Alex lives, not alone, in Tierra del Fuego province. She lives in a small place about forty kilometers from Ushuaia, which claims to be the southernmost city in the world. She occasionally needs to drive there to buy essentials, deal with paperwork, and write down her name and birthday on countless identical forms. This is the hard part of living somewhere as a foreigner. She takes some time while driving there to consider the purpose of doing these things. Maybe the only way for people to show that their lives are meaningful is by doing many meaningless things. Although so much paperwork has been done and six years have passed, her father's death certificate is still not fully completed. Alex read somewhere that a human being dies three times. The first time is when your heart stops beating, you are biologically declared dead. The second time is when you are buried, which claims that you no longer exist in this society. The third time is when even the last person in this world who remembers you forgets you, then you truly die, and then the whole universe has nothing to do with you. She wonders if her father has not really died yet if this is the definition. She feels like she can keep thinking about this and drive to the end of the Earth despite not knowing where the end is.
The closest point of Ushuaia to the Antarctic continent is only 800 kilometers, so it is the rear base for Argentine and other countries' expeditions to Antarctica, where they get food supplies and their ships are refueled. There are many ships going to Antarctica in this place and the city has tourists from all over the world, some of whom will wait here for months just for a ticket to Antarctica. There is also the lighthouse at the end of the world---Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse--and every tourist has an obsession with it. Some of them know this place because of Wong Kar Wai's film, Happy Together. Alex saw that film, too. Film is a good thing, it gives people the urge to explore a foreign place, she thought. The cruise departs from the port, sails towards the lighthouse with the tourists' eyes filled with anticipation, hoping that a glance at the southernmost lighthouse will take their minds off all the bitterness in their lives. Alex wonders what her father would be thinking every time he saw this lighthouse on his way home from Antarctica. Alex could not fall asleep one night. She got up and painted her Opel Vetra car red and white--like that lighthouse. Although she immediately regretted this decision, she didn't change it back. She hoped that the lighthouse did not feel lonely anymore if there is another doppelganger of it running freely on the road somewhere.
Her father was a marine biologist and worked for a scientific expedition team in Antarctica. She watched many videos her father brought home and heard many stories about the giant creatures in the Southern Ocean in her childhood. She envied them. They can be protected by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, isolated from the rest of the world. They do not care at all about the happiness and sadness of everyone on other continents and just grew up freely in the highly oxygenated water. Many people are curious about life in Antarctica. What is the room at the research station like? Will there also be colorful posters on the walls? Will the scientists eat breakfast together in one place every day? What do they do when they are bored? How to communicate with their families? By fax or by phone? But Alex is not curious. Her father barely talked about his life to Alex. As if such a life did not exist as long as it was not mentioned. Alex's vague impressions of Antarctica is each nation's scientists have carved out a small portion of the ice shelf to isolate themselves. Some places temporarily became American, then French, then Chinese, and maybe Russian for a while. The Antarctic plate would find this ridiculous if it knew about it. It never belonged to anyone, but everyone here belonged to it.
The cause of her father's death turned out to be a mystery; he was poisoned. His picture appeared in the local newspaper just for a few days, and then he was nowhere to be found. He disappeared permanently from the busy lives of the people. During that time, there would always be people in the lab who had worked with him who would come over to offer their condolences. They said he was a good man, and they were sorry. Alex wondered why people couldn't show more care and appreciation when someone was alive, but waited until he was dead and could not hear anything more.
Cold weather days remind her of a piece of memory she had as a child when she lived in China. Her home had a blue iron rear gate that was a little bit off paint. After she pushed it open, outside was a forest of birch trees. She often went deep into it with other kids. They came across a gigantic hole in the ground that was so deep they couldn't even see the bottom. She thought this was supposed to be the forest with its big mouth open. She remembered a time when the forest was on fire. She stood on a mountain from a great distance and watched the entire sky lit up by the flames, flickering as if it would be burnt out like a piece of paper. She was worried that the Earth would be burned into a big hole and lead to the universe. The forest no longer existed after the fire, but the hole was still on the ground, surrounded by black soil. She did not have a clear idea that her home had burned down. She only knew her mother was still in that house. She wanted to back to that place to see if her mom still lived there. She could probably build a new home in that wide-open space. She also wanted to check if the big hole was still in the ground, and if it was, she would like to jump down and see where it was connected. Alex knew that mother's photos had been in the newspaper since the fire. She was four-years old, she could not read enough to understand what it meant, but she could sense that it was not good. She and her father first moved to a warehouse-like place in the city, which she remembered had many, many beds and many, many people, lived there. After that, they moved in and bounced around in the houses of her father's friends. She remembered there was a long, steep wooden spiral stair inside someone's house, and every time she ran up and down, she felt like she could go all the way up to the sky or down to the ground. Then they moved several times. She did not pay attention to count. They moved to different cities, different countries, and to random houses. Each one had a different roof and stairs. Alex was not very happy that some apartments did not have stairs. They ended up in Tierra del Fuego province, Argentina, where Alex is now.
