South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

  “This expired in 1996,” she said.

  Pearl shrugged. “We’re at the end of a long supply chain.”

  * * *

  Across an expanse of snow a quarter mile from the Dome, the Jamesways lay atop the ice like giant prehistoric grubs. This tent city, called Summer Camp, was where most of the Polies slept. The rest bunked in the Hypertats, closer to the station, while a select few had rooms in the elevated dorm under the Dome. Cooper was halfway to camp with her bag—bag-drag was an individual sport and a rite of passage for Fingys—when she heard the sound of footsteps, which, on dry Antarctic snow, sounded like boots crushing Saltines.

  “Hey,” a familiar voice called. Cooper turned to find Sal walking toward her, his rose-red parka a Pollock drip against the starched sky. He grinned at her, and Cooper noticed for the first time a deep dimple in his right cheek. “Technically, I’m not supposed to help you bag-drag,” he said. “It’s a time-honored tradition to force the Fingys to haul their luggage out to camp.” He reached for Cooper’s duffel. “But I’m feeling charitable today.”

  “Except I’m too proud to take handouts,” Cooper replied, moving the bag out of his reach with her boot. She hauled the strap back over her shoulder, hoping to give the impression that she found the duffel featherlight.

  “Do you even know where you’re going?”

  “E6.”

  “Ah, E6. That’s where they found the body last season.” He grinned again and gestured to the Jamesway farthest from the station. “Last one on the left there.” It looked miles away. Cooper groaned, and let the duffel strap slip from her shoulder. Sal slung the bag over his shoulder easily, and together they walked toward Summer Camp in silence.

  When they arrived at E6, it suddenly occurred to Cooper that the only things that would be standing between her and minus-56-degree temperatures were plywood and vinyl-coated cotton duck. “I can get it from here,” Cooper said, taking the bag from Sal. “Thanks for the good deed.” Sal tipped an imaginary hat. As Cooper watched him walk away, she considered how much she hated guys who tipped imaginary hats.

  She pulled the Jamesway door open and kicked her bag into the darkened interior. The door sucked shut behind her, and the walls breathed in and out with the Antarctic summer winds. Canvas curtains separated the sleeping quarters, leaving a narrow hallway running down the middle of the Jamesway. Light snoring came from all directions, along with the faint sound of death metal leaking from someone’s headphones. All at once, the heater—a massive metal monster set at the back of the tent—kicked on with a congested roar.

  Using a flashlight she’d been given back at the station along with two towels and a set of bedclothes, Cooper scanned the doors until she found her room at the end of E6. It was the size of a closet, nothing more than a single bed, a dorm-style desk, and a chair. Cooper clambered onto her bed to peer out the plastic-paned window cut high in the wall. More white without end. She craned her neck and saw that a huge snowdrift hugged the other side of the Jamesway wall. She glanced down at the floor and saw the foot of the drift ended under her bed.

  Kicking her snow-crusted bag closer to the dresser, Cooper pulled off her fur-backed mittens before removing layer after layer of clothing until she reached her thermal vest. This she unzipped, before removing her money belt, where she’d been keeping her oil paints since landing in Christchurch three days earlier. The visual arts coordinator at the NSF’s Artists & Writers Program had suggested she transport her paints this way if she “insisted” on using oils instead of the obviously more practical tempera; the warmth of her body would keep them from freezing and losing integrity. Titanium white. Yellow ochre, burnt umber. And the workhorse of polar artists, cerulean blue. Cooper rarely opened new tubes—the firmness and fullness of the paints felt as strange as the first time she had held an erect penis in her hand. She was more comfortable using the twisted, deformed soldiers, often capless, found in high school art rooms. So when her sister, Billie, had handed her the bag from Utrecht Art Supplies, Cooper had been shocked. Inside was a set of Winsor and Newton oil paints, and two small containers of turpentine.

  “The guy said these were the best,” Billie had said. “Something about pigment load. I assume this is a painting term and not a porn sequence.”

