Joe exulted in the sinking of U-1421, and in his role therein. He wallowed in it, even going so far as to permit himself to imagine that it might have been the boat that had sent the Ark of Miriam to the bottom of the Atlantic in 1941.
He trotted down along the tunnel to the Mess Hall and, for the first time in over two weeks, filled and turned on the snow melter, and took a shower. He fixed himself a plate of ham and powdered eggs, and broke out a new parka and pair of mukluks. On his way to the Hangar, he was obliged to pass the door to the Waldorf and the entrance of Dog-town. He shut his eyes and ran past. He did not notice that the dog crates were empty.
The sun, all of it, an entire dull red disk, hung a bare inch above the horizon. He watched it until his cheeks began to feel frostbitten. As it sank slowly back below the Barrier, a lovely salmon-and-violet sunset began to assemble itself. Then, as if to make certain Joe didn’t miss the point, the sun rose for a second time, and set once more in a faded but still quite pretty flush of pink and lavender. He knew that this was only an optical illusion, brought on by distortions in the shape of the air, but he accepted it as an omen and an exhortation.
“Shannenhouse,” he said. He had gone barreling down the steps without giving the pilot any warning and, as it turned out, had caught him during one of his rare periods of sleep. “Wake up, it’s daytime! It’s spring! Come on!”
Shannenhouse stumbled out of the plane, which glistened eerily in its tight glossy sheath of seal hides. “The sun?” he said. “Are you sure?”
“You just missed it, but it will be back in twenty hours.”
A softness appeared in Shannenhouse’s eyes that Joe recognized from their first days on the Ice long ago. “The sun,” he said. Then, “What do you want?”
“I want to go kill Jerry.”
Shannenhouse pursed his lips. His beard was a foot long now, his smell excoriating, probing, nearly sentient. “All right,” he said.
“Can that plane fly or not?”
Joe started around the tail, over to the starboard side of the plane, where he noticed that the hides covering the front part of the fuselage were of a much lighter color and a different texture than those on the port side.
Stacked in a neat pyramid beside the plane, like cargo waiting to be loaded on board, sat the skulls of seventeen dogs.
WAHOO FLEER, their dead CO, had been at Little America with Richard Byrd in ’33 and again in ’40. When they went through his files, they found detailed plans and orders for transmontane Antarctic flights. In 1940 Captain Fleer himself had flown over part of the territory they would be crossing to kill the Geologist, over the Rockefeller Mountains, over the Edsel Fords, toward the shattered magnificent vacancy of Queen Maud Land. He had made carefully typed lists of the things a man ought to carry with him.
1 ice-chisel
1 pair of snow-shoes
1 roll toilet paper
2 handkerchiefs
The great anxiety of such a flight was the possibility of a forced landing. If they crashed, they would be alone and without hope of rescue at the magnetic center of nothingness itself. They would have to fight their way back to Kelvinator Station on foot, or press on ahead to Jotunheim. Captain Fleer had typed up lists of the emergency gear they would need in such an instance: tents, Primus stove, knives, saws, ax, rope, crampons. Sledges that they would have to drag themselves. Everything had to be considered for the weight it would add to the payload.
Engine muff and blow-torch 4 lbs.
2 reindeer-fur sleeping-bags 18 lbs.
Flare gun and eight cartridges 5 lbs.
The precision and order of Captain Fleer’s instructions had a settling effect on their minds, as did the return of the sun, and the idea of killing one of the enemy. They resumed each other’s company. Shannenhouse came in from the Hangar, and Joe moved his bedroll into the Mess Hall. They said nothing about their descent over the past three months into some ancient mammalian despair. Together they ransacked Wahoo Fleer’s desk. They found a decoded tidbit from Command, received the previous autumn, passing along an unconfirmed report that there might or might not be a German installation on the Ice, code-named Jotunheim. They found a copy of the Book of Mormon, and a letter marked “In the Event of My Death,” which they felt entitled, but could not bring themselves, to open.
