Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  I’d asked the shrink if the glowing tiger was supposed to be scary, and he’d said that the self could, at times, feel dangerous. I said, “So I’m the tiger.”

  He said, “Yes.” Then he said, “And no.”

  * * *

  —

  In the end I said yes to Marian because yes is easier than no. Yes is an accelerant, a rush. You only live once. I called up Hugo myself, and he said this was wonderful news, he was thrilled, and he would get in touch pronto about scheduling the audition, and I tried to pretend I hadn’t assumed I wouldn’t have to audition.

  Before my callback for Katie McGee, I’d stayed in character for days, like I was Daniel Day-Lewis in a training bra, as though Katie McGee were really a character and not just a marketable alloy of precocity and sass. Mitch chaperoned me to the studio himself, marking the gravity of the occasion. No one had yet told me to manifest anything back then, but I manifested the living fuck out of Katie McGee. I walked into that room radiating more Katie McGee–ness than I ever did again for the run of the show. I was pure, unadulterated spunky charm, and when I saw the studio people light up and exchange glances while I said my lines, I felt a white-hot pleasure in my core like the fusion at the center of the sun, radiating outward, warming the faces of the adults behind their table. For the first time in my life, I felt a sense of perfect belonging, of doing something just right, of certainty that I would get what I wanted.

  I’d given up hoping ever to feel that way again, but once I realized getting to be Marian wasn’t a given, I suddenly wanted to be her a thousand times more badly than I had. I submerged myself in her. I strode around my house the way I imagined she would. I barely glanced in the mirror because I imagined she disdained vanity. I slouched and sprawled in chairs. I started speaking deliberately and not like a SoCal bubblehead, which had the unintended consequence of making Augustina worry I was mad at her. I tried to do everything the way I thought Marian would, to be confident and self-contained. I googled my brains out, looked at every photo of her I could find and watched the only stray bit of film that seemed to exist: Marian and Eddie Bloom, the navigator, climb out of the plane after a test flight in New Zealand; he grins; she puts her hands in her pockets; they look at each other; she looks at the plane. There’s a close-up of her, her eyes sliding away from the camera, and a close-up of him, looking sturdy and pleasant. In Carol Feiffer’s novel, Eddie is in unrequited love with Marian, while she’s hung up on her childhood friend, Caleb, and I scrutinized the clip for fraughtness between them. Her smile was more reluctant than his, but when they glanced at each other, I could identify only the basic presence of inscrutable silent communication, not its nature. They were saying something to each other, but it was encrypted, accessible only to them.

  There was one other thing. Hugo had suggested I take a flying lesson (gingerly, given my family history), and I said no and then okay and then no again. Then maybe. He said I could think about it, but just in case, he would have one set up and get the instructor to sign an NDA. That way the option was there. I tried to think about the lesson the way Marian would, to inhabit a person who actually wanted to fly a plane. I wasn’t afraid of flying itself, of being aloft. I didn’t get nervous on commercial flights. I didn’t connect that experience, the white noise of it, with my parents plunging into a vast and freezing lake. I didn’t need to recite statistics in my mind or engage in soothing meditations or remind myself of the trustworthy physics of the whole enterprise. But when I imagined flying a plane myself, I could only think of falling.

  Hugo’s people had arranged the lesson for very early morning to avoid the press and humans in general, and in the dark predawn, pacing my kitchen, dressed and ready to go, I clutched my phone, desperate to cancel yet never dialing. I’d barely slept. Then M.G. was bringing the car around, headlights on, and I got in and sat paralyzed inside the runaway forward momentum of a yes I’d never quite uttered.

  The instructor pilot had thick salt-and-pepper hair the texture of a badger’s and a fat gold wedding band and aviator sunglasses in his front shirt pocket for when the sun came up. He didn’t seem flustered by me. He walked around the plane, explaining what all the different parts did. The Cessna was chunky and earnest-looking, cream-colored with two brown stripes and a single propeller. The morning was overcast. The long strips of grass between the little airport’s runways were gray with dew.

