South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

  “Believe in it? I thought it was a done deal.”

  “Not a done deal. Not yet. I don’t buy the inflationary theory of the origins of the universe. I like a different model. I like the one that says there wasn’t a Big Bang. That the universe is not infinitely expanding. That our universe collides against another universe—a brane—every few trillion years and this spurs something that looks like a ‘big bang’ but is really a big bounce. The theory is completely compatible with every finding now held up as evidence for the inflationary theory, completely in line with what the WAMP satellite has detected. In fact, our models—the inflationary theory and the cyclic model, which is what my model is called—are like twins. They share 99.99 percent of their DNA. Only their mother can tell them apart. But if Lisa finds b-modes, the cyclic model is smoke.”

  “What if she doesn’t find them?”

  “If she doesn’t, those waves are too small to measure, and all those temp fluctuations and galaxy seeds were created in a process gentler than the violent expansion the inflationists promote. The cyclic model is like the lover’s kiss of cosmology. In my opinion, it’s the most compelling scientific theory outside of gravity and evolution.”

  “Then why does it seem like you’re the only one who believes it?” Cooper said. Sal looked discomposed.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said. “That’s not how science works. But I find it compelling enough to devote my life to it. The inflationary theory has serious conceptual problems. It’s extravagant, for one thing—about as fine-tuned as a Beverly Hills housewife. It also dabbles in the anthropic—it takes life into account—and that moves it from physics to metaphysics.”

  There was an opening here, Cooper thought, one she could slip through by asking a big but simplistic question. She wanted to connect with him in a way that went beyond their moment in the library. She decided to go for it. “How can something come from nothing?”

  It was clear at once that Sal was irritated, but Cooper didn’t know why. “And there’s the metaphysics, right on cue,” he said.

  “I’m just asking a question,” Cooper said, confused.

  Sal looked at her for a moment. “Ah, I see now. You’re not asking me how it happened. You’re asking me who pulled the trigger.” He turned away and tinkered with the telescope. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  He looked over at Cooper. “Nothing. It’s just—I think you’re spending too much time with Pavano. These are his questions, not yours. Dumb questions are not attractive.”

  Cooper felt humiliated. Blistering heat coursed through her body. “Well, since I live each day in service to what you find attractive, I’m devastated.”

  Sal stared at her in surprise—Cooper herself was surprised—and both fell silent.

  “Why is it so hard to talk to you?” he finally said.

  “You brought me out here so I’d ask questions, right? Or did you just want me to ooh and ahh over your big telescope? I asked a question because I’m interested. In this. In you. You’re telling me you and Alek sit out here and talk about the minutia of the beginnings of the universe and it never occurs to you to ask how it started?”

  “That’s all we do.”

  “No, I mean how it started before it started.”

  “And I am answering your question with precision: the universe is cyclic, it is built and destroyed, and then it is rebuilt. It bumps up against another world, from which we are separated by a dimension, and this sets off a bounce, what inflationists call the Big Bang.”

  “Before that. Before any of it, Sal.”

  “These are questions every kindergartener asks, Cooper.”

  “Have they gotten an answer yet?”

  Sal started pacing the metal scaffold. “You know what gets old real quick? People trying to ask if there’s a god in about a hundred different ways. Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds to someone who knows what the universe actually looks like? Is it my job to pretend like we’re all on equal footing here, that we’re all smart and all of our answers are equal and we all get certificates just for showing up? That may work in art, Cooper, but that doesn’t work in the real world. Science doesn’t work that way.”

  He studied Cooper for a moment, and then seemed to grow remote. “Oh, I see. It’s meaningless to you because it doesn’t take you into account.” He laughed. “I know exactly what you want me to say. That your precious ‘Big Bang’ was the eye of god opening. When I don’t play your game, you ask me if I can prove that it wasn’t. Here’s a real question for you: Would you even want me to tell you if I could?”

  Cooper and Sal stood staring at each other. Cooper could see both certainty and fear looking back at her, until Sal blinked, and only certainty remained.

  * * *

  At the Smoke Bar that night, Cooper sat in silence with Birdie, watching Floyd and a contract plumber grind against a dining assistant to the strains of Electric Hellfire Club.

