Big Dead Place

by Nicholas Johnson

  A few of the questions had me stumped, such as:I do not always tell the truth.

  To answer “true” might imply deviousness. But to answer “false” would claim extraordinary rigidity about telling the truth. Who tells the truth about the money in his shoe to a thief? But how many other test-takers will make me look more devious by ignoring such obvious exceptions and answering “false”?

  I was fond of excitement when I was young.

  By saying this statement is true, does that mean I am no longer fond of excitement because I am no longer young, or just that I was fond of excitement at that time? By saying it’s false, does that mean that my fondness for excitement has not been diminished through time, or that I have never been fond of excitement? What does it mean anyway to be “fond of excitement”?

  I have had very peculiar and strange experiences.

  One time in a city of ten million people in Asia I ran into a friend I had worked with on a fish-processor in Alaska. Was that peculiar and strange?

  One time I went to the Grand Opening of a Supermall where a band played the National Geographic theme and a local TV celebrity used giant scissors that were insured for $10,000 to cut a ceremonial ribbon before the teeming throng rushed inside to buy Tupperware and eat yogurt cones. Was that peculiar and strange?

  The psych eval itself was peculiar and strange. Disturbing, even troubling. I took an educated guess and answered “false.”

  After the written test we were each interviewed by one of a team of crack psychologists trained in riot prevention who had been flown to Antarctica to apply the last-chance tourniquet to stop the flow of dementia into our quiet village.9 I wanted to get Grade-A marks that did not include authority issues, so about two minutes before my appointment I walked into the psychologist’s office and immediately began blabbing like an idiot.

  “Hi! Am I too early!”

  “No! Come on in!” she said.

  She shuffled some papers while I sat down and adjusted my backpack on the floor. Outside the window, loaders beeped and rumbled carrying frosty cargo. I had left work early for the interview.

  “Did you get to spend any time in Christchurch!” I asked.

  “I did! There were some weather delays!”

  “Isn’t Christchurch beautiful!”

  “It’s so gorgeous!”

  “So, is this your first time down here!”

  “Yes! And it is just great!”

  “It’s something, isn’t it!”

  With a single stroke of her pen, the psychologist could have me removed from Antarctica. The blue-collar worker therefore wished to make the white-collar subject comfortable in her new environment by introducing her to unique environmental and social phenomena that she may not have previously considered when temporarily adjusting to a new locale. His experiment consisted of relating geo-specific anecdotes, to facilitate her feeling of acceptance and thereby allowing her response to unfamiliar stimulus to be one of pleasure and nurturing rather than one of hostility and distance.

  She would be full of glowing ideas about rough isolation and scientific progress and stark romantic beauty, so I did not tell her that Larryville, otherwise known as the pipe yard, is so named to honor a Navy guy who once managed to fly down a couple of prostitutes. I also did not tell her that Jeannie and Wilson had hosted “Eggs and Porn” Sunday in their dorm room, where we gathered in the morning to gobble watery scrambled eggs before a video pageant of drooling fur and squirting shanks. Nor that a Marine Tech on one of the science ships once ran up a bill of thousands of dollars by calling sex hotlines from Antarctica on NSF’s expensive satellite phone.

  I told her about penguins and weather. “Isn’t that something!” she shrieked.

  “Isn’t it!” I screamed.

  After the chitchat we got down to business, but I had already passed the test.

  “Do you ever feel sad?” she asked.

  “Not too often,” I said.

  “Well, sometimes there’s this kind of, well, we all feel a little bit—it’s not to the level of depression or anything—but what do you do?”

  “This too shall pass,” I said.

  “So you just let it go?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s great. The winter is dark and cold and you’ll be away from your friends and family for quite a while. If you start getting depressed, how do you think you’ll handle it?”

  “Well, I like to read a lot. I bought a ukulele. I’m going to learn how to play Hawaiian songs. I write. I like spending time alone. But I also have a lot of friends here. I talk openly with them. So either way, if I want to be alone, I have lots to do, if I want to talk to people, I have good friends.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you drink?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How much?”

