Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  I got it then, what the racket was. “So he’s looking to be something other than rich and idle, and he thinks he’s going to reinvent Hollywood.”

  “That’s likely his basic plan, yes.”

  There was no real inflection to his words. Like how a general planning an air strike might give an estimate of civilian casualties. A bit of businesslike hardness to forestall pity. There are always a bunch of these rich kids floating around L.A., riding on fortunes they didn’t earn as though on litters born aloft by the ghosts of their ancestors. They want to make good movies, they all say: projects chosen for quality writing, compelling vision, original voice, etc., and not for their prospects in the Asian market. They want to reinvent something that doesn’t want to be reinvented, to disrupt a system that’s orders of magnitude more complex and predatory and fortified than they think. That’s their plan. Hollywood’s plan is to strip the flesh from their bones so slowly they won’t notice at first. Tiny little bites, and then big ones at the end.

  But, to be fair, Hugo wanted to make good movies, too. He just needed other people’s money to do it.

  “He’s putting up all the money?” I asked.

  “Ah, no. But a good chunk. Frankly with the locations and the airplanes and the CGI and all, it’s a bit rich for our blood, so we took it to Sun God.” Sun God Entertainment was backed by hedge funds and had ambitions to make movies that were too expensive to be indies but not expensive enough to be worth the studios’ time. “They signed on, and now perhaps there is just the slightest overabundance of cooks in the kitchen, but I think it could work. With the right star, of course.” He winked. “We couldn’t pay you much.”

  “How not much?”

  “Scale. And something on the back end.”

  “Siobhan’s going to love that.”

  “Screw Siobhan. You don’t need the money. This is your moment to show the naysayers what you’re capable of.” He was making his voice extra sonorous, booming at me like I was a medieval army he was trying to rally to wipe out another medieval army advancing over some moor.

  What was I capable of? I didn’t actually know. I pictured myself with the Oscar again. Did I deserve an Oscar? No, but who did, really? Manifest.

  Hugo clapped his hands on his thighs and stood up. “Think about it.”

  I walked him through the house. As he stepped out the front door, I said, “I should tell you, Gavin du Pré has a grudge against me. It might be inconvenient.”

  “He’s not involved.”

  “But still. He can do things.”

  “How do you know he has a grudge?”

  “Oh, I got that feeling yesterday when he told me he’d kill my career. His exact words were”—I put on the raspy growl of a comic book villain and clenched one hand into a fist—“ ‘you’re finished.’ ”

  To my surprise, Hugo only laughed. “Do you know who the head of Sun God is?”

  “Ted Lazarus, isn’t it?”

  “Do you know that Ted Lazarus and Gavin du Pré hate each other?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “No.”

  “Gavin fucked Ted’s wife. So it’s fine. Everything’s fine. Everyone’s already out to ruin each other.” He reached for my hand. “This will be a very good role for you, my dear. This will elevate you.” He kissed my hand with a loud smack and went striding off. While he waited for my gate to open, he squared himself up, then, between the parting panels, swept a low bow to the paparazzi, who cheered.

  Eight

  After Hugo left, I got in the bathtub and opened Marian’s book.

  Editor’s Note

  The document contained in the following pages, reader, has taken a most unlikely journey before settling, as it has, in your hands.

  Very true, I thought.

  In 1950, Marian Graves, an accomplished pilot and the author of this short tome, vanished along with her navigator, Eddie Bloom, while attempting to circumnavigate the globe longitudinally, by way of both the North and South Poles. They were last seen in Queen Maud Land, East Antarctica, when they refueled at Maudheim, the encampment of the Norwegian-British-Swedish Antarctic Expedition. From Maudheim they were to have flown across the continent, passing over the South Pole, to the Ross Ice Shelf, where lay the remains of the various bases built and used during Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s Antarctic expeditions, all dubbed “Little America.” Though the bases were abandoned, more than enough cached gasoline would have been available to refuel the plane, the Peregrine, before Marian and Eddie embarked on their journey’s final leg, bound for New Zealand. Tragically, after departing Maudheim, neither pilot nor navigator nor aircraft were ever seen again. For almost a decade, nothing was known of their fate. Most assumed the Peregrine had crashed somewhere in the pitiless Antarctic interior.

