by Rich Horton
Yeling came into the control cab to take over. Icke locked the controls and got up. In the small space at the back of the control cab, they spoke to each other for a bit in lowered voices, kissed, while I stared at the instrument panels, trying hard not to eavesdrop.
Every marriage had its own engine, with its own rhythm and fuel, its own language and control scheme, a quiet hum that kept everything moving. But the hum was so quiet that sometimes it was more felt than heard, and you had to listen for it if you didn’t want to miss it.
Then Icke left and Yeling came forward to take the pilot’s seat.
She looked at me. “There’s a second bunk in the back if you want to park yourself a bit.” Her English was accented but good, and you could hear traces of Icke’s broad New England A’s and non-rhoticity in some of the words.
I thanked her and told her that I wasn’t sleepy yet.
She nodded and concentrated on flying the ship, her hands gripping the stick for the empennage—the elevators and rudders in the cruciform tail—and the wheel for the trim far more tightly than Icke had.
I stared at the empty, cold desert passing beneath us for a while, and then I asked her what she had been doing when I first showed up at the airport.
“Fixing the eyes of the ship. Barry likes to see the mouth all red and fierce, but the eyes are more important.
“A ship is a dragon, and dragons navigate by sight. One eye for the sky, another for the sea. A ship without eyes cannot see the coming storms and ride the changing winds. It won’t see the underwater rocks near the shore and know the direction of land. A blind ship will sink.”
An airship, she said, needed eyes even more than a ship on water. It moved so much faster and there were so many more things that could go wrong.
“Barry thinks it’s enough to have these.” She gestured towards the instrument panel before her: GPS, radar, radio, altimeter, gyroscope, compass. “But these things help Barry, not the ship. The ship itself needs to see.
“Barry thinks this is superstition, and he doesn’t want me to do it. But I tell him that the ship looks more impressive for customers if he keeps the eyes freshly painted. That he thinks make sense.”
Yeling told me that she had also crawled all over the hull of ship and traced out a pattern of oval dragon scales on the surface of the hull with tung oil. “It looks like the way the ice cracks in spring on a lake with good fengshui. A ship with a good coat of dragon scales won’t ever be claimed by water.”
The sky darkened and night fell. Beneath us was complete darkness, northern Mongolia and the Russian Far East being some of the least densely inhabited regions of the globe. Above us, stars, denser than I had ever seen, winked into existence. It felt as though we were drifting on the surface of a sea at night, the water around us filled with the glow of sea jellies, the way I remember when I used to swim at night in Long Island Sound off of the Connecticut coast.
“I think I’ll sleep now,” I said. She nodded, and then told me that I could microwave something for myself in the small galley behind the control cab, off to the side of the main corridor.
The galley was tiny, barely larger than a closet. There was a fridge, a microwave, a sink, and a small two-burner electric range. Everything was kept spotless. The pots and pans were neatly hung on the wall, and the dishes were stacked in a grid of cubbyholes and tied down with velcro straps. I ate quickly and then followed the sound of snores aft.
Icke had left the light on for me. In the windowless bedroom, the soft, warm glow and the wood-paneled walls were pleasant and induced sleep. Two bunks, one on top of another, hung against one wall of the small bedroom. Icke was asleep in the bottom one. In one corner of the room was a small vanity with a mirror, and pictures of Yeling’s family were taped around the frame of the mirror.
It struck me then that this was Icke and Yeling’s home. Icke had told me that they owned a house in western Massachusetts, but they spent only about a month out of the year there. Most of their meals were cooked and eaten in the American Dragon, and most of their dreams were dreamt here in this room, each alone in a bunk.
A poster of smiling children drawn in the style of Chinese folk art was on the wall next to the vanity, and framed pictures of Yeling and Icke together, smiling, filled the rest of the wall space. I looked through them: wedding, vacation, somewhere in a Chinese city, somewhere near a lake with snowy shores, each of them holding up a big fish.
