“Do you want me to bring you back anything?”
Pavano shook his head. “I’ve got a Cup o’ Noodles.”
*
The galley at the Divide was just a tent, and as she looked at the dinner offerings steaming away in the large aluminum warming trays, unrecognizable in various states of congealment, Cooper missed Pearl’s cooking keenly. She held out her tray and a lump of something resembling meatloaf was dropped onto her plate. She picked a stale roll out of a plastic basket and scanned the room. Across from her, a man in a blond wig topped with a tiara sipped soup from a bowl. Next to him, Cooper noticed Sri and his team studying some printouts. Cooper tried to catch his eye, but he seemed to be ignoring her. She considered sitting at his table anyway, but decided instead to take a seat at an empty one.
As she was poking the meat product on her tray with her fork, Cooper felt someone staring at her. The ice-core tech Cooper sat next to on the flight in was scowling at her, a lock of purple hair obscuring her right eye.
“Why are you helping him?” she asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Frank Pavano. He’s a pseudoscientist.”
“I’m an artist,” Cooper said, as if that explained everything.
“You his girlfriend or something?”
“Christ, no. I’m here for inspiration. A change of scenery.”
The tech put her hand on her waist and cocked her head. “Artists and Writers Fellow?”
“Yeah.”
“But you’re on the list as a tech. They put you on his manifest?”
“I know, weird.”
“And what exactly are you painting?”
“I’m here to sketch and observe the field camp. And the surrounding ice sheet plateau, also.” She cast about for something believable. “I’m calling it ‘Transparent Truths.’”
“Transparent Truths?”
Cooper knew she had to get jargony now—jargon was the strongest shield for the professional with nothing to say. “I plan to create a suite of etchings and paintings on this source material, using color and implied texture, and focusing on a postmodern application of serial imagery.”
The core tech relaxed a little. “Okay, sorry to grill you. It’s just—having a guy who thinks global warming is a hoax at a climate research site is sort of big deal. My name’s Fern.”
“Cooper. And believe me, I get it.”
A couple of other people sauntered over to Cooper’s table. “It’s just weird that you came on his manifest. That’s not how this is usually done. I mean, you usually have your own flight order.”
Cooper shrugged. “I don’t even know what that means. I just do what I’m told.”
“You know that he’s on Big Oil’s payroll, right?” Fern said. “This is basically like giving an NSF grant to Exxon.” She paused. “What’s he like?” The crowd around Cooper’s table had grown bigger, but everyone remained silent, as if what Cooper had to say was extremely important.
“He seems normal.”
“There’s no way he’s normal,” someone from the edge of the group said. “Not even Pole-normal.”
“The NSF is a craven, cowardly agency run by mealy-mouthed pieces of shit,” another voice shouted from the back, this one belonging to the wig-wearing male beauty queen.
“Randy has that on his business card,” Fern said, finally cracking a smile. “So you’re here to help him extract a core? You know how to do it, right? Because it’s actually really dangerous. They have people here whose only job is to do shit like that, and none of them are on his tech roster.”
“I think he’s going to do it himself. Seeing as no one will help him.”
The room boomed with laughter. Cooper had no idea why.
*
Once she came to, Cooper’s first thought was, why is Pavano puking? A few yards away, he was leaning over his knees, an entire Cup o’ Noodles pouring out of his mouth and onto the ice in a steaming pile. Her second thought was that her hand was warm, even though she’d taken her mitten off to help Pavano with the corer, and last she remembered it was basically flash-frozen. She got to her feet, wondering why she’d been prostrate on the snow. Now Pavano was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and now he was shouting at her: Don’t look. As if in slow motion, Cooper turned to see what he was going on about. Was that blood on the ice? Was that her finger, half attached—no, three-quarters detached—to her right hand? She felt consternation upon seeing the dangling finger, as if it were something stubborn, like a hangnail, and reached for it with her other hand and pulled it off. It came off easily, and she tossed it into the snow.
That gesture—the toss—seemed to trigger a sudden response, as if the cosmos had been waiting for this act, and now that it had been completed, the world splintered into shards. Each shard reflected the sun, like waves on a lake. Saganaga. The lake at the end of the Gunflint Trail. You stayed in the possession corridor because you didn’t want to face the wind. Cooper was in the canoe, alone now, driving it straight for the shore.
*
Her mind was a museum. Only dusty relics remained: her hands guiding the elephantine drill onto the spot Pavano had marked on the ice. The sensation of her right mitten twisting into an infinite spiral as the generator roared; searing pain that quickly gave way to numbness. Pavano’s noodles. His startled face. The blood on the ice and Cooper’s mangled finger, which had been dug out of the snow by a compassionate research tech—Fern?—once the drill had stopped grinding and help began arriving. The finger had been placed in a snow-filled Coleman. Cooper remembered marveling at the Coleman, that such a thing could be found both at a suburban picnic and also on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. There was the med tent and the disembodied face of the medic, displaying teeth in some facsimile of a smile. This was followed by a stretch of blackness, studded by occasional bursts of light and scored by a ceaseless shriek. Someone had tried to peel open her eyes; she had fainted. Cooper had blinked against the assault and reluctantly focused her eyes until she realized she was looking at Doc Carla. That’s when the pain arrived—decadent, laughably excessive. Cooper felt an intense desire to chop off her right arm.