South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

  Denise shook her head. “No, he’s a walking example of the Black Sheep Effect. In cultural groups, like the one here, people will upgrade certain group members based on culturally desirable traits or likability. Look at Marcy, the heavy machine operator, for instance. Because years on the ice are culturally valuable, Marcy is a high-status individual. Off the ice, that might not be true.” She opened her laptop, and Cooper saw the background photo was set to a photo of Bozer standing on a beach in thermal socks and sandals. “The flip side is that the ‘in-group’ will keep group members who threaten the group’s cohesion on the outside, making them into a separate out-group. A black sheep.”

  “Why would this guy be a black sheep?”

  Denise looked at Cooper, confused. “A climate-change skeptic working at the world’s foremost climatology and atmospheric science research site is not likely to be warmly welcomed by the existing group.”

  So Alarmism and the Climate Change Hoax wasn’t the opposition research material Cooper had assumed it to be. It was actually research material. Pavano. Suddenly all those outraged comments on the “South Pole Pals” message board she’d scanned six months earlier made sense. “Wait, is this the guy who’s trying to prove that the ice under the Pole isn’t all that old and could totally fall in line with the whole Noah’s Flood thing?”

  Denise stared back at her blandly. “No, I believe that’s the working hypothesis of a biblical climatologist in Australia whose name I don’t recall. I don’t know much about Pavano’s research yet, only that his findings set him in direct opposition to the vast majority of climate researchers around the world. The rumors surrounding the provenance of his funding only add fuel to the fire.”

  Everything was coming together now, and Cooper was cheered by the fact that some of the weird social interactions she’d witnessed were starting to seem a little less puzzling. At breakfast a week earlier, for example, people had been talking about how one of the head climate researchers, a paleoclimatologist from Madison named Sri, kept “forgetting” to get “the Denier” a username and password for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet data server. When Sri and his team had hopped a plane for the research camp—known as the Divide—they had removed the Denier’s name from the manifest. It was treated as a joke, and no one was disciplined. But the Denier—Pavano, Cooper now realized—had contacted his congressional sponsor, a Republican senator Cooper thought she’d heard of named Bayless, who promptly called his contact at the NSF, and Pavano was immediately shuttled out to the camp and given full access to the ice archives, the lab, and, at Bayless’s request, Sri’s research site.

  Cooper dropped her brushes in a can of turpentine. “Well, it sounds complicated,” she said as Denise sat down to begin work.

  “All social interaction is complicated, of course, but down here it’s even more so, which is what makes my job so fun,” Denise replied. “I’m waiting to see if metaphorical effects are amplified at a place like Pole. You know, the idea that holding a cup of hot tea makes people feel warmly toward others, or that a person in a high place, like a cherry picker, is seen as being situated farther up the hierarchy. Last year, Lee and Schwartz found that when exposed to a fishy smell, people actually grow suspicious.” Denise glanced over at Cooper. “In sociological terms, you might say that Frank Pavano is a just-opened can of tuna.”

  A very slight smile was the only indication that Denise had made her first joke.

  * * *

  Back at the Jamesways, Cooper found a note under her door from Birdie indicating that there was an artists’ meeting in thirty minutes. Cooper groaned, but she knew Birdie was counting on her to be there. Before leaving her room, she saw her Terra Nova sketch had fallen from the canvas wall, where she’d pinned it. She set it on her desk and studied it for a moment. Her sketches were often the products of procrastination, but Cooper kept coming back to this one—so many times, in fact, that she had completed it. Who knew what it meant? All Cooper knew was that looking at it made her feel better. She pulled on her balaclava and parka for the trek back to the station.

  As she hurried out, she accidentally nudged her pee can with her boot. She heard sloshing and realized she’d have to empty it. If she waited another day, she could have a biological disaster on her hands. Pee cans were one of the many secrets veterans kept from Fingys, but after Cooper’s act of civil disobedience with the Swedes, she’d apparently garnered some social capital; Pearl had left an empty #10 can, once filled with industrial-grade cling peaches, outside the door of Cooper’s room, with a note thanking her for not selling her out to Simon. Now Cooper no longer had to venture outside the Jamesway to use the bathroom, which was located in a separate structure a hundred yards east. However, she still had to walk over there to empty the can into the communal pee barrel.

