by Mark Helprin
Freddy had been to all the major places in America that were even vaguely like England. In favour of playing polo in Virginia or making a speech in Cambridge, he had skipped the West except as a place, in the late fifties, to kill large animals, and was unfamiliar with it other than by looking down from the Concorde on his way to Los Angeles or San Francisco. And these, as far as he was concerned, were cities with a tenuous hold not only upon America but upon earth. The first time he had seen San Francisco he had come from the sea on Britannia and had assumed he was hallucinating. He loved it, but he never stopped believing it was only a puff of ether. He had gone inland in California, once, to visit a walnut ranch, but apart from that had known nothing other than a strip of Pacific coast ten miles wide. Now they were in the West that neither he nor Fredericka had experienced except as a terra-cotta-coloured carpet so distant that it might have been the textured wall of one of the neopalaeolithic buildings Freddy so disdained.
Awakening in the evening of the second day and having eaten all their rations that required no cooking, they were tired of the noise of the train and they wanted hot food, hot tea, the smell of a fire, and quiet. “Where are we?” Fredericka asked, because Freddy always knew where he was.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I was totally confused when we crossed the mountains, and I have no idea how long we’ve slept.”
A sharp line of blue-black mountains ran close and parallel. The train was slowing on a grade. “Look, Freddy,” Fredericka said, pointing out and to the right. “Look at that.” Forward of their position the serrated edge of the mountains was diffused with a pink glow, and the stars that rested on the dark ridge looming above them had a different character than those on either side.
“It must be a town or a city,” Freddy said.
“Not the setting sun?”
“The setting sun would line the tops of the mountains along their whole length, and dim the stars that ride close over them. And because the air is so clear that most of the light escapes through it, what we see must be the remnant of a powerful emanation. It has to be a large city.”
“What city?” she asked.
“Perhaps it’s Amarillo,” he said, pronouncing it Amariyyo. “When the train slows, let’s get off and climb to the top of the ridge. There we’ll see what kind of town it is, and as it will probably take several hours to get to the top, we can prepare a meal at the summit before deciding where to go.”
“What about snakes?” she asked.
“What about them?”
“Won’t we step on them?”
“Do you think the land is covered with snakes?”
“Once, in Greece, I saw a hill covered with snakes.”
“Someone must have fed them. They’ll be scarce here. To survive on land so dry, they need a large territory. And if they hear us they’ll run away or rattle.” The train shuddered as it took the grade. “Come, it’s time to get off.”
Freddy went first. Sitting on the floor with legs hanging down, he gripped the handle of the open door and pushed himself out, right hand on the handle, left hand on the steel rim of the floor. Holding on to the train, he had time for his feet to find the ground, come to a properly paced run, and feel what was beneath them. Then he disengaged and, still running, dropped his pack so he could keep up with Fredericka, who threw hers down and did what he had done, though he helped her by clasping her waist so she would not fall when she let go.
They slowed from their run, grateful that the ground was even and not too rocky. As the train passed with great booms of hollow steel, they stepped back to catch their breath, holding one another in what they did not know was an embrace common in square dancing. Within a minute or two, everything was quiet. While they walked along the ties on their way to retrieve the packs, the wind came up, and they buttoned their jackets.
“It smells good,” Fredericka said. “They sell that kind of herb in fancy cosmetic shops, in little metal tins, for ten pounds,” she marvelled, “and here the air is saturated with it.”
“You see,” said Freddy, “the sweat and sacrifice, the loss of life, the lifelong work and discipline, that it took to make a class of people who could afford to buy that herb in Mayfair for ten pounds an ounce, is here confounded and contradicted as transcontinental winds blow it in a volume a fifth of the American sky over distances that make of Mayfair a stupid little snuffbox of vanity and pomposity that God crushes with the railroad track of His foot.”
“Freddy,” Fredericka asked, “are you insane?”
“Absolutely not.”
“You sound like Cheverly de Montbasse Blasson-Couville when he was on LSD.”
“Who was he?”
“He was a boyfriend.”
