Eddie connected a few good swings, at least judging from his knuckles afterward, but one of the sailors got him in the head with something heavy, and he’d woken up sometime later, lying in a filthy alley between a Chinese bookshop and a fishmonger’s. Opening his swollen eyelids, he’d seen a green blur that slowly resolved into the reflection of a neon parrot in a fish-reeking puddle, though he hadn’t been able to think of the word parrot or to make sense of why one would be gleaming on the ground.
In the storm, coming from Svalbard, he had been afraid, but he doesn’t think he will ever again be as afraid as he’d been waking up lost in that Chinatown alley. In the storm, he had kept hold of the net of longitude and latitude that held the planet together, but in the alley he had been so disoriented he might as well have been wrapped and chained and tossed into dark water, his lostness absolute. The storm, even if it had killed him, would never have had the power over him the alley did.
He begins to slide into sleep, wakes with a jolt from a dream of green lights that might be the aurora or might be the neon parrot.
In the morning, he will concern himself with his bath and his coffee and what kind of Swedish jam to put on his toast. He will remember in a detached, fading way how ice had grown over the plane like unwanted armor, a malicious crystalline straitjacket, how the Peregrine had grown sluggish and heavy, her engines labored. Their situation had been so precarious it had seemed like the weight of just one more snowflake might have tipped them into doom, but instead they had touched down in Bulltofta. Then the warm hotel, the white bed, the innocent snow.
He’d had a week to heal in his tatty room in Honolulu before he saw Marian, and by then he was mostly better, just a little bruised around one eye and bothered by headaches that rippled unpredictably through his brain. She’d looked at him with concern, asked if he was all right, then left it alone. He supposed she’d been preoccupied with Caleb. He hadn’t gone back to the Nut, hadn’t seen Andy again.
From Malm? they will fly to Rome, and from Rome across to Tripoli, then south into damp equatorial heat, ever-lengthening days.
I look forward, and there is the horizon. I look back. Horizon. What’s past is lost. I am already lost to my future.
—marian graves
Cape Town, South Africa, to Maudheim, Queen Maud Land, Antarctica
33°54? S, 18°31? E to 71°03? S, 10°56? W
February 13, 1950
18,331 nautical miles flown
The call comes at two-thirty in the morning. Marian’s room is on the second floor of a little hotel near Wingfield Aerodrome, but the distant sound of the phone ringing downstairs is enough to wake her. Even sleeping, she has been waiting. By the time the night clerk knocks on her door, she is dressed. Out the window is a clear summer night.
“The man from the aerodrome rang,” the clerk tells her. “He says—” He glances at a scrap of paper in his hand. “He says the morsel radioed the weather’s gone right.” He looks up. “I hope you know what that’s about because that’s what he said.”
“The Norsel. Anything else?”
“He said the morsel says it looks to stay all right, as best they can tell, which he wanted me to be sure to say was not well, and if you still wish to go, they recommend you leave as soon as possible. Though he said he personally wouldn’t recommend going at all.”
“Call back, please,” Marian says, “and tell him we’re on our way. Ask him, also, to try to raise any ships to the south and get a report on conditions.”
His tongue poking from the corner of his mouth, the clerk makes a note and retreats down the stairs. Eddie’s room is next door, and Marian presses her ear to the wall, listening for any activity. Surely he must have woken, but the silence is absolute. Please, she thinks, nearly prays, please be in there.
They had arrived in Cape Town on February 9th, and the Norwegian-British-Swedish Antarctic Expedition, after being repeatedly repelled by pack ice, had finally made landfall the next day. Before that, in Rome and Tripoli and Libreville and Windhoek, Eddie had taken to vanishing. She thinks that storm coming from Svalbard had shaken him, or maybe the change has something to do with whatever had happened in Honolulu to give him that black eye. He’d seemed fine in Alaska, had been in peak form navigating over the North Pole, but since Malm? he’s been slipping away from their lodgings, sometimes staying out all night. She’s never quite sure if he’ll return.
She had tried to engage him in the last planning tasks for Antarctica, sought his opinions on her endless nervous tinkering with calculations of load and fuel （the addition of the skis and their drag add a nagging unknown）， but his answers were always perfunctory, indifferent, even terse, as though she were pestering him with frivolous and irrelevant concerns. He seemed to want nothing to do with her and her charts and scribbling pencil, but in Cape Town, she told him he had to stop wandering off. The season was waning. They needed to be ready to leave at any moment.