Oh, Sam, she says, I’m so flattered.
He looks out at the water when she says this. He sees two sailboats moving at opposite ends of the ocean.
What does that mean, flattered? he says to the water.
It means that I’m honored you would think of asking me.
It means no, that’s what it means.
Years later, when she tells him before she tells anyone else that she is flying across the Atlantic, she recognizes the pained expression, the pinched eyes, the tightened mouth, from that day on the beach. She wants to laugh and pretend that he’s only pouting. Before she leaves, she asks him to tell her mother and sister for her as soon as she’s taken off. She gives him two letters to give to them. In the letters she writes that she knows what she’s doing. She accepts the hazards. She has to go.
He watches her lips promise to send him a postcard from somewhere. Waving goodbye, he says to himself that that is her style: intimately heartless. He can tell by the way she smiles at him, that she has no idea how unhappy he is.
•
The temperature exploded. There is no other way to describe it. The heat rose steadily all day, but there was a breeze in the morning and so we didn’t notice the change at first. The jungle was as quiet as on any other morning. The birds were by the lagoon. But what we did not know was that they were drinking the water, getting ready for the heat. They had a way of knowing what was coming up, a way that eluded us. They congregated around the lagoon in strange formations, like supplicants of some exotic religion.
On the first day of the heat wave, I hear the birds talking to one another around the edge of the water. They have been at the lagoon since the earliest light of dawn. They are gathering force. The vicinity of the lagoon is exceptionally buggy. The insects also are preparing for the heat.
When I see Noonan for the first time that morning, he’s taken off his shirt, like a soldier stripped for combat.
A bolt of lightning that announces the heat wave strikes about a mile out to sea. We catch sight of it as we emerge from the jungle onto the beach. It sizzles in the distance, a sinister line of yellow in the sky, and it leaves a dark impression in its afterglow. I see the bright flash for a few more seconds, hanging in the bright white sky. By the time it has faded completely from my vision, there is such a noticeable change in the weather, which had been hot but bearable a minute before, that Noonan has wrapped his shirt in a turban around his head, Arabian style. Heat seems to rise around us on all sides, and over the beach we see the air ripple in waves, as if the sand had turned to flames. The sky is cloudless. In the sky we see only the rays of the sun beating down on the sand and reflecting back.
The heat will take over the island. It will keep up all day and all night for several weeks. The sun beats down, the air is still, the deafening hum goes on. The things that will happen could only have happened during a heat wave. Everything becomes quite unreal and it seems as though there is no future. It is impossible to think about the future during the heat wave. All during the heat wave we have the feeling, even in the darkness, that we need to escape from the sun.
That first afternoon we stay around the lagoon. All of the animals gravitate there. There’s a haze of insects. The birds step in and out of the water, delicately, like ladies. In the jungle it’s as if someone lit a match under every leaf. It shimmers with heat. Huge tropical rats with long silken tails run in circles, made crazy by the heat. Giant crabs scurry up the vines. Eventually, the lagoon grows shallow and its waters stagnate into a cesspool on top of which winged bugs float belly up, their tiny legs shriveled in morbid curlicues. At night it will become necessary to sleep under the cloth fuel covers to protect ourselves from the mosquitoes, and then being alive seems worse than death. To the heat and the mosquitoes there will be added the stench of dead marine life that the tide leaves behind on the reef.
After a while she gives up sleep and spends the nights roaming the beach, swatting away insects with her silk scarf.
The water in our tanks dried up and the dew on the leaves was whisked away by the sun. Our lips cracked and our tongues turned white. We drank what coconut milk we could, but it gave us grinding stomachaches. We sucked on the jungle leaves. We felt a mortal thirst; it throbbed in our chests and then it hurt. Nevertheless, each time our spirits sank, something would happen to renew our hope. Sometimes it was just a sunset. It was a beautiful sunset. It was the finest sunset of the heat wave, and the temperature seemed to intensify the colors. Or maybe our delirium did.
