“I know, weird.”
“And what exactly are you painting?”
“I’m here to sketch and observe the field camp. And the surrounding ice sheet plateau, also.” She cast about for something believable. “I’m calling it ‘Transparent Truths.’”
“Transparent Truths?”
Cooper knew she had to get jargony now—jargon was the strongest shield for the professional with nothing to say. “I plan to create a suite of etchings and paintings on this source material, using color and implied texture, and focusing on a postmodern application of serial imagery.”
The core tech relaxed a little. “Okay, sorry to grill you. It’s just—having a guy who thinks global warming is a hoax at a climate research site is sort of big deal. My name’s Fern.”
“Cooper. And believe me, I get it.”
A couple of other people sauntered over to Cooper’s table. “It’s just weird that you came on his manifest. That’s not how this is usually done. I mean, you usually have your own flight order.”
Cooper shrugged. “I don’t even know what that means. I just do what I’m told.”
“You know that he’s on Big Oil’s payroll, right?” Fern said. “This is basically like giving an NSF grant to Exxon.” She paused. “What’s he like?” The crowd around Cooper’s table had grown bigger, but everyone remained silent, as if what Cooper had to say was extremely important.
“He seems normal.”
“There’s no way he’s normal,” someone from the edge of the group said. “Not even Pole-normal.”
“The NSF is a craven, cowardly agency run by mealy-mouthed pieces of shit,” another voice shouted from the back, this one belonging to the wig-wearing male beauty queen.
“Randy has that on his business card,” Fern said, finally cracking a smile. “So you’re here to help him extract a core? You know how to do it, right? Because it’s actually really dangerous. They have people here whose only job is to do shit like that, and none of them are on his tech roster.”
“I think he’s going to do it himself. Seeing as no one will help him.”
The room boomed with laughter. Cooper had no idea why.
* * *
Once she came to, Cooper’s first thought was, why is Pavano puking? A few yards away, he was leaning over his knees, an entire Cup o’ Noodles pouring out of his mouth and onto the ice in a steaming pile. Her second thought was that her hand was warm, even though she’d taken her mitten off to help Pavano with the corer, and last she remembered it was basically flash-frozen. She got to her feet, wondering why she’d been prostrate on the snow. Now Pavano was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and now he was shouting at her: Don’t look. As if in slow motion, Cooper turned to see what he was going on about. Was that blood on the ice? Was that her finger, half attached—no, three-quarters detached—to her right hand? She felt consternation upon seeing the dangling finger, as if it were something stubborn, like a hangnail, and reached for it with her other hand and pulled it off. It came off easily, and she tossed it into the snow.
That gesture—the toss—seemed to trigger a sudden response, as if the cosmos had been waiting for this act, and now that it had been completed, the world splintered into shards. Each shard reflected the sun, like waves on a lake. Saganaga. The lake at the end of the Gunflint Trail. You stayed in the possession corridor because you didn’t want to face the wind. Cooper was in the canoe, alone now, driving it straight for the shore.
* * *
Her mind was a museum. Only dusty relics remained: her hands guiding the elephantine drill onto the spot Pavano had marked on the ice. The sensation of her right mitten twisting into an infinite spiral as the generator roared; searing pain that quickly gave way to numbness. Pavano’s noodles. His startled face. The blood on the ice and Cooper’s mangled finger, which had been dug out of the snow by a compassionate research tech—Fern?—once the drill had stopped grinding and help began arriving. The finger had been placed in a snow-filled Coleman. Cooper remembered marveling at the Coleman, that such a thing could be found both at a suburban picnic and also on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. There was the med tent and the disembodied face of the medic, displaying teeth in some facsimile of a smile. This was followed by a stretch of blackness, studded by occasional bursts of light and scored by a ceaseless shriek. Someone had tried to peel open her eyes; she had fainted. Cooper had blinked against the assault and reluctantly focused her eyes until she realized she was looking at Doc Carla. That’s when the pain arrived—decadent, laughably excessive. Cooper felt an intense desire to chop off her right arm.
