The Pathless Sky

by Chaitali Sen

  “Maybe a change of scenery would help me,” John said, pretending to go back to the problem of his dissertation. “Are you working on a map this summer?”

  “I am, in Luling Province.”

  Luling was more remote than John had in mind, nowhere near English Canal.

  Malick noted John’s disappointment. “You said you wanted a change of scenery. You can meet me there.”

  “Maybe I could come to English Canal,” John offered. “I could help you there. I could work with the summer students.”

  “That would make trouble with Nehemia.”

  “Nehemia will be out of the country.”

  “You’re not going with him?”

  “It isn’t for work. He’s visiting family.”

  Malick stopped and inspected John.

  “I need help in Luling,” he said. “Come to Luling with me and then we’ll see.”

  That night John thought about going to Luling with Malick. What would it achieve? He could go to English Canal now and find Mariam at the library if that was what he wanted. He could write her a letter. He could call. Or he could stall again, make a map with Malick and spend more time delaying things.

  John decided he would go. He decided he had to go, as if Malick knew a trick that would set him right.

  As soon as he and Malick worked out the details of their mapping trip, John went to see Vic at his apartment where he lived with three other students. It was subsidized student housing, affordable, but filthy and crowded and Vic was miserable there.

  Vic had not been at Presidency for long. A year after John started his doctoral program, he found Vic sitting in a coffee shop near campus. Even after John approached his table he still wasn’t sure it was Vic. His features were all familiar, the curly hair, the broad chest and hulking body, but his posture, his whole way of carrying himself was entirely different. Vic stood up and shook his hand. “John Merchant. I can’t believe it. How long has it been?” John sat down with him and waited for some flashes of the Vic he knew at Mount Belet, the boisterous pontificating, the awkward outbursts, the constant fidgeting, but none of these manifested. John accepted that they were older, and looking back he couldn’t believe how young they really were, how much like kids in a playground, and it wasn’t fair to allow himself to mature and not attribute that same capacity for growth to Vic. It was only that Vic had been such a large personality. Brilliant in many ways, but stunted and confrontational, even more so as the years went by.

  John and Vic had gone through the same coursework at Mount Belet. Sometimes John got the eerie sense that Vic was following him, always watching. By the end of their four years they knew each other well, though John would not have wanted to call him a friend. Yet he was happy, surprisingly happy, to run into Vic that day in the coffee shop, because he had been feeling lost in his own body for some time, feeling untethered, disconnected even from his family. Vic’s recognition of him made something inside of him click, if only briefly.

  Vic said he was looking at some doctoral programs at Presidency, and John had asked him unwittingly what he’d been doing for the last two years. He assumed he would have said working, or traveling. He didn’t actually know what he expected Vic to say, but when he said he’d recently gotten out of prison, John didn’t believe him. Vic had to explain how he’d run away from the barracks during his military service and got caught. While he was in prison he’d received a medical diagnosis from a military doctor. He was put under the care of a psychiatrist and released after two years.

  Stunned, John said, “You didn’t have to tell me all that.”

  “There’s no point in lying about it.”

  What doctoral program was going to take Vic, who was incapable of lying about his prison record and psychiatric disorder? Vic said he was interested in Climate and Atmospheric Science, and John said it wasn’t his department, but he could talk to Nehemia, who could talk to the head of that department, and they could see what happened. Perhaps it had helped a little but in the end Vic got himself admitted to the program, and had so far proven himself to be a serious scholar. He expressed his gratitude to John often, perhaps disproportionately to anything John had actually done for him.

  Now he saw Vic often. Vic brought John into his impeccable room, a retreat from the chaos just steps away. He got a bottle of whiskey off the bookshelf and filled two glasses.

  John told him he was going away for a few weeks, possibly for the whole summer. “You can stay in my apartment, if you want.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Why leave it empty? It’s quiet. You can get some work done.”

  Vic made a feeble protest, but the offer was too good to refuse.

  “Where are you going, anyway?” Vic asked.

  “Just following Malick around for a little while.”

  “Malick? Why? Is Nehemia spying on him?”

  John didn’t say any more about it. They drank their whiskey, talking a little about Vic’s coursework.

  “You’re going to see Mariam, aren’t you?” Vic asked suddenly.

  How could Vic have known that? They had only talked about Mariam once, nearly ten years ago.

  “You know it’s a bad idea,” Vic said.

  “Why?” John asked.

  “Obvious reasons,” Vic said. “Whatever made you let her go once is still a factor, isn’t it?”

  John considered Vic’s point, but lately he felt like he was coming out of a long illness. The person who severed Mariam from his life was a fevered version of himself.

  “I’m not trying to change your mind. I’d like to get out of this dump for the summer so the longer you stay the better for me.”

  “Good.” John felt it was settled.

  “I didn’t know Mariam well,” Vic said.

  “Right. You didn’t know her at all.”

  “No, I did know her a little. You broke her heart every day, I think.”

  “You didn’t know her. What do you mean? How would you have known her?”

  Vic smiled. “You see, John, how much it all matters? Look at you. It might as well have been yesterday. How will you contain your disappointment when you see she’s not the same girl?” He leaned forward. “She belongs in the past. That’s where you left her.”