Shannenhouse took a shower. This necessitated the melting of forty-five two-pound blocks of snow, which Joe, grunting and cursing in three languages, cut and shoveled, one by one, into the melter on the Mess Hall’s roof, whose zinc maw, like the bell of a gramophone, broadcast the thin reedy voice of the pilot singing “Nearer My God to Thee.” They spoke little, but their exchanges were amiable, and over the course of a week they resumed the air of comradely put-uponness that had been universal among the men before the Wayne disaster. It was as if they had forgotten that flying unsupported and alone across one thousand miles of storm-tossed pack and glacier to shoot a lonely German scientist had been their own idea.
“How would you feel about a nice ten- or twelve-hour stretch of, oh, say shoveling snow?” they would call to each other from their bunks in the morning, after they had spent the previous five days doing only that, as if some unfeeling superior had put them on shovel duty and they were just the unlucky stiffs who had to obey the order to dig out the Hangar and the tractor garage. In the evening, when they came aching, faces and fingers seared with cold, back into the tunnels, they filled the Mess Hall with cries of “Whiskey rations!” and “Steaks for the men!”
Once they had the snow tractor dug out, it required a full day of tinkering and heating various parts of its balky Kaiser engine to get it running again. They lost an entire day driving it thirty yards across level snow from the garage to the Hangar. They lost another day when the winch on the tractor failed, and the Condor, which they had managed to tow halfway up the snow ramp they’d crafted, snapped loose and went sledding back down into the Hangar, shearing off the tip of its left lower wing. This required another three days of repair, and then Shannenhouse came into the Mess Hall, where Joe had a Royal Canadian Mounted Police manual for 1912 open to the chapter entitled “Some Particulars of Sledge Maintenance,” and was struggling to make sure the man-sledges were properly lashed. MAKE SURE SLEDGES PROPERLY LASHED was item 14 on Captain Fleer’s Pre-Flight Checklist. Three languages did not suffice for his cursing needs.
“I’m out of dogs,” Shannenhouse said. The new tip he had grafted on the Condor’s wing needed to be covered and doped to the rest of the sheathing, otherwise the plane would not take off.
Joe looked at him, blinking, trying to take in his meaning. It was the twelfth of September. In another few days, perhaps, if it could break through the melting pack, a ship bringing soldiers and planes would be returning to Jotunheim, and if they had not managed to get aloft by then, their mission might have to be called off. That was part of Shannenhouse’s meaning.
“You can’t use the men,” Joe said.
“I wasn’t suggesting that,” Shannenhouse said. “Though I would be lying, Dopey, if I said the thought hadn’t occurred to me.”
He stroked at his whiskers, looking at Joe; he still hadn’t shaved his bearish red beard. His eyes rolled toward Joe’s bunk, where Oyster lay sleeping.
“There’s Mussels,” he said.
They shot Oyster. Shannenhouse lured the not wholly unsuspecting dog topside with a slab of frozen porterhouse and then put a bullet point-blank between the good eye and the pearl. Joe couldn’t bear to watch; he lay on his bunk fully dressed, zipped into his parka, and cried. All of Shannenhouse’s former loutishness was gone; he respected Joe’s grief at the sacrifice of the dog, and handled the grisly work of skinning and flensing and tanning himself. The next day Joe tried to forget about Oyster and to lose himself in vengeful thoughts and the stupendous tedium of adventure. He checked and rechecked their gear against Captain Fleer’s lists. He found and removed the ice-hammer that had somehow fallen into the gearbox of the tractor’s winch. He waxed
the skis and checked the bindings. He dragged the sledges back in from the tunnels, undid them, and lashed them again the Mountie way. He cooked steak and eggs for himself and Shannenhouse. He plucked the steaks from the salted pan, set them steaming on two big metal plates, and deglazed the pan with whiskey. He set the whiskey on fire and then blew the fire out. Shannenhouse came in stinking of processed flesh. He took the plate gratefully from Joe, his expression solemn.
“Just big enough,” he said.
Joe took his plate, sat down at the captain’s desk, and, hoping to absorb from the instrument some of the captain’s thoroughness, typed the following statement:
To those who will come searching for Lt John Wesley Shannenhouse (j.g.) and Radioman Second Class Joseph Kavalier:
I apologize for our presence being elsewhere and probably in all truth dead.