From the meager shade of the palms, I watch the fruit-punch colors of the sun reflect off the burnished metal of the Electra. It glistens like a mirage on the sand. It’s on fire, blazing. It reminds me of a sunset seen from a fire escape in New York City, the red sky coming down like a curtain over the purple Palisades. But the heat here doesn’t end, it seems incapable of ending. We play twenty questions. We talk to keep ourselves sane.
Somewhere, it’s raining, I say to Noonan.
I know, he says. Try not to think about it.
For long stretches of time we’re completely silent. Long after sunset we’re still sitting there, on the sand. I recognize the terror of the quiet, the silence of flying. Everything is moving, but everything is still.
In the middle of the night I woke up. I sat in the Electra and tried to console myself. I was so tired that I rested my head on the wheel and prepared to fall asleep and die. That was when I saw G.P., sitting next to me in the cockpit, smoking a cigar. I hadn’t thought about my husband for a long time. I had thought about a lot of figures from my past, but I had not thought about G.P. since the day the plane abandoned us, and I had assumed he’d given me up for dead. But now, as soon as I closed my eyes, he appeared to me, sitting next to me, smoking, first holding his cigar between his fingers, then puffing on it, then holding a telephone in his lap and handing me the receiver.
At first, it was a dream. G.P. would appear to me in my sleep, always next to me, smoking that cigar. He spoke to me, and I said something back. I couldn’t hear what I was asking and I didn’t understand what he answered, but I knew that we were talking in the cockpit of the Electra and then suddenly there was the shock of the fall, the fatal fall, and I woke up with a start.
It was still dark. I had long ago given up trying to see a plane on the horizon, but shortly before dawn a shimmering light seemed to rise up from the water and I looked out to sea. That was when I saw G.P. standing a few feet away from me on the beach, dressed in his familiar gray felt fedora and gray suit, his silk tie fluttering in the wind.
He stood there, waiting, for a long time, and then I got out of the plane and climbed down from the wing.
Hello, G.P., I said.
It’s so damn hot here, he said.
If this had been a dream, or a hallucination, I might have forgotten it. But I was awake, I was hungry and thirsty, I could hear the shattering surf.
Why didn’t you take the trailing wire for the radio? he asked me.
Because it was too long, it was a nuisance, I answered.
Why didn’t you put a signal on Howland Island? he said.
Because you wouldn’t let me. I raised my voice.
It seemed ridiculous that he was berating me now, and I wished he were only an apparition.
He said nothing. Then he lit himself a cigar and took a few puffs. The flame from his match illuminated his silver cuff link and cast a reddish glow, for an instant, over his face. He blew out the match and stared out into the darkness. Then, holding the lit cigar in his thick fingers, he pointed out to the ocean. I followed his direction with my gaze, and there they were: the crystalline lights of the Manhattan skyline, twinkling in the distance. For a long time I looked at the lights of the city, without happiness, without despair either, as if I were coming in for a landing after an ordinary, everyday flight.
The lights flit and sparkle. I ask G.P. if he will walk with me to the end of the beach so that I can get a better look at the city. But he isn’t ther
e. I’m standing on the beach, and as the sun comes up, the lights of Manhattan turn into early-morning stars. Another day of the heat wave dawns.
The water looks empty. Suddenly a fin slices through the surface. Then another, and another. They are circling, close together. They circle for several minutes, and then come two more and then three others, which are racing to join in. You can sense that they are coming in for a kill, and all of a sudden a fish leaps out of the water, freely, in a perfect arc. Then there is a mad rush toward the center, and then a flowering of red. It all happens very quickly. One fish floats up to the surface, its head torn off, and spins quietly.
I am exhausted with desire for my plane.
