Читать книгу Water, Ice & Stone - Bill Green - Страница 16

FOUR

The Map

I was remembering my father’s maps, those old Texaco numbers, creased into falling lint at the folds, folding open with the smell of paper dust and raw heat from the glove compartment. I was thinking of him opening his maps on the front seat of the Pontiac Chieftain, moving the wet, well-chewed El Producto cigar around in his mouth, exhaling a blue cloud of vapor that hung and hung until it got stale in the hot car. And we were in the back, eating these red-stained warm tomato sandwiches he had packed, wondering what curvy switchback of a road he was going to head down next and whether we were going to make it through the afternoon with our stomachs intact. And his head was down now, the map crawling up my mother’s arm, and his finger was tracing along some thin spaghetti of highway that ran near battlefields and the quilt of farms and over the river with its ferry and down to the sea.

And I wanted us just to stop for the day, get out, walk over behind the small white motel units beyond the neon signs into the fields and throw baseballs, make them disappear into the red evening sky and then reappear as plunging arrows onto the green earth. But he had his map now, shredded in the creases, red- and blue-veined and smelling of oil and heat, and the dead gray ash of his cigar was falling onto it, and he was brushing the dry ash away.

My mother was wearing a white dress or maybe it was a blue dress with a white collar, and she was saying nothing, just looking off into the distance beyond the chrome war bonnet on the hood. The map was my father’s instrument of navigation on the long eastward journey through the strawberry and melon and corn roads of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and through the streets of the seaside city with its wooden three-story guest houses and its seaside restaurants and its piers jutting into the Atlantic. With his map he would find us a room and a meal and a bed to sleep on. Most of all, with his map he would find us the churning, magnificent sea. The sea filled with light.

NIGHT IN ANTARCTICA is so little different from day. At McMurdo you sense only a slowing of the pace, a diminishing of machine noise. The orange helicopters, with their rigid schedules, sit motionless on the pad, their blades sacked and roped into place against the wind. The sun at this time of year merely circles the horizon, a pale disk low in the sky. In full daylight, the streets are mostly empty. People have gone inside, into the warmth and familiarity of the television room with its sofas and magazines and beer dispensers dropping Coors and Michelob for half a dollar into your hands; and into the officers’ club, with its antiquated popcorn machine, still there, still off in the corner across from the bar; and into countless dens and warrens of ping-pong and eight-ball; and into solitary rooms with their books and pens and papers edging away the distance and loneliness. In my own room, I pulled down the window shade, closed the drapes, and pinned to the rough fabric a map of the continent. I poured some bourbon into a plastic cup, pulled up a chair, propped my feet against the wall, and began to study the white and blue shapes that hung before me.

A map can do strange things. On a flat surface the incomprehensible world lies stretched and somehow intelligible, its myriad particulars brought together in a single, unified whole. Out of the chaos of coordinates and compass readings and place names, an order emerges, a system of relationships that seems somehow complete and enduring. With a few pins, or with a few words of historical commentary, the dimension of time can be added, the progression of events can be traced. In a single glance an entire universe of content and association can be reconstructed in a thousand different ways, each remembrance colored and shadowed by whatever unpredictable gloss the mind lays over it.

I remember once, while reading Moby Dick, I mounted a map on a large slab of cardboard over my desk and festooned it with pins that eventually traced the journey and fate of the Pequod. In greens and reds and blues, the pins marched across the breadth of the oceans from the tiny hook of Cape Cod, eastward to the Azores and south down the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, curved westward along the coast of South America to where the Rio de la Plata empties into the sea. Then they moved in a straight line northwest to St. Helena, south around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, northeast into the South China Sea, and off toward Japan. Off Fanning Island, near Samoa and Tonga, I stuck a black pin into the map, where the sea had rolled over the ship’s mainmast, leaving not a trace of its passage. The map that hung before me was like this: a symbol of movement and passage and quest, of objects vast and minuscule creaking and ambling and probing through time. A symbol of order, of things understood, connected and whole.

The click of metal, the sturdy door opening, brought me back. Varner had returned from the lab. There was a trace of isobutanol from the phosphorus analysis still clinging to his clothing. He sat down at one of the desk chairs and said nothing, as though the presence of the map in the darkened room was something that needed no explanation. After a few minutes he turned to me and said, “You know, this place is starting to scare me.”

He was leafing through the unmarked pages of the journal he had bought in New Zealand. “I don’t think I can write about this,” he said. “It’s just too immense. Too damned hostile looking.” He was pointing up to the map, inscribing a big circle in the air. “There is no language for this.”

He moved to his bunk and lay down, his face over against the wall. “I’ll tell you what’s out there,” he said. “Nothing. Nothing that I can understand. Nothing that you can understand either, even though you pretend.” He fell silent for a minute. Then he turned over and rubbed his eyes. “Don’t say anything to Mike and Walt and the others. They wouldn’t understand. I’m not sure I do.”

Varner turned toward the wall again. His plaid shirt picked up the light filtering through the map that covered the window. “Do you know what light does to our body’s sleep cycle?” he asked rhetorically. “Do you know how unnatural twenty-four hours of daylight is?” He was speaking in a very low voice, so that I could barely hear him. “We’re meant for light and dark. Not for this. We’re not meant to be here at all.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I let it go. He’ll get over it, I thought. It’s early. Things will change. He’ll find the words he needs. I let my eyes drift back to the map. I became more interested in thinking about the continent in other ways, about how it had come to be here, so isolated and ice-filled, so remote from our history, almost invisible. It was immense, as Varner had said, almost too immense to have drifted here into these latitudes, undiscovered and nameless until so recently. Until just last year, you might say.

I ran my finger in a clockwise circle, whispering the names that appeared over the background of the ice: Queen Maud Land; Wilkes Land; Marie Byrd Land; Ellsworth Land; Palmer and Graham Lands, curving off toward Argentina. Outward from the Pole, I traced my finger over the coasts: Princess Martha Coast; Princess Astrid Coast; Princess Ragnhild Coast; Ingrid Christensen Coast; Queen Mary Coast. And over the ice shelves: Ross, Ronne, Filchner. And the capes: Darnley, Elliott, Goodenough, Adare. And the seas: Weddell, Ross, Amundsen, Bellinghausen. Name after name, kings and queens and princesses, explorers and statesmen, ordinary seamen and scientists—I spoke them aloud, as my finger traced the disk of continent, traced its 5.5 million square miles (as large as the continental United States and Mexico combined!), its circling geography of plateaus and ice-buried mountains, its indented coastlines, like cockles and scallops, until I felt dizzied by it all. This naming, what did it mean? Could you possess this? And once you did, what would you have? A handful of water. Better to bless yourself.

The shape on the bed rolled over. “You forgot Varner Land and Cape Varner and the Varner Massif,” it said. I laughed, took out a pen. Stood up and moved the few feet over to the map. I drew a line through the word Ross and above it wrote Varner. The Varner Sea. What did it matter? Varner smiled, rolled back to the wall, trying to sleep.