  Reluctantly, she picked up the can with her mittens and pushed the door open with her shoulder. She immediately collided with a man dressed in full ECW gear and watched as at least a quarter cup of her urine splashed onto his bunny boots. His woolen face mask and neck gaiter muffled his angry roar, and Cooper hurried past him before he could get a good look at her, grateful for the anonymity provided by the balaclava and the darkness of the hall.

  After emptying the can into a barrel and tucking it into a corner to avoid having to return to the Jamesway, she turned to the warped mirror, and cleared a swath through the condensation. It was time to see how she was faring in terms of polar aesthetics. The rule of thumb, she now knew, was that someone who was a “five” off the ice was easily an “Antarctic Ten.” Cooper squinted at her reflection: her infected eye, which had looked like a gelatinous bead for a week, was totally healed. Her hair was so oily it had darkened a few shades—two-minute showers twice a week meant thorough shampooing was now a luxury. Her shaggy bangs fell across her eyes. As she stared at her reflection, she felt she embodied the very definition of the word mediocre. She noticed a waffle crumb in the corner of her mouth, and as she flicked it free, her brother’s face suddenly seemed to inhabit hers, staring back at her through her own eyes. She gripped the sides of the sink to steady her suddenly weak knees and quickly closed her eyes against the image.

  “You meditating or something?” Cooper opened her eyes to see Marcy.

  Cooper brushed her bangs out of her eyes. “Sort of.” It wasn’t three days ago that she’d held Marcy’s hair off her face as she’d puked into a toilet. Cooper thought she looked better.

  “Well, for a second there, I thought you were doing the rosary,” Marcy replied. She seemed as if she wanted to say more. Talking to Marcy was helping. Studying her face helped even more—analyzing the angles of another face obscured David’s—and Cooper saw that although Marcy was only in her late thirties or early forties, her skin was already worn and craggy from her cold weather adventures. Yet her mouth had a sweet downward droop to it, like a baby’s pouchy lips. Her small eyes were almost as dark as Cooper’s, and the lines that radiated from them made her look like a happy Buddhist deity. But right now, the eyes were sad.

  “Thanks for the other day,” Marcy said. “It wasn’t my finest moment.”

  “No worries. I’ve had my share of not-fine moments, too. You’re feeling better?”

  “Yep, fit as a fiddle,” she said tightly. “You got your costume ready for tonight?”

  “Costume?”

  “The Halloween party?”

  “Is that tonight?”

  “Well, it is Halloween.”

  “I lose track of the days.”

  “Just wait until winter, honey.”

  “I don’t have a costume.”

  “Scrounge one up from skua, no biggie.”

  Marcy reached past Cooper and plunged her hand in the plastic bin containing condoms that was replenished daily. “Tonight’s the night to land an ice-husband,” Marcy said. “If you want one.” Cooper thought she saw the sheen of tears in Marcy’s eyes, but they were quickly blinked away. She dropped the condoms into Cooper’s hand. “Get laid, honey. It t
akes the edge off.”

  * * *

  Like everything else at South Pole Station, the gym was located in a trailer. On the outside door was a handwritten poster announcing the first meeting of the American Society of Polar Philatelists: The Harvis Collection in Da’ House at Our Next Meeting! Be There or Be Filled with Aching Regret.

  Inside, Birdie had arranged the folding chairs in a circle. Cooper took the one directly beneath the net-free basketball hoop, and watched as the historical novelist and the interpretative dancer walked in together, not quite holding hands. The literary novelist entered alone, listening to his Discman.

  “Does anyone want to run the meetings?” Birdie asked, brandishing a clipboard. “The Program insists on a group leader.” No one replied, and Birdie tried to hide his pleasure at taking the helm.

  “Could I say something before we start?” the interpretive dancer asked, and Birdie reluctantly granted her the floor. “I’d like to start off this meeting with a haiku that I believe may put this whole strange adventure in perspective.