I crawled into the top bunk, and between Icke’s snores, I could hear the faint hum of the ship’s engines, so faint that you almost missed it if you didn’t listen for it.
I was more tired than I had realized, and slept through the rest of Yeling’s shift as well as Icke’s next shift. By the time I woke up, it was just after sunrise, and Yeling was again at the helm. We were deep in Russia, flying over the endless coniferous boreal forests of the heart of Siberia. Our course was now growing ever more easterly as we approached the tip of Siberia where it would meet Alaska across the Bering Sea.
She was listening to an audio book as I came into the control cab. She reached out to turn it off when she heard me, but I told her that it was all right.
It was a book about baseball, an explanation of the basic rules for non-fans. The particular section she was listening to dealt with the art of how to appreciate a stolen base.
Yeling stopped the book at the end of the chapter. I sipped a cup of coffee while we watched the sun rise higher and higher over the Siberian taiga, lighting up the lichen woodland dotted with bogs and pristine lakes still frozen over.
“I didn’t understand the game when I first married Barry. We do not have baseball in China, especially not where I grew up.
“Sometimes, when Barry and I aren’t working, when I stay up a bit during my shift to sit with him or on our days off, I want to talk about the games I played as a girl or a book I remember reading in school or a festival we had back home. But it’s difficult.
“Even for a simple funny memory I wanted to share about the time my cousins and I made these new paper boats, I’d have to explain everything: the names of the paper boats we made, the rules for racing them, the festival that we were celebrating and what the custom for racing paper boats was about, the jobs and histories of the spirits for the festival, the names of the cousins and how we were related, and by then I’d forgotten what was the stupid little story I wanted to share.
“It was exhausting for both of us. I used to work hard to try to explain everything, but Barry would get tired, and he couldn’t keep the Chinese names straight or even hear the difference between them. So I stopped.
“But I want to be able to talk to Barry. Where there is no language, people have to build language. Barry likes baseball. So I listen to this book and then we have something to talk about. He is happy when I can listen to or watch a baseball game with him and say a few words when I can follow what’s happening.”
Icke was at the helm for the northernmost leg of our journey, where we flew parallel to the Arctic Circle and just south of it. Day and night had lost their meaning as we flew into the extreme northern latitudes. I was already getting used to the six-hour-on, six-hour-off rhythm of their routine, and slowly synching my body’s clock to theirs.
I asked Icke if he knew much about Yeling’s family or spent much time with them.
“No. She sends some money back to them every couple of months. She’s careful with the budget, and I know that anything she sends them she’s worked for as hard as I did. I’ve had to work on her to get her to be a little more generous with herself, and to spend money on things that will make us happy right now. Every time we go to Vegas now she’s willing to play some games with me and lose a little money, but she even has a budget for that.
“I don’t get involved with her family. I figure that if she wanted out of her home and village so badly that she was willing to float away with a stranger in a bag of gas, then there’s no need for me to become part of what she’s left behind.
“I’m sure she also misses her family. How can she not? That’s the way we all are, as far as I can see: we want that closeness from piling in all together and knowing everything about everyone and talking all in one breath, but we also want to run away by ourselves and be alone. Sometimes we want both at the same time. My mom wasn’t much of a mom, and I haven’t been home since I was sixteen. But even I can’t say that I don’t miss her sometimes.
“I give her space. If there’s one thing the Chinese don’t have, it’s space. Yeling lived in a hut so full of people that she never even had her own blanket, and she couldn’t remember a single hour when she was alone. Now we see each other for a few minutes every six hours, and she’s learned how to fill up that space, all that free time, by herself. She’s grown to like it. It’s what she never had, growing up.”
There is a lot of space in a zeppelin, I thought, idly. That space, filled with lighter-than-air helium, keeps the zeppelin afloat. A marriage also has a lot of space. What fills it to keep it afloat?
