the dance of the anxious penguin

The Gore-Tex mitten Cooper was trying to sketch was in bad shape—a small rip discharged yellowed insulation material while the tip looked as if it had been dipped in barbecue sauce ten years earlier. Cooper had found it in the skua pile—a repository for random shit abandoned by current and former Polies. Named for the opportunistic brown seabirds that haunted the Antarctic coasts, skua functioned at Pole as both a verb and a noun: you could skua something—either by adding it to or removing it from the skua stream—or you could seek out skua. At McMurdo, the skua took up an entire shed. At Pole, it was located in a cardboard box. Cooper had spotted the mitten after breakfast, and, artistic desperation clouding her judgment, had seen in it great potential to create a work that “accurately reflects your time spent at South Pole,” per the NSF directive. As she looked at her first attempts, she felt that although it was shitty work, it was at least better than the fourteen sketches of her own mitten she’d done up to this point. When she returned stateside, she’d have to present her output to a joint National Science Foundation/National Endowment for the Arts committee. She suspected that a study of various polar mittens would not suffice, not that she wasn’t trying. She’d completed one panel of a planned triptych—of mittens.

She was trying to remember what grass looked like when someone knocked on the door. She found the Alarmism and Climate Change Hoax–reading scientist from the galley on the other side. “Hi,” she said.

“I realized too late that we did not exchange names the other day. Tucker told me your name and where to find you. I’m Frank Pavano.” The name sounded vaguely familiar to Cooper, like the name of an Italian food company based in Weehawken, but she couldn’t place it.

She pulled the door open a little. “Well, Frank Pavano, do you want to come in?”

“I don’t want to interrupt your work,” he said, glancing over her shoulder.

“There’s no work going on here, I assure you.” Cooper held the door open wider, and Pavano strode past her, directly to her easel. Cooper was unused to the frankness of his interest in her art—most people looked everywhere but the work. Instead, Pavano leaned closer to her canvas to study the Gore-Tex mitten drawing she’d transferred from the sketchbook. “You seem to have an interest in protest art. Capitalist sublimation specifically.”

“You got that from a mitten?”

He shrugged. “I took some art criticism courses in college to break up the biochem curriculum. But I got C’s, so you can take my observation for what it’s worth.”

“It’s worth a C,” Cooper said, “speaking as someone familiar with C’s.” She smiled, and to her relief Pavano smiled back. “You’re a Beaker, right? Sorry—scientist. What are you doing down here?”

“Broadly, I’m studying methane isotope variability in deep ice cores,” Pavano replied, still studying the canvas. “My early career work was in heliophysics, but I’ve cultivated an interest in climatology over the years. I received some unexpected funding this year to go a bit outside the scope of my previous research.” He scratched the side of his nose with delicate precision. “What about your objectives while you’re down here? What are the parameters? Do you have to deliver a statement of results?”

Before Cooper could answer, someone knocked on the door. She glanced at her watch. “That’ll be Denise. My shift is almost up. Do you want to grab lunch?”

Pavano seemed alarmed by the invitation. “No, I have to get back to the lab. I just wanted to formally introduce myself. On reflection, I realized I’d repaid your interest and kindness with a hasty departure, and I thought I’d apologize.” He opened the door, and slipped past Denise wordlessly. A moment later, he reappeared. “Thank you for the invitation, though.”

Denise raised an eyebrow at Cooper as she walked in. “I’m curious to see how, or if, he is going to integrate into the scientific community,” she said, as she pulled out her laptop and set it heavily on the desk.

“He’s nerdy enough to fit in,” Cooper said.

Denise shook her head. “No, he’s a walking example of the Black Sheep Effect. In cultural groups, like the one here, people will upgrade certain group members based on culturally desirable traits or likability. Look at Marcy, the heavy machine operator, for instance. Because years on the ice are culturally valuable, Marcy is a high-status individual. Off the ice, that might not be true.” She opened her laptop, and Cooper saw the background photo was set to a photo of Bozer standing on a beach in thermal socks and sandals. “The flip side is that the ‘in-group’ will keep group members who threaten the group’s cohesion on the outside, making them into a separate out-group. A black sheep.”

“Why would this guy be a black sheep?”

Denise looked at Cooper, confused. “A climate-change skeptic working at the world’s foremost climatology and atmospheric science research site is not likely to be warmly welcomed by the existing group.”

So Alarmism and the Climate Change Hoax wasn’t the opposition research material Cooper had assumed it to be. It was actually research material. Pavano. Suddenly all those outraged comments on the “South Pole Pals” message board she’d scanned six months earlier made sense. “Wait, is this the guy who’s trying to prove that the ice under the Pole isn’t all that old and could totally fall in line with the whole Noah’s Flood thing?”

Denise stared back at her blandly. “No, I believe that’s the working hypothesis of a biblical climatologist in Australia whose name I don’t recall. I don’t know much about Pavano’s research yet, only that his findings set him in direct opposition to the vast majority of climate researchers around the world. The rumors surrounding the provenance of his funding only add fuel to the fire.”

Everything was coming together now, and Cooper was cheered by the fact that some of the weird social interactions she’d witnessed were starting to seem a little less puzzling. At breakfast a week earlier, for example, people had been talking about how one of the head climate researchers, a paleoclimatologist from Madison named Sri, kept “forgetting” to get “the Denier” a username and password for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet data server. When Sri and his team had hopped a plane for the research camp—known as the Divide—they had removed the Denier’s name from the manifest. It was treated as a joke, and no one was disciplined. But the Denier—Pavano, Cooper now realized—had contacted his congressional sponsor, a Republican senator Cooper thought she’d heard of named Bayless, who promptly called his contact at the NSF, and Pavano was immediately shuttled out to the camp and given full access to the ice archives, the lab, and, at Bayless’s request, Sri’s research site.

Cooper dropped her brushes in a can of turpentine. “Well, it sounds complicated,” she said as Denise sat down to begin work.

“All social interaction is complicated, of course, but down here it’s even more so, which is what makes my job so fun,” Denise replied. “I’m waiting to see if metaphorical effects are amplified at a place like Pole. You know, the idea that holding a cup of hot tea makes people feel warmly toward others, or that a person in a high place, like a cherry picker, is seen as being situated farther up the hierarchy. Last year, Lee and Schwartz found that when exposed to a fishy smell, people actually grow suspicious.” Denise glanced over at Cooper. “In sociological terms, you might say that Frank Pavano is a just-opened can of tuna.”

A very slight smile was the only indication that Denise had made her first joke.

*   *   *

Back at the Jamesways, Cooper found a note under her door from Birdie indicating that there was an artists’ meeting in thirty minutes. Cooper groaned, but she knew Birdie was counting on her to be there. Before leaving her room, she saw her Terra Nova sketch had fallen from the canvas wall, where she’d pinned it. She set it on her desk and studied it for a moment. Her sketches were often the products of procrastination, but Cooper kept coming back to this one—so many times, in fact, that she had completed it. Who knew what it meant? All Cooper knew was that looking at it made her feel better. She pulled on her balaclava and parka for the trek back to the station.

