Cooper brushed her bangs out of her eyes. “Sort of.” It wasn’t three days ago that she’d held Marcy’s hair off her face as she’d puked into a toilet. Cooper thought she looked better.
“Well, for a second there, I thought you were doing the rosary,” Marcy replied. She seemed as if she wanted to say more. Talking to Marcy was helping. Studying her face helped even more—analyzing the angles of another face obscured David’s—and Cooper saw that although Marcy was only in her late thirties or early forties, her skin was already worn and craggy from her cold weather adventures. Yet her mouth had a sweet downward droop to it, like a baby’s pouchy lips. Her small eyes were almost as dark as Cooper’s, and the lines that radiated from them made her look like a happy Buddhist deity. But right now, the eyes were sad.
“Thanks for the other day,” Marcy said. “It wasn’t my finest moment.”
“No worries. I’ve had my share of not-fine moments, too. You’re feeling better?”
“Yep, fit as a fiddle,” she said tightly. “You got your costume ready for tonight?”
“Costume?”
“The Halloween party?”
“Is that tonight?”
“Well, it is Halloween.”
“I lose track of the days.”
“Just wait until winter, honey.”
“I don’t have a costume.”
“Scrounge one up from skua, no biggie.”
Marcy reached past Cooper and plunged her hand in the plastic bin containing condoms that was replenished daily. “Tonight’s the night to land an ice-husband,” Marcy said. “If you want one.” Cooper thought she saw the sheen of tears in Marcy’s eyes, but they were quickly blinked away. She dropped the condoms into Cooper’s hand. “Get laid, honey. It takes the edge off.”
*
Like everything else at South Pole Station, the gym was located in a trailer. On the outside door was a handwritten poster announcing the first meeting of the American Society of Polar Philatelists: The Harvis Collection in Da’ House at Our Next Meeting! Be There or Be Filled with Aching Regret.
Inside, Birdie had arranged the folding chairs in a circle. Cooper took the one directly beneath the net-free basketball hoop, and watched as the historical novelist and the interpretative dancer walked in together, not quite holding hands. The literary novelist entered alone, listening to his Discman.
“Does anyone want to run the meetings?” Birdie asked, brandishing a clipboard. “The Program insists on a group leader.” No one replied, and Birdie tried to hide his pleasure at taking the helm.
“Could I say something before we start?” the interpretive dancer asked, and Birdie reluctantly granted her the floor. “I’d like to start off this meeting with a haiku that I believe may put this whole strange adventure in perspective.
“The man pulling radishes
“Pointed the way
“With a radish.”
Birdie looked over at Cooper, but she turned her gaze to the climbing wall to avoid his eyes; she understood that laughter would diminish the power of the radish. Still, the dancer grew frosty at the lack of appreciation, and said crisply, “What are we supposed to be doing at these meetings anyway? I’d like to get a handle on what’s expected of me. I tend toward anxiety, and anxiety is not conducive to creativity.”
“It can be,” the literary novelist said, fiddling with his Discman. The dancer looked at him with disdain and flicked her long braid over her shoulder.
“Yes, well, it isn’t for me,” she said.
“So far as I can tell,” Birdie said, “the Program wants us to meet in an official way once a month and to keep minutes, and then submit them to the officers at the end of this adventure. Why don’t we go around the circle and talk about what we’re working on?”
“My work deals with the cartographic imperative,” the literary novelist said. The dancer leaned over her knees to look at him.
“Cartographic imperative? Like, the desire to map things?”
“Yeah, exactly. Like, why do the people who come down here feel like they have to, you know, name it? Or claim it for their country? I’m really interested in what is behind that motivation.”
“And what’s the title of your book?” Birdie asked.
“I’m calling it Mapping the Breath.”
“Profound,” the dancer said, punctuating her point with the kind of dreamy sigh she’d expected for the radish haiku.
“Yeah, I was thinking that, like, mapping the breath is pretty much impossible. And cartography in general is such a hubristic endeavor that it’s almost as ridiculous.”
“But the book itself sounds self-aggrandizing,” Cooper said, before she could stop herself. The tenor of the room changed at once, like a writing workshop suddenly infused with candor. “I mean, at least the title does,” Cooper added. Birdie shook his head slowly, stifling a smile. The literary novelist, loose-limbed and squinty-eyed, squinted at her harder. “Yeah, no, I want feedback,” he said. “I mean, that’s good. In many ways the desire to put a cartographic imprint on land that belongs to all humankind finds a parallel in the canine impulse to mark its territory.”
The door to the gym opened and Denise walked in, followed by a blast of cold air. Her glasses instantly turned opaque with steam. “Sorry I’m late,” she said as she pulled off her hood. “I’m Denise.”
“She’s a sociologist,” Cooper added as Denise wrestled off her parka.
“I was told this would be a closed meeting,” the dancer said stiffly. “I have no interest in being studied.”
Denise’s plain face radiated serenity. “You needn’t worry—my research interests lie elsewhere, though I do have a casual interest in the Artists and Writers contingent because they have, historically, been even more isolated due to their low social status at the station.”
“Low social status?” the dancer asked.
A sound somewhere between a snort and a cat trying to clear a hairball exploded from the historical novelist. “So we’re pariahs,” he said acidly, picking at a mole on his neck.
“Perhaps I was a little too general.”
“But low social status means no one likes us,” the dancer said.
“Well, in layman’s terms, I suppose that would be a fair characterization,” Denise said. “Though the term superfluous would be more accurate.”
“This makes me really anxious,” the dancer said to the historical novelist.
“Put it in your work,” he said soothingly.