“How many bloody boyfriends have you had? I’ve never heard of him.”
She stopped on the ties. “I’ve had many,” she said. “Some people think that I’m beautiful. That’s a power, like the power of royalty. It’s why you chose me, is it not? After all, you didn’t know me. But I’ve dismissed all of them and devoted myself to you. I’ve given myself to you, Freddy. You may have my body, soul, everything. Time passes, and all I want is the intimacy that slows, defeats, and confounds it. Love, Freddy, that’s what it is. You’ve always made the mistake that men often make, and carried forward the great fault that mars civilisation, which is that you believe that your philosophy is deeper than love.”
Freddy stopped abruptly. He had fallen in love with her in America as if she had been something as natural and unconscious as a sea fan waving in the ocean above a reef. Now he had discovered that her philosophy was indeed, and had always been, deeper than his—something that now made him desire her without limit.
He guided her off the tracks, his hands on her broad and lovely shoulders.
“Freddy,” she asked, although she did not have to, “what are you doing?”
He brought her to rest on an earthen bank of dry dust. “Fredericka. Fredericka Whitaker Nicols Marshall Seaforth Kent . . . Fredericka, Fredericka.” Never had he been able to say her entire name: even she had great difficulty remembering it. They had thudded down, and on the rough ground of the high desert, on a dark hillside by an empty track, in escape from the terrible gravity in the lives of commoners and kings alike, a queen of England was conceived.
NAKED, AMAZED, freezing, shocked, and shivering, they awoke at three in the morning, covered themselves, and spent the next two hours climbing to the top of the ridge. The glow from the city on the other side made the edge a salmon-coloured line pulsing like a sunset. Perfumes of the desert rose with them in their ascent, and when they reached the summit thousands of feet from where they had started they saw on the other side a most extraordinary thing, as if they were not on earth but in a kind of heaven where entertainments of light were the chief concern.
Beneath them was a city stretching to a horizon of distant mountains in a meadow of a hundred million lights. Rigid lines of rubies and pearls blinking red and white travelled as smoothly as blood surging through a beast on the Serengeti. Like traversing shotguns, the royal eyes moved to the centre, where the scintillating arteries led to glowing boxes, light-washed pyramids, and jets as white as maggots, sucking passengers from gangways like piglets alongside a sow. Filled and happy with power after feeding, they ran down purple-spotted tarmacs and left the earth behind.
In the midst of all this was, obviously, a giant sphinx; delicate rows of royal palms by the thousand, each illuminated by an individual spotlight; and fountains in fake Egyptian gardens that shone like rayon. Always through everything moved the red bloodstream of cars, twinkling cells streaming along broad boulevards through the black of undeveloped sand waiting for the mitosis of a casino. Its lights were as riotous as bubbles in a mountain flume, and absent astronomical or galactic metaphor this city, which seemed to be on fire, made no sense whatsoever.
“What is that?” Fredericka asked. “Is it a city? Is it a hallucination? Is something wrong with us?”
; “It is a city,” her husband answered, happy, spent, and delighted, “a very strange city in the desert. They don’t have any water: they have to pipe it in, and I think that they may gamble there.”
“What’s it called?”
“I don’t really remember. Ciudad de something or other. Though the lights are fascinating, you can see even from a great distance that it’s ugly and dangerous, and we shan’t go there. We need wilderness now, and purity, and, God knows, neither wilderness nor purity is down there.”
DEWEY KNOTT called Finney into his office three times a day to ask, as if he had never asked before, “Where is this Lachpoof guy? Have you found him?” Finney was beating the bushes all over the United States in an increasingly obsessive search. Teams of investigators—some freshly retired from CIA or the FBI; others hard-bitten, heavily accented, former New York cops who normally could find a drop of water hiding at the bottom of the ocean—made life very difficult for dentists, endodontists, pediatric dentists, orthodontists, cosmetic dentists, periodontists, dental surgeons, hygienists, technicians, enamelists, and receptionists. Unsuspecting presidents of state dental societies were rousted in the middle of the night or easily pulled over in their Cateras, Mercedes, and Excelsiors with license plates like Bicuspid, Fang, and Bite. The former agents and police would flash their federal gun permits and say, “Just a few questions, Dr Mega-loseras. We’re looking for two dentists; last names Moofoomooach, man and wife, his name Lachpoof Moofoomooach, her name, we think, Popeel Moofoomooach.” The universal response to this was a narrow-eyed gaze, a slight turn of the head, and then the incredulously phrased, “What?”
