Cooper took this opportunity to say goodbye to Denise and Bozer, and approached the galley kitchen with her tray. Pearl was piling a stack of them onto a cart. “Excuse me,” Cooper said. Pearl brushed a stray lock of blond hair out of her face with the back of her wrist and looked at her. “What about those skiers?”
“What about them?” Pearl replied.
“They’re camped outside. VIDS won’t let them eat in the cafeteria.” Pearl frowned, uncertainty darkening her normally sunny face. “They have to eat,” Cooper pressed.
“I know, but I could get in trouble,” Pearl said.
“What about the expired ramen? The Melba toast?”
Pearl leaned back and glanced over her shoulder. “Let me ask Bonnie first.”
As Cooper waited for Pearl to get the head cook’s okay on the mission, she noticed the VIDS staffer watching her from the coffee tureens. Pearl returned and gave Cooper the high sign, before noticing the admin’s owl-like glare. She cleared her throat conspicuously and said somewhat robotically, “Oh, you want to eat at your studio? Let me give you a to-go container.” Together, the women shoveled gratin, slices of meatloaf, canned fruit salad, and carrot sticks into to-go boxes, and eventually the admin turned his attention to a commotion at the tureens: a Fingy cryogenics tech had just learned that neither tureen contained decaf, which had annoyed him, and was then told there was no decaf at the station at all, which destroyed him. While this was happening, Pearl placed the containers into a small cardboard box for Cooper and passed it across the counter. Cooper slipped out the door without being noticed.
Outside, about a hundred yards from the station, Cooper saw a ski planted in the snow with a Swedish flag tossed over it. The flag hung limply, looking hungry.
Cooper kicked at the bottom of the tent with her boot—the winter camper’s doorbell. One of the men unzipped the flap. His wind-burned face took Cooper aback: his skin looked like upholstery.
Inside, it was quickly established that the Swedes’ English was perfect, but they seemed unsure of Cooper’s, so initially they thanked her effusively with much hand-steepling and half-bows. She took a seat on a pack while they devoured the cold food. The younger one wiped his mouth on his sleeve, then apologized for his bad manners. “Will you get in trouble for this?” he asked.
“Maybe,” Cooper said.
“You are a very kind person,” he replied.
“Not really,” Cooper said.
“No, Americans are very friendly,” the older Swede said with conviction, “except for your bureaucrats. But that’s true everywhere.” He rummaged through his pack and pulled out a package of biscuits. He offered it to Cooper; after months of eating these Swedish cookies, his taste for them was lost forever.
“So, why are you guys skiing across Antarctica?” Cooper asked.
The older one gazed back at her. “Why are you here?”
“I’m an artist. I’m here to paint.” Cooper didn’t mention the fact that she’d painted exactly nothing since arriving.
“You must come to South Pole to paint?” the other Swede asked, grinning. Cooper was about to reply when she heard footsteps. She cursed softly, and the Swedes quickly boxed the food back up and slid it under their sleeping bags. When Cooper moved to unzip the tent, the younger Swede motioned her toward the rear. He lifted up a sleeping bag and indicated that she should hide under it. Cooper crawled beneath the bag, nose-first into a rucksack containing their dirty laundry. She tried not to gag.
“Excuse me, fellas,” she heard VIDS admin say. “I’m just looking for a station member.” There was a pause, and Cooper realized the Swedes were pretending not to know English. She envied this ability to disappear from a conversation. “Look, guys, I know she’s here.”
Cooper pushed the sleeping bag off her head and struggled to her feet. The admin rolled his eyes. The Swedes moved closer to Cooper, like protective older brothers, and she nodded at them, letting them know that it was okay. As she inched her way toward the opening, the older one, noticing Cooper had left behind her Swedish biscuits, slipped them into her parka pocket.
The VIDS admin—Cooper saw from the stitching on the front of his parka that his name was Simon—helped her out of the tent, then took her arm, as if they were going for a stroll across the English countryside. “It’s hard to know which end is up when you’re down here for the first time,” he said. Cooper peered into his parka hood, but his face was deep in shadow now that they were outside in the relentless sun. She could only see his pale lips moving as he spoke.
“I’m figuring things out,” Cooper said.
“Yes, I see that. But it’s my job to ensure that you’re figuring them out right. Taking food out of a federal research facility, for example, is against protocol.”
“The Beakers take lunch out to their labs all the time.”
“Please don’t call them Beakers. It’s disrespectful. And the scientists are eating their own lunches, not stealing from our limited food supply and giving it to every foreigner who happens to be passing by.” Cooper looked at him uncomprehendingly. Simon sighed. “Look, I know you were trying to do the right thing, but the protocols are in place to protect life and government property. What if we get into a fix where our food supply flights are delayed and we’re facing a shortage? That food you just gave away could have fed a couple of our support staff. Would you be able to look them in the eye if they had to go hungry?”
By now they had reached the Dome. “Did you receive help from anyone in the kitchen?” Simon asked.
“It was all me,” Cooper said quickly.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“And the to-go containers?”
