Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  “About what?”

  He spoke quietly, as though he were trying not to be overheard. “I like you, and I don’t presume to know how you feel about me or what you want, but I need to be careful…” He trailed off, then restarted. “Like one minute you’re texting me that you miss me, and the next you’re having this thing with Alexei Young. It feels a little dramatic.”

  “For what it’s worth,” I said, “there’s history there.” He was silent, and I went on, “I didn’t know he was coming to Vegas. I thought it was over. It had been over for a long time.”

  When he spoke again, his tone was softer. “You don’t owe me an explanation, but, on the other hand, I think knowing that does make me feel a little better.”

  “Okay. Good.”

  “What’s going on with that? With you and him?”

  “Nothing. It’s over again.”

  “Because of him or you?”

  I wanted to lie, but I said, “Him.”

  “That’s honest, at least.”

  “Will you come over? Just to hang out?”

  He hesitated. He said, “I can’t. Leanne’s here.”

  “Oh, well then, I won’t take up any more of your time.”

  He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “She and I are friends.”

  Now I hesitated, then plunged. “How come nothing happened the night I stayed over?”

  Another big gap of silence. “I’m trying this thing,” he said, “where I have to know the women I sleep with.”

  “We’d talked all day.”

  “It was still just a day.”

  I couldn’t decide if he was being ridiculous or if I was. “Are you single?”

  Silence again, then: “Yes.” I heard her voice in the background. “But I should go.”

  “Just one more thing,” I said, not wanting him to hang up. It scared me how irrelevant Redwood had seemed when Alexei was around and how essential he seemed now that no one was around. “I was thinking. Adelaide Scott said it’s good to know what you don’t want, and I don’t want to be a wrecking ball anymore. I want to hang out with someone I actually like.”

  “Okay,” he said, quietly. “Well. We’ll talk. But I really do have to go.”

  After we hung up, I thought about texting Travis Day, asking him to come over, but I didn’t. That was something at least. Where was my medal? My prize for impulse control? And the night didn’t scare me anymore. It was just wind, just leaves brushing together. My house wasn’t watching me. Nothing was watching me. I was a dumbass sitting by a swimming pool in the dark, feeling unloved and sorry for myself but also, suddenly and pleasantly, invisible.

  The War

  Alaska

  February–May 1943

  Six weeks later

  In the letter he received with his orders, Jamie had been informed his task was to express if you can, realistically or symbolically, the essence or spirit of war. What the essence or spirit of war was, the letter did not disclose.

  He was allowed to state a preference for where he went, and he requested Alaska, not because he thought it the most likely location for the essence of war but because he was curious to see the place that had held Marian’s attention. And he thought he might as well work inward from the war’s edges.

  On the naval transport from San Francisco to Kodiak, Jamie sketched soldiers playing cards or sunbathing on deck. He painted them stacked in their bunks, their skin nicotine yellow in the sickly glow of the hanging light fixtures that swung sickeningly with the roll of the ocean. The ship, before, had transported cattle, and Jamie thought its new purpose was not so different, still involved livestock.

  He stood watch like everyone else, just as in basic training he’d marched and drilled and shot and jogged like everyone else, had sailed around San Diego harbor in a whaleboat and slept in a hammock. At night, some of the boots had cried but tried to muffle the sound, others ground their teeth so loudly it echoed.

  For a week, he saw only water. Despite the spreading V of the wake, despite the shifting colors of the sky and the low passage of the winter sun, the ship seemed to be just churning in place, always at the center of the same flat disk of empty sea. The rest of the world seemed irrelevant. His father’s life had been spent at the center of such disks. Over time, what did that do to a person?

  He tried to paint the roar and blast of the engine room, the green-white crust of sea spray that froze to the railings, the band of pale sky at the horizon, the prow chopping down on the whitecapped swells, sending up walls of spray. Titanium white. Davy’s gray. Indigo. Blue black. Some guys heckled him about his sketching and painting; some seemed worried about him. They asked if he knew how to shoot his rifle. He only said yes and no more. He’d been one of the best shots in boot camp, payoff from all the tin cans he’d blasted to smithereens as a child.

