Cooper was intrigued enough to hold her pee. “This is important research season for our team,” Alek continued. “For world.” He lifted his glass of clear liquid. “I drink to it.”
Sal looked embarrassed. “Samogon makes Alek sentimental,” he said. “Ignore him.” He gestured to a chair. “Sit down. I want to talk to you about something.” Cooper took the chair, and Sal leaned over the table. “I hear you’re getting cozy with Frank Pavano.”
“Cozy? He visited me at my studio the other day.” Sal leaned his chair back again, resting his knees against the edge of the table. “Does this have something to do with your petition?” Cooper asked.
“I can’t hear of this man anymore,” Alek said, and took his samogon to the table where Birdie was sitting with Pearl.
“His work must be legit if the NSF funded his research,” Cooper said.
Sal made a guttural sound in the back of his throat. “Look, last year, a couple of Republicans in Congress got letters from their constituents saying that they couldn’t get the literature on alternate explanations for climate change in the schools, they couldn’t get federal funding, they couldn’t ‘teach the controversy.’ Then one of these morons—guy named Bayless, out of Kansas—realizes that serious science is done at Pole and not one scientist is down here trying to prove climate change is a hoax. He gets constituents to flood the NSF with letters, joins forces with another Bible-thumping congressman, Calhoun, goes on Fox & Friends, they do their thing, open inquiry, whatever. Of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Bayless and his own personal Lennie Small are up for reelection next fall.”
“So the NSF caved to political pressure?”
Sal shook his head. “Officially there was no ‘political pressure.’ In fact, NSF rejected Pavano’s application initially. Then all of a sudden he’s funded and NSF releases a statement that says they support the general principle of academic freedom and inquiry and are sending Pavano down here to disprove climate change.”
“Is there anything there? What’s his science?”
“Let’s not use science and Pavano in the same sentence, okay?” Sal said. “Pavano is collecting ice-core data from the Divide that he’ll use to dispute the models that indicate Earth is going to become a giant Bunsen burner. At the same site, I might add, where the real climatologists are extracting and analyzing ice cores that will prove that it is. His presence on the ice means that somewhere a real climate scientist did not get his grant approved.” He raised his glass. “And so, my darling painter person, the fact that Frank Pavano is at South Pole Station is officially a sign of the end times.”
“You’re not a climate scientist. Why do you care so much?”
“If you were a scientist, you wouldn’t ask that question.”
All around them, people were starting to leave to get dressed for the Halloween party. “You coming?” Sal asked. “Everyone comes. It’s a polar spectacle.”
Cooper looked over at Birdie—his face was rosy and tears were streaming from his eyes. Pearl rubbed his shoulders as Alek held an empty glass of samogon above his head triumphantly.
“I guess so.”
Tucker appeared at their table, his hands clasped in front of his body. “Frosty Boy’s back,” he said. Sal threw his head back and punched the sky with both fists. Tucker turned to Cooper. “Frosty Boy is a soft-serve machine that delivers flaccid ice cream in a continuous stream.”
“He’s probably spent more time under the loving, quasi-sexual ministrations of the maintenance specialists than he has actually dispensing soft serve,” Sal said.
“Why keep it around if it doesn’t work?” Cooper asked.
“You can’t just come in here and replace things like Frosty Boy with something that works better. We grow attached to these temperamental pieces of crap. They’re rejects, just like us.”
*
A half hour and scavenged costume later, Cooper found herself standing in the darkened gym wearing a Freddy Krueger mask and surgical scrubs while a five-piece band calling themselves Coq au Balls covered an Avril Lavigne song as a joke. No one was laughing. On the booze table beside her, a jack-o’-lantern vomited seeds and pith. Cooper watched as the VIDS and NSF administrative staff jogged onto the dance floor, singing along to “Sk8er Boi.” She worked her straw through a slit in the Krueger mask and drained her screwdriver. A ghost-memory flickered in Cooper’s mind of Billie, at fourteen, advising her that liquor before beer, you’re in the clear and beer before liquor gets you there quicker. Or was it never been sicker? Whatever. Next to her, Dwight groomed his Chewbacca mask with a small comb. When he noticed Cooper watching, he trilled at her.
Halfway through her third screwdriver, everything in Cooper’s line of vision began to take on the soft edges of a high school senior portrait. She scanned the crowd. There was Bozer, dressed as a hobo, a play on Tucker’s widely adopted moniker for him, hobosexual, a man who was the opposite of a metrosexual, a man who gave not two shits about his appearance. (“Like Michael Moore,” Tucker had said helpfully.) Holding a woman’s purse on the end of a stick, and wearing torn culottes, Bozer was showing off a handmade birdhouse to a Fingy meteorology tech, who apparently believed his story about the rare “glacier sparrow” that nested at South Pole. Across the gym, the interpretive dancer was sporting a rainbow clown’s wig and enormous novelty sunglasses in the shape of hearts, and Electric Sliding with the historical novelist, who really was just shuffling.
Cooper turned away from the stage in time to see a woman from McMurdo walk purposefully toward Sal and grab his hand, pulling him back toward the dance floor. Through the eyes of Freddy Krueger, Cooper considered the woman: so that’s what Sal liked, she thought. Women who wore oversize football jerseys, hot pants, and slightly off-kilter trucker’s hats and called it a costume.
“This is the annual start-of-the-season hook-up,” Tucker said, stepping next to Cooper. “Whoever you hook up with becomes your ice-wife or ice-husband for the season.” He looked out over the crowd of bearded Britney Spears and wobbly space cowboys. “Choose wisely.”
“I’m trapped in a bad remake of Meatballs,” she said.
“One wonders if a Meatballs remake could be good?”
“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Cooper replied.
“I know it seems like a frat party, but it won’t last. The beginning is always like rutting season on the Great Plains.”