Somebody had to find the missing cook, somebody else had to decide whether a man who had flown in two days earlier counted, and a third person had to shout down the corridor because the station manager had apparently forgotten that he himself was expected to appear.
Lucille arrived near the end of that process, behind Hensley and ahead of a clerk carrying two folders she had clearly refused to continue carrying for him. She stopped inside the doorway when she saw the cleared room and the people assembled in partial rows. Hensley seemed to understand sooner. He checked his watch, looked at Walsh and said that he had been told about this at breakfast. Walsh answered that everybody had been told at breakfast. Hensley accepted the rebuke with the weary dignity of a man whose schedule had once again failed to govern Antarctica. Lucille looked toward Mags, not for rescue but for information. Mags lifted her coffee slightly toward the camera. “Routine station photograph,” she said. “Apparently the community intends to prove it existed.” Lucille nodded, removed the scarf from around her neck and began to step toward the back row without being directed. Mags saw Walsh notice her and close his eyes for a fraction of a second.
There had been no shortage of practical discussions about Lucille’s height since her arrival. Beds, bunks, protective layers, sleeves, doorframes and vehicle seats had all required some degree of adjustment or acceptance, and Lucille had become very good at distinguishing inconvenience from actual obstruction. A group photograph appeared, at first, to belong to inconvenience. She went naturally to the rear, where tall people usually went. The first problem became visible as soon as she stood still. She was not merely the tallest person in the row. She changed the apparent height of the entire row. Two men who were tall enough to stand at the back under ordinary circumstances now looked as though they had been placed in front of her by mistake, and the woman between them disappeared to the eyebrows beneath the angle of Lucille’s shoulder. Walsh stared through the camera, walked forward, moved one man six inches to the right, returned to the camera and stared again. He asked Lucille whether she could shift half a step left. She did. A different person vanished. Walsh asked the shorter woman in front to move. This revealed a gap elsewhere and placed her directly behind June’s head. June looked over her shoulder and said she preferred not to acquire another person’s torso for posterity.
Walsh lowered the camera. “All right. Mrs Robinson, could you try the end?” Lucille moved to the right edge of the back row. The change seemed promising until Walsh looked through the lens again and discovered that fitting her full height comfortably into the frame left a large quantity of blank wall above everyone else. He adjusted the tripod downward, then upward, then stepped farther back until the rear legs nearly touched the opposite wall. Someone opened the door behind him and struck one leg with the edge. Walsh caught the camera before it moved, turned and asked for the door to remain closed until he had finished. The person in the doorway said he was looking for his coat. Rosa pointed to a pile on a chair without leaving her place. The coat was extracted. The door closed. Walsh looked again and asked Lucille if she would stand a little closer to the row instead of at its outer edge. She did. Her shoulder covered part of a man’s face. He leaned outward. The entire right side of the photograph began to resemble people looking around a tree.
Mags did not help. She could have suggested several arrangements and was reasonably sure at least one would work, but Lucille had spent most of the visit meeting practical difficulty with such patient competence that Mags found the sight of her defeated by a group photograph too enjoyable to interrupt. Lucille knew this. Their eyes met after Walsh asked her to move for the fourth time, and the smallest change in Lucille’s face told Mags that she had noticed the absence of assistance. Mags took another drink of coffee. Lucille looked away again with composure intact. There was no private performance in it, only the ordinary recognition between two women who had spent enough nights together that silence could contain a very clear decision. Mags was going to let the situation continue. Lucille was going to remember that choice later. Neither required the room to know any of this.
Walsh tried the left side. That failed differently. The Mount Erebus print behind Lucille made it look as though the mountain ended at her shoulder, and shifting the entire row to compensate pushed Rosa almost beyond the taped boundary on the floor. Rosa looked down at the tape, then at Walsh, and asked whether he actually needed her inside it. Walsh said the marks were only a guide. Rosa stepped back over the line after he showed her where the edge of the frame fell. Elaine, now standing beside her, asked whether moving Rosa had solved anything. It had not. The room’s attention had begun to loosen, which made Walsh more determined. He called everyone back into place, restored Rosa to a position he could see and then pointed at one of the dining chairs. “Let’s sit her down.” There was enough relief in his voice that several people turned toward Lucille at once.