Then there had been twenty-four hours in Hard Truth with Doc Carla—triage and treatment, including an awful irrigation of the “wound site.” No one else had been allowed to speak with her. There had been one time when Sal—it was Sal, Cooper knew, because he’d touched her bare arm as she lay there, and she’d remembered the feel of his hand from that night in her room—sat next to the bed and read to her after Doc Carla had kindly slipped her a Vicodin when the expired Tylenol with codeine had failed. She couldn’t remember what book it was now—it was the sound of his voice that had penetrated, not the words.
Doc Carla told her there had been an accident, that a finger on her right hand—the “pointer,” the CEO of the hand—was gone, that they’d been unable to save it. Because Cooper couldn’t visualize the injury, and because Doc Carla refused to let her see the wound until it had healed, it didn’t seem real. None of it seemed real. And because it didn’t seem real, Cooper appeared to be taking it well.
Unfamiliar people showed up at Hard Truth. Men and women dressed in Pole gear who weren’t Polies. They were from the National Science Foundation, they were from VIDS. Doc Carla sat in a folding chair while the admins interrogated Cooper—it was like a deranged version of Inherit the Wind. Again and again, Cooper went over every detail of her visit to the Divide. Her inability to be specific frustrated the admins, and when she mentioned Pavano’s name, they became agitated. No one would tell her what had happened to him or where he was.
On their next visit to Hard Truth, the admin guys leveled with her. The media already knew what had happened, and this had opened the door to scrutiny. Pavano’s congressional sponsors were claiming harassment and discrimination. There was talk that the two congressmen who had lobbied to get him on the ice wanted a federal investigation. This would mean subpoenaing every grantee who had had contact with Pavano—including Cooper, Sal, Sri, and entire climate research teams at the Divide. They would be expected to leave the ice to meet with investigators. The effect this could have on the ongoing experiments at Pole would be catastrophic. In an effort to stave this off, Alexandra Scaletta, head of the NSF, had invited the congressmen to Pole to assess the situation for themselves, as “a gesture of goodwill.”
“So, am I being sent home?” Cooper asked the latest NSF admin to interrogate her, a stout, genial man named Warren.
“I know it seems like we’ve been asking you the same questions a hundred different ways, but we’re just trying to figure out how this happened. Why you were there, why Dr. Pavano was working with equipment checked out under another team’s grant number. Is there anything else you can tell us that will help us out here?”
“How is he?” Cooper replied.
“Dr. Pavano?”
“Is he still here or did they send him back?”
“I’m afraid we’re not allowed to say,” Warren said. His look turned pleading. “That’s why we’re asking you these questions. The sooner we can create a timeline of events, the sooner we can put this all to rest.” Cooper smiled to herself. Good luck with that.
* * *
When she awoke in her own room, she found her desk piled with homemade gifts wrapped in fax paper. There was even a bottle of Crown Royal in a purple sack with a note signed by Dwight. Pearl had left a basket filled with knitted items and various baked goods. Hanging from the coat hook on the back of the door was a small wooden birdhouse from Bozer,
accompanied by a little sign that said Glacier Sparrows Only.
She glanced up at her tiny window, as if the constant sunlight could indicate the time. She peed in her pee can, holding herself steady by gripping the desk chair with one hand, so she could skip the bathroom—even though she couldn’t remember the last time she’d brushed her teeth. She noticed now that Sal had left a note on the desk. Radio when you get up and I’ll come get you. Do not walk to the station alone. Sal.
As she struggled into her balaclava, she saw Pavano’s Scotch on her desk. She grabbed it by the neck and shoved it into the deepest pocket of her parka, along with her painkillers. Doc Carla had been careful: there were only three in the bottle, but at least they weren’t expired.
Cooper was halfway to the Jamesway door when she turned around and went back to her room. Next to her compass was the vial containing David’s ashes. She placed them both in her other pocket.
Outside the Jamesway, Floyd sat astride a snowmobile arguing with a fuel tech about glycol levels. When he saw Cooper walking toward the station, he cut the argument short and offered her a ride, which she accepted. As the snowmobile careened across the ice, Cooper tried to sort out exactly how she was supposed to feel about this finger thing. The whole experience so far had been like living inside Picasso’s Guernica. She wasn’t dead. She hadn’t lost an arm. This wasn’t cancer or a stroke. It was a finger. And yet Doc Carla had called it a catastrophic injury. Cooper felt as if she had been anesthetized. Where was her fear? Her outrage? Why did she feel nothing about this, besides the pain and the constant throbbing? She was disfigured—a painter, with hyperrealist tendencies, who’d lost a finger on her dominant hand. Was she an abstract painter by default now? Was she a painter at all? She didn’t know. And right now, she hardly cared. All that mattered was that she get back to the station. Floyd drove the snowmobile up the entrance ramp and idled in front of Annex B.
