South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

  But still, a thought began eating away at him. It filled him with shame first, and then with dread. Wasn’t it right, he began to wonder—unquestionably right—that Pavano was on the ice alongside him?

  * * *

  It was a week after the accident out on the Divide, after Cooper’s injury and after the media had picked up the story and after Bayless and Calhoun had scheduled their flight down, that Sal approached Sri with his thought about Pavano. Tucker had come out to the Dark Sector the day before to tell Sal that Scaletta had met with the congressmen and had been told that unless NSF formalized a process to grant “minority scientific views” a place at federal research facilities, they would hold up the agency’s polar regions budget in committee, which would quickly prompt a station shutdown. Scaletta had refused, and asked Tucker to begin preparing the scientists for the possibly of a station shutdown.

  So Sal went to the climatology lab and put his idea to Sri: let the skeptics come. There weren’t many of them—it was a 90/10 split among climate scientists already—and their research wouldn’t yield anything dangerous. He tried to sound confident—dismissive, even. Let the children have dessert at the adult table—the meal’s almost over, anyway, right?

  It didn’t go well. Sri paced the eight-by-eight room over and over again, muttering incoherently (Sal caught words like betrayal and end of science). But it seemed the easiest way to make the threat disappear—and, in some tenuous way, it adhered to the principle of scientific freedom. But Sri felt Sal’s plan was morally reprehensible, that his motives were suspect—“selfish”—and Sal wondered if his friend was right. He let the idea go, and tried to ignore the growing sense of doom in the labs. But, like his constant thoughts of Cooper, he found his mind returning to the question again and again.

  “What do you think about my idea?” he asked Alek one day after the congressmen had returned to Washington. Alek only shrugged. “You have no opinion whatsoever on capitulating to the demands of two science-illiterate congressmen? Sri says funding a climate skeptic would be like funding Bigfoot research. Or an archaeological dig for Noah’s ark. He says I’ll do anything to keep my experiment going.”

  Alek sighed. “I tell story. In Leningrad, 1987, I am seventeen years old. St. Isaac’s Square is full of people, because the authorities just demolished Angleterre hotel. This place is sacred. The great poet Yesenin end his life here. Understand, for us, this is like destroying Shroud of Turin. So we must protest. But this time, there are no arrests. No one can believe this—glasnost was slow to come to Leningrad. So the protests continue for weeks. I visit and help distribute samizdat. One day someone comes running to tell us dissidents are giving speeches in Mikhailovky Gardens. This is new—such things did not happen. But when we get there, a military band is playing and no one can hear the speakers. We are told the authorities have sent the band to play so the dissidents cannot be heard. The speeches stop and an old man puts half a lemon in my hand. ‘Suck,’ he tells me, and points to the band. ‘Make sure they see you.’ Before I can say, I see everywhere people sucking on lemons. At the front, I see the crazy old dissident Ekaterina Poldotseva handing them out from a basket. When the old man sees I am not sucking on lemon, he slaps my hand, he tells me, ‘Poldotseva says the band will stop playing once when they see everyone sucking on lemons.’ Empathetic saliva, he tells me. ‘They will not be able to play their instruments.’ Ten minutes later, the band packed up and left. They never return.”

  Alek turned back to his computer.

  As Sal stared at the back of his friend’s head, he wondered if Alek was, in fact, insane.

  * * *

  When the subpoena from the Wisconsin attorney general arrived for Sri, Sal had watched his friend’s research techs bag-drag to one of the LC-130s that were evacuating nonessential staff in advance of the shutdown. It was like watching someone toss Darwin’s dead finches off the side of the Beagle.

  Once the letters from NSF began circulating, Sal began spending hours away from his own lab in order to get up to speed on the Kavli team’s work—aside from her outburst at the winter-over meeting, Lisa Wu had remained stoic, but as they went over the data together, Sal noticed her fingernails had been chewed to the quick.