  Now, thanks to a remarkably fortuitous discovery, we know that Marian and Eddie indeed reached the Ross Ice Shelf. Last year, while conducting research as part of the collaborative International Geophysical Year, scientists exploring the buried remnants of Little America III found not only the expected artifacts of Byrd’s 1939–1941 expedition but also an odd bundle of yellow rubber. They determined, to their great surprise, that it was the kind of aviation life preserver known as a Mae West, and it was wrapped carefully around Marian’s handwritten journal containing her elliptical, fragmented musings from the flight: the manuscript of this very book.

  I’m afraid I cannot elucidate her reasons for leaving behind her journal (and, ominously, one of their two life preservers). Perhaps she weighed the odds of reaching New Zealand versus the odds of future visitors to Little America finding the book and, disturbing to contemplate, found the latter more likely. It can be counted as a stroke of luck that the base was still in existence at all. Icebergs are continually breaking, or calving, from the Ross Ice Shelf, and half of Little America IV, a more recent encampment from 1946–47, has already been carried out to sea.

  As exciting as we may find the news that Marian’s flight extended far beyond what was previously known, bringing her only 2,600 nautical miles short of a completed north–south circumnavigation, this revelation also carries with it a sad truth: Marian Graves and Eddie Bloom took off from Antarctica and were lost. Despite the fanciful theories some have put forward, we can be certain they lie together deep under cold and stormy waters, in a tomb without walls, a place that remains lonely beyond imagination despite the thousands upon thousands who have made their final rest there.

  The offices of D. Wenceslas & Sons have lately been the site of impassioned debates over whether or not Marian would have wished for this manuscript to be published without having a chance to edit and consider its text. Was the manuscript intended as a posthumous message in a bottle? Or was she turning her back on her own words? Admittedly, both in conversation before her flight and in the pages themselves, Marian expressed ambivalence to me about the idea of a readership, but, as I have argued to my colleagues, if she truly did not wish these pages to be read, why did she then not simply destroy them, as she could have so easily? We reached no consensus, and she left no instructions, only the journal itself, abandoned in a frozen, hostile place. What she left resembles less a book than a scaffolding for a future book, but I felt she would prefer it be published as is rather than having it shaped and prettified. Beyond simple corrections of spelling and grammar, I have left her writing unedited, as the risk of distorting her thoughts and intentions seemed to outweigh my own impulses toward tidiness.

  I am glad to have known Marian. I wish she were still with us, but I am grateful for her decision, long ago now in that desolate place, to leave behind a record of her final flight. While the record, like the flight itself, remains incomplete, at least it has brought us closer to the end.

  Though, as Marian points out in this text, a circle has no end.

  Godspeed.
/>   Matilda Feiffer

  Publisher

  1959

  An Incomplete History of Marian’s Fifteenth and Sixteenth Years

  September 1929–August 1931

  The same month Marian turns fifteen and goes up with Trout for the first time, a test pilot takes off from an airfield in Garden City, New York. He is already known for speed records and stunting and long-distance flying, and in less than thirteen years he’ll become much more famous after he leads sixteen bombers in a bold daylight raid over Japan.

