South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

  C.

  p.s. It took me forty minutes to write this e-mail. Tell Dad I’m okay. Tell Mom the polar bears say hey.

  In the Smoke Bar, the vets were telling old station tales about the ones who went crazy: The guy who’d crammed a backpack full of graham crackers and beer and tried to walk to Zhongstan Station for hot-and-sour soup. The lady doing ice-core analysis last season who went on a vodka binge and tried to shave her underarms with a butter knife. The biophysicist who had torn the stuffing out of his pillow, because it “made too much noise in the night.”

  “You’re all gonna be looney-tunes before this shit plays itself out,” Bozer boomed from his seat at the bar, and it was Bozer who noticed Cooper first. “Welcome back, cupcake,” he said. All eyes turned to her.

  It had been two days since her trip outside, since Bozer had found her, fixed up her hand, and showed her a corpse. Seven pairs of eyes blinked at her, and Cooper couldn’t summon any words. Finally, Doc Carla hauled herself out of her chair, walked over to Cooper, and led her to a table.

  “Bozer told me nothing,” she whispered. “But from here on out, you only get Advil.”

  Cooper smiled gratefully and sat down. Pearl brought her a beer, but no one spoke.

  “So,” Cooper said, taking a sip and looking around the room. “What happened while I was gone?”

  Dwight and Sri glanced at each other, and then sped-walked to Cooper’s table, each with a fistful of faxes. Based on communications Dwight had received from his counterparts at McMurdo and WAIS, as well as eavesdropping he’d done on the admin lines, he’d learned that Pavano had been triaged for shock at the Divide, and then put on the same flight as Cooper, which was supposed to continue on to McMurdo after a refuel. But once the plane landed at Pole, the trauma team—led by Pearl—decided to bring Cooper in to Hard Truth instead. Pavano had wandered out of the C-17 while Cooper was transported to the clinic, and commenced a “drunkvincible” walk toward the Dark Sector. Sal and Floyd had had to chase him down.

  Cooper’s ripped and bloodied mitten was currently in a Ziploc at McMurdo, along with the illegally procured corer. The tech who’d helped Pavano forge the sign-out had already been DQ’ed and put back on a plane to Missoula. That was the extent of the information they had about Pavano’s whereabouts and his future plans.

  Dwight shoved one of the faxes he’d been holding at Cooper. “The campaign has already started.”

  “Campaign?”

  “Oh, you’re famous, Cooper,” Dwight said.

  “As Jane Doe,” Sri added. He shrugged. “HIPAA rules.”

  It was a small piece in the Associated Press daily digest, with the headline: “Injury reported at ice-coring camp in Antarctica.” The reporter quoted a source as saying that Pavano had been denied use of the industrial corer to which all other climate scientists at WAIS had access. That same anonymous source indicated that Pavano’s time at the ice-coring camp and at South Pole Station itself had been marked by open hostility, ostracism, and obstruction. In other words, climate scientists had made research impossible for him, so, out of desperation, he’d worked around them.

  “And then these just came in tonight,” Sri said, bouncing on the tops of his toes. He handed her additional news digests, the same ones that arrived every night, but Sri had highlighted the headlines, which included “Climate skeptic ‘frozen’ out at climate change camp,” “Could Antarctica accident have been avoided?” and “Republican congressmen who pushed for climate skeptic say ‘hostile working environment’ to blame in Antarctic amputation.”

  “‘Antarctic amputation’ sounds like a Lovecraft novel,” Cooper said, but only Birdie laughed.

  “It’s not funny, Cooper,” Sri said. “This is serious. They’re coming to Pole.”

  “Who’s coming?”

  “The politicians, the suits, the directors, the congressional aides, the media.”

  “I think it was all a setup from day one,” Dwight barked. “This shit was orchestrated.”

  “Dwight,” Pearl said warningly.

  Dwight looked over at Cooper guiltily. “I mean, I don’t know if the finger thing was part of it, or…”

  Cooper wondered if Dwight was right. What if it was all a setup? She recalled Pavano’s preternatural calm in the line that first day at the Divide, when the “freeze-out” had begun. The way he’d come prepared with an envelope full of cash and the technical know-how to erect a twenty-foot-high ice-core drill. It wasn’t just that he expected the roadblocks; it was almost as if he’d welcomed them.