  “I’m not worth these paints,” Cooper said, and Billie had grown impatient.

  “Stop cringing. Just take them. As we both know, the clock on talent runs faster than regular clocks. Tick-tock.”

  As with most things, Billie was, of course, right: in art, as in life, your innate talent was valued in inverse proportion to your age. For Cooper, the clock had ticked off almost fifteen years. She’d been plucked from obscurity while in high school by the “Holy Order of the Precocious Child,” as Billie called it, when a curator for MoMA, in town for a lecture at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, had deigned to look at the lobby display where the winners of the Minnesota High School Visual Arts Competition had their pieces set up. Having discovered in junior high that she had the technical skills of a hyperrealist, Cooper had gone all Charles Bell and produced a series of paintings depicting vending-machine charms. The curator was particularly taken with Cooper’s absurdly detailed study of a tiny roller skate on a lead chain. “You’ve brought a sense of allegorical wonder to the obviously tawdry,” she’d said.

  Within two months, Cooper and her vending-machine series had been featured in The New York Times Magazine, alongside the work of three other visual arts prodigies (the title of the article had been “Could These Young Artists Save the American Art World?”). Cooper was bewildered to read that her “preoccupation” as an artist was not just on “gifted creations of likenesses, but also the instigation of psychological states in the observer,” when all she’d been trying to do was not look too closely at the things around her that actually mattered. Like what was happening to her brother.

  It was around that time that David had gotten worse—though by that point, using the word worse was like gilding one of Monet’s water lilies. The “Weisman Incident” had made the ten o’clock news on all three local stations (in Minnesota at that time a teenager flailing incoherently on the roof of a modern art museum was sweeps-worthy). That was when the painting stopped. Cooper wasn’t sure why she’d stopped, only that nothing seemed worth painting. She knew even then that to adults this sounded truculent, but representation suddenly seemed a cheap way to comment on ideas. Interpretation seemed hubristic. Better, Cooper thought, as she watched her parents grapple with David, to leave life in its native language. So the planning had stopped, too. Everything did. And Cooper was glad. She was relieved to once again be unexceptional—but of course said nothing to her family and concerned mentors about this relief and instead stockpiled their pity like she was building up treasures.

  But then, some months after one of David’s institutionalizations, when it seemed that David, back in high school again, was doing better, Cooper did start to paint again. Small things, mostly for friends, and mostly staying in the well-worn ruts: a butterfly, a still life, a tree. Nothing that had any real meaning to her. Such things were still too dangerous. Eventually, though, she set the crutches aside, and tried to pick up where she’d left off when David had first gotten sick, quietly enrolling at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design after graduation.

  She had showings at small local galleries, where people who didn’t know her name sipped white Zin and praised the kind of art they could afford while denigrating the kind they couldn’t. She sold a few canvases at art fairs, had a couple pieces hanging at the Uptown Caribou Coffee (“Man Staring into Latte” and “Untitled Meditation on Shade-Grown Beans”), and had even been commissioned to paint the skyline of St. Paul for a professor from Hamline University (although she’d blown it after she asked: “What skyline?”).

  Armed with a BFA and a spotty résumé, Cooper worked as a substitute art teacher, but had been laid off when the Minnesota legislature cut all “nonessential curriculum” funding. She turne
d to community ed and began teaching “Adventures in Acrylics” to retirees far more motivated than her. Then she turned thirty, and saw that the years behind her were littered with part-time jobs, newsboy hats, half-finished canvases, and visits to the psych ward at Hennepin County Medical Center to see David. She quickly ran out of money, and began work at the same Caribou Coffee where her canvases were still hanging, unsold. She started dating a fellow barista, a twenty-three-year-old emo named Forrest, to whom she lied about her age.

