South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

  But then, through the groans of the generator that was powering the smoke machine, she thought she heard something. Someone was humming. Cooper crawled down the hall and pushed open the second door. There, next to the window, was a man in fire gear, on his haunches, cowering. For a moment they stared at each other through the smudged Plexiglas of their masks. Then Cooper kicked his boot with hers and he slowly got to his feet. She took hold of his arm and forced him down the stairs like Lennie Briscoe on an episode of Law & Order.

  By the time they burst through the front door, a crowd had gathered around the Maze, and it exploded into applause. Cooper pushed the man away from her so hard that he fell to the ground. She tore off her fire mask and tried to get a good breath.

  “You were never in danger,” the fire chief said, marking something on his clipboard.

  As the crowd dispersed, Cooper watched while a medic attended to the scientist, who was now draped in a shock blanket. When he turned his enormous china-doll eyes toward her, she couldn’t stop the scowl that formed on her lips.

  “Congratulations,” Sal said, handing Cooper a bottle of water.

  “Thanks,” she said. “You think I’ll pass?”

  “You’ll pass.”

  She looked up into Sal’s face, surprised. “Really?”

  He nodded, then tilted his head toward the scientist. “So will he.”

  “Isn’t he the one who abandoned the CPR lady-dummy in the bathtub on his first Maze run?”

  Sal shrugged. “This is a formality for him. His ticket was punched a long time ago.”

  “Who the hell is he?” Cooper asked.

  Sal glanced at the man. “He answers to ‘The End of Science.’ See you at Ninety South.”

  * * *

  Four months later, Cooper was standing on a slice of sea ice just outside of McMurdo, the American polar station set on the hairy fringes of Antarctica. To the north, the bare volcanic rock of Hut Point Peninsula sloped toward McMurdo Sound in glossy black sheets. Short-stacked dorms, repair barns, and warehouses seemed locked on the basalt as if petrified midslide. Diesel fumes burned her nostrils.

  The sun hung low in the sky, an ornament that swung from east to west, never disappearing, until the day it did. On the C-17 that had ferried them from Christchurch, an electrician had told Cooper that when the month-long sunset ended in March and the sun finally hooked around the Earth, leaving South Pole in total darkness for months, she’d forget what it looked like almost at once. “You’ll live for civil twilight,” he said mysteriously.

  As she waited for the National Science Foundation rep to finish gossiping with the pilot, Cooper looked around at the raggedy group of artists loitering a few hundred yards from the humorously big-wheeled bus that was waiting to take them into town. Which one, Cooper wondered, was Harold? Back in Denver, the NSF had assigned each grantee a buddy—a “fellow Fellow”—and instructed them to exchange regular e-mails up until the date of their departure. It was important, the grant administrator had impressed upon the artists, to be supplied with an existing friend at Pole. Cooper had been paired with a biographer named Harold. When she’d asked him about the subject of his book, he had been evasive. After four months of correspondence, all Cooper knew about him was that he was a British ex-pat from Sacramento who fancied peach melba and foxhounds, and who suffered from mild eczema. Harold’s knowledge of Cooper was limited to two facts: that she felt hotdish had never received its gastronomic due and that the fake Minnesota accents in Fargo were the blackface of regional phonology. Pictures had not been exchanged, so Cooper had no way of picking Harold out from the collection of fur-lined hoods and balaclavas arrayed before her.

  Finally, the NSF administrator, wearing UV goggles and an impossibly large parka, walked toward the group, looking as buoyant as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. “Seventy-seven degrees, fifty-one minutes south,” he boomed, each word accompanied by a steam blossom. “One hundred sixty-six degrees, forty minutes east.” The historical novelist, who’d vomited into his hands on the plane, sighed in recognition, letting everyone know he’d done his homework. “Welcome to McMurdo, everybody,” Stay Puft said. “Welcome to Antarctica.” The sound of heavy mittens clapping followed this pronouncement, and someone attempted a whistle, then quit halfway through, winded. The high altitude and thin air did not offer enough oxygen for carefree whistling.

  “All right, guys,” Stay Puft continued, “I know you’re moving on to South Pole Station tomorrow morning, but I think there’s still time for you to enjoy what Mactown has to offer. We always treat the artists to a game of bowling before they head for Pole, mostly because we put a little money on the game and because you guys are notoriously bad bowlers.” Ha-ha-ha, the group laughed. We’re bad bowlers.