  “So what exactly happened?” Sri asked as he paced under the dart board. “I mean, I know you’re not really allowed to talk about it … but…”

  “They didn’t give him a tech. They didn’t give him access to any drills, or give him any means of extracting a core. I wasn’t approved either, as his research tech, even though Pavano forwarded me an e-mail the day before we left that said I was.”

  Sri scratched his head compulsively and muttered, “Oh shit oh shit oh shit.”

  “But he didn’t seem too upset about it,” Cooper replied.

  “That’s because he’s incapable of showing emotion,” Sri snapped.

  “No, I just mean that he didn’t seem surprised. He seemed—I don’t know—prepared for it.” Sri stopped pacing and stared at her for a minute. Then he slammed his beer on a nearby table and raced out of the bar. The beer was quickly claimed.

  As the conversations picked up again, Cooper leaned over to Pearl, who had resumed her knitting under Birdie’s adoring gaze. “Have you seen Sal?”

  Pearl shook her head. “I haven’t seen him for days. I think he’s sleeping in his lab. Alek comes and gets the team’s meals. Must be important stuff happening.”

  * * *

  The dystopian hum of the power plant rattled in Cooper’s chest as she passed two arguing maintenance techs on her way to Hard Truth.

  “What time is it?” one said.

  “What is time?” the other replied.

  “Shut up and tell me what time it is.”

  “But time is irrelevant here.”

  “I’m just asking if we’re still on New Zealand time now or if we switched to Denver time yet.”

  “Where did the extra day go?”

  “Smoke my meat, asshole.”

  As Cooper headed toward the entrance tunnel, she heard someone calling her name. It was Sal. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to run to him or run away, but as he got closer to her, she felt her body grow lighter, as if she might float away. His gait bore no trace of that swagger that made him so easy to identify out on the ice, when everyone looked the same in their parkas and hoods. He walked as if he’d walk right through her, but when he reached her, he gathered in his arms and pulled her up against his body. She felt him take three deep, deliberate breaths.

  “You didn’t wait,” he said. “You were supposed to wait. You were supposed to let me come get you before leaving your room. Fuck you for not waiting.”

  “I’m sorry, Sal,” Cooper said, and meant it.

  “Bozer told me what happened,” he said into the top of her head. “Outside.” His warm breath on her hair felt good. “He saved your life.”

  “I know.”

  “You should be on a flight home.”

  “I know,” Cooper said. “Did Bozer tell everyone about what happened outside?”

  “No, only me and Doc Carla.”

  “Why you?”

  Sal pulled away and looked at her. “Because even he knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  “Are you going to make me say it?” Sal said. She winced as Sal pulled her close again and her hand was caught under his arm.

  “Christ, I’m sorry,” he said. He glanced down at her bandaged hand. “How is it?”

  “Doc Carla keeps telling me that it will start looking better, but right now it looks like bad sci-fi makeup.”

  “You shouldn’t have been on the Divide—”

  “Sal—”


  “No, let me finish. You shouldn’t have been there—but more important, like vastly, vastly more important, Pavano should never have been there.” He let her go and ran his hand down his beard as he paced. “I don’t know what to do. I mean, it’s one thing for oil executives to pressure Congress to defund working groups on the human impacts of climate change, but to send someone like Pavano to the Divide, and then to dangle him on stage like a puppet.” He stopped and looked at Cooper. “And then your hand—your fucking hand, Cooper!”

  As Cooper watched him pace, she found she was becoming annoyed. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “This. This ‘I’m outraged’ act. The last time I saw you I was a mistake you’d made. You were confused. You were sorry. Is this you being angry at Pavano for hurting me or you being angry that some politicians are fucking with your sacred science shit?”

  Sal looked at Cooper for a long minute. “I deserve that. All of it.”

  Cooper hated him for saying this. It left her nowhere else to take her anger.

