It is impossible to tell from this distance whether the plane is friend or foe, American or Japanese, or someone else. If it’s an American plane, it would be waiting to see evidence of their presence before making a difficult landing. If it is Japanese, and since it is likely they have fallen into Japanese waters, it would be waiting for the same thing, and the appropriate time to pounce. They would not be treated kindly by the Japanese. They would not appreciate her presence: they would assume that she was a spy. Maybe they would feel the need to send her home, she is so famous, but maybe not: she is presumed dead. No one would know if they captured her. She could be valuable. She could be brought into Saipan on an enemy barge, pulled slowly, standing beside her Electra. She thinks about Noonan, what he would have to endure. She feels a fear spread like liquid through her body. She squints into the sky to see if the plane has come closer.
She considered the possibility that they were on the verge of being rescued. The mere idea stirred old desires. She thought about what used to be called home—the way she had when she first landed on the island, only this time her memories did not make her swoon with guilt and regret but instead made her tremble with fear. There was not much consolation. She looked up at the sky and the plane was still there. She started walking more quickly through the jungle.
As I walk back through the jungle to Noonan’s end of the island, everything looks changed. I have never seen the trees before. I have never seen the birds before, nor the rats or the coconut crabs. It is all different. I feel as I once felt coming home from a crack-up. I was driving from the airfield through the familiar streets of the city, and everything was new. They were watering lawns and playing catch in the street, and I pulled the car up onto the side of the road and watched. It was strange. Then I went on, and the sound of the car seemed to be far away, and everything seemed to be coming from a long way off, and I could hear the sound of the motor as if it were the sound of a radio playing two blocks away. I had crashed badly. It’s like that crossing the jungle.
In the jungle, the merciless heat. The great heroine leans against a tree, closes her eyes, lets the bugs sit on her shoulders, she’s used to them now. Sweat pours from her brown skin. She wipes it away with her silk scarf and the beads of perspiration form immediately as soon as she wipes it away. She smells the tropical, moist, dirty fragrance of the jungle. She hears the chirping and the whirring and the silence. She closes her eyes for a long time. While she closes them, the scenery changes. The pungency of the jungle softens to the smell of familiar flowers and an artificial scent: the scent of ladies’ perfume. The sound of the birds and the bugs relaxes into the sound of flutes, then horns, and then an entire band. At first she just stands there, with her eyes closed, breathing in the perfume and swaying to the swing of the band. When she opens her eyes, she is somewhere outside of New York, at a party, outdoors, on a wide veranda. The people are like long, tapering candles, a swarm of tuxedos and bias-cut silks. There are Japanese lanterns up in the trees, and a rolling lawn leading down to the water. Everything is lit, and fluttering, and painfully pretty. She sees people from her life dancing past her as she spins around on the dance floor, escorted by an invisible partner. She sees her father, dancing with Eleanor Roosevelt. The President is there, he’s leading the band, and G.P. is having a smoke by the water. The feeling of the party is ominous and beautiful, decadent and lost.
We went into hiding. We had already made our decision, but because it was impossible for us to discuss it and we needed time to get ready, we said we were hiding, but really we were getting ready. We were getting ready to go.
We slept during the day in the darkest part of the jungle, and at night we prepared the Electra. By now she had been ravaged by the elements, although she was still beautiful, in a ravaged way. Her skin was rusted and her seams were loose, we had looted her and vandalized her to decorate our houses, her windshield was broken. But she was our last hope, and we lavished our attention on her in those last hours. Noonan said he loved her because she reminded him of me.
He unrolled the charts and reset the chronometer. He found his glasses, which he had long since forgotten about. They had fallen into one of the water tanks. She filled up coconuts with water and plugged them with leaves. She cleaned off the dashboard. They checked the fuel. They had a little left. They hadn’t let themselves think about it, but now it seemed to them as precious as blood. They patched up the windshield. They mended the landing gear.
They don’t talk about it anymore. It’s understood that there’s something in the air, something coming to take away their happiness, a shark circling in the sky. They know they have very little time, that the plane must have spotted the Electra, and possibly even them, and will be coming to get them soon.
In the hammock she lies with her head on his chest. He puts his arm around her. He says it’s a good thing a plane’s finally come for them. It’s about time someone noticed they were missing. They are silent in the heat of the day. Sometimes he gets up to look through a hole in his shack at the sky. In the beginning, he used to get up to keep the fire going, but it’s been a long time since they made an effort to be seen, and now they keep the fire out.
She sleeps soundly but not deeply, with her head on his chest, and he wakes her up with his tears.
•
We still went at night for a swim in the lagoon. We behaved as usual, and for a while we both continued to find happiness on the raft. We’d make love on the raft and our love would seem more intense, as if it were taking place on a magic carpet drifting over the ocean. We’d lie next to each other, naked, under the milky night sky, until somebody turned off the moon. But now we had no energy, no strength for love. It happened suddenly, without our realizing it. Our bodies couldn’t pretend. They wanted nothing to do with leaving. Sometimes we were able to give each other pleasure, but it was painful. We did it anyway.
