When Tucker walked into Room 221, he found the borderline case hunched over a compact, attempting to dispatch a zit. It was an image so devastatingly familiar that Tucker felt as if he’d just walked into his childhood bedroom. Her name was Cooper—the kind of unexpected gender flip he found endearing. Tucker looked at her face, the intact blemish, the right eyebrow ever so slightly shorter than the left, her lips pink and full, her rich, dark eyes full of fear. Even with the pimple, she was pretty, but in a took-you-a-minute kind of way.
Before she spoke a word, he knew this would be a close call. But that’s why they’d hired him. He knew how to make close calls. All but one had been successful. There was the metalworker with Asperger’s—VIDS psychologists had argued his eccentricities and wooden personality would cause problems. Instead, the guy had been the most productive metalworker on the team, and was so popular that he’d been voted Equinox King. Then there was the highly skilled maintenance specialist who was a diagnosed bibliomaniac—Tucker had assigned him librarian duties, and filled out thirteen forms, some in triplicate, so the man could sleep in the library. The guy had alphabetized the library within the first week. Bozer, their veteran construction chief, who had been red-flagged one year because of several complaints about his Confederate flag bandanna—both VIDS and the NSF had decided to make Tucker the final arbiter on the matter, because (and of course this was only implied) he was the Only Black Person at South Pole. In interviewing Bozer, Tucker knew he had on his hands a red-blooded clay-eater from the poorest part of South Carolina. But he also knew Bozer was smart and steadfast, a man whose long years of experience in war and on the ice made everyone at Pole safer. Tucker knew that if he gave Bozer an ultimatum—the bandanna or his job—the man would’ve come to Pole with a naked pate, but angry as an adder. He didn’t do that. Instead, he approved Bozer, and his bandanna, and let the admins wonder.
But while VIDS trusted Tucker to make the close calls, even they were worried about Doc Carla. They had not been keen on her. She was considered a “high-risk investment” despite the fact that finding candidates for this particular posting was so notoriously difficult that Karl Martin had called it “a janitor at the porno theater kind of a gig.” The type of board-certified physician who was willing to sojourn in Antarctica for six months, preferably a year, for paltry pay and under extremely difficult work conditions was one whose personality might not be described as “charming.” Tucker assumed this was a known fact, but thanks to the complicated tenure of Jerri Nielsen, the Pole doc who’d diagnosed her own breast cancer and who was widely considered a personable “normal,” the threshold for minimal sociability had been raised (along with the number of release-of-liability forms).
It had not helped Doc Carla’s case that the majority of her practice had, in the years leading up to her posting at South Pole, been focused on drug-addicted prostitutes. It was through this work that Tucker had gotten to know her almost twenty years earlier, and it was how he’d known she’d be the right person for the job. He had been working as a production assistant for a famous documentary filmmaker in New York when he read a short article in the Times about a woman doctor who drove a van around the city, handing out condoms and McDonald’s vouchers to girls who worked the worst strolls. “Check it out for me,” his boss said when Tucker showed him the article. “See if there’s anything there.”
But when Tucker cold-called Doc Carla’s office and mentioned the word documentary, she hung up on him. He called back the next day and, disguising his voice, made an appointment for a hepatitis test. A week later, he arrived at her office, which was located in a brownstone in Alphabet City. Sitting in the window was an orange cat, its tail whipping this way and that, its face impassive. When the cat opened its mouth to meow, no sound came out. For some reason, Tucker had always remembered that.
“How old are you, Tucker?” the doctor had asked as Tucker took a seat on her exam table. She tied a piece of rubber hose around his left arm.
“Twenty-five, Dr. Nicks,” he said, keeping his eyes on his veins.
“Call me Doc Carla.” As she tapped the underside of his forearm, she examined his face. The Bell’s palsy, which would render half his face slack and droopy from time to time, had gone away for now, but the acne had not. Tucker averted his eyes from his ugly blue veins.
“Do you engage in high-risk behavior?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you have anal sex with men, do you share needles, do you sleep with hookers?”
“No! I mean, no, I haven’t done that before.”
“Which one?”
“All of them, I guess. Any of them.”
The doctor ran her fingers over the inside of his forearms, looking for good veins. The feel of hands on his body was almost arousing, and Tucker felt ashamed.
“But you’re gay, right?” she said, in a tone Tucker would come to realize was her version of gentle.
“I guess so.” He hated when people could tell at a glance.
“Don’t guess so—know so!” she replied.
“Yes, I’m gay.”
“But you don’t engage in homosexual behavior?”
“Sometimes. Just not that thing you mentioned—not that way. Yet, I guess.” He wanted to disappear into one of those magician’s dry-ice plumes.
“A gay black man,” Doc Carla said. “You sure got it easy, kid.” Suddenly, she exhaled—it was almost ecstatic—and said: “Look at these veins. Oh, my. They are just pristine. And look, I don’t even need to really coax.”
The time seemed right, so Tucker cleared his throat. “I read about your work with prostitutes. In the Times.”
She rubbed his skin with iodine. “They check in with me every couple years. I almost didn’t talk to them this time.”
“Why?”
“Every time they write about me, the do-gooders come out of the walls. I’ve gotta peel ’em off. They’re useless. I can’t take their checks because I’m not a charity and if they volunteer one night, they never come back. Their tender sensibilities and all. I just lost my van driver.”
“Yes, I read about that in the article.”
Tucker closed his eyes as Doc Carla slid the needle into his vein; the initial prick gave way to a dull ache. After a moment, he opened his eyes and saw her attach a small vial to the tubing. Tucker watched as his blackish blood rushed through the needle. He felt dizzy. Doc Carla noticed.
“Jesus, stop looking, honey! Focus on Lulu,” she commanded, pointing to the cat, who was still sitting in the window. “It’ll help. She’s one of the stations of Brahma. What do you do for work, Tucker?”
He hesitated. “I work in film.”
She withdrew the needle and prepared a second one. “I’ve heard that before.”
“It’s not like that. Legitimate film. I’m just a production assistant.”
“Gotta get that foot in the door. I better give you an AIDS test, too, even though you tell me you’re a monk.”
She removed the second needle from Tucker’s vein and held a piece of cotton over the tiny wound.
“Could I go with you once?” Tucker asked.
“On one of my runs?” Doc Carla asked. She studied his face again, the way she had when he first sat down on the exam table. “Do you drive?”
“I’ve driven before.”
She snapped off her plastic gloves. “You ever been around hookers?”
“No,” Tucker said.
“You squeamish?”