Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

  In the sixth hour, the cloud begins to lighten, thinning from above, and there comes a white jostle and rattle, the magnificent pop into the open sky, the belly of the plane skimming the white. Eddie passes a note. PNR -30. Point of no return in thirty minutes.

  He is not suggesting they turn back, only telling her, as is standard practice, that any opportunity to do so will soon be gone. But she is long past that point already. Their beginning and their end lie ahead.

  The clouds clear. The PNR evaporates behind them. Below is a sheet of dark blue, ribbed with swell. In the plane, the temperature drops. Marian sits in comfortable boredom, the familiar trance of flying, watches the instruments and the engines, switching from one fuel tank to the next, following Eddie’s recommendations. This is all she can do.

  The first iceberg appears, a flattopped island the size of a city block, blue caves dug in its sides by waves. White birds wheel around. A glowing aqua lip of ice shows through from underwater. There is more of the berg down there, of course, much more, a huge frozen root.

  The compass begins to wander, confused by the abundance of southerliness. The cold is getting the better of the Peregrine’s heaters. They put on heavy sweaters. Sometime in the eleventh hour, a bright white patch appears above the horizon: an iceblink, the overcast sky reflecting ice they can’t yet see. The water is black now, glossy as obsidian, and soon enough a band of pack ice appears, a mess of slush and slabs and bergs. In places the water is mottled with translucent disks of ice like massed jellyfish. A group of seals lie clumped on one floe, and they stir and heave around, peering up at the noise. Another is speckled with penguins as though with poppy seeds.

  The ceiling lowers, pushing them down to four hundred feet. Eddie is quiet, bent over his desk, recalculating and recalculating. Flecks of ice build up on the wings, clumping together like spitwads blown by the clouds. Marian inflates the boots on the wing edges to break off the crust. Twelve and a half hours.

  Something strange appears between the black of the sea and the white of the clouds: a thin silver line, vertically striated like a stretched seam of glue, running as far as Marian can see in either direction. She calls to Eddie, thumps his shoulder when he comes up to see. The ice shelf. She hadn’t expected him to look as he does, gazing out—like a man witnessing a holy miracle. His eyes well. She supposes he’d braced so violently against the fact of this flight that awe catches him by surprise.

  They fly low, following the edge of the shelf. After twenty minutes, in answer to Eddie’s repeated transmissions, radio contact is made with the expedition base, Maudheim. They’ve marked a landing strip with flags. After forty minutes: a ship docked against the ice, stacks of cargo and lines of chained dogs, trails in the snow from the ship to the site where the huts are being erected, small figures, arms waving. Flags and a wind sock mark a flat strip of snow. Marian circles, puts down the skis.

  The sound of the wind has become my idea of silence. Real silence would sit heavily on my ears, like the pressure of the grave.

  —marian graves

  Maudheim, Queen Maud Land, to Little America III, Ross Ice Shelf

  71°03ʹ S, 10°56ʹ W to 78°28ʹ S, 163°51ʹ W

  February 13–March 4, 1950

  20,123 nautical miles flown

  They are offered accommodations on the Norsel, but the ship so stinks of whale meat and dogs and men that Marian and Eddie are glad to leave after dinner and pitch their tent near where the plane is anchored with cables, blocks of snow stacked on its skis for good measure. On Richard Byrd’s first expedition in 1929, a Fokker was torn from its tethers by the wind, blown backward, and wrecked. If such a thing were to happen to the Peregrine after they’ve left Maudheim, Marian thinks the best course of action will be to lie down in the snow and wait. Rescue doesn’t figure into her plans. Rescue would be impossible. For the sake of weight, they are carrying only enough food to see them through one or two prolonged periods of bad weather.

  Her bones still vibrate with the memory of the engines. Before plunging into sleep, she looks outside again. Daylight, of course, though it is late. The clouds have cleared, and a miasma of ice crystals shimmers around the plane. Antarctica had always seemed fantastical, but now it seems like the only possible place, the rest of the world fading away like an outlandishly lurid dream.

