South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

  Finally, after an inning and three glasses of samogon, Alek stretched his mantis-like arms and sighed. “So,” he said. “Information. I have some. Pavano agrees to debate.”

  “Who?” Pearl asked.

  “The climate skeptic,” Cooper said.

  “Please don’t call him a skeptic,” Sal said. “All scientists are born skeptics. Pavano is not practicing science.”

  “Debates are against regulations,” Dwight said. “If he’s going to talk, he has to call it a lecture.”

  “This would be incorrect term to use,” Alek said, as Kirby Puckett adjusted his cup on the edge of the batter’s box. “Pavano doing presentation on climate change would be like lecture on baby dolls.”

  “I did a lecture on quilt making last month,” Pearl offered.

  “Yes, but you didn’t advertise a lecture on quilt making that was really a lecture on Bigfoot,” Sal said.

  “I’d go to a lecture on Bigfoot in a hot second,” Dwight said.

  “I’d go to one on baby dolls,” Pearl replied.

  “Guys, you’re not helping,” Sal said.

  Cooper knew from Worst Journey that there was a great tradition of lecturing at South Pole. On the Scott expedition, everyone had been expected to produce a discourse on a topic that could be considered a specialty. In addition to being a fine physician, Edward Wilson was a brilliant artist, and he lectured on sketching. Debenham on volcanoes. Titus on “horse management”—even after all the ponies had died, his ideas on equine caregiving were apparently still worth hearing. Eighty-plus years later, lectures continued to be popular events at Pole, except now the talks were about things like “Subglacial Lake Properties on Polar Plateaus” and “Crafting with Crown Royal Bags.”

  Alek informed everyone that Sri had approached Pavano at Midrats and asked if he’d consider a lecture on his ongoing research so the rest of the station could understand what was behind the “controversy.” Pavano had refused to go into specifics, citing his sponsoring university’s confidentiality policy, but had agreed to a big-picture presentation, with time for Q&A. This kind of setup could easily be turned into a debate if the moderator was game.

  As Dwight and Pearl were discussing the ethics of this bait-and-switch, Sal suddenly sat up and said, “I have a new rule: if you refuse to accept the central tenets of science and insist on trying to destroy science education in our schools, then you don’t get to benefit from it. Turn in your iPod, throw away your computer, and no more vaccines for you. Live by your principles. Also, no synthetic fibers. That’s in the Bible.”

  “Well, I don’t even believe in vaccines,” Dwight said.

  “You had to get them before you came down here,” Pearl said.

  “I know. I’m just saying I don’t believe in them.”

  On the television, fifty thousand homer hankies waved in unison as Kirby Puckett chugged around the bases.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until mid-December that Cooper next saw Frank Pavano, fumbling with his parka in front of the clinic.

  “Hey,” she said. He looked up at her, startled. “I’ve been looking for you. You’ve dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “I’ve been out at the Divide for much of the last month,” Pavano said. He successfully zippered his parka. “I’m on my way to the shortwave carol sing. Do you want to carol?”

  “You like caroling?”

  “I find I’m in the Christmas spirit.”

  Together, they walked to Comms. This trading of carols was another Antarctic tradition, along with the Christmas tree the ironworkers built out of metal scraps, a collection of aluminum glistening in the twenty-four-hour sunlight. When Pavano and Cooper arrived, they found twelve other people in ridiculous hats crowded around a shortwave radio. This motley crew of Polies, named the Singing Skuas, sang mangled hymns into the radio to the McMurdo station choir—the Mactown Madrigals—who had been rehearsing since September and were therefore tools. Both groups hoped their carols also reached some of the field camps scattered across the continent, including the ice-coring climate camp on the Divide.

  A man wearing angel wings and a halo on a wire handed Cooper and Pavano sheet music, and the group began singing. “The Twelve Days of Christmas” to modified lyrics. “Twelve berms a-growing, eleven carps a-siding, ten waste pallets weighing, nine galley slaves cooking, eight smokers lounging, seven loaders loading, six congressional delegations, FIVE FLIGHTS A DAY! Four tourist herds, three expired condoms, two thermal gloves, and a glacier sparrow in an aluminum tree!” Cooper was surprised to learn that Pavano had a beautiful, crystalline singing voice.

