South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

  As she walked, she kept thinking of what she hadn’t told Sal that night in her room, of what had happened after that trip to Saganaga. About how she and Billie had returned to the Boundary Waters a month later without Bill, and without his knowledge, to take matters into their own hands. At their launch point, a group of men had appeared, wearing Duluth Packs on their shoulders and many-pocketed cargo pants. As soon as they saw Billie pulling the canoe off the car rack, the packs had dropped from their shoulders, hitting the hard grassless soil on the edges of the launch point simultaneously.

  “We’re good, boys,” Billie said, grunting as she lifted the canoe on her shoulders. Her curse-soaked stumble confirmed the men’s initial impulse. Two of them walked over to where she stood, slipped their shoulders under the eaves of the canoe, and raised it off her shoulders.

  “Thanks, guys,” Cooper said. Billie turned to her and mouthed an emphatic fuck you.

  “You two planning to portage?” a scrawny guy in shorts asked. “We-no-nahs are a bitch.” Cooper said nothing, chastened by her sister’s soundless curse. The big guy looked at Billie, down the length of her body and then back again, assessing her suitability to the task and finding it wanting.

  “You guys aren’t going in alone, are you?” he asked.

  “We’re meeting our old man at Saganaga,” Cooper said. “It’s a test.” Billie said nothing to contradict Cooper’s easy lie.

  “A test?”

  “A competence test,” Billie said, picking up the lie with ease. “We do this every year. He marks up the map. He goes in two days before us. We find him.” These words came out of Billie’s mouth without cadence or emotion, and Cooper saw her sister’s lively eyes had turned dull and cold. She wanted the men gone.

  “Wow, that’s hard-core,” the scrawny one said.

  “You know what’s really hard-core,” Billie said, and to Cooper’s horror, she dug the baggie out of her pants pocket.

  “Billie, don’t,” Cooper said.

  The guy peered at the baggie, and broke into a grin. “Dope? Yeah, that’s real hard-core,” he said.

  Billie walked up to him and dangled the bag in front of his Maui Jims. “Guess again,” she said. From where Cooper was standing, the guy looked like the figure in Magritte’s The Son of Man, except instead of a bowler he was wearing a bad buzz cut and instead of a green apple in front of his face there was a Ziploc containing David’s cremated remains.

  The guy took a few steps back. “Jesus. You can’t do that, you know. It’s illegal.”

  “You gonna tell on me?”

  “No,” the guy said, even more quietly this time. “I’m just saying.”

  Billie put the baggie back in her pocket and walked down the ramp, leaving Maui Jim gaping after them. The big guy had set the canoe on the launch point, and held it steady as Cooper stepped in, and when she did she felt like she was stepping off the edge of the earth.

  Later, when the men’s voices had faded to silence and the only sound was the whisper of the paddles whirlpooling the water, Cooper remembered how the tangled mass of streams and rivers on the navigation map became a single ribbon of clear water. You took it on faith that on the other side of the granite islands, with their forests of spruce looming over the clearings, another waterway, another lake, another body, lay glinting like steel in sunshine. Maps were promises.

  They paddled across the lake in silence, except for Billie’s occasional call to switch, or to draw left or right. Billie favored her left stroke, and they were continually listing east. As the sun rose higher in the sky, the extent of the damage from the 1999 blowdown was laid bare. Cooper had heard that Ogishkemuncie and Seagull lakes had gotten the worst of it, nearly every mature tree felled by the wind. The patches of flattened forest made Cooper fearful; the open, endless horizon seemed to her like death.

  But, still, the route was so familiar, it was like walking around the block. This was their circuit, the Gosling circuit, their route, their road, the only place David was ever truly serene. The annual trip where, invariably, all was quiet, even his brain, an electrified reef teeming with strange thoughts. All around the canoe, the yellow grass in the channels waved in the breeze like flickering candles, bright against the black remains of the charred trees.