Cooper hesitated. “I—I took them from the kitchen.”
“You mean you stole them,” Simon said, with the exhaustion of a put-upon parent.
“I guess.”
Simon released her arm. “Cooper, you’re an NSF grantee, so I can’t write you up—I only oversee the support staff, not the feds—but I will have to send a memo to your grant coordinator about this. I’m sorry.”
“What does that mean?”
“It just means that there will be a flag on your file, and if you violate any more policies, they may revisit your grant status.” He stared at Cooper for a long minute, and she realized he wanted her to plead with him not to do this, that the only reason he’d brought up the memo was so he could hear her beg him not to send it. She’d given up begging after David died, so she summoned her inner Bartleby and remained silent as the wind picked up around them. Finally, Simon shrugged his shoulders and walked up the entrance tunnel.
Cooper waited until he had disappeared, and then walked across the ice in the opposite direction. She passed the ceremonial South Pole marker—a line of international flags snapping in the breeze, representing the twelve signatories to the Antarctic Treaty, and a mirrored gazing ball set atop a barber’s pole. This tourist stop wasn’t her destination, though. No, she wanted ninety degrees south—the geographical South Pole, the Pole of her imagination, of David’s.
She could see it in the near distance, a polished copper star set atop a stake rooted to an ice sheet. From orientation, Cooper knew that on New Year’s Day, this marker would be ceremoniously repositioned to account for its annual drift, as the entire station population looked on. The copper star installed the year before would be replaced by another symbolic work of art wrought by one of the Polies. This year, Cooper had learned via the Antarctic Sun, the honor would go to Sal.
But Cooper didn’t care about polar tchotchkes. Back in Denver, Tucker had told Cooper that here she could find some of Robert Falcon Scott’s words printed on a sign speared into the ice. She gazed at the large square sign now. On the left were Roald Amundsen’s bland platitudes, the kind of banalities uttered by those who won races. On the right was a quote from Scott, the words of a man who had given everything, including his life, in his attempt to reach the Pole, only to come in second place to Amund
sen: The Pole. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected.
Son,
I hope your decision to send me the book was not an attempt to gain my acceptance for your lifestyle choice. You won’t get it. We’ve shared some good times in the past—you always did know how to make me laugh. But that’s all behind us now. You’ve made your choice and now I’ve made mine. Our conversation tonight was our last. There will be no more of them. No communications at all. I will not come to visit, and I don’t want you in my house. Have a good Christmas and a good life.
Goodbye.
Leon (Dad)
borderline-borderline
When the contract psychologist told Tucker there was a “borderline” applicant waiting in the office, he took her literally. After all, the job site was almost custom-made to attract people with personality disorders: narcissists, anti-socials, avoidants, dependents. Borderlines. The well-adapted chose McMurdo, the Hampton Inn of Antarctica. The slightly less normal picked Palmer Station. Only the margin-dwellers looked farther inland, toward Amundsen-Scott. It was the most remote research station on the planet, a place you went to become unreachable. This, of course, diminished the pool of applicants, so only those with a documented history of psychiatric disorders were rejected out of hand.
There were three widely accepted behavioral predictors that distinguished a successful polar applicant: emotional stability, industriousness, and sociability. But these traits had to be finely balanced against the necessary component of “crazy” required of a person who would choose to spend months upon months in Antarctica. Furthermore, that person had to be interesting enough for others to want to spend large amounts of time with, but not too “interesting.” Over the years, Tucker had learned that some social skills were more highly valued at Pole than others: intimate familiarity with Settlers of Catan, detailed knowledge of nonconformist zombie-apocalypse scenarios, and the willingness to grow facial hair competitively, to name a few.
As he looked through the applicant files each season, Tucker would wonder how he had slipped by. Not only slipped by, but climbed the ranks quickly, going from site manager to area director in a single season without the relevant experience typically required for a promotion. He knew nothing about carpentry. Less about logistics. Zero about the allocation of limited resources. The Pole veterans assigned to positions under him knew far more than he did about how the station was run, but they had showed no bitterness at his appointment. This worried Tucker, until he realized that he hadn’t been hired for his technical skills. When Karl Martin had offered him a job five years earlier, he’d mentioned Tucker’s “cool gaze” and his powers of observation—both key attributes, apparently, for a successful South Pole station manager. It struck Tucker as bizarre that he had not had to submit to a psychological exam himself.
“Not borderline-borderline,” the psychologist said to Tucker now. “Borderline, as in she’s right on the cut-off.”
“Reason?”
“Fairly recent death in the family.”
“Cancer?”
“Suicide.”
“That’s an automatic DQ.”
The psychologist wrinkled her nose and grimaced. “Yeah, but she’s one of the Artist and Writers Fellows. You know the parameters are a little wider on those applicants. Also, she wouldn’t look at the results. Technically a red flag.”
“That’s a red flag?”
“I know, I actually had to look that up in the manual. No one’s ever not wanted to look before.”
“What did the manual say?”
“That it suggests avoidance.”
Tucker pinched the bridge of his nose. “Naturally. I’ll go see her.”