  “So what happens on an introductory flight like this,” the pilot said, “is we’ll take off and get up over the marine layer and fly around a bit, and I’ll explain what I’m doing, and then you can have a turn at the controls. Sound good?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I must not have sounded convincing because he said, “You nervous?”

  “A little.” I could tell he hadn’t bothered to google me, didn’t know about my parents. He thought my misgivings could be cajoled away.

  “Don’t be. I do this every day. I’ll talk you through every step, and you don’t have to do anything you don’t feel comfortable with. Deal?”

  Ordinarily I would have found his teacher-coach vibe irritating, but now it reassured me. “Deal,” I said, and he beamed, close-lipped.

  The seats in the cockpit were bourbon-colored leather, cracked with use. The doors locked with levers that seemed too flimsy to keep out the sky, and the seat belts were floppy nylon straps that didn’t retract. We put on green plastic headsets, the cups bulbous like flies’ eyes, and the pilot’s voice came pinched and tinny through them over the noise of the engine as it warmed up. He was telling me about the instruments, pointing at the dashboard, but I wasn’t really listening because I had no plans to ever become a pilot. What caught my attention was the slight sideways jostle of the plane caused by the turning propeller. I knew the plane didn’t have a mind or feelings, wasn’t capable of eagerness, but it was an eager, ready feeling, like a racehorse in a starting gate or a boxer just before the bell, the movement of something constrained that knew it was about to be free.

  The pilot taxied out and throttled forward, peeled us up off the runway into pulsing gray cloud. The propeller droned; my armpits prickled. I held perfectly still, as though the plane were a frightened animal I didn’t want to startle. The pilot was talking, but I couldn’t focus on his words. When we surfaced into the sky, pulling the sun up with a flash, he said, “There she is!”

  A mat of plush gray lay over the ocean and the coast. Mountaintops poked up like islands. “That’s Catalina,” the pilot said, pointing. So some were actually islands.

  He made the plane go slowly up and down, turned it to the right and then to the left, explaining about balanced turns, about how you didn’t just steer with your hands but also controlled the rudder with your feet. Eventually he asked if I wanted to try. “Put your hands on the yoke,” he said. “Don’t turn, just try to fly straight and level.”

  I put my hands on the yoke. I felt overwhelmed by precariousness.

  “Good,” said the pilot. “Now, Hadley, if you want, you can gently pull back, and the plane will go up.”

  At first I pulled so tentatively I wasn’t pulling at all, and nothing happened. I pulled harder. The windshield angled incrementally toward the sky, and I felt the earth falling away behind me, sucking me down.

  I snatched my hands away. “I don’t want to do it,” I said.

  “Okay,” the pilot said, calmly taking over, clearly no stranger to freak-outs. “Okay, but you did just fine. You asked the plane to go up, and it went up.”

  I said, “I don’t like the feeling.”

  He shook his head. “Best feeling in the world,” he said.

  Ten

  When I went in to audition, Sir Hugo was there, sitting at a table with Ted Lazarus, the boss of Sun God Entertainment whose wife got banged by Gavin du Pré, and Bart Olofsson, the director, and a casting director who shall remain nameless but is much
-feared and looks like someone’s kooky aunt with her pink Keds and spiky red hair. “How are you, Hadley?” she said, and I could tell from her grave intonation she was asking about Archangel, about Oliver.

  “Great,” I said. “Really excited to read for you guys.”

  An assistant tended a camera on a tripod. Off to the side in overflow seating (a wheeled desk chair) was an enthused-looking hipster guy with a dark beard, retro gold-framed glasses, and hair just long enough to tuck behind his ears. “This is Redwood Feiffer,” Hugo said. “I mentioned he will be producing as well.”

  “Fantastic to meet you,” Redwood said, jumping up to shake my hand. “I’m a massive fan.”

