Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  Eddie said, “I’d say we’ve earned the right to do whatever we want from here on out.”

  “That would be nice,” Leo said, and dread had settled in Eddie.

  They’d been airlifted to a transit camp outside Le Havre. Leo had turned distant, avoided Eddie. One day he just disappeared, presumably on a ship home. Soon enough Eddie got sent back, too.

  How does it feel to be free, men?

  A year later, when he was living in New York, Eddie had received a note in the mail. Leo was marrying his high-school sweetheart and going to work for her father. He was sorry he hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye.

  “Why would you come here?” Leo had said when they’d turned out of Halliday Cadillac in the blue coupe.

  “I’m just passing through. I got a job in Florida with the airlines.”

  “I mean, what do you want? Turn left up here.”

  “I wish you would have told me this was what you were planning. The whole boring charade.”

  “You have a wife.”

  “Actually, she died. In a plane crash. I didn’t find out until I came home. And you know that was different.”

  Leo touched his shoulder, just for a second. “I’m sorry. Eddie, I’m so sorry.”

  “We don’t have to get into it.”

  “Pull over here. No one comes this way.”

  They were on a narrow road lined with forest. Eddie, too tall for the little car, swiveled as best he could to look at Leo in his unfashionable suit, his tie clip and wedding ring and short, almost military haircut. “Does your wife know?”

  Leo looked out the window into the trees. “She’s a good soldier. We have two little girls.” He shifted, pulling his wallet from his back pocket and extracting a snapshot: two toddlers in dresses and sandals.

  “They’re beautiful,” Eddie said, handing back the photo.

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess I just wanted to see you again.” Eddie slid his hand along the seat, stopped short of touching Leo. “You were right. Things haven’t changed. Not in the way I’d hoped. Everyone’s so desperate to pretend we weren’t all just murdering each other five minutes ago that there’s no room for anything but the picket fence and baby carriage. We’re all going to grit our teeth and be happy.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You’re not surprised. I envy that. I wish I’d never hoped.”

  Leo put his hand on top of Eddie’s. “Who would have thought I’d have the most fun of my life in a German prison camp?”

  “You couldn’t get away, could you? Just for a couple of days?”

  Leo hesitated. Just when he seemed about to answer, a car passed, and he jerked his hand away. He said, “You aren’t really looking to buy a car, are you?”

  * * *

  —

  The coral runway on Aitutaki was built during the war and is plenty long and has a radio beacon. “Too easy,” Eddie says when they’ve landed. “Maybe this won’t be such an adventure.”

  “It won’t be like this the whole way,” Marian says.

  “No,” he agrees.

  They have rooms at a thatched and stilted little inn on the lagoon where they’d stayed during their shake-out flight. “Going out tonight?” the innkeeper asks them. “New Year’s Eve? There’s a pub down the road.” He’d been a Seabee in the navy, had helped build the runway and come back after the war. It’s paradise, he’d explained, incredulous anyone would ask why.

  Eddie says no to the pub.

  At sunset, he swims in the lagoon. The surface is glassy flat, mirroring the lurid pink-and-purple sky, the first few stars. He can see the distant white flutter of surf breaking on the reef and hear, muffled and delayed, the ocean roaring to be let in. The lagoon’s sandy floor is pronged with dead coral and so densely populated with black sea cucumbers it is nearly impossible to take a step without feeling one squish underfoot.

  He’d sold the blue coupe to some slick California lawyer who’s now unwittingly zipping around Long Beach in a totem of lost love.

  He stands waist-deep and closes his eyes. He’d had some rum before his swim. He thinks he can feel the planet turning. The immensity of the ocean troubles him. This is something he can’t tell Marian. In the war, his worst fear, worse than burning, worse than a parachute failing, was drowning.

  He tries to think what the next land would be in the direction he’s facing, more or less due east. Maybe some tiny island, more likely South America, thousands of miles away.