  “The man pulling radishes

  “Pointed the way

  “With a radish.”

  Birdie looked over at Cooper, but she turned her gaze to the climbing wall to avoid his eyes; she understood that laughter would diminish the power of the radish. Still, the dancer grew frosty at the lack of appreciation, and said crisply, “What are we supposed to be doing at these meetings anyway? I’d like to get a handle on what’s expected of me. I tend toward anxiety, and anxiety is not conducive to creativity.”

  “It can be,” the literary novelist said, fiddling with his Discman. The dancer looked at him with disdain and flicked her long braid over her shoulder.

  “Yes, well, it isn’t for me,” she said.

  “So far as I can tell,” Birdie said, “the Program wants us to meet in an official way once a month and to keep minutes, and then submit them to the officers at the end of this adventure. Why don’t we go around the circle and talk about what we’re working on?”

  “My work deals with the cartographic imperative,” the literary novelist said. The dancer leaned over her knees to look at him.

  “Cartographic imperative? Like, the desire to map things?”

  “Yeah, exactly. Like, why do the people who come down here feel like they have to, you know, name it? Or claim it for their country? I’m really interested in what is behind that motivation.”

  “And what’s the title of your book?” Birdie asked.

  “I’m calling it Mapping the Breath.”

  “Profound,” the dancer said, punctuating her point with the kind of dreamy sigh she’d expected for the radish haiku.

  “Yeah, I was thinking that, like, mapping the breath is pretty much impossible. And cartography in general is such a hubristic endeavor that it’s almost as ridiculous.”

  “But the book itself sounds self-aggrandizing,” Cooper said, before she could stop herself. The tenor of the room changed at once, like a writing workshop suddenly infused with candor. “I mean, at least the title does,” Cooper added. Birdie shook his head slowly, stifling a smile. The literary novelist, loose-limbed and squinty-eyed, squinted at her harder. “Yeah, no, I want feedback,” he said. “I mean, that’s good. In many ways the desire to put a cartographic imprint on land that belongs to all humankind finds a parallel in the canine impulse to mark its territory.”

  The door to the gym opened and Denise walked in, followed by a blast of cold air. Her glasses instantly turned opaque with steam. “Sorry I’m late,” she said as she pulled off her hood. “I’m Denise.”

  “She’s a sociologist,” Cooper added as Denise wrestled off her parka.

  “I was told this would be a closed meeting,” the dancer said stiffly. “I have no interest in being studied.”

  Denise’s plain face radiated serenity. “You needn’t worry—my research interests lie elsewhere, though I do have a casual interest in the Artists and Writers contingent because they have, historically, been even more isolated due to their low social status at the station.”

  “Low social status?” the dancer asked.

  A sound somewhere between a snort and a cat trying to clear a hairball exploded from the historical novelist. “So we’re pariahs,” he said acidly, picking at a mole on his neck.

  “Perhaps I was a little too general.”

  “But low social status means no one likes us,” the dancer said.

  “Well, in layman’s terms, I suppose that would be a fair characterization,” Denise said. “Though the term superfluous would be more accurate.”

  “This makes me really anxious,” the dancer said to the historical novelist.

  “Put it in your work,” he said soothingly.

  Cooper smiled. Put it in your work. This had always been her father’s standing advice. Maybe this was the standing advice all exasperated relatives or spouses gave to agitated artists. My first date ever stood me up, Dad. Put it in your work. I made a really bad decision having to do with a vending-machine salesman/artisanal tobacconist/urban shaman last night. Put it in your work. And it was true, Cooper thought. You could put it in your work, and you did, but then the work itself became nothing more than a hall of mirrors, reflecting back all the crappy things that had happened, or which you had made happen, in your life. That was why she’d stopped painting when David was sick. Who needed a mirror when the only thing reflected was loss after loss? She dropped her hand into her pocket, her fingers searching for the vial. She found it and ran her thumb over the serrated edges of its childproof cap.