As she hurried out, she accidentally nudged her pee can with her boot. She heard sloshing and realized she’d have to empty it. If she waited another day, she could have a biological disaster on her hands. Pee cans were one of the many secrets veterans kept from Fingys, but after Cooper’s act of civil disobedience with the Swedes, she’d apparently garnered some social capital; Pearl had left an empty #10 can, once filled with industrial-grade cling peaches, outside the door of Cooper’s room, with a note thanking her for not selling her out to Simon. Now Cooper no longer had to venture outside the Jamesway to use the bathroom, which was located in a separate structure a hundred yards east. However, she still had to walk over there to empty the can into the communal pee barrel.

Reluctantly, she picked up the can with her mittens and pushed the door open with her shoulder. She immediately collided with a man dressed in full ECW gear and watched as at least a quarter cup of her urine splashed onto his bunny boots. His woolen face mask and neck gaiter muffled his angry roar, and Cooper hurried past him before he could get a good look at her, grateful for the anonymity provided by the balaclava and the darkness of the hall.

After emptying the can into a barrel and tucking it into a corner to avoid having to return to the Jamesway, she turned to the warped mirror, and cleared a swath through the condensation. It was time to see how she was faring in terms of polar aesthetics. The rule of thumb, she now knew, was that someone who was a “five” off the ice was easily an “Antarctic Ten.” Cooper squinted at her reflection: her infected eye, which had looked like a gelatinous bead for a week, was totally healed. Her hair was so oily it had darkened a few shades—two-minute showers twice a week meant thorough shampooing was now a luxury. Her shaggy bangs fell across her eyes. As she stared at her reflection, she felt she embodied the very definition of the word mediocre. She noticed a waffle crumb in the corner of her mouth, and as she flicked it free, her brother’s face suddenly seemed to inhabit hers, staring back at her through her own eyes. She gripped the sides of the sink to steady her suddenly weak knees and quickly closed her eyes against the image.

“You meditating or something?” Cooper opened her eyes to see Marcy.

Cooper brushed her bangs out of her eyes. “Sort of.” It wasn’t three days ago that she’d held Marcy’s hair off her face as she’d puked into a toilet. Cooper thought she looked better.

“Well, for a second there, I thought you were doing the rosary,” Marcy replied. She seemed as if she wanted to say more. Talking to Marcy was helping. Studying her face helped even more—analyzing the angles of another face obscured David’s—and Cooper saw that although Marcy was only in her late thirties or early forties, her skin was already worn and craggy from her cold weather adventures. Yet her mouth had a sweet downward droop to it, like a baby’s pouchy lips. Her small eyes were almost as dark as Cooper’s, and the lines that radiated from them made her look like a happy Buddhist deity. But right now, the eyes were sad.

“Thanks for the other day,” Marcy said. “It wasn’t my finest moment.”

“No worries. I’ve had my share of not-fine moments, too. You’re feeling better?”

“Yep, fit as a fiddle,” she said tightly. “You got your costume ready for tonight?”

“Costume?”

“The Halloween party?”

“Is that tonight?”

“Well, it is Halloween.”

“I lose track of the days.”

“Just wait until winter, honey.”

“I don’t have a costume.”

“Scrounge one up from skua, no biggie.”

Marcy reached past Cooper and plunged her hand in the plastic bin containing condoms that was replenished daily. “Tonight’s the night to land an ice-husband,” Marcy said. “If you want one.” Cooper thought she saw the sheen of tears in Marcy’s eyes, but they were quickly blinked away. She dropped the condoms into Cooper’s hand. “Get laid, honey. It takes the edge off.”

*   *   *

Like everything else at South Pole Station, the gym was located in a trailer. On the outside door was a handwritten poster announcing the first meeting of the American Society of Polar Philatelists: The Harvis Collection in Da’ House at Our Next Meeting! Be There or Be Filled with Aching Regret.

Inside, Birdie had arranged the folding chairs in a circle. Cooper took the one directly beneath the net-free basketball hoop, and watched as the historical novelist and the interpretative dancer walked in together, not quite holding hands. The literary novelist entered alone, listening to his Discman.

“Does anyone want to run the meetings?” Birdie asked, brandishing a clipboard. “The Program insists on a group leader.” No one replied, and Birdie tried to hide his pleasure at taking the helm.

“Could I say something before we start?” the interpretive dancer asked, and Birdie reluctantly granted her the floor. “I’d like to start off this meeting with a haiku that I believe may put this whole strange adventure in perspective.

“The man pulling radishes

“Pointed the way

“With a radish.”

Birdie looked over at Cooper, but she turned her gaze to the climbing wall to avoid his eyes; she understood that laughter would diminish the power of the radish. Still, the dancer grew frosty at the lack of appreciation, and said crisply, “What are we supposed to be doing at these meetings anyway? I’d like to get a handle on what’s expected of me. I tend toward anxiety, and anxiety is not conducive to creativity.”

“It can be,” the literary novelist said, fiddling with his Discman. The dancer looked at him with disdain and flicked her long braid over her shoulder.

“Yes, well, it isn’t for me,” she said.

“So far as I can tell,” Birdie said, “the Program wants us to meet in an official way once a month and to keep minutes, and then submit them to the officers at the end of this adventure. Why don’t we go around the circle and talk about what we’re working on?”

“My work deals with the cartographic imperative,” the literary novelist said. The dancer leaned over her knees to look at him.

“Cartographic imperative? Like, the desire to map things?”

“Yeah, exactly. Like, why do the people who come down here feel like they have to, you know, name it? Or claim it for their country? I’m really interested in what is behind that motivation.”

“And what’s the title of your book?” Birdie asked.

“I’m calling it Mapping the Breath.”

“Profound,” the dancer said, punctuating her point with the kind of dreamy sigh she’d expected for the radish haiku.

“Yeah, I was thinking that, like, mapping the breath is pretty much impossible. And cartography in general is such a hubristic endeavor that it’s almost as ridiculous.”

“But the book itself sounds self-aggrandizing,” Cooper said, before she could stop herself. The tenor of the room changed at once, like a writing workshop suddenly infused with candor. “I mean, at least the title does,” Cooper added. Birdie shook his head slowly, stifling a smile. The literary novelist, loose-limbed and squinty-eyed, squinted at her harder. “Yeah, no, I want feedback,” he said. “I mean, that’s good. In many ways the desire to put a cartographic imprint on land that belongs to all humankind finds a parallel in the canine impulse to mark its territory.”

The door to the gym opened and Denise walked in, followed by a blast of cold air. Her glasses instantly turned opaque with steam. “Sorry I’m late,” she said as she pulled off her hood. “I’m Denise.”

“She’s a sociologist,” Cooper added as Denise wrestled off her parka.

“I was told this would be a closed meeting,” the dancer said stiffly. “I have no interest in being studied.”

Denise’s plain face radiated serenity. “You needn’t worry—my research interests lie elsewhere, though I do have a casual interest in the Artists and Writers contingent because they have, historically, been even more isolated due to their low social status at the station.”

“Low social status?” the dancer asked.

A sound somewhere between a snort and a cat trying to clear a hairball exploded from the historical novelist. “So we’re pariahs,” he said acidly, picking at a mole on his neck.

“Perhaps I was a little too general.”

“But low social status means no one likes us,” the dancer said.

“Well, in layman’s terms, I suppose that would be a fair characterization,” Denise said. “Though the term superfluous would be more accurate.”