  “Oh, hey,” Stay Puft said to a tall, stone-faced man who was briskly passing the group on his way to the Terra Bus. “Goggles really aren’t optional down here, brother. I mean, unless you want to light your corneas on fire.”

  “Noted,” the man said, his consonants tinged with unmistakable Russian frication. “But I’m not Fingy, and McMurdo is not cold.”

  “What’s a Fingy?” someone asked. Cooper felt no need to provide this person with the secret knowledge she’d been given at fire school—she suspected any advantage, no matter how small, could be helpful to her. Stay Puft turned to everyone else and clapped his mittens together: “Terra Bus time! Grab your bags and let the festivities begin!”

  Cooper dragged her bag past the other artists, and caught up with the tall Russian, who was carrying his enormous duffel as if it were a lunch box. He’d been seated across from Cooper on the flight from Christchurch, and was imperious and massively bearded. Once or twice during the six-hour flight he had consulted a notebook, but had otherwise barely moved. When he noticed Cooper was keeping pace with him, he looked down at her.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hey,” Cooper said. “Are you a writer or a painter?” When he didn’t immediately reply, Cooper added: “Muralist?”

  “You mistake me for artist,” he finally said. “I am not here to paint pretty pictures of penguins.”

  “Carpenter?”

  “Now you confuse me with construction personnel. Those are assholes. Science is only reason for people to come here.” He looked down at Cooper again. “You are one of these artists?” Cooper nodded. “I do not understand why you are here.”

  Cooper saw herself reflected in the man’s mirrored aviators, which he’d donned in place of the goggles everyone had been issued back in Christchurch. Reflected in his sunglasses, Cooper’s head was bulbous, her body a tube. She was ridiculous.

  * * *

  That night, the artists crowded into the bowling alley at McMurdo, Mactown Lanes, which was located in a Seabee Quonset hut that also housed a ceramics studio, and was a gathering point for exactly the kind of people one might expect to find in bowling alleys and ceramics studios. The bowling alley consisted of two lanes and the last existing Brunswick manual pinsetter system in the world. A woman in a bikini top and board shorts was the designated “pin monkey.”

  As she waited for her turn to bowl, Cooper learned she’d be heading to Pole with an interpretive dancer who hoped to choreograph a show based on the mating rituals of the hydrocarbon seep tubeworm; two novelists, traversing the same ground as the novelists who came before them (The Catcher in the Crevasse, Fahrenheit-98, The Sun Never Rises, Love in the Time of Snow Blindness); and Cooper’s pen pal, the biographer named Harold.

  Cooper watched as the interpretive dancer threw a gutter ball and danced back to her seat under the pink and green strobe lights pulsing to the beat of “Heart of Glass.”

  “It’s rather quaint, isn’t it,” the man sitting next to Cooper said as they watched the heavily tatted pin monkey get up from her folding chair at the end of the lane and reset the pins. Cooper took in the man’s pink jowls-in-training and his friendly, constantly blinking eyes. A portrait would focus on the broad, Truman Capote fore
head abandoned by the hairline. These features, and the British accent, could only mean that this was Harold.

  “Actually, I’m surprised how ugly this place is,” Cooper said. “You think Antarctica is going to be the purest place in the world—like the last pure place on earth—and you get here and it’s like Akron.” She offered him her hand. “I’m Cooper.”

  The man’s face flushed, and he offered a gap-toothed smile. When he took her hand, his was predictably moist. “I’m Harold, your pen pal!” He giggled. “Now, is there a ghost of a chance that you’d allow me to perform my best Minnesota accent, or would that just send you into a rage? I’ve been working on it for weeks.”

  “I’ll try to control myself,” Cooper replied. “Go ahead.”

  Harold squared his shoulders and straightened his posture, affecting the standard Minnesotan-at-the-wheel-during-rush-hour position. “Oh geeeee, yoooooo betcha!”

  “Not bad, but if you’re going for cinéma vérité, you might want to try the phrase ‘I’m headed over to Lindy’s for the meat raffle.’” Harold positively glowered. “Anyway, nice to finally meet you, Harold.” Cooper wasn’t sure she’d ever spoken the name Harold out loud before; it came out sounding a little sarcastic.

