Cooper and Pavano stood at the end of a long line leading into the admin shack, manned by an effusive NSF field rep, whose guffaw seemed to echo throughout the entire camp. Cooper and Pavano hadn’t exchanged words since leaving Pole; the flight had been uneventful and characteristically deafening. Conversation was out of the question, and Pavano had spent most of the ride staring at the cargo rack just above Cooper’s head.
“Pavano, Frank—and research tech,” Pavano recited when they reached the front of the line. The rep looked down at his clipboard for a moment too long. Cooper could tell he wasn’t reading anything.
“Would you excuse me for a moment,” he said, before disappearing into an adjoining room. Cooper could hear whispers and the sound of shuffling papers. The rep returned, looking sheepish. “Your, uh, research tech is not approved,” he said, his eyes not quite meeting Pavano’s. “She has not undergone basic safety training.”
“I was told this requirement had been waived since she is an NSF grantee and underwent safety training in Denver,” Pavano replied.
“I’m just telling you what I know,” the man said. “You can talk to the site manager if you want, but for now, she can’t touch any equipment. You’re in Sector 4B.” He pointed to a shelf stocked with bright neoprene bundles. “Tents and camp stoves over there.”
“What are my access hours to the ice-core archive?” Pavano asked.
The rep looked embarrassed. He consulted the clipboard. “Says here that you will have access to the core-handling room at 0300 hours; you may access the archive freezer at that time.” Three a.m., Cooper thought. Jesus.
“And the coordinates for my coring site?” Pavano continued, unperturbed.
“Well, yes, there’s a bit of a problem with that, too, I see.”
“What’s the problem?”
“That request has been denied—it says here that there are some safety concerns.” Behind them, the people in line sighed. Denied requests led to long delays and grumpy core techs, who were in the ice archives waiting to be spelled. But to Cooper’s surprise, Pavano didn’t argue. He thanked the rep, then gathered his bag and stepped over to the shelf where the tents were wrapped in neat, ornament-like balls. Astonished, the NSF rep watched as Pavano scooped two tents from the shelf.
“Sector 4B is this way,” Pavano said as he led Cooper out the door.
“Wait, don’t you want to—”
“Argue? I knew exactly what would happen when I arrived. People are reassuringly predictable. Which makes my job easier.”
“It’s your job to get railroaded?”
“In a sense.”
Cooper laughed. “You are so weird.”
“I find I am just weird enough.”
The walk from the central site to sector 4B was comparable to the walk from the station to Summer Camp at Pole, but Cooper wanted to crawl the last twenty yards—the air was so thin it felt as though she were sipping air through a straw. Her whole body hurt. Sector 4B turned out to be a ghost town. Vacant tents dotted the landscape, their nylon flaps dancing in the wind. Pavano dropped the gear. “I’d say they put us all the way out in Antarctica, but we’re already here, so I’ll say they put us in Siberia instead.” He gestured toward the perimeter of camp. “Take a walk,” he said. “I’ll put up the tents.”
Cooper was bent over her knees, huffing. She cocked her head up at Pavano and squinted in the sun. “How are you breathing and talking at the same time?”
“I did some high-altitude cross-training in preparation before the season began.”
“Well, goody for you,” Cooper gasped. Pavano almost smiled. “I’ll help with the tents. I’m pretty good at setting them up. Lots of practice.”
Pavano shook his head. “No, go walk. Look around. Maybe you’ll get inspired.”
“Maybe I’ll die of hypoxia.”
“Either way, a different perspective.”
As Cooper began trudging away, she heard Pavano call after her, “Follow the flags.”
“I’m sick of following flags,” Cooper muttered.
The sun was merciless—bright with burning hydrogen and helium but offering no heat. That the continent on which she walked was wrapped around the bottom of the planet—that rock and ice could adhere to a curve—suddenly seemed a ridiculous notion. Cooper squinted, trying to conjure an image of Cherry, or even Mawson—the redoubtable Aussie survivor of a different adventure, with his skin peeling off in thick sheets, his tongue swollen, and his gums black as ink. Several of the Program’s past artist Fellows had painted images of these men haunting the ice, sometimes literally as ghosts. But when Cooper thought of them, they faded quickly, replaced by other, more familiar ghosts.
As she walked, she kept thinking of what she hadn’t told Sal that night in her room, of what had happened after that trip to Saganaga. About how she and Billie had returned to the Boundary Waters a month later without Bill, and without his knowledge, to take matters into their own hands. At their launch point, a group of men had appeared, wearing Duluth Packs on their shoulders and many-pocketed cargo pants. As soon as they saw Billie pulling the canoe off the car rack, the packs had dropped from their shoulders, hitting the hard grassless soil on the edges of the launch point simultaneously.
“We’re good, boys,” Billie said, grunting as she lifted the canoe on her shoulders. Her curse-soaked stumble confirmed the men’s initial impulse. Two of them walked over to where she stood, slipped their shoulders under the eaves of the canoe, and raised it off her shoulders.
“Thanks, guys,” Cooper said. Billie turned to her and mouthed an emphatic fuck you.
“You two planning to portage?” a scrawny guy in shorts asked. “We-no-nahs are a bitch.” Cooper said nothing, chastened by her sister’s soundless curse. The big guy looked at Billie, down the length of her body and then back again, assessing her suitability to the task and finding it wanting.
“You guys aren’t going in alone, are you?” he asked.
“We’re meeting our old man at Saganaga,” Cooper said. “It’s a test.” Billie said nothing to contradict Cooper’s easy lie.
“A test?”
“A competence test,” Billie said, picking up the lie with ease. “We do this every year. He marks up the map. He goes in two days before us. We find him.” These words came out of Billie’s mouth without cadence or emotion, and Cooper saw her sister’s lively eyes had turned dull and cold. She wanted the men gone.
“Wow, that’s hard-core,” the scrawny one said.
“You know what’s really hard-core,” Billie said, and to Cooper’s horror, she dug the baggie out of her pants pocket.
“Billie, don’t,” Cooper said.
The guy peered at the baggie, and broke into a grin. “Dope? Yeah, that’s real hard-core,” he said.
Billie walked up to him and dangled the bag in front of his Maui Jims. “Guess again,” she said. From where Cooper was standing, the guy looked like the figure in Magritte’s The Son of Man, except instead of a bowler he was wearing a bad buzz cut and instead of a green apple in front of his face there was a Ziploc containing David’s cremated remains.
The guy took a few steps back. “Jesus. You can’t do that, you know. It’s illegal.”
“You gonna tell on me?”