Desire Provoked

by Tracy Daugherty

  “It’s like not being able to read.” The voice is cold. “Imagine a grown man with no education trying to figure out his income tax or a newspaper headline or the warning label on a can of pesticide. That’s death.”

  Adams says, “What can’t you do?”

  “It’s not so bad, not so bad. We have our share of erotic moments, though don’t ask me how. I think, somehow, we’re more purely erotic without our bodies, as if the soul or energy that animated our arms and legs were not spirit or chemical reaction or electricity, but desire. But I don’t know. You’d have to ask one of the others. Some of these guys seem to know what’s going on here. I don’t. You know what I miss? Eyes. I never realized how important eyes are.”

  Rosa opens her eyes and his grandfather is gone. Adams gazes out the door. Tombstones, lighted houses. Children making food with the mud beneath a tree.

  His mother airs a bedroom for him. She is stooped and dark. A searing headache. “Hand me my pills,” she says, folding a wet cloth on her forehead.

  “How’s Dad?”

  “You’ll see the old coot tomorrow. I invited him over for supper.”

  “Good. Can I get you anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Good night, son.”

  Adams sets his glass of water on a nightstand by the bed. The moon is full. He is reminded of a night long ago. In the afternoon his mother had taken him shopping. On the way home he saw in the window of an antique store a set of toy musketeers hand-carved by a London cobbler in 1836: a toothpick army dressed in red tunics, black caps, and white belts, with brown ammunition bags on their backs. Some stood, aiming rifles. Others knelt. Still others manned tiny wooden cannons. Adams’ mother let him stand in front of the window while she ran to the jewelry store down the block.

  Adams pressed his fingers to the glass, pretending to thump the wounded soldiers. Then he noticed, next to the little brigade, a display of nautical equipment: a brass telescope, a pocket watch made of gold, a silver gyroscope, and an old-fashioned rod wound tight with string. Lying open next to the rod was a captain’s log bound in leather. The ink had faded to the color of a sparrow’s wing. Adams couldn’t read the words but he made out the date, 1798, in the upper right-hand corner of the page. Next to the log, another wonder: the captain’s survey kit. Inside, encased in blue velvet folds, a wooden straight-backed compass, a ruling pin, and a divider. The instruments gleamed, their edges precise. Adams knelt closer to the glass.

  Just then the shopkeeper appeared. He wore a gray suit and a tie as red as the wooden soldier’s coats. He placed his right hand on a gold-leaf globe the size of a small freezer on the floor next to him, and his left hand on a Louis Quatorze chair. He scowled at Adams—he’d smudged the window. Adams turned and ran. He received a scolding from his mother, who’d searched for him for half an hour, but it didn’t matter. That night, curling up in his sheets, he felt himself wrapped in velvet, the moon gleaming between the folds.

  His father heats bread and thick potatoes. His face above the boiling water’s light stands out, stung by the hot Nebraska air. Without words he tells Adams, “You descend from a man without foresight and are handicapped by the need to go on.”

  The bales behind his house are cut and carelessly stacked. Throughout the morning, combines graze on the fields; they are willful, with solid arms. Adams thinks, “This is my father’s home, a scraped rock. People cry in the middle of the day and I don’t know what to do with them.”

  Last night dust poured through the air vents like salt. A jug of fresh water waited to dry on the kitchen table. Adams cleaned the things he’d kept and went to see the river fish stirring up mud.

  Okra, creamed corn, cauliflower, fried chicken, and rice. Tumblers of iced tea. Adams’ father is quiet. His mother chatters about her church friends, passes biscuits and salad, asks about his upcoming trip.

  After supper, Adams’ father says to him, “Let’s go for a spin.”

  They get in his pickup, an old black Ford, and drive to the miniature golf course. A Monday night, it’s closed. Adams’ father unlocks the gate and they stroll the carpeted greens. Windmills, castles, and moats flank the fairways under sodium vapor lights. As they walk, Adams’ father knocks a blue ball ahead of them with a putter.

  On all sides of the course, cornstalks scrape one another. Diesels moan on the highway.

  “So you let your wife get away from you?” Adams’ father says.

  “Looks that way.”