  Harold winced. “As I’ve been told incessantly since we landed at Christchurch, Harold is a perfectly awful name.” He paused, thoughtful. “I don’t believe they’re naming children Harold anymore. I’ve settled on Birdie for the duration.”

  “Birdie?”

  “It’s the nickname of the bloke I’m writing a book about. I’ve simply co-opted it.”

  “Birdie Bowers?” Cooper said.

  Birdie went pinker. “You know Birdie? Americans never know him.”

  Cooper shrugged. “My father’s a frustrated explorer, so I’m on a first-name basis with a lot of dead men.”

  “Yes, there’s a whole generation of those kinds of fathers, isn’t there? Men cut out for Shackleton’s adventures but forced to work as accountants or teachers.” He ran a hand across his pate. “It’s a bloody shame, actually. There’s nothing left for them.”

  The overheads suddenly dimmed and were replaced by the swirling colored lights found in Cosmic Bowling systems across the globe—Antarctica, apparently, included. Birdie made his way to the bowling lane, and as Cooper watched him test the weight of several bowling balls, she put her hand in her parka and touched the vial she’d carried with her from Minneapolis. As she did so, she imagined Cherry in his bunk on the Terra Nova as it neared this continent, and a jubilant Birdie Bowers hauling him out to give him a celebratory dig in the ribs.

  * * *

  The next morning, as Cooper stood on the McMurdo ice runway waiting to board the plane to South Pole, the sun hovered on the horizon, looking as runny as an undercooked egg. A few weeks earlier, in mid-September, it had risen for the first time in six months. According to the breathless reports Cooper had overheard in the dining room, penguins had gone into hysterics, which had promptly sent a National Geographic cruise tour group into hysterics.

  The sea-ice runway was busier than O’Hare, crowded with C-17s and a gaggle of LC-130s from the New York Air National Guard. All of the planes had been outfitted with skis instead of wheels, as well as jet fuel that wouldn’t turn to Smuckers in sixty-below temps. It was into one of these LC-130s—everyone called them Hercs—that Cooper climbed, along with the rest of the artists, scientists, and support staff heading to Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

  The interior of the plane looked like the digestive tract of a cyborg: the floor was littered with various cables, tie-down straps, and metal bars. There were no windows. Cooper strapped herself into a jump seat and, since there was nothing to look at besides red cargo netting and beards, she closed her eyes and tried to sleep.

  Three hours later, the sound of the pilot’s voice broke through the howl of the plane’s engines. “McMurdo was Fiji compared to what you’re about to experience,” he shouted over the speaker. “And goggles are required, folks. We’ll be on the ground shortly. Might want to grab on to something. Could get a little bumpy on the way down.”

  As if on cue, the plane fell a few hundred feet, before floating up again, and then dropping another hundred. It went on like this for ten minutes. The scientists and construction workers in the jump seats across from Cooper seemed unfazed, while next to her, the historical novelist yelped pathetically. Halfway down the row, Birdie had dropped his head between his knees.

  The landing, however, went smoothly, and as the plane coasted along the ice, Cooper had the strange feeling of being on a seventy-seven-ton toboggan. Relieved cheers filled the cabin as they coasted to the end of the skiway. Almost before the plane had come to a complete stop, the doors were opened and everyone began filing out, but Cooper couldn’t move. McMurdo had been the last exit, a place with bowling alleys and an ATM. This was the end. This was South Pole.

  When she finally made her way to the exit, she stopped short, holding up the rest of the line as she stared into infinity—sheer white of a character she’d never seen in life or art. She felt light-headed.

  “Your goggles,” Birdie shouted over the din of the roaring engine. He pressed them into her hands. She pulled them over her head and onto her face, and began walking down the stairs, but on the last step she stumbled. As if in slow motion, she landed face-first on her bag, which had been thrown out of the cargo hold. Immediately, a mouthful of polar air seized her lungs, and she started to choke. It was as if her throat had instantly crystallized. Birdie hauled Cooper to her feet.

  “Thanks,” she croaked.

  All around her was a landscape of snow without end; there was no horizon. She felt seaborne, bodiless. There was no edge, no crust to hold it all in. Crowded around the runway were groups of people wearing the green parkas that distinguished the Polies from the McMurdo-ites, who wore cherry-red. Again, the tall Russian scientist disembarked and carried his oversize duffel with ease, his aviators glinting in the sun. Cooper watched as other hoodless men in aviators surrounded him, clearly excited to see him. Beyond them was a large silver geodesic dome: South Pole Station.

