The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far

by Quintan Ana Wikswo

  Within a few months, however, the government became increasingly concerned about the uncontrolled freedom of its more liberal scientists. Karolina became a political prisoner at Neuengamme, where she could be more carefully watched. She saw herself become a bird in a cage. Watched. Clipped. Crumbs.

  George became a pilot in the Royal Air Force. He had the eyesight of a bluebird. His first days in the bomber plane were awkward and uncomfortable until he gradually began feeling his bones turn into aluminum and steel, and his body stretched out to fully inhabit the remarkable machine.

  His moment of honor arrived at the very end of the war, when his commander ordered him to bomb the Cap Arcona, a luxury liner that had just set off for a voyage across the Baltic Sea, filled with escaping war criminals.

  George’s mission was to sink the Cap Arcona before it reached Helsinki.

  In the reconnaissance photos, it is not entirely impossible to distinguish the political prisoners from Neuengamme: thin gray and white figures in uniforms of thin stripes of white and gray. They are standing among large crates of explosives, which the escaping war criminals planned to detonate shortly after their arrival in Helsinki.

  From the deck of the Cap Arcona, Karolina saw the glorious airplanes descend through the clouds.

  She waved to George.

  He waved back to her from inside the cockpit of his airplane.

  The bomb fell through the air between them.

  To Karolina and George, it looked very much like an egg.

  THE DOUBLE NAUTILUS

  Deep below this city is a double nautilus of stone. A twinned mating of helix upon helix, their sloping tunnels sounding and resounding with a pale and somber echo that speaks of absence, longing, sorrow.

  On the surface, there is little talk of it.

  An iridescent place, halfway between deep night and dawn.

  We know that all here once was ocean—this ancient soil a burial mound for the diluvians. And these—our sinuous pitched stone tunnels—perhaps some flung-out corpse of twinned crustacean within calcified shells whose inner meat was long since harvested for protein. A form now hollowed out and resonant with echo.

  It was nearly morning when I put the cotton in my ears and began the long descent into the alabaster.

  There is an archaic humor to the stone that still defies us.

  The structure suggests to some that these chambers might have once met a physiological intent: been sacks or veins of bile or phlegm or melancholic fluid demanded by an organ of enigmatic purpose, contained within two subterranean beasts we no longer recognize or know.

  Those were distant days, lit by a star that hung above like some bright lantern in an otherwise endless night.

  The great Swiss lake stretched its wet along newly sewn seams of dirt, and pricks of green drank at it before edging themselves up the foothills.

  Trees issuing forth from follicles on a newborn skin of earth, hairs sloughed off with each new layer.

  And beneath it all, these sweet and stoic beasts, inhabiting their mated shells below our world.

  Most contemporary scholars posit that across time, older, long-extinguished shadows of ourselves cut and clawed and hewed this refuge, then polished it, abandoned it, and moved on.

  Perhaps these first peoples sought shelter in the depths. Perhaps an apocryphal event on the surface sent them downward for survival—perhaps hurricanes, or cyclones, or tornados.

  Fires. Or freezes.

  Perhaps devoted acolytes, long dead, drilled out these mathematical passages in service to some entity we no longer know to worship.

  Others suggest that early human life-forms developed a primitive technique for mining a soft substance from the earth, and these coiled and tilted tunnels were canals for its extraction.

  Less tedious early theories, once axiomatic, infer that this mined substance was in fact the flesh or inscrutable lymph of two enormous sea creatures that formerly dwelt within the shells.

  The folktales say that once, very long ago, two sea creatures came into being deep below the Baltic Sea. They grew alongside one another, twisting and turning ever outward together in a meticulous southward calculus of movement.

  As the eons passed, these amorous companions built layer upon layer of shell, melding together a solid, calcified spiraled membrane that separated yet structured them.

  Their flesh was two. Their forms were one.

  They were close to one another, yet far.

  It was a strategy that supported growth and change without compromise or disunion.

  They grew thicker and broader and stronger, and rose up ever closer to the surface of the earth, until one day, the two hooded openings reached light and the fleshy things—astonished and bewildered—knew no better than to unshell themselves and crawl and crouch and dream on the emergent strata of the planet.

  They were unprepared for the sun.

  They were unaccustomed to the light.

  They were savaged by the separation, by the loss of structure and love and communion.

  They became disoriented and lost: they had no means of navigation.

  They cried out for each other, but had no ears.

  They looked for each other, but were without eyes.

  Their flesh crept and crept, but each could not find each.

  One day, amid the sweat and silt of loss and longing, the creatures became lodged beneath the rise of an alpine mountain in a burrowing thrust of pain, crying out, From here I do not know how to find you.

  And thus they perished, each alone on the rock, dying against the hard ridge of gneiss and granite.

