The man’s head resembled a melted red candle.
Mama’s migraine, Adams thought, then someone whisked him out of the room. “There’s nothing to see, nothing to see,” a man said, holding people back.
He asks his colleagues at breakfast if they happened to hear a cat in the night. They shake their heads. One young geologist says his bunk is right below the pumps. “Can’t hear a thing.”
“You hear lots of funny noises at sea,” says Harry Schock, the senior geologist. “The jibboom creaks, sails tear, bolts rattle. It doesn’t mean anything. You get used to them. You’ll see.”
A few nights later, after dinner, Adams strolls the deck. The breeze gets cooler each evening; the air becomes thinner.
Human beings were not made to live in this environment. Though he’s glad of the assignment, sometimes he misses the quiet of his kitchen.
He wonders if the kids will forget him. For the first time since leaving the States, he hopes the trip is brief.
He’ll bring them something special. A piece of the North Pole. Better yet, he’ll make them a map, the way he used to do when they were small. Brick roads, waterfalls, mountains. The princess who slept on the pea, Brer Rabbit, the three little pigs.
This time he’ll make a magical map of the north with mythical beings like Gog and Magog roaming the Ural Mountains, waiting to break loose and storm through Europe, eating everyone in sight. He returns to his cabin, unrolls a sheet of paper. With a grease pencil he marks the center of the page longitude seventy-five degrees, latitude fifteen degrees north, the approximate location of Desire Provoked.
In swirling script at the bottom of the page he warns that vipers inhabit the sea: “Sailor Beware: They Will Shake a Ship to its Rafters Like a Happy Child Dancing in His Bones.”
Carol says, “My father used to take the family on vacations through Texas and New Mexico. He’d point out the geological features: ‘Mount Capulin, that’s a volcano. See how the land here is flat and smooth? Lava has evened it out.’ Or, ‘This is the Permian Basin—it used to be under water.’ His explanations were far more interesting than the places we stayed.”
Adams nods. They’ve taken roast beef from the galley and climbed up on deck with it. Already the air has chilled the meat.
“I guess what he taught me,” Carol says, “is that knowing how something works doesn’t diminish its beauty. From a distance a mountain is gorgeous, right, then you get up close and it’s just a bunch of rocks. But then if you look at the rocks, the mountain seems more amazing than ever. The way the mica shines or the sulfur rubs off on your hands.”
“I just like to know where everything is,” Adams says. “In case I need it.” Carol laughs. “I remember seeing a book in the library as a child. I never read it, but the title stayed with me. It was called You Must Know Everything.”
“Exactly,” Carol says, balancing her plate on the ship’s copper rail. “That’s how I felt, growing up. And I love what I’m doing now, but sometimes I wonder if I’d followed other options…”
“It’s good that you wonder.”
She smiles. Adams feels attractive.
“Well, I can’t change it,” she says, inadvertently brushing his sleeve. “There are lots of things—and lots of people—I’d like to get to know.”
On his map for the kids Adams draws an Island of Beautiful Women.
Than invites Adams to his cabin. Iťs amazing what he’s done with the space. Books stacked neatly in corners. Photographs of his family. An old Vietnamese flag taped to the wall. The flag is gold, with three thin red stripes running parallel through the center. Circular stains, as though someone had set a can of varnish on it, appear in one of the corners.
Than was trained at UCLA. His family remained in Saigon until the end of the war, he says, when they escaped with the last Americans.
“What was Saigon like at the end,” Adams asks.
“For a long time it wasn’t Saigon. It was a French city—like paintings of Paris, you know? Wide boulevards in the center of town, security apartments for the French civil servants. My father said a French laborer could earn more money in Saigon than a Vietnamese merchant. In school the courses we took were based on the classical French tradition. Languages and literature.” He laughs. “My family complained I was getting an elitist education that wouldn’t help me in my own country. When Ho Chi Minh ran the French out of the northern provinces, my father, who was not a Communist, cheered.