  “Cooper?” Birdie said. She withdrew her hand quickly and looked up. The artists were watching her expectantly. Next to her, Denise scribbled something in her notebook. Out of the corner of her eye, Cooper saw Thousand-yard stare—already? written in the margin.

  “Sorry,” she said. “So, I’m a painter, though since I got here, I’m not sure anymore.” There were a couple of appreciative chuckles. “Actually, I probably shouldn’t even call myself an artist. A professor once told me that you can’t be cynical and artistic, that these traits are diametrically opposed. He said I was cynical. And I guess I am.” Hard, actually—“hardened by premature success” were her professor’s exact words. Artists had to be porous, he’d said, like sponges, capable of soaking things up and releasing them. If you were a stone, you could do nothing but take up space. And while a sponge could become a stone, a stone could never become a sponge. “So I’m finding the polar landscape challenging to capture because I don’t want to do dead-explorer stuff or glaciers, and I definitely don’t want to go the route of putting incongruous, unexpected man-made stuff on the ice, like I’ve seen in other polar art. That feels sort of didactic.”

  “I actually think that sounds interesting,” the literary novelist said. “Like painting a Walmart on the polar cap to make a point?”

  “Too obvious,” Cooper said.

  The literary novelist looked at his nails. “I didn’t realize visual artists were interested in subtlety.”

  As the conversation continued around her, Cooper began wishing that someone would appear and point the way—with a radish, a compass, a finger, it didn’t matter. She just wanted someone to tell her how to move forward.

  * * *

  After the meeting ended, Cooper stepped out of the gym, and saw a commotion near the door of a construction office at the other end of the trailer. A knot of people, including Pearl, were doing a little dance. Cooper noticed Sal standing with them. “I’ll come to the recital but I’m not taking the class,” she heard him say.

  “What’s happening?” Cooper called down to him.

  He seemed surprised to see her, but quickly assumed a look of nonchalance. “Hey, it’s Frida Kahlo,” he said, walking toward her. “Make yourself useful and paint me something I won’t want to drop-kick to Vostok.”

  “Something with tater tots?” Cooper replied.

  “Oh, if you got into tot art and you were any good, I’d marry you.”

/>   “Why are the girls all excited?”

  “Dave’s in from McMurdo.”

  “Dave?”

  “Dave’s dance class? The most popular rec class in the history of the Program?” He noted Cooper’s skepticism. “It’s kind of a big deal. Starts Thursday, if you’re interested.”

  “Nothing could induce me to go to Dave’s dance class.”

  “Fingy, when you can’t walk your dog, mow your lawn, get a coffee at the place where you know the guy who makes it, you will begin to find dance class with Dave appealing. And if Dave doesn’t show up for the dance class, you’ll go apeshit. You have the expectation that he will be there and he better well keep his fucking commitments, because Dave’s dance class is all you’ll have to hold on to down here once those doors close for the winter.”

  All this bluster, but he was grinning. “And now I have to keep my own commitment to show up at the Smoke Bar and get wasted before the Halloween party. Adios.” He turned and began walking away.

  “Where’s the Smoke Bar?”

  “Winter-overs only,” Sal called over his shoulder.

  “Come on.”

  He stopped walking. “All right, Fingy. Follow me.”

  Smoke Bar was located on the second floor of the galley trailer. Cooper had heard about the Smoke Bar, but had never been able to suss out its exact location. All the summer workers and most of the scientists congregated at the other bar, 90 South, which was the Señor Frog’s of Antarctica. Smoke Bar was Chumley’s—back when you had to be somebody to get in. Gaining entry to the Smoke Bar was, Cooper understood, a privilege.

  When they reached the top of the metal stairs, Sal blocked the door and turned to look at Cooper. “You’re about to enter a very delicate ecosystem, so when we get in, go sit with Tucker, who will be drinking vodka neat at the table under the dart board. I’ll introduce you to the Beakers when it makes sense. They get excited and weird around ladies, seeing as they’re in such short supply here. I have to manage their expectations.” Cooper knew Sal was bullshitting, but she didn’t mind. He pushed the door open with his shoulder and let Cooper enter.