“Please don’t be nice because you feel bad for me,” Cooper said as Floyd helped her off. “I don’t want pity.”
Floyd gave her a wry look. “You’ve been around long enough to know there’s no such thing as pity here.”
Inside her studio, Cooper found her easel where she’d left it and the blank canvas with the roughly outlined polar landscape. It seemed to have come from another era. She pulled the compass out of her pocket and set them on her desk. Then she shook off the mitten on her left hand—the bandage on her right was so thick it functioned as a mitten. After a couple of attempts, Cooper gave up on removing her parka. That would require help, and she didn’t want any more help.
She slowly lowered herself to her knees and unfurled a measure of drawing paper from her roll. Doc Carla had cut away the top of the bandage so her thumb and remaining fingers were exposed, which would, theoretically, allow her to pick up her pencils and her brushes. Cooper seized a charcoal nib between her thumb, middle, and ring fingers, which, when squeezed together, functioned as a single digit. It felt awkward, and it hurt like hell, and when she set the nib to the paper, it moved as if following remote instructions from someone else, skittering all over the page and leaving a greasy black trail across the paper. After a few more tries, Cooper sat back on her haunches. There would be no more detailed studies of vending machine charms, no more hyperrealistic portraits of landscapes or roadside cafés. What about faces?
The door opened behind her, and there was Tucker, in sunglasses with a silk scarf tied around his neck and pulled up over half of his face. He was holding a solitary cupcake. “From Pearl,” he said, his voice muffled. He set the cupcake down on the desk. Cooper glanced over at it. It was absurdly baroque, way out of proportion to its surroundings. The frosting had been colored pink with valuable food coloring, and a tiny purple violet had been piped upon it. A marzipan bumblebee, with two sliced almonds for wings, perched atop.
Tucker removed Cooper’s paints and brushes from her stool and sat down.
“When do I rejoin the gen-pop?” Cooper asked. Tucker didn’t immediately reply.
“Or am I being sent home?”
“I am not currently in the loop on that discussion,” Tucker finally said.
“Does this mean my quarantine is over at least? Since you’re talking to me. Even Floyd talked to me on the way here.”
“You know that wasn’t my decision. The NSF wants you ensconced here, hermit-like, so the media can’t find you, so you can’t get online and tell the world what happened. The place is leaking like any number of doomed ships in history.”
She rolled up her drawing paper. “Tell the world what happened? I don’t even know what happened.”
“This whole business is my fault. I shouldn’t have let you go to the Divide. I rarely make mistakes, but when I do—”
“This isn’t your mistake.”
Cooper walked over to the corner of the studio, where she kept the canvases: the beginnings, the orphans. “I want to show you something,” she said. She found the portrait of Tucker. She pulled it out and shoved it at him without meeting his eyes.
“What’s this?”
“You. That night. The Halloween party. Remember?”
Tucker looked at the painting—an eye regarding itself in a shard of mirror that was cupped in a brown-skinned hand. In the background of the reflection were the dirty tiles of a subway bathroom.
“I remember,” he said quietly. He cleared his throat. “However, for true verisimilitude, I’m afraid you’ll have to revise.” He carefully removed his sunglasses and handed them to Cooper. Then he unwrapped the scarf, and Cooper saw that the left side of his face now seemed to hang slightly below the right. The left corner of his mouth fell slack and the corner of his left eye looked as if it were being pulled downward by an invisible thread. The unnatural smoothness of his chemically sanded face had given way to dark sprouts of wiry hair. He seemed half sad; and the look of half-sadness struck Cooper as far worse than a look of complete sorrow.
Cooper started to say something, but Tucker put his hand up.