  Sal reached out a hand to her. “I have something to show you in the machine shed,” he said. “Will you come?” Cooper looked at his mismatched mittens. One was black, a Gore-Tex, while the other—the one he was holding out to her now—was a fur-backed gauntlet with a large rip along the top. Cooper knew at once that the Gore-Tex mitten she’d found in skua, the one with the barbecue-encrusted tips—the one she’d painted months ago—was Sal’s. For some reason, her anger dissipated.

  She put her hand in his and allowed him to take her to the machinery arch.

  When they got there, it looked like ground zero of a Scud missile attack. Cooper stepped over vehicle parts and long curling threads of metal and wood, toward the squeal of a lathe. A Polie in overalls and safety glasses stood hunched over the lathe, blue sparks flying from between her hands. Cooper recognized Marcy by her tangled blond hair. Sal walked around the machine so Marcy could see him, and she stopped working on the crankshaft she’d been repairing.

  She pushed her safety glasses on top of her head and, using her sleeve, wiped the sweat from her forehead. “Jesus, you again? Get off my back, man. It’s done.” She grinned at Cooper. “This asshole has been on me like tie-dye on a hippie about the new Pole marker. Hold on, I’ll get it.” When Marcy disappeared into a small supply shed on the other side of the arch, Cooper turned to Sal. “What’s this about?”

  “Marcy’s in charge of making the new Pole marker.”

  “The one you designed,” Cooper said.

  Sal nodded. “I want you to see it before the ceremony.”

  “I thought the ceremony was supposed to happen on New Year’s Day.”

  Sal grimaced. “Thanks to the war of bureaucratic attrition, the powers-that-be told us to reposition the marker closer to the end of the summer season, in mid-February.”

  “Why?”

  Sal shrugged. “It’s a directive from NSF. Some congressional committee wrote it into an appropriations bill. Arbitrary interference—just letting us know that they can control the operations down here. But if that’s all the interference we get from Washington this year, I’ll dirty-dance with Floyd in the galley.”

  Marcy emerged from the shed carrying something bound up in a rag. She gestured toward one of the worktables and they gathered around it. A coughing forklift pulled into the garage and shuddered off. Marcy leaned back to look, and, seeing it was Bozer, called him over. “I’ve outdone myself, boss,” she said. “Come look.”

  As they waited for Bozer to lumber over, Cooper wondered what Sal’s design would look like. She imagined it first as Viper, the coffee-filter telescope he had shown her. But that didn’t touch the history of the continent, which was important. Something more generally cosmic, perhaps—a constellation, the Milky Way. Cooper remembered Sal’s horrible drawing of the two branes colliding—the two pancakes—and stifled a laugh, imagining the sketch transformed into the Pole marker.

  Bozer arrived and slapped his hands on the table expectantly. Marcy gathered the fabric between her fingers, then stopped and looked over at Sal. “I just want you to know that this was the hardest design I’ve ever worked from and that I’ve wished you dead pretty much constantly since you brought it to me. That being said, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

  Bozer told her to can it, and Marcy removed the rag.

  The bright shop lights bounced off polished brass, creating white bursts in Cooper’s vision. Slowly, the marker’s shape became clear—the sinuous upslope of a bow, the sturdiness of two masts, and a web of rigging, like spun silk. Etched into its body were the words Terra Nova. Cooper realized she was trembling.

  “That’s good shit, Marce,” Bozer growled, squeezing Marcy’s shoulder. “That’s very fine shit.”

  Marcy pulled a crumpled piece of paper from the bib of her overalls and spread it out on the table. “Well, I had a good design. A fussy-as-hell design, but still, a good design.”

  Cooper looked down at her sketch of the Terra Nova. Sal’s precise mathematician’s handwriting was all over it—numbers, and arrows, and measurements in centimeters and in millimeters. Instructions to Marcy, Cooper realized. Sal leaned over the marker, examining its intricacies, his face bright with happiness and admiration. When he turned to see what she thought, Cooper found she was unable to speak. She didn’t notice Marcy and Bozer quietly walk away.

  “Well,” Sal laughed. “What do you think?”

  Cooper could only shake her head and choke out, “Why?”

