“Maybe. But if she was, she didn’t know. She wouldn’t have come if she’d known.”
“That one would come if her legs and arms were chopped off. And you know it.”
Tucker thought back to the incident at the comestibles berms two days earlier that had kicked off this whole drama. He had come into the galley after Pearl had radioed him for help—she and Bonnie were making lamb ragout for dinner later in the week, and they needed two lamb carcasses from the berms, which were located a quarter mile from the station. When he’d arrived in the kitchen, Marcy and Cooper were slouched over the metal prep table, having also been summoned. Cooper had been on house-mouse duty all week, a rotating job each Polie undertook at least twice a season that had him or her at the beck and call of the galley.
“About time,” Marcy snapped, peevish.
“‘He who forces time is pushed back by time; he who yields to time finds time on his side,’” Tucker replied. “Talmud.”
“I don’t care what he said, I just don’t like sitting here with my thumb up my ass when I could be out helping Bozer on A3.” Marcy was Bozer’s right-hand woman, a skilled heavy machine operator with four winters under her belt, more than any woman in polar history. She wore stained Carhartts, her dishwater-blond hair tucked into a rainbow-colored knit cap, and she could replace the suspension system on a thirty-year-old tractor with her eyes closed.
“You’re in a sweetheart of a mood, Marce,” Tucker said.
“I just want to get this show on the road,” she growled.
Ten minutes later, Tucker was straddling a snowmobile, his arms around Marcy’s waist, with Cooper seated behind him. The engine roared as they sped out to the comestibles berms, rounded mounds of snow that stretched like dikes along the plowed paths. There were berms for many things: wooden spools, obsolete scientific equipment, construction debris. Tucker remembered seeing the berms from the air on his first plane ride in, laid out like Morse code in the snow.
Marcy suddenly gunned the engines and pulled the snowmobile sharply into a doughnut, sending up a sheet of ice crystals. Tucker felt Cooper tugging desperately on his parka in an effort to stay on. When Marcy pulled up to the berm, she braked hard, and Cooper was thrown off the snowmobile before it had come to a stop. To Tucker’s great relief, she got to her feet, brushed the snow from her parka, and headed to the berms without even glancing back, barely limping.
Tucker looked at Marcy. “That wasn’t very nice.”
“Just wanted to give the Fingy a thrill,” Marcy replied.
“Or a compound fracture.”
Suddenly, Marcy’s shoulders convulsed, and a great wave seemed to roll up her back. She listed to the right and vomited onto the ice. Tucker saw Cooper turn at the sound of Marcy’s retching. Veterans seemed immune to the Crud, and Tucker had never known Marcy to be sick. He had a bad feeling about this, but knew it was better to wait on Marcy than to press her. He waved Cooper back toward the berms. A few minutes later, he joined her, and together they chopped away at the snow and ice surrounding the lamb carcasses. “She okay?” Cooper asked. Tucker nodded, but said nothing.
After a few minutes, Marcy finally got herself upright and motored over to the berm. Tucker and Cooper dragged the two lamb carcasses to the cargo hauler attached to Marcy’s snowmobile. Without a word, Marcy revved the engine, and as Tucker and Cooper climbed onto the back, she casually vomited again.
By the time they were all walking through the galley, though, Marcy had regained some strength, and even joked with some of the Nailheads on her way to the bathroom. Both Tucker and Cooper followed Marcy into the restroom, however.
“Get this parka off me,” she said. Tucker clawed at the Escher landscape of zippers on the heavy coat and yanked it off, just in time for Marcy to launch herself toward the toilet. He backed up against the wall until he was almost a part of it, but Cooper headed straight for the stall and gently pulled Marcy’s hair out of her face. This was good, Tucker thought. First, she’d done a tuck-and-roll after being thrown from the snowmobile and hadn’t blinked. Now she was helping Marcy puke with dignity. She could be useful. It was good to be useful, especially for a Fingy. Especially for an artist Fellow. Good, good, good! As his thoughts devolved into one-word declaratives, a bigger thought wormed its way through the cracks: Marcy didn’t have the Crud. Marcy was knocked up.
As she retched, he kept his eyes fixed on a Robert Crumb Tommy the Toilet poster taped on the wall above the sink. Tommy Toilet sez: Don’t forget to wipe your ass, folks.