  As each scientist shut down his or her experiment—from the experiments in the Atmospheric Research Observatory to the seismology labs—Alek’s words began to take hold of Sal. To his consternation, the story about the lemon wedges was beginning to make sense. A week into the shutdown, he already knew what had to be done. He started sending e-mails. He started with the National Academy of Sciences listserv, followed by one to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, proposing the idea he’d pitched to Sri: Let them come. There would be a provision for practical requirements that would seem reasonable, even to backwater congressmen—like a track record of peer-reviewed science—but which would be difficult for a denialist to acquire.

  “Science is a mirror that reflects nature,” Sal wrote to Alexandra Scaletta at NSF. “Experiments are attempts to polish that mirror. Not all of them rub off the streaks, but these don’t hinder the experiments that do.” Sal wasn’t sure he believed this last part—he wasn’t sure of a lot of things now—but he sent the e-mail anyway.

  The initial response from his fellow scientists ranged from disbelief to actual horror. He heard nothing from Scaletta. He waited. He wanted to give the Pole-based scientists, whose experiments had been ruined, enough time to reflect on the idea.

  Then came the phone calls, all of them asking for Sal. He was spending twenty hours a day in his lab, analyzing the readouts from his own experiment, so Dwight fielded things as they came and took messages. He brought these scraps of paper to the Smoke Bar each night, so Sal could go through them.

  “What are they calling about?” Cooper asked.

  “The shutdown. How to end it.”

  Alek scoffed at this. “No, he is buying lemons.”

  “Lemons?”

  “Alek,” Sal said, his voice hoarse.

  “This is how shutdown will end,” Alek said.

  Floyd made his way over to where Sal was sitting. “And how are you going to go about doing that?”

  Sal pinched the bridge of his nose. “I think NSF should agree to fund a climate skeptic on the Divide once a season.”

  “Wasn’t that the opposite of what you were railing on about earlier in the season?” Pearl said. “I don’t mean to sound like a jerk, but it sounds like you’re just changing your mind because you don’t want your experiment to be affected.”

  “You’re right. But I think we should give Pavano the opportunity to fail. I think we should let all of them fail. That’s all they want—the opportunity to be totally, unmistakably wrong. If we don’t give them that opportunity, they’ll just keep stirring up this idea about uncertainty—‘we’re not sure, there’s no consensus, let us show you the science.’ I say, let them try. And in the meantime, we can get back to the real work of science.” This earned him a blank look, so he sat forward in his seat and cleared his throat. “Let me tell you a story about lemons.”

  That night, he’d awakened in Cooper’s room to find her out of bed, standing at her desk. The room was dark and she remained frozen in the strange shadows cast by the seam of light under the door. Although her naked back was facing toward him, Sal could see she was looking at something, studying it intently. It took him a minute to see the pile of bandages and gauze on the desk.

  “Cooper,” he said softly. “Come here.” He could see her stiffen, and she shook her head without turning around. Sal threw the blankets off and got out of bed. As he approached, she curled into herself, cocooning her injured hand. She shook her head again, as if, for the first time since he’d known her, she was unable to find her voice. When he wrapped his arms around her, she heaved a great sob.

  “Let me see,” Sal replied, pulling her closer. She had tucked the injured hand between her rib cage and her left bicep, as if keeping it warm. He gently pulled at her wri
st until her hand came free, and in the fading luminescence of the twilit sky that stole through the tiny window, he saw, for the first time, how her right hand looked pale and wrinkled with moisture, and how the place where her finger had been was knobby and scabbed. It struck him as so uncommonly beautiful, so like a tesseract, that he felt tears spring to his eyes. But he could tell from the way Cooper hung her head, and the way her body tried to become small as he cradled her hand, that she considered it ugly, and for once, he knew the kind of incomprehension everyone else experienced when looking at the Riemann hypothesis. They couldn’t see why its uncertainty made it beautiful. He couldn’t understand their blindness. Maybe there was something ugly in Cooper’s disfigurement, but he couldn’t see it, no matter how hard he tried.

