I Was Amelia Earhart (Vintage Contemporaries) (6 page)

She looked over his shoulder out the window at the night, and she saw the strange constellations, empty and meaningful, strung like jewels. She wanted to live, but it occurred to her that death might be just as beautiful as flying.

I’m sorry, he said finally. This was all my fault.

Don’t be an idiot, she said.

W
HEN SHE WAKES
from the lucid dream that carries her three thousand feet down, in a tumbling parade of images from the farthest reaches of her memory, her first impression will be that she has died a violent death and gone directly to hell.

A barely perceptible change comes over her, a heightened sense of awareness enters her, the moonlight on the ocean turns from blue to silver, an infinitesimal change. Everything inside her shifts slightly too, shifts from one shade to another.

Never again will I see New York. Never again will I drive my silver Cord Phaeton. From now on I’ll only have
Noonan and my Electra, and I’ll live on a desert island. And I’ll be lost in the between, in the emptiness of the between, with the threats and the moments of radiant danger, the perfect days, the oases, the furious whisper of the night wind in the trees, the happiness, my fears, the imminent dawn.

She moved. Her neck was stiff but it felt good to move it. She turned to her right, and without saying anything she looked at Noonan. He started talking. He said it was a miracle. He said she’d saved his life. She listened without saying anything. He went on. He said this couldn’t be Howland Island but that maybe they were not far off. He said maybe they’d died and gone to heaven.

She didn’t say anything for a long time because she was convinced that she had lost her ability to speak. But she did stare out the windshield at the astonishing view, a heartbreaking dawn over glittering waters, and it looked real enough to persuade her she was alive.

It went very quickly, those first few days. They got out of the plane, and together they looked around and tried to make sense of their surroundings. Then all of a sudden, as if part of the choreography of a dream, they set about performing the necessary rituals of survival.

•

They check the radio, which picks up nothing, and the fuel tank, which is low but not empty, and they confirm their worst suspicions—that they have no idea where they are. They do have some gas left; it seems impossible, but it is true. The fuel analyzer malfunctioned, and she managed to land before the Electra lost everything. They build a fire on the beach to attract attention. They know that a search will have already begun. They construct two water-collection tanks out of cloth fuel covers, and Noonan begins experimenting with ways of turning salt water into fresh. He builds a small device which collects the water as it evaporates and funnels it back into a deep shell. But the process is painstakingly slow. They use the bamboo fishing pole to catch their dinner, and after dinner they let the fire burn all night.

It’s a small island. Not even an island really, more of an atoll, four miles long and half a mile wide. It isn’t much more than a sandbar. There’s an outer ring of coral reef that extends from the beach about five hundred feet at low tide, and an inner ring of jungle encircling a peaceful lagoon. The fringes of the reef are infested by sharks that appear every evening promptly at five. The beach is lined with coconut palms which sway lazily in the wind and spill their bounty on the sand. The jungle is a labyrinth
of immense, muscular, twisted stalks in the midst of which rats make their hairy nests, spiders spin enormous webbed cathedrals, and gargantuan coconut crabs remain motionless for days. Unlike the islands she had read about in her youth, this one did not have tattooed natives drumming around bonfires, but the lagoon was enchanting, complete with exotic flowers and technicolor fishes, and a perfumed, paradisal air. She had not bothered to explore the place the very instant they arrived, as someone else stranded on a desert island might have done immediately. Instead she became aware of her environment gradually in the days to come, first discovering the lagoon at sunset when she had lost herself in the maze of the jungle while looking for a good place to urinate and saw, through the silken death net of a spider’s web, the light making pink and yellow lily pads on the undulating surface of the water.

She knows that she wanted this to happen. She made it happen. But she never expected it to happen. She has nothing with her but a change of clothes, the dictionary of pidgin English she bought in Lae, and her silver powder compact. She left behind a parachute, a life raft, her good-luck elephant’s foot bracelet, and in order to make the plane as light as possible, they had unloaded anything else deemed unessential on the runway in New Guinea. She hadn’t even wanted Noonan to
take the pearl-handled knife he had bought in a street market in Dakar, but now she is grateful for it because it enables her to hack through the otherwise impenetrable jungle.

