“Hey,” a familiar voice called. Cooper turned to find Sal walking toward her, his rose-red parka a Pollock drip against the starched sky. He grinned at her, and Cooper noticed for the first time a deep dimple in his right cheek. “Technically, I’m not supposed to help you bag-drag,” he said. “It’s a time-honored tradition to force the Fingys to haul their luggage out to camp.” He reached for Cooper’s duffel. “But I’m feeling charitable today.”
“Except I’m too proud to take handouts,” Cooper replied, moving the bag out of his reach with her boot. She hauled the strap back over her shoulder, hoping to give the impression that she found the duffel featherlight.
“Do you even know where you’re going?”
“E6.”
“Ah, E6. That’s where they found the body last season.” He grinned again and gestured to the Jamesway farthest from the station. “Last one on the left there.” It looked miles away. Cooper groaned, and let the duffel strap slip from her shoulder. Sal slung the bag over his shoulder easily, and together they walked toward Summer Camp in silence.
When they arrived at E6, it suddenly occurred to Cooper that the only things that would be standing between her and minus-56-degree temperatures were plywood and vinyl-coated cotton duck. “I can get it from here,” Cooper said, taking the bag from Sal. “Thanks for the good deed.” Sal tipped an imaginary hat. As Cooper watched him walk away, she considered how much she hated guys who tipped imaginary hats.
She pulled the Jamesway door open and kicked her bag into the darkened interior. The door sucked shut behind her, and the walls breathed in and out with the Antarctic summer winds. Canvas curtains separated the sleeping quarters, leaving a narrow hallway running down the middle of the Jamesway. Light snoring came from all directions, along with the faint sound of death metal leaking from someone’s headphones. All at once, the heater—a massive metal monster set at the back of the tent—kicked on with a congested roar.
Using a flashlight she’d been given back at the station along with two towels and a set of bedclothes, Cooper scanned the doors until she found her room at the end of E6. It was the size of a closet, nothing more than a single bed, a dorm-style desk, and a chair. Cooper clambered onto her bed to peer out the plastic-paned window cut high in the wall. More white without end. She craned her neck and saw that a huge snowdrift hugged the other side of the Jamesway wall. She glanced down at the floor and saw the foot of the drift ended under her bed.
Kicking her snow-crusted bag closer to the dresser, Cooper pulled off her fur-backed mittens before removing layer after layer of clothing until she reached her thermal vest. This she unzipped, before removing her money belt, where she’d been keeping her oil paints since landing in Christchurch three days earlier. The visual arts coordinator at the NSF’s Artists & Writers Program had suggested she transport her paints this way if she “insisted” on using oils instead of the obviously more practical tempera; the warmth of her body would keep them from freezing and losing integrity. Titanium white. Yellow ochre, burnt umber. And the workhorse of polar artists, cerulean blue. Cooper rarely opened new tubes—the firmness and fullness of the paints felt as strange as the first time she had held an erect penis in her hand. She was more comfortable using the twisted, deformed soldiers, often capless, found in high school art rooms. So when her sister, Billie, had handed her the bag from Utrecht Art Supplies, Cooper had been shocked. Inside was a set of Winsor and Newton oil paints, and two small containers of turpentine.
“The guy said these were the best,” Billie had said. “Something about pigment load. I assume this is a painting term and not a porn sequence.”
“I’m not worth these paints,” Cooper said, and Billie had grown impatient.
“Stop cringing. Just take them. As we both know, the clock on talent runs faster than regular clocks. Tick-tock.”
As with most things, Billie was, of course, right: in art, as in life, your innate talent was valued in inverse proportion to your age. For Cooper, the clock had ticked off almost fifteen years. She’d been plucked from obscurity while in high school by the “Holy Order of the Precocious Child,” as Billie called it, when a curator for MoMA, in town for a lecture at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, had deigned to look at the lobby display where the winners of the Minnesota High School Visual Arts Competition had their pieces set up. Having discovered in junior high that she had the technical skills of a hyperrealist, Cooper had gone all Charles Bell and produced a series of paintings depicting vending-machine charms. The curator was particularly taken with Cooper’s absurdly detailed study of a tiny roller skate on a lead chain. “You’ve brought a sense of allegorical wonder to the obviously tawdry,” she’d said.
Within two months, Cooper and her vending-machine series had been featured in The New York Times Magazine, alongside the work of three other visual arts prodigies (the title of the article had been “Could These Young Artists Save the American Art World?”). Cooper was bewildered to read that her “preoccupation” as an artist was not just on “gifted creations of likenesses, but also the instigation of psychological states in the observer,” when all she’d been trying to do was not look too closely at the things around her that actually mattered. Like what was happening to her brother.
It was around that time that David had gotten worse—though by that point, using the word worse was like gilding one of Monet’s water lilies. The “Weisman Incident” had made the ten o’clock news on all three local stations (in Minnesota at that time a teenager flailing incoherently on the roof of a modern art museum was sweeps-worthy). That was when the painting stopped. Cooper wasn’t sure why she’d stopped, only that nothing seemed worth painting. She knew even then that to adults this sounded truculent, but representation suddenly seemed a cheap way to comment on ideas. Interpretation seemed hubristic. Better, Cooper thought, as she watched her parents grapple with David, to leave life in its native language. So the planning had stopped, too. Everything did. And Cooper was glad. She was relieved to once again be unexceptional—but of course said nothing to her family and concerned mentors about this relief and instead stockpiled their pity like she was building up treasures.