  In Kodiak, he was told to report to a captain. He showed his orders, explained he was the combat artist.

  “Christ, what next?” said the captain. “All right, what do you need?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Jamie. “I’m supposed to go around painting what I see.” He didn’t want to explain how, really, the point was to interpret what he saw. The captain didn’t strike him as someone who would relish being interpreted.

  “Sounds great. They’ll surrender in no time now you’re here. Carry on.”

  Jamie sent off the paintings he’d made on the voyage and began new ones, working with stiff fingers and numb toes through the short, cold days. The inner parts of Kodiak’s harbor were frozen in a flat pane (titanium white) that ended in a crisp edge against the open water (Mars black). Slabs of ice, padded on top with new snow, broke off and floated away. Sometimes the glossy black fins of orcas sliced up, rolled down through the water’s surface like the turning cogs of submerged wheels. Bears came to forage through the garbage. Sea lions (Van Dyke brown, a little Venetian red) lay in heaps on the docks and rocks, roaring and biting. The females were smaller and tawnier than the males, bullied and put-upon, with tragic black eyes.

  Jamie painted the mud and snow, the barracks and hangars and storage buildings, the jeeps and lumber piles. He painted a trawler tied up next to a submarine, a destroyer plastered with snow along its broadside after a blizzard, two P-38 Lightnings silhouetted against a snowy peak. The snow was white; sometimes the sky was white, sometimes the sea, too. He would need more white paint, more gray and blue and ocher, more Naples yellow for the tender winter light. He hadn’t used watercolors much since his boyhood, but he returned to them, leaving patches of the paper dry and bare for snow, adding faint streaks and blotches of gray to suggest the dimensions of the mountains.

  If he was idle, he felt guilty and conspicuous, though of course he was much more conspicuous when he was working: an eccentric figure at an easel, some en plein air fanatic obliviously scraping away with his brushes in the middle of a war. This was what the navy wanted him to do, he reminded himself. We believe we are giving you the opportunity to bring back a record of great value to your country, the letter had said. Had the letter been sincere? Sometimes he felt almost mocked by it.

  He ate meat because it seemed impossible not to. He drank but not too much.

  Before he learned to lash down his boards and canvases, more than one had been lifted off his easel by the wind, sent cartwheeling through the mud to lodge against the wheels of some machine or smash into the side of a building, leaving a smear of color.

  The barracks’ interiors were collaged with women, barrel-vaulted Quonset huts densely papered with smiling movie stars and nameless models the way some cathedral ceilings were crowded with angels and apostles. The women from home, the real women, were kept in pockets or pinned above bunks and washstands like patron saints. Men were always showing their sweethearts and wives to Jamie. Proudly, anxiously. They worried their girls wouldn’t wai
t, not that they themselves usually turned down the chance to stray, if it arose. You just want someone to touch you, the guys said. There was no point in feeling guilty.

  In the nurses’ quarters were photos of men in uniform. They worried those men would die, but also that they would stray.

  “Is someone waiting for you at home?” This was a nurse, Diane, who showed Jamie a photo of her parents and another of her sister in a WAAC uniform.

  “No,” he admitted. “No one at all.”

  On their first outing, he kissed her in the lee of a boulder. After their second, a dance in the Officers’ Club, in the cab of a bulldozer left unlocked, he put his hand down her woolen trousers. She lifted her hips and he tugged off her pants, maneuvered around the bulldozer’s various levers and knobs until he could wedge himself between her knees. She gave him a little nod, and he pushed into her. He hadn’t been with anyone in months, didn’t last long, pulled out and came into his handkerchief. Then followed an awkward parting, a heavy melancholy filled with thoughts of Sarah.