“This makes me really anxious,” the dancer said to the historical novelist.

“Put it in your work,” he said soothingly.

Cooper smiled. Put it in your work. This had always been her father’s standing advice. Maybe this was the standing advice all exasperated relatives or spouses gave to agitated artists. My first date ever stood me up, Dad. Put it in your work. I made a really bad decision having to do with a vending-machine salesman/artisanal tobacconist/urban shaman last night. Put it in your work. And it was true, Cooper thought. You could put it in your work, and you did, but then the work itself became nothing more than a hall of mirrors, reflecting back all the crappy things that had happened, or which you had made happen, in your life. That was why she’d stopped painting when David was sick. Who needed a mirror when the only thing reflected was loss after loss? She dropped her hand into her pocket, her fingers searching for the vial. She found it and ran her thumb over the serrated edges of its childproof cap.

“Cooper?” Birdie said. She withdrew her hand quickly and looked up. The artists were watching her expectantly. Next to her, Denise scribbled something in her notebook. Out of the corner of her eye, Cooper saw Thousand-yard stare—already? written in the margin.

“Sorry,” she said. “So, I’m a painter, though since I got here, I’m not sure anymore.” There were a couple of appreciative chuckles. “Actually, I probably shouldn’t even call myself an artist. A professor once told me that you can’t be cynical and artistic, that these traits are diametrically opposed. He said I was cynical. And I guess I am.” Hard, actually—“hardened by premature success” were her professor’s exact words. Artists had to be porous, he’d said, like sponges, capable of soaking things up and releasing them. If you were a stone, you could do nothing but take up space. And while a sponge could become a stone, a stone could never become a sponge. “So I’m finding the polar landscape challenging to capture because I don’t want to do dead-explorer stuff or glaciers, and I definitely don’t want to go the route of putting incongruous, unexpected man-made stuff on the ice, like I’ve seen in other polar art. That feels sort of didactic.”

“I actually think that sounds interesting,” the literary novelist said. “Like painting a Walmart on the polar cap to make a point?”

“Too obvious,” Cooper said.

The literary novelist looked at his nails. “I didn’t realize visual artists were interested in subtlety.”

As the conversation continued around her, Cooper began wishing that someone would appear and point the way—with a radish, a compass, a finger, it didn’t matter. She just wanted someone to tell her how to move forward.

*   *   *

After the meeting ended, Cooper stepped out of the gym, and saw a commotion near the door of a construction office at the other end of the trailer. A knot of people, including Pearl, were doing a little dance. Cooper noticed Sal standing with them. “I’ll come to the recital but I’m not taking the class,” she heard him say.

“What’s happening?” Cooper called down to him.

He seemed surprised to see her, but quickly assumed a look of nonchalance. “Hey, it’s Frida Kahlo,” he said, walking toward her. “Make yourself useful and paint me something I won’t want to drop-kick to Vostok.”

“Something with tater tots?” Cooper replied.

“Oh, if you got into tot art and you were any good, I’d marry you.”

“Why are the girls all excited?”

“Dave’s in from McMurdo.”

“Dave?”

“Dave’s dance class? The most popular rec class in the history of the Program?” He noted Cooper’s skepticism. “It’s kind of a big deal. Starts Thursday, if you’re interested.”

“Nothing could induce me to go to Dave’s dance class.”

“Fingy, when you can’t walk your dog, mow your lawn, get a coffee at the place where you know the guy who makes it, you will begin to find dance class with Dave appealing. And if Dave doesn’t show up for the dance class, you’ll go apeshit. You have the expectation that he will be there and he better well keep his fucking commitments, because Dave’s dance class is all you’ll have to hold on to down here once those doors close for the winter.”

All this bluster, but he was grinning. “And now I have to keep my own commitment to show up at the Smoke Bar and get wasted before the Halloween party. Adios.” He turned and began walking away.

“Where’s the Smoke Bar?”

“Winter-overs only,” Sal called over his shoulder.

“Come on.”

He stopped walking. “All right, Fingy. Follow me.”

Smoke Bar was located on the second floor of the galley trailer. Cooper had heard about the Smoke Bar, but had never been able to suss out its exact location. All the summer workers and most of the scientists congregated at the other bar, 90 South, which was the Señor Frog’s of Antarctica. Smoke Bar was Chumley’s—back when you had to be somebody to get in. Gaining entry to the Smoke Bar was, Cooper understood, a privilege.

When they reached the top of the metal stairs, Sal blocked the door and turned to look at Cooper. “You’re about to enter a very delicate ecosystem, so when we get in, go sit with Tucker, who will be drinking vodka neat at the table under the dart board. I’ll introduce you to the Beakers when it makes sense. They get excited and weird around ladies, seeing as they’re in such short supply here. I have to manage their expectations.” Cooper knew Sal was bullshitting, but she didn’t mind. He pushed the door open with his shoulder and let Cooper enter.

As she walked in, The Smithereens’ “A Girl Like You” was playing at max volume. Cooper took in the foosball table, a disco ball, and the stripper pole. Twinkling fairy lights hung from the ceiling, along with at least twenty purple Crown Royal sacks, below which ashy clouds of cigarette smoke created a small weather system. The bar itself was a piece of plywood on crates, behind which a man in a George W. Bush mask was dispensing drinks from a series of mini-fridges lined up against the wall. Everyone bought their own liquor at the station store, or shipped their own booze down to Pole before the season started. Cooper had settled for the cheap New Zealand beer that came in cases on every flight in, but her supply was down at 90 South with the rest of the Fingys’.

Cooper spotted Tucker at a table with some galley workers and assorted Wastees—the people who handled garbage and sewage—and she and Sal silently parted ways.

“I know a guy whose credit card was stolen,” a guy without a chair was telling the table. “The thief ordered a really expensive cell phone and also sent him a Lobstergram. Guy cancels the card, and Lobstergram didn’t want the lobster back. The guy was allergic to shellfish so he gave it to a friend.” This raised no response, and no one offered him a chair.

“Anyway,” a tall man with Cher-like hair and a sparse, preadolescent-style mustache said. “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted: you play the Antarctica card off the ice, you’re laid ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”

“Doesn’t work for women,” a dark-haired woman said, her feet on his lap. Cooper recognized her as Pearl’s boss, Bonnie, the head cook.

“Why?” her cloak-wearing companion asked.

“No man sitting at a bar is gonna get his dick hard if a woman tells him she’s just back from the ice chip, except maybe another Polie. And in that case, it’s just a reflex.”

Tucker took Cooper’s arm and simultaneously pulled out a chair from another table. “Congratulations on gaining entry,” he whispered. Then to the group, he said: “This is my friend, Cooper.” Cooper cringed. The first thing she’d understood when she’d arrived was that introductions were for the desperate; the fewer you required, the stronger you appeared. Pole was a place where people simply became known.

“You tell us you don’t have friends, Tucker,” Bonnie said, “that you’re a lone wolf.”

“Well, Bonnie, I’m starting fresh,” Tucker said. Cher then introduced himself as Dwight, “the wizard-god of Logistics and Comms.” Too late, Cooper realized Tucker had slipped away.