  Going down, one must fill the ears with cotton and bandage the eyes with gauze against this cryptic, nacreous half-light that can neither illuminate nor obscure.

  I wonder: could the iridescence here be the source of trouble?

  The nerves of my cornea, arrayed in logarithmic spiral, break down within this nautilus.

  Perhaps it is the similarity of biologic architecture that causes destructive interference—a nest of spirals in the eye, with the impact of Medusa’s tangled snakes: at first the sight grows dim, then begins to blur until a white night of opacity descends.

  Mine is a visual madness.

  This kind of light begs an eyelid’s shuttered gaze.

  When the vista ahead cannot be comprehended or believed.

  I have come too far here—in this place, in this story—without answering the fundamental questions of how and why and when. I haven’t asked them, and it’s possible they don’t exist.

  Down here, there is only what is, and was, and perhaps will be.

  It was late summer in Rome, and I had arrived in the lecture hall of the mathematics building—early, earnest, and half-hearted—to prepare for my lecture on spira mirabilis, Bernoulli, and Torricelli. I arranged the chairs in thin, long strips with few rows, somehow hoping this would settle my nerves. Averse to caffeine, I had taken several espressos, each with two cubes of ice: they arrived in my stomach with such abrasiveness that I wondered if I should soon give frictive birth to pearls.

  I opened the windows to let in the damp air of early morning.

  I was setting a prospectus on each chair. It contained my credentials, my area of specialization in the spirals of Theodorus and Fermat, of Archimedes and Euler and lituus and Cornu.

  The light streamed into the room from the north.

  She entered, a stern and curious assemblage of spectacle and movement and intent.

  There are hawks whose bodies hunt in similar equations. Their success is calibrated on a commanding pitch of directional flight, a calculated angle of descent.

  The alpine borderlands of Italy, our twists of road and perched rock structures—the softness of our soil was never more than a false promise, for below it all is rock and fundament.

  Along some distance, the road follows the enormous twisted corpus of these spiraled beings, these half-mined husks that came to grow around their flesh. Their annulated chambers whorl b
eneath the Alps, the high lands near Athens, and into the blackened, angry forests of the Slavs before vanishing deep below the flatlands at the Baltic Sea.

  Amidst this rise of mountain that forms the creatures’ crests? The bronchial lung of the particle collider, and its quantum mysteries of matter.

  These were the early days of the particle collider, and the geology of its future home was under scrutiny. Because of the structural engineering research for this multinational enterprise, contemporary scientific inquiry surrounding the origin and structure of our nautilus was briefly reinvigorated.

  Its possibilities ignited a tide of curiosity that promised to raise all ships.

  Project funds, peer-reviewed articles—anything seemed possible.

  She had arrived in Rome seeking resources for her own investigations. As she told me, here was her best opportunity to secure long-awaited funding of a subterranean expedition into the enigmatic tunnels of the double-helix nautilus.

  She told me of her work each day. Assembling her equipment, her instruments, and all necessary apparatuses.

  She was trained as a geologist. In her years above, she established a significant reputation for clearheaded logic surrounding the sort of problems that accumulated arthritis in the joints of learning: old, erroneous theories within earth sciences that had long been suspect or proven wrong, yet still radiated a nimbus of incorrectness that somehow hung over the enigma and thickened, obscuring the path toward new knowledge.

  She became known for her ability to penetrate this fog of ignorance and construct a membrane from which she would announce new and startlingly simple approaches that had long defied the most highly regarded minds.

  As her career quietly advanced, this ceased to be an asset. Resentments grew, and the field around her quickened with whispered anecdotes concerning her near-mythic ability to demolish her peers’ proprietary hypotheses moments before their appointment at the tenure review committee.

  She became legendary, and unwanted.

  The old wooden doors of earth science academia closed in and snubbed her innovations.

  It was then that she began fundraising for her expedition to the cavernous tunnels that have forever underpinned our city.

  Her apartment was near mine. After my lecture, she walked me home, and vanished into the alleys of the old city.

  I hoped she would appear again, and she did.

  There were at first long afternoons walking the ghettos of Rome together, only half-aware of our surroundings, pausing to pick up stones from the roadside and tumble them in our hands, and look at leaves and tear up tiny pieces of ticket stub and rail pass as the ideas circulated. Nervous, unnerved, we shared secret enthusiasms, we noted the temperature of the light, and we shyly paced together in long, skeletal strides across the cobblestones.

  We were as uneven as the cobbled rocks, and excited. There was a scientific response between us that was chemical and biological.

  We quivered and shook, and our neurons rose up in a spectacular array.

  As a geologist, she approached each strata of her suitor: my skin, then the adipose tissue, then the muscle, bone, and marrow.

  A thigh became a cliff.

  An abdomen a mineral morass.

