Birdie cleared his throat. “This is our second meeting, so I think it would be wise to assess what we’ve produced since being on the ice as a way of holding ourselves accountable. Seeing as I’ve been quite unproductive since arriving, I will yield the floor.”
The literary novelist raised his hand. “I wonder if we can talk a little about the world-building that goes on here. I mean, we’ve been here for a few months now, and the novelty of, you know, living at South Pole quote-unquote has worn off, at least for me. Taking this from a literary perspective, I feel as though”—he cast a sidelong glance at the open notebook on his knee—“there’s this completely separate reality that people down here have constructed for themselves. I definitely still feel like an outsider, like I haven’t been fully embraced. I mean, no one even came and got me during that fire drill. If it had been a real fire, I would have been charcoal.”
“They didn’t come get you because you’re a freak,” the historical novelist snapped. “All of you are. I haven’t met one normal person yet. Not one.” He stood up and began pacing.
“And why exactly are you here?” the interpretive dancer asked him. “Have you figured that out yet?” Cooper heard frost in the dancer’s voice for the first time since the unfortunate radish haiku.
The historical novelist snorted. “To keep my head down and write.”
“And you couldn’t have done that back in Poughkeepsie?”
“As I’ve explained to you in great detail, it’s impossible to situate a speculative World War Two battle set at South Pole without actually being here. Why is that so hard to understand?”
As the dancer and the historical novelist bickered, Cooper realized that the literary novelist was actually on to something: the Pole community was, in fact, a parallel universe in miniature. It was a place you could go where people weren’t flying planes into buildings or shooting up schools. They were just bickering about Poughkeepsie and satellite phone calls and pontificating on the hydrocarbon seep tubeworm’s vascular plume. Most people off-continent didn’t even remember this place existed, except maybe a handful of bored newspaper reporters and the schoolchildren in De Pere, Wisconsin, with whom Sal corresponded.
Cooper tapped the literary novelist on the knee. “Hey, when you were a kid, did you ever lock yourself in the bathroom and pretend it was a house?” He stared at her uncomprehendingly. “You know, like a cottage in the Black Forest: bathtub for your bed, sink for your cooking needs, the cabinet beneath the sink for your oven?” Nothing. “Look, I guess my point is that for me, South Pole is like my fantasy bathroom-cottage. You can pretend you have everything you need here. People might pull on the doorknob and threaten to kick the door down, but you know they won’t do it, and you can be safe here until you’re ready to face whatever ends up being on the other side of it. I like it here because this isn’t the world. It’s somewhere else.”
“And it also has a toilet, so the parallel is complete,” the historical novelist barked. “Christ. I’m counting down the days until I can get out of here.”
“You’re just mad that the Argentinean swabbed your girlfriend,” Birdie said, and held out his pink hand to Cooper for a high-five.
*
Cooper finished The Crud the second week of December, having learned important things like where all the waste from the toilets went (a “lake” beneath the ice), and was ready to read the sequel, Skua Birds in Paradise: Wintering Over at SP, which Sal kept hidden in his room. Knowing Sal always skipped game night, she decided to venture over to El Dorm with The Crud to find him and Skua Birds in Paradise.
When she approached his door, she could see that it was half open, and that there was a woman in the room. The banter was intimate, the low lilt typical of people who have recently swapped bodily fluids. Cooper tried to turn back silently on her bunny boots, but the right one squeaked on the linoleum and brought the banter to a stop midsentence. The Frosty Boy tech in the hotpants and trucker hat who’d flown in from McMurdo, and who, Cooper thought irritably, might never leave, appeared at the door.
“Who is it?” Sal called out to the tech.
“A girl,” she said flatly. This was a rare enough occurrence in El Dorm that Sal came to the door himself. His shirt was off. Cooper tried not to look at his chest, but ended up staring directly at it and quickly took in the details: no hair, some definition, not too much, nipples symmetrical and the color of strawberries. Sal edged past his visitor and closed the door against his shoulder.
“Don’t tell me you already lost The Crud.”
Cooper handed him the book. “To the contrary. I’m ready for the sequel.”
Sal’s demeanor immediately shifted. “Meet me in the library in ten.” He closed the door in her face.
In the library, Cooper perused the shelves, noting that there were duplicate copies of every Douglas Adams book ever written, as well as the compulsory copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. She was pleased to find that Tucker was wrong—there was a copy of Shackleton’s South. It just had never been opened.
“This will generate gossip,” Sal said when he walked in. He locked the door behind him. “Now, it goes without saying that you do not read Skua Birds openly. Admin has a bounty pool on both books—winner gets an extra R-and-R off-continent, so motivation is high. Now turn around.”
“What?”
“I can’t let you see where I keep it.”
“Fuck off,” Cooper laughed, but she turned to face the back wall, on which hung every winter-over group portrait in Pole history. She stopped counting at thirty. As Sal shuffled around behind her, she studied the photos. They went from sepia in the 1950s to black-and-white in the ’60s to color in the ’70s and beyond, and yet the composition of each was remarkably similar: beards abounded, one person in a cowboy hat, another eschewing his parka for a flannel shirt, someone caught midsentence.
Just below these photographs was a lighted display case filled with brass sculptures—the old geographic Pole markers, which were replaced each year on New Year’s Day. The 1999 marker was a gleaming copper bottle cap with the continent etched on top; 2000’s depicted the South Pole under a wavy magnetic field, with the words To Inspire and Explore running the perimeter; another, its year unmentioned, was a rotating sextant.
“These are beautiful as hell,” Cooper said admiringly.
“The Pole markers are works of art,” Sal said behind her. “Each year someone gets to design the new one. It’s a huge honor.”
“Who gets it this year?” Cooper asked, even though she knew. Sal placed his hands on her shoulders and turned her around to face him.
“Yours truly.”
“Why you?” Cooper asked. “Oh, right—your super-important experiment.”
Sal handed her a paperback with a black cover. This one didn’t even bother with the title.