  The captain had decided he liked Jamie’s paintings. He asked gruffly if Jamie would paint one of the harbor for him personally. When Jamie delivered it, the captain asked where he wanted to go next. To the action, Jamie said, though that word made him queasy: chipper, dishonest shorthand for violent death. The captain said he would see what he could do.

  Jamie was put on the passenger manifest of a shovel-faced PBY Catalina seaplane, bound for Dutch Harbor. Five days in a row they tried to go, but the weather was terrible. Three days, they didn’t even take off. The other two, they turned back. He stopped bothering to say goodbye to Diane. On the sixth day, finally on their way, over the ocean with only gray cloud in the windows, the plane jolted and bounced with awful swoops and groans, and Jamie held his paint box against his chest, closed his eyes. Almost daily, planes and crews vanished into the Bering Sea, downed by weather more often than enemy fire. He wished Marian were flying the plane.

  In Dutch Harbor, bombed by the Japanese six months earlier but mostly repaired, he made more paintings, sent them off. Planes were smudges in the sky, one or two small brushstrokes each. He wasn’t there long, was only waiting to go west again, following the sweep of the perforated Aleutian arm toward Attu and Kiska, tiny, muddy, storm-scoured islands far out in the chain that the Japanese had invaded in June and needed routing from.

  He was lucky with his flight to Adak. Arriving at all was lucky, and at times the clouds had even broken open, revealing the islands below: steep, snowcapped, smoke-plumed volcanic cones sloping down into collars of sheer cliffs fringed by waves.

  He stayed in a Quonset hut with a cohort of army journalist types. adak press club said a sign on their door.

  The Seabees had filled in a lagoon with bulldozed volcanic ash and hammered down perforated steel planking to make a runway. After a storm, planes returning from bombing runs would land in standing water, their propellers driving up dense clouds of mist as they hurtled down the runway in angry white puffs, only their noses and wing edges visible.

  The Japanese flew over sometimes, strafing and bombing, usually not doing much damage. The tundra swallowed their bullets and bombs. “We do better than that, don’t we?” Jamie said to an army photographer after an attack.

  The man gazed after the departing planes. “Yeah, their mud is probably much more shot up than ours.”

  Jamie was loitering outside the hospital huts when a man, wounded by a bomb, was unloaded from a jeep, part of his jaw missing, his uniform soaked with blood. The photographer came running, ducking behind his camera. The man held up a sticky red hand, warding him off. Jamie sketched the man from memory later but felt dirty about it. There had been a helpless intimacy to the destroyed body, something embarrassing about the obviousness that he would die. He’d wanted privacy.

  Jamie enclosed a sketch of a row of P-40s in a letter to Marian, their cowlings painted to look like the mouths of roaring tigers.

  I wish I could talk to you about Alaska, though I don’t know if you ever had reason to come this far out into the islands since there was only fog and mud and muskeg out here before. Now there’s a harbor and a runway. A tent city. There were some people on Attu and Kiska, missionaries I think, and people at a weather station, but no one seems to know what happened to them.

  He wanted to tell her about everything the war had brought to Adak’s empty shores. Endless ships disgorged all the ingredients of civilization, everything needed to feed and house and entertain ten thousand men. Huts and hangars but also cold-storage buildings and mess halls and darkrooms and torpedo shops, movie theaters and gymnasiums and surgical suites. A menagerie of machines arrived along with everything required to tend them, mountains of ammunition and ordnance, of tools and spare parts. The essence of war sometimes seemed to be the accumulation and transportation of stuff, of things. He wanted to list these things for Marian, to make her marvel at their number and variety and mundaneness (consider the journey of a single can opener), but the list could never be long enough to make his point. Maybe that was where the scale of the war lay, in the bits and pieces.

  He made a watercolor of ships in the harbor and sent it to Sarah without a note.

  In April, bombardment against the Japanese increased; invasion seemed imminent. The assumption was Kiska would be first because it was closer. Out by the runway, Jamie ran into the executive officer and told him he’d like to go along when the invasion happened. “You want to paint the invasion?” the man repeated, puzzled.