The wind has died down, and above the lagoon there’s the otherworldly light that precedes dawn. A few birds are wailing their broken songs. As they wail, the sun breaks through the clouds, criminal, and slices like a knife across the water.
Fear revives them. He tells her to get her belongings—she has hardly any, just her logbook, her scarf, a hat—and she does. They had thought of taking the life raft from the plane and setting out. There seemed to be nothing to lose. But there were the sharks and the heat, and the realization that it would be harder to die than to go on living. Once before, they had chosen death, but had nevertheless continued to live. Now, without speaking, they both head toward the Electra.
The navigator feels so alone at the thought of losing her. The pleasure he takes in her, in being with her, is the only pleasure he knows anymore. He can’t speak to her as they walk. He tries to take in the magnitude of their condition, but he can’t. Nothing matters but the possibility of losing her. He realizes that without doing anything he has fallen in love, beyond love, out of love into life. It was on that walk, on the way to the Electra, that he let himself feel the full sadness of what he had never had before.
In the jungle, he looks at her. He can’t stop looking at her, he sees her when his eyes are shut. He breathes her in, along with the smell of the jungle, his eyes shut, the jungle light electric blue behind his lids, the salty smell of her skin and her hair, he takes it in. In the jungle, in the dirty heat, he kisses her, and she kisses him, and they lie down together. They take each other on the floor of the jungle, and they know now that there is no difference between being rescued and being captured.
Part Three
.. heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out.
— EMILY BRONTË, Wuthering Heights
Twelve
IN THE ELECTRA the light is blue. There’s a smell of gasoline. The heat is heavy, there are no windows that open, so I leave the hatch up, but still the air is stifling.
I think maybe that he never said it, but that I only
heard him say it, in silence. We were looking at each other, very hard, and I heard him say it without speaking and I said it too. His words entered my heart soundless, directly.
There is a time known as the between. The between voyager travels through uncharted territory, navigating dangers, attempting passage into the next life. There are times in life, after a death of some kind, when we are open to the slightest shifts, when our powers are acute, when we can change the future. The between voyager temporarily possesses an immensely heightened intelligence, extraordinary powers of concentration, special abilities of clairvoyance and teleportation, flexibility to become whatever can be imagined, and the openness to be radically transformed by a thought or a vision or an instruction.
More people should know this. We should be taught this. This time never announces itself, never tells us it is here, or coming. But there are signs, and ways of preparing. Life is the preparation. I had been risking my life without living it before, so I wasn’t fully prepared when my time came. But I had a navigator. And so when my time came again, a second time, I was prepared.
Planes used to be vehicles for dreaming. They were strong and curvaceous, manly and womanly at the same time, simple, almost old-fashioned mechanical toys and vessels carrying the future. As soon as you saw a plane, you started dreaming. It was a thrill just to catch a glimpse of one. In Los Angeles, on hot nights, we used to drive out to the airfield and watch the military pilots practicing. Just landing and taking off. We did it to get away from the heat, and to dream even when we couldn’t sleep. Large parts of the world were without airplanes. Back then, and it’s not that long ago, most people in the world had never seen a plane, let alone been up in one.
Planes were not like ocean liners. They were not sprawling, they were intimate. They were not like towns with all the amenities of towns, they were like cars, or covered wagons. I think it was this, the intimacy of planes, the isolation, the privacy, the antisocial nature of flying a plane, this appealed to me. Everything that made ocean liner travel appealing ceased to exist in a plane. It was uncomfortable, you couldn’t eat well, you couldn’t dance or read a book. This was before many people started using planes for travel. Planes were mostly for mail, or for stunts. Many people still thought that airplanes were not for real people. That they were somehow ridiculous.
Takeoffs were not like ship departures. They were riveting, unpredictable, dangerous. There was not yet a ritual way of taking off in a plane, and each ascent was fraught with its own adventures. People have always departed, by land or sea, but to leave by air is still new, it is still a cause for wonder. Now, maybe by now, that’s not true anymore. But at the time I’m describing, to leave in an airplane is as magical as taking off on a spaceship. It’s a resurrection.
•
The Electra looked beautiful. She sat on the reef flat, enormous, expectant, waiting to take us away. But she didn’t seem to want to go any more than we did. When it was time to go I climbed into the cockpit, and Noonan sat next to me, in the cockpit. He didn’t go in back into the navigator’s cabin because his instruments were mostly lost or broken and we needed to be closer to each other. Before he climbed in he checked everything one last time. He made sure that there were no birds trafficking our makeshift runway. Then he shut the hatch behind him. I tied on my scarf. I put on my goggles. Then I waved one last wave to the island, a cheerful wave, but the kind that always made everyone weep, with excitement and with the sadness of saying goodbye. Then, very slowly, as if it were remembering how with all its might, the Electra lifted herself into the air. For a long time her distinctive shape could be seen rising toward the clouds. Many animals congregated on the beach and looked on, their heads lifting to follow the mysterious angel. And I thought I could see G.P. standing off to the side, the outline of the jungle juxtaposed archly behind him, his tie fluttering in the wind.