  In his lab now, where his phoenix had incinerated itself, Sal looked into Cooper’s face as she kneeled over him, her eyes wide and happy. Before he had a chance to speak, the sound of All-Call filled the room. Sal propped himself up on one elbow—there was cheering in the background.

  He stood up, and he, Cooper, and Alek crowded around the speaker. The chants grew louder.

  “What are they saying?” Sal asked.

  Cooper turned to him, her eyes wide. “That’s why I came out here to find you. It’s over.” She kissed his dry lips. “Listen,” she whispered.

  Sal, Sal, Sal, went the chant.

  The lemon wedges had worked. Sal looked at Cooper and realized that while there was nothing left of his experiment but a pile of ashes, in the cinders the phoenix already stirred.

  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

  4201 WILSON BOULEVARD

  ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA 22230

  Cooper Gosling

  PO Box 423

  Minneapolis, MN 55410

  Dear Ms. Gosling:

  At the close of every grant period the Antarctic Artists & Writers Program assesses the output of each grantee following his or her return from Antarctica. We have now had a chance to review the portfolio you sent. What follows reflects the comments from our distinguished panel of artists and arts administrators.

  While we by no means consider ourselves the arbiter of “good art,” the panelists were confused by the complete lack of landscape in the collection. In fact, its absence suggested, as one panelist put it, “an act of will.” As you know, the United States Antarctic Program is a science-based research program, which takes as its sole directive the interaction with and better understanding of Nature. The Artists & Writers Program was designed specifically to convey this directive to the general public through different media. The panelists felt that your collection of portraits, while quite fine technically, could have been painted, in the words of one panelist, “in any local bar.”

  There was one exception. We were particularly moved by the portrait you titled “David.” That the subject’s face was represented only by a smear of white seemed an appropriate homage to the courage and selflessness of the great polar explorers. The mitten cleverly embedded in the background added depth. We hope you build on this strength in your future work so you can provide, for yourself and others, a greater understanding of the heritage of human exploration in Antarctica. We also encourage you to consider applying for another Artists & Writers grant. Enclosed is an application for the upcoming research season, along with a preliminary psychological questionnaire.

  Regards,

  National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists & Writers Program

  one ton depot

  2004 July 10

  20:46

  To: Billie.Gosling@janusbooks.com

  From: cherrywaswaiting@hotmail.com

  Subject: Prodigal daughter’s return

  B.,

  Thanks for all your e-mails. Tell Mom and Dad we’re all okay. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to respond sooner. Once the station shut down, Dwight forbid all personal e-mail, since it took up bandwidth during the satellite fly-bys. Whatever that means. Anyway, looks like this shitshow is coming to an end. We got word last week that Jack Calhoun decided to commit political hari-kari and break with Bayless to end the impasse on the budget committee. I guess once Pavano did that interview with 60 Minutes about the oil consortium, he had to cut his losses. I suppose it helped that NSF says it’s willing to talk about formalizing a process to ensure grant money for “non-traditional scientists.” They’re going to insist on a robust body of “peer-reviewed science” from each applicant, and Sal tells me there is no such thing as “peer-review” in climate denial—but don’t tell the deniers that! So we’re free! (well, free until September when the first plane can fly in.) We’re basically eating nothing but Ry-Krisps and canned tuna now, but we still have a shit-ton of Russian vodka.

  C.

  By mid-August, nearly everyone knew enough Russian to sing all three refrains of “The Song of the Volga Boatmen.” Cooper had learned how to use the rodwell to melt Antarctic ice for the station’s water supply, learning, too, that the water swishing around in the station toilets might be made from snow that had fallen in the fifteenth century (if you dug down far enough). She had finished nearly everyone’s portrait, except Sal, whom she found she didn’t dare commit to canvas since his countenance burned so brightly and so beautifully in her mind. But it was time, she knew, to do the last portrait—the one of David. The one, she now understood, that she’d come down here to paint. And to do that she had to do something else first.

  Cooper found Bozer and the others in the bar the night after the announcement of the sequester’s end. When Bozer glanced up at her and saw the vial she displayed to him in her hand, he nodded and stood up. The ragged crew around him immediately understood. Sal gripped Cooper’s left hand and squeezed.