  Then one day, the professor from Hamline who’d canceled her commission called to tell her about the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program at South Pole. “It’s a unique opportunity to experience humility and accountability on a visceral level,” he said. “When the paperwork crossed my desk, I thought of you immediately.” The words—South Pole—had pierced her. Cooper thought she had buried those two syllables and everything they signified long ago. When David became sick around their sixteenth birthday, their fondly recalled playtime heroics had given way to hallucinations and obsessions. To David, South Pole was no longer a place where men went to become lions, a landscape that spawned a thousand daydreams. It was instead a viper’s nest of secret civilizations. It was a Nazi hideout. It harbored a portal into a hollow earth, where men like Arthur Gordon Pym and friends sailed into a milky wormhole and vanished. David wanted desperately to be there, and sometimes, when things were bad, thought he was. Cooper felt strongly that she would have been able to handle it all better if it—this chemical Grendel that had replaced her brother’s fine mind—had allowed Titus and Cherry to stay at South Pole. But these paladins had been erased from the continent—and when they disappeared, Cooper did, too.

  She looked down at the tubes of paint in her hands. None of them had lost integrity, so she wrapped them up in the bath towels and put them in her battered green canvas Duluth Pack with the rest of her supplies. Next, she set her books on the desk—a polar library in miniature, with Shackleton, Amundsen, and the ancient copy of Worst Journey her father had given her back in Minneapolis (all of which she’d decided to bring after Tucker assured her little polar literature would be found on the continent itself). On top of the books was where she placed the antique pocket compass Bill had snuck into her duffel, and which she’d found while searching for a tampon during the layover at McMurdo.

  Finally, she plunged her hand deep into the pocket of her parka and pulled out a Tylenol travel vial, the Extra Strength rubbed out by her constantly searching fingers. It was four and a half inches long, point-eight ounces light, though, of course, the packaging data no longer reflected the vial’s contents. Cooper set this next to the compass and lay down on her bed. After a few minutes, the heater cycled off, revealing the sounds of a couple having sex on the other side of the Jamesway. A moment later, they stopped. A woman’s voice, dripping with sarcasm, said, “I’ll guess I’ll just finish myself off then.” It was the first familiar thing Cooper had encountered since stepping foot on South Pole.

  * * *

  The second familiar thing was South Pole’s computer lab, referred to at the station as the Cube Farm. It looked like any second-rate college’s computer science department, with a half-descended projection screen dangling against a whiteboard and three rows of candy-colored iMacs. The lab was half full when Cooper walked in to check her e-mail, and aside from rapid keyboard clicking, mostly silent. As she walked down the least-populated row of computers, she saw one of the Polies was scrolling through photos of disgruntled cats dressed up as circus clowns.

  The only e-mail in Cooper’s in-box was from Billie.

  2003 October 11

  00:13

  To: cherrywaswaiting@hotmail.com

  From: Billie.Gosling@janusbooks.com

  Subject: Working the Pole?

  C.,

  How’s Pole? Life at the World’s Most Mediocre Publisher remains mediocre. Mom just acquired a book on divination by punctuation and set me up with the author of said masterpiece. I agreed to the date because of my long-standing fascination with the Oxford comma. Our first date ended with an exchange of punctuation-related insults. He finds commas guilty of crimes against humanity. I told him double spaces after periods or I walk. If you’re in the market for some reading material, I can provide. Illuminati conspiracies? The Book of Thoth? Labyrinth literature? Mom’s been on a spree. Meanwhile, I sit here and write rejection notes all day. (Yes, Janus Books does sometimes reject things.) Oh, and I’m supposed to say that Mom misses you terribly and sends you her blessing.

  Billie, your sister, The World’s Oldest Editorial Assistant™

  * * *

  2003 October 12

  09:50

  To: Billie.Gosling@janusbooks.com

  From: cherrywaswaiting@hotmail.com

  Subject: RE: Working the Pole

  B.,

  I can only e-mail when the heavens and the satellites align, and the sword is in the stone. I’ve been here for eight hours and have already lost all sense of time. It’s strange down here. Like a strip mall at the end of the earth. There are only nine women. When winter starts in March, there will be four. I’m told that while the odds are good, the goods are odd. The guy at the computer next to me is starting to get really excited—like, bordering on sexually excited—by a cat video, so I need to sign off now. More later.