  Jimmy Doolittle makes one circle and lands. It’s a brief flight, only fifteen minutes, mundane except for the opaque hood over his cockpit, cutting him off from everything except the instruments. Flying blind, it’s called. Some of his instruments are experimental, among them the Sperry gyroscopic artificial horizon. In its later form, a fixed airplane (you) is superimposed on a gimbaled sphere. The sphere is black below its middle and blue above (the earth, the sky) and orients you to the planet. This object will make the future possible. Before, you didn’t fly in bad weather, so there could be no scheduled flights. Not really. No reliable airlines, certainly. Mail pilots took their chances; lots of them died. Before, if you lost sight of the ground for long enough, you were probably toast. Fly into cloud, and you’d likely end up in a spiral, though you might not even realize what was happening until too late. Up, down, left, right, north, south—all of it a terrible tangle, dragging you out of the sky. Survivors described a state of terminal confusion.

  When Doolittle goes up with Sperry’s invention, plenty of pilots, despite their many brethren who’d corkscrewed down to their deaths, don’t believe such an instrument is necessary, take offense even at the suggestion. The more cautious sorts keep a close eye on their indicators to make sure they aren’t inadvertently turning, but if you get distracted and start a spiral, those indicators won’t be much help. The lucky living (Trout among them) tell one another that dead pilots are dead because they didn’t have the elusive, magical “it.”

  You have to fly by the seat of your pants, they say. Meaning: A real pilot feels the plane’s every movement in his ass.

  But it’s your inner ear, not your ass, that’s the problem. And your inner ear is a liar.

  A man, blindfolded and spun slowly in a rotating chair, will think when the chair slows that it has stopped. When it has stopped, he will think it has begun to spin the other way. The mistake happens deep in his ear, among the tiny hair cells and drifting fluid inside the semicircular canals of the bony labyrinth. These are the minute, impossibly fragile internal instruments that detect the yaw, pitch, and roll of the human head—wondrous little gizmos to be sure but poorly evolved for flight.

  Imagine a biplane. Left to its own devices, the plane will naturally begin to bank, slowly entering a balanced, insidious turn that a pilot can’t always detect if the real horizon is obscured by darkness or cloud. Neither your ass nor your inner ear will bother to tell you about a balanced turn if you’re in it long enough, and without help from the right instruments, you’ll think you’re flying along straight and level. But the airplane’s nose will drop toward the earth; its path will tighten, begin to describe a funnel. Presently, you will become aware that your airspeed has increased and altitude decreased, that the engine is whining and the guy wires singing, that the dials are moving and you’re being pressed into your seat, and without an artificial horizon you will conclude the plane is in a dive (speed going up, altitude going down), not a turn. At this point the airplane might be banked to vertical or beyond, might even be upside down, and when you pull back on the stick to bring up the nose, you will only tighten the turn further.

  It’s called a graveyard spiral.

  Now one of three things will happen. You will pop out the bottom of the cloud with enough time to make sense of where the ground is and to level the wings and pull out. Or the airplane will break apart under the stress. Or you will spin directly into the earth or ocean or whatever’s there.

  With the right instruments, you have a fighting chance of leveling out even if the cloud goes all the way down and brushes the earth like the marabou hem of a diaphanous white robe worn by God. But getting right with the horizon isn’t easy. The sky is full of traps and temptation. Pilots report that their instruments went haywire in cloud, though of course they didn’t—the pilots’ own bodies are lying, not the dials. Your inner ear gets comfortable in a spiral. Even after you’ve extricated yourself, when the instruments say you are flying straight and level again because you are, your ear begs to differ. You’re the blindfolded man in the rotating chair. The fluid inside that labyrinth is still spiraling, and the tiny little sensory hairs insist you are, too. Your ear begs you to throw the controls over, to make the spinning stop. Sometimes pilots listen, put themselves right back into a spiral. An oblivion of mist hides the earth, the truth.

  It’s difficult to believe the gauges, that array of soulless little dashboard windows, over the insistence of the body, which is as sure as you live and breathe that you are funneling down into death.

  But you’re not. You’re dizzy inside a cloud. That’s all.

  * * *

  —

  The second month of Marian’s fifteenth year, October, the stock market crashes. Black Thursday. Black Tuesday. All of it spiraling. Things breaking apart.