  “Oh, a few beers after work.”

  “You know, in the winter some people get depressed and try to use alcohol to boost themselves out of depression, but it only makes it worse.”

  I nodded soberly.

  “Have you ever taken drugs?”

  I thought of the time in the parking lot of a Dead show when I had gotten drunk, smoked weed, snorted coke, drank a bottle of Robitussin DM, and finally, when I took a hit from a nitrous balloon, had a vision of the sun as a benevolent symbol of death, one day to explode but presently growing our food, a recurring reminder that death is not a far-off distant point, but a core component of life. The sun remarked on this little paradox by appearing before me in sunglasses.

  “I’m not into that stuff,” I said.

  “Okay. What would you consider to be one of your strengths?”

  I had to think about that one, and she stared at me while I looked off into the corner.

  “I’m flexible. I try to adapt,” I said, thinking primarily of how social codes change like weather when you cross borders.

  “And what would you say is one of your weaknesses?”

  “Uh. I try to adapt. I accept in order to understand. That makes me gullible.”

  “Okay. What is your greatest success?”

  “I’m where I want to be.”

  “And your greatest disappointment?”

  In 1974, psychologist Stanley Milgram published the results of a program of experiments at Yale University in which unwary subjects were recruited and paid a small sum to act as “teachers” in a “Study of Memory” that was actually an experiment in obedience. A learner-victim sat in a separate room and was to memorize word-pairs read by the teacher. The “teachers” were told by a scientist to administer electric shocks to the victim each time he failed to memorize the word pairs, with the shocks getting progressively stronger by 50 volts with each incorrect response. The victim was an actor and, after 150 (fake) volts, began protesting the shocks and asked to be released from his chair, and by 270 volts screamed in agony. These screams and protests continued until, at 330 volts, he became silent, as if unconscious. Whenever the “teacher” became hesitant to administer the shocks, the scientist made simple statements like, “The experiment requires that you continue,” or “You have no other choice, you must go on.” At the command of the scientist, most people went on to administer the highest shock of 450 volts.

  “I don’t know,” I said after a long uncomfortable silence.

  “Nothing? You’ve never experienced anything that really let you down?”

  I wanted to tell her that even though I despised Elton John, I knew the words to dozens of his songs from hearing them in supermarkets and elevators.

  “Sure, but there’s not one incident that stands out,” I said. I’ve been pretty lucky, I think. I’ve never been to war or had the plague, so I can’t really complain.”

  Then she pulled out my test results.

  “First of all, this part of the test”—she pointed to a line on a graph—“is where you answered the questions favorably because you knew you were taking the test for your employer.”

>   I looked at the graph in astonishment. She knew I lied.

  “Is that what those ‘always tell the truth’ questions are about?” I asked.

  “I can’t tell you how the test works.”

  “Okay, so how do you grade these things when everyone’s a bunch of liars?”

  We had a good laugh at my inappropriate terminology.

  “Well, it’s only natural for people to want to impress their employer, and there’s a standard allowance for this,” she said. She told me how different types of mental patients and prisoners show different results. “Yours is fairly normal. What that means is that these other areas of your personality”—she pointed to the graph—“are a little bit more extreme than they actually would be. So this spike over here isn’t really that pronounced. We read it as if it were a little lower. And these low ones? We read them as a little higher.”

  I was excited. This was fun. Like going to a palm-reader, but zanier.

  Since the test had compensated for my lies, she explained, we could now read it with some accuracy.

  “When I look at this”—she pointed to the graph—“you’re not someone who tends to somaticize stress. You probably don’t get a lot of physical complaints: headaches, bellyaches, backaches. Some people get a headache whenever they feel stress. You’re not going to do that.”

  That’s true, I thought.

  “That’s true!” I said.

  “And here”—she pointed to the graph—“it shows you’re not familiar with depression. You may not have a language for depression. That’s good in that you’re not prone to depression. But if you face depression you may not know what to do.”