The first night, she and Noonan sleep next to each other on the beach. The sky is clear, the sea is calm, the wide night stretches out like an enormous tent, but still she is troubled by the sound of his breathing, by his nocturnal mutterings, and by the feeling that on this loneliest of islands she is unfortunately not alone.

She reveals herself to him in her despair. In the middle of the night she gets up from their makeshift camp and in her ravaged sleep she climbs into the Electra. She climbs into the plane, which sits on the reef flat like an embodiment of their grounded longings. She sits, her hands lightly skimming the controls, her eyes focused past the darkness over the sea. She sits in a meditation so intense that for a moment even he believes that she is flying through a supernatural element.

The plane doesn’t move. A seagull perches on top of it, mocking its directionless, stationary flight.

Already, in the sky, she was preparing for these mysterious, internal flights.

The sky, now I know, is endless.

•

Very soon, fortunately, it rains. After the rain she sits by the lagoon and watches the giant frogs relaxing on sun-baked stones, their mouths popping open to catch bugs. She watches flocks of migrating birds rise like plumes of lavender smoke across the ocean at twilight. She admires the sharks, their punctual appointments with death, the leisurely circles they make in the sea. In one day she sees them devour three exotic birds which dip down to the water for dinner. First the purple one was pulled under by a sudden force, and then the other two disappeared in a clean swipe, and then all that was left were a few iridescent feathers swirling gently in a bloody whirlpool.

The streamlined precision of the sharks makes her long for the fluid engineering of her plane.

These are very good, he says.

We don’t talk much, but then one day he asks me if I like coconut. I tell him, somewhat formally, because I haven’t been speaking much, that I have never been introduced to coconut.

I never met one I didn’t like, he says.

He hands me a coconut, teases me. I look at it. I turn it around and around, the liquid splashing inside. I wonder how to get at it. It’s like a human head, maddening, inaccessible.

You have to shell a coconut to get at its fruit, and for that you need a machete. I don’t know that, so I try to
break it on a tree. I hit the tree with it, but nothing happens. When I throw the coconut at the tree again, we both start to laugh. Then I throw the coconut at him, and he catches it, and he falls backward, still laughing. He takes his knife out from his pocket and starts to shell the fruit. When he splits open the white skull, the milk drips over, and I realize how hungry I am. We’ve been eating fish and drinking the water we collected, but I realize that I’m hungry for something sweet.

I notice that for the first time I’m noticing him.

He says he feels sorry for me because I’ve never eaten a coconut before. Never had the experience, he says. I say I don’t need his pity and anyway here I am, about to taste a coconut. He hands me half the coconut to drink from, and I take it, the liquid almost painful it’s so sugary. I feel it travel from my mouth all over my body. He asks me if I like it. But I don’t hear him at first; I’m just looking at him and listening to the sea. He asks me again and before I can answer he hands me another piece. I feel something deepen inside me, very gently, like the sand soaking up the water after a wave. I feel that I’ve absorbed something.

Sometimes the sound of the ocean is almost deafening. It’s like the roar of the Electra’s engine. I remember some things so vividly: the light was bright, but now it’s falling, the beach is empty, we don’t speak, we’re surrounded by the continuous roar of the ocean, we’re swept up in it, borne along. There are no obstacles between us and the water, just the sand, and then the reef, and then
the sea. Out on the water you can see the shadows of the clouds going by under the slanting sunlight. Great masses of clouds sometimes. They look like the undersides of vast ships. Their shadows look like ships on the water. The wind can be as deafening as the water, and the sound of trees in the wind is frightening. Palm leaves can make a noise more portentous than anything I’ve ever heard. It’s a sound of rage, full of heat.

Now the day is ending. You can tell by the water, the tide’s coming back in again. It’s coming home at the end of the day, reaching closer and closer.