  “Are you coming to my presentation this weekend?” Pavano asked as they pulled on their parkas.

  “I’ll be there. Are you going to talk about your research?”

  “I’m going to talk about my ice-core analysis and the so-called climate crisis. The scientific staff offered me an opportunity.” He halted and analyzed her frowning face. Cooper was reminded of the smoking computer icon her Macintosh would display during an irreparable failure. “You seem skeptical,” he continued haltingly. “Don’t worry. I’m used to hostile audiences. Perhaps I can change one person’s ideas about my work.”

  But Cooper thought his words came out like a series of deflated balloons. “You don’t have to do it, you know.”

  “I want to,” Pavano insisted. He looked at the ceiling and seemed to be searching for a thought. Finally, he said, “I’m clued in. I’ve seen the T-shirts, I’ve seen the drawings in the game room. I know what they say.”

  “So you know they’re trying to trap you into a debate,” Cooper said.

  Pavano nodded. “In fact, I’m glad people care so much. Climate change will become a central policy point in the next few years.” He pulled on his reflective snow goggles.

  “Come on, let’s go look at the Christmas tree.”

  They walked down the entrance tunnel in silence for a few minutes, the sounds of their breath coming through their face masks almost in sync. Outside, Cooper blinked against the sun, then looked across the ice through her goggles, toward the great invisible boundary that separated the six-month day from the six-month night. She thought about the catalog of polar art she’d studied on the flight from Los Angeles to Auckland—some of the painters had chosen to paint the explorers, but they made certain their work underscored the great hubris of these adventurers, not their heroism. The painter who’d depicted Shackleton’s ship listing in the hard-packed blue ice had taken care to emphasize the continent’s triumph over the “cartographic imperative,” by making the men translucent. But, in fact, the vast majority of the work deemed resonant enough for inclusion in the catalog had been nearly featureless, experiments in light, shade, and variations of blue and white using acrylic and ink. Oil, it appeared, was passé, as was chiaroscuro: the place was too flat, too dead-seeming, for body.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Cooper said. She pointed at the horizon with her mitten. “What do you see when you look out there?” Pavano gazed at the smoking ice—a light wind had lifted the top layer of snow. “I’m supposed to see something profound,” Cooper continued. “I’m supposed to translate this profound thing through art. But to me, it just looks like snow.”

  Pavano considered the plateau, his arms hanging slack by his sides. In his stillness, his profile seemed to Cooper to take on the aspect of bas-relief. He was Lincoln on the penny.

  “Just as I thought. Impossible,” she finally said, and began walking again. Pavano didn’t walk with her.

  “Wild horses,” he said.

  “Wild horses?”

  “Yes, to me, the sastrugi over there looks like a herd of wild horses. Running into the wind, just about to leap into the high prairie grass. Frozen, naturally.”

  Cooper looked at Pavano, surprised. “I’d give that a B-plus.”

  “You’re a tough grader.”

  “Should I grade on a curve?”

  “Only if it’s not the Keeling Curve,”
Pavano said, and chuckled. Cooper resolved to look up the Keeling Curve later. They walked a little farther in silence. “Have you been out to the ice-coring camp yet?” he asked. “Ah. No, of course you haven’t. What I meant to say was that you should come out to the ice-coring camp. It’s a slightly different icescape. It might jog something loose, perhaps provide some inspiration.”

  “That’d be nice, but they’re not handing out Airbus rides to tourists like me.”

  Pavano seemed to think about this for a moment. “Then come as my research assistant.” Cooper laughed, but Pavano continued. “I’m entitled to one, though they haven’t exactly made it easy for me to find a willing volunteer. Currently, I’ve been assigned one of Sri’s research techs, though she’s made it clear that she has no interest in being part of my project.”