  It had been Billie’s idea to pull a permit and go back a month after the first attempt with Bill, when Cooper hadn’t been able to navigate to Lake Gray, when David’s ashes rode back to the launch point in a wet pack wedged in the center of the canoe. Billie had prepped everything herself, even spirited away the We-no-nah without Bill noticing. This time, Billie had the compass—not the antique compass that had failed Cooper, but a plastic one purchased at REI. On it, north was north.

  Later, after they’d camped and eaten, and after Billie had climbed into the hammock, Cooper walked into the woods that fringed the campsite, the baggie in her hand. A few yards past the latrine, she fumbled in her jacket pocket for the empty travel-size vial of Tylenol that she’d hidden in her backpack before she and Billie had left Minneapolis. She opened the child-safety lid with her teeth and, using a birch leaf as a funnel, poured a teaspoon’s worth of her brother’s ashes into the vial. She wasn’t asking for much, she told herself—just a fragment. Lake Gray could have the rest of him, but these motes, these particles. These were hers.

  That night, she and Billie walked together to the outcropping on Lake Gray and tossed David’s ashes into the water without ceremony. Billie went back to the tent alone but Cooper sat at the fire, feeding it until the sky began to lighten with the dawn, occasionally touching the vial in her jacket pocket. Veils of mist hung above the water, as if waiting to reveal someone. And, indeed, Cooper saw a yellow We-no-nah gliding soundlessly through them. She went knee-deep into the lake, her eyes straining to catch another glimpse. In a moment, the canoe emerged from the fog, revealing a faceless man, and a Husky wearing a lifejacket. The man waved and continued on, and was once again enveloped by the mist.

  Cooper climbed back up the sloping granite outcropping and looked down at her feet, at the bones of the continent. It seemed as if everything around her—the spiny arms of the pines bent over the water, the crackle of the fire she hadn’t let die in the night, even the persimmon clouds of dawn—had receded completely. The silence was crystalline. Then, all at once, the sun emerged from the horizon, an undulating smear of orange. Cooper closed her eyes against the light.

  When she opened them now, she was surrounded by snow.

  * * *

  As Cooper approached their site, she heard a bright, resonant male voice singing “Famous Blue Raincoat.” Pavano’s voice quavered for a moment as it glided over the notes in the line she was nobody’s wife, then fell silent. Cooper coughed loudly before unzipping the tent door.

  Inside, Pavano was lying prone and tending a camp stove.

  “How did it go?” he asked.

  “It looks exactly like Pole,” Cooper replied.

  Pavano readjusted the Sterno canned heat with his mitten, and leaned back on his elbow. The expression on his wind-chapped face startled Cooper; peering out at her from the shadows, he looked almost macabre. His clear eyes took everything in, but betrayed nothing. Cooper felt something stir in her—possibly an idea. It was in Pavano’s face; Cooper saw it in his strange eyes, in his angular features. As she gazed at him, committing each feature to memory, a noise issued from his mouth. It took Cooper a moment to recognize it as a laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I was just thinking that it’s been a long time since I’ve had company,” Pavano replied. “I’m a loner, if you haven’t noticed. Not always by choice. I’m afraid I have forgotten how to make small talk.”

  “No small talk necessary,” Cooper replied. “When do we get to work? Do we get to work?”

  “In time. I’m waiting for a piece of equipment.”

  “I thought you were going to talk to the site manager.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  �
��Well, let me know when I can help,” Cooper said.

  “I should mention that if the site manager refuses to budge on your approval status, any help you give me will likely land you in hot water.”

  Cooper shrugged. “I’ve already got a flag on my file. What’s another one?”

  She sat back against her canvas pack and pulled her sketchpad from the outer pocket. Across the camp stove, Pavano watched her remove her mittens in order to retrieve her pencil. She laid her sketchpad across her knees and rolled the pencil between her fingers as she considered Pavano. She could sense an artifice about him, but couldn’t pinpoint it. Maybe it was the way his eccentricities could come and go: Pavano couldn’t meet her eyes in the galley but here on the Divide he could stare at her unblinking for whole minutes. At the station he skulked; here he lounged.

