Two stoplights later, Doc Carla was asleep, her chin on her chest, and her braid falling over the seat belt and across her shoulders. Having her hand on his face had made Tucker feel less alone. Her question, though he’d left it unanswered, had made him feel human. He felt seen. And now he wanted nothing more than to remain forever in this metal beast loaded with condoms and coupons hurtling down Houston on a string of green lights.
Over the next six months, Tucker worked for Doc Carla after work, driving her van and getting to know the girls on the strolls. He never mentioned the doctor to his boss, and his boss forgot about her. When the film crew began work on a documentary about a cadre of squatters in a Lower East Side tenement, Tucker was tasked with locating archival footage at the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space. That was when he began writing, in the five-minute stretches it took for the museum’s archivists to locate the requested VHS tapes. It had started as a diary, but soon became a story, then a novel.
Little in Tucker’s life had come easily, but the novel did: he wrote a complete draft in eight weeks. The filmmaker hooked him up with a literary agent, and the agent sold the book. A year later, it was published as Unfortunate. The summer after it came out, Tucker had been named the third tine on a trident of “promising” young male writers, christened thusly by New York. But Tucker always knew it was Doc Carla they were interested in, not him—the story, not the writer. He tried to forget this. He found that he couldn’t.
Tucker waited to tell Doc Carla about the book until he had a copy to give her; he had dedicated it to her. She was not happy. “You lack imagination and integrity. You mined me for material. You took from these women the last things they had—their dignity and their anonymity. This is real life, Tucker, not art. I thought you cared. You’re not an artist. You’re a voyeur.” She took the keys to the van and stopped answering his phone calls.
At first, Tucker ached for her presence as if she’d been a lover. He couldn’t sleep. He barely ate. It faded, over time, but there hung about him always a heaviness. For a while, he lived off his advance, but soon he had to beg the filmmaker for his job back. He spent the next few years logging archival footage, applying for licensing rights, and, later, proving his genius for administrative work, as a unit production manager on several well-received documentaries. He found he was unable to write. Doc Carla was right. He was not an artist.
In 1997, after managing a documentary about the birth of the National Science Foundation, Tucker was offered a job as a speechwriter with the NSF’s Office of Legislative and Public Affairs. He’d become friendly with a number of admins during filming, including the head of the NSF, Alexandra Scaletta. Tucker moved to Washington, D.C., where he was told to write pithy, diplomatic, “accessible” speeches for her. After the midterm elections, when the speechwriter position was eliminated due to congressional budget cuts, Scaletta decided to take Tucker with her on a trip to Antarctica. She wanted him to suss out the federal research stations, get status updates from the Program’s support contractor, and to meet Karl Martin, VIDS’s head of Hostile and Developing Regions.
It was during that first jaunt, a visit that took them to all three U.S. research stations in a single weekend, that Tucker had an hour-long tryst with a welder in the comestibles storeroom at Palmer Station. It was his first physical encounter in three years, and he had tried to pass off his inability to work his way through the man’s layers of ECW gear as a seductive burlesque. But eventually the welder grew anxious and wrenched off his overalls, his jeans, and his long underwear, and pulled out his well-insulated dick himself.
Although Tucker knew full well the unexpected rendezvous was a fluke, it colored his perception of Antarctica, infusing it with hope. He applied for the assistant manager position at South Pole Station as soon as he got back to Washington. Despite Scaletta’s letter of recommendation, Tucker was turned down the first time, due to a “lack of relevant experience,” but after his third try, he received an invitation to VIDS’s Denver campus, where he was deemed “exceptionally well-suited” for polar service.
One day, several years later and between Pole assignments, Tucker picked up The New York Times and read that the city had shut down Doc Carla at the urging of the American Medical Association and sex worker activists, who found her work with prostitutes greatly concerning. The doctors abhorred the McDonald’s coupon swap. The activists didn’t like the implications of the tests—they infringed on the sex workers’ human dignity. And so, after citing her for numerous violations, the Department of Health had confiscated Doc Carla’s van. When she refused to turn over the medical records she kept on the women she tested, they suspended her license and took her to court. No one came to her defense because no one she had cared for had a voice.
To Tucker’s relief, there was no awkwardness when he got ahold of her. She acted as if there had never been a break between them. He encouraged her to begin seeing private patients again, but she told him she was done. “This was the only thing that kept my work meaningful, Tucker. They’ve taken it from me now, and I’m done.”
“Well, I need a doctor,” Tucker said.
“I told you—”
“It’s a tough assignment, though.”
There was a pause on the end of the line. “Go on.”
“It’s a clinic that sees injuries and illness not typically encountered in regular medical practice.”
“Go on.”
“It’s a lonely outpost. Populated by difficult patients. Impossible environment. Far from civilization. Lots of drunks. Lots of red tape. Poorly supplied. Plus, you’ll be responsible for any dental emergencies.”
“Is it in hell?”
“It’s at South Pole.”
*
The woman in Room 221—Cooper—was lying to him because she hadn’t prepared. The other artists and writers knew the game. They’d applied for enough grants and fellowships to have become adept at crafting the bloated prose required of artists in search of funding. But Tucker had been at the game long enough himself to know that the less slick the self-presentation, the better the artist. And then there were the eyes—anxious but penetrating. Tucker wasn’t concerned about the brother’s suicide, even though the contract psychologist was. She was paid to be. He was paid to be intuitive, and he sensed that Cooper was coming from a place of strength. She wanted to go to Pole for the reason he had gone: to avoid becoming a tragic figure.
Still, she was officially borderline, and Tucker would be expected to present some evidence at the final psych meeting that night which counterindicated the initial red flag. One thing that typically smoothed the way in these cases was a coherent, thoughtful reason for wanting to go to South Pole—one that didn’t include heroics or escape fantasies. But so far she had nothing for him and, by the time he was halfway down the hall, he had almost given up on her. Still, he wasn’t entirely surprised when he heard her calling his name from the doorway of room 221.