It was easy to disappear in America. A man had only to grow a blond moustache, lift weights, buy a pickup truck, and wear a tool belt. A woman had only to frost her hair, wear a blue suit, and drive an SUV. By adopting names other than Lachpoof or Popeel, such as Randy, Jason, Jennifer, or Cheryl, you could walk through walls. Though neither Freddy nor Fredericka knew that they were being sought, and had not thought to hide, they could not have been better hidden or lost more than they were in the mountains, weaving unseen to one side or the other of the Continental Divide as they made their way north through evergreen forests, open meadows, and across blindingly bright snowfields in a patchwork that covered the high mountains like the coat of a dappled horse. They went almost five hundred miles this way, skirting settlements except for brief forays to buy food or equipment, until they came to a place where they stopped, and changed direction.
NOT QUITE A TOWN, Pine Ridge floated in clear air and warm intermittent sunshine, the flow of which was controlled by the shutters and apertures of enormous mountain clouds higher and whiter than the snow-covered summits above which they sailed. Like the miscalculations of a pastry chef, they accumulated in rolls and bulges, a kingdom of whipped cream rising into the troposphere on winds aloft. Freddy and Fredericka knew the Alps quite well. These mountains were sharper, younger, lower, and neither half as looming nor half as dark. The greens were lighter, the sun brighter, the air sweeter. And yet they shared with the Alps the high, almost unreachable snow cornices that cut the clouds into clumps of stray sheep, and they shared the great sheer walls. There is no better or purer way to reset the clock of the soul than by reaching the top of one of these massifs, with bloody hands and fingers, ten pounds gone, and the sweet smell of mountain lichen everywhere on your clothes.
They themselves stood in the alternating waves of sunshine and shadow as they watched the light play across high snowfields. Whenever the wind came up, they were surrounded by pacifying scents of pine that perfumed valley after valley and were carried on the air in a world of unnamed rivers. Their feeling of well being, however, was challenged by their sudden immersion in a vibrant youth culture in which they had no place. Nearly everyone in Pine Ridge was a firefighter, a blemishless youth in search of adventure and devoted entirely to fitness, physical tests, and the opposite sex. The young men and women there survived, it seemed, on inedible, foil-wrapped, pseudo–candy bars that went by names such as Amino-Glycosine Surprise and B1Folic Acid Crunch. Their skin was smooth, their muscles taut, and their eyes covered in hideous futuristic sunglasses with lizardine lenses and garishly coloured frames. The dress code was as strict and malicious as that which once had governed Restoration dandies, and though neither a frill nor a ruffle was to be seen, the spectrum of colours could easily have outshone a Brazilian Indian in his most extravagant war paint. Freddy was too middle-aged for this, and even Fredericka—young enough to have passed, and who, because of her snow-blinding teeth, could have been taken for a California girl—was too old to feel comfortable. As they walked through the settlement to the Forest Service office, rather than take note of men engaged in pull-up contests or strutting like heroes of battle, or of women so nubile, fresh, and young as to make even Fredericka seem mature, they tended to look into the mountains and up at the sky. Though vitality did not overflow from them as it did from the youths, it filled them nonetheless, quietly, and exactly to the brim.
In the Forest Service office they had only just completed a few forms before they were quickly pulled out of the queue by a grandfatherly uniformed ranger who looked like a badger. Every word he spoke had the grace of age, as if he had come through much that was bitter, only to be kind. “Come in,” he said. “You may wonder why I skipped you ahead the way I did. Have a seat.”
He gestured to two cane chairs. Then he sat down at his desk, put on his reading glasses, and picked up their applications. “You people have two advantages none of those kids out there has, and I’m hoping that we can put them to good use. One, you’re married. And, two, you’re old enough not to mind periods of stillness.”