  “How was McMurdo?”

  Cooper peered into yet another fur-lined hood and saw Tucker’s face. Relief washed over her.

  “We bowled,” she said, her body beginning to shake from the cold. “Two games.”

  “Put on your hood,” Tucker said, and Cooper complied. “I’m glad you’re here. You were missed.” The passivity of the sentence only underscored its weirdness. “Come on, let’s go inside.”

  The entrance to South Pole Station had nearly been swallowed by drifting snow. The ramp leading into the dome sloped down into the frozen earth like a long, swollen throat. Cooper stopped to watch a group of people shoveling out a trench that encircled the dome like a moat. On seeing the artists pass into the tunnel, one of the workers stopped and leaned on his shovel. He pointed toward a wooden sign speared into the ice. In handwritten letters, it spelled Caution! Crevasse of Death.

  “Live it. Learn it. Love it,” he said.

  As the Fingys inched farther down the tunnel, a town the color of a safety-hazard cone materialized beneath the frozen Spaceship Earth dome. A collection of ugly, two-story prefab buildings sprouted from the dirty ice. One of the novelists began hacking uncontrollably as a tractor and forklift rumbled past them coughing exhaust that wreathed the buildings in smog. Cooper glanced at an enormous digital thermometer hanging over the entrance to one of the trailers. Inside the dome it was thirty-five degrees below zero. Outside it was negative fifty. This, Cooper knew from the station guide, was a balmy summer’s day.

  Tucker led the artists into the galley, located on the first floor of the largest trailer. As they shuffled in, a pair of guys playing chess looked up at them, then looked at each other, and flashed the international sign of cultural superiority—the Star Trek finger-split.

  Tucker stopped near the soda dispenser. “This is the galley. This is where you’ll come to eat
,” he said. “Our production cook is Miss Pearl here.” The woman in the pink bandana Cooper had seen at fire school now stood in the middle of the kitchen. She was smiling, both hands on her apron-wrapped hips, her ash-blond hair gathered in a short ponytail, the same bandanna wrapped around her head. A small cadre of galley workers buzzed behind her, preparing for lunch.

  “Hi, artistes, welcome to South Pole! I’ll give you a quick run-down of how the eats work around here, and I’m sorry if I’m short on details—we’re in the middle of the lunch prep and also, this is my first year so I’m going by what the binders tell me.” In the kitchen, soups bubbled in industrial-size pots and a couple of guys in hairnets chopped vegetables. “I’m told food is really the only unequivocally nice thing about institutionalized life down here,” Pearl said as she led the group between prep tables. “We really try to make it special, make it nice. Lots of people have told me that they haven’t eaten better food than the food they ate here on the ice.” Pearl slipped past the meat slicer, where a thin guy was running a ham across the blade. “And this is Kit. He’s our rock star DA.”

  “District attorney?” one of the artists asked, and Cooper caught Tucker rolling his eyes.

  “Nope, here DA stands for dining assistant,” Pearl said cheerfully. “Everyone say hi to Kit.” Everyone murmured a hello, and the group moved through the kitchen. As Cooper passed him, Kit began moving his pelvis in rhythm with the slicer, tongue hanging out, eyes half closed.

  “Your zipper’s down,” Cooper whispered. Kit shrugged and continued slicing.

  Pearl was now standing in front of a stack of cabinets, saying that there were three squares a day, six days a week. “If you need to eat at Midrats, let me or Bonnie know,” she said, gesturing to a heavy-set dark-haired woman working the stove across from the cabinets. “Bonnie’s the head cook.”

  “Excuse me, but what are Midrats?” Birdie asked, smiling stupidly at Pearl. Cooper could see he was already enamored.

  “Midrats is the term we use for our midnight meal cooked for the workers on the graveyard shift. It’s short for ‘midnight rations’—Midrats! Does that answer your question?” Birdie signaled his assent with a thumbs-up. “Anyway, leftovers are stored in the white fridge over there, and you can warm up whatever you want in the microwave. But if you’re seriously unmotivated, you can check out the cabinets.” She turned around and pulled open the door to a large cupboard. A pile of ramen noodles and plastic-wrapped Melba toast tumbled out. Cooper picked up one of the ramen soup packages from the floor.