  She turned back to her sketchpad. Started. Erased. The shape of his eyes was hard to reproduce—they were wide-set, but also deep in his face. She tried again, and, once more, erased the beginnings. On the bruised paper, she drew an outline of a penguin, but it looked morbidly obese, and she erased it, too. She tried a rendering of the Empire State Building with arms, but it looked like a Transformer.

  “Problems?” Pavano asked.

  “I’ve given up on you. You’re hard to sketch.”

  “I’m flattered that you’d choose me as a subject. Who, would you say, might be easy to capture on the page?”

  Cooper thought of the portrait she’d done of Tucker, how she’d sworn to herself that although it was turning out pretty well, it was a one-off, an exercise meant to get her across the bridge and into the land of polar art. After all the mittens she’d produced, she’d resigned herself to painting the standard skyscapes, cloudscapes, glacierscapes, and snowscapes that seemed to be the expected output for a visual artist at Pole. But then she’d started that portrait of Bozer. And then, last week—after Cooper had noticed the two-inch scar above Pearl’s right eyebrow—the one of Pearl.

  “No one is easy to capture on the page,” Cooper finally replied.

  Pavano gestured toward the sketchpad. “Will this become part of your portfolio?”

  Cooper shook her head. “No, I’m here to make grand statements, not portraits. That’s what they want: statements. A face is not a statement.”

  “It’s a statement of existence,” Paveno replied.

  Cooper set her notebook on the floor of the tent and inched toward Pavano on all fours until she was at his knees. He watched her as she reached up and took the bridge of his glasses between her fingers and pulled them from his face. His pellucid eyes regarded her impassively.

  “You want to know if I exist,” he said.

  “Yes,” Cooper said quietly. For a long moment, they gazed at each other, and the moment grew taut. The longer Cooper studied Pavano, the more familiar he seemed. He leaned in, drawing closer to her, and the world roared back to life. Cooper moved away, her heart thrumming. A blast of wind shook the tent, sending the Sterno canister into a cartwheel. The time it took Pavano to set it right again gave Cooper a chance to collect herself.

  “What did you gather,” Pavano said, “from your peek into my soul?”

  “I don’t know anything about souls. They’re a human construct, they’re not real.”

  Pavano seemed discomposed, as if he were a translator who’d fallen hopelessly behind. “It’s natural to say such things when you’ve been spending time with scientists,” he finally said. “To them, everything is constructed.”

  “But you’re a scientist.”

  Pavano hesitated. “I’m also a man of faith.”

  “You said you were an atheist.”

  “No, I didn’t say that.”

  “You implied it.”

  His expression softened, and he sat back against his pack. “Yes, perhaps I did. I find implications give me just enough wiggle room to work in peace. May I have my glasses back?” Cooper hadn’t realized that the glasses were still in her hand.

  Pavano removed the teapot from the canned heat, and Cooper watched as he carefully selected two teabags from the outer pocket of one of his packs. “Sal says you don’t believe your own research,” she said. “That you do this for the money because your career in academia tanked.”

  “Like most of Sal’s theories, that’s only about half accurate. As I’m sure he told you, I made some mistakes in my career that pushed me to the margins of academia. When you’re in the margins, you’re impossible to see. You find new frontiers, and you join forces with the people who live on them.”

  “Like Creationists.”

  “Theistic science,” Pavano said.

  “God.”

  “Methodological naturalism is religion.”

  Cooper rolled her eyes.

  “What I’m trying to say,” Pavano continued, “is that it’s all religion at the end, whether it’s me making the teleological argument at a conference or Sal trying to parse out the beginnings of the universe through his telescope.”

  “Sal’s not religious.”

