The psychologist handed Cooper a sheaf of papers.
“Here are the results of those tests, by the way.”
“Already?”
“We have a machine.”
Cooper folded the papers in half without looking at them. This caught the psychologist’s attention.
“You don’t want to see your results? It’s actually very interesting. It takes your answers and graphs your responses, showing where you fall in several categories of human neuroses.” She turned her copy of Cooper’s test toward her. “Take ‘tendency toward delusional thinking,’ for example.”
It seemed to Cooper as if the earth had tilted slightly, by degrees. She gripped the arms of the chair in a way that didn’t suggest panic.
“Here is the center line,” the psychologist continued, “which represents a statistically ‘normal’ person. This x here shows us where your answers indicate you’d fall. No one falls right on the line.” Cooper did not look up from her hands to see where the x was.
“Cooper?”
“I’m sorry,” Cooper replied. “I’m not much into explanations.” The psychologist stared at Cooper for a moment, the tests limp in her hand. Look her in the eyes. “I just want to paint at the bottom of the earth,” Cooper heard herself say.
The psychologist surveyed Cooper as if she were a thrift store evening gown.
Finally, she said, “Just sit tight for a minute, would you?”
Once the door clicked shut, Cooper pulled at the fabric of her shirt from beneath her armpits, trying to get some ventilation. She fished a compact out of her bag and began studying the swollen zit under her nose. A moment later, she heard the door open.
“People will pity a person with rosacea or shingles,” a voice said, “but there is no sympathy in the world for a person with acne. I’m living proof of this.” Cooper twisted around in her seat to see a man wearing a tight thermal shirt tucked into what looked like very expensive jeans. “I’m being sympathetic,” he added, “not judgmental.”
Cooper had never seen a human enter a room in this way, like an android whose design hadn’t included joint flexion. After his confident pronouncement on acne, the man shuffled in, head down, and offered her a painful-looking smile. “Miss Gosling,” he said in a faint Southern accent, “I’m Tucker Bollinger, your friendly South Pole area director.”
He was a black man with eyes a color she’d never seen before, a mix of yellow and green—Golden Beryl, if you were going by a paint box. He had three piercings in his left ear, all of them empty. His cheeks were hollow and acne-scarred, and Cooper saw there was a kind of beauty about him; yet it was a beauty that had been coaxed into existence. He seemed as guilty as if he’d stolen it, as unconvinced of its authenticity as someone who’d witnessed its creation and knew it to be false.
“They brought in the big gun,” Cooper said, snapping the compact closed.
“Am I a big gun?” he replied. “I’ve been told I have a big gun.”
“You just told me you run South Pole,” Cooper said. “In terms of guns, that qualifies as an assault weapon.”
Tucker moved toward the chair next to Cooper, and seemed to consider sitting for a moment, before placing his hand on the back of it, as if posing for a Matthew Brady portrait. “I’m more of a matchlock musket,” he said thoughtfully. “In fact, the parallels are nearly complete.”
“So, you’re here because I wouldn’t look at my test results.”
“Sometimes the contract psychologists get responses that aren’t on their protocols, so they call somebody from the Program in to double-check. One person’s tendency to hole up in her room with Proust is another person’s schizoid isolation. Not that I speak from experience.” He glanced over at the paperwork on the desk, his hands now thrust into his pockets. “You’re in the Artists and Writers Program.” He looked up from the pages. “Says here that you’ve been a live-event artist.”
“My first job out of art school.”
“Bat mitzvahs?”
“Weddings, mostly. The brides carried kale.”
“Better than a caricaturist-for-hire,” Tucker replied.
“Barely.”
“Well, we don’t get a lot of traditional visual artists anymore,” he said.
“Conceptual?”
“No, they stopped coming in the early nineties. Now it’s mixed-media artists, collagists, and found art. Last season, they had a guy doing paper clips. He made a uterus. He called it a feminist conduit to tactile interaction. There was one sexual harassment complaint.”
Cooper felt her limbs relax, and her muscles immediately ached from the tension they’d been holding for the past three hours. Clearly the bar for artistic achievement was low at South Pole.
“Do you have any talent?” Tucker asked.
“Maybe,” Cooper said.
“Maybe?”
“It’s kind of like psychological exams, I guess. Subject to protocols.” When Tucker didn’t reply, Cooper added: “I’ve been told I have talent.”
“If you don’t agree, then why are you here?”
“I don’t know why I’m here. But I’m here.”
Cooper could see this wasn’t enough. “What if I promise to just be your typical aimless thirty-year-old looking to delay the inevitable slide into mediocrity?”
“That rolls off your tongue easily.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve said it before.”
Cooper thought she detected a slight smile somewhere on Tucker’s face, but he didn’t let it crack open.
“Then you will fit in very well,” he said. “But can you, just for paperwork’s sake, give me one line that I can write down on this form? One line about why you want to go to South Pole?”
“I put that on my application.”
“That thing about ‘new horizons’ and ‘fresh perspectives’?”
Cooper sighed. “How about to further my creative journey?”
“Insincere.”
“For adventure’s sake?”
“There is no adventure, only a grind.”