The antipode of any given location on Earth is the point on the surface of the planet that is diametrically opposed to it. It may be described as a vertical cut into the Earth. Because Argentina is the antipode area of that forest, Alex jokes about it to other people. She thinks she might have arrived because she accidentally fell through that hole in the woods and then experienced a geocentric adventure but miraculously did not get roasted to death by the burning core to get here. When she finishes, her friends always laugh, not because of the joke, but because she is a scientific researcher who can tell such an unscientific joke.
Alex is a thin, tiny person with short hair. She always wears a green jacket that makes her recognizable from a long distance. Her body becomes even smaller when she puts on her lab coat and goggles. The coat looks like a shell wrapped around her. Her eyes will curve when she laughs. Her colleagues once joked that she looked way too kind to be a researcher. Alex asked them what they would think she would do for a living if they did not meet in the lab for the first time. One colleague said Alex looked like an artist, another said Alex looked like a young babysitter, and another said Alex looked like a ticket seller at the movie theater in front of her house. In fact, she is really interested in selling tickets at the cinema; she even imagined when she was young that she would open a small theatre when she grew up, and it was better to be in an amusement park. Alex likes films, they fill her free time, and she can find her own connections to most of the films. Sometimes she falls asleep while watching them, but she still feels that her particular connection to these films as that they offer her some good rest. So every film has its own meaning. Alex does not like watching television news, although it is moving pictures and created by people, too. Alex does not understand why, when it is a film, everyone has a tacit understanding that it is fake and made up, but when the same thing is on TV and becomes news, everyone thinks it is real.
The behemoth that lives with her. That THING, often tears the house into pieces when it is at home. It even breaks the beam of the house when it turns around. When it is mad, it roars like crazy but not deafening. More like the wind rustling through the ears, a kind of infrasound, accompanied by the sound of wood and iron breaking. Alex can only lock herself in her room. She locks the door, holds her breath, and her forehead starts bleeding for no reason. She feels she can be erased from this blue planet at this moment. She listens to the rainstorm outside. She is surprised by how crisp the wood sounded when it cracked. It broke as quickly and clearly as ripping a page--their densities are different, but maybe they came from the same tree. As she cleans up, she notices that some of the cracks in the wood have jagged marks. She does not know if the wood was broken or just chewed on hard. After it calms down, it runs out of the house and heads into the forest behind it, out of sight. Alex thinks it would be better for it to live in the woods because this house is too small. No, the entire Antarctic continent is not enough for it to live, it is too huge, and it can step on and break the Earth's femur--the Equator--with a single lift of its leg. Alex dedicated a large portion of her life to studying why the animals in Antarctica are crazily huge. It is strange that she has never thought to study the mysterious creature who lives with her. It takes in too much oxygen from the water and may need more room to hold it.
Alex cannot fix her house by herself. She is afraid that one day this house will collapse and kill her, just like the house that collapsed in the fire when she was young, so she hires a professional repair team. The workers wonder if a wolf has run in to mess up the house like this. Alex does not know how to explain it to them. She couldn't remember when this thing appeared out of nowhere. She was so scared at first that she didn't even dare to leave her room. She locked herself in her room for a day until she really needed to go out to get food and water. So the next day, she got up the courage and opened the door, and she saw this monster sitting on the couch in the living room, quietly watching her every move as if it wasn't going to hurt her. Alex tested it a few more times, she kept going in and out of the living room, and she found that it probably was not really here to hurt her, or at least he didn't let Alex feel that way. But Alex was still scared. It was still a monster, after all. He did get reckless when he got mad, and he was irrational. Alex didn't go to work for several days and didn't know how to get help. She thought calling the police might get her into more trouble. What if the police came and just shot it dead? She called a friend, also her colleague at the lab, Hella, to come over. When Hella arrived, she asked Alex where the monster was since she did not see it; she only saw Alex was in the house. Alex rushed out of the room to find it had indeed disappeared. It did not leave any traces except a mess on the ground.