  I thought of those periods, sometimes lasting days, sometimes weeks, when any crumb of joy I can muster seems sure to be the product of some internal delusion and must be discarded. When the world’s fluctuations are a fragmented and absurd chaos. When the mere presence of any object in its space is one more word of vocabulary in a universal language of brutal occupation.

  “Isn’t that interesting?” I said.

  She referred back to the test.

  “Your anger is somewhat deflated. I don’t see much expression of anger. When it comes up, you probably diffuse it quickly.”

  I recalled driving a taxi, the blur of screamed exchanges between myself and shithead drivers and cocksucking pedestrians who weren’t paying attention until I made them pay attention you fucking assholes.

  “Huh,” I said.

  She showed me a different graph whose center axis was vertical rather than horizontal. Down the sides were lists of opposing psychological traits. To one side was femininity and sensitivity, to the other masculinity and assertiveness. To one side was practicality and conventionality, to the other imagination and whim. She pointed out that I was in the median range for most traits. But in one category the line veered entirely to the left edge. The daggerlike vertex revealed that I am “Genuine, Forthright, and Artless.”

  After she’d finished explaining my psychology, she asked if I had any questions, and I did.

  “We signed a consent form that allows Raytheon to distribute the results of this test. Are the results used only for jobs on the ice? Or if I apply to work for Raytheon somewhere else in the world will they have my psych results in the file whereas other employees vying for the same jobs won’t be asked to show psych results?”

  “That’s a good question,” she said. “I don’t know about that. I’ll find out and get back to you.”

  She took down my email address.

  “Also, could I get a copy of the test results?”

  “Huh, that’s interesting,” she said. “I’m not sure. I’m pretty sure that’s against policy.”

  “If the consent form allows anyone in the world to have the results, it’s funny if the people who are being evaluated can’t have a copy.”

  “Okay, I’ll look into that. I have your email address right here.”

  We chatted for a while informally. She was very nice, though she does not always tell the truth. She never got back to me.

  After the psych eval I went to Ben and Laz’s room. Jeannie and Ivan were there. Psych eval debriefing was in progress. Someone handed me a drink. I was the last person to finish my interview.

  Laz’s mouth began to form the tight-lipped downward curl indicating he was about to ridicule me.

  “Well, it appears to me, sir, that you were the first one in and the last one out. I do believe”—his faux-Victorian diction grew more pronounced—“it took approximately an hour for the good doctor to wade through the murk that inhabits your delirium-riddled cranium, whilst most of us were discharged promptly with high marks.”

  “Dude, she liked me,” I laughed. “We were talking. Her kid plays the guitar. She was nice.”

  “I suppose to one as desperate as yourself, the interest of an inquisitor would seem as friendship.”

  “Yeah yeah…”

  CHAPTER 3 NOTES

  1 The frozen piss chipped from beneath 155 was scattered to melt in the yard, a few weeks later the site of Winstock, an outdoor concert, with dancing and a chili cook-off.

  2 A squinting survey of American Antarctic workers turns up several prominent character types and reveals some of what brings people here:Outdoorsies like to hike and witness profound natural beauty. They want to see the truly immense and baffling wonders of Antarctica. When they get there they find out they have to work most of the time in dirty buildings or outside in the cold surrounded by dirty buildings. Nearly everything they want to do is prohibited. They have to check out with the Firehouse before they go anywhere. They stay only one season, because they can do all the things they love elsewhere. It makes more sense for them to leave than to stay.

  Crazy Outdoorsies are the same as Outdoorsies, but they keep coming back. They find that glimpses of the immense and profound natural beauty of Antarctica are worth the toil and mindless drudgery, and they are often savvy enough to do what they like regardless of prohibitions. Some of these people are legendary. One guy silently borrowed a skidoo on a long weekend and climbed Mount Erebus and made it back into town by Monday with no one the wiser. Another waited until the last Winfly flight left in August and quit his job, thereby freeing himself from the control of local authorities. Though he probably lost over five thousand dollars in pay and bonus, he spent the next six weeks going wherever he liked, camping out at Castle Rock, and skiing and hiking all over before he was kicked out on the first plane at Mainbody. One worker at Pole, who may or may not fit in this category, hoarded food, got his hands on a sledge, and set out skiing to McMurdo, over 800 miles away. A team of people on skidoos went after him and brought him back.

