Cooper treated each reading as if it were a poetry slam, leaping out of bed during the exciting parts, and falling asleep on David’s shoulder during the boring “Spring” chapters, which featured light polar housekeeping and a broken George Robey record spinning on the gramophone. David, on the other hand, listened quietly but intently to everything. It wasn’t Cherry’s myopia or Edward Wilson’s rendering of penguin fat that captured his imagination. It was Titus Oates, the one who walked into the blizzard, his frostbitten foot black and grotesquely swollen. Titus had asked to be left behind; he knew he was slowing them down. Scott and the others refused to leave him so he begged, like a child, and they put him to bed in his sleeping bag. He prayed, loudly, to die before morning, and when he awoke to discover he was still alive, he decided to do it himself. He didn’t bother to put his boots on. This time no one stopped him.
The idea of philanthropic suicide was too abstract for Cooper to understand (their mother, Dasha, who felt explorer lit documented “man’s endless quest to enlarge his penis,” claimed the idea itself was impossible, not to mention inappropriate for elementary-age children). But David was gripped by the notion. Titus’s honorable death figured into their play on winter days, David devising scenarios where he’d walk into the woods that ringed their suburban home in order to disappear, leaving Cooper to await his return. When Cooper played Cherry to David’s Scott or his Titus, she did little more than hang around expectantly, just as Cherry had. Hoping for months to see the Scott party emerge from the Beardmore Glacier valley, Cherry was always certain the men were just over the rise. As a result, Cooper came to identify with him, this aristocrat who’d bought his way onto the Terra Nova, the Scottish whaling ship that carried the Scott party to Antarctica. Twee and myopic, Cherry was a hothouse flower; Cooper was sure everyone must have doubted him. Over the course of the journey, however, he’d become indispensable, and, eventually, its most eloquent witness.
But that was years ago now, and neither Cooper nor Bill had so much as glanced at The Worst Journey in the World in a decade. In fact, after the divorce, Bill had begun selling off his rare book collection volume by volume, and Cooper had always assumed that Worst Journey had been the first to go. It was burdened by memories that had never made the promised transition from unbearable to bittersweet. The only other copy in the house, David’s own heavily annotated mass-market edition, had disappeared.
Cooper took the book from her father and chose to say nothing. Bill gazed out the window at the lightly falling snow. The flakes were fat and hairy, and they descended at an angle. Bill apprised the snow cover. He signaled his approval with a curt nod, and told Cooper to get her coat. Five minutes later, they were outside. It was after ten, but the freshly fallen snow illuminated the backyard as cleanly as moonlight. “Snow is one of the best insulating materials, if used properly,” Bill said as he assessed its moisture content by rubbing the soft flakes between his fingers. “The quickest way to die is to stop paying attention.”
Winter survival training dictated that you did not travel in a blizzard, he told her. You stop and dig a snow trench or make a snow cave with a hand shovel. What hand shovel? You travel with a hand shovel. If you are an amateur and don’t carry a hand shovel on your person, you can use your snowshoes. What if you aren’t using snowshoes? If you are sans snowshoes, you are a dipshit with no business traveling overland in winter. But if you are a dipshit traveling overland in winter with no snowshoes, you use your hands.
Bill and Cooper spent the next hour digging out a trench, a coffin-shaped cavity carved out of the snow. Cooper marveled at her father’s efficiency, the certainty of his movements. How well he seemed to know how to do this.
When the specifications were just right, Bill slipped under the lip of the roof by sliding down the snow ramp they’d built to facilitate entry. Cooper peered into the darkness and saw her father supine, his hands behind his head, smiling at nothing.
“What’s so funny?” she asked. Bill shook his head, but the smile remained.
“This is how I’d like to die.”
“In a snow trench in your backyard?”
“In nature, in winter. Climb in the trench, kick out the roof, and go to sleep. It’s like Cherry said. If Death comes for you in the snow, he comes disguised as sleep. ‘You greet him rather as a welcome friend than a gruesome foe.’” Bill peered up at Cooper. “Doesn’t get any easier.”
It didn’t occur to Cooper then to ask her father if death was supposed to be easy.
*
The suburban campus of Veritas Integrated Defense Systems looked like a centerfold from Maximum Security Prisons Quarterly. Its cinder-block buildings were divided into quadrants and separated by LiftMaster Mega Arm security gates. A shuttle bus deposited Cooper, along with eight other Pole candidates, at Quadrant 9, where they were photographed and fingerprinted. They followed a Veritas employee down intersecting beige hallways in a disaffected clump. As they waited for an elevator, Cooper saw two men in royal-blue company polos in a break room staring up at a suspended television, watching a recap of Bush’s State of the Union speech from the night before. “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” Bush was saying.
“Holy shit,” one of the Veritas guys laughed. “I mean, at this point, you have to go loco on Hussein, right? You have to bomb the shit out of Baghdad.” He looked over at his companion. “He’s gonna, right?”
The man clutching a vending-machine latte replied carelessly, “Relax, we already submitted a bid.”
Cooper and the other applicants were led to a large conference room with a view of Parking Ramp Alpha (parking ramps Beta, Charlie, and Delta were a short shuttle ride from the main complex). Cooper took a seat at the table and looked around at her fellow Pole candidates: all men, all self-consciously hirsute, and all engaged in silent contests over who could fit more carabiners on their stainless-steel water bottles. They avoided making eye contact with Cooper, so she turned her attention to the stack of paperwork in front of her: hundreds and hundreds of questions that had no good answers.
Two hours and five hundred questions later, Cooper and the eight men were allowed to grab a coffee before returning to watch a mandatory video from the Veritas Integrated Defense Systems president. The video commenced with a synthesizer version of “My Country ’Tis of Thee” playing behind scenes of waving flags and purple mountains majesty. The fruited plains dissolved into a shot of a man in a company polo of slightly better quality than the ones Cooper had encountered in the break room. He wore an American flag pin on his lapel, and was looking just off camera.