One afternoon in Hawaii, Caleb had convinced Marian to fly them to the Big Island. A friend of his, Honi, a younger guy who’d been in the Pacific and was also a paniolo, had picked them up at the little Kona airport, taken them out on his rusty old boat. In the evening, as they drifted offshore, drinking beer, Honi had given them masks and snorkels purloined from the navy.
“They like this spot,” he’d said, gesturing at the inky water. She’d known she was supposed to ask who they were, but she resisted the bait, splashed in.
Emptiness below, cobalt fading to black. Caleb grasped her wrist, tethering her to him. A bright beam of light slanted down: Honi was shining a big flashlight into the water, attracting the floating sea motes. Some silvery fish glinted in the depths, like coins in a well. The first manta ray had appeared as an undulation in the murk, far below, barely perceptible. It curved upward, ascending, mouth opening, gills flexing, underside glowing white. As it arced under her, belly to belly, the water had shifted between them like wind. Descending, it became a winged shadow, briefly vanished before looping back up. Again and again it looped through the spotlight’s slant, feeding, and she had fallen through a gap in time and felt the giddy weightlessness of spooling loops over Missoula in the Stearman biplane.
Eddie hands forward a note. Might be in range Isfjord Radio. Will try.
When she’d radioed their flight plan from Barrow, she had been promised all possible Svalbardian assistance, and now the operator tells Eddie the sky is clear and everyone in Barentsburg and Longyearbyen has turned on lights for them.
The Nazis had taken Svalbard twice, wanting it for weather stations. Free Norwegians had glided over the glaciers on skis, chasing radio signals that came and went like will-o’-the-wisps, sometimes finding and killing the Germans at their source, sometimes not. Always more Germans came, deposited in the northern islands by submarine. The last Germans to surrender in the whole war had been in Svalbard. Four months after V-E Day. They would have surrendered sooner, but no one bothered to go get them.
Marian approaches from the west, low over the sea, passing through the frozen mouth of Isfjord, flanked by flattopped white mountains. They pass the lights of the Soviet mining settlement at Barentsburg. The fjord’s frozen surface gleams patchily where the snow has blown thin. They will try to land up the valley from Longyearbyen, at Adventdalen, where the Luftwaffe had made an airstrip.
Caleb had given her the manta rays to tell her he loved her. He knew how to tell her so she would hear him. She and Eddie had left on January 20th, the day they received word the delayed Norsel had finally crossed the Antarctic circle, nearing the continent. Caleb was at work on the ranch when she’d gone to the airport. No goodbye, of course. Their love meant everything, changed nothing. Their trajectories would continue along, unbowed by it.
She turns down a small inlet off the Isfjord, passes over the clumped yellow lights of Longyearbyen and the rickety wooden structures and cables that support mining trams. Already the transit across the North Pole, the stars and auroras and ice, has taken on the disintegrating strangeness of a dream.
The narrow valley is hazy. A coal fire still burns in one of the mines, started by a shell from a German battleship. They land on smooth snow marked by burning flare pots. A crowd has gathered to greet them.
When you are truly afraid, you experience an urgent desire to split from your body. You want to remove yourself from the thing that will experience pain and horror, but you are that thing. You are aboard a sinking ship, and you are the ship itself. But, flying, fear can’t be permitted. To inhabit yourself fully is your only hope and, beyond that, to make the airplane a part of yourself, also.
—marian graves
Malmö, Sweden
55°32ʹ N, 13°22ʹ E
February 2, 1950
10,471 nautical miles flown
Eddie is in bed, in a dark hotel room, under a plump white goose-down duvet. By some miracle, he is safe and warm and alive. Out the window, snow falls on a small city square, a smooth layer swelling upward, butter-yellow in the streetlights. The buildings are narrow, with steep roofs and tidy rows of windows, snow on their sills.