  “I don’t think they’d allow me to get anywhere near the site. And anyway, I don’t know how to do research.”

  “Isn’t this research?”

  “What, taking a walk?”

  “Metaphorically, all research is a long walk.”

  “And all great literature is set in Madison County,” Cooper replied.

  They reached the Pole marker. Just a few feet downwind was the Christmas tree. At the very top, a snowflake of aluminum nuts sparkled in the sunlight.

  “I find myself thinking of that tree as I fall asleep at night,” Pavano said. “It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”

  Cooper regarded the tree for a moment, then Pavano. “If you can get me on the manifest, then I’ll go,” she said. Pavano turned his radiant face to Cooper and smiled. His smile plucked something deep inside her, and a feeling—familiar and yet out of reach—washed over her. Her heart began to pound and she silently recited, The urge to jump reaffirms the urge to live.

  She left Pavano without saying goodbye and hurried toward the machine shop, praying to find it empty. It was deserted, and she slunk between a grader and a bulldozer. Her face was numb and her fingers felt only half there: she could bend them, but even bent they felt as if they were straight. She rubbed her mittens together, but this did little to distract her from the powerful feeling that had overcome her as she stood with Pavano. The urge to jump, she told herself again, affirms the urge to live. This had been drilled into her head by different therapists, who told Cooper the feeling was common, that it even had a name: high-place phenomenon. The desire to throw oneself off a building was the brain’s misinterpretation of the instinctual safety signal. But at the time she had first encountered the impulse, it did not feel like a signal. It seemed very much like a voice. Cooper and David had just turned eighteen. He’d been strange for two years, but had not yet been accurately diagnosed. The first diagnoses—attention-deficit disorder, generalized anxiety, bipolar disorder—had initially inspired hope, but had faded like fireworks. This was the twilight time, before things became clear. They were, all of them, standing atop the Dahl Violin Shop in downtown Minneapolis—Billie, Dasha, and Bill in the background, Cooper and David standing at the edge of the roof. Below them, the Aquatennial parade streamed past. The Queen of Lakes sat perched atop her float like a doll.

  The impulse to leap off the edge seized her without warning. It was a drumbeat, a song. Her mouth went dry, and it felt as if her limbs were filled with sand. It was the most powerful feeling she’d ever experienced. She gripped David’s hand, and he looked over at her in surprise.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I kind of want to jump off,” she whispered. “I don’t know why.”

  David turned back to the parade. “Because he’s telling you to,” he replied coolly. “Don’t worry—I hear him, too. There’s only one way to make it stop, you know.”

  Goose bumps rose on her forearms. Here was confirmation. The faceless thief had taken him.

  A snowmobile careened through the shed, sending a shower of snow crystals over Cooper’s head, and she forced herself to begin walking back toward the station. Nothing about Pavano was like David. Nothing, except their loneliness.

  * * *

  Cooper spent the hours leading up to Pavano’s presentation trying to realize in oils a sketch she’d made after her walk with him. The colors combined to create too-dark grays and Disney-like blues. Everything was contrasty and obvious. And, again, everything was flat. She turned to the portrait of Tucker she’d begun on Halloween. She’d sketched most of the painting out on the canvas already, and had gotten as far as the right eye with her oils. But now the eye was too big: it dominated the canvas grotesquely. After staring at it for a few moments, Cooper realized that of course it was supposed to be grotesque. She grabbed her eraser and briskly removed the rest of the sketch, including the weak attempt to capture Tucker’s sharp facial structure, the unintentionally cubist lips, and the left eye that was not only smaller than the right, but also oddly shaped. In erasing, she felt she’d accomplished enough to soak her brushes in turpentine and head to the galley for Pavano’s presentation.

  When she got there, the room was packed with Polies—even the artists had shown up. Cooper took an empty seat next to Sal and Sri, whose messy thatch of black hair and tired eyes suggested he had clearly spent too many hours squinting at ice cores. Dwight, who was handling the moderating duties, tapped the microphone twice, then said, “Icebreaker to start.” When everyone laughed, he looked around, puzzled.