  At some point, Sir Hugo had set about wooing Siobhan, and since wooing is one of his strong suits, she’d come around. The information that a rich young dupe was involved in the project had helped her warm up to the whole thing. “These obscure historical footnotes do make for good content,” she’d conceded to me. “And the Day brothers are having a moment.” It could be an interesting angle for publicity, she’d said, this whole family affair, Redwood and his novelist mother and publisher grandmother. Just like Sir Hugo had, she’d called them Feiffer Feiffers. “And your own history—” She cut herself off.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “The lost parents. It’s a helluva coincidence. I don’t mean to sound callous.”

  “It’s not really a coincidence,” I said. “It’s a reason.”

  “A reason?”

  “For why I should do this. Hugo says it’s destiny.”

  “He would say that,” Siobhan said.

  After my utter failure to fly a plane, I’d only become more determined to be Marian. I needed the relief of being someone who wasn’t afraid. It helped that she wasn’t completely alien, that we were both products of vanishment and orphanhood and negligence and airplanes and uncles. She was like me but wasn’t. She was uncanny, unknowable except for a few constellations I recognized from my own sky.

  I responded to Redwood Feiffer with the kind of smile you give the money guy. Not explicitly flirtatious but on the road to it. “Yeah?” I asked him. “Big into Archangel?”

  “One hundred percent.” I assumed he was kidding, but he leaned forward in his swivel chair, said earnestly, “Those movies are beautifully made and really romantic. Also, I’m always fascinated by things that turn into phenomenons. Like, why, you know? What is it that strikes a chord in so many people? When it happens, it seems so intuitive in retrospect, like you can clearly see the void that was filled, but the real trick is identifying the void when it’s still a void.”

  “The billion-dollar void,” Hugo said. “Let’s hope there’s a vanished-lady-pilot void.”

  “Okay,” said Ted Lazarus, “should we get started?”

  When you’re a movie star, you’re basically a good-looking dingbat running around with headshots, but people don’t see the dingbat. They see the sum of the characters you’ve played: someone who’s time-traveled, who’s saved civilization, who’s been chosen by a beautiful, powerful man as the object of his undying devotion, who’s been rescued from terrorists by her father, Russell Crowe. You take on weight and consequence. It’s like the dance of a thousand veils except with every role you’re putting on another veil, concealing yourself. Still, the effect is more seductive than a striptease.

  “Ready when you are,” Hugo said. He was going to read the other parts.

  “Good to go,” I said.

  I looked at the floor, the blue-gray institutional carpet, and when I looked up, the conference room seemed to become less tangible, blurred as though frames of it were alternating with frames of another life. Manifest, manifest. The memory of the Cessna flickered and went out. I didn’t look at the people at the table, but I felt my glow reflecting off their faces. I was hunkered down in a tent in Antarctica while a blizzard raged, and Hugo was Eddie Bloom, and we were talking about what would happen when we got home, describing what we would eat. I told him I loved him even though I didn’t really, not the way he loved me. It didn’t matter, though, because neither of us thought we’d survive.

  “No one will ever find us,” he said.

  “We’re not just going to disappear,” I told him. I knew that was a lie, even if I didn’t want it to be.

  Millionaire’s Row

  Seattle

  May 1931

  Two months before Marian flew Barclay over Glacier National Park

  Inside a tunnel, Jamie clung to the side of a boxcar, hot darkness pressing in, clanking and sulfurous. The glow of the headlight seemed far away, pulling the train along behind like a comet’s tail. When you think the train is slowing, the tramps in Spokane had told him, reach down with your foot and start tapping the cinders to gauge the speed. Best to make your leap before you get to Union Station. The bulls there aren’t pleasant. You’ll end up in jail or beaten or both.

  Back in Idaho, Jamie had been awakened in a rail yard by a bull’s nightstick across his shins, had little interest in another encounter.

  He’d heard it was possible to suffocate in the long tunnels, but the tramps thought he’d be all right.

  The clacking and huffing slowed. He lowered himself until his toe clattered through the cinders. Too fast still. A screeching he thought must be the brakes, and he tried again. This time the ground seemed to grab at his foot, wrenching loose his grip. He fell, landed hard, and rolled away. At least his knapsack cushioned him a little.

