“Carpenter?”
“Now you confuse me with construction personnel. Those are assholes. Science is only reason for people to come here.” He looked down at Cooper again. “You are one of these artists?” Cooper nodded. “I do not understand why you are here.”
Cooper saw herself reflected in the man’s mirrored aviators, which he’d donned in place of the goggles everyone had been issued back in Christchurch. Reflected in his sunglasses, Cooper’s head was bulbous, her body a tube. She was ridiculous.
*
That night, the artists crowded into the bowling alley at McMurdo, Mactown Lanes, which was located in a Seabee Quonset hut that also housed a ceramics studio, and was a gathering point for exactly the kind of people one might expect to find in bowling alleys and ceramics studios. The bowling alley consisted of two lanes and the last existing Brunswick manual pinsetter system in the world. A woman in a bikini top and board shorts was the designated “pin monkey.”
As she waited for her turn to bowl, Cooper learned she’d be heading to Pole with an interpretive dancer who hoped to choreograph a show based on the mating rituals of the hydrocarbon seep tubeworm; two novelists, traversing the same ground as the novelists who came before them (The Catcher in the Crevasse, Fahrenheit-98, The Sun Never Rises, Love in the Time of Snow Blindness); and Cooper’s pen pal, the biographer named Harold.
Cooper watched as the interpretive dancer threw a gutter ball and danced back to her seat under the pink and green strobe lights pulsing to the beat of “Heart of Glass.”
“It’s rather quaint, isn’t it,” the man sitting next to Cooper said as they watched the heavily tatted pin monkey get up from her folding chair at the end of the lane and reset the pins. Cooper took in the man’s pink jowls-in-training and his friendly, constantly blinking eyes. A portrait would focus on the broad, Truman Capote forehead abandoned by the hairline. These features, and the British accent, could only mean that this was Harold.
“Actually, I’m surprised how ugly this place is,” Cooper said. “You think Antarctica is going to be the purest place in the world—like the last pure place on earth—and you get here and it’s like Akron.” She offered him her hand. “I’m Cooper.”
The man’s face flushed, and he offered a gap-toothed smile. When he took her hand, his was predictably moist. “I’m Harold, your pen pal!” He giggled. “Now, is there a ghost of a chance that you’d allow me to perform my best Minnesota accent, or would that just send you into a rage? I’ve been working on it for weeks.”
“I’ll try to control myself,” Cooper replied. “Go ahead.”
Harold squared his shoulders and straightened his posture, affecting the standard Minnesotan-at-the-wheel-during-rush-hour position. “Oh geeeee, yoooooo betcha!”
“Not bad, but if you’re going for cinéma vérité, you might want to try the phrase ‘I’m headed over to Lindy’s for the meat raffle.’” Harold positively glowered. “Anyway, nice to finally meet you, Harold.” Cooper wasn’t sure she’d ever spoken the name Harold out loud before; it came out sounding a little sarcastic.
Harold winced. “As I’ve been told incessantly since we landed at Christchurch, Harold is a perfectly awful name.” He paused, thoughtful. “I don’t believe they’re naming children Harold anymore. I’ve settled on Birdie for the duration.”
“Birdie?”
“It’s the nickname of the bloke I’m writing a book about. I’ve simply co-opted it.”
“Birdie Bowers?” Cooper said.
Birdie went pinker. “You know Birdie? Americans never know him.”
Cooper shrugged. “My father’s a frustrated explorer, so I’m on a first-name basis with a lot of dead men.”
“Yes, there’s a whole generation of those kinds of fathers, isn’t there? Men cut out for Shackleton’s adventures but forced to work as accountants or teachers.” He ran a hand across his pate. “It’s a bloody shame, actually. There’s nothing left for them.”
The overheads suddenly dimmed and were replaced by the swirling colored lights found in Cosmic Bowling systems across the globe—Antarctica, apparently, included. Birdie made his way to the bowling lane, and as Cooper watched him test the weight of several bowling balls, she put her hand in her parka and touched the vial she’d carried with her from Minneapolis. As she did so, she imagined Cherry in his bunk on the Terra Nova as it neared this continent, and a jubilant Birdie Bowers hauling him out to give him a celebratory dig in the ribs.
*
The next morning, as Cooper stood on the McMurdo ice runway waiting to board the plane to South Pole, the sun hovered on the horizon, looking as runny as an undercooked egg. A few weeks earlier, in mid-September, it had risen for the first time in six months. According to the breathless reports Cooper had overheard in the dining room, penguins had gone into hysterics, which had promptly sent a National Geographic cruise tour group into hysterics.
The sea-ice runway was busier than O’Hare, crowded with C-17s and a gaggle of LC-130s from the New York Air National Guard. All of the planes had been outfitted with skis instead of wheels, as well as jet fuel that wouldn’t turn to Smuckers in sixty-below temps. It was into one of these LC-130s—everyone called them Hercs—that Cooper climbed, along with the rest of the artists, scientists, and support staff heading to Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.
The interior of the plane looked like the digestive tract of a cyborg: the floor was littered with various cables, tie-down straps, and metal bars. There were no windows. Cooper strapped herself into a jump seat and, since there was nothing to look at besides red cargo netting and beards, she closed her eyes and tried to sleep.
Three hours later, the sound of the pilot’s voice broke through the howl of the plane’s engines. “McMurdo was Fiji compared to what you’re about to experience,” he shouted over the speaker. “And goggles are required, folks. We’ll be on the ground shortly. Might want to grab on to something. Could get a little bumpy on the way down.”
As if on cue, the plane fell a few hundred feet, before floating up again, and then dropping another hundred. It went on like this for ten minutes. The scientists and construction workers in the jump seats across from Cooper seemed unfazed, while next to her, the historical novelist yelped pathetically. Halfway down the row, Birdie had dropped his head between his knees.