  The entrance tunnel was bathed in red, but outside the sky was black as ink, the cold winds rolling off the East Antarctic Plateau and the southern lights streaming across the sky in refracting sheets of color. When they reached the Pole marker, the crew gathered around its silver globe expectantly, and their reflections swelled and shrank. For an instant, Cooper saw herself just as she’d been that first day when she’d looked into Alek’s mirrored aviators.

  “Not here,” Cooper said. She pointed toward the Terra Nova, the geographical marker. “There.”

  Bozer looked at her for a moment. “You know if you bury him here, he won’t be here next year. He’ll drift.”

  Cooper held his gaze. “I’m counting on it.”

  Bozer tucked the ice augur under his arm and they began walking toward the Terra Nova, their flashlights casting milky beams into the darkness. When they reached the marker, Cooper pointed at a spot of ice at its foot, and Pearl and Doc Carla trained their flashlights on it.

  Bozer leaned on the ice augur. “We’re all here because of some shit. Everyone’s got it, but you ain’t got to be alone in it.” He grunted. “That’s all I’ve got to say.”

  He looked over at Cooper, his balaclava obscuring all but his clear eyes, and she nodded. He drove the blade into the mark. The group watched the auger rotate in silence; to Cooper, the spiraled blade seemed a vision of infinity. It was only when Sal gently nudged her that she realized Bozer had finished coring.

  She stepped to the edge of the hole and dropped to her knees. Sal helped pull off the mitten on her right hand. Carefully, he opened the vial and emptied the ashes onto the flat of her mitten. For the first time since that night on the edge of the lake, she looked at the gunmetal gray of her brother’s remains. Her hand trembled. She couldn’t move.

  Then the others were kneeling beside her: Dwight, Denise, Floyd, Doc Carla, Pearl, Marcy, Alek, Sal—even the Swedes. Only Bozer stood apart, leaning on the auger. She closed her eyes and released David’s ashes into the deep cut in the continent.

  * * *

  The sun was warm. The sound of birds had not yet become familiar again, and Cooper was thinking wistfully of the silent song of Bozer’s glacier sparrow. Sal drove the rental like a kid on a learner’s permit, hands at ten and two, his body taut, eyes fixed
on the road ahead. As they drove through Palo Alto, the lush lawns—freshly watered and glittering under the sun like sheets of emerald—struck Cooper as about as probable as a McDonald’s on the Divide. The piebald hills seemed ostentatious. The tidy parks were exquisite. The palms fronting the university looked as flamboyant as showgirls, and the occasional appearance of children seemed deeply strange. Cooper and Sal drove through the streets in silence.

  They hadn’t even stopped in Christchurch. The others had back-channeled hostel bookings and begun making plans online as soon as the end of the sequester had been announced. Floyd and Bozer sketched out an appeal to the New Zealand government to give the Man Without Country a proper burial; Denise went looking for a thrift-store wedding gown, having agreed, finally, to marry Bozer when they got off the ice. Pearl found Birdie waiting for her at the airport with a bouquet of daisies and a finished manuscript, and Dwight haunted Internet cafés until he found Bonnie in a cosplay chat room. Tucker was still in Washington, helping Alexandra Scaletta and Daniel Atcheson Johnson pick up the pieces, and lobbying for a dismissal of possible federal charges against the occupiers. The support staff arranged to meet in Denver to plead their cases to VIDS. One thing everyone had agreed upon was that they would all be back.

  But Sal had to tell Professor Brennan five-sigma. The sixth milestone had been reached. Slithering toward the telescope like an army of infinitesimal Slinkys, the gravitational waves had confirmed what the inflationists had claimed all along: that space was a wild, chaotic place marked by violence, and that humanity occupied a remote pocket universe carried along by eternal inflation. There were no branes, no hidden dimensions, no hints of elegant cosmic evolution—there was only the vacuum, and a planet adrift in a multiverse. And he wanted Cooper with him when he did it.