“Judging by your attire,” Dwight said, “you are neither Beaker nor manager, neither galley slave nor Wastee. Reasonably attractive, yet with no obvious male companion.” He paused and looked over at Bonnie. “Wow, this is exactly like cosplay.”

“No, I recognize her. You were in the kitchen the other day,” Bonnie said, scrutinizing Cooper’s face. “I think you’re a VIDS psychologist, trying to blend in with the population.”

“I’m a painter,” Cooper replied.

“They sent people down to paint the walls?” Dwight asked, incredulous.

“Artist,” Cooper clarified. “The NSF sends artists down each year to do … whatever.”

Bonnie reached across the table and offered Cooper her hand. “Well, let me formally introduce myself—I’m Bonnie, the head cook.” Cooper took Bonnie’s chapped hand for a shake, but Bonnie grasped Cooper’s and pulled it toward her, caressing it. “Dwight, honey, feel her skin.” Dwight ran a bored finger over the top of Cooper’s hand and withdrew it, nodding.

“So pink and soft,” Bonnie cooed.

“That’s how we find the Fingys when there’s a blackout and we need fresh meat,” Dwight said in a monotone. “Their soft, infant-like skin.”

Cooper excused herself to beg a beer off George W. Bush. She cursed softly when she noticed, again too late, that the man sitting to her left was Floyd. “Who’s more heroic,” he asked his companion, brandishing a glass of whiskey, “a woman doc who got a common disease, but who was also trained to deal with it, or the pilot who successfully landed a Herc in the middle of a polar winter to evac her?” He paused here, letting his rage build. “You tell me which demands more bravery. You tell me who risked their life. Do you even know the pilot’s name?”

“Dude, I’m just trying to have a drink,” the guy said wearily, pushing his fingers in and out of a plastic jack-o’-lantern’s mouth.

“Major George R. McAllister,” Floyd said. “You remember that name.” He glanced over at Cooper. “You, too—George R. McAllister. Oh, hey, I know you. You’re the McMurtry apologist. Who the hell let you in?”

Luckily, death metal began blaring through the speakers at that moment and Floyd skipped over to the stripper pole and started gyrating. While everyone guffawed at this, Cooper noticed Sal was watching her, but he quickly looked away. She watched Floyd for a while—he was surprisingly agile—and finished the Canterbury ale Bush had loaned her, but it gave her a headache. She was about to leave when Birdie walked in, his thick glasses reflecting the lights from the revolving disco ball. He carried a bottle of Dewar’s bearing his name on a piece of masking tape and two highball glasses pinched between his thumb and fingers. He took a seat next to Cooper.

“Who told you?” she asked.

“Told me what?”

“About this place—who let you in?”

Birdie smiled and opened the bottle. He poured out two measures, then handed a glass over to Cooper. “She did.” He nodded toward Pearl, who was throwing darts with a couple of dining assistants.

“You’re kidding me.”

“This strains your credulity? I’m not offended. It strains mine. Look at her. She’s gorgeous.” Cooper looked over at Pearl. For the first time, the pink bandanna was off, and Cooper saw that both sides of her delicately shaped head were shaved to the skin, leaving only a thatch of blond hair, which had been pulled up into a ponytail. She was wearing a black headband with glittery cat ears, and when she laughed, Cooper could see what Birdie meant.

Cooper clinked her glass to Birdie’s. “Cheers.”

“How’s it going, then?” Birdie asked. “The painting, I mean.”

“Mittens,” Cooper said. “All I’ve got is mittens. And there’s no way to justify that as art.” Not that she hadn’t tried. The mitten is a talisman, an image of worship in a place where god is dead. It’s a study of both the humility of the simple garment and the hubris of our belief that it protects us from this savage continent.

“You?” Cooper asked.

“I’m having a hard time pulling things together myself. Now that I’m here, Bowers grows elusive.” Cooper could feel Sal’s eyes on her again, but didn’t risk a look in his direction this time.

“I can’t imagine caring enough about a person I’ve never met to spend years researching his life and writing about him,” she said. “You’d have to be obsessed.”

Birdie nodded. “Biography is not a genre for the lukewarm. Bowers was just a sledger, like me, head down, strap over his shoulder, the only one on the Scott expedition without skis. He was optimistic to the point of being demented. Cherry said there was nothing subtle about him. He wasn’t complex like Cherry, who was a head case. He’s not intrinsically interesting like Scott either, nor a hero like Titus, and thank god he wasn’t a narcissistic ass like Teddy Evans. There are no scandals to unearth on this fellow, no dark side. I suppose I’ll need to find a dark side. I’m told we all have them.”

“Except me,” Pearl chirped as she passed. She leaned down between Cooper’s and Birdie’s chairs and slung an arm around them both. “Dark sides are for moons, not people.”

Birdie nearly snapped his neck watching Pearl continue on to the bar top. Cooper told Birdie she had to hit the john. She passed Sal’s table on the way to the restroom, and he reached out as she walked by and hooked his fingers through one of the belt loops on her Carhartts. He was leaning back, his chair resting precariously against the wall—sodden, and more attractive for it, a feat Cooper had never seen achieved before. Next to him, his Russian cohort, Alek, looked up at her with bleary eyes.

“Where you going, strange person?” Sal said.

“To the bathroom.”

“I come with?” Alek said thickly.

“Sure, that’s going to happen.”

Alek fist-pumped toward the sky. “She says this will happen.”

Sal squeezed Alek’s shoulder with his free hand. “Alek’s drunk on moonshine.”

“Samogon,” Alek growled.

“Sorry—samogon. It’s a moonshine they make in the Urals. NSF thought it was isopropyl alcohol and let it pass. You met Alek, right? You can call him Rasputin.”

Alek frowned. “Always Rasputin. Why not Gorky or Pushkin?”

“Because you’re an evil monk, not a literary genius,” Sal replied.

Alek extended his middle finger and thrust it skyward. “Why do I allow you?” he bellowed.

“What do you actually do, Alek?” Cooper asked.

“I am here to help Sal win Nobel.”

Cooper was intrigued enough to hold her pee. “This is important research season for our team,” Alek continued. “For world.” He lifted his glass of clear liquid. “I drink to it.”

Sal looked embarrassed. “Samogon makes Alek sentimental,” he said. “Ignore him.” He gestured to a chair. “Sit down. I want to talk to you about something.” Cooper took the chair, and Sal leaned over the table. “I hear you’re getting cozy with Frank Pavano.”

“Cozy? He visited me at my studio the other day.” Sal leaned his chair back again, resting his knees against the edge of the table. “Does this have something to do with your petition?” Cooper asked.

“I can’t hear of this man anymore,” Alek said, and took his samogon to the table where Birdie was sitting with Pearl.

“His work must be legit if the NSF funded his research,” Cooper said.

Sal made a guttural sound in the back of his throat. “Look, last year, a couple of Republicans in Congress got letters from their constituents saying that they couldn’t get the literature on alternate explanations for climate change in the schools, they couldn’t get federal funding, they couldn’t ‘teach the controversy.’ Then one of these morons—guy named Bayless, out of Kansas—realizes that serious science is done at Pole and not one scientist is down here trying to prove climate change is a hoax. He gets constituents to flood the NSF with letters, joins forces with another Bible-thumping congressman, Calhoun, goes on Fox & Friends, they do their thing, open inquiry, whatever. Of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Bayless and his own personal Lennie Small are up for reelection next fall.”