“Self-pity is vain,” Tucker said. “Don’t encourage it, and don’t engage in it.” He stood up. “Eat the cupcake. Act normal. Act like you want to be here, like you’re strong enough to be here. And start painting. As soon as possible. If you don’t start immediately after the blow, you won’t ever start again. I speak from experience.” He cleared his throat and lightly stroked his cheek. “And now you have a whole new face to inspire you.”
After Tucker left, Cooper felt a wave of despair wash over her. Her wound pulsed with heat as the dull ache gave way to scorching pain. She pulled out the pills Doc Carla had given her and tapped one out onto her palm. She took it dry, then sat down, trying to get a handle on the pain. She examined her bandaged hand. It didn’t make sense to wait for Doc Carla in order to assess her disfigurement, to quantify what she’d lost. She had to see her hand now. But first she needed fortification. She pulled Pavano’s Scotch from her pocket. It took two minutes, and the assistance of her teeth, but she was able to twist the top open. The first mouthful was medicinal. It burned, the way a wound burns the first time you run it under cold water. The second drink was smoother—still astringent, but warm. The warmth filled Cooper’s chest, and it, along with the sublime cooling effect of the painkiller, took just enough of the edge off to give her the courage to assess her injury.
First, she released the insect-like jaws of the metal clamp biting the elastic bandage and began unwinding it. Her arm grew tired—the bandage seemed endless. Eventually, she reached the sterile gauze wrapping her hand in layers as thin as phyllo. After three circumnavigations, Cooper began to see the bloodstains and the thin slice of plywood that supported her hand.
She removed the final layer of gauze, tugging a bit to release it from the scabs, and there it was, a bloom of pith and dried blood. The other fingers, the thumb, the middle, the ring, the pinkie, were white and shriveled, glistening with moisture, and Cooper was overcome by revulsion. The pain came roaring back, crashing through the narcotic. I
t was as if the wound had sprung to life, as if it had a heartbeat of its own, and was determined to make itself known. Cooper wiped sweat off her forehead and tried to steady herself by taking another mouthful of Scotch. The pain didn’t subside, and although somewhere in the far reaches of her brain she knew all she had to do was wait—just wait—she shook out the two remaining pills from the bottle. Cherry waited, and no one came. Cooper had waited, too, and David hadn’t come. She was done waiting. She swallowed the pills with a double swallow of Scotch, and as the burn in her chest subsided, Cooper remembered that David’s ashes were in her parka pocket. She jammed her uninjured hand into its depths and withdrew the vial. She sat down at the desk and set it next to the empty bottle of painkillers, and laid her head down next to them. As she stared at both bottles, they seemed to merge until it was impossible to distinguish one from the other.
Eventually, her thoughts returned to the igloo that Cherry, Wilson, and Birdie Bowers had made at Cape Crozier, the endpoint of the “Worst Journey in the World,” just as they had in the weeks after David went missing. As the police searched, as Billie turned cold and Dasha and Bill turned on each other, Cooper thought endlessly of Cherry, Wilson, and Birdie huddled together in their igloo, waiting out a blizzard in complete darkness, save for the flickering glow of the camp stove. For twenty-four hours we waited, Cherry wrote. Things were so bad now that we dared not unlash the door.
They did, though. They had to in order to survive, and so had Cooper. In the spring, when they’d found the tire marks on the shore of West Lake Sylvia, out in Wright County, Cooper was the only one in the family who would go downtown to identify David’s body. When she got to the morgue, they warned her. They told her they only needed confirmation. They told her they hadn’t taken off his seatbelt. They told her about the book found wedged between the dashboard and the windshield. Cooper knew him only by his thick brown hair. It looked so much like her own.
She stood up so suddenly her chair fell backward onto the cement floor with an ear-splitting crash. The sound seemed to come from miles away. The opiates and the alcohol had met in her bloodstream by this time, and were finally mingling. Cooper tried to make a fist with her right hand, and though she could feel some dried blood crack, she felt no pain. When she looked into the fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling, illuminated commas dove in and out of her line of vision. She may never paint again, but she would do this one thing. This was why she had come to this place, this frozen, dead place. And it was time. She picked up the vial of ashes and walked out of the studio, unaware that her parka was still hanging on the back of the door.
South Pole Station Page 22
