But then, some months after one of David’s institutionalizations, when it seemed that David, back in high school again, was doing better, Cooper did start to paint again. Small things, mostly for friends, and mostly staying in the well-worn ruts: a butterfly, a still life, a tree. Nothing that had any real meaning to her. Such things were still too dangerous. Eventually, though, she set the crutches aside, and tried to pick up where she’d left off when David had first gotten sick, quietly enrolling at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design after graduation.
She had showings at small local galleries, where people who didn’t know her name sipped white Zin and praised the kind of art they could afford while denigrating the kind they couldn’t. She sold a few canvases at art fairs, had a couple pieces hanging at the Uptown Caribou Coffee (“Man Staring into Latte” and “Untitled Meditation on Shade-Grown Beans”), and had even been commissioned to paint the skyline of St. Paul for a professor from Hamline University (although she’d blown it after she asked: “What skyline?”).
Armed with a BFA and a spotty résumé, Cooper worked as a substitute art teacher, but had been laid off when the Minnesota legislature cut all “nonessential curriculum” funding. She turned to community ed and began teaching “Adventures in Acrylics” to retirees far more motivated than her. Then she turned thirty, and saw that the years behind her were littered with part-time jobs, newsboy hats, half-finished canvases, and visits to the psych ward at Hennepin County Medical Center to see David. She quickly ran out of money, and began work at the same Caribou Coffee where her canvases were still hanging, unsold. She started dating a fellow barista, a twenty-three-year-old emo named Forrest, to whom she lied about her age.
Then one day, the professor from Hamline who’d canceled her commission called to tell her about the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program at South Pole. “It’s a unique opportunity to experience humility and accountability on a visceral level,” he said. “When the paperwork crossed my desk, I thought of you immediately.” The words—South Pole—had pierced her. Cooper thought she had buried those two syllables and everything they signified long ago. When David became sick around their sixteenth birthday, their fondly recalled playtime heroics had given way to hallucinations and obsessions. To David, South Pole was no longer a place where men went to become lions, a landscape that spawned a thousand daydreams. It was instead a viper’s nest of secret civilizations. It was a Nazi hideout. It harbored a portal into a hollow earth, where men like Arthur Gordon Pym and friends sailed into a milky wormhole and vanished. David wanted desperately to be there, and sometimes, when things were bad, thought he was. Cooper felt strongly that she would have been able to handle it all better if it—this chemical Grendel that had replaced her brother’s fine mind—had allowed Titus and Cherry to stay at South Pole. But these paladins had been erased from the continent—and when they disappeared, Cooper did, too.
She looked down at the tubes of paint in her hands. None of them had lost integrity, so she wrapped them up in the bath towels and put them in her battered green canvas Duluth Pack with the rest of her supplies. Next, she set her books on the desk—a polar library in miniature, with Shackleton, Amundsen, and the ancient copy of Worst Journey her father had given her back in Minneapolis (all of which she’d decided to bring after Tucker assured her little polar literature would be found on the continent itself). On top of the books was where she placed the antique pocket compass Bill had snuck into her duffel, and which she’d found while searching for a tampon during the layover at McMurdo.
Finally, she plunged her hand deep into the pocket of her parka and pulled out a Tylenol travel vial, the Extra Strength rubbed out by her constantly searching fingers. It was four and a half inches long, point-eight ounces light, though, of course, the packaging data no longer reflected the vial’s contents. Cooper set this next to the compass and lay down on her bed. After a few minutes, the heater cycled off, revealing the sounds of a couple having sex on the other side of the Jamesway. A moment later, they stopped. A woman’s voice, dripping with sarcasm, said, “I’ll guess I’ll just finish myself off then.” It was the first familiar thing Cooper had encountered since stepping foot on South Pole.
*
The second familiar thing was South Pole’s computer lab, referred to at the station as the Cube Farm. It looked like any second-rate college’s computer science department, with a half-descended projection screen dangling against a whiteboard and three rows of candy-colored iMacs. The lab was half full when Cooper walked in to check her e-mail, and aside from rapid keyboard clicking, mostly silent. As she walked down the least-populated row of computers, she saw one of the Polies was scrolling through photos of disgruntled cats dressed up as circus clowns.
The only e-mail in Cooper’s in-box was from Billie.
2003 October 11
00:13
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Working the Pole?
C.,
How’s Pole? Life at the World’s Most Mediocre Publisher remains mediocre. Mom just acquired a book on divination by punctuation and set me up with the author of said masterpiece. I agreed to the date because of my long-standing fascination with the Oxford comma. Our first date ended with an exchange of punctuation-related insults. He finds commas guilty of crimes against humanity. I told him double spaces after periods or I walk. If you’re in the market for some reading material, I can provide. Illuminati conspiracies? The Book of Thoth? Labyrinth literature? Mom’s been on a spree. Meanwhile, I sit here and write rejection notes all day. (Yes, Janus Books does sometimes reject things.) Oh, and I’m supposed to say that Mom misses you terribly and sends you her blessing.
Billie, your sister, The World’s Oldest Editorial Assistant?
*
2003 October 12
09:50
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Working the Pole
B.,
I can only e-mail when the heavens and the satellites align, and the sword is in the stone. I’ve been here for eight hours and have already lost all sense of time. It’s strange down here. Like a strip mall at the end of the earth. There are only nine women. When winter starts in March, there will be four. I’m told that while the odds are good, the goods are odd. The guy at the computer next to me is starting to get really excited—like, bordering on sexually excited—by a cat video, so I need to sign off now. More later.