  Stamp Collectors derive their pleasure in Antarctica almost exclusively from historic associations. They want to walk where Robert Scott walked, they try to see the mountains as if Shackleton were peeking over their shoulder, and they get all worked up about IGY. Antarctica is not a work-in-progress, but a museum. They like to show slide shows and videos of the great explorers in the Coffeehouse. Nothing is valid until it is historic. Stamp Collectors, if given a ride to the moon, would run around looking for Neil Armstrong’s footprints.

  Mercenaries have no interest in Antarctica itself, as a place, as an idea, or as an experience. Like migrating herds of marine mammals, they follow the warm waters of cash flow. Antarctic pay is substandard for foreign contract wages. Food and rent are covered, however, so all money goes in the bank. It’s a good deal if certain conditions are unimportant. These people, if they think about him at all, think Ernest Shackleton probably had a set of balls, but what of it? They do not attend the lectures put on by the Stamp Collectors. They are not interested in local affairs unless they interfere with the television programming or their paychecks. They are quick to roll their eyes about the way things are run in their department, but also quick to defend rules and order even if they run contrary to their interests, because they are protective of the hand that feeds them.

&nbs
p; Mercenaries’ Foremen are like Mercenaries, but interested in titles and positions rather than paychecks. Also, they are more likely than Mercenaries to have streaks of the Stamp Collector or the Penguin Hunter.

  Penguin Hunters want excitement and adventure, so they buy a lot of souvenirs at the store. They came to Antarctica to see penguins. Antarctica is rough for them. They bemoan the absence of their favorite shampoo, diet soda, and hand lotion. They send down ten boxes of stuff for their four-month stay. Their walls are full of photographs of family. They hang Christmas cards and wreaths on their door during the holidays. They buy phone cards more than one at a time, and they check email ceaselessly. They try to bring their friends down the next season, but their friends hate it and leave, and so do they eventually, unless they’re one of a married couple.

  Quicksanders also appear in all the other categories. The more time you have spent on the ice, the less time you have spent elsewhere; your orbit can shift before you know it, and it seems you have nowhere to go but back to the ice. All your things are in a storage unit, or at a friend’s or a parent’s. Better to go back to the ice than deal with all that shit just now. Just one more season. Maybe another winter. Then that’s it. You’ll live in a town or a city where you don’t know who founded it or when, and where every day there are more people you’ve never seen or heard of than all the people you’ve ever known in your life. Where you’ll wait at traffic lights with all those people. Maybe just one more season. Then that’s it.

  3 Good weather allows boondoggles. By its strictest definition, a boondoggle is a recreational trip out of town, but it has been blurred by threadbare jokes to mean any trip that is desirable, whether for work or not. The most common authorized boondoggle in the summer is to Cape Evans, where Robert Scott built a hut in 1911 for his fatal expedition to the Pole. To enroll for the trip, one must find an empty slot on a signup sheet on the Rec board in Highway One. The signup sheet appears sporadically and may fill up minutes after being posted. Fingees learn quickly that this first-come-first-serve opportunity passes quickly and learn, rightly enough, that one should sign up whenever one can. And since old-timers know this about fingees, and know that fingees aren’t yet aware of how restrictive their new environment is, occasionally other boondoggle signup sheets appear, such as the one for the “Russian Submarine Ride,” or the “Mt. Erebus Ski Trip,” or the “Swim with the Antarctic Cod” boondoggle. Times and meeting places are given to add credibility, and these lists fill up quickly with the full names of fingees who can later be humiliated in person before a jeering crowd.