  In the night, a sound like a burst of rifle fire wakes them. After a wide-eyed moment, Eddie says, “It’s just the ice shifting.” He had been lively at dinner, so much like the charming young man she’d known in London that she’d been disconcerted, almost fearful. Pilots who’d flown in Antarctica had warned her about fata morganas, phantom mountain ranges or icebergs that might hang above the horizon, doubling or magnifying some lesser feature of the landscape, and she wonders if this Eddie is another kind of mirage.

  The sun is gone in the morning, the cloud too low. The meteorologist says to wait.

  They help, as best they can, with the construction of Maudheim. The expedition members winch crates and equipment and Liberty Oil fuel drums off the ship and onto tank-treaded weasels that chug and grind a mile and a half over the ice to the site of the huts. Men are crafting ice foundations and putting up the timbering. Men are digging caves for storage and workshops, building passageways out of crates and tarps, stacking oil barrels as windbreaks. All of it will be buried in drifting snow soon enough. Dozens of sled dogs are tethered all around, keeping up a constant chorus of barks and howls.

  The expedition leader tells Marian he’d never seen dogs so happy as theirs when they landed. On the sea voyage, the animals had been tied and kenneled on deck in the sea spray and the sluicing blood from the heaped-up whale meat and their own shit, but once they were finally on the ice they rolled themselves clean and dry in the snow and barked and frolicked and were new again. Perhaps Eddie is not a mirage; perhaps he is simply refreshed by the purity of the place.

  * * *

  —

  After a day and night of cloud, the sky clears. The fuel barrels are brought, the Peregrine’s tanks filled. The engines are thawed under canvas hoods and fed a breakfast of warm oil.

  Despite the heavy load and the throttle’s stiffness in the cold, the skis lift cleanly from the hard-packed snow. Marian turns the plane away from the waving men and barking dogs, away from the sea, toward nothing.

  In an hour, they pass over mountains that don’t appear on their charts. Probably no one else has ever seen them. Steep ridges of black rock and lonely nunataks jut from the ice.

  Then an astonishing infinity of white.

  The surface of the ice has an ever-changing texture, like the sea. (Marian supposes it is a kind of free-standing sea, thousands of feet deep.) Sastrugi ripple like frozen waves; cracks run through like currents. Even with sun goggles, the glare bores into her skull. After four hours, a filmy haze forms, grows denser: a relief from the light but a problem in other ways. Ice speckles the wings. She climbs to twelve thousand feet, into clear air, only three thousand feet or so above the plateau, which has been rising steadily toward the pole. The sun casts the plane’s shadow down on diaphanous cloud, a perfect miniature, ringed by a rainbow—a glory, it’s called. By the book, they should be on oxygen, but she decides to conserve their supply. Who knows how long the fog will last, how much higher they will have to go.

  South Pole now, reads the note Eddie passes up a bit later. PNR -30. He is smiling, radiating enthusiasm. He appears elated. The bottom of the world shows faintly through the haze, white and trackless, indistinguishable from the rest of the trackless white. Marian gazes on it without emotion. The only place she wants to go is onward, away. She understands now this place, vast and lifeless, might as well be death itself.

  The oil pressure gauge has gone flat, but the instrument has probably just failed in the cold, as the engines still drone along. The heater has surrendered, too, and the metal in the cabin is cold enough to sear exposed skin.<
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  She hesitates, thinking of the PNR. But why does she hesitate? Nothing is wrong.

  She shouts to Eddie, “What do you think?”

  He looks blank, bawls back, “About what?”

  “Should we keep on?”

  He peers at her from under the hood of his reindeer parka. “Why wouldn’t we?”

  “Just checking.”

  He grins and gives her a thumbs-up. “All good.”