  “I’m supposed to paint more than supply lines and air support.”

  “The landing force is coming from somewhere else. They won’t stop here, so there’s no way to get you in with them. It’ll be a quick operation.”

  “Maybe I could go with one of the bombers.”

  Fog was advancing over the water, and the XO jabbed a thumb at it. “You wouldn’t see much, thanks to this shit. Are you sure you don’t want to go back to Kodiak? Get on your way somewhere else?”

  Jamie watched the fog drift and creep toward the shore. It was a neutral party to the war but powerful. It shrouded and delayed, swallowed planes. “Maybe,” he said. “Soon.”

  On May 11, word came: The invasion had begun. Attu was the target, not Kiska. They thought it would take three days. Probably only five hundred Japanese soldiers were on the island.

  Days passed. The officers were grim-faced. There were more Japanese soldiers on the island than they’d thought. Multiples more. Conditions were bad, the going slow.

  After a week, Jamie went up with a bomber crew, but the XO was right. He didn’t see anything. They dropped bombs into the gray nothing just to conserve fuel. “Stupid motherfuckers,” the navigator said, and Jamie didn’t know who he meant, the Japanese or their own commanders or the bombs themselves. The thought struck him that, up in the air, they were no different from planes that vanished. Only their eventual return to Adak distinguished them. Being aloft meant being lost to everyone but yourself, and he wondered if that appealed to Marian. Or maybe she didn’t notice anymore.

  An armada assembled in Tokyo Bay: carriers, battleships, destroyers, etc., all bound for the Aleutians to drive the Americans back to the mainland. It never sailed. Might have; didn’t.

  After two weeks, word came that the infantry was closing in on the harbor where the Japanese had retreated. The XO passed Jamie where he was sketching near the harbor, then turned back, boots squelching in the mud. “A ship’s stopping in later today before resupplying Attu,” he said. “If you still want to go, I could arrange it. You might make it in time for the last push. How about it?”

  So Jamie was on a ship, and the next morning he was on a landing craft chugging through the layer of clear air between the low fog and silver water, and then he was on a dismal gray beach, cratered from shelling. A sleeping bag and food and extra socks were in his backpack; over one shoulder he
had a small satchel with his pencils and notebook and watercolors, and over the other he carried a rifle and ammunition. Three tractors were waiting on the sand. He helped load them with supplies, then followed on foot with eight other men. They walked for hours. The truck and tractors outdistanced them, but the tracks were easy to follow. Once he tried to sketch, but he was told it wasn’t safe to stop, better keep moving.

  Eventually the rear lines came into sight: a colony of peaked tents pitched amid mud and sphagnum moss on a sloping valley floor, snow-streaked peaks above. Scattered bodies of Japanese soldiers began to appear beside the road, limbs at strange angles, sometimes just a helmet atop a crumpled mass. In the bivouac area, Jamie found a lieutenant in charge of a company of engineers and explained that he was a combat artist (“Something new every day,” said the man) and wished to go to the front. He was told there wasn’t really anywhere to go at the moment. The forward groups were holding their positions. “Make yourself at home,” the lieutenant said, making a sweeping gesture toward the tents. “Sample the many delights of Attu.”

  * * *

  —

  In the evening, not far away, Japanese soldiers drank sake in gulps. They’d been on the tundra for a year and were low on supplies. For a time there was almost only night; now there was almost only day. Always there was fog, the terrible wind. The colonel in charge had decided against surrender. The Americans’ defenses in the valley were light, but, beyond, they had a battery of howitzers on a hillside. If the colonel could seize those, he could turn them back on the Americans. The plan was desperate, almost impossible, but an attempt would be an honorable course.

  A thousand men were left. They jumped up and down, screaming and stamping the soil. Pistols were pressed into the hands of the wounded, who, as instructed, shot themselves in the head. Those who couldn’t were dispatched with injections of morphine or, when patience ran out, grenades. They drank more, everything they could find.