They had planned for Oslo, but a storm had made landing there impossible. “Where else?” Marian had shouted above the crash and rattle of the plane, and he had gone to his charts and set his fingertip on Malmö, at the southern tip of Sweden. At least they had not been over water. If they were to crash, he’d thought, please let it be into solid earth. By radio, through waves of static, he had pieced together that conditions at Malmö were poor but not murderous. Somehow he had found the airfield. Somehow Marian had landed the plane. Bulltofta Airport. He remembers hearing about damaged bombers making forced landings there in the war rather than flying all the way back to England.
The gently falling snowflakes, the tiny bits of frozen lace sifting through the streetlights, seem so delicate, so innocent, but they are emissaries from a black, blind fury that, even now, hangs over the orderly roofs, the pious steeples and meticulous clock towers. He’d seen the flakes streaking and swarming around the plane, darting at it maliciously, but now they waft peaceably down onto the square, accumulating like harmless dust knocked loose from the sky.
He thinks his body should bear some scar from the storm, some trace beyond the cold lingering in him. He’d sat for an hour in a near-scalding bath without dislodging it. How could that place and this one exist so closely, one stacked atop the other? All the things around him, the bed linens and hot water and light switches and radiators, are part of an elaborately constructed, pleasantly convincing, utterly inane illusion of safety, of consequence.
* * *
—
In Honolulu, he’d found a cheap hotel on the edge of Chinatown. Faded anchors and hula girls plastered the windows of tattoo parlors. Grocery stores and spice shops displayed gnarled roots and jars of unknown powders, signs in foreign characters. A fetid smell hung in the damp, tropical air: rotting fruit, a trace of sewage from the river.
A bartender told Eddie he should have seen the place during the war. Sailors six deep at the bar, lines down the street at all the brothels, everybody cutting loose in the full light of day. “Had to, because of the blackouts,” he said. “Brothels got shut down, though. Now there’s pimps out there, which don’t seem any better to me, but I could introduce you to a nice girl if you wanted.”
“No, thanks,” Eddie said. He held the guy’s eye. “Not my style.”
The guy lowered his voice, leaned closer. “Try the Coconut Palm if you want something a little different.”
The second time he went to the Nut, as people called it, he took a guy back to his hotel. The guy, Andy, who’d lost his left hand on D-Day, was going to the University of Hawaii on the government’s dime and offered to show Eddie around. They lay on powdery white beaches, climbed up red-earth hills to look at the pillboxes from the war, ate thick macadamia nut pancakes with passion-fruit sauce.
“Why are you doing this round-the-world thing again?” Andy said when they were sunning themselves atop one of the pillboxes, concrete hot under their bare backs. Andy had his arms up over his head. The sight of his bald stump still caught Eddie by surprise sometimes.
“She needed a navigator. I was bored.”
“Bored. Sure. You can go to the movies if you’re bored. Do you actually want to do it?”
Below, the ocean spread to the horizon. He dreaded the long overwater flights that remained: to Kodiak, to Norway, to Antarctica, to New Zealand.
Mankind lacks that sixth sense which seems to guide seabirds across thousands of miles of trackless ocean. That had been the first sentence in the Army Air Corps manual. But there had been times when he privately suspected he might possess that missing instinct. In the air, he had a surety of where he was, even though he could not have proved it or explained how he knew.
“I wanted to do somethin
g that’s really hard,” he told Andy, “but in a practical-technical way, not a human-emotional way. You always are somewhere, you just have to figure out where. The place you want to go exists. You just have to find it.”
One night after they’d come out of the Nut, a bunch of sailors had followed them. Eddie had told Andy not to turn around. He hadn’t, but one of the sailors had thrown a bottle that hit him in the back, and then Eddie had been the one to turn. Andy had run away, not that Eddie really blamed him.
Eddie connected a few good swings, at least judging from his knuckles afterward, but one of the sailors got him in the head with something heavy, and he’d woken up sometime later, lying in a filthy alley between a Chinese bookshop and a fishmonger’s. Opening his swollen eyelids, he’d seen a green blur that slowly resolved into the reflection of a neon parrot in a fish-reeking puddle, though he hadn’t been able to think of the word parrot or to make sense of why one would be gleaming on the ground.