“I like cold climates?”
“Stay in Minnesota.”
“I want to be somewhere else.”
“You’re getting closer.”
“But if I say that, you’ll think I’m running from something,” Cooper said.
“It’s not ‘running from something.’ It’s turning aside.” Tucker thought for a moment. “Or looking askance. Looking askance at civilization. If you apply to go to Pole because it seems ‘cool’ or because you’re looking for ‘adventure,’ then you’ll crack up when you realize it’s not a frat party. If you don’t fit in anywhere else, you will work your ass off for us. This has been proven time and time again.”
He clicked the pen attached to his clipboard and scribbled something. Then he stood up and indicated that Cooper should, too.
“I’ll have to meet with the program directors this afternoon to go over the borderline cases.”
“I’m borderline?”
“Sorry.”
“What about my one-liner?”
“What about it?”
“You’re going to use that thing about the personal journey?”
“Unless you have something better. The paper-clip guy said something about a personal journey, and he scraped in.” Tucker waited a moment, rubbing his left earlobe between his fingers, but Cooper could think of nothing to add. As she gathered her things, Tucker said, “Listen, shrinks worry about fresh death. Especially a suicide. Unresolved grief does sometimes lead to breakdowns, especially in extreme environments. But then so do delays in booze shipments. I’m sorry for saying ‘fresh death.’”
“I don’t mind. I guess it is.”
“You’ll know by tonight,” Tucker said. Cooper smiled weakly and watched as he left the room. She could hear his footfalls in the hallway. It sounded like South Pole itself was receding. As she closed her eyes to deny tears an exit point, she realized that she had underplayed the importance of this whole thin
g. For the first time, she understood it wasn’t the lark she’d been telling herself it was; Cooper knew that the jagged edges would continue to lacerate her unless she did something drastic. She didn’t quite know why she believed this, but she did. In fact, it was one of the only things she believed in now.
As she stared at the pale, sickly leaves of the office plant, Cooper understood that her chance was slipping away. She was on the verge of being rejected, as Scott had rejected Cherry.
Cherry.
She leapt to her feet. “I’ve got one,” she called down the hallway, where Tucker was talking to a VIDS employee. “A reason to go.”
Tucker dismissed the man, and waited as Cooper jogged toward him. “It’s a quote, but it’s why I want to go down.”
“Quoting others suggests avoidance,” Tucker replied when she arrived.
Cooper shook her head. “No, it only means that someone more articulate than me has been in my shoes. It only means”—Cooper could hear the hitch in her voice—“that someone else said it better than I could. But it’s why I want to go.”
Down the hall, someone began brewing a vending-machine latte, and Cooper realized she was holding her breath. Tucker finally clicked the pen again and held it poised above the clipboard. As she spoke, Cooper tried to keep her voice steady.
* * *
That night, after a “trust-building” exercise at Applebee’s involving Tabasco sauce and 7UP, Cooper returned to her hotel room to find the red cube on the phone blinking. It was Tucker calling to confirm that the shuttle for “fire school” would arrive at the hotel promptly at seven a.m., and that she was expected. Cooper listened to the message twice. She wanted to assume that an invitation to fire training meant she was in, but earlier at the restaurant, over double-crunch bone-in wings, some guy from Spokane told her a story about a woman who’d done the tests, completed fire school, flown to Christchurch, New Zealand, and been allowed to pick out all her extreme cold weather (ECW) gear, before being denied a berth on the flight to Pole because of a “clerical error.” It was best to assume nothing.
The next morning, Cooper boarded a shuttle bus with twenty other sleepy people and three highly caffeinated officials from VIDS. She chose a seat next to a pale, heavy-lidded man of about forty. He had poorly maintained ginger mutton chops, a high-and-tight, and the face of a hamster. He was examining a chain wallet with his name, Floyd, spelled out in tiny strips of duct tape. She imagined him straining over this project, fat pink tongue sticking out, Lit’l Smokies–esque fingers arranging the strips in the letters that formed his name. He glanced over at Cooper, so she said, “Hi.” He turned away, or possibly askance.
“I’ve done this three times,” he said to the window. He drew a penis with a cartoonish scrotum in the fog his breath had made on the glass.
“You’ve done fire training three times or you’ve been to South Pole three times?” Cooper asked, to be polite.
“Was I talking to you?”
“I’m pretty sure you were.”
“It’s a mistake to be ‘pretty sure’ of anything,” he said, using quote hooks. Cooper remembered her earlier use of quote hooks and burned with shame.
“Excuse Floyd. He’s saying, in his typical incoherent way, that he’s been to Pole three times.”
Before Cooper could turn to get an eye on the man seated behind her, a VIDS official wearing Ray-Bans atop his salt-and-pepper crew cut whistled to get everyone’s attention. “Get ready, folks. This is team-building time,” he shouted as the bus pulled into the Centennial State Fire Academy, which was located a few miles from the VIDS corporate campus.