“Anyway, Saigon became an American city, very flashy and noisy. Money changing hands. The army tried to clean it up so it would look prosperous and democratic on the news. The cameras never showed the edge of the city where American products were dumped.”
“I remember wondering before they changed the city’s name if I was going to have to take Saigon off the map.”
Than nods. He lights a kerosene lamp, offers Adams a cup of tea. “The first thing the American military did was to lay a new set of coordinates on the country, ignoring the old boundaries. Aggression is not always physical.” He sits on his bunk. “Sometimes it takes place in the imagination. The West forced values on Vietnam that had no place in its culture. For example, here you divide the mind into conscious and unconscious. All very rational. In the East it’s generally believed that the mind is unknowable, that its processes are more intuitive than rational.”
“How did you get interested in science?”
“Naturally, many of us do value rational thought.”
“Knowledge is comforting,” Adams says.
Than agrees. “But on the most basic issues, I think education fails.”
From A.D . 300 to 500 pilgrimages were the fashion in western Europe, from Britain to the Orient and points in between. They were not scientists, these solitary travelers on their way to the Holy Land. The first geographical documents in Europe, however, grew out of these pilgrimages. Early records are scanty, but they do mention a Gallic matron who in A.D . 31 walked across Europe to the Holy Land and returned with a shell filled with the blood of John the Baptist, murdered that year by Herod Antipas.
The first authentic guidebook dates from A.D . 330: the Itinerary from Bourdeaux to Jerusalem, a route to the Holy Land via southern Europe. Though mapless, it mentions cities and towns along the way, with listings of hotels and inns. The unknown author traveled on donkeys and records that the distance from Bour-deaux to Constantinople is 2,221 miles, with 112 stops and 230 changes of animals.
There are no cats aboard Desire Provoked, yet Adams is awakened by a whine. He’s hot and muggy under the covers. The ship rocks. His left hand, limp with sleep, thumps the metal wall above his head. He listens. Again, as though the hull were being sheared.
Is there a psychological trigger for these sounds? Does the fact that he misses Toby and Deidre, for example, have a bearing on what he hears, the way latitude affects the location of a city on a map? A reasonable explanation, but the kids never had cats, unless you count the stray…
The hold is quiet. He lies awake for a while, remembering the children’s faces, then turns to the wall and sleeps.
From the deck of Desire Provoked Adams spots the first piece of ice in the sea. A small fragment, about the size of a Victorian chest of drawers.
He shivers. Long johns, two cotton shirts, a pull-over sweater, a jacket, a parka, and still he is cold. Fog hits the sails, spreading them like a bellows. They are the color of biscuits. He hunkers down against the bow. He has been reading accounts of Arctic explorers. Pytheas from Massilia—a contemporary of Aristotle’s—wrote that six days north of Ireland was an island named Thule, near the frozen sea. From there northward, he reported, there was no longer a distinction between earth, air, and sea, but a strange combination of all three, a gelatinous suspension similar to a jellyfish, which made navigation, not to mention human life, impossible.
Carol taps on his door, offers him a cup of coffee. He invites her to have a seat on his bunk, lights the kerosene lamp. She picks through the sketches he h
as made for his kids.
“Let me show you,” he says. He’s fashioned a square mat of old palm fronds found in the ship’s storage room. Placing his fingers on the edge of the mat, he wiggles the yellow fronds. They appear to ripple. “A living map,” he says. “Wave movement.” He drops tiny seashells onto the mat. “These are the islands.”
“It’s wonderful,” Carol says. “And these?”
“Sketches for another map—a mythical guide to the north.”
“They’re delightful. Do you mind?” She goes through the stack. Watching her long fingers shuffle paper reminds Adams of von Frisch’s famous experiments with honeybees in 1954. The scouts would locate a pollen source and then report, dancing, to the hive. The shape of the dance indicated the distance of the pollen source from the hive. A circular dance meant “nearby,” a tail-wagging dance meant “far.”