“Room two twenty-one.”
Tucker walked down a hallway in the Systems and Solutions wing, which was lined with framed photographs of VIDS’s various work sites—the U.S. military’s “enduring bases,” like Kosovo’s Camp Bondsteel, Bosnia’s Eagle Base, and Bagram Airfield outside of Kabul. South Pole Station was considered by VIDS to be part of its “Hostile and Developing Regions” branch, but Tucker was far removed from the military ops. Still, it was not uncommon to see military types—mostly black-ops CIA agents—going into the VIDS offices with the contract psychologists for their own exams. Tucker admired the agents’ taut bodies, their set jaws, their bristle-brush hair.
When Tucker walked into Room 221, he found the borderline case hunched over a compact, attempting to dispatch a zit. It was an image so devastatingly familiar that Tucker felt as if he’d just walked into his childhood bedroom. Her name was Cooper—the kind of unexpected gender flip he found endearing. Tucker looked at her face, the intact blemish, the right eyebrow ever so slightly shorter than the left, her lips pink and full, her rich, dark eyes full of fear. Even with the pimple, she was pretty, but in a took-you-a-minute kind of way.
Before she spoke a word, he knew this would be a close call. But that’s why they’d hired him. He knew how to make close calls. All but one had been successful. There was the metalworker with Asperger’s—VIDS psychologists had argued his eccentricities and wooden personality would cause problems. Instead, the guy had been the most productive metalworker on the team, and was so popular that he’d been voted Equinox King. Then there was the highly skilled maintenance specialist who was a diagnosed bibliomaniac—Tucker had assigned him librarian duties, and filled out thirteen forms, some in triplicate, so the man could sleep in the library. The guy had alphabetized the library within the first week. Bozer, their veteran construction chief, who had been red-flagged one year because of several complaints about his Confederate flag bandanna—both VIDS and the NSF had decided to make Tucker the final arbiter on the matter, because (and of course this was only implied) he was the Only Black Person at South Pole. In interviewing Bozer, Tucker knew he had on his hands a red-blooded clay-eater from the poorest part of South Carolina. But he also knew Bozer was smart and steadfast, a man whose long years of experience in war and on the ice made everyone at Pole safer. Tucker knew that if he gave Bozer an ultimatum—the bandanna or his job—the man would’ve come to Pole with a naked pate, but angry as an adder. He didn’t do that. Instead, he approved Bozer, and his bandanna, and let the admins wonder.
But while VIDS trusted Tucker to make the close calls, even they were worried about Doc Carla. They had not been keen on her. She was considered a “high-risk investment” despite the fact that finding candidates for this particular posting was so notoriously difficult that Karl Martin had called it “a janitor at the porno theater kind of a gig.” The type of board-certified physician who was willing to sojourn in Antarctica for six months, preferably a year, for paltry pay and under extremely difficult work conditions was one whose personality might not be described as “charming.” Tucker assumed this was a known fact, but thanks to the complicated tenure of Jerri Nielsen, the Pole doc who’d diagnosed her own breast cancer and who was widely considered a personable “normal,” the threshold for minimal sociability had been raised (along with the number of release-of-liability forms).
It had not helped Doc Carla’s case that the majority of her practice had, in the years leading up to her posting at South Pole, been focused on drug-addicted prostitutes. It was through this work that Tucker had gotten to know her almost twenty years earlier, and it was how he’d known she’d be the right person for the job. He had been working as a production assistant for a famous documentary filmmaker in New York when he read a short article in the Times about a woman doctor who drove a van around the city, handing out condoms and McDonald’s vouchers to girls who worked the worst strolls. “Check it out for me,” his boss said when Tucker showed him the article. “See if there’s anything there.”
But when Tucker cold-called Doc Carla’s office and mentioned the word documentary, she hung up on him. He called back the next day and, disguising his voice, made an appointment for a hepatitis test. A week later, he arrived at her office, which was located in a brownstone in Alphabet City. Sitting i
n the window was an orange cat, its tail whipping this way and that, its face impassive. When the cat opened its mouth to meow, no sound came out. For some reason, Tucker had always remembered that.
“How old are you, Tucker?” the doctor had asked as Tucker took a seat on her exam table. She tied a piece of rubber hose around his left arm.
“Twenty-five, Dr. Nicks,” he said, keeping his eyes on his veins.
“Call me Doc Carla.” As she tapped the underside of his forearm, she examined his face. The Bell’s palsy, which would render half his face slack and droopy from time to time, had gone away for now, but the acne had not. Tucker averted his eyes from his ugly blue veins.
“Do you engage in high-risk behavior?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you have anal sex with men, do you share needles, do you sleep with hookers?”
“No! I mean, no, I haven’t done that before.”
“Which one?”
“All of them, I guess. Any of them.”
The doctor ran her fingers over the inside of his forearms, looking for good veins. The feel of hands on his body was almost arousing, and Tucker felt ashamed.
“But you’re gay, right?” she said, in a tone Tucker would come to realize was her version of gentle.
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