Tommy the Toilet was who Tucker thought of now as he listened to Doc Carla tell him that she’d have to send Marcy home. “NPQ,” she added. He winced. No acronym in the polar lexicon was more feared than this—Not Physically Qualified. He knew sending Marcy off the ice was their only course of action, but he also knew that an NPQ on her record would make it very hard for her to return to the ice. If the cause was recorded as pregnancy, she’d never be back.
“Who have you told?” Tucker asked Doc Carla.
“Who have I told? I’m a vault. I’ve told no one. But she has to go.”
Doc Carla waited for Tucker to reply. When he didn’t, she said, “I’m glad we agree.” She shifted on the metal steps leading to her clinic and craned her neck to look at the frost fronds hanging from the ceiling of the Dome. “Ah.”
“What?”
“I’m just thinking how fun it’ll be telling her she’s going home. The woman has nothing in life except this shithole.” Tucker thought but did not say that this was one thing he and Marcy had in common.
After leaving Doc Carla, Tucker took a walk around the outside perimeter of the station to think. He stopped at the construction site for a while to watch Bozer and his team, which included Marcy, assemble the mezzanine stairs to the A3 module. He wondered what it would be like running the new and improved South Pole Station while watching this one sink under the snow. For a moment, he was overcome by sadness.
Just beyond the site, he saw Cooper and Sal talking out on the road to the Dark Sector. He almost smiled; he liked when the young people got together. Back in Denver, Sal had announced that he was planning on celibacy this time around. Everyone knew how much he had at stake this season, even those Polies who had failed science. Tucker had made a point during training to explain to the support staff that this was an unusually important season for the Dark Sector—one cosmology experiment in particular was in the final stages of long-term research that could possibly confirm or destroy the inflationary theory of the universe. It was, Sal had told Tucker, unprecedented that physicists researching two different models would work on the same experiment: Sal and his team from Princeton were working jointly with the Kavli team from Stanford, both looking for something called b-modes.
The Californians, who moved about the station as a unit, were disciples of Sal’s father, the great physicist John Brennan. They were Big Bangers. Sal, on the other hand, had thrown his fortunes in with another pioneer scientist who fervently felt that the evidence pointed toward something called the cyclic model, in which there was no Big Bang, but rather a series of collisions between membranes—the universe being one of those “branes” and the other being just a hop, skip, and a jump across an invisible dimension. There was more, of course, but Tucker had forbid further discussion when Sal started talking about “pre-Planckian predictions of dust.”
The radio squealed. It was Comms. Dwight shouted something—every other word was lost in static. But Tucker had heard enough to get the gist of things: there was a phone call for him in the office, and, as all phone calls to the station manager typically were, it was urgent.
“I’ve got two unhappy congressmen on my ass,” Karl Martin said when Tucker finally picked up the satellite phone in the communications office. “You need to open the kimono and tell me what the hell is going on with this—what’s his name?” Tucker could hear Karl searching through some papers.
“Pavano. Frank. There have been some minor tensions between the s
cientists, but nothing out of the ordinary,” Tucker said. “Standard territorial posturing.”
“Well, I don’t know what the hell that means, Tucker, but these guys, they floated the term ‘hostile working environment’—at which point I brought in Legal. What’s going on down there?”
“I’ve received no complaints. The grantee has been assigned a lab and is taking full advantage of the facilities.” Tucker chose not to mention the T-shirts, the petition, and the ruthless ostracism at meals. He heard voices in the background and the moist sound of a sweaty palm squeezing the mouthpiece of the phone. “I’ve gotta run into this meeting,” Karl said, “but get Scaletta on the horn—she’s been getting an earful, too, but she’s not returning my calls. See if you can put this fire out.”
Tucker had tried for months to get Scaletta’s input on the situation with Dr. Frank Pavano, but the NSF had remained silent on the matter. Tucker had thought it wise to add diversity workshops to the mandatory training for research techs who supported the major experiments. Turned out it was far easier for white male scientists to accept colleagues with dark skin or vaginas or both than it was for them to accept the presence of a climate denier in their midst. In fact, all the scientists, regardless of ethnicity or gender identity, hated Pavano, even before meeting him. Meeting him personally, it seemed, was beside the point. As a result, resistance to the training sessions tailored to prepare the support staff for Pavano’s arrival was intense, and buy-in was nonexistent. To make things worse, Pavano had been unable to secure a research tech, which meant he’d be responsible for all aspects of his research project, including operations, repairs, and soul-crushing amounts of paperwork.