  “Man ought not to let his wife get away from him.”

  “Not if it’s not for the best,” Adams says. “What’s that mean?” The old man sends the ball past a Plexiglas squirrel.

  “What about you two,” Adams asks. “That’s a different situation.” “How?”

  “We’da killed each other.”

  A large metal buffalo blocks their path. They step around it.

  “How you gonna get her back?”

  “I’m not,” Adams answers. “She filed for divorce. I agreed to it.”

  “Hell, boy.” Adams’ father swipes at a weed growing through a crack in the carpet. “That’s bad business.”

  Adams watches the weed sail over the head of a mermaid curled alluringly on the edge of the thirteenth green.

  “It ain’t an easy path, Lord knows, but a man ought to be able to hang on to his women.”

  The blue ball swings around the mermaid’s fin and into the cup.

  “You’re right,” Adams says.

  He phones Kenny, then Otto.

  “You’re going to freeze your ass off, boy.”

  “Probably. Listen, do me a favor and check on Pam and the kids while I’m gone, all right? Just give them a call.”

  “If Pammy’ll talk to me. She’s a good girl, but she listens to her father.”

  “Make her talk to you. Don’t let her treat you that way.”

  “Pammy does what she wants. You know that by now. But I’ll try.” “Thanks, Otto.”

  “Keep a hot potato in your pants. You’ll need it.”

  On the computer Adams simulates world climate, concentrating specifically on the northern hemisphere. He types in a climate model developed by North, Short, and Mengel of the Goddard Space Flight Center, calls a world map to the screen, and averages temperatures for the month of July over a period of a hundred and fifteen thousand years. A hundred and fifty thousand years ago glaciation covered North America and most of Eurasia. If the temperature at high northern latitudes remains below zero degrees Celsius in the summer months, ice builds slowly over decades. Presently, July temperatures fall below freezing only in Greenland and Antarctica.

  Otto is right about his ass.

  In the company’s small library next to the coffee room he reads about a man named Milankovitch, a Yugoslav astronomer who insisted, early in the twentieth century, that the glaciation of eighteen thousand years ago (earth’s most recent ice age) was caused by a small variation along the earth’s axis and in the shape of the earth’s orbit around the sun.

  Using Milankovitch’s figures as well as more recent data, Adams predicts that continental ice sheets have an oscillation period, based on earth’s orbit, of roughly a hundred thousand years. He projects on the screen a simulation of continental drift and discovers that Antarctica iced over about thirty thousand years ago, after it had separated from South America and was isolated from warm equatorial waters.

  Presently there is less ice on the earth’s surface than there has been at any time in the past hundred and twenty thousand years. Though he knows it makes no difference in his travels, Adams is somewhat comforted by the fact.

  The kids want to go for a walk in the park that Pamela takes them to, where the zoo is, and the public golf course. Adams anticipates a dreadful day, explaining what little he knows about lions, as he did when the kids were small, but the zoo is not on their list. They just want to walk.

  It is a cool spring afternoon. The par
k is fresh, wet pines snapping under a whitecap of mist. On still days deer sometimes skip across the fairways—briefly, always a surprise—and disappear into the pines. Beyond the trees, wheat and corn sway dryly in tight little rows.

  “Will you bring us something, Daddy?” Deidre says. “From that place you’re going to?”

  “Of course I will.”

  Toby, predictably, is quiet.

  A V of grackles swings from the sky. Adams pulls his sweater tight around his chest. The black birds work their beaks into a collective sound like air leaking from a hose, and settle on the golf course several yards ahead. A field of black poppies, wings lifting like petals before growing still. Adams can feel his children’s bodies—first Toby’s, then Deidre’s—break from his hands as the children rush toward the birds, flapping their arms. The grackles rise at once, gyre toward the trees, circle up, then right, descending again toward the kids, then wheel over Adams’ head and are gone. Strings of mist break from the trees where the birds have made a hole, the children, meanwhile, laughing.

  Part Six

  WORDS for the sea:

  swnrde

  brimes

  yðe

  wiægholm

  sund

  eoletes

  In Old English the sea is called “swan road” or “whale road,” the pouting or billowy track. A ship is called a wave-traverser (yð1ida) or simply sea-wood.