Hella is ten years older than her and lives near the lab with her young son, whose husband has been missing in her life, and she never mentions him. She is tall. She has wide shoulders and short, curly hair. She has no expression when she speaks--only her mouth moves. She always looks so serious and calm. She has an inherent affinity that makes people naturally want to trust her. Hella reminds Alex of her own mother. Hella is a good person. She has not mentioned to anyone that Alex thinks there is a monster living in her house, and especially not to anyone at the lab. She knows that as a person who works in the scientific field and needs the traits of rigor and calmness, it is not acceptable to have hallucinations. But Hella believes Alex. She thinks the monster should be really there even though she is a scientist. Otherwise, who destroyed the house? But Hella has never seen the monster herself, as if the thing can predict that she will visit and escape in advance.
Usually, it is gone for a few months, but sometimes it can be gone for a year or two. Like she forgot how she got here, Alex wishes it could forget this house. It's hard to describe its shape because it fills the house in a boundless and invisible way. It rests in the living room, but its odor permeates all corners of the house. It penetrates the back of the cream-colored wallpaper, stays in the stove fire, and dives into the fish tank to suffocate the goldfish. Alex touched it once a long time ago. She can still remember the touch. It is smooth but rougher than a dolphin's skin. It feels like human's skin. Alex thought it was incredibly hairy, like a beast on the land, until she actually found out it had only a thin layer of hair. The touch was almost negligible.
It does not eat a lot of things compared to its size, about the same amount as a grown man. It consumes both raw and cooked meat of great variety. It always has a voracious appetite, since it could not find anything decent to eat in that cold place during the time he spent away from home. It gulps the food into its mouth and hurriedly swallows it without chewing much. Alex prefers its eating time, freeing him from destroying something. But the noise it makes is intolerable for Alex. There are times that she even has the urge to stab it in the mouth with a fork as it eats. Alex is a sensible person who knows her limitations and current situation. She knows she cannot take such action, or she is not capable of doing such a thing, right now.
Alex tries to stay in the lab for longer hours when it's at home rather than coming home and sharing a space with that creature. Normally, it is asleep when Alex goes to work in the morning. It crouches on the stove when Alex gets home and looks at Alex with a fierce look. The pillows' feathers are torn all over the floor, shredded newspapers, broken glass are everywhere. On an early morning in the winter, when Alex was ready to go to work, she found nearly everything in the house was smashed. The light was pulled down from the ceiling, and the whole place was in darkness. The only thing Alex could see in the dark, through the faint dawn, were its red eyes. It stared at Alex, then it swooped onto her and bit her neck. She could not remember how she kicked it away, but it was as disgusting and difficult as shaking off a giant leech that had latched onto her.
Alex is aware of when to put an end to repetition. She drives to the lab again and has some irrelevant philosophical thinking on her way. She is going to get some potassium cyanide this time. It has to be potassium cyanide. If it is other chemicals, such a huge thing has to consume a ton for the effect Alex wants. When Alex returns home, she finds it has disappeared. The house is tidy, clean, and polished everywhere, and a kettle sits on the stove with water boiling. Alex starts to wait for it, but this time it has not shown up for six years. Alex thinks it may not come back. It should go back to where it came from. It goes into its own antipode that only it knows where and reaches the other side of the Earth. It may come back from this antipode someday in the future, but it does not matter. Alex will find her next antipode before then.
Shiyuan Zhang's short story "Wandering Elephants and Sad Whales" won second prize in the Tenth Annual Humanities & Sciences Undergraduate Writing Contest. Shiyuan is a Film major who graduated this spring. She is a narrative writer who works across multiple platforms exploring the interconnectivity of different media forms. Her themes focus on absurd, otherworldly, and transnational elements. She currently works as an assistant director on film production sets.