  “Quit hogging the girl,” the plumber shouted at Floyd.

  “Has anyone seen Sal?” one of his research techs called from the door.

  “He’s up in El Dorm fucking that cargo handler,” Floyd replied.

  “No, I just saw him in the library,” Denise shouted from the bar.

  “You’re seeing things, then,” Floyd said, “because he’s definitely getting his cargo handled right now.”

  Sal’s research tech grinned sheepishly and walked out.

  If Cooper hadn’t already been completely soused, the exchange would have stung. Instead, she turned her attention to a half-full beer on the table that did not seem to have an owner. She drained it and set it back down. Next to her, Birdie slowly pushed the bottle away with his index finger.

  “Well,” he said, “unless I’m much mistaken, I’ve just witnessed a moment of desperation,” he said. “What’s wrong, Cherry?”

  Cooper responded by pushing back her chair and getting another beer from the bar. She wandered around, pausing at various tables, and after downing a Jägermeister beer bomb with the contract plumber, walked up to Floyd and began an impassioned but incoherent defense of Larry McMurtry.

  He merely waved her off. “Go sober up, honey.”

  She sauntered back to Birdie’s table, but he was in deep conversation with Pearl now, so she decided to lay down on the floor and rest her eyes. Some time later, she found Tucker looming above her like a monument—he was wearing sunglasses, and in them, Cooper saw herself, twice. She realized she was using someone’s bunny boot—Birdie’s?—as a pillow. A new face appeared next to Tucker’s—an unfamiliar pink face with a mouth like an earthworm. “Are you okay, love?” The face swam in and out of view, and it wasn’t until she noticed the surplice that Cooper realized it was the chaplain in from Palmer Station.

  “I’m okay,” she slurred. “Just wanna sleep.” She dropped her head back against Birdie’s bunny boot with a thud. The next thing she knew, Tucker was hauling her to her feet.

  “I’ll escort her to her room,” she heard Tucker say to the chaplain.

  “Encourage her to come talk to me tomorrow, will you,” he said. “Best to cut these problem drinkers off at the pass, I think.”

  “Come on,” Tucker whispered in Cooper’s ear. He dressed her in her ECW, and escorted her down the stairs and across the Dome. As she emerged from the entrance tunnel, the crisp, thin air seemed to slap her halfway sober. Like a riderless horse galloping over a hill, vague but searing shame appeared and overtook her. She summoned every shred of competence she had to put one boot in front of the other.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t be. Public intoxication is an occupational hazard.”

  “You have my paperwork. You know I’m not a drunk.”

  “Situational alcoholism is a documented disorder,” Tucker replied.

  “And it’s not even cold,” Cooper cried, as she blinked into the sunlight. “I’m at South fucking Pole and I’m not even cold!”

  “It’s thirty degrees bel
ow zero.”

  Cooper shook off Tucker’s grip and skipped across the snow. She stumbled and fell face-first, her reflexes too slow to break her fall. Tucker turned her over and looked down into her hood.

  “I’m going insane,” Cooper heard herself say.

  “You know what Foucault says,” Tucker replied. “Madness can be silenced by reason.”

  This comment hit Cooper like a steel-tipped ice chopper to the head. She scrambled to her feet and pushed Tucker with both hands. “Take that back!” An expression of shock passed over Tucker’s face, quickly replaced by sadness. Cooper pushed him again. “It’s reason that is silenced by madness, and you know it. Take it back!”

  Suddenly, Tucker gathered her into his arms, into a firm, bigger-than-the-sky embrace. “Forgive me, Cooper,” he said. Then, just as suddenly, he pushed her away and turned back toward the station.

  The Jamesway was deserted. At her door, Cooper found a small package, wrapped in brown paper. She tucked the package under her arm and shouldered her way into the room. She successfully unzipped her parka on the third try before sitting down to work off her damp long johns and assorted underclothes.