  A flight to London, a journey by car to northern England, past Penrith and Glassonby, then into the country where Adams visits Long Meg and her Daughters, a set of ancient stones in an uneven field of gravel and broom. Legends say that Long Meg, the largest rock, was a witch, and the surrounding fragments her coven. In the days of the Celts, the witches met on this spot until Michael Scot, a Scottish wizard, turned them into stone. If the rocks are chipped or scratched, it is said, they bleed. Adams approaches Long Meg. He can smell the salt in the air, the powerful scent of the broom. Dust-spots fly off the rock and shower his coat in the breeze. He cannot imagine stones—any stone, not even a stone at the bottom of the sea—moving. Surely they drop from the sky and remain where their great weight has placed them.

  North from England. In late summer Svalbard is effectively cut off from the rest of the world. The North Atlantic freezes over in winds forecasting autumn, lean chunks of ice imperil ships, commercial air flights are canceled. Only Braathen’s SAFE lands on Spitsbergen, the largest island of the Svalbard group, on a permafrost landing strip in Advent-dalen, the largest outpost. Comtex, however, has made its own arrangements. In Edinburgh, along with a small crew of geologists and engineers, Adams boards a four-hundred-ton, one-hundred-and-fifty-foot square-rigger named Desire Provoked after a point in Hudson Bay.

  A shark’s tail hangs from the jibboom, a voluptuous wooden maiden leads the ship into the cold Atlantic spray.

  Adams stores his pack in a small cabin belowdeck. The hull is new—freshly painted metal. The cabin smells of varnish. Wooden bunk, blanket, and a quilt. A small hand mirror fastened to the wall.

  One of the crew members gives the scientists a tour belowdecks. “We’ve recently renovated the entire ship,” he says. “It was originally built in England around the turn of the century and traded mainly in sugar, rum, and mahogany. Then a Swedish exporting firm bought it, reduced it to a barkentine, and put an engine in. After the Second World War, it kicked around the Mediterranean for a while before winding up in a Greek scrapyard. Then, in ‘79, Comtex purchased and restored it.”

  He shows them the galley, the heads, and the engine room. Oil and steam. Standing water. Fresh paint. Already Adams feels cold.

  The sixteenth century saw the first sea charts printed on paper. On board Desire Provoked, Adams discovers that paper doesn’t work at sea. Documents he has packed soon become soft and moist. On deck, maps shred in his hands or become so wet with spray that the ink begins to run. The crew’s maps, printed on vellum, still tear. The pilot depends for the most part on the compass and electronic equipment.

  In his bunk, jostled softly against the hull, Adams realizes he’s never known the past. He knows its maps, but they’re only paper, bound in books or displayed in museums. The seamen’s actual charts must have been destroyed at sea or reduced to illegibility. Maps printed for the public were based on explorers’ notes, or on hearsay. The most accurate information was lost. In this sense the past has broken free, like ice from a glacier, making its way over distance.

  In all there are twenty-three scientists aboard Desire Provoked: eleven geologists, eight engineers, one landman, two marine biologists, and Adams. He has touched base with only a handful of his colleagues. The geologists he likes—they’re openly curious about their surroundings. Engineers he finds aloof. An exception is Than Nguyen, a drilling engineer from South Vietnam on his first international assignment. Adams enjoys filling him in on the do’s and don’t’s of fieldwork.

  The only other person who especially interests him is a young geologist named Carol Richardson, a recent graduate of the University of Texas. As the only woman aboard, she receives much attention from her colleagues and it’s hard to get a private moment with her.

  After dinner one evening, Adams finds her alone on deck. She is striking, Candice Bergen with dark hair. Eyes that seem to wander on their own to the sides of her face, slightly out of focus. This has an unsettling effect, but the tension in her brow, when she concentrates and brings her vision back into line, is disarming. She appears angry and confused, then her face relaxes, her forehead pale and even. She stands at a distance from Adams, arms withdrawn, defensive.

  “Do you have a cigarette?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I don’t smoke,” Adams says.

  “I quit two years ago, but I’ve wanted one ever since coming aboard.”

  “Nervous?”