  Pavano handed Cooper a mug. “Sal Brennan is one of the most religious people I’ve ever known. For many years he worked on confirming the main model of the cosmos. His work was a kind of chase after his father’s—my wife used to call them Odysseus and Telemachus. Anyway, Sal played a major role in building on Hawking and Penrose’s model and making the inflationary model a widely accepted theory among the general public. Now he rejects it. He thinks he’s found something better. Think about that for a moment, Cooper—here is a man who spent the better part of his career looking at what is essentially the same data he now has before him, coming to a conclusion that he believes is fact, and then changing his mind. And now he is a paragon of nonstandard cosmology, not to mention a cast-out son, and he’s in danger of becoming as marginalized as the proponents of Intelligent Design he abhors. He’s a believer, Cooper. His faith is immense.”

  “But he might actually be right,” Cooper said. “There’s no possibility that the earth is six thousand years old, that humans walked with dinosaurs.”

  “Forget Young Earthers and dinosaurs. Those are distractions. The compelling argument is that living things are too well designed to have come about by chance.”

  Cooper laughed. “The world is the least-well-engineered thing ever.”

  “You go too far.”

  No, Cooper thought. She hadn’t gone far enough. “Explain suicide.”

  “The intelligence I’m talking about doesn’t deal in individual circumstances.”

  “It creates a machine only to have it self-destruct?”

  “It is an engineer, and it engineered a creature that can intentionally end its life. Maybe in some people, when the wiring has gone wrong, suicide is instinctive. There are countless documented examples of this in nature—mostly birds, as it happens. Petrels that fly into campfires. Mergansers that seek out submerged roots and drown while clinging to them.” He removed his glasses to wipe away condensation, and saw, with a start, that tears were leaking down Cooper’s cheeks.

  The welcome sound of an approaching snowmobile allowed Cooper to wipe her eyes while Pavano struggled to his feet and put his goggles on. After he walked out, Cooper leaned over his sleeping bag to peer through the tent door. Hitched to the snowmobile was a large pallet containing a small generator, several winches and cables, three long, skinny blue cylinders, and something that looked like an enormous tampon applicator. The man on the snowmobile looked nervous as Pavano handed him an envelope folded in half. As soon as he unhitched the pallet, he sped off back toward camp.

  When Pavano returned to the tent, he was radiant.

  “What’s all that?” Cooper asked.

  “It’s an agile drill that can retrieve cores up to thirty meters,” Pavano replied. “But since they integrated the new BID-Deep system, it can, theoretically, reach depths of up to two hundred meters.” Cooper was startled to see how happy this made Pavano. “It has been signed out under another team’s name and won’t be
missed for about twenty-four hours. Once I extract this core, it’s mine. The lab will be obligated to store it, no matter how it was obtained, and then send it to Denver, where I will analyze it. It shouldn’t take us too long to set up.”

  “You did a work-around,” Cooper said.

  “I did what I had to do.”

  “Let’s get started, then.”

  “I’ll only need you to help me erect the tripod and the double sheave. The rest I can handle. You go get dinner.”

  “Do you want me to bring you back anything?”

  Pavano shook his head. “I’ve got a Cup o’ Noodles.”

  * * *

  The galley at the Divide was just a tent, and as she looked at the dinner offerings steaming away in the large aluminum warming trays, unrecognizable in various states of congealment, Cooper missed Pearl’s cooking keenly. She held out her tray and a lump of something resembling meatloaf was dropped onto her plate. She picked a stale roll out of a plastic basket and scanned the room. Across from her, a man in a blond wig topped with a tiara sipped soup from a bowl. Next to him, Cooper noticed Sri and his team studying some printouts. Cooper tried to catch his eye, but he seemed to be ignoring her. She considered sitting at his table anyway, but decided instead to take a seat at an empty one.

  As she was poking the meat product on her tray with her fork, Cooper felt someone staring at her. The ice-core tech Cooper sat next to on the flight in was scowling at her, a lock of purple hair obscuring her right eye.

  “Why are you helping him?” she asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Frank Pavano. He’s a pseudoscientist.”

  “I’m an artist,” Cooper said, as if that explained everything.

  “You his girlfriend or something?”

  “Christ, no. I’m here for inspiration. A change of scenery.”

  The tech put her hand on her waist and cocked her head. “Artists and Writers Fellow?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you’re on the list as a tech. They put you on his manifest?”