Lucille took the chair without objection and placed it where Walsh indicated, slightly right of center in the front row. Sitting did not solve the problem. It only transformed it. Her knees rose higher than anybody expected because the chair was low, forcing her long legs to angle sideways if the front row was to remain visible. Even seated, the top of her head aligned with the standing people behind. Walsh moved the chair farther forward. Lucille’s knees entered the foreground so strongly that the lens made them look enormous. Mags pressed her lips together. Lani did not bother. She laughed openly and then, when Walsh looked at her as though requesting constructive help, said, “Put her on the floor.”
Several heads turned toward Lani. She was entirely serious about the geometry, though the suggestion had arrived through laughter. “Front center,” she explained. “Cross-legged. Then everybody can build upward behind her.” Lucille looked down at her trousers, then at the floor. “I can sit on the floor.” Walsh considered it, measuring the idea with his eyes. Mags knew before he spoke that it was not going to work. Lucille lowered herself anyway, one hand briefly on the chair for balance, and sat cross-legged on the taped line. Her legs required so much horizontal space that the two people meant to kneel beside her had to shift outward. Walsh looked through the camera. “Your knees are wider than the front row.” Lucille glanced down at them as if this were new information. Lani leaned sideways to see the camera’s view and admitted that the floor had only made the arrangement worse.
June had remained seated through most of the rearrangement because she had understood before anyone else that every person who stood voluntarily would eventually be asked to sit somewhere else. She watched Lucille unfold from the floor and return the chair to the front. Walsh had begun rubbing one thumb over the camera body in a way Mags recognized from scientists confronted by equipment that was technically functioning but refusing to produce a useful answer. June said, “Put everyone else on boxes.” Walsh stared at her. June’s expression did not change. “If the problem is relative height, raise the average.” Rosa immediately said supply could provide boxes, though she wanted it entered in the record that medical had requested them. Somebody behind Mags asked whether they were all really meant to stand on cargo. June said she was addressing the difference in height, not recommending that Walsh actually do it. Lucille laughed then, brief and low, and the sound travelled through the room because several people had been waiting for permission to stop pretending the situation remained purely administrative.
For the next few minutes the photograph became a collective engineering problem nobody had been assigned and therefore everyone wanted to solve. One of the pilots proposed placing the bench behind the chairs so the second row gained height. Elaine pointed out that the bench legs were uneven on the floor and would produce more medical work than June wanted. A mechanic suggested the short people stand on the bench while tall people sat, which Walsh tried with three volunteers before abandoning it because half the front row disappeared behind knees. Rosa brought two wooden crates despite June’s suggestion having been mostly theoretical. The crates proved different heights. Lani asked whether communications could send north for matching ones and received three simultaneous answers concerning the time involved. Hensley, who had been standing quietly near the back with the look of a man determined not to become responsible, finally asked whether they could stop turning a routine photograph into a supply problem. Nobody answered because Walsh was already trying the next arrangement.
Mags set down her empty mug and allowed herself to be moved into the second row between Elaine and a meteorologist she knew only well enough to borrow pencils from. Lucille was returned to standing position, this time near the back but not at the edge. Walsh put a tall man on either side of her, then shifted both men outward until their heads created something like a gradual rise instead of two abrupt steps. The composition improved. It still looked wrong. Lucille’s head remained conspicuously above the others, but the human eye, Walsh said after a long inspection, could perhaps be allowed to survive that fact. The greater problem was that she was now directly behind Mags. Mags saw this only when Walsh told her to move six inches left because Mrs Robinson was disappearing behind her. The room reacted to the sentence with a silence too quick to be accidental, followed by laughter from Elaine. Mags turned around. Lucille’s mouth had opened in disbelief. “I’m disappearing behind you?” she asked. Walsh, already embarrassed, explained that perspective did strange things. Mags looked from her own shoulder to Lucille’s face well above it and said nothing because anything she offered would worsen the situation.