Pavano himself had been given extra counseling by one of the senior psychologists, and when Tucker had asked how it’d gone, she’d said, “He’s basically autistic.”
“That,” Tucker had replied, “will work to his benefit.”
It was only when the two congressmen who’d sponsored Pavano’s efforts to get to Pole held a joint news conference that Tucker received a call from Scaletta.
“I dropped the ball on this one.” She sighed. “Bayless and Calhoun promised to keep the grant on the down-low. Now they’re on fucking Fox & Friends talking about methane isotope variability in deep ice cores—a concept I can assure you they don’t understand, much less pronounce correctly.”
“I think we have it under control,” Tucker said.
“I knew you would. But I do need to say this: it’s vitally important to the Program and to the NSF itself that Dr. Pavano’s research is unimpeded, and that all previously agreed-upon resources be made available to him.” She paused. “I know that’s not technically your purview—”
“I understand.”
“I’d also like to minimize media interest in his research. I’m hoping this will die down.”
After handing the sat phone back to Dwight, Tucker stared at the collection of Star Wars figurines that the comms tech had arranged fussily on his desk. He imagined Dwight reverently bubble-wrapping Yoda and Darth Vader before placing them in the corners of his duffel bag for the trip to Pole. The thought cheered him briefly.
“Everything okay?” Dwight asked.
Tucker picked up Darth Vader. “Do you think he was a good manager?”
“He commanded authority naturally,” Dwight replied. “He asked penetrating questions and listened to stakeholders.” When Tucker raised an eyebrow at this, Dwight conceded that perhaps Darth Vader wasn’t all that good at listening to stakeholders.
Instead of heading out of Comms and back to the admin pod, where he had hundreds of e-mails waiting for responses, Tucker decided to head upstairs, to the library. He found it deserted. He flipped on the fluorescents and walked over to the bookshelves. The maintenance specialist’s alphabetization efforts had mostly held, although he did see David Baldacci living with Stephen King.
Tucker let his fingers dance over the wrinkled paperbacks one by one until they reached a glossy, unbroken spine. He knew which book it was by touch alone. Slowly, he pulled it from between Baldwin and Bradbury. It was clear that it still hadn’t been read. As he always did, Tucker turned the book over to look at the author photo, a broody Ettlinger. It seemed like a daguerreotype—limpid, light eyes; snug-fitting white undershirt; a subtly flexed bicep; airbrushed skin the color of weak coffee. The man in the photo was unknown to Tucker now.
* * *
DEFENDED NEIGHBORHOODS AND DEGRADATION CEREMONIES IN REMOTE POLAR COMMUNITIES
* * *
Denise Notebloom
Department of Sociology, Columbia University
New York, NY 10025
ABSTRACT
Utilizing eight months of direct observation of the sociocultural issues inherent in prolonged isolation and confinement in a remote location, this paper examines the process of psychosocial adaption to an outsider whose presence enhances the in-group’s mechanical solidarity. In a social environment in which “monopolistic access to particular kinds of knowledge” (Merton, 1972) is a hallmark feature and Gesellschaft a guiding principle, the arrival of a scientist whose views are in direct opposition to mainstream scientific opinion presents a unique opportunity to observe in-group/out-group dynamics. Based on observations recorded in the context of the four distinct characteristics of human behavior unique to the “polar sojourner”—seasonal, situational, social, and salutogenic (Palinkas, 2002)—the in-group’s foundational Gesellschaft, when confronted with an outsider whose presence threatens the social ecology, transforms into mechanical solidarity. This is manifested in a more vigorous defense of “neighborhoods” against the outsider, as well as more frequent degradation ceremonies. I argue that such strategies are strained to the breaking point in reestablishing social equilibrium.
Keywords: ANTARCTICA, MICROCULTURES, ADAPTATION, COPING
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. Inste
ad, 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.
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