“So the NSF caved to political pressure?”

Sal shook his head. “Officially there was no ‘political pressure.’ In fact, NSF rejected Pavano’s application initially. Then all of a sudden he’s funded and NSF releases a statement that says they support the general principle of academic freedom and inquiry and are sending Pavano down here to disprove climate change.”

“Is there anything there? What’s his science?”

“Let’s not use science and Pavano in the same sentence, okay?” Sal said. “Pavano is collecting ice-core data from the Divide that he’ll use to dispute the models that indicate Earth is going to become a giant Bunsen burner. At the same site, I might add, where the real climatologists are extracting and analyzing ice cores that will prove that it is. His presence on the ice means that somewhere a real climate scientist did not get his grant approved.” He raised his glass. “And so, my darling painter person, the fact that Frank Pavano is at South Pole Station is officially a sign of the end times.”

“You’re not a climate scientist. Why do you care so much?”

“If you were a scientist, you wouldn’t ask that question.”

All around them, people were starting to leave to get dressed for the Halloween party. “You coming?” Sal asked. “Everyone comes. It’s a polar spectacle.”

Cooper looked over at Birdie—his face was rosy and tears were streaming from his eyes. Pearl rubbed his shoulders as Alek held an empty glass of samogon above his head triumphantly.

“I guess so.”

Tucker appeared at their table, his hands clasped in front of his body. “Frosty Boy’s back,” he said. Sal threw his head back and punched the sky with both fists. Tucker turned to Cooper. “Frosty Boy is a soft-serve machine that delivers flaccid ice cream in a continuous stream.”

“He’s probably spent more time under the loving, quasi-sexual ministrations of the maintenance specialists than he has actually dispensing soft serve,” Sal said.

“Why keep it around if it doesn’t work?” Cooper asked.

“You can’t just come in here and replace things like Frosty Boy with something that works better. We grow attached to these temperamental pieces of crap. They’re rejects, just like us.”

*   *   *

A half hour and scavenged costume later, Cooper found herself standing in the darkened gym wearing a Freddy Krueger mask and surgical scrubs while a five-piece band calling themselves Coq au Balls covered an Avril Lavigne song as a joke. No one was laughing. On the booze table beside her, a jack-o’-lantern vomited seeds and pith. Cooper watched as the VIDS and NSF administrative staff jogged onto the dance floor, singing along to “Sk8er Boi.” She worked her straw through a slit in the Krueger mask and drained her screwdriver. A ghost-memory flickered in Cooper’s mind of Billie, at fourteen, advising her that liquor before beer, you’re in the clear and beer before liquor gets you there quicker. Or was it never been sicker? Whatever. Next to her, Dwight groomed his Chewbacca mask with a small comb. When he noticed Cooper watching, he trilled at her.

Halfway through her third screwdriver, everything in Cooper’s line of vision began to take on the soft edges of a high school senior portrait. She scanned the crowd. There was Bozer, dressed as a hobo, a play on Tucker’s widely adopted moniker for him, hobosexual, a man who was the opposite of a metrosexual, a man who gave not two shits about his appearance. (“Like Michael Moore,” Tucker had said helpfully.) Holding a woman’s purse on the end of a stick, and wearing torn culottes, Bozer was showing off a handmade birdhouse to a Fingy meteorology tech, who apparently believed his story about the rare “glacier sparrow” that nested at South Pole. Across the gym, the interpretive dancer was sporting a rainbow clown’s wig and enormous novelty sunglasses in the shape of hearts, and Electric Sliding with the historical novelist, who really was just shuffling.

Cooper turned away from the stage in time to see a woman from McMurdo walk purposefully toward Sal and grab his hand, pulling him back toward the dance floor. Through the eyes of Freddy Krueger, Cooper considered the woman: so that’s what Sal liked, she thought. Women who wore oversize football jerseys, hot pants, and slightly off-kilter trucker’s hats and called it a costume.

“This is the annual start-of-the-season hook-up,” Tucker said, stepping next to Cooper. “Whoever you hook up with becomes your ice-wife or ice-husband for the season.” He looked out over the crowd of bearded Britney Spears and wobbly space cowboys. “Choose wisely.”

“I’m trapped in a bad remake of Meatballs,” she said.

“One wonders if a Meatballs remake could be good?”

“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Cooper replied.

“I know it seems like a frat party, but it won’t last. The beginning is always like rutting season on the Great Plains.”

“What about you? Do you have an ice … person here?” Cooper asked.

“As Calvin Coolidge once said, ‘I have found out in the course of a long public life that the things I did not say never hurt me.’” With this, Tucker wandered away, and Cooper finished off her screwdriver. Now she was sufficiently drunk. She pulled off the Krueger mask and threw it high into the air, not bothering to watch it fall in the middle of the makeshift mosh pit by the stage. She spotted her parka hanging on the NordicTrack that had been shoved into a corner of the gym. On her way over, she passed Birdie and Pearl, who were deep in conversation. “And they have these things called ‘meat raffles,’” Birdie said, his face still flushed from Alek’s samogon. “Meat raffles!”

As Cooper made her way to the door, the lights suddenly dimmed—everywhere she looked, jack-o’-lanterns leered at her, their crooked mouths illuminated by battery-powered votive candles. By the door, she had to force her way through a knot of Beakers dressed as approximations of Christ’s apostles (bedsheets and beards). “Finally, the waiter leaves,” one of them was saying. “And that’s when she leans over and whispers, ‘I don’t believe in carbon dating.’ So I said, ‘I don’t believe we’ll be dating.’”

As soon as she stepped outside the gym trailer, the icy air wrapped itself around Cooper’s midsection, and she realized she hadn’t zipped up her parka. When she tried to join the zipper parts together, the world tilted and she felt certain she could feel the speedy rotation of the earth on its axis. She leaned against the tire of a forklift and steadied herself. Below her boots, though, the ground circulated like a frothy whirlpool. She raised her head and stared in wonder at the sunlight pouring into the long entrance tunnel; she knew it had to be well after midnight, but it was as bright as a Folgers morning. The thought of fresh air pulled her forward.

Halfway down the tunnel, she took a deep breath—the cold air rinsed through her lungs and the world stopped spinning for a moment. Then she saw the row of metal folding chairs blocking the entrance. A large handwritten sign had been taped to a chair. It read: NO, YOU CANNOT GET SOBER BY GOING OUTSIDE! RETURN TO PARTY YOU DUMBSHIT.

Cooper remembered her studio—it was technically under the Dome. Maybe she’d be a better painter drunk than sober. They said Hemingway was. Hemingway wasn’t a painter, Cooper reminded herself. And who was “they”? Hemingway wasn’t a painter. Hemingway wasn’t a painter. She chanted this line out loud as she circled back to the artists’ annex. A couple making out in the cab of a Caterpillar stopped to stare at her.