  I hoped she would learn my form as though it were the only land worth knowing. That she would plumb deeper in search of clues to what events preceded our common era. I knew she could ascertain of what I am composed, and the process by which I evolve.

  She could predict my hazards and understand my movements, my patterns of erosion and deposition.

  She drew me out, and in.

  Later, there were late nights when she stayed talking with me until dawn, and I longed for the soft sound of floss between her teeth that would remind me to go into the bathroom and pull her back to bed before she could remove the taste of seashore from her mouth.

  Yet that desire was fantasy: the only exchange between us was in words—no erotic fluids built by body to blend soul.

  Instead, she critiqued my publications, and I checked all her equations.

  There were rare moments in which I could look at her while her head was turned, and I wished to run my fingers along the channels of stretched flesh below her breasts, across her slip of nose, her stabile and confident armature of bones that arrayed themselves in her delicate jawline, shoulder, hip.

  We were a continent of want, all flesh and blood and brain.

  There were tears in my eyes when she first took my hand in her long rock fingers, hard and smooth and fully charged with a cool pull that felt governed by fundamental laws of nature.

  I do not weep, but my liquid salts dislodged from the charge of her electricity.

  The sturdy flat plates of her fingernails suggested the grip of some entirely other entity: a reaching, grasping thing that came for me and held and then let go.

  After several months had passed, I found her name referenced on a poster for a scholarly symposium at the university.

  I wore my best suit and took a seat at the back of the hall.

  The speaker claimed to be a former member of her team. He suggested that eighteen years previous, my geologist had embarked into the nautilus as the director of a well-equipped, highly funded team of scientists. In the subsequent ten years, each of the other scientists returned to the surface one by one—each of them astonished to learn she had not already surfaced.

  Eight years, he said, have now passed without any trace of her existence.

  I knew he was an imposter, and apocryphal: I had met her only months before, when she was as yet seeking funds for her expedition.

  I attended occasional and increasingly obscure symposia, each led by her purported former team members. Each claimed to have quickly lost sight of the others below the surface, and thought they had been alone down there in the cold and dark. Each described a harrowing experience of disorientation: key equipment no longer functioning, incorrect instrument readings, settings that defied calibration, the compass needle that spun and spun without pausing to point north.

  One by one, her team secured modest positions of authority within structures of society and intellect and culture, and made their mark there, without her. As though she had never existed on the surface at all. She became a legend, and I, unwillingly fooled by false belief, her sole adherent.

  I located the remaining members of her party. I traveled to Athens, to Naples, to Vilnius, to Cambridge, to Copenhagen. I sat down with them, and described in great detail the time I spent with her in Rome: how we walked and talked of her plans for the journey below, the cogent questions she asked following my lecture, the delicacy of her small ears, the odd accent in her voice, the structural schemata she carried with her and spread out across my breakfast table. I shared with them my consternation when she vanished—that I’d thought there were months yet to go before her descent, that we would have time.

  I asked if they had clues to her coordinates. Where and how I could find her.

  And each by each, they bent their heads to examine the date on my tattered flyer for the Bernoulli lecture, and they pronounced—apologetically yet with certainty—that she was already far inside the nautilus at that time.

  It is impossible that she attended your lecture, they said. The years are all wrong. It must have been some other woman. You are mistaken. It is simply not possible.

  That was their attempt at kindness, because what they wanted to say was far worse: that I am not grounded in reality.

  That I am mad, or sick, or deluded.

  The calculations are all wrong. The coffees, and the conversations, and the dreams of dental floss and lovemaking are equally chronologically impossible. I was simply lost in Rome. And I was alone.

  Above, there is a fireman who made me a pack with sturdy shoes and a blanket. He was trained in rescue missions. He was the one to lace up and buckle my shoes, because he believed I was unlikely to do it—like so much else—in the calm, rational way that would ensure their safe and proper functioni
ng.

  The fireman said my danger would come in suffocation, in crushing, in collapse.

  Like me, the fireman spends his surface time in grief and confusion.

  The fireman had knots of dark curls, and muscles for lips that talked to me of resolve and fortitude and calm in the face of certain defeat. His forehead displayed the disrupted fascia of his soul, which knotted up each time someone was lost, burned—at times charred only in sections, so that a finger remained pristine, moist.

  His is a battle with water, more than heat: he said my battle was more difficult.

  The fireman said that many who are never rescued long to be. He said that many who are saved had been hoping not to live.

  That sometimes it is the rescuer who winds up needing to be saved.

  These homilies did not speak to me. I told him nothing of my time with her. What she provoked within the most distant reaches of my being he could no more accurately hear than see.

  I told him only that she had gone below, and I must follow.

  I first entered the tunnel of the nautilus in an early autumn so subtle it seemed like summer, and it became the cusp of winter while I was down below.