  Was it possible she had dreamed the frightened man in the hotel in Cape Town, staring at her like she’d come to escort him to the gallows? How could that man be the same as this dauntless, ebullient one? But he is also being logical: There is no better reason to go back than forward. The visibility isn’t perfect, but it could certainly be worse. Nothing is amiss with the plane. If they were to go back, assuming they made it to Maudheim, they would have no fuel to try again but would have to wait out the season, rely on the supplies and hospitality of the expeditioners, be retrieved by ship.

  Another leap must be made. Go against your instincts, Trout had told her. Give in when you want to resist, she’d told Eddie in London. Resist when you want to give in. She flies on.

  * * *

  —

  Sky and ice blend into a seamless shell, can’t be prised apart. Like flying in a bowl of milk, pilots say. The horizon is gone. There is empty space around her, above and below, but she has no means of judging how much. The altimeter says they are at eleven thousand feet, but that’s above sea level. She doesn’t know how thick the ice is. They might be only a thousand feet above it. She can see nothing beyond a vague swirl of blowing snow. Eddie is leaning up beside her, peering out.

  Once, in Alaska, she’d flown a man out to a copper mine, a city guy, an executive from San Francisco come to make an inspection. They’d gotten caught in cloud, couldn’t get under or over, had to go through. After a while she noticed the guy kept pinching his earlobe between two fingers. When she asked him if his ears hurt, he admitted, in a dry whisper, that he was having the strangest feeling. He kept thinking they might have crashed and died and this shapeless droning white was purgatory. If he pinched himself, he said, he felt more confident he was still alive.

  Now she understands. Where is the border between life and oblivion? Why should anyone presume to recognize it?

  She makes a shallow turn, retreating in hope of better visibility. She thinks she catches a faint glimpse of the ice below, and then it is gone. They need to land soon and without wasting fuel. Nearly blindly, playing close to stall speed, she brings the plane lower. Wind buffets. The engines whine. A gust, and she sees the ice, pulls up. A horrible scrape and jolt, the plane slewing sideways.

  * * *

  —

  Their tent floats in nothingness. The wind shrieks without resting, might tear apart the rattling canvas at any moment. Marian wants to call it merciless, but, here, mercy is an alien concept, irrelevant.

  Outside, the blowing drift blinds and suffocates. All is white. She seems to hang suspended, as there is no way to tell the snow she stands on from the air around her. She can’t see the plane where it is dug in and tethered, can only hope it hasn’t blown away. She can’t go to it. If she were to take more than a few steps out into the white, she would never find her way back to the tent.

  It is a miracle they’d survived the landing with only a bent prop blade and one damaged ski. She’d bent a million props in Alaska, knows how to whack them back with a sledgehammer and how to tape and tie and splint a ski. It is a miracle the blizzard had not yet reached full blast when they landed, that they’d been able (after a struggle) to secure the plane and erect their tent and light the stove so they might silently suffer the excruciating pain of thawing their feet and hands.

  They sleep and wake inside their reindeer sleeping bags, sleep and wake, lie mostly in silence when they are awake. After two days, when the wind finally drops, Marian can think only of the plane. Quietly, trying not to wake Eddie, she crawls from the tent. There is only the faint shape of mounded snow where the plane had been. She begins to run, tromping in her heavy boots, and can’t have taken more than a dozen steps when the snow does something strange under her right foot.

  She has instinctively thrown her weight to the left and dropped to her knees before she understands what has happened.

  Black space where she’d stepped, as though she had kicked a foot-size aperture from this white world into a subterranean void. A few feet of vertical ice glow blue in the crevasse; below that is a familiar darkness. It has been following her since she first flew to Canada, perhaps since the Josephina went down. She is sitting on a thin membrane between a white void and a black one. Two halves of a sphere, each made of absence: the absence of color, the absence of light.

  She crawls back to the tent on hands and knees. Eddie stirs when she enters, murmurs that the wind is dropping off. She can only make a guttural sound she hopes he will take as agreement. The chasm waits outside, submerged like a crocodile. The plane, assuming it’s still there, might be resting on a precipice. The tent might sit atop a snow bridge that could collapse at any moment. Thinking of the small black hole in the snow, she feels terror but also pity for her body—its hapless, clumsy vulnerability, its smallness, the dumb weight of it. She can do nothing for now. The wind is rising again. She retreats into sleep.