When she arrived at the door to her studio, she tapped the postcard of Foucault for good luck. Upon walking in, though, Cooper came face-to-face with her Mitten in Winter canvas, and her heart sank. The painting now struck her as revolting. She glanced over at Denise’s desk; a large cardboard box had been set atop a stele of textbooks. Cooper knew it was filled with slightly less than twelve gross Blue Razberry Blow Pops; the candy was circulating among the station population as currency. (Someone had already been called into HR for simulating fellatio on one of them during the sexual harassment training video.) But Cooper wasn’t looking for candy. She wanted the box cutter Denise had used to open the package. When she found it, she pushed the blade up and watched as its geometry changed the farther it extruded. She lay it flat against her forearm to test its sharpness and discovered that a slight change in angle could draw blood.

She turned to her canvas and thrust the blade into it. It didn’t rip cleanly—the canvas resisted and the first cut frayed. It was only when she retracted the blade a few degrees that it became an efficient tool of destruction. Cooper ripped long, jagged lines through the mitten, and the fabric peeled away from the gashes, dropping fiber at her feet. Every sound—the thrumming bass from the party next door, the vibration of the power plant, the creaking of the ice—faded, save her own thumping heartbeat. Then, slowly, she realized someone was pounding on her door. She froze, hoping whoever it was would walk away, but the knocks continued, taking on a percussive quality.

“Who is it?” Cooper called.

“Herbert Hoover.”

Cooper unlocked the door and opened it a crack to find Tucker’s pockmarked face. He was holding two steaming cups of black coffee. As he handed her one through the gap in the door, his eyes traveled to Cooper’s shredded canvas. “Ah, killing your darlings tonight, I see.” Cooper opened the door wide and let him pass through into the room.

She sat down heavily on the stool and sipped the bitter coffee while Tucker took off his parka and hung it on the back of the door. He kicked the ribbons of canvas into a pile and removed the frame from the easel. In its place he put one of the blank canvases Cooper had stretched and prepped the week before in a fit of optimism. As he tidied the room, Cooper could feel the high-octane coffee sobering her up, sip by sip.

Finally, Tucker turned to her, his muscular arms hanging awkwardly at his sides.

“You didn’t mention it on the application,” he said.

“Mention what?”

“That you were a prodigy. The New York Times Magazine thing. Whether you had or had not saved the American Art World at age sixteen. Incidentally, according to my online research, it’s still at risk.”

Cooper’s head swam. “That person no longer exists.”

“Don’t be dramatic.”

She fixed Tucker with a glare. “Would you trade on fleeting success fifteen years after the fact?”

Tucker winced.

“I am not an attractive person but I am an honest one. You can ask me anything. I will tell you I am single and a homo. I relate to you because when I was your age, I was also someone who had hopes and dreams. I find as I grow older that I like to give the young people advice. And my golden rule is this: If you are going to be self-conscious, try to be funny about it or insightful. Otherwise, and I’m guilty of this, it is nothing but self-indulgence. And smile more—easier said than done if you have had Botox and a job like mine.”

He picked up her sketchbook and held it out to her.

“What?” Cooper said.

“You’re going to paint my portrait.”

“I don’t do portraits.”

“Just pretend you’re at a wedding. I can get some kale from the kitchen if it would help.”

Cooper looked at Tucker’s face, ruthlessly pitted by years of acne, and yet strangely smooth from all the chemical peels. Despite its imperfections, though, his face was a limpid image, perhaps the only truly clear image she’d seen since she’d arrived at this confusing place. She was starting from zero anyway, so she selected the sharpest pencil from her pencil cup and pulled her sketchpad onto her lap.

“Do I seem straight to you?” Tucker asked as Cooper began to work. “I mean—am I queeny?”

“Why are you asking me that?”

“I’ve been advised several times to ‘be a man.’ In corporate scenarios, mainly. It’s made me question my masculinity.”

“Well, whoever said that is an asshole.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

With the side of her hand, Cooper blended the outline she’d drawn of Tucker’s head. “Why are you down here?” she asked. “Give me a one-liner.”

“Smartass.”

“I want to know.”

Tucker looked down at the cup of coffee in his hands. “One day, I decided to embrace a new manifesto, and I say this without being glib or self-deceiving: always look for the positive in all situations. This credo is also self-serving, since in my case, anyway, negativity causes facial afflictions.”

As she sketched, Cooper thought the eyes would be most difficult; the eyes always were. But Tucker’s were uniquely challenging. The startlingly green irises disappeared beneath his upper and lower lids, but the eyes themselves had a slight downturn at the corners. Sometimes, there was a flatness to them, as if he had checked out. Other times, rarely, they looked almost manic. Still, as she worked, she felt a kind of peace, as if her brain were cooling off. All she had to do right now was draw a picture.

“Here’s what I learned, Cooper. If your current environment is not conducive to a satisfying life, then you change your environment. That well-worn advice about your problems following you wherever you go? Patently false. I find I can live well at South Pole, which is good, because I want to live long enough to find out if John Cougar Mellencamp gets buried in a small town.

“Hey.”

Cooper looked up from her sketchpad.

“You’re working.”

Cooper grinned. “I guess all I needed was coffee—and Herbert Hoover.”

“I am but a humble servant,” Tucker replied.

As she worked, looking from her paper to Tucker’s gentle face and back again, Cooper was overcome by a feeling she hadn’t touched since David was alive, since she’d stood on the edge of the woods and waited for him to return—the conviction that the world could become known if only you looked hard enough.

*   *   *

2003 November 01

06:23

To: cherrywaswaiting@hotmail.com

From: Billie.Gosling@janusbooks.com

RE: Changing the subject line

C.,

My Internet research tells me that you have to take another psych eval in a couple months because you’re staying through the winter. My guess: you have to fail the psych exam with flying colors in order to stay. Would crazy people, if collected together, actually form a unit of sanity, their respective psychoses canceling one another out? Dad drove up to Grand Casino Hinckley last week. He and some other 3M retirees got schooled at the poker table by a bunch of elderly Hmong men who literally had no tells. Afterwards, they went to see Styx at the Events Center. OK, I have to go—there’s a manuscript by Carlos Castaneda’s last lover waiting to be photocopied. Mom acquired it last year and now has “buyer’s remorse.” Question: Did you ever wonder if Christ wore the cloak of the Illuminati? Me either. But Mom assures me that a huge “sub-sub-segment” of the New Age population wants an answer to this burning question, and I live to serve. Dad tells me the real money is in explorer lit anthologies. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the market for explorer lit died with “talking machines” and lineament.

B.

*   *   *

2003 November 03

11:08

To: Billie.Gosling@janusbooks.com

From: cherrywaswaiting@hotmail.com

Re: Changing the subject line

B.,

The Halloween party was a bust. I got drunk and left early. In other news, I completed a triptych. Mittens. Actually, one is a glove. Which means I can assign it meaning. It was originally supposed to be all mittens, but I destroyed one of the panels in a fit of Artistic Angst. Tucker, the station manager, convinced me to “start fresh or become a tragic figure,” so I also started a portrait. In other news, there’s a guy. He spoke to me at length about the dangers of politics intruding on science, but all I could think about when he was talking was how weird it was that an astrophysicist could be extremely physically attractive. That never happens. Why does that never happen?

C.

*   *   *

When Cooper woke the next morning, her left eye was encrusted with dried pus. Cursing, she hauled herself out of bed and felt around for her ECW gear. She was embarrassed to have to go see Doc Carla about her eyes again—it was her fault for not taking the entire course of antibiotics.