Walsh moved Mags right instead. That placed her directly in front of Lucille rather than slightly off-center, which made the physical absurdity clearer. Lucille’s hands rested loose at her sides. Mags’s head barely reached the upper part of her chest from Walsh’s perspective. The camera reduced the difference in depth but not enough to prevent several people from noticing. Mags could feel Lucille standing behind her without contact, close enough that the heat of her body registered faintly through layers. She had learned the exact distance at which Lucille stopped herself from touching in public rooms. It was not secrecy in the frightened sense. Their relationship was known to enough people at McMurdo that pretending otherwise would have required more effort than either wanted to spend. It was privacy, and Lucille was good at it. Mags found herself suddenly more aware of the photograph than she had been when she entered. This was not a portrait of them, and she did not want it turned into one. She did not want a future viewer deciding that the whole station had arranged itself around a romance. She looked at Walsh and said, “Move me wherever you need. Just don’t solve it by making the two of us the center.”
Walsh nodded with immediate understanding. “I wasn’t trying to.” Mags believed him. He shifted her to Elaine’s other side and moved a radio operator into the space she had occupied. Lucille stayed where she was. The arrangement became less intimate and more balanced, which was exactly what Mags wanted. She watched Lucille relax by a degree. There were photographs elsewhere, or there would be eventually, in which Lucille and Mags could look at one another and allow the meaning to occupy the whole frame. This one belonged to the room. It belonged to Rosa and her supply ledgers, June and the clinic, Lani carrying messages across impossible distances, Elaine refusing to discard a repaired glove, Hensley with his schedules, the cooks, mechanics, pilots, scientists, radio operators and people whose names Mags did not yet know well enough but who still inhabited the same weeks of cold and work. Lucille could be in that without consuming it. Mags loved her enough not to want every shared object to become evidence of them.
The near-final arrangement used two rows standing, one seated and four people crouched at the very front. Walsh had surrendered the desire for mathematical symmetry. He wanted visible faces, open eyes and nobody half hidden behind a shoulder. Lucille remained in the rear, slightly left of center, where her height could no longer be disguised and therefore no longer needed solving. The tallest man on one side reached her ear. The woman on the other side was shorter, but Walsh balanced the difference by placing another tall man farther along the row. Mags stood in the second row near Rosa, with Lani seated below them and June on one of the matching dining chairs. Elaine had ended up in the front, crouched reluctantly with one knee on the floor and the repaired glove from the earlier incident stuffed into her back pocket because she had come straight from work. Hensley was at the opposite edge. He had lost the expression of someone supervising and acquired the blank endurance of someone waiting for an aircraft delay to end.
Walsh checked the camera again. “Nobody move.” Someone near the left wall asked whether breathing counted. Walsh said breathing was permitted if done without changing height. This did not help. A man in the back row began laughing silently and set off the person beside him. Walsh waited. The laughter passed. He leaned over the camera. “Eyes here.” Mags looked at the lens. She could hear Lani whisper something to June below but not the words. June answered under her breath. Lani’s shoulders moved. Walsh told them both to stop. June said she had not done anything. Lani lowered her head and recovered. Mags kept looking at the lens, aware that Lucille behind and above her was probably doing the same. The room became still in increments rather than all at once. Boots settled. Sleeves stopped brushing. A chair creaked under somebody shifting weight and then went quiet.
At the instant Walsh’s hand moved toward the shutter, the community-room door opened again. Everyone nearest it looked. A galley worker stood there holding an enamel pot and froze when he saw the rows. Rosa turned her head because the door had struck the pile of coats. Elaine blinked at the flash. Lani, who had only just recovered from laughing, closed her eyes an instant too early. Lucille heard the door and glanced toward it, then heard somebody in the front mutter that if one more person entered they would have to begin again. Her mouth opened in the beginning of another laugh just as Walsh took the picture. The flash filled the room. For one bright fraction of a second nobody knew what had been captured.
Walsh swore softly, though not at anyone. “Again.” The galley worker backed out and closed the door with exaggerated care. Rosa restored the coats with one foot. Lani rubbed her face and said she had been ready. June informed her that ready people generally kept their eyes open. Lani said June had distracted her. June denied responsibility. Elaine stood from her crouch to relieve her knee and had to be persuaded back down. The room reassembled itself. Mags looked over her shoulder at Lucille. She was still smiling, not broadly, but with the residual helplessness of someone trying to regain control of her face. Mags wanted suddenly and sharply for Walsh to have caught that version. Lucille in public photographs could become almost impossibly composed because she understood cameras and had spent years around people who needed pictures to communicate position, marriage, family or politics. The expression behind Mags now belonged to the room instead. It had been caused by coats, an enamel pot and forty adults unable to stand still together.