  An aerial navigator, the Army Air Corps manual had said, directs an aircraft from place to place over the surface of the earth, an art called aerial navigation. He’d liked the word art, how it had been underlined. He’d liked the idea of himself directing the aircraft. Transplanted sullenly to a navigation classroom after he’d washed out of pilot training, he’d heard more words he liked. Celestial observation. Dead reckoning. Drift. Vector. Point of recognition.

  Symbols had peppered the maps. Cities. Airfields. Railroads and abandoned railroads. Lakes and dry lakes. Ovals for racetracks and little oil derricks for oil derricks. Red stars for flashing beacons. Tidy reductions, pleasantly simple. Until he’d been shot down, he’d believed in his art, in a true relationship between three-dimensional space and printed maps, in the possibility of accurately saying I am here. But, after the war, no matter how far he traveled, he felt stuck, marooned, immobile. There must be another trajectory he hasn’t yet found, more equations besides the ones he knows, another, more elusive dimension underlying the mappable world.

  Inevitably we will omit almost everything. In flying the length of Africa, for instance, we will only cover one track as wide as our wings, glimpse only one set of horizons. Arabia and India and China will pass unseen to the east and the great stretched-out Soviet beast with its European snout and Asian tail. We will see nothing of South America, nothing of Australia or Greenland or Burma or Mongolia, nothing of Mexico or Indonesia. Mostly we will see water, liquid and frozen, because that is most of what there is.

  —marian graves

  Oahu, Hawaii

  21°19ʹ N, 157°55ʹ W

  January 3, 1950

  4,141 nautical miles flown

  Caleb has grown his hair long again but wears it in a ponytail at his nape now rather than a braid, loose strands flying around his face as he steers his truck up the windward coast, singing to himself. Marian can’t catch the words. Out her window, jumbled black lava rock rambles into the sea, scraping the waves to white shreds. She sticks out her hand and the wind arches up under it like a cat’s back. On Caleb’s side: a fluted wall of rock, the island’s steep green mountain spine.

  Mauka. Toward the mountain. Makai. Toward the sea. Hawaiian words Caleb has taught her.

  She and Eddie had thought they might fly the whole way from Aitutaki to Hawaii but decided instead to stop halfway at Christmas Island in the Line Islands, a huge flat T-bone of an atoll, nearly naked except for coconut palms, a few villages, an airstrip from the war. Land crabs skittered everywhere. They had spent the night, left before dawn. She’s grateful Oahu has heft and height, a lush and shaggy green pelt.

  Caleb is taking her to see the ranch where he works as a cowboy, a paniolo. When he’d first come, he’d worked on a taro plantation, but he prefers this. In his house she’d noticed a photo of him sitting on a horse, a garland of pink flowers wrapped around his hat.

  He stops at a five-bar gate, and she gets out and opens it, closes it again behind the truck. When she’s climbed back in, he says, “Eddie seems all right.”

  Eddie had claimed he wanted a nap, stayed behind at Caleb’s place, a small blue house on stilts, almost at the water’s edge. Marian thinks he is considerately giving them space but also supposes he’s not anxious to spend time with the man Marian had chosen over Ruth.

  Marian says, “I’d be lost without him.” She sm
iles, pleased with herself.

  “Navigator jokes. Is that what we’ve come to?” A man on a horse crosses the dirt road ahead of them, lifts a hand. His vaquero saddle is small and flat, cushioned by a wool blanket. “That guy was on Utah beach,” Caleb tells Marian. “You can see his hat sits funny because his ear got shot off.” All the other paniolos are native Hawaiian, he says, but they tolerate him because he’s good with horses and only half white and because word of his war has gotten around.

  The ranch house, low and long and built from blocks of coral and roofed with red tiles, sits beneath the mountains on an undulating lawn of vibrant, electric green. The branches of immense monkeypod trees hover in perfect domes.

  Caleb drives past, into a narrow valley and through a maze of paddocks, stops at a barn.