  * * *

  —

  Drifting snow buries the tent, insulating them. They dig out the entrance every few hours to be sure they aren’t permanently entombed. Eddie, when Marian told him about her discovery of the crevasse, had remained the stalwart Antarctic version of himself. All they can do for now is be careful, he said, and when the storm abates, they will see what they see. If the plane is gone, then it is gone. He thinks, though, it is probably still there, just buried.

  The weather must break. Even in this most hostile place, the sun and sky must return. Marian tells herself this but does not entirely believe it. She thinks again of her passenger in Alaska trying to convince himself he was not already dead. Could they be dead? Anything seems possible, but also nothing seems possible except white and cold. No, she thinks, oblivion must be pure, and their presence mars the purity of this place. They are the speck of imperfection that proves life.

  There is still food and kerosene, but after a week, death has started to seem near, not a leap but a small sideways step. The cold is always nibbling at Marian’s hands and feet, looking for a way in, a breach in her defenses. Numbness is not an absence of feeling but a felt absence. If they stay too long outside, frostbite turns their faces white as death masks. They rub at their cheeks and noses and toes, endure the pain of returning to life.

  Condensation from their breathing accumulates as a flaky rime on the sleeping bags and tent walls that must be brushed off twice a day. Eddie leaves a damp sock on the floor of the tent, and when he picks it up, it breaks as crisply as chocolate.

  The cold has found its way to the core of her and, once established, proves nearly impossible to evict. The crusted yellow patches on her nose and cheeks she can’t get rid of, the fogginess of her mind—death is curled and waiting within her; death is massed along her borders. She has wild, colorful dreams that feel like small, vivid rebellions against the shrouding nothingness.

  Sometimes she still finds herself thinking that she will visit Jamie after the flight. Remembering the truth brings a small detonation of grief.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” she says to Eddie from inside her sleeping bag, “but sometimes my brother’s death gives me courage. I catch myself thinking that if he could die, if he could endure it, so can I, though obviously I have no choice, and it’s not something anyone endures. In fact it’s the opposite.”

  “I think you should take courage from wherever you can find it,” Eddie says. “What’s the harm?”

  Her gratitude to Eddie knows no bounds, and yet there are moments wh
en she wishes him gone. To find the essence of Antarctica, she has an instinct it must be confronted alone. Or maybe the essence of the place is too large and empty for anyone to grasp, no matter how stark a confrontation is made. Maybe that is the appeal of Antarctica, the itch of it. She thinks of Jamie painting infinite space, knowing infinite space could not be painted.

  When they go outside during lulls in the wind, Eddie stands with his back to her, staring out across the white disk, and doesn’t seem to hear her when she speaks.

  In the tent, he says he likes Antarctica because it hasn’t been touched by the war. He likes that there is nothing to rebuild. “The rebuilding depresses me almost as much as the destruction did,” he says. “At least the rubble was truthful.”

  She remembers cities reduced to flat patches of pink-gray dust and jumbled heaps of masonry. She thinks he means that no matter what earnest promises of peace are made, what fragments are hauled up and glued back together, the dead will not return. A return to the world as it was is impossible; the only choice is to make a new world. But making a new world seems dreary and exhausting.

  * * *

  —

  The sky is clear and they are digging, exhuming the bloodless silver body of the plane from a mound of snow. They’ve exposed a wing and most of the tail. The inside is full of snow, too. Their hands are already raw inside their mitts, but they must keep digging. Eddie has made a careful survey of the crevasse, probing with a tent pole, and marked a safe path. He thinks the ice ahead of the plane is solid. They dig in a fever, hoping the weather holds.

  * * *

  —

  Clouds close in, part, close again. They dig for a full day, can’t stop without their sweaty clothes freezing solid. Once they get the body of the plane free, they dig out the inside, and they bang the propeller blade straight enough, patch the ski well enough.