Once everyone had shuffled down the aisle and off the bus, the prospective “Polies” lined up against a chain-link fence. Cooper noticed the guy next to her was stretching, linking his fingers and reaching for the sky. After two days of mingling with the marginally attractive, Cooper was startled to encounter someone whose looks were above average. He was built like a basketball player, at least six-four, with lean limbs and fierce hazel eyes in an otherwise relaxed and confident face. She wondered about his Pole occupation—carpenter, engineer, forklift driver? Cooper decided he was a carpenter, because he had that rangy look that she associated with woodworkers.
He glanced over at her. “You a Fingy?” Cooper recognized his voice as the one that had asked her to excuse Floyd earlier.
“A what?”
He laughed. “You’ve answered the question. Fingy—stands for ‘fucking new guy.’”
“Is that an official term?”
“Official enough. I’m Sal,” he said, sticking out his hand.
“Cooper.”
“Science or support?”
“Uh, I’m not sure—I’m down on the A-and-W grant.”
“Ah, you’re an artiste.”
“I detect sarcasm.”
Sal grinned. “Never.”
Cooper turned to watch as a squat two-story building disgorged smoke while people dressed in fire gear ducked in and out, rescuing dummies and laying them on the grass about ten yards away.
“After these cadets finish, we’ll start suiting up,” the VIDS official said.
“What’s this guy’s name again?” Cooper whispered to Sal.
“Just call him VIDS. That’s what we call all the Denver-based admins. They’re interchangeable. It’s easier that way.”
“VIDS sounds like a venereal disease you’d catch at Blockbuster.”
“Good one.”
The VIDS official clapped his hands to get the Polies’ attention. “While we wait, I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the United States Antarctic Program, also known as the Program. You may be going down there as a cook, a geologist, a custodial engineer, an admin—”
“Astrophysicist!” Sal coughed into his hand. Cooper snuck another look at Sal. It strained her credulity to believe that an astrophysicist could be both physically attractive and supremely self-assured—not that she’d ever met an astrophysicist, which had always sounded to Cooper like a made-up job title.
“In whatever capacity you come down here,” the VIDS official continued, “whether you’re on the science side or the support side, you hold your colleagues’ lives in your hands.”
A small woman wearing a pink bandanna raised her hand. “Excuse me but I have a thing with fire masks. For example, I wasn’t a good scuba diver because the mouthpiece freaked me out. I could see myself being someone who would take it out underwater, against my better judgment, you know, just because it’s a foreign object in my mouth. So I’m just wondering how this, um, tendency, I guess, is going to impact fire training.” Scornful chuckles all around. The woman looked at the group. “What, is that a dumb question?”
“All questions are good, all questions are good,” the VIDS official said, rubbing his hands together nervously. “What’s your name, honey?” Cooper noticed her stiffen at this. Apparently so did the VIDS guy. “I mean, your name?” he stammered.
“Pearl.”
“Pearl, I think because the fire mask doesn’t actually go into your mouth like a scuba regulator does, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how nonintrusive it is.”
Pearl nodded. “Good. Nonintrusive is always welcome.”
Over the next four hours, the Pole candidates donned helmets, fire jackets, overalls, boots, and face masks, and endured every worst-case scenario known to man. Forced entry using a halligan and an ax. Extinguishing vehicle fires with dry chemical powder. Crawling through an eighty-foot plastic tunnel called the Gerbil Tube in order to “get used to tight spaces.” Some of the applicants folded under the pressure and were hastily wrapped in shock blankets. Pearl did, in fact, find the face mask obtrusive, to the tune of a panic attack in the Gerbil Tube, and so was officially reassigned to the Trauma Team, which, at Pole, would muster to provide CPR or splints in case of catastrophic injury. Some of the Polies, Cooper noted, were studs. Sal had been the only one to locate the “infant reported to be in the building” and drag the min
iature dummy out by the scruff of its neck, only to pretend to breastfeed it as the others scrambled to safety.
The last exercise of the day was in the Maze, a smoke-filled, two-story house. Cooper was expected to perform a sweep-search and rescue her victim—a scientist who had joined the group late. She had already seen several other veteran Polies, at fire school for recertification, complete this exercise; they’d exited the synthetic fires laughing and slapping one another on the back. It wasn’t easy, Cooper reasoned, but it was probably doable. She awaited the fire chief’s whistle, and when she heard it, sprinted into the building.
As soon as she stepped into the Maze, though, she realized she was fucked. The place was a carnival funhouse of stairs, dead ends, and walls of fire. It turned out synthetic smoke wasn’t all that different from real smoke—and it obscured everything, so Cooper began crawling. Room by room, she searched for the scientist. Sweat began to dribble down her forehead and into her eyes, steaming up the glass of her fire mask.
“Where are you?” Cooper cried. It sounded as if she were shouting into a pillow. She climbed up the stairs on all fours, and turned into the first room she came to. The ceiling was on fire. Cooper thought she could make out something lying motionless halfway across the room. She got to her feet and scuttled over to the body. It was one of the CPR dummies. Cooper began kicking it mercilessly, her fear and frustration mounting to panic. What if this was a trick? Some kind of test? Maybe there was no one in the Maze awaiting rescue. Maybe the scientist had entered the building and then slipped out the back door, and Cooper’s score was based on how long it would take her to realize this.
South Pole Station Page 2