It was when we lifted above the first clouds, when the earth disappeared below us and the sky seemed to take up more space than the sea or the land, that I cried. I cried without letting Noonan see, because we were leaving together and there really wasn’t anything to cry about. I tried to cry without letting him know and then I couldn’t anymore and I just cried. He was silent and dark, sitting with his charts on his lap. I could feel that he was trembling. He was holding his glasses in his hand, and the glasses, they were trembling. He was overcome. I couldn’t bear to look. I stared straight ahead, like before, so long ago, that night, our last night in the sky. I knew he was thinking the same thing.
There was the mindless roar of the engine, the quivering of the fuel gauge, the hot white sunlight reflecting off the windshield, but there was no more bamboo fishing pole, there was no need for that. Above all there was the sky. The widest, the most serene, the Pacific sky, as empty as a mind at peace. Sometimes it stretched out before us with the clarity of a single thought. There seemed to be nothing between us and our flight.
Very late at night, during the flight across the Pacific sky, they had a talk. She was tired, the moon was dim, Noonan was quiet. He was resting with his eyes closed. Then he started talking. He said he’d once known a fellow who’d set himself on fire. He was a sailor. They were sailors together. He’d been shipwrecked, alone, for ten days on a raft in the Indian Ocean, but had managed to survive. He’d eaten the money in his pockets and killed a seagull. He’d finally drifted toward land. That was years before. When Noonan knew him, he was a gambler. They gambled together. One night, in port, they were in the south of France, they were at a casino, a first-class casino, playing roulette. And all of a sudden the sailor excused himself, put out his cigarette, walked out of the casino, and shot himself in the head. But he didn’t die. He went on living. The bullet lodged somewhere in his skull, but it didn’t kill him. A few years later, after more seafaring, he set himself on fire.
The story was incredible to her, and for a moment it seemed as if everyone’s story was fictional, as if all that was real were the bystanders, the people who told and retold the stories, not the characters themselves.
Later, she heard music. Not the music of Noonan’s harmonica, but a celestial music, the music of the night. It was a sarabande. There was a gentle trade wind blowing across the emptiness, and it carried the music on its back and spread it like stardust over the ocean. She heard it clearly, vividly—it was written on the wind with the elliptical clarity of a telegram. It was playing very slowly, deliberately, each note dropping evenly, inevitably, after the one before. And she thought about the man setting himself on fire, to music, the music she was hearing. It seemed so morbid and melodramatic a thing to be thinking. But then she thought of her own life, just for a moment, and she thought that it could be seen that way too, operatic, overblown. But it didn’t feel that way to her. It felt simple, and now, perfectly natural, as if it were an everyday river about to open onto a new sea.
The way of life is wonderful, she remembered. It is by abandonment.
Around her, the stars slept, not troubled or touched by the music. She felt a strong love for the night, and at the same time she realized that if her happiness were taken away from her, even Noonan, she would still be whole, with the same capacity for easy enjoyment from the world. She would not grieve. She had already done that. But she wished she could make everyone else feel how she felt, wished she could be sure that without her, he would still feel the perpetual revelations she felt. Then she would be happy. It was this feeling, and only this, that made her sad. That she might be leaving him with an unhappiness that he would not know how to cure. It was while she was thinking this that he opened his eyes and looked at her. His face was heavy.
Then he said, What are we having for dinner tonight?
Coconut, she said.
She doesn’t know how long it was after they left the island that they ran out of fuel, found themselves lost once again over the Pacific Ocean. It happened in the morning. The heat was terrible. Everything happened as it had happened before: the plane stalled, then sputtered, then
seemed to stop. She was frightened for a moment but then her sense of humor returned, and she guessed that somewhere, someone might be thinking she was a heroine.
When she woke from the lucid dream that carried her three thousand feet down, in a tumbling parade of images from the farthest reaches of her memory, her first impression was that she had died a violent death and gone directly to hell.
But this time she wasn’t afraid. She knew that when she opened her eyes she would find a new island, more beautiful than the last, with the palm trees taller and more elegant, the beach wider and softer, the surf more accepting, calm.
•
It was true. Their brains intoxicated with the familiar smell of the sea, their bodies weak with hunger and exhaustion, they crawled out of the wreckage and looked around. It was just what she had expected. The wind was gentle. The air smelled like gardenias. The Electra had had a bad fall, but she was still standing. Her wings gleamed in the sunlight and cast long, graceful shadows, as if they were resting on the sand. Noonan walked down to the water and waded in up to his knees. She thought that with his long dark hair, his brown skin, and his long, brown limbs, he looked like a horse, naturally regal, looking out over the water.
I’ve told my story. I’ve written it in my pilot’s log. I’ve read it to Noonan, who likes it very much. But he says that if anyone ever read it, they wouldn’t believe it. They’d say that it was a fantasy.
I’d say to them, If it is, then what have I been doing all these years?
I Was Amelia Earhart (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 9
