Big Dead Place. Nicholas Johnson
rung him one day to offer him a position as a cook, and said if he didn’t take the job his benefits would be cut. “Is it cold there?” he asked.
When they got to the ice, they found that the IAP manager wore alligator shoes and a suit and tie to work each day. Wearing a suit and tie in McMurdo is like wearing a spacesuit to a bullfight. Even though he was a manager, Housing had dumped him in Lower Case, and Kath watched him from her window as he commuted to work through the wind in his parka and alligator shoes, clutching his briefcase.
Alligator held a meeting with the janitors. He set up his laptop on the Galley table and handed out graphs charting the season’s performance. He introduced them to something called the managerial module, and asked the toilet-scrubbing crew for their input on measurement tools to chart performance efficiency. Nearby, a DA wiped tables with a wet cloth.
The meeting adjourned, Kath asked him where he was from, and what he had done before this. He rattled off a résumé. When he told Kath to attend weekly supervisor meetings at 2 p.m.—in the middle of her nightshift sleep schedule—she said no. He insisted, but she demanded to know how he would like to wake up for a meeting in the middle of the night. He relented, but was thereafter wary of her team spirit.
Meanwhile, the Galley staff was at odds with Alligator because he ordered that each day fresh fruit be decoratively cut and placed on top of the serving islands in the Galley, for the touch of class it added. “We’re in Antarctica,” they complained, “Fresh fruit is scarce and valuable.” He demanded that the practice continue, so the top of the food warmers sported halved oranges with triangular ridges and sprigs of grapes that were hot and mushy by the end of the day. Finally, when murmurs percolated up through management that the new subcontractor wasted fruit, plastic fruit was flown down.
After a few months it became obvious that payroll problems among the janitors and Galley workers were not isolated mistakes. Some were receiving half pay and others had not been paid for as long as two months. Those who did receive checks noticed that these were handwritten and drawn from an offshore account in the Cayman Islands. Those who reexamined their contracts noticed an article prohibiting employees from discussing their salaries with NSF or with ASA (the support contractor at the time), punishable by termination.
Unrest in the rank and file was evident, so Alligator held a meeting with all IAP employees and told everyone to sign a statement promising not to discuss their salaries with NSF or ASA; anyone who did not sign would be fired and required to pay for their own plane tickets back to the U.S., and thus pay straight into IAP’s pocket, since their contract with NSF guaranteed them the cost of employee travel expenses. No one signed the paper, and a few brought their contracts to NSF and ASA managers for consultation. The contract was illegal, and NSF demanded that IAP provide the employees with a new contract. Because of their previous troubles, 15 or so people no longer wanted anything to do with The Program and refused to sign the new contract. But because Alligator had previously fired a number of people to emphasize a no-nonsense work environment, the Galley and janitorial staffs were already running on skeleton crews. NSF and ASA had an emergency meeting and determined that the only way to keep those 15 people from leaving was to keep them bound to the original contract, meaning that they would have to pay for their own plane tickets should they decide to leave.
Now they had to pay to leave Antarctica. A few people told Alligator quietly that he wouldn’t make it through Christchurch without a beating. Alligator, now afraid, held employee parties in the Coffeehouse and paid for oceans of wine from his own pocket, but the threats lingered in meaningful looks and gestures. At the end of the season he tried to leave on an early flight but ASA rebuffed him because, after all, he was a manager and supposed to oversee things until the end. As the end of the season closed in, he panicked and finally, wanting to make it through Christchurch before his disgruntled underlings got there, declared that he had a “family emergency” at home. “Family emergency” is a potent phrase, like “safety concerns” and “inappropriate behavior.” It worked; a woman was bumped from her flight so he could leave.
No one knows whether Alligator made it through Christchurch scot-free. But some still remember the day one of Alligator’s bags was run over multiple times with a loader, cologne seeping from smashed vials within, seams bursting, so that the entire mess had to be tied together with twine before resuming its place on the pallet of cargo.
Laz and Jeannie arrived for Thai food. Bulky red parkas slumped in a pile by the door. Boot treads relinquished filaments of snow onto the worn carpet. “The wind is loud in these corner rooms,” someone said.
Señor X distributed bowls of rice covered in spicy gray sauce, spiked with carrots and peppers. If you had just awoken from years of sleep and walked into the room, the carrots and peppers would tell you a plane had recently visited. The white shreds of snow on the carpet turned clear before they melted. To the bulletin board I pinned a note that I had found tucked inside a cheap novel at a Seattle thrift store. I read it aloud to the feeding throng:
Meg,
Take this money to use toward your dress. I just wish I had more. You are just the best daughter I could ever have asked for. I love you dearly, Meg. There is some soup on the stove on “warm.” Can you stir it and turn it off when you get up. Wake me up before you go so we can visit a little.
Love you, Mom.
“Awww,” Jeannie cooed. “That’s nice.”
Señor X nodded.
“That’s sweet,” Kath said.
“Isn’t it?” I said.
Laz remained silent, his mouth contorted like a toppled parenthesis.
“What the hell are you smirking about?” I demanded.
“I don’t want to spoil your tidy illusion,” he said.
“Oh please.”
“Obviously they had some sort of fight. They had an argument and now the mom’s trying to make up for it. ‘Hey, here’s some cash. Sorry I yelled at you.’ She might have hit her. The daughter came in drunk or all messed up on cocaine. She’d been out sucking a bushel of dicks. This is clearly the aftermath of some grievous turmoil.”
“You’re all fucked up.”
“Sir, you may adjust your blinders as you see fit.”
One morning near the end of October, settled and adjusted to my rounds as a town garbageman, I took a loader down to check the Wood and Construction Debris dumpsters that needed constant attention at the Playhouse demolition project. The Playhouse was a large Quonset hut in the center of town, located between the Coffeehouse and Southern Exposure, the smoking bar. The Playhouse had been constructed by the Navy many years ago, and was being demo’d to make room for an office building called JSOC.
It was Condition 2, the windiest day of the season so far, and the sheets of metal at the apex of the Playhouse arches were acting as a wind-catch. The whole structure was very unstable and leaning about 45 degrees, like a crumpling covered wagon. The workers had chained the bucket of a Caterpillar loader to the end of the Playhouse to stabilize it.
The new Safety Guy was there to watch. He had recently emailed emphatic demands that people on the construction projects wear hardhats and eye protection. He had braved the wind to visit the Playhouse to ensure strict compliance with Safety procedures. With one hand gripping his own clean hardhat to keep it from flying away, and the other clutching a clipboard, he watched a group of men wearing hardhats and eye protection run into the quaking Playhouse to collect the tools and scaffolding before the structure collapsed in the wind.
This brand of playacting, in which rigorously enforcing minutiae (such as hardhats) symbolically defends against larger dangers (such as a collapsing building), pervades The Program. The act requires a straight-faced zeal that favors the ignorant or the ambitious, simply because it is avoided by everyone else as a contagious brain-eating disease. One time, with winter temperatures hovering around -80°F, the South Pole Safety Representative, running out of topics for the mandatory daily meetings, instructed workers on first aid