We watched the display of the aurora borealis outside the window in the northern skies as the ship raced towards Alaska.
I don’t know how much time passed before I was jolted awake by a violent jerk. Before I knew what was going on, another sudden tilt of the ship threw me out of my bunk onto the floor. I rolled over, stumbled up, and made my way forward into the control cab by holding onto the walls.
“It’s common to have storms in spring over the Bering Sea,” Icke, who was supposed to be off shift and sleeping, was standing and holding onto the back of the pilot’s chair. Yeling didn’t bother to acknowledge me. Her knuckles were white from gripping the controls.
It was daytime, but other than the fact that there was some faint and murky light coming through the windows, it might as well have been the middle of the night. The wind, slamming freezing rain into the windows, made it impossible to see even the bottom of the hull as it curved up from the control cab to the nose cone. Billowing fog and cloud roiled around the ship, whipping past us faster than cars on the autobahns.
A sudden gust slammed into the side of the ship, and I was thrown onto the floor of the cab. Icke didn’t even look over as he shouted at me, “Tie yourself down or get back to the bunk.”
I got up and stood in the back right corner of the control cab, and used the webbing I found there to lash myself in place and out of the way.
Smoothly, as though they had practiced it, Yeling slipped out of the pilot chair and Icke slipped in. Yeling strapped herself into the passenger stool on the right. The line on one of the electronic screens that showed the ship’s course by GPS indicated that we had been zigzagging around crazily. In fact, it was clear that although the throttle was on full and we were burning fuel as fast as an airplane, the wind was pushing us backwards relative to the ground.
It was all Icke could do to keep us pointed into the wind and minimize the cross-section we presented to the front of the storm. If we were pointed slightly at an angle to the wind, the wind would have grabbed us around the ship’s peripatetic pivot point and spun us like an egg on its side, yawing out of control. The pivot point, the center of momentum around which a ship would move when an external force is applied, shifts and moves about an airship depending on the ship’s configuration, mass, hull shape, speed, acceleration, wind direction, and angular momentum, among other factors, and a pilot kept a zeppelin straight in a storm like this by feel and instinct more than anything else.
Lightning flashed close by, so close that I was blinded for a moment. The thunder rumbled the ship and made my teeth rattle, as though the floor of the ship was the diaphragm of a subwoofer.
“She feels heavy,” Icke said. “Ice must be building up on the hull. It actually doesn’t feel nearly as heavy as I would have expected. The hull ought to be covered by a solid layer of ice now if the outside thermometer reading is right. But we are still losing altitude, and we can’t go any lower. The waves are going to hit the ship. We can’t duck under this storm. We’ll have to climb over it.”
Icke dropped more water ballast to lighten the ship, and tilted the elevators up. We shot straight up like a rocket. The American Dragon’s elongated teardrop shape acted as a crude airfoil, and as the brutal Arctic wind rushed at us, we flew like an experimental model wing design in a wind tunnel.
Another bolt of lightning flashed, even closer and brighter than before. The rumble from the thunder hurt my eardrums, and for a while I could hear nothing.
Icke and Yeling shouted at each other, and Yeling shook her head and yelled again. Icke looked at her for a moment, nodded, and lifted his hands off the controls for a second. The ship jerked itself and twisted to the side as the wind took hold of it and began to turn it. Icke reached back to grab the controls as another bolt of lightning flashed. The interior lights went out as the lightning erased all shadows and lines and perspective, and the sound of the thunder knocked me off my feet and punched me hard in the ears. And I passed into complete darkness.
By the time I came to, I had missed the entire Alaskan leg of the journey.
Yeling, who had the helm, was playing a Chinese song through the speakers. It was dark outside, and a round, golden moon, almost full and as big as the moon I remember from my childhood, floated over the dark and invisible sea. I sat down next to Yeling and stared at it.
After the chorus, the singer, a woman with a mellow and smooth voice, began the next verse in English:
But why is the moon always fullest when we take leave of one another?