I crawl into the cockpit, in the heat of the day. My hands leave dark, wet palm prints on everything I touch. I want to take my Electra for another ride, I want to wheel above the clouds, to soar above this weather. I want to find weather that will cheer me up. I want to drink from the rain that rains beyond the sun. I consider actually starting the engine, using what little fuel we have left, and diving over the sun. I wish I could tell you what stops me, but I can’t. I’m still hoping, hope against hope.
I haven’t forgotten G.P. I haven’t forgotten the man with the hat. And I’m still on the island. It’s where I live, the only place I know how to exist. It’s in my plane, my Electra, burning on the beach, that I’ll write my story, my book. It’s the place where, later on, I’ll lift my way into the future. In my plane, all alone, I’m at work on the extraordinary preparations for my future. But during the heat wave I don’t know that yet. During the heat wave it’s impossible to think about the future.
•
I don’t know what happened to G.P. I don’t even know when he died. I assume he remarried, he always had to have a wife. It must have been a long time before he could fly. I wonder if he ever flew again. Actually, as I remember, he never really liked to fly.
Nine
LET ME TELL YOU what happened next, what it was like. It was like the end of the world.
We hid in the Electra for shelter. The rain drummed down on the beaten metal and the wind whistled in through the loosening screws. The navigator’s cabin still housed some of our charts—which now lay strewn on the floor, flattened by footsteps or curled up in giant cylinders—and the illuminated table, Noonan’s shoes, and his instruments. Through the specially installed windows we could see the palms bending in the storm, curving and tossing and throwing their hair in a tempestuous dance against death.
But before all this, there was the dry storm. The storm between the heat wave and the rain.
The heat wave lasted for several weeks, at the end of which we were strangers. We had changed so much, the heat had taken so much, we were strangers to ourselves. We spent our time together, but we barely spoke anymore. What was there to say? We were desiccated, blistered. Noonan had done everything he could: he’d built us shelter, he’d perfected his device for extracting water, he’d made us a little boat. But still the sun was too much for us. One day, he went out in his boat, and by the time he came back he was bleeding from the heat. He’d covered himself, but the sun had burned through his protection, and he was so cooked that his skin peeled and then bled.
It was at night that the electrical storm ignited. We hadn’t seen lightning for a long time, just sun, or haze, but now a bolt of lightning struck out at sea and crackled in the air, suspended for so long that it lit up the entire island. It was like being on a film set, with the giant lights. The bolt of lightning illuminated the sky. It made the night day. All of the color was washed out, but the light was there, deadly, supernatural. There was no rain, just electricity. The electricity was palpable in the air. The atmosphere tingled. The animals were terrified, but fascinated. They pricked up their ears. At first it felt exciting, and fresh. But it went on for a long time this way, the lightning crashing through the night, ferocious, blinding. Everything was waiting for the rain to come, but it didn’t. We were being teased. We’d waited so long you’d have thought we could have waited another night, but it was excruciating. The air felt menacing and alive. I didn’t know that you could expect that from nature, such manipulation, such deep anger.
It was a gray morning, the next morning, the morning the storm began. A Friday, I think it was. We had stopped counting the days. But then I started again, picking up where we had left off. It may not have been Friday anywhere else, but it was Friday on our island.
He told me to hide in the Electra. He’d been around the world on ships, he knew what he was talking about, but I challenged him. I didn’t believe him. I said it seemed that the Electra would be a dangerous place to go, that it might attract the lightning. He said the lightning was over, we’d seen the last of it.
And then he looked at me. No, he said. Actually, you’re right. I thought I would try to get us killed.
Night fell suddenly, in the middle of the day. Just as the first storm brought the daylight to the darkness, this one turned the sun black. First the clouds massed, then they turned purple, bruising before our eyes, and then a wind came down on a thousand horses and threatened to annihilate the island. It was one of those storms that was like a disease. When you are sick you can’t remember being well. During the storm it seemed as if there had never been any other weather, anything but storm.