  Walk along the tunnel, the tramps had said. You’ll find a way out eventually.

  One hand on the wall, he limped and stumbled through the darkness until his fingers found a steel door. Behind it, a ladder. After a hatch and another tunnel, he emerged into cool air and, under a gray sky, the biggest city he’d ever seen. Grand buildings wore corbels and pilasters like medals on their puffed-out chests, cornices like epaulets. The wide streets teemed with cars and trolleys. Signs clamored about lunchrooms, tailors, mattresses, Coca-Cola, cigars, canned crab, everything else anyone could sell. A passing man in a suit pointed to his own temple and said, “You’re bleeding, you know.”

  Jamie spat on his handkerchief and dabbed at his scalp and cheek as he walked. The already dingy cotton came away smeared with soot and blood.

  Ranks of apartments and offices and houses and churches marched up the hills, but he turned down toward the waterfront. When he’d decided to leave Missoula for the summer, the Pacific had drawn him irresistibly, and finally here it was, oily gray, hectored by gulls. Ships and boats crowded the piers. On a semblance of a beach, crunchy with broken shells and ripe with rotting seaweed, he wet the handkerchief and wiped at his face, wincing at the sting of salt. He’d wanted no part of what was happening with Marian and Barclay Macqueen, and he’d gotten so tired of worrying about Wallace, so fed up with his way of trying to conceal his drunkenness by speaking and moving with a careful, childish hauteur.

  Jamie couldn’t even escape into his friendship with Caleb. Marian had changed that, too. Neither she nor Caleb had ever made any allusion to their trysts, but Jamie knew they’d happened, knew they’d stopped. In some ways, he had always been the least necessary vertex of their triangle, but, in at least one way, he’d been essential: Marian and Caleb needed a buffer to convince themselves they weren’t a pair. Not that he thought they were—or should be—a proper couple. No. But the wildness that had rooted in all of them as children had grown thickety and riotous between Marian and Caleb, as barbed as blackberry shrubs, hopelessly entangling. They were a pair, as some things naturally and undeniably were, and once a pair was established, everything outside it (himself, for example) became inevitably and inherently extraneous. He and Marian were a pair, too, of course, but the bond of their twinness was so fundamental it could almost be disregarded. Or at least Marian seemed to think so.

  Turning uphill (everywhere seemed to be uphill), he walked for hou
rs, stopping men in work clothes to ask if they knew of any boardinghouses, knocking at doors until he found somewhere cheap enough that would have him, dried blood and all.

  “Do you know where I could find work?” he asked the proprietress after she’d shown him his closet-like room, its small window almost opaque with dirt.

  “Not much work for the finding.”

  This turned out to be unequivocally true. There were simply too many people looking for work, droves of grim men with grim stories about lost homes and farms, usually with families to support. He’d had an idea he could get hired at the docks or on the fishing boats that was underlaid with the queasy, barely acknowledged hope he might turn up a clue about his father, might even, by some miracle, stumble upon him. But although he was tall and strong for his age, he was not as tall and strong as most men haunting the waterfront and not as desperate, certainly not aggressive enough to push to the front of the crowd when a boss came looking for hands.

  He looked into the faces of men coming off ships, waiting for some burst of recognition. (Had the ocean’s gravity really been what pulled him west? Or had it been the tidal pull of his father?) He bought a coffee in a dockside café and asked tentatively if anyone knew Addison Graves. No one did, though one meat-faced man wondered aloud why he knew the name, then snapped his fingers and said, “Captain Cowardice!”

  After a few days Jamie gave up the docks. His fantasy of finding his father seemed foolish once he’d absorbed the scale of the city, the multitude of ships. There was no reason to assume he would recognize Addison or that Addison was even alive. And if he was, why shouldn’t he be living in Tahiti or Cape Town? Or even Tacoma, which was only thirty miles away but might as well be the moon?