  Once she’d stowed her ECW, she opened the package. It contained a bottle of Scotch. A note was included, which was decorated by an amateurish but endearing drawing of two penguins. The penguins were regarding each other from across an ice crevasse. The note, written in immaculate but minuscule print, read, In hopes of inspiration. (They say Scotch was the drink of choice at Scott’s Hut.) Thank you for your kindness. My invitation to the Divide still stands. You’re on the manifest if you want to be. Frank Pavano.

  Placing the note from Pavano on her desk, she picked up the old Tylenol vial. She ran her thumb over the cap, thought about opening it, then decided against it, setting it next to the compass. She lay down on her bed with her boots on to wait for the room to stop spinning, and after about an hour, it did. She staggered over to her desk and laid a blank piece of paper on it. She stared at its brilliant whiteness for so long that iridescent green specks began flying across the page. Finally, she picked up a sharpened pencil and began sketching.

  Fifteen minutes later, she had a crude drawing of a vending-machine charm in the shape of Frank Pavano. It was the first drawing she’d completed since the last mitten in the triptych, and it was that fact, rather than any merit inherent in the sketch itself, that calmed Cooper’s nerves.

  She heard the door to the Jamesway open at the end of the hall. The squeak of bunny boots echoed down the corridor until the footsteps stopped at her door. The sound of heavy mittens being removed was followed by a confident knock.

  “You decent?”

  “Wait,” Cooper said. “Just—hold on.” She struggled into her thermals and tucked the sketch she’d done of Pavano between the pages of Worst Journey. Finally, she opened the door to find Sal in his green parka and gaiters, frost on his eyebrows and his beard. He pushed his hood off his head with his forearm.

  “Tucker told me you got obliterated at the Smoke Bar. He asked me to check on you.”

  “He’s exaggerating. I’m fine. As you can see.”

  “Well, I told him I’d check on you. So I’m checking on you.” He glanced around her room. “Can I come in?”

  Cooper stepped aside to let him pass. He spotted the Scotch and picked it up.

  “Mackinlay’s?” There was reverence in his voice. “Where’d you get this?”

  “It was a thank-you gift.”

  Sal looked over at Cooper. “From who?”

  “Pavano.”

  “Frank Pavano gave you this?”

  “There was a note. It’s on the desk.”

  Sal read it, then tossed the sketch back on the desk. “He offers you ‘inspiration’?” The ice groaned beneath the Jamesway, shifting.

  “I’ll take what I can get,” Cooper said.

  “Why is Pavano sending you gifts?”

  “I think this is his way of being human.”

  “In my line of work, sharing research is like swapping bodily fluids, so I’m sure it’s the same with art. Not that this is art.” Then he saw Cooper’s sketch of the Terra Nova taped to the wall. “Now this—this looks like art,” he said. He leaned close to it, his eyes roaming from the ship’s figurehead to its masts and riggings. “This is fucking intricate, Cooper. You did this?”

  Cooper stepped next to him. “It’s the Terra Nova. The Scottish whaler Scott brought to Pole.”

  “Holy shit,” he said softly. He turned to look at her. “This is good, Cooper.”

  “You can have it,” Cooper said, not quite knowing why she said it. “I mean, if you want it.”

  “Of course I want it.”

  Cooper reached across him to remove the sketch from the wall, and as she did so she felt she was toeing the edge, the parade passing by below her. She handed him the sketch and he set it on the desk without taking his eyes off her face. He touched her cheek with his cold hands like she was the most fragile thing on earth. They stood like this for what felt to Cooper like hours, and yet she had no desire to break their silence, or even move. Suddenly, Sal inhaled sharply and shook his head. “I’m just going to say it: I think you’re beautiful and I want to be near you. Can that be enough?”

  Cooper responded by leaning into him and, hesitatingly, kissing his mouth. She pulled back to see if this had been a welcome gesture, but his eyes were closed.

  She sat on the edge of her bed and watched as Sal dropped to a knee in front of her and began unlacing her bunny boots, unthreading the laces through the eyelets unhurriedly. Once he’d pulled off her boots, he held her feet in his hands and looked up at her. “You should be wearing your blue boots,” he said mildly. “They don’t get your socks wet.”

