Memoir From Antproof Case (22 page)

As we were used to flying straight at their greatest strengths, the Benghazi SLOC was considered merely a formality, an opportunity to rest, and I wasn't paying attention, as I should have been, to the sky around me. Not only did enemy planes never show up in the Gulf of Sirte, having no longer any reason to be there, but I was lost in memories of a woman I had once known in Boston. Had it not been for the war, I might have married her. To the accompaniment of very gentle and happy semi-indigenous music that my radio brought me dimly from French West Africa across thousands of miles of silent desert and cobalt-blue skies, I was looking into her eyes, my arms resting on her shoulders, as I moved back and forth, to and from her face, kissing her in adoration each time I came in. This had lasted for a long time, and was totally hypnotic both when it happened and when I recalled it.

I had neglected my instruments and gauges, had glanced at the compass only unconsciously, and my one thought of the sky was that it was the color of her blue eyes. I had kissed her for so long that we were both delirious. It was on a cold winter day, in a parlor room in the Back Bay, as the radiator hissed and the wind blew. I had kissed her like this because it was such a joy to see her face.

Had she known that I was still kissing her, twenty thousand feet above the Gulf of Sirte, she might have been as numb with pleasure as was I. That was the problem. My mouth hung half open and my eyes focused on infinity. And as I sank deeper and deeper into the kiss, a spray of cannon shells tap-danced up my fuselage and across my wings, all in a second. I woke with a terrible start.

I never saw the plane that had passed over me. He undoubtedly rolled back to get behind me again, but I was too busy to search for him. My first instinct was to bank left, but the aircraft did not respond.

In the movies, when planes are shot up, they catch fire and dive smoothly until they can "explode" behind a hill. Naturally, pilots just simulating a crash can fly smoothly: their aircraft are intact. I was flying anything but smoothly: the cannon shells had severed enough spars and ribs to make the plane shake like a renegade washing machine. The more it shook, the more things popped and broke, and to keep myself from breaking into pieces I cut the throttle until I was almost gliding. I had only half my controls, and was doing everything I could just to stay in level flight.

Where was he? I didn't know. I guessed. He was several thousand feet above, watching to see if he had to come in for the kill or if I was going to be a hole-in-one. I kept on saying, "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!," as if he could hear me as I was knocked around in my own cockpit like a bug who had gone to sleep in a jackhammer.

I was spitting like someone at the end of an hour of rough dentistry. You don't spit in your cockpit, because then you have to live with it. "Why am I spitting?" I asked myself. Then I looked, and I realized that I was spitting blood. But I felt no pain. I must be wounded somewhere, I thought, but I have a lot of strength, and I feel no pain. My flight suit was binding me like a pressure bandage.

Then the engine caught fire. Why, I wondered, had it burst into flame after such a long delay? The answer that I was able to give only much later was that everything had happened in a few seconds that were greatly hollowed out in time.

"The goddamned windshield," I told myself, "is covered with blood." I couldn't see. But it wasn't blood, the engine was spraying oil, which was then applied to the glass by the atmosphere acting as a 300 mph airbrush. Still, if I could get home, I could land with only side visibility. I looked to check my instruments. They were shattered and covered with blood. The glass had been broken in the frames, and shards of it covered my legs. The panel was dripping wet.

Whose blood is that? I thought.

The shaking had not subsided, and when the engine cut out, the ride got a little smoother but a lot less controlled. I decided to bale out.

The engine was dead, the plane was buffeting and on fire, I was blind in front and spitting blood. I unlocked the canopy and pulled on it, but it refused to slide. The frame had been bent and would not move even an inch. I had to ditch.

Looking down, I saw that the sea was now fairly close. Though ten or fifteen miles from the coast, I was unable to head in closer, because I couldn't steer. I remembered a trick for crash-landing in the sea that a British Hurricane pilot had told me in the officers club in Algiers. Just before you go down, you fire all your guns simultaneously. Due solely to the fact that for every action there is a reaction, thirty seconds of sustained firing through six cannons could slow you perhaps enough to save you.

I put my flaps down and pulled hard to keep the nose high. This seemed to tame one frequency of vibration and liberate another. Even though the engine was dead and the prop feathered, we were making a lot of noise, in wind that shrieked through broken glass, in the roar of oxygen-pumped flame, and as the wings and fuselage vibrated like a metal roof in a July downpour.

My speed was high and the waves unfortunately vigorous. Because I had to slide in on my belly, I hadn't been able to drop the wheels to increase drag, for I assumed that I would not have been able to get them up again. As the sea rose to meet the plane I fired the cannons and felt them slow the forward momentum. They were deafeningly loud.

The plane banged down, bounced, and flipped over. The next thing I knew, I was hanging upside down in the cockpit, underwater, slowly sinking.

I undid my harness and fell onto the canopy. I thought I had broken my neck. How was I going to get out? I was already sitting in water up to my thighs, and the canopy wouldn't slide open. The water was silent, blue, and clear, with nothing in it but dissolved azure and rows of streaming sun.

After I kicked and punched the parachute out of my way, I half ripped off and half slithered out of my flight suit. It, too, was bulky, and covered with attachments, projections, and accoutrements that might have caught on the metal and drowned me.