In the storm, coming from Svalbard, he had been afraid, but he doesn’t think he will ever again be as afraid as he’d been waking up lost in that Chinatown alley. In the storm, he had kept hold of the net of longitude and latitude that held the planet together, but in the alley he had been so disoriented he might as well have been wrapped and chained and tossed into dark water, his lostness absolute. The storm, even if it had killed him, would never have had the power over him the alley did.
He begins to slide into sleep, wakes with a jolt from a dream of green lights that might be the aurora or might be the neon parrot.
In the morning, he will concern himself with his bath and his coffee and what kind of Swedish jam to put on his toast. He will remember in a detached, fading way how ice had grown over the plane like unwanted armor, a malicious crystalline straitjacket, how the Peregrine had grown sluggish and heavy, her engines labored. Their situation had been so precarious it had seemed like the weight of just one more snowflake might have tipped them into doom, but instead they had touched down in Bulltofta. Then the warm hotel, the white bed, the innocent snow.
He’d had a week to heal in his tatty room in Honolulu before he saw Marian, and by then he was mostly better, just a little bruised around one eye and bothered by headaches that rippled unpredictably through his brain. She’d looked at him with concern, asked if he was all right, then left it alone. He supposed she’d been preoccupied with Caleb. He hadn’t gone back to the Nut, hadn’t seen Andy again.
From Malmö they will fly to Rome, and from Rome across to Tripoli, then south into damp equatorial heat, ever-lengthening days.
I look forward, and there is the horizon. I look back. Horizon. What’s past is lost. I am already lost to my future.
—marian graves
Cape Town, South Africa, to Maudheim, Queen Maud Land, Antarctica
33°54ʹ S, 18°31ʹ E to 71°03ʹ S, 10°56ʹ W
February 13, 1950
18,331 nautical miles flown
The call comes at two-thirty in the morning. Marian’s room is on the second floor of a little hotel near Wingfield Aerodrome, but the distant sound of the phone ringing downstairs is enough to wake her. Even sleeping, she has been waiting. By the time the night clerk knocks on her door, she is dressed. Out the window is a clear summer night.
“The man from the aerodrome rang,” the clerk tells her. “He says—” He glances at a scrap of paper in his hand. “He says the morsel radioed the weather’s gone right.” He looks up. “I hope you know what that’s about because that’s what he said.”
“The Norsel. Anything else?”
“He said the morsel says it looks to stay all right, as best they can tell, which he wanted me to be sure to say was not well, and if you still wish to go, they recommend you leave as soon as possible. Though he said he personally wouldn’t recommend going at all.”
“Call back, please,” Marian says, “and tell him we’re on our way. Ask him, also, to try to raise any ships to the south and get a report on conditions.”
His tongue poking from the corner of his mouth, the clerk makes a note and retreats down the stairs. Eddie’s room is next door, and Marian presses her ear to the wall, listening for any activity. Surely he must have woken, but the silence is absolute. Please, she thinks, nearly prays, please be in there.
They had arrived in Cape Town on February 9th, and the Norwegian-British-Swedish Antarctic Expedition, after being repeatedly repelled by pack ice, had finally made landfall the next day. Before that, in Rome and Tripoli and Libreville and Windhoek, Eddie had taken to vanishing. She thinks that storm coming from Svalbard had shaken him, or maybe the change has something to do with whatever had happened in Honolulu to give him that black eye. He’d seemed fine in Alaska, had been in peak form navigating over the North Pole, but since Malmö he’s been slipping away from their lodgings, sometimes staying out all night. She’s never quite sure if he’ll return.