  Then he helped her pull her long underwear over her head, and each time his cold hands brushed her skin, it seemed like getting a good deep breath was impossible. A sense of urgency began to rise up and grip Cooper as Sal undressed her. She scooted back on the bed to make room for him, and watched as he pulled his overall straps off his shoulders, like Cooper imagined a lumberjack might.

  But as he reached for his belt, something changed in his expression—he looked at her as if seeing her for the first time, and froze. His suspenders hanging off his waist, and his blue thermal stained with old sweat, the cuffs pushed up to his elbows, he pulled away. He shook his head twice, like he was shaking off a blow.

  “Oh god, what?” Cooper said. She looked down at her bare arms and curled into herself, drawing her knees up to her chest. Sal’s back was now against the canvas door.

  “I don’t know,” he said, his voice strange. “Something’s wrong about this. I’m confused.”

  His eyes searched the room, landing on everything but Cooper’s face. Then they found the compass, the antique compass—baroque, incongruous, but necessary. “The compass,” he said. “Who brings an antique compass to Pole?”

  “Who cares?” Cooper said weakly.

  “No, it says something. It means something,” Sal said. “It’s messing me up.” Cooper didn’t believe him. Of course it wasn’t the compass. They both knew this was a lie. The compass, with its dumb glass face, was itself a lie Bill had told Cooper again and again since the day he’d dropped it in her hands—that it was all you needed to navigate yourself to safety.

  As she watched Sal pulling his suspenders back over his shoulders, Cooper realized there was no longer a reason not to reveal that lie—no reason not to step off the precipice, and no one to stop her from doing it. So she told him about Saganaga, how it had been during the trip to the Boundary Waters with Billie and their father two months after David was found that Cooper had gone wandering, gotten lost. She’d stumbled back into camp around ten at night, her panic long since replaced by indifference to her fate. Billie was already in her sleeping bag. Bill had been chopping wood; he hardly looked up. “You had a compass and you had our coordinates,” he’d said, as if she’d only been out to use the latrine. “Obvi
ously, you don’t know how to use either.”

  The next morning, Cooper awoke to find he’d designed a compass course outside of camp. There was a log. Then, ten feet away, a stone. About two yards from that was a Nalgene bottle. Past that, the small wooden box containing David’s ashes.

  “I decided last night,” Bill said. “It’s up to you to get us to Lake Gray. You have the map and you have the compass. If we’re not there in two days, we turn back. He remains in the box.” Cooper had no time to absorb her father’s anger before he roughly shoved the antique compass into her hands. He then grasped her shoulders and positioned her until she faced the woods. “What does it say now?”

  “North.”

  “Wrong.”

  “Who cares,” Billie said sleepily from the door of the tent. “That’s what GPS is for.” But something inside Cooper, a half-buried but strong and relentless feeling, took hold of her and said, I care.

  But they never got to Lake Gray, not that time, and Cooper held the box in her lap the entire drive home.

  All this Cooper told Sal not because she wanted him to understand her—it no longer mattered what he thought about her—but because she wanted him to know that, even if the compass was a lie, she was not. She told him about Cherry and Titus, about her imaginary journeys with David, how Edgar Allan Poe had infected his vision of South Pole, and how she’d come here to make sure their first idea of Pole was the right one, to reclaim it from the lies. Sal listened to all this, his chin on his chest, but when she was done, he said nothing. Cooper felt completely alone.

  “I’m sorry,” he finally said, grabbing his parka from the desk chair. “I know I’m being a dick, but I really don’t know what to say. I need to think.”

  Cooper understood then that she had unloaded her baggage at his feet and he’d kicked it once or twice before deciding it was too much trouble. She continued hugging her knees, head down, and listened to the rustle of his parka, the metallic étude of his zipper going up, catching, going down, then going all the way up to his neck, and, finally, the sound of his boots retreating down the hall.

  Cooper got out of bed, moved her desk chair to the back wall, and climbed on it. She pushed aside the towel she’d hung over the small window, the one she’d looked out of that first day. It was nearly three in the morning, but stark sunlight poured into the room. Outside, the sky was a pale and taut canvas. She glanced down at her desk, and saw the Terra Nova sketch was gone.