On his map for the kids Adams draws an Island of Beautiful Women.
Than invites Adams to his cabin. Iťs amazing what he’s done with the space. Books stacked neatly in corners. Photographs of his family. An old Vietnamese flag taped to the wall. The flag is gold, with three thin red stripes running parallel through the center. Circular stains, as though someone had set a can of varnish on it, appear in one of the corners.
Than was trained at UCLA. His family remained in Saigon until the end of the war, he says, when they escaped with the last Americans.
“What was Saigon like at the end,” Adams asks.
“For a long time it wasn’t Saigon. It was a French city — like paintings of Paris, you know? Wide boulevards in the center of town, security apartments for the French civil servants. My father said a French laborer could earn more money in Saigon than a Vietnamese merchant. In school the courses we took were based on the classical French tradition. Languages and literature.” He laughs. “My family complained I was getting an elitist education that wouldn’t help me in my own country. When Ho Chi Minh ran the French out of the northern provinces, my father, who was not a Communist, cheered.
“Anyway, Saigon became an American city, very flashy and noisy. Money changing hands. The army tried to clean it up so it would look prosperous and democratic on the news. The cameras never showed the edge of the city where American products were dumped.”
“I remember wondering before they changed the city’s name if I was going to have to take Saigon off the map.”
Than nods. He lights a kerosene lamp, offers Adams a cup of tea. “The first thing the American military did was to lay a new set of coordinates on the country, ignoring the old boundaries. Aggression is not always physical.” He sits on his bunk. “Sometimes it takes place in the imagination. The West forced values on Vietnam that had no place in its culture. For example, here you divide the mind into conscious and unconscious. All very rational. In the East it’s generally believed that the mind is unknowable, that its processes are more intuitive than rational.”
“How did you get interested in science?”
“Naturally, many of us do value rational thought.”
“Knowledge is comforting,” Adams says.
Than agrees. “But on the most basic issues, I think education fails.”
From A.D. 300 to 500 pilgrimages were the fashion in western Europe, from Britain to the Orient and points in between. They were not scientists, these solitary travelers on their way to the Holy Land. The first geographical documents in Europe, however, grew out of these pilgrimages. Early records are scanty, but they do mention a Gallic matron who in A.D. 31 walked across Europe to the Holy Land and returned with a shell filled with the blood of John the Baptist, murdered that year by Herod Antipas.
The first authentic guidebook dates from A.D. 330: the Itinerary from Bourdeaux to Jerusalem, a route to the Holy Land via southern Europe. Though mapless, it mentions cities and towns along the way, with listings of hotels and inns. The unknown author traveled on donkeys and records that the distance from Bour-deaux to Constantinople is 2,221 miles, with 112 stops and 230 changes of animals.
There are no cats aboard Desire Provoked, yet Adams is awakened by a whine. He’s hot and muggy under the covers. The ship rocks. His left hand, limp with sleep, thumps the metal wall above his head. He listens. Again, as though the hull were being sheared.
Is there a psychological trigger for these sounds? Does the fact that he misses Toby and Deidre, for example, have a bearing on what he hears, the way latitude affects the location of a city on a map? A reasonable explanation, but the kids never had cats, unless you count the stray…
The hold is quiet. He lies awake for a while, remembering the children’s faces, then turns to the wall and sleeps.
From the deck of Desire Provoked Adams spots the first piece of ice in the sea. A small fragment, about the size of a Victorian chest of drawers.
He shivers. Long johns, two cotton shirts, a pull-over sweater, a jacket, a parka, and still he is cold. Fog hits the sails, spreading them like a bellows. They are the color of biscuits. He hunkers down against the bow. He has been reading accounts of Arctic explorers. Pytheas from Massilia — a contemporary of Aristotle’s — wrote that six days north of Ireland was an island named Thule, near the frozen sea. From there northward, he reported, there was no longer a distinction between earth, air, and sea, but a strange combination of all three, a gelatinous suspension similar to a jellyfish, which made navigation, not to mention human life, impossible.
Carol taps on his door, offers him a cup of coffee. He invites her to have a seat on his bunk, lights the kerosene lamp. She picks through the sketches he has made for his kids.
“Let me show you,” he says. He’s fashioned a square mat of old palm fronds found in the ship’s storage room. Placing his fingers on the edge of the mat, he wiggles the yellow fronds. They appear to ripple. “A living map,” he says. “Wave movement.” He drops tiny seashells onto the mat. “These are the islands.”
“It’s wonderful,” Carol says. “And these?”
“Sketches for another map — a mythical guide to the north.”
“They’re delightful. Do you mind?” She goes through the stack. Watching her long fingers shuffle paper reminds Adams of von Frisch’s famous experiments with honeybees in 1954. The scouts would locate a pollen source and then report, dancing, to the hive. The shape of the dance indicated the distance of the pollen source from the hive. A circular dance meant “nearby,” a tail-wagging dance meant “far.”
Adams is oddly touched that bees should have a spatial sense. Carol’s dancing fingers are oddly touching, too. He sits nearer, brushing her hip.
The ocean at night breaks white and black. On deck a forgotten coat, stiff with salt, raises an arm to him as he approaches the bow. He’s far from the flat country that made him — far from himself in sleepless longing for his kids. He must want to stand here tonight, turning colder with each new rush of spray.
The rigging thunders with the sails like horses rocking in their stalls. He must want to hear this. He remembers accompanying his father to a neighbor’s ranch when he was ten or eleven years old. Cowboys, drunk, hugging each other, a mare who bit herself in the back giving birth. Sometimes he watched the neighbors’ wives haul baskets of laundry out under the webworms’ silk. The women cracked pecans in the grass and strung their clothes between the trees. Peaches barely made it through each burning spring; his father washed his father with a sponge.
Tonight it’s all one sound: water and wind, memory and breath. He would like to say some of this to Carol Richardson. Because of his desire for her. He would like to tell her about intimacy and maps, the direction of the hands: He’s put the old man to bed now, Carol. His father’s whiskers float in a bowl of water and he looks at me, thinking something I can’t name. Outside, a foal is trying to stand.
He pulls a practice pad from his bag, takes out his sticks, and does an extended roll. He had thought life in the cold would be slow. Instead each moment is crisp, the days divided into abrupt little scenes. He tries to imagine the island of ice. Like the ocean, it is blank, ever-changing — defined for him only in texts, where words and lines can guide his eye.
On a rotating basis, members of the crew are allowed to use the communications equipment for personal business.
“How are you, honey?”