She had tried to engage him in the last planning tasks for Antarctica, sought his opinions on her endless nervous tinkering with calculations of load and fuel (the addition of the skis and their drag add a nagging unknown), but his answers were always perfunctory, indifferent, even terse, as though she were pestering him with frivolous and irrelevant concerns. He seemed to want nothing to do with her and her charts and scribbling pencil, but in Cape Town, she told him he had to stop wandering off. The season was waning. They needed to be ready to leave at any moment.
She knocks on his door. “Come in,” he says at once. He is sitting on the bed, fully clothed. The bed doesn’t look slept in.
“Did you sleep?” she asks from the doorway.
“I don’t know. No. I haven’t been, much. And tonight I had a feeling. Is it time?”
“The weather’s gone right.”
He looks down at the floor, clasps and twists his big hands. “Right for now. Three hours until we leave, probably. Maybe thirteen more in the air. It could be a whiteout when we get there. It could be anything.”
She fights her impatience. Does he think she doesn’t know this? “At some point we have to leap.”
He looks up at her, wretched, supplicating. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
“You mean you don’t want to go?” She is astonished.
He shakes his head. “I mean I don’t know if I can find the way.”
She comes into the room, sits beside him. “If anyone can, you can.”
“That’s not much of a guarantee.”
“There never was any. Each of us had to accept that the other might fail.”
“I’ve gotten shaken up.”
“The storm?”
“That didn’t help, but it’s been more of an accumulation. I thought I’d get used to the long flights over water, but I haven’t.” He presses his fingertips gingerly to the side of his skull, and pain flickers across his face.
“Are you all right?”
“Just a headache. It’ll pass.” He takes a bottle of aspirin from his pocket, chews two.
“You did so well to Svalbard,” she says as though reminding a recalcitrant child that he had liked a certain food just yesterday.
“That was different.”
She can’t deny this. Near the North Pole, the rules of navigation changed, but still they’d had decent charts, plenty of advice, radio beams from Barrow and Thule, people waiting in Longyearbyen. They’d had the good luck of clear skies, too, unobscured stars by which Eddie could take their bearings. In the south he will have woefully patchy charts, no beacons, and no stars except the sun, which is likely to be frequently occluded by vicious, fast-changing weather.
He says, “I’ve been thinking a lot about everything that could go wrong. But I’ve also been thinking about what will happen if nothing goes wrong. Do you think about after?”
“I’m trying to take it day by day. Each leg, each landing.” She senses Eddie is in danger of comi
ng apart but can’t gauge the seriousness of the problem, as a structural weakness in a plane may or may not spell disaster, depending on the stresses exerted. He is bent forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his big head in his big hands. She says, “Have I dragged you into this?”
“No.” He shakes his head again. “No, I chose it. I needed…I needed something, and I thought this might be it.”
“We’ve come so far,” she says quietly, pleading. “It’s just more flying. Land, water, ice—it’s all the same, really.”
This is a lie, of course. They will be flying into severe danger. He knows this as well as she does—but she doesn’t care. She almost couldn’t conceive of caring. She has hardened inside. Only flying matters.
She knows he knows she is lying, but he says, “You’re right.”
She is impatient to get to the airfield. “Are you ready?”
He lifts his head. He looks exhausted. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
* * *
—
They take off at dawn, arc to the south, catch one last glimpse of Table Mountain in the rosy sideways spill of the rising sun. A great migration of whitecaps moves across the sea. The Peregrine bounces on the wind. Until they gain a bit of altitude, Marian is much too hot in her woolen clothes. She can’t imagine needing the reindeer parka and finnesko boots and thick socks piled in the copilot’s seat, but soon enough she won’t be able to imagine not needing them.
After two hours, a thin veil of mist materializes below, broken in places. Ahead, a wall of cloud rises up, gray and solid, too tall to climb over. They pass into pale obscurity.
From time to time, Eddie hands up a note with a course correction. She can glean nothing from his impassive expression. She tries to send him a transmission of her own, a message of faith: He can find the way. Perhaps what’s broken in him will be mended when they close the circle.
Great Circle: A Novel Page 60
