—marian graves
Malm?, Sweden
55°32? N, 13°22? E
February 2, 1950
10,471 nautical miles flown
Eddie is in bed, in a dark hotel room, under a plump white goose-down duvet. By some miracle, he is safe and warm and alive. Out the window, snow falls on a small city square, a smooth layer swelling upward, butter-yellow in the streetlights. The buildings are narrow, with steep roofs and tidy rows of windows, snow on their sills.
They had planned for Oslo, but a storm had made landing there impossible. “Where else?” Marian had shouted above the crash and rattle of the plane, and he had gone to his charts and set his fingertip on Malm?, at the southern tip of Sweden. At least they had not been over water. If they were to crash, he’d thought, please let it be into solid earth. By radio, through waves of static, he had pieced together that conditions at Malm? were poor but not murderous. Somehow he had found the airfield. Somehow Marian had landed the plane. Bulltofta Airport. He remembers hearing about damaged bombers making forced landings there in the war rather than flying all the way back to England.
The gently falling snowflakes, the tiny bits of frozen lace sifting through the streetlights, seem so delicate, so innocent, but they are emissaries from a black, blind fury that, even now, hangs over the orderly roofs, the pious steeples and meticulous clock towers. He’d seen the flakes streaking and swarming around the plane, darting at it maliciously, but now they waft peaceably down onto the square, accumulating like harmless dust knocked loose from the sky.
He thinks his body should bear some scar from the storm, some trace beyond the cold lingering in him. He’d sat for an hour in a near-scalding bath without dislodging it. How could that place and this one exist so closely, one stacked atop the other? All the things around him, the bed linens and hot water and light switches and radiators, are part of an elaborately constructed, pleasantly convincing, utterly inane illusion of safety, of consequence.
* * *
—
In Honolulu, he’d found a cheap hotel on the edge of Chinatown. Faded anchors and hula girls plastered the windows of tattoo parlors. Grocery stores and spice shops displayed gnarled roots and jars of unknown powders, signs in foreign characters. A fetid smell hung in the damp, tropical air: rotting fruit, a trace of sewage from the river.
A bartender told Eddie he should have seen the place during the war. Sailors six deep at the bar, lines down the street at all the brothels, everybody cutting loose in the full light of day. “Had to, because of the blackouts,” he said. “Brothels got shut down, though. Now there’s pimps out there, which don’t seem any better to me, but I could introduce you to a nice girl if you wanted.”
“No, thanks,” Eddie said. He held the guy’s eye. “Not my style.”
The guy lowered his voice, leaned closer. “Try the Coconut Palm if you want something a little different.”
The second time he went to the Nut, as people called it, he took a guy back to his hotel. The guy, Andy, who’d lost his left hand on D-Day, was going to the University of Hawaii on the government’s dime and offered to show Eddie around. They lay on powdery white beaches, climbed up red-earth hills to look at the pillboxes from the war, ate thick macadamia nut pancakes with passion-fruit sauce.
“Why are you doing this round-the-world thing again?” Andy said when they were sunning themselves atop one of the pillboxes, concrete hot under their bare backs. Andy had his arms up over his head. The sight of his bald stump still caught Eddie by surprise sometimes.
“She needed a navigator. I was bored.”
“Bored. Sure. You can go to the movies if you’re bored. Do you actually want to do it?”
Below, the ocean spread to the horizon. He dreaded the long overwater flights that remained: to Kodiak, to Norway, to Antarctica, to New Zealand.
Mankind lacks that sixth sense which seems to guide seabirds across thousands of miles of trackless ocean. That had been the first sentence in the Army Air Corps manual. But there had been times when he privately suspected he might possess that missing instinct. In the air, he had a surety of where he was, even though he could not have proved it or explained how he knew.
“I wanted to do something that’s really hard,” he told Andy, “but in a practical-technical way, not a human-emotional way. You always are somewhere, you just have to figure out where. The place you want to go exists. You just have to find it.”
One night after they’d come out of the Nut, a bunch of sailors had followed them. Eddie had told Andy not to turn around. He hadn’t, but one of the sailors had thrown a bottle that hit him in the back, and then Eddie had been the one to turn. Andy had run away, not that Eddie really blamed him.