“Ever been north?”
“Never strayed far from Texas. Until now.”
“I was in Alaska in the summer of ‘67. People on Svalbard consider that the tropics.”
Carol laughs. “I’m intrigued by what I’ve read of the island. I must say I never bargained for work like this.”
“More comfortable in an office?”
“I figured I’d go into academics, like the rest of my family.”
“What changed your mind?”
“No money in thought. Besides, when it comes to hiring, colleges are even more sexist than the private sector. It’s the tenure system. Bunch of cavemen in the department at UT.”
He wonders if in her view he’s a caveman, wrapped tightly in his parka, trying to imagine her without a heavy coat. She smiles. They talk for a few minutes more before, chilled by a sudden squall, walking down the stairs of the companionway together.
A cat’s mewling wakes Adams in the middle of the night. The sea is calm. He gets up, pulls on his pants, carefully makes his way down the narrow metal walkway between quarters in the hold. The officers are asleep. He climbs the metal stairs. No movement on deck. The canvas sails whip like towels in the wind. Adams’ throat is dry. He licks his lips, swallows. Salt in his nose, his mouth. His body is being reduced to its essentials.
He stands beneath the mizzenmast, listening to the sea. Two sailors on watch smoke cigarettes in the curve of the bow. Adams is learning the ship: bowsprit, foc’sle, foremast. Poop deck at the rear. The guests’ quarters are located in the hold, below the pumps.
At night, when a gale rises unexpectedly, Adams hears the cry “Aloft and stow!” The canvas, trapping too much wind, must be bound with gaskets; if not, the highest sails would blow away.
Tonight all is quiet except for the cat sounds. Adams returns down the companionway, pauses by the galley. Pots and pans rattle, but don’t account for the noise. Pumps hiss, otherwise the hold is silent. He returns to his cabin, lights the kerosene lamp beside his bunk, picks up The Travels of Amerigo Vespucci, and reads.
Ancient visions of the other world (prior to Dante’s cosmography) depicted the mysterious regions as an island or a group of islands reached by crossing a water barrier. In these accounts the ocean often is dense with swords.
The only image of the Underworld Adams remembers from college is the punishment of Tantalus: Having angered the gods, he was placed in cool water up to his neck. Luscious grapes hung above his head. When he bent to drink, the water turned to dust. When he stretched his tongue for the grapes, they rose out of reach. Perhaps spatial expressions such as “over my head” and “I’ve had it up to here” spring from this. “Underworld” itself is a spatial expression, remarkably resonant even today. Ways of seeing, understanding. He remembers, as a child, questioning his ability to see. “Can’t you see I’ve got a headache?” his mother said. He asked her what the headaches did. “They make the whole world red.” He didn’t see until the afternoon he noticed a melted red candle on the kitchen table. Wax had dripped down the golden stem of the holder onto the tabletop glass. He imagined a candle burning inside his mother’s head.
One afternoon, playing in back of the house, Adams heard a sputtering in the sky, getting louder. A small airplane came into view just above the tree line, climbed, then fell again, close to the ground. Adams ran inside to tell his mother. She was lying in the bedroom with the blinds drawn, a cool rag over her eyes. She told him to hush, she had a splitting migraine. He rushed to the window, parted the blinds. “There’s nothing out there,” she told him. “Now leave the blinds alone.”
The plane rolled wildly out of control, trailing a plume of smoke. Adams ran outside and watched from the back porch as it dipped, its right wing just missing the water tower at the end of the block. There was a flash of light, a scattering of wood in the air. Adams ran down the block past a gathering crowd. The plane had come apart above the neighborhood and was lying out of sight. A gaping hole in the roof of a nearby house. Adams shoved his way past spectators at the front door, followed a group of men to the bathroom. Lying in the tub, a man in a crumpled suit, arms and legs at impossible angles. A thin line of water leaked from the faucet. Washcloths covered the floor.
The man’s head resembled a melted red candle.
Mama’s migraine, Adams thought, then someone whisked him out of the room. “There’s nothing to see, nothing to see,” a man said, holding people back.
He asks his colleagues at breakfast if they happened to hear a cat in the night. They shake their heads. One young geologist says his bunk is right below the pumps. “Can’t hear a thing.”
“You hear lots of funny noises at sea,” says Harry Schock, the senior geologist. “The jibboom creaks, sails tear, bolts rattle. It doesn’t mean anything. You get used to them. You’ll see.”
A few nights later, after dinner, Adams strolls the deck. The breeze gets cooler each evening; the air becomes thinner.
Human beings were not made to live in this environment. Though he’s glad of the assignment, sometimes he misses the quiet of his kitchen.
He wonders if the kids will forget him. For the first time since leaving the States, he hopes the trip is brief.
He’ll bring them something special. A piece of the North Pole. Better yet, he’ll make them a map, the way he used to do when they were small. Brick roads, waterfalls, mountains. The princess who slept on the pea, Brer Rabbit, the three little pigs.
This time he’ll make a magical map of the north with mythical beings like Gog and Magog roaming the Ural Mountains, waiting to break loose and storm through Europe, eating everyone in sight. He returns to his cabin, unrolls a sheet of paper. With a grease pencil he marks the center of the page longitude seventy-five degrees, latitude fifteen degrees north, the approximate location of Desire Provoked.
In swirling script at the bottom of the page he warns that vipers inhabit the sea: “Sailor Beware: They Will Shake a Ship to its Rafters Like a Happy Child Dancing in His Bones.”
Carol says, “My father used to take the family on vacations through Texas and New Mexico. He’d point out the geological features: ‘Mount Capulin, that’s a volcano. See how the land here is flat and smooth? Lava has evened it out.’ Or, ‘This is the Permian Basin — it used to be under water.’ His explanations were far more interesting than the places we stayed.”
Adams nods. They’ve taken roast beef from the galley and climbed up on deck with it. Already the air has chilled the meat.
“I guess what he taught me,” Carol says, “is that knowing how something works doesn’t diminish its beauty. From a distance a mountain is gorgeous, right, then you get up close and it’s just a bunch of rocks. But then if you look at the rocks, the mountain seems more amazing than ever. The way the mica shines or the sulfur rubs off on your hands.”
“I just like to know where everything is,” Adams says. “In case I need it.” Carol laughs. “I remember seeing a book in the library as a child. I never read it, but the title stayed with me. It was called You Must Know Everything.”
“Exactly,” Carol says, balancing her plate on the ship’s copper rail. “That’s how I felt, growing up. And I love what I’m doing now, but sometimes I wonder if I’d followed other options…”
“It’s good that you wonder.”
She smiles. Adams feels attractive.
“Well, I can’t change it,” she says, inadvertently brushing his sleeve. “There are lots of things — and lots of people — I’d like to get to know.”