  “Dwight is deaf to puns,” Sal whispered to Cooper.

  Dwight cleared his throat, and tried again. “Tell us a personal thing about yourself, Pavano. And by the way,” he added, looking out at the audience, “each questioner will have to do the same when he asks his question.”

  “I enjoy Rollerblading,” Pavano said.

  “What’s the worst thing about Rollerblading, Pavano?” Floyd called from the back, where he sat with Marcy. “Telling your mom you’re gay!” The room exploded with laughter.

  “Careful, Floyd,” Simon, the VIDS admin, warned.

  Dwight pulled a scrap of paper from a small pile on the table in front of him. “Okay, first question goes to my lovely companion, Bonnie.”

  Bonnie got to her feet. “My name is Bonnie and a personal thing about myself would be that I am the head cook here and that I hate vegetarians because they make my life difficult. And then my question is: What’s up with ice cores, and why is everyone mad?”

  The audience tittered.

  “I think I understand your question, Bonnie,” Pavano said, with a voice that possessed all the treble and pitch of a window air conditioner. “You are interested in the controversy surrounding ice-core analysis.”

  “Sure,” Bonnie said. Next to Cooper, Sri bounced in his chair, and Sal placed a hand on his friend’s knee.

  “Prevailing scientific opinion states that ice cores will reveal patterns of climate change,” Pavano continued, “even evidence of volcanic eruptions. However—”

  “Look, most of us understand basic ice-core analytics, right?” Sri burst out, wrenching around in his seat to look at everyone in the audience.

  “Here we go,” Sal murmured.

  “Drill down a million feet, take out an ice core, look at the rings, analyze. Summers get warm, so the ice melts and you get clear layers. Winters, no melt, you get snow layers, a milky layer, and you look at the air bubbles trapped in the layers. People who have dedicated their lives to analyzing these cores know what they are looking at; they know how to interpret the data.”

  Pavano cleared his throat. “What Dr. Niswathin is saying is that it is widely assumed—and I use the word assumed intentionally—that each ring pair, the clear ring and the milky ring taken together, account for a single year: the clear ring accumulates during the summer season and the milky ring appears at the conclusion of a winter season. That’s how you get estimates of a hundred thirty-five thousand years of ice data. But on what evidence do we base our assumption that each pair represents a year?”

  “It’s rather obvious,” Sri said.

  “That is the
fallback position of the researcher with bad data,” Pavano replied with a smoothness that Cooper hadn’t thought possible. “I’m not here to debate geology, of course, but if the earth is billions of years old,” he continued, “why isn’t there more ice at the North and South Poles? Is the earth, as you posit, billions of years old, or is there any chance the polar ice cores show us that other models might have some validity? If they do, what does that say about your team’s climate-change research?”

  One of the climatologists on Sri’s team raised her hand. “Before this, you were a vocal proponent of intelligent design. Intelligent design is not a scientifically accepted theory. You don’t even believe in the validity of radiometric dating.”

  “I am often surprised by the parochialism of mainstream science,” Pavano replied.

  Sal leaned forward in his seat. “And I’m surprised that the oil industry landed a bought scientist at a federal research facility.”

  “Are you suggesting that I manipulate my conclusions to align with the financial interests of my funding source?”

  “I’m saying that you and whoever signs your checks are making a cottage industry out of global warming denial because the money’s good.”

  “If I were willing to alter my views to ingratiate myself with a funding source, I’d be an extremely vocal proponent of so-called global warming, seeing as most of the grant money seems to go to researchers who take man-made causation as fact. As I’ve argued with you before, there is nothing unscientific about looking for other explanations. But let’s step into your line of expertise: the origins of the universe.”

  For a moment, the men shared a look that betrayed some level of intimacy, and everyone in the galley caught it.

  “Sounds like a desperate ploy to distract from your poor science, but go ahead,” Sal said.

  “Time and time again, scientists like you have failed to provide any meaningful explanation of how the universe began. You can tell us what it looked like; you can tell us how it was done. You can’t tell us why.”