She pulled on her parka and, out of habit, thrust her hand into the depths of the pocket to touch the old Tylenol vial. To her horror, she realized the cap was loose—not detached, but nearly. She removed it from her pocket, and after checking to make sure nothing had escaped, pressed the top down firmly. She held it in her hand and stared at it through her good eye for a minute. What the hell was she doing, carrying this around like a talisman? And what was her plan for it anyway? She’d only ever gotten as far as getting it down here. She hadn’t considered what she’d do with it once she arrived. She set the vial on her desk, next to the compass. She’d have to deal with it at some point, but not now.

As she walked down the entrance tunnel toward Hard Truth, she passed yet another guy holding a large pillow to his chest. He stopped short and looked hard at her. Suddenly, he began fumbling in his pocket for something. “Hey,” he said, shoving another folded note at her. “Will you give this to Bozer?” In a place where Beakers were peering into the beginnings of the universe, how could a pool table be so important? Tucker had so far refused to intervene, hoping the situation would resolve itself with a frenzy of broken test tubes and bent levels that would allow the hostile energy to dissipate without causing bodily harm. Denise, on the other hand, remained convinced that only when one of the groups established dominance would equilibrium be restored. Cooper snatched the note from the pillow-clutcher’s hands without a word. Bozer, it read, The cases of Schlitz will arrive on the morning flight from McMurdo. We expect reciprocity.

When Cooper got to the clinic, the door was locked. She knocked, and heard Doc Carla bark, “Wait!” After a minute, the door opened just slightly and Tucker’s face appeared. He took one look at her, then slammed it shut. Cooper could hear people talking on the other side. Suddenly, the door flew open and Tucker pulled her in.

Toward the back of the room, Marcy huddled on a chair, a blanket pulled over her shoulders. “Oh … I can come back later,” Cooper said.

“Stay,” Marcy said. “Learn from my mistake.” Tucker had his head in his hands. The feeling in the room was familiar—Doc Carla’s rugged bedside manner a little too forced, Tucker’s silence, Marcy’s resignation. This was the Trinity of the Unfortunate Event. Cooper had been through its rigors before. It had been present during David’s third 5150 hold—the day Cooper had run out of her shift at Caribou Coffee when he’d been found on the roof of the Weisman Art Museum, flapping his arms and walking in tight circles, unresponsive to the museum’s security officers, and then, later, the police. “That’s what happens to everyone who sees the Damien Hirst exhibit,” Billie had said at Hennepin County Medical Center, where they had traveled to meet the cops. Bill had laughed at this. Cooper still couldn’t forgive him for it. That was the only thing she had left to forgive him for—the laugh. When Cooper had glimpsed David as the orderlies walked him down the hall to the back ward, he looked like a mannequin, his arms bent at weird angles, his legs stiff. Cooper, still wearing her latte-stained barista’s apron, had watched in horror as he’d hobbled down the hall until he and the orderlies stopped before a set of white doors. With a swipe of a key card, the doors opened and swallowed him up.

Cooper was still standing there, frozen, when a nurse shoved something at her. “He was waving this around when the cops got to him. Most of ’em, if they’re raving, they got a Bible. Never seen this one before.” Cooper took the book without looking at it. She knew which one it was. Only when the nurse was halfway down the hall did Cooper dare to look: the ghostly image of three men—Edward Wilson, Birdie, and Cherry—silhouetted in the mouth of an ice cave.

Every night that week, Cooper stood outside in the backyard with Bill, staring at Hale-Bopp through the telescope. It was March, and for three months the comet had been a smeared fingerprint on the sky, but now, as it approached second magnitude, it grew brighter, it grew tails—one yellow, one blue. It had split at the root. Toward the end of the week, Cooper overheard Bill in the kitchen saying care facility and Clozaril and menial jobs and Dasha saying, “In some cultures, schizophrenia is a form of shamanism.” Billie, uncharacteristically, remained mute for days. And the book that the orderlies had had to rip from David’s hands, with its crenellated spine and its portrait of their men, remained Cooper’s secret possession; the Worst Journey in the World was now the most important thing in the world.

Doc Carla gripped Cooper’s upper arm roughly and propelled her to the sink. “I don’t have time for this shit,” she snapped. “You should’ve finished the whole course of antibiotics.” She forced Cooper’s eye open like it was a clam and squeezed eyedrops into the seam.

“I have such a good pee can,” Marcy said thoughtfully. “I mean, it’s the best one on the station. Epoxy-lined steel. Substantial volume. It even has a top. Damn. I take that pee can home with me between seasons. I use it when I’m off the ice.” She looked over at Tucker. “Sometimes I become immobilized on a toilet. I don’t know why.” She shook her head. “No, you know why, Marce. You know. You know it’s because you have no idea how to be outside of this place.” She laughed bitterly. “You know what’s funny is that about a week in, some guy in the machine shop, some asshole loaner from McMurdo, was telling me how he didn’t think women should be on the ice at all. He tells me that in the military there’s this ‘phenomenon’ of female service members getting knocked up so they can be relieved of their duties. Says, ‘It’s an easy out, like a no-fault divorce.’ And you know what? I agreed with him.”

Marcy looked worn and tired, her wild hair pointing in all different directions. “Well, it’s my own damn fault.” She shook her head. “It’s dumb to say it out loud, but, Christ, I thought I was too old to make a baby. I haven’t bled in a year. I thought it was over for me. I guess I got lazy. If anyone else finds out, especially the guys, my long and storied career here will go down in flames.”

“It’s happened before, Marcy,” Doc Carla said. “And it will happen again. Human nature.”

“If it were some other chick, Doc, I’d be standing there with everyone else wishing she was dead. As it is, I’ll be the only one wishing I was dead, but at least I’ll be off the ice when everybody finds out.”

“You’re leaving?” Cooper asked.

“This shit’s an automatic NPQ,” Marcy replied.

“Couldn’t you come back? Afterwards, I mean.”

Marcy looked from Cooper to Tucker and Doc Carla and back again. “Afterwards?”

It took a minute, but Cooper’s question finally penetrated, and Tucker pushed himself off the wall. “After your R-and-R trip. To Cheech.”

“What the hell do I want in Cheech?”

“It’d be tough to find a provider in New Zealand who could help,” Doc Carla said casually, “but let me work on that. Only if you’re interested of course.”

Marcy understood now. She leapt up and looked at Tucker. “You’d take me back? No NPQ?”

Tucker caught Doc Carla’s eye. She nodded, and Tucker put his arm around Marcy’s shoulder. Tears began leaking from Marcy’s eyes, and she wiped them away angrily. “Then put me on the fucking manifest,” she croaked. “Next plane out.”

“You should still do your seasonal meeting, Marce,” Tucker said.

“Yeah?”

“If you don’t, there will be talk after you leave. Act like nothing’s changed. Meet with the girls, and people will know you’re coming back. You’ll just have to come up with a reason why you’re taking your first-ever R-and-R.”

Marcy nodded. “I can come up with something.” She turned to Cooper and thrust out her hand awkwardly. Cooper took it uncertainly and let Marcy pump it a few times. “Hey, man,” she said. “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“I was driving so hard, and so fast, I missed the exit ramp. You didn’t. I owe you.”

Cooper shrugged. “I guess there’s a reason I’d rather be a truck driver than a florist.”