Adams is oddly touched that bees should have a spatial sense. Carol’s dancing fingers are oddly touching, too. He sits nearer, brushing her hip.
The ocean at night breaks white and black. On deck a forgotten coat, stiff with salt, raises an arm to him as he approaches the bow. He’s far from the flat country that made him—far from himself in sleepless longing for his kids. He must want to stand here tonight, turning colder with each new rush of spray.
The rigging thunders with the sails like horses rocking in their stalls. He must want to hear this. He remembers accompanying his father to a neighbor’s ranch when he was ten or eleven years old. Cowboys, drunk, hugging each other, a mare who bit herself in the back giving birth. Sometimes he watched the neighbors’ wives haul baskets of laundry out under the webworms’ silk. The women cracked pecans in the grass and strung their clothes between the trees. Peaches barely made it through each burning spring; his father washed his father with a sponge.
Tonight it’s all one sound: water and wind, memory and breath. He would like to say some of this to Carol Richardson. Because of his desire for her. He would like to tell her about intimacy and maps, the direction of the hands: He’s put the old man to bed now, Carol. His father’s whiskers float in a bowl of water and he looks at me, thinking something I can’t name. Outside, a foal is trying to stand.
He pulls a practice pad from his bag, takes out his sticks, and does an extended roll. He had thought life in the cold would be slow. Instead each moment is crisp, the days divided into abrupt little scenes. He tries to imagine the island of ice. Like the ocean, it is blank, ever-changing—defined for him only in texts, where words and lines can guide his eye.
On a rotating basis, members of the crew are allowed to use the communications equipment for personal business.
“How are you, honey?”
There is a moment’s delay and a slight echo of his own voice before Deidre finally answers, “I’m hungry.”
“Well, tell Mommy to fix you a sandwich.” “I did already.” “Do you miss me?”
“Yes. Come home and watch me dance.”
“I will soon. I love you.”
Toby says “Hi.”
“How’s school,” Adams asks.
“Fine.”
“You taking care of your sister?”
“I’m trying not to bug her.”
“I’m going to bring you something special.”
“Great.”
Pamela comes on the line. “Take care of yourself, Sam.”
“I will. Anything you need?”
“A straitjacket for Toby.” She laughs. “Otherwise everything’s smooth.”
“I’ll call again as soon as I can. They don’t give us much time on this thing.” (Conversations must be as brief as possible, and messages must be truthful, according to the manual.)
Adams overhears Carol talking to a young man in Austin, Texas. “Remember the Willie Nelson concert when you took off your shirt?”
He wishes he knew guitar. It’s hard to play Willie Nelson on a practice pad.
“Have you heard noises at night?” They are sitting on Carol’s bunk.
“I sleep like a baby at sea. What kind of noises?”
“Like cats, close to the hull. But I can’t locate them.”
“Maybe your bunk’s near a stress point.” She lowers the kerosene lamp.
“Tell me about your friend in Austin.”
Carol lies back on the bunk. “We lived together for a while. His name is Jack,‘ she says. “Neither one of us wanted to settle down, really. We agreed to see other people, he moved out.”
“And?”
“I don’t know.” She sits up on one elbow. “I’m jealous of the women he meets. And the men I’ve gone out with may as well have died in a war or something. I think, sometimes, a whole generation of American men has been ruined. They say the first World War wiped out every English boy between seventeen and thirty—well, that’s how it feels. Like nuns have been sending brain waves out to all the men in the country, fucking them up forever.”
“What’s wrong with them? Us?”
“You’re always running. I swear, the business world is full of these asexual men living by the clock, putting all their energy into contracts and torts and things. I mean, careers are important and all, but there’s an inordinate number of guys out there whose lives are nothing but careers. And I think a lot of men are turning gay because they’re fucked up about women.”
“You’re not serious.”
Carol shrugs. “Something’s going on. They couldn’t handle Women’s Lib or Vietnam or something. American men are just wimps.”
“Was Jack a wimp?”