“What exactly do you mean?” Freddy asked.
“Long stretches of inactivity. You like to read? You like to watch as the wind pushes the clouds?”
Freddy smiled.
“Yeah,” said the ranger. “I’ll bet you do. You get a nineteen-year-old kid, and he’s gotta move. Doesn’t have the attention span of a waterbug. And, here’s the thing. The rules may be antiquated, but they do say that if two people man a fire tower and they’re of the opposite sex, they’ve gotta be married. Not one of those kids out there is married, but you are. How’d you like to spend the summer in a fire tower: supplies (or most of them anyway) supplied, money accumulating, and the most beautiful, private place in the world all to yourselves?”
“I would have thought,” said Freddy, “that each position would have a hundred applicants.”
“You would have been right,” said the ranger. “But the couple that manned Centennial Seven is leaving today, because his mother died yesterday. It came through this morning. We’re airlifting them to Bozeman, where they’ll get a flight to Seattle, and as that’s home, that’s I guess where they’ll stay.”
“I see,” said Freddy.
“The helicopter will come back here. We can have you up there by tomorrow evening. Lucia, the chief of the Centennial Line, can teach you how to map-read and locate, and you can start forthwith.”
“I know how to map-read,” Freddy said. “I was trained as a navigator and in route finding.”
“Where?”
“The navy and the army. I fly helicopters and fixed-wing, although I don’t have my papers with me.”
“I understand: this is your vacation. Can I ask you a question or two, just to check, and then we’ll leave it at that? Just so I can let Lucia in on it?”
“By all means.”
“Good. All right, what’s declination?”
“Declination is the angular difference between true north and either magnetic or grid north,” Freddy answered.
“What’s the back azimuth of one hundred and eighty degrees?”
“Zero, or three hundred and sixty degrees, whichever way you express it.”
“Sharp,” said the ranger. “One more.”
Freddy nodded.
“Last question. How do you plot an azimuth from a known point
?”
“If necessary,” Freddy told him, “you convert from magnetic to grid. You place the index mark of a protractor at the mass centre of the point in question, with the zero/one-eighty baseline parallel to a north-south grid line. Mark the map at the azimuth desired. Connect the two. That’s it.”
“What’s it called?”
“The grid direction line.”
“You are a navigator.”
“I said so.”
“Take the job. You and your wife will keep a twenty-four-hour watch. It isn’t difficult at all. I’ll put you in at the highest grade I can, and I promise to do my best when we load up the helicopter with supplies. We want you until the middle of September unless the whole damn forest burns down around you, in which case the job is over. It happens sometimes, and it’s been very dry. Probably, though, you’ll get through the summer and remember it as one of the best things in your life.”
ALTHOUGH THEY HAD not known they needed rest, at Centennial Seven they would get the rest they needed. Rest, Freddy had told Fredericka when he was courting her, was like the willow tree at Moocock. At first its leaves grow almost imperceptibly. In the beginning of the world no bookmaker would have given odds that such a skinny, stringy thing would ever become full. But the willow in spring explodes in green so suddenly and quickly that it can fill out in hours. Rest works ever so slowly, but on every single cell at once, so that when one has been repaired, so have all the others, and strength returns as if in a flood.
They shopped in town for personal items the Forest Service did not provide, and Freddy hired a youth to obtain some necessities for them in Cheyenne. Just before the helicopter was about to lift off, and after ducking beneath its rotor blades and handing Freddy a book and two slab-like packages, the youth became five hundred dollars richer. The packages contained a copy of the Iliad in Greek, each page reproduced on a sixteen by twenty-four sheet of bright white paper; and a copy of the Liddell and Scott new abridged Greek Lexicon, of 1871, with four pages on each sixteen by twenty-four sheet, the text nicely enlarged and bright, two hundred sheets in all, quite easily manageable. Freddy was going to have another go at the Iliad, hoping to make a leap from these light-filled mountains to the light-filled Aegean.