  “This is me telling you that you belong here, Cooper.” He hesitated. “And this is me saying I think we should be together down here. I know I was a dick in your room that night, before you left for the Divide. It was just—when you were sitting on the edge of the bed like that, with your boots off, looking at me—” He looked away, frustrated. “Everything about that moment felt too important to be in my clumsy hands. I didn’t realize how important it was until I was touching you.” His brow furrowed. “This is hard to explain.” He walked over to the forklift and back again. “Okay,” he said, “I think I know how to say this to you. Math. It explains everything. There’s a moment when every geek comes upon a mathematical equation that almost destroys him. For Alek it’s the Mandelbrot set equation. For me it’s the Riemann hypothesis. Whatever a great poem means to a poet, that’s what understanding these things for the first time is to someone like me. I can’t explain it to you. All I can tell you is that your face that night, that night in your room, it was like seeing the Mandelbrot for the first time, the Riemann. Like starting a single-variable equation and watching it turn into differential calculus before your eyes. It was scary. I was scared. I didn’t know how to explain that to you, and I didn’t know what to do, either.” Sal reached for Cooper and drew her close. “Then when you left with Pavano, I got angry, because I wanted you to be with me, not him. I was angry that he had that time with you, and that’s when I realized: I can’t even be away from you for a day without feeling like every minute is an hour.”

  These words created an incision in Cooper, which caused both pain and immense relief. She took his mitten in hers. “Come with me.”

  They walked across the plateau in silence. Once they were in Cooper’s room in the Jamesway, she sat on her bed and lifted her feet toward him. Sal kneeled on the floor and took off her boots. He undressed her carefully, slowly easing the thick cuff of her parka over her injured hand. He eased her back onto the bed, and brushed the hair off her forehead. He peeled off his thermal sweatshirt, only taking his eyes of her as he pulled the shirt over his head. He slid one suspender off his shoulder, then the other, and once his base layer was off, Cooper saw his body was sinewy and muscular, and very pale. It seemed to Cooper at that moment the most beautiful, most desirable thing she’d ever seen, and her heartbeat pulsed in her ear. Her body wanted to disintegrate beneath his fingers.

  He leaned over her and kissed her mouth, and he lay down on the bed next to her. P
ulling her hair away from her face, he touched his dry lips to her throat, and told her to let go, so she did.

  It was only later, long after Sal had reluctantly left her bed to return to the Dark Sector, that Cooper saw the vial on her desk. There was a note.

  You don’t do this kind of shit alone. Do it with us standing beside you. Bozer here.

  * * *

  When Cooper arrived at the studio the next morning, she saw that Denise had cleared their communal desk of textbooks and papers, and had tied a number of Blue Razberry Blow Pops into a bouquet with a note signed, Good luck. Your friend, Margaret Mead.

  With one of the suckers in her mouth, Cooper walked over to the easel. She pulled off the dropcloth: Tucker’s eye stared back at her. Without the Scotch and painkiller cocktail, she could better see that it was objectively decent. Despite what Tucker had told her that night, it needed no revision. In fact, it might even be done. Then there was the painting of Pearl. The brown eyes stippled with copper and the plain freckled face that burned with ambition.

  Then there was the one of Bozer. She’d been outside, ready to start fresh in order to avoid becoming a tragic figure, observing the white wasteland to the west of the station. She’d tried to look at the landscape critically, the way she hadn’t been able to do out on the Divide. It was an ocean, with wind-sculpted waves frozen in time. No—that was too generic. It was a desert—blowout dunes, sand seas. No, not that either. There was a reason, Cooper could admit now, that her desert series—“Richat Structure”—had not impressed nor sold at Caribou Coffee. (“This one makes me thirsty,” she’d overheard someone say. “I refuse to be thirsty in my own home.”) Then she’d blinked into the sun, and had been startled to see it was encircled by a purple and gold halo. It seemed impossible, as if her unchanging Minnesota sun had been replaced by a pulsating counterfeit. Deep black to the west, Cherry had written, shading into long lines of gray and lemon yellow round the sun, with a vertical shaft through them, and a bright orange horizon. His foot on the edge of the Antarctic Plateau, and Scott told him to turn back. Cherry had peered through his myopia waiting for them as he winked in the sun’s faint gleam.