  “Fidgety. The cabins are so small. I’m used to lots of space—spreading my stuff out all over the place. You’re the cartographer?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have a terrible memory for faces, but I remember you from the briefing.” She points to her eyes. “Plus I can’t wear glasses out here. The spray.”

  “Ever been north?”

  “Never strayed far from Texas. Until now.”

  “I was in Alaska in the summer of ‘67. People on Svalbard consider that the tropics.”

  Carol laughs. “I’m intrigued by what I’ve read of the island. I must say I never bargained for work like this.”

  “More comfortable in an office?”

  “I figured I’d go into academics, like the rest of my family.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “No money in thought. Besides, when it comes to hiring, colleges are even more sexist than the private sector. It’s the tenure system. Bunch of cavemen in the department at UT.”

  He wonders if in her view he’s a caveman, wrapped tightly in his parka, trying to imagine her without a heavy coat. She smiles. They talk for a few minutes more before, chilled by a sudden squall, walking down the stairs of the companionway together.

  A cat’s mewling wakes Adams in the middle of the night. The sea is calm. He gets up, pulls on his pants, carefully makes his way down the narrow metal walkway between quarters in the hold. The officers are asleep. He climbs the metal stairs. No movement on deck. The canvas sails whip like towels in the wind. Adams’ throat is dry. He licks his lips, swallows. Salt in his nose, his mouth. His body is being reduced to its essentials.

  He stands beneath the mizzenmast, listening to the sea. Two sailors on watch smoke cigarettes in the curve of the bow. Adams is learning the ship: bowsprit, foc’sle, foremast. Poop deck at the rear. The guests’ quarters are located in the hold, below the pumps.

  At night, when a gale rises unexpectedly, Adams hears the cry “Aloft and stow!” The canvas, trapping too much wind, must be bound with gaskets; if not, the highest sails would blow away.

  Tonight all is quiet except for the cat sounds. Adams returns down the companionway, pauses by the
galley. Pots and pans rattle, but don’t account for the noise. Pumps hiss, otherwise the hold is silent. He returns to his cabin, lights the kerosene lamp beside his bunk, picks up The Travels of Amerigo Vespucci, and reads.

  Ancient visions of the other world (prior to Dante’s cosmography) depicted the mysterious regions as an island or a group of islands reached by crossing a water barrier. In these accounts the ocean often is dense with swords.

  The only image of the Underworld Adams remembers from college is the punishment of Tantalus: Having angered the gods, he was placed in cool water up to his neck. Luscious grapes hung above his head. When he bent to drink, the water turned to dust. When he stretched his tongue for the grapes, they rose out of reach. Perhaps spatial expressions such as “over my head” and “I’ve had it up to here” spring from this. “Underworld” itself is a spatial expression, remarkably resonant even today. Ways of seeing, understanding. He remembers, as a child, questioning his ability to see. “Can’t you see I’ve got a headache?” his mother said. He asked her what the headaches did. “They make the whole world red.” He didn’t see until the afternoon he noticed a melted red candle on the kitchen table. Wax had dripped down the golden stem of the holder onto the tabletop glass. He imagined a candle burning inside his mother’s head.

  One afternoon, playing in back of the house, Adams heard a sputtering in the sky, getting louder. A small airplane came into view just above the tree line, climbed, then fell again, close to the ground. Adams ran inside to tell his mother. She was lying in the bedroom with the blinds drawn, a cool rag over her eyes. She told him to hush, she had a splitting migraine. He rushed to the window, parted the blinds. “There’s nothing out there,” she told him. “Now leave the blinds alone.”

  The plane rolled wildly out of control, trailing a plume of smoke. Adams ran outside and watched from the back porch as it dipped, its right wing just missing the water tower at the end of the block. There was a flash of light, a scattering of wood in the air. Adams ran down the block past a gathering crowd. The plane had come apart above the neighborhood and was lying out of sight. A gaping hole in the roof of a nearby house. Adams shoved his way past spectators at the front door, followed a group of men to the bathroom. Lying in the tub, a man in a crumpled suit, arms and legs at impossible angles. A thin line of water leaked from the faucet. Washcloths covered the floor.