  C.

  As she sent off the e-mail, Cooper wondered again why her older sister chose to spend her days photocopying new-age manuscripts and preparing their mother’s morning yerba mate. Billie claimed nepotism was her only chance at gainful employment after years of failed attempts, and perhaps this was true. Their mother, Dasha, had climbed the ranks at Janus Books after becoming interested in the questions of “The Seeker.” The Seeker was on a journey for meaning, and stuffed into her tribal-feather double-fringed medicine-bag purse were books like the Tao Te Ching, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Ernest Holmes’s collected works. After several years in middling editorial positions at Janus, Dasha had learned the hand grips, the passwords, the ritual work, whatever it was that launched a former paralegal into a position of Masonic power, and was now executive editor. In the decade she’d been there, Dasha had transformed Janus Books from a quiet publisher of self-help books, a kind of lapdog for the self-actualizing, to a frothing Aquarian beast. It hadn’t escaped Cooper’s notice that this ascent took place as David succumbed to mental illness. This fact bothered Cooper—she wasn’t quite sure why. Clearly selling self-help books was her mother’s coping mechanism, and didn’t we all need coping mechanisms? Still, as a rule, Cooper avoided Janus’s myrrh-scented halls. But she also understood you had to say goodbye to your mother if you were departing for the seventh continent—even if your mother was wearing a dashiki.

  It was Billie who met Cooper at Reception. Her older sister was imperious, angled, beautiful, and cool. Bette Davis in army-navy tactical cargo pants and a black tank top. Even though she couldn’t snow camp, Billie had been, until recently, the Goslings’ Best Hope: the one with the brains, the Algonquin wit, the ability to produce obscure Jack London references at the perfect moment. These were traits that were highly valued by their father, and so Billie honed them until she could wield them like a prison shank to keep Cooper, and her talent, at bay. Of course, Billie had talent to burn. She’d gone to New York on a playwriting fellowship, begun dating an artisanal tobacconist, and after eighteen months found herself in the midst of fleeting success—a run at the Lortel with the play she wrote between waitressing shifts, an Obie nomination, and the inevitable inability to pen a second play.

  Soon, Billie was back in Minneapolis, living in the guest bedroom of Dasha’s warehouse-district loft, humiliated by her failures and determined to play out that narrative for as long as possible. In the meantime, she assisted her mother by logging copyedited changes to The Visigoth Manager: Germanic Paganism in the Workplace, and pretended nothing hurt.

  As Billie walked Cooper down one
of the hallways toward Dasha’s office, she’d said, “Did you know that when you do book deals with certain lady folk singers from the sixties, you have to put into the contract that her hotel rooms will be outfitted with reiki candles and a synthesizer?” She stopped in front of a door and knocked. “Such wisdom I have gained while working here.”

  “Come in,” Dasha commanded. Billie pushed open the door, and promptly disappeared around a corner. Cooper found her mother leaning back in her Herman Miller Aeron chair, feet on desk, glasses atop forehead, Sontag stripe gleaming in the cold glow of energy-efficient lights.

  “Hello, dear.”

  “Hello, Mother.”

  “Please don’t call me ‘Mother.’”

  Cooper did jazz hands and shouted: “Hello, Mommy!” This, at least, produced a smile.

  “Sit down, honey.” Cooper sat in the chair next to the door and waited. Dasha only stared at her, smiling, so Cooper said, “I am now seated.”

  Dasha looked at her searchingly. “Ant-ar-tica?”

  “Antarctica. There’s a C in it.”

  “Polar bears.”

  “Penguins.”

  “Clearly, I need to brush up on my geography skills.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Cooper replied.

  Dasha sighed deeply. “I want you to know that I understand what you’re trying to do, and I give this venture my—”

  “Mom, please, no blessing, no benedictions, no burning sage. I just came to say goodbye. Can we just do ‘goodbye, good luck, I’ll miss you’? I don’t even need the ‘I’ll miss you.’”