“He couldn’t make a commitment. But then neither could I, I’m not being fair. It’s just that … my feelings are hurt.” Adams rubs her neck. “I feel rejected when I want to feel enjoyed.”
Adams smooths her dark hair (she is fragrant), holds his lips against her temple. “I’m over forty,” he says. “I’m fucked up, but maybe in different ways than you’re used to.”
Carol smiles. He holds her breast. “Not so hard,” she whispers. They rock with the motion of the ship. She has opened the port above her bunk and soon their hair is glistening with salt spray.
Carol’s hips are narrow—he feels that he will break her. “It’s okay,” she says, pulling him closer against her. She wets the tip of a finger and rubs his nipple. Her touch is so light he can barely feel it, yet he is tingling in his shoulder, all the way down to his elbow, where a pool of sensation has him frozen. They are awkward with each other, out of synch. He begins to think of Pamela, Jill … but Carol is a surprising lover. She becomes daring, excited when he least expects it, gripping the base of his neck, pulling him down. Before they are through, she has brought him back to her.
He is twelve years Carol’s senior, Mesozoic to her Paleozoic, Cretaceous, reptilian, seed-bearing, of relatively short duration, whereas she is Carboniferous, amphibian, seaweed and spore, full of new life testing its legs. If they grow together they will never be together. Her Shepherd Kings will just be setting up shop in northern Egypt while his Joan of Arc is being burned at the stake. In the night she reaches for him with affection and assurance.
Icebergs: yellow mist, yellow ocean. The wooden rigging of Desire Provoked looks yellow in the fog. Adams sips hot yellow tea, leans against the railing. A giant slab of ice breaks the mist, water lapping its base. To the port side another slab, then another, like one-story office buildings. Their movements are abrupt, broken by the sea. Quietly Desire Provoked slides past them, its sails lax and yellow.
When Adams and Carol make love, they stroke each other carefully. Their hands are rough from handling rope. Twice a day they are asked to assist the regular crew in raising and lowering sails. The ropes are smooth and white, made of polyester fibers, but burn when tugged through the hand. Gloves don’t help much. To keep the ropes from chafing, the crew has wrapped them in pieces of leather or split pieces of garden hose.
Adams has learned the eight essential knots that every seaman needs: the figure eight, the square knot, the sheet bend, t
he bowline, the clove hitch, the doublehalf hitch, the fisherman’s hitch, and the rolling hitch. In the evenings, when the wind is steady, Adams’ task is to tie the jib sheets to the clew, accelerating ship’s speed. Adams gazes at the sails. They are beautiful white surfaces, curved with the wind. He remembers Deidre sticking her arm out the car window (a habit he tried to break). When she held her palm flat, her arm was forced straight back, but when she cupped her hand, she felt less stress. Desire Provokeďs sails work on the same principle. He imagines maps painted on the canvas, vivid colors pointing home.
“Magnetic north is located at about seventy-six degrees north, a hundred and one degrees west,” the helmsman explains. “It’s not the same as true north, which lies almost directly beneath the polestar, so we’ve got to make adjustments. I prefer old-fashioned potato navigation myself. You toss the potatoes ahead of the ship as you go. When you don’t hear a splash, you turn the son-of-a-bitch fast.”
One of the engineers manages to collect small sections of an iceberg as Desire Provoked, in still waters, floats by. Adams takes a piece about the size of a golf ball, and with bright red colors draws on it the petals of a flower. After supper he presents it to Carol. She holds it in her palm, and slowly they watch the flower melt.
In 1613 William Baffin piloted one of seven ships fitted out by the Muscovy Trading Company, and traveled to Spitsbergen to fish and whale.
From Baffin’s journal: “Upon this land there be manie white beares, graie foxes, and great plentie of deare; and also white partridges, and great store of white fowle, wilde geese, sea pigeons … and divers others, whereof some are unworthy of naming as taste-ing. The land also doth yield much drift wood, whales finnes … and some times unicorn homes.”
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