  * * *

  —

  Caleb puts rope bridles on the horses but no saddles. He takes off his boots before he mounts and makes Marian do the same. She understands why when, after they ride back the way they’d come, makai, and cross the road onto a beach, he rides straight into the sea. The roan shoulders of her short, willful mare move in front of Marian’s knees. Her bare feet swing below the animal’s belly as she breaks into a rushed, jolting jog, anxious not to be left behind, whinnying at Caleb’s horse, chasing after it into the water. Marian hasn’t been on a horse since she left Barclay. She bounces off-balance, rights herself. The mare wades through the low surf, straining against the drag, white spray breaking against her chest. When Marian is submerged to her waist, she feels the animal become buoyant. Her lower body lifts off, and she is stretched out along the horse’s back, reins loose, clutching the coppery mane. The mare’s head is high out of the water, and she snorts softly in rhythm with her churning legs.

  “She’s swimming!” Marian calls out to Caleb, giddy.

  He turns. His same old amusement flashes from under his hat, his certainty that she loves him. “What tipped you off?”

  She can feel the horse’s ribs and muscle and beating heart, familiar since she was a child. She is still that child, still climbing mountains on old, dear, dead Fiddler, alone or with her body pressed against her brother’s, his heart beating, too, his lungs working. Another self entirely is submerged in the cool Pacific Ocean, the water gently but persistently tugging at her, lifting her off the horse, separating her from the animal that is swimming so earnestly, so industriously. Where does the mare want to go? Wherever Caleb’s horse is going. They swim parallel to the shore. Soon Caleb will turn back in.

  Her body marks a junction. Toward the sea. Toward the mountain. Toward the sky. Toward the horse. Toward the man.

  * * *

  —

  Caleb’s bedroom is upstairs under a peaked roof, bare rafters. Outside, the palms toss their long, heavy fronds; the surf susurrates on the reef. The dark world curls around the little blue island house.

  “Do you think I’ve gone soft?” Caleb says.

  Marian has settled horizontally on the bed, up by the pillows, on her side, naked in the breeze that comes through the jalousie windows. His head rests in the crook of her hip. “Anything would seem soft after your war,” she says.

  Three years in the worst of it without a scratch—North Africa, Italy, D-Day, France, Germany. Good luck so miraculous it had taken on the weight and gloom of a curse. New guys would touch him in hopes that whatever spooky voodoo protection he had going on would rub off, then go out and get killed their first day, sometimes right beside him. He’d told her his intact body had started to feel shameful. At least if he’d been shot or blown up he could have stopped, alive or dead. But on and on he went, never even getting trench foot, waiting for some kind of end. He’d grown reckless, but it hadn’t made any difference. The war refused either to swallow him or to spit him out.

  She adds, “I think soft’s all right.”

  “Sometimes I miss the war, and I hate myself for it.”

  “A lot of people miss things about it.”

  “Do you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Without the war, he tells her, he probably would have spent his whole life in Montana, hunting. It never would have occurred to him to leave. But when he came back, he found he didn’t like walking in the mountains anymore. He didn’t like being cold or sleeping outside or shooting things. He’d had enough of all that. He got confused sometimes.

  “One minute I’d be out for elk,” he says, “and the next I’d be hunkered down somewhere, hiding from the Germans, all mixed up about past and present.”

  “Time to go makai.”

  He laughs. “You’re practically a local already. Yeah, I guess it was time. Did I tell you why I came here?”

  “No.”

  “I was drinking a lot, that sort of thing, but I was also reading a lot because I had nothing else to do, and I happened to check a book out of the library that had these drawings of the islands, and all of a sudden I had to see Hawaii. I had to.” His fingers trail along her ankle. “I packed a bag and got on a train, then a ship. That was it.”

  “I envy you,” Marian says. “Finding a place where you can stay put. Being content somewhere.”

  “No, you don’t. If you did, you’d find that place, too. You don’t even let the possibility in.”

  She doesn’t think he’s strictly talking about geography anymore. “Maybe someday,” she says.

  The aurora occupies huge swathes of sky in a blink. One moment an arc of light hangs from horizon to horizon, bleeding up into the stars; the next it is gone. You feel you are receiving messages from an unknown sender, of indecipherable meaning but unquestionable authority.