  But Marian barely notices. Wall Street seems far away, and, anyway, she is flying.

  From high enough up, the mountains in their blazing autumn dapple resemble lichen-covered rocks, bright and nubbly, and she imagines they are in fact only rocks, that she has been shrunk to the size of a gnat. What is the difference between her and a gnat, really? Relative to the distance between the planets? To the size of the sun?

  No, you can’t go up every day, Trout says when she asks. Not too much too soon. You’ve got to give things time to sink in.

  Trout can’t teach her every day anyway. He has to fly to Canada, pick up booze in some hamlet, fly it back over the line, land on some stubby landing strip hidden in the mountains. Men in fast cars will be waiting there to distribute his cargo to points unknown. The nation is thirsty. The nation wants to drink away its cares. If he’s landing after dusk, the leggers will light up the strip with their headlights, make a small glowing green rectangle in the great shadowed nothing of the mountains.

  Marian keeps driving for Stanley. She nearly causes an accident when she steps hard on the brake while going around a corner, daydreaming it into a rudder.

  Practice is all she needs to be competent, Trout says. As far as being good, well, that comes down to a lot more practice, some natural ability, and a bucket of patience. To be great? Trout shrugs. Not everybody has it in them.

  She doesn’t tell him she is determined to be the best. Probably he’d say there’s no such thing, that she might as well be determined to be an actual bird, and even birds get lost or caught in bad weather, fly into things, misjudge their way into that last smashup.

  After six lessons of an hour each, she solos. Trout believes it’s better to solo sooner rather than later so she won’t build it up too much in her head. “Just fly the same as always,” he says. She goes up and is alone in the sky, but she is concentrating too hard to exalt. Trout’s voice has lodged in her ear, pointing out her mistakes, keeping her company. She bounces her landing, and Trout waves her up again. She circles around, lines up, touches down a little long. The earth below, so dependable and stationary when she is standing on it, turns into a wobbly, tippy thing on final approach. He waves. Again. Go again.

  “If you’re going to do real mountain flying,” Trout says, “you have to be able to land on half a dime. Otherwise you’ll roll off a cliff or plow into the trees.”

  “When am I going to do real mountain flying?” she asks, feigning impatience though she knows she isn’t remotely ready to land anywhere except on a flat runway with plenty of open space.

&n
bsp; “Not real soon,” he says.

  He chalks a line on the Missoula strip. She’ll have to land short to hit it. Mountain flyers have to know how to land short, he says. He wants her within fifty feet of that chalked line nine times out of ten. Her ambitions for herself are all about accuracy, precision, steel nerves, the seat of her pants.

  * * *

  —

  And there is Barclay Macqueen.

  “Trout says I need to get rid of my old instincts and replace them with new ones,” she tells him on his porch, delivery basket forgotten at her feet. “Because if you do what feels natural, you’ll get yourself killed.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Like if you’re long on approach, you can’t just point the nose at the ground because that’ll increase the speed and you’ll balloon up and away. Or if you didn’t turn tightly enough to line up, you can’t just add rudder or you’ll skid into a spin. Trout says then you might as well aim for the cemetery and save everybody some trouble.”

  “Sounds dangerous.”

  “Of course it’s dangerous.”

  When she’d returned for her second lesson with Trout, she had known she was accepting Barclay’s patronage and therefore his presence and also the unanswered question of what he would eventually ask for in return. But, she told herself, even if she hadn’t gone back to the airfield, he would have insinuated himself into her life some other way.

  “You’re not afraid?” Barclay says.

  “No.” Then: “Maybe a little sometimes, but it’s worth it.”

  “Frankly, I’d prefer you to stay on the ground.”

  She is afraid he’ll say what would seem to follow: He’d prefer her to stay on the ground, and so he will keep her there. But he bites into one of the cream puffs Stanley has sent. A shower of confectioners’ sugar speckles his black waistcoat.