We have confirmed an establishment of a German military and scientific base located in the Queen Maud Land, also known as Neuschwabenland. This base is presently manned by one man only. (See, if you please, attached transcripts, intercepted radio transmissions A-RRR, 1.viii.44-2.ix.44.) As there are two of us the situation seems clear.
Here Joe stopped typing and sat chewing for a minute on a piece of steak. The situation was far from clear. The man they were going to kill had done nothing to harm either of them. He was not a soldier. It was unlikely that he had been involved in any but the most tangential, metaphysical of ways with the building of the witch’s house in Terezin. He had had nothing to do with the storm that blew up out of the Azores or the torpedo that had blown a hole in the hull of the Ark of Miriam. But these things had, nonetheless, made Joe want to kill someone, and he did not know who else to kill.
To those who quite reasonably inquire as to our motives or authorities in performing this mission,
He stopped typing again.
“Johnny,” he said. “Why are you doing this?”
Shannenhouse looked up from a nine-month-old copy of All Doll. Cleaned up and bearded, he looked like one of the faces that had lined the main hall of Joe’s old gymnasium, the portraits of past headmasters, stern and moral men untroubled by doubt.
“I came here to fly airplanes,” he said.
let it be not doubtful that we thought only to serve our country (adopted in my case).
Please see to the care of the men in quarters who are dead and frozen.
Respectfully,
JOSEPH KAVALIER, Radioman Second Class.
September 12, 1944.
He pulled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter, then rolled it in again, and left it like that. Shannenhouse came over to read it, nodded once, and then went back out to the Hangar to see to the plane.
Joe lay down on his bunk and closed his eyes, but the sense of conclusiveness, of putting his affairs in order, which he had sought in typing up a final statement, eluded him. He lit a cigarette and took a deep draft of it, and tried to clear his mind and conscience so that he could face the next day and its duties untroubled by any scruple or distraction. When he had finished his smoke, he rolled over and tried to sleep, but the memory of Oyster’s single trusting blue eye would not leave his mind. He turned, and tossed, and tried to lull himself to sleep, as Rosa had once instructed him to do, by imagining that he lay floating on a black raft, on a warm black lagoon, in the blackness of a moonless tropical night. There was nothing inside or outside of him but soft warm blackness. Presently he felt himself slipping toward sleep, pouring into it like sand racing toward the neck of an hourglass. In this twilit hypnogogic state he began to imagine—but it was stronger than a mere imagining, it was as if he were remembering the fact, believing it—that Oyster had been capable of speech, had possessed a sweet, calm, plaintive voice capable of expressing reason and passion and concern, and that he could not now get the dead dog’s voice out of his ears. We had so much to say to each other, he thought. What a shame that I only realized it now. Then in the instant before he went under, a sharp barking sounded in his inner ear and he sat bolt upright, his heart pounding. He realized that it was not the betrayed love of Oyster, but of someone far dearer and more lost to him, that haunted him now and prevented him from making peace with the possibility of his own death.
He crawled down to the foot of the bunk and opened his footlocker, and took out the thick sheaf of letters that he had received from Rosa after his enlistment at the end of 1941. The letters had followed him, irregularly but steadily, from basic training at Newport, Rhode Island, to the navy’s polar training station at Thule, Greenland, to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he had spent the fall of 1943 as the Kelvinator mission was assembled. After that, as no reply from their addressee was ever forthcoming, there had been no more letters. Her correspondence had been like the pumping of a heart into a severed artery, wild and incessant at first, then slowing with a kind of muscular reluctance to a stream that became a trickle and finally ceased; the heart had stopped.
Now he took out the penknife that had been a gift from Thomas, and that had once saved the life of Salvador Dalí, and slit open the first of the letters.
DEAR JOE,
I wish that we could at least have said goodbye to each other before you left New York. I think I understand why you ran away. I am sure that you must blame me for what happened. If I had not sent you to Hermann Hoffman, then your brother would not have been on that ship. I don’t know what would have become of him in that case. And neither do you. But I accept and understand that you might hold me responsible. I suppose that I might have run away, too.