*   *   *

A few weeks later, a rumor began circulating about a reporter from the Miami Herald on his way to the ice, having been thoroughly vetted and approved by the NSF based on his prior friendly coverage of the Program. NSF thought he was likely to produce a piece that would put a shine on things, and therefore safeguard the Program’s budget from conservative freshman congressmen, all elected in the recent midterm elections, and whom Sal described as “Tracy Flicks with dicks.”

“God, I hope he’s Cuban or something,” Bonnie said as a group of Polies, including Cooper, settled in to watch a VHS of the 1987 World Series. “I want to see someone other than Tucker who has skin with melanin, for chrissakes.” She looked over at Dwight. “No offense, honey.”

“None taken,” he replied, arranging the tail of his cloak behind him as he took his place on the sofa. Cooper fell into one of the La-Z-Boys and watched as Tom Brunansky made his way to home plate. Pearl was knitting another pair of leg warmers for a woman in Dave’s dance class, and had just frogged her last row of stitches when Sal and Alek stalked in toward the middle of the third inning. Alek was holding another bottle of samogon.

“Turn on game,” he said.

“It is on, Einstein,” Bonnie snapped.

Sal took a seat on the arm of Cooper’s recliner and said nothing. Pearl caught Cooper’s eye and gave her a quizzical look, but let the awkward silence go.

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.”

“Why? This is all about god?” Sri exclaimed. “Of course! It’s what you do. I mean, look at your paper on the structural dynamic stability of Noah’s ark. I read that.” He looked over at Sal. “We all did.”

For the first time that evening, Pavano looked flustered. “That was an early publication, and one that I regret. And I’ve said so in print. I will add, just for interest’s sake, that some models of ice cores do suggest significant quantities of snow accumulated immediately after the Flood, that perhaps as much as ninety-five percent of the ice near the Poles could have accrued in the first five hundred years or so after the Flood—”

The room fell quiet, as if Pavano’s words had gone beyond the pale and could never be taken back. Cooper and the other nonscientists looked at one another, confused.

“Holy shit,” Pearl whispered. “I think he just said Noah’s flood is a scientific fact.”

“Sri, you’re wrong,” Sal said. “This isn’t about god. This is about money. Frank Luntz is why Pavano is going to become a very rich man.”

“Frank Luntz?” Bonnie asked. “Sounds like a hot dog company.”

“Frank Luntz advises the Bush administration about various policy decisions. Last year somebody got hold of a memo he’d written about how to handle what he called this ‘global warming problem.’ Luntz and everyone else in the White House knows global warming is real, that it’s man-made. Luntz told them the scientific debate is closing against them, but isn’t fully closed—that there’s just enough time to keep the public uncertain, to keep it thinking that there’s no consensus in the scientific community. No big policy changes need to be made if the public thinks there’s widespread disagreement. Pavano enters stage right.”

Pavano shuffled behind the podium—his face had drained of color.

“So you’re saying, what?” Pearl asked, her brows furrowed. “That he doesn’t actually believe what he’s saying? That he’s gonna make stuff up while he’s down here?”

“To believe in climate change—” Pavano tried, but Sal interrupted him.

“See, look at his language. He’s talking about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny. Scientists don’t believe in things. They either know things or they don’t.”

Cooper could tell that Sal had just walked into a trap, because Pavano suddenly seemed very focused. “Just like those who once promoted the Big Bang as fact—as the gospel of how the universe began—suddenly change their minds? Tell me if this sounds familiar, Dr. Brennan: ‘Humanity’s deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest.’”

“Don’t take Hawking’s words in vain,” Sal said.

“So Stephen Hawking’s your prophet, and yet you desecrate what many others find sacred.”

“And now we’ve fallen down the nerd-hole,” Bonnie groaned behind Cooper. “In like, a minute, they’re gonna start talking Elvish.”

“He’s putting up a good fight, though,” Pearl murmured over her shoulder.

“You guys have gone way off the rails,” Dwight said, exasperated. “Can we get back to Bonnie’s question about ice cores?”

“Yes, tell us what research you’re trying to thwart while you’re down here,” Sal said.

“Unlike other grantees on the ice this season, I’m not trying to thwart anyone’s research,” Pavano said. “Alarmists are finding it difficult to explain away the fact that Antarctica’s sea ice is at record levels. It’s not melting. To the contrary, it’s quite robust.”

“The record amount is only three-point-six percent over the 1981 to 2002 mean,” Sri cried. “I mean, this year the edge of the ice extends out only thirty-five kilometers farther than it does in an average year. It’s actually getting thinner.”

“In climate science, it seems to me, anything is possible,” Pavano said.

“Could Antarctica melt?” Pearl asked. Cooper noticed a couple research techs roll their eyes.

Pavano chuckled. “I think the scientists in this room would agree that even if man-made climate change was real, it would take thousands of years for it to grow warm enough for the Antarctic ice shelf to melt. In fact, that kind of catastrophic ice melt would require heat of apocalyptic proportions. But because I dispute the assumption that the earth is warming, it’s nothing I worry about.”

“So what you’re saying,” Pearl replied, “is that the earth is not warming up like everyone says, that global warming isn’t real?”

“What I’m saying is that very little research has ever been funded to look for natural mechanisms for climate change. It has simply been assumed, by the scientific community, that global warming is man-made.”

“I would actually prefer that the earth was not warming,” Pearl said.

“It may not be,” Pavano said.

“That makes me feel better.”

“No, Pearl,” Sri shouted, “don’t go over to the Dark Side!” This resulted in a chorus of protestation. Amid the shouts, Cooper noticed Sal quietly stand up and walk out of the galley.

That night Pavano pinned to the large bulletin board in the galley an abstract from a just-published paper by Willie Soon from the journal Climate Research, which claimed “the twentieth century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.” By the next morning, it was gone, and in its place was a hand-drawn flyer: Breaking News Update: Climate Change Jesus super-excited about new developments, says “you’re getting warmer!” Next to this was a muscle-bound superhero Jesus, with a bubble coming from his mouth containing what one of the Beakers later told Cooper was the Schrödinger equation. Climate Change Jesus was set upside down, coring ice with his crown of thorns.

 

PRODUCTION COOK: 5:00am–3:00pm and 4:30pm–10:00pm

 

PREPARES HOT BREAKFAST: including pastries, fills juice machine and breadbox

 

PREPARES LUNCH. Soup Daily Assists with dinner.

 

Shops for own menu items on regular basis and general kitchen use items every other week on rotating basis with Head Cook (Bonnie)

 

Menu will be provided. Both cooks are accountable for the food and adhering to the APPROVED menu. Special occasions/holidays are excepted from the menu.

 

Food is to be used from Berm B first. Call in items from Berm A only after ensuring they are not available from Berm B. Food rotation is very important to its quality.

 

COOKBOOK KEY

EBF: Enchanted Broccoli Forest

MW: Moosewood

MWC: Moosewood Cooks for a Crowd

SL: Still Life with Menu

SP: South Pole 3-Ring Binder

 

BASIC ROTATIONS

Pasta 2 × week

Mexican 1 × week

Italian 1 × week

Seafood 1 × week

Alt every other cycle: Italian chicken fingers with patty, Tuna Melt with Seafood Croissant