Walsh took a second photograph. It was cleaner. Nobody entered. Everyone faced the camera. Lani kept her eyes open. Elaine’s expression was resigned but visible. Lucille had recovered and looked calm. Walsh took a third to be safe, then announced that the room could return to being a room. People broke formation immediately, which nearly knocked June’s chair backward before the man behind her caught it. The card players reclaimed the windowsill. Rosa demanded her galley chairs back. Elaine stretched her knee and told Walsh that if the photograph showed only the top of her head after all this, he could explain himself to her personally. Hensley disappeared before anybody found another reason to detain him. Lucille remained long enough to help move the bench without being asked, taking one end while the young mechanic took the other. Walsh began packing the tripod. Within five minutes the cleared wall had regained a table, two coats and somebody’s mug. The event collapsed so efficiently that Mags could almost believe the rows had never existed.
She stayed because she had nowhere immediate to be and because the common room had become pleasant again now that nobody was being organized. June reclaimed the end of the bench, this time for sitting rather than composition. Rosa returned the fuel notice to the wall but left the calendar off because she could not remember which nail it had used. Lani was called back to communications by someone at the door and left with a small gesture of resignation. Elaine found the cards in the mechanic’s shirt pocket and informed him that two had been bent. The mechanic denied bending them while visibly straightening one against his thigh. Lucille brought Mags’s mug from the windowsill, discovered it was empty and asked whether she wanted more coffee. Mags said no. Lucille looked at her for a second. “You enjoyed that.” Mags did not pretend ignorance. “Very much.” Lucille sat beside her, though not close enough to turn the bench into a declaration. “At no point did you intend to help.” Mags said she had considered helping several times and rejected the idea each time on its merits. Lucille nodded as if recording the information for later use.
A few days passed before anybody saw the results. Walsh used the small darkroom attached to the station’s photographic work area and produced a set of contact prints first, then several larger copies. The clean second photograph was exactly what he had wanted: orderly enough to identify everyone, sharp, evenly framed and almost devoid of accidental movement. The third was similar except one man looked tired enough to resent history personally. The first should have been the failure. Rosa was looking away. Lani’s eyes were closed. Elaine had been caught at the start of a blink, though not badly enough to erase her expression. The galley worker’s hand and enamel pot existed as a pale intrusion at the extreme edge near the door. Lucille was visibly laughing. Not posed, not smiling for Walsh, not looking toward Mags or anyone else in particular. Her attention had been split between the door and the room at the exact moment the shutter closed, leaving her half turned and half amused, her height making the expression easy to find without making it the point of the picture.
People preferred the first one almost immediately. Walsh objected that it was technically worse. Rosa said that was obvious and took a copy anyway. Elaine said at least it proved she had not spent Antarctica professionally crouching on a floor. Lani wanted one despite her closed eyes and said it looked more like the room she remembered than the cleaner version did. June said no observer would infer anything so elaborate. Hensley chose the second, which surprised nobody. Mags stood at the table looking from one print to another and understood why the imperfect image held her attention. The clean photograph documented a station. The first one remembered a room. It had people caught against one another rather than arranged into successful visibility. The person at the door had caused three separate reactions. Rosa had turned. Elaine had blinked. Lucille had laughed. Lani had closed her eyes for a reason that belonged to the second before the shutter, not to the finished object. Nothing in it was flattering enough to feel designed.
Walsh noticed Mags still looking. “You want that one?” he asked. She said she did. He warned her that he could make another print from the better negative. Mags touched the edge of the imperfect copy without picking it up. “This is the better one.” Walsh looked as though a small portion of his soul had been insulted, but he handed it over. Mags let the photograph dry fully before putting it between two sheets of clean paper in her notebook. That evening Lucille saw the corner of it when Mags opened the notebook beside her. “You chose the bad one.” Mags said, “I chose the one where you look like you were actually there.” Lucille considered that, then looked again at the picture. Her own attention did not stay on herself. She found June, Rosa and Lani first, then paused over Hensley and said he looked more tired in the photograph than she remembered him being. Mags reminded her that the picture had taken nearly half an hour to arrange. Lucille looked at it again and agreed that might have been enough.