For us, there is sorrow, joy, parting, and meeting.
For the moon, there is shade, shine, waxing and waning.
It has never been possible to have it all.
All we can wish for is that we endure,
Though we are thousands of miles apart,
Yet we shall gaze upon the same moon, always lovely.
Yeling turned off the music and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
“She found a way out of the storm,” she said. There was no need to ask who she meant. “She dodged that lightning at the last minute and found herself a hole in the storm to slip through. Sharp eyes. I knew it was a good idea to repaint the left eye, the one watching the sky, before we took off.”
I watched the calm waters of the Pacific Ocean pass beneath us.
“In the storm, she shed her scales to make herself lighter.”
I imagined the tung oil lines drawn on the ship’s hull by Yeling, the lines etching the ice into dragon scales, which fell in large chunks into the frozen sea below.
“When I first married Barry, I did everything his way and nothing my way. When he was asleep, and I was flying the ship, I had a lot of time to think. I would think about my parents getting old and me not being there. I’d think about some recipe I wanted to ask my mother about, and she wasn’t there. I asked myself all the time, what have I done?
“But even though I did everything his way, we used to argue all the time. Arguments that neither of us could understand and that went nowhere. And then I decided that I had to do something.
“I rearranged the way the pots were hung up in the galley and the way the dishes were stacked in the cabinets and the way the pictures were arranged in the bedroom and the way we stored life vests and shoes and blankets. I gave everything a better flow of qi, energy, and smoother fengshui. It might seem like a cramped and shabby place to some, but the ship now feels like our palace in the skies.
“Barry didn’t even notice it. But, because of the fengshui, we didn’t argue any more. Even during the storm, when things were so tense, we worked well together.”
“Were you scared at all during the storm?” I asked.
Yeling bit her bottom lip, thinking about my question.
“When I first rode with Barry, when I didn’t yet know him, I used to wake up and say, in Chinese, who is this man with me in the sky? That was the most I’ve ever been scared.
“But last night, when I was struggling with the ship and Bar
ry came to help me, I wasn’t scared at all. I thought, it’s okay if we die now. I know this man. I know what I’ve done. I’m home.”
“There was never any real danger from lightning,” Icke said. “You knew that, right? The American Dragon is a giant Faraday cage. Even if the lightning had struck us, the charge would have stayed on the outside of the metal frame. We were in the safest place over that whole sea in that storm.”
I brought up what Yeling had said, that the ship seemed to know where to go in the storm.
Icke shrugged. “Aerodynamics is a complex thing, and the ship moved the way physics told it to.”
“But when you get your Aurora, you’ll let her paint eyes on it?”
Icke nodded, as though I had asked a very stupid question.
Las Vegas, the diadem of the desert, spread out beneath, around, and above us.
Pleasure ships and mass-transit passenger zeppelins covered in flashing neon and gaudy giant flickering screens dotted the air over the Strip. Cargo carriers like us were constricted to a narrow lane parallel to the Strip with specific points where we were allowed to depart to land at the individual casinos.
“That’s Laputa,” Icke pointed above us, to a giant, puffy, baroque airship that seemed as big as the Venetian, which we were passing below and to the left. Lit from within, this newest and flashiest floating casino glowed like a giant red Chinese lantern in the sky. Air taxis rose from the Strip and floated towards it like fireflies.
We had dropped off the shipment of turbine blades with the wind farm owned by Caesars Palace outside the city, and now we were headed for Caesars itself. Comp rooms were one of the benefits of hauling cargo for a customer like that.
I saw, coming up behind the Mirage, the tall spire and blinking lights of the mooring mast in front of the Forum Shops. It was usually where the great luxury personal yachts of the high-stakes rollers moored, but tonight it was empty, and a transpacific long-haul Dongfeng Feimaotui, a Flying Chinaman named the American Dragon, was going to take it for its own.