  John stared at Vic. He had to remind himself that Vic was certifiably insane. No matter how much sense he made, he had no real understanding of people.

  One day he would ask Vic what made him run from his barracks in the middle of the night. What couldn’t he stand to do? Every day, without fail, John saw a little girl in a car, her tearstained face and blood-soaked dress, her little button nose, little polished fingernails the size of peas. Every day he wondered who had painted her nails that candy pink color. He could imagine the girl, lively and small, showing off her fingernails everywhere she went, distracting her mother, tugging at her father, soliciting the attention of neighbors and workmen, and after everyone else had seen them, giving them a good look herself. Tucked into bed, before she falls asleep, she can’t stop smiling at her own hands. Vic had three years in prison, but John had this, a girl, her mother, her father.

  “You have to be able to fix your mistakes, Vic.”

  “What do I know about it?” Vic said. He lifted his glass in a kind of surrender.

  John took an overnight train to a town six hours north of the cabin where he and Malick would set up base. Malick picked him up in an old van and they drove, starting off along a sheered-off hillside through a massive section of blue-hued limestone. The laminations ran horizontally for a while, but then they curved, buckled, undulated, and turned sharply toward the sky, the layers of rock like the spines of books placed vertically on a shelf, evidence of drifting, collision, and compression. In a matter of kilometers they moved millions of years up the time scale, through siltstone and shale, thinly bedded marine mud. Further sti
ll the rock became coarse and cobbled, like a poorly assembled stone wall, a conglomerate mess deposited by an ancient river system.

  It was a spectacular road cut that made Malick philosophical. “Geology and roadbuilding are two chain-linked human endeavors,” he said. John had nothing of value to add, but quoted his first geology professor at Mount Belet. “Road cuts are a geologist’s X-ray machine.” They both chuckled. So far Malick seemed delighted with his company.

  The cliffs tapered. The land flattened and sprouted a windswept pelage of tall yellow grasses. That too faded, and the road became as rough as the fields around it. The van pitched until the road forked and they came to a town where a cement factory stood like a fortress over a limestone quarry. They stopped at a small cafeteria to eat lunch. It was hot and everything was bleached from a dusting of limestone powder, making the sky brighter and the sun more blinding. The cafeteria was cooled by a number of standing fans blowing toward the middle of the room, but only a few tables caught the moving air. They took the only available table by an open screened window. John sat there sweating over a glass of chalky, tepid water. From here it would be another two-hour journey.

  They got back in the van and Malick drove laboriously out of that barren white basin. They reached a range of rounded hills and John dozed off for a while, jerking awake when the van turned off-road to climb a rocky path, where the brush had been sloppily cleared away. The low branches of the shrubs tapped the sides of the van.

  “We’re here,” Malick said. A small adobe shelter came into view, a beige cube so congruent with the geology of the place it appeared to be thrust out of the ground like some habitable outcrop.

  The cabin had to be cleaned before they could unload their equipment. John found the old water pump and filled a tin pail with cold water. He put his mouth into the stream to relieve his parched throat. The water was rich in iron and had a bloody aftertaste that coated the back of his tongue.

  After Malick swept the dust off the floor, John mopped it down with a wet rag. When he was in the military he enjoyed this sort of collective, ritualistic cleaning. By the time they were finished cleaning and unloading the van, it was almost sundown. “Let’s drink,” Malick said. He opened a provision pack and pulled out two small glasses and a bottle of whiskey, a box of crackers, a ceramic bowl, and a tin of sardines his daughter had sent from Italy. “There’s a charcoal pit out back,” he said. “Tomorrow perhaps we can procure some meat.”

  The mere mention of meat ignited John’s hunger. He watched Malick roll open the top of the sardine can and empty it into the bowl. He broke the sardines up with a fork and then mashed them into a paste. John looked sadly at the small bowl, wondering if Malick had any more food tucked away in his pack or if this was to be their evening’s ration.

  Malick measured out a thumb-sized portion of whiskey for each of them, and they clinked their glasses. “A small drink. We have a long day tomorrow.”

  Malick asked him about the fieldwork he’d done with Nehemia, but John didn’t have much to report. Nehemia’s guidance was more theoretical. Malick obviously disapproved, surely already knowing Nehemia’s lack of field orientation, and John realized too late he’d been set up for a lament. Prolonged study in the field was the only way to achieve an intimate knowledge of the earth. What was geology if not fieldwork? John nodded, silently disagreeing.

  “My training was all in the field,” Malick explained. “These days young people want to see everything through a machine. When I was your age, younger actually, we mapped the Lake District in Northern Sulat. Even then the region was heavily militarized, but we had clearance. Have you ever seen pictures of the Northern Sulat Lake District?”

  “I’ve seen maps,” John said. “Not photographs.”

  “I worked on those maps. Lake District is a misnomer, makes it sound clean. It wasn’t clean. It was hell.”

  “A complex system of waterways,” John remembered.