We watched the storm from the Electra. Or, I watched it. Noonan smoked his pipe, he smoked so that the entire plane was filled with ribbons and then sheets of his smoke. He sat slumped in a corner, not caring about the storm, or caring so much that he couldn’t watch it. During the heat wave, he had thought about dying, but now here he was, still alive. He was alive and the storm was bringing us water, and fish, and, if not a reason to live, at least the possibility. But he was past possibilities.
I think it was then, during the storm, while we were waiting, that he finally understood what had happened to us.
In the morning the beach was transformed into a Sunday boardwalk, with coconuts and orchid petals and anemones and fish strewn about the sand like the remnants of a Saturday night.
She spends the morning watching the birds pick at the debris, she watches them fight over fish and pass over urchins, and she does not realize for quite some time that Noonan is among them, squawking and clucking and bickering. She sees him when he is already deeply engaged in conversation with a bird of paradise, gesticulating madly, with his radio in one hand and a piece of fish in his mouth. She calls out to him, but he doesn’t respond, and she sees him walk away from her, lost in argument with a bird, and then soon afterward she sees him round the bend of the beach and disappear from her sight.
Then she feels completely alone.
Three days later, on an exquisitely clear night, she found herself in the traditional state of a stranded islander, with a melancholy composed of memories and regrets, and too much time on her hands. Noonan had survived the storm with a poetic stoicism, taking their exile to its purest extreme. He appeared that night wearing flowers in his hair, he danced alone on the sand in the transparent moonlight, and before daybreak she decided that he was lost to her and to the rest of the world forever. Heartbroken with grief, she had gone to sit in the cockpit, where his singing couldn’t reach her, and she put on her goggles and her skullcap in an effort to overcome the desire to join him in his madness. It was a time of torment, which ended at dawn when she sighted the shore of her island through the broken windshield of her plane, and she decided once and for all that she had taken this journey in order to escape the madness of the world, that she didn’t give a damn if she was alone, she wouldn’t go crazy, and that she would live the rest of her long and brilliant life on this wild and desolate island.
It took her several days to turn her lean-to into a house, and then she felt she was home again. From the moment she hung a mirror over the makeshift mantelpiece and saw her reflection in the piece of aluminum that she had broken off from the navigator’s table, she felt that life was good again. She was still recognizable to her
self as herself, but she had a new expression. She could see in the atmosphere around her eyes that she had lived through something tremendous, in the way that people who have survived a traumatic experience or accident always look palpably changed. Her skin was brown, not just freckled, for the first time in her life. But she was so eager to finish fixing up her new house that she didn’t have the time to examine her features. She stuffed a bed with dried leaves and made a pillow out of her silk shirt. She fashioned a table and chair out of branches and twine. One day, when she was bored, she carved herself a set of utensils in the same pattern she’d eaten from at her grandmother Otis’s house. Before she put the last touches on the place she performed a symbolic act: she threw her silver compact into the ocean, and followed it with her eyes as it floated over the sharks, dipped between the waves, and disappeared into the Pacific. She was sure she would never need it again. There would be no more photographers.
The lagoon was calm the first morning she woke up in her new home. Above a bluish mist she saw the tops of the trees, emerald in the first light of day, and she saw the coconuts hanging in testicular arrangements, and orienting herself by the clusters of fruit, she located a nest of two birds, where she supposed the cooing lovers were still engaged, their beaks nestling into each other’s breasts. The idea broke her heart, but she did nothing to avoid it. For the first time, she took pleasure in her pain. The sun was getting hot as the mist lifted off the lagoon, where the countless aromas of opening flowers and decomposing mulch at the bottom of the water congealed into one pungent, unhuman smell. The screech of birds had begun, and gangs of frogs in water up to their necks snatched butterflies from floating leaves. She fried herself a banana over her metal stove. She had taken another piece of Noonan’s table and turned it into an oven, and from that moment on she was no longer bothered by the hothouse environment of her new home but was only aware of the sweet scent of sizzling fruit.
I Was Amelia Earhart (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 7