The beach is separated from the sea by the coral reef flat, which the water is beginning to cover. There’s nothing separating us from the ocean. It doesn’t know that we exist, although we watch it all day. It surrounds us, rules our lives, cuts us off, brings us together, holds us.

The smell of the lagoon drifts by in the late air, and the smells of salty water, coconut flesh, birds, sweat, flowers, strange spices, fire, the fire always burning on the lonely stretch of beach. The smell of the island is the smell of the sea and the desert and the jungle mixed into one.

I find him sitting in the back of the plane. He’s drinking rum, smoking one of his last cigarettes.

He says what took me so long, he’s been waiting for
me. I’ve been listening to the sea. He is lit on one side by moonlight streaming in through the window.

He’s a very predictable man, for a drunk. I bet he comes here often. This must already be part of his routine, I think. He’s an addict. He’s addicted to his habits, to his drink, to his cigarettes. He was addicted to women. He must still be addicted to women.

We look at each other in the blue light. The air is an eerie, nightclub blue. It lends everything a sordid drama. He smells strongly of good rum, cheap tobacco, burning wood, salt—he smells wonderful. He’s drunk and he asks me to stay awhile. Pull up a chair, he says.

He tells me that he thinks we’re going to be saved, and then he tells me we are going to die here. He talks to me, tells me he knew from the beginning this would happen, that he knew when we were crossing the ocean, crossing the desert, he knew that I would take him to this place. Now, he says, I’ll probably leave him to die here alone, I’ll betray him somehow. He says the fortune-teller told him he would live a long, happy life. I told him she said that to me too. We laugh and then he becomes quiet, brooding. I close my eyes and smell his smell. He’s used to it, I know, the effect he has on women. But I don’t believe this is the usual effect.

Later, we make love very easily, half asleep. It’s understood that it doesn’t mean anything.

•

The sound of the water is so intimate, so close, you can hear it lapping underneath the Electra. It feels as if we’re on a ship anchored at sea. I touch his hair in the darkness. The moon is obscured. The clouds pass over it in black, lacy veils.

I wake him up and tell him I need to talk to him. I need to talk so that I don’t lose my mind. Tell me a story, I say. Tell me what we’ll say to the reporters when they bring us back to New York.

He felt for the bottle of rum and gave it to me. Very softly, right in my hair, he spoke to me.

He told me what we would say when we got back to New York.

Because I want to be close to him but don’t know how, I say something I don’t entirely mean. I want to tell him something nice so I say to him, Thank you, that was a good story.

It’s the middle of the night. He says they’ll never believe us if we tell them the truth. He says maybe we should keep it a secret. We’ll tell them that we were taken by pirates, or by the Japanese, and captured as spies. He tells me that he’s never been anywhere like this, and I say, I know, neither have I.

•

I still remember his story. I remember the way he told it, just what words he used. It was a story about spying on the Japanese and being captured and tortured and executed. But he told it in a very funny way, using fake voices and giving characters silly names. At one point he used an expression I’d never heard: “rearranging deck chairs on the
Titanic
.” It seemed at once too silly and too sophisticated for him, but I realize he is actually a very sophisticated, very rough, contradictory man.

It was a sad story, but it ended with a happy twist. I thanked him for it, told him it was a good story, and then he asked me what I was really thinking.

At night I dream about my plane. I see myself sinking to the bottom of the ocean in my once magnificent Electra, my eyes focused blankly on the perpetual blue, my silk scarf floating in an eternal wave. Later, a man with a hat appears to me. He’s standing on the coral reef flat in the dawn, his tie lifting in the wind, a silver Cord Phaeton parked behind him, waiting to take me away. The first dream calms me. It seems perfectly natural. The second one wakes me up. It’s a nightmare.

Morning streams in through the windows. The specially installed windows of the navigator’s cabin. They’ve spent the night in the Electra, almost by accident, and now it’s hot inside, a furnace.