  “Limitless. The easy part was paddling the canoe, but most of it was portage over rocky hills in unpredictable weather. It took the whole summer, and when we were finished, there were three of us, we were sick with respiratory infections. I still have complications from that trip, but we were over the worst of it and returning home when my friend Samir said he had to relieve himself. We pulled over next to a grassy field, thinking nothing of it, and waited while he went to take care of his business.”

  Malick paused for a moment to retrieve a kerosene lantern. The daylight in the cabin was vanishing rapidly, and soon John and Malick were like two apparitions glowing in the dusk. Malick continued his story.

  “We didn’t even have time to smoke a cigarette before we heard the explosion, coming from the field. Samir had stepped on a land mine. I was frozen, terrified. A part of me wanted to drive off but somehow we forced ourselves to step into the minefield to look for him. It felt like years passed before we found him. He’d been thrown further in, away from the road. Because he hadn’t cried out we were sure he was dead, but he was alive, staring at the sky with a strange smile on his face. He was in shock. His leg was gone. I mean completely. There was no right leg. We carried him, trying to retrace our steps, thinking any moment might be our last, and then we drove like lightning to the checkpoint, but he’d lost too much blood already. He died there, just after they pulled him out of the vehicle.”

  Malick looked shaken, as if this had happened not twenty years ago but last week.

  “No one warned you there was a minefield there?”

  “We had a defense map, but it was not accurate.”

  “What a pointless death,” John said.

  Now past the distraction of his land mine story, Malick took a cracker and dipped it into the sardines. “If I had more energy, I would have made you endure more hardship on this trip.”

  “I’m amazed you still come out here, practically on your own. Why?”

  “It’s the only thing I know how to do. And why are you here?” Malick asked. John almost misinterpreted the question before Malick elaborated. “Why did you choose to become a geologist?”

  In the beginning people asked him this all the time, but not lately. John tried to remember what he used to say. “I like the scale of it,” he said. That was all he could retrieve and his mind went off on a different tangent. “A part of me believes an understanding of the earth will always give me a feeling of belonging, a sense of home anywhere in the world, no matter where I find myself.”

  Malick laughed. “That’s the strangest answer I’ve ever heard,” he said, pouring another sliver of whisky into their glasses. “Isn’t it the people that make a home? The culture, the language?”

  “Ultimately, I suppose.”

  “The land itself is not important. We attach meaning to it, but the land is important only because of humanity, because it serves us, because it helps us evolve. The idea that you can feel you belong somewhere because you know the composition of the land, I don’t think I agree.”

  John tried again. “Maybe ‘belonging’ isn’t the right word. I meant because I study the land I have a purpose for standing on it, and that sense of purpose negates the alienation of being a stranger in a new place.”

  “You’re attached to your home,” Malick remarked.

  “No, not particularly.”

  “You are. Only you don’t realize how much.”

  John corrected him. “I’m attached to a feeling of home.”

  That night, John slept soundly, exhausted from his travels and soothed by the utter darkness of the cabin. He repeated to himself what he had said earlier to Malick—he was attached to a feeling of home—and he was satisfied, having at last revealed something of himself that felt conclusive.

  The next day they hiked to the broad, flat summit of a low mountain with their awkward packs of surveying equipment. This was the best place to begin, giving them the widest overview of the topography, a ran
ge of long and narrow hills, beds of granite under a carpet of soil and grassy vegetation. The range was bound by a moderate fault in the east and the Luling uplift to the west and north. “There is incredible diversity here,” Malick said. “We could map this for years. That irregular hill that looks like a lion’s head consists of alternating intervals of glauconitic sandstone and glauconitic skeletal grainstone. Over here we have Precambrian granite and schist.” There were two major transgressive-regressive sequences, telling a story of rising and falling sea levels. “If we get enough good days like this we’ll be able to capture quite a bit of complexity.”

  John’s limited experience with mapping had taught him more about reading a map than making one. The mechanics and concepts of the task were not difficult to grasp. He knew how to level the plane table and tape down the Mylar sheet, first by the centers of the long sides, then the short sides, then the corners, and then all around to keep dirt and moisture from seeping under the sheet, and he understood how to measure and tape off a baseline, setting up the plane table along it. The mathematics of it, the procedures for calculating and recording vertical and horizontal distance and slope length and measuring the strike, dip, and dip direction of a geological feature, was all basic trigonometry, but he couldn’t immediately grasp how Malick made the big decisions—which points to use as controls, where and how far apart to place the stations, and later, which features to include and which to ignore.

  He worked slowly, stooping awkwardly over the plane table until his back hurt. In the afternoon sun he frequently had to stop and wipe the perspiration off his face to keep it from dripping onto the Mylar sheet. At certain angles the sun blinded him, and his head hurt, and he was hungry, and after he had been working a long time and Malick told him to take a break, he looked down at the map and saw nothing but a blank sheet marked with a few light pencil lines. He could not imagine it turning into anything that could capture the truth of this landscape. Malick kept saying, “What is on the ground must be reflected on the map,” but there was so much on the ground. And as their terrain got rougher, over the next few days, the work became more physically demanding and John’s exhaustion more profound. He would fall asleep each night still reading the crosshairs on the alidade, still sketching, still seeing the lines and swirls of the map. They appeared to him like thumbprints and the delicate tracks of inky caterpillars.