  —marian graves

  Barrow, Alaska, to Longyearbyen, Svalbard

  71°17ʹ N, 156°46ʹ W to 78°12ʹ N, 15°34ʹ E

  January 31–February 1, 1950

  9,102 nautical miles flown

  They wait in Barrow for four days. When an auspicious forecast comes, they leave in the evening so as to arrive in Svalbard at midday, when the southern sky will glow with blue arctic twilight. The sun won’t actually rise for two more weeks, but at least they won’t have to land in pitch-darkness. This is an advantage to their delayed schedule, to the sixteen days they spent in Hawaii instead of the planned-for two: more light in the north. On the other hand, Marian worries about the consequences of reaching Antarctica so late in the southern summer, assuming they reach the continent at all.

  The Norsel, the ship bringing the Norwegian-British-Swedish Antarctic Expedition (and also the Peregrine’s fuel) to Queen Maud Land in East Antarctica, had suffered a delay, costing the expedition at least two weeks, probably more. A telegram had arrived for Marian at the Honolulu airport. The upshot: No hurry.

  We might as well hunker down here for a bit, she and Eddie had said to each other, feigning more reluctance than they felt. Eddie had found his own lodgings in Honolulu rather than stay at Caleb’s. He’d been the one to mention the waning Arctic night as reason to dally. They’d thought they would probably have to fly all the way from Barrow to the Norwegian mainland, at the outside edge of the Peregrine’s range, as there was no real airfield on Svalbard and few navigation aids, but with good weather and a bit of twilight they’d have a better chance. She’d seized on the idea, had told herself, as she lingered in Caleb’s bed, that she had no choice but to stay.

  * * *

  —

  As the Peregrine lifts off from Barrow, heavy with fuel, reluctant to climb, the edge of the frozen land is indistinguishable from the beginning of the frozen sea. To the north lies darkness, studded with stars. Green auroras ripple like shafts of light through moving water.

  Extreme cold generally discourages overcast, but even so, they are lucky. For much of the flight the sky is not only free from cloud but so transparent there seems to be no air at all. At the pole, the stars hover against the black of the universe. Below, a froze
n ocean is lit by starlight and the thinnest paring of moon, its platinum surface pushed up into broken dunes, shadow rippling in the trenches between. Where the tides have tugged rips in the ice, narrow channels of open water breathe fog as they freeze over. Never has Marian seen a landscape so suffused with hush, so monochromatic and devoid of life.

  That woman marking up her map in Long Beach seems so distant, so silly, unrecognizable as herself, this other woman flying through an expanse of dark clarity. What did that map have to do with this place?

  If they crash, survival will be impossible, but there are other perils, too. So far north, the compass wanders. Lines of longitude pinch together like bars at the top of a birdcage. To make sense of the place, the idea of true north must be banished, the ways in which they have previously oriented themselves against the planet forgotten. The birdcage must be lifted up and away, navigation done by specialized charts under a flattened grid where north is set artificially and lines of longitude wrenched parallel.

  In Kodiak, they’d put skis on the plane. In Fairbanks, they had gotten Eddie a reindeer parka, and when she glances back, she sees his shaggy brown form hunched over his desk as though in this dream of polar night her only companion has been magically transformed into a beast. He’d had the remnants of a black eye when they left Hawaii, but it had faded to nothing, now seems as illusory and dreamlike as the rest of their tropical hiatus. She doesn’t know how he’d gotten it. The Fairbanks recon boys, who fly high latitudes almost daily, had given Eddie some last-minute tips, but he had listened only casually, without concern. He seems unbothered by the Arctic’s tricks and deceptions. He handles his charts and tables and astrocompass with the calm assurance of a priest readying communion.

  As they near the Svalbard archipelago, long black crooked leads of open water fracture the ice into a sharp-edged silver jigsaw of drifting floes. Still the weather holds. It is almost noon; to the south the horizon is lit with a narrow band of weak dishwater light. The shapes of islands appear, shadows against shadows.