I know that you still love me. It’s an article of faith for me that you do and that you always will. And it breaks my heart to think that we might never see or touch each other ever again. But what is even more painful to me is the thought—the certainty I have—that right now you are wishing that you and I had never met. If that is true, and I know it is, then I wish the same thing. Because knowing that you could feel that way about me makes all that we had seem like nothing at all. It was all wasted time. That is something I will never accept, even if it’s true.
I don’t know what is going to happen to you, to me, to the country or the world. And I don’t expect you to answer this letter, because I can feel the door to you slamming in my face and I know that it’s you slamming it shut. But I love you, Joe, with or without your consent. So that is how I plan to write to you—with or without your consent. If you don’t want to hear from me, just throw away this and all the letters that follow it. For all I know these words themselves are lying at the bottom of the sea.
I have to go now. I love you.
ROSA
He read through the rest of them after that, proceeding in chronological order. In the second letter, she mentioned that Sammy had quit his job at Empire and gone to work for Burns, Baggot & DeWinter, the advertising agency that handled the Oneonta Woolens account. In the evenings, she said, he came home and worked on his novel. Then, in her fifth letter, Joe was startled to read that, in a civil ceremony on New Year’s Day of 1942, Rosa had married Sammy. After that, there was a gap of three months, and she wrote to say that she and Sammy had bought a house in Midwood. Then there was another gap of a few months, and then in September 1942 she wrote with the news that she had given birth to a seven-pound, two-ounce son, and that, in honor of Joe’s lost brother, they had named the baby Thomas. She called him Tommy. Subsequent letters gave news and details of little Tommy’s first words, first steps, illnesses, and prodigies—at the age of fourteen months, he had drawn a recognizable circle with a pen. The scrap of paper place mat from Jack Dempsey’s restaurant on which he had drawn it was included in the envelope. It was wobbly and poorly closed off, but it was, as Rosa said in the letter, as round as a baseball. There was a single photograph of the child, in undershirt and diaper, holding himself up against a table on which some comic books lay scattered. His head was big and luminous and pale as the moon, his expression at once wondering and hostile, as if the camera frightened him.
Had Joe read t
he letters from Rosa as they arrived, with gaps of weeks and months between them, he might have been deceived by the falsifying of the date of baby Thomas’s birth, but read all at once—as a kind of continuous narrative—the letters betrayed just enough inconsistency in their accounting of months and milestones that Joe became suspicious, and his initial stab of jealousy and his deep puzzlement over Rosa’s hasty marriage to Sammy gave way to a sad understanding. The letters were like fragments from a old-fashioned novel—they contained not only a mysterious birth and a questionable marriage, but a couple of deaths as well. In the spring of 1942, old Mrs. Kavalier had died, in her sleep, at the age of ninety-six. And then a letter from late summer of 1943, just after Joe’s arrival in Cuba, reported the fate of Tracy Bacon. The actor had joined the Army Air Forces shortly after completing the second Escapist serial, The Escapist and the Axis of Death, and had been shipped to the Solomon Islands. In early June, the Liberator bomber of which Bacon was the copilot had been shot down during a raid on Rabaul. At the bottom of this letter, the last letter in the packet, there was a brief postscript from Sammy. Hi buddy was all it said.
Until now, Joe had told himself that he had buried his love for Rosa in the same deep hole in which he had laid his grief for his brother. She had been right: in the immediate aftermath of Thomas’s death, he had blamed her, not merely for having introduced him to Hermann Hoffman and his cursed ship but also more vaguely and more crucially for having lured him into betraying the singleness of purpose—the dogged cultivation of a pure and unshakable anger—that had marked his first year of exile from Prague. He had all but abandoned the fight, allowed his thoughts to stray fatally from the battle, betrayed himself to the seductions of New York and Hollywood and Rosa Saks—and been punished for it. Although his need—indeed, his ability—to blame Rosa for all this had passed with time, his renewed resolve and his craving for revenge, which grew in intensity as it was frustrated again and again by the inscrutable plans of the U.S. Navy, so filled his heart that he believed his love to have been completely extinguished, as a great fire can put out a smaller one by starving it of oxygen and fuel. Now, as he returned the last letter to the packet, he was almost sick with longing for Mrs. Rosa Clay of Van Pelt Street, Midwood, Brooklyn.