Big Dead Place. Nicholas Johnson
riser had left and Bonanza was over, each person who arrived believed the current channel had been selected by someone in the room, or possibly by everyone in the room. There was a sense that the channel was intended. Very rarely, someone would enter the filthy den and say, after a few minutes of watching The Flintstones, “What the fuck is this? Anyone watching this shit?” We were all watching it, but everyone shook their heads. The channel-changer would be fortunate if there was a ball game on another channel, which would be greeted by a murmur of approval. But if the other channels were no better, like a soap opera or the news, then sometimes the channel-changer would murmur, “Shit, nothing on…” but now he was in a pinch. In the warm ashtray smell of the lounge, he was to blame for whatever stupid show we watched, even if he returned to the original channel.
I listened to the psychologist carefully. As a backstage participant in the field of behavior modification, perhaps she would explain the indistinct variable ratio schedule of approval and negative reinforcement that rained down in daily emails. Maybe she would translate in which cases the artificial and material reinforcers in our contracts were authentic and in which cases they were just part of the shtick, to be later revoked. The psychologist might even reveal the Solomon’s wisdom behind it all, and a design for frontier social control, thoughtful and well-executed, would clearly emerge from the smeared napkin-plan of The Program. I was on the edge of my seat.
The psychologist suggested that we go to bed early, quit drinking coffee, and quit smoking.
On Thanksgiving7 weekend we had two days off instead of one. The Galley made an extravagant meal and people dressed in their finest. Many men bring down one suit and tie for these occasions, and women often pack at least one dress. On the tables were cards sent by kind people, such as the members of the Covenant Congregational Church in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, who wrote: “…we hope the important research you are accomplishing more than makes up for all the hardships you encounter.”
Speed, an Equipment Operator from Pole, stuck in McMurdo by weather after a winter at Pole, had met AGO Jordan, and invited him to eat with us.
When someone asked Jordan what he did at home, he said he was studying lightning and then, in order to describe the fundamentals of his research, went into a detailed description of how a radio works.
I was focused on the cheese and salmon on my plate, and was pondering scenes from the previous evening in my room where I insisted on playing Brujeria all night, and maybe it was the dark metal vibe that led the editor of the NSF-sponsored Antarctic Sun to demand that Ben stab him in the arm with a fork. Ben made a practice stab on the cutting board, leaving four deep gouges from the prongs. Ben said, “You probably won’t be able to use your hand afterward,” but the editor didn’t care. He was drunk. We were all drunk. It was a two-day weekend. I wouldn’t allow the transaction in my room because I knew Ben would do it, just as he had once attacked me with a vacuum cleaner outside in the snow, and there was no reason for the editor to lose a hand if I could halt the game of chicken with a spontaneous policy prohibiting blood on the carpet, though I would have loved to see it.
I lost track of what Jordan was saying about radios and lightning, but I appreciated his thoroughness, and he was sincerely curious about local operations. We told him about the ice pier in Winter Quarters Bay that is formed like a cake with alternating layers of ice and dirt and attached with cables to the shore. We told him about the year the ice pier had outworn its useful life, and the Coast Guard was charged with towing it out to sea, but it broke into fragments that they surrounded in dinghies, scratching their heads in the middle of the bay, and how the replacement ice pier split in half last summer and had to be stitched together with cables. We told him how the hill above town is scraped by dozers to collect dirt for spreading on the icy roads, and how buried beneath the town’s surface are deposits of scrapped wood, metal cables and barrels and charred debris from the trashburnings at Fortress Rocks, and how the entire town is saturated with fuel, and how the Navy in the winter used to push barrels of bad fuel onto the ice where they would disappear into the bay come the summer thaw. We told him that Laz’s ass was likewise a repository for piss, but Laz argued that he was good for no more than two liters.
An NSF Rep was walking around to the tables serving pumpkin pie. The time-honored tradition of a head honcho adapting a servile role on a holiday was performed gracefully, and people laughed nervously and snapped their fingers for more pie, which he obeyed amidst a chorus of mitigating thank-yous.
The week after Thanksgiving, Jordan began approaching lunch tables and telling people that aliens would arrive at noon on Thursday, November 30. The aliens would come down from the sky to meet Jordan in the open lot between Medical and 155.
A local prankster made signs showing the spaceship from the movie Independence Day with the caption “We Are Coming.” Someone else made pictures of the top of nearby Ob Hill and various landmarks in town exploding from laser blasts. These were posted on the I-Drive8, communal space for photos on the local network.
On Thursday, November 30th, a co-worker and I were banding flatracks all morning at Fortress Rocks. Absorbed by the task, we lost track of time and came down late to lunch.
As we hung our coats in Highway 1, people were filing in from outside and a male and female NSF Representative were pacing the hallway. She said, “What should we do?” He said, “Well, I know what I’m going to do…” and he began ripping down the “We Are Coming” posters while his colleague stood in the hallway menacing those who toted alien paraphernalia. “What are you doing with that?” she asked a woman who walked by with an alien mask in her hand.
At noon Jordan had been outside waiting for the aliens. 50 people that Jordan had met at the lunchtables came to meet him. They were wearing alien masks and glittery bobbing antennae from the Rec Office costume closet. They had showed up to see what would happen, and stood in a group nearby, watching as Jordan wandered the dusty lot looking to the sky.
The NSF Representatives and some other higher-ups had heard about the gathering crowd and showed up to keep things in line, one of them taking video. They surrounded Jordan. Then someone wearing an alien mask raced up on a four-wheeled Polaris, did a few circles in the lot while the crowd of aliens laughed and cheered, and sped off. Recovering from their temporary confusion, the bigwigs corralled Jordan into Medical.
Later that evening Jordan was still in Medical; the word “lockdown” was used. He was manifested immediately and flown out the next day. A memo to the Commander of Operation Deep Freeze (CODF) described the evacuation of Jordan: “…a civilian patient began exhibiting erratic behavior. He described events about ‘aliens’ coming to McMurdo. He had been previously examined in Christchurch by a psychiatrist and deemed not acutely psychotic. However, due to his increasingly bizarre behavior, it was decided to transport him back to CONUS.”
The abduction was hot on the grapevine and would certainly be talked about for years.
That Saturday, after work, lounging with the Fuelies on some cargo in the sun, an administrator told us she had seen the Photoshopped pictures of destruction on the I-Drive and was scared that Jordan was going to blow up the town. Before noon on Thursday, while Jordan was waiting for the aliens, she had driven her work truck down to Scott’s Hut to avoid the explosions.
“Are you joking?” I asked.
“I’m not joking,” she said severely. “At home I’m a grade school teacher. We’re trained to pay attention to these things.”
CHAPTER 2 NOTES
1 The bottom of the barrel are Hotel California and MMI (Mammoth Mountain Inn) because they are far from the Galley next to the thundering Helo Pads and the walls are