The knife I carried had a heavy bolt at the butt, and I used it to attack the glass canopy as if I were in mortal combat with a wolf. Seawater came flooding in, colder now because the plane had sunk deeper. I took the last of the air and put my head through the opening. As I passed through, the plane began a graceful cartwheel, the tail turning in an arc that reached up and failed to break the silver surface. I was free. I rose toward the bottom of the waves, bubbles of air preceding me on the way up.

When I burst into clear air and felt the spray on my face, I was choking with brine, bleeding in the water, whooping, laughing, and crying for joy. I had hours of swimming ahead, and despite the fact that I was wounded I did the first mile or so like a porpoise, leaping into the troughs of the waves with an explosion of foam and the spray stinging my face. I was alone in windblown reaches of water. The Mediterranean is an old and gentle sea, shallow and warm, blue and green—the color of sapphires and sea turtles.

 

I will never know exactly how many miles I swam—whether it was ten, or fifteen, or less, or more—but when I reached shore I was exhausted as never before.

In the sea I had felt a pain in my left side, and when I crawled onto the sand beyond the breakers I discovered a little hole there the size of a small-caliber bullet. Although I didn't know it, a rivet had been propelled into me. Had it reached my heart, I would have been slain in battle not by a German bullet but by an American metal fastener.

Because I was now only occasionally coughing up blood, I didn't worry. And yet I was sufficiently anxious that I didn't fall asleep on the beach, which was the most beautiful, empty beach I had ever seen, and I had seen some very lovely beaches (after all, I was an investment banker).

It was several hundred yards wide, and sloped so that the waves rolled in and broke with a semi-Southampton thud, and the sand was the soft white color of a good broadcloth shirt—which is to say that it was slightly yellow and gold, just enough to make it a cousin of the sun that beat upon it from dawn to dusk.

Unfortunately, I was already thirsty, and it seemed ironic that my only choice was to walk into the interior, for I am sure that someone downed in the desert almost certainly would have made for the sea. But as I saw no hotels, seaside restaurants, or mahogany launches, I headed in the direction of the road.

I had studied the map. Along the entire length of the Libyan coast, the road paralleled the beach. In some places they ran close together, but at other points the road was almost forty miles inland. Having no idea of my location, I imagined that I might have exhausted my luck and come ashore at the forty-mile section. I had.

Weak, bleeding, and dehydrated, I did not relish the prospect of walking forty miles in the hot sun, but I hoped I would not have to. At least I'd kept my shoes, even diving for one when it slipped off as I swam. Before setting out, I cut my pants into shorts and bandaged my wound with one of the dismembered legs.

Soon, the land fell into a huge rock-littered depression. I passed the hours hoping to come across a plant, but I was in the world of minerals. As I walked, I chanted, "Animal, vegetable ... mineral. Animal, vegetable ... mineral." I tried to hum Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert—not Bach, who does not lend himself so much to humming—but I could not make the transition.

After five or six hours, and, presumably, fifteen to twenty miles, I could hardly stand, and had ceased to chant. I rested my eyelids by closing them most of the time and blinking every few seconds, long enough to take a still photograph of what lay in front of me, which I then altered in the remembered image as I walked. I was good at this, having practiced when I was a child, initially to see what it was like to be blind and cheating as I did so, and then to see whether with memory alone I could do justice to time, space, and distance.

Why did I cheat when I pretended to be blind, why does every child? For the same reason that our sympathy and love for those who have died is not strong enough to make us follow. Knowing that our turn will come, we cheat our love and hold on to life. I had opened my eyes simply because, knowing that someday I would be blind, I was not able to resist the light.

I was so drained as I stumbled across the desert that all I wanted was sleep, and in the early morning I surrendered, falling against a convex dome of perfectly white smooth sand. It was cooler than I thought it would be, and as soft as cornstarch. In this magnificent bed, sleep was heavier than ever before or since, and as I began to lose consciousness and dream I hoped I would not die, though I knew that if dying were the price of rest I could not resist payment. My limbs relaxed and I was immediately pulled under.

I awoke at night, in cold primitive air that smelled of ageless sand and rock. When I opened my eyes I was blinded by a rash of stars in the sky, and I had to blink to adjust to the light.

This was the only time in my life when for as far as I could see I saw nothing that lived and nothing made by man. The sky stretched for 360 degrees in a bowl undisturbed by spires or hills or ranks of trees. And yet the air moved in columns of heat, refracting the starlight, making the pins of phosphorus jump and dance, and it did so as if I were looking over the prospect of a city on a frigid winter night ribboned with air rising from active chimneys. Though the sky was broken by translucent wavy columns they rose not from fires but from large rocks or dark patches of sand.

I always feel enormously revived by the sight of stars, and as I walked west-southwest, guided by the North Star in a line perpendicular to the coast, I was very happy to be in Africa, at night, alone (as far as I knew) for hundreds of miles. Had I struck southward I might have wandered through a thousand miles of desert, seeing no one, not even a lizard or a palm, until the wastes of French Equatorial Africa turned green.

Africa, it seemed to me, and still does, is the last bastion of dreams. Its perimeters have been clarified and stabilized by written languages and machines, but in its depth nothing can be remembered except what comes from the heart. In the real Africa, time has no punctuation, and flows between misty green banks. There, the color and texture of the landscape, the grace of the animals, and the forbearance of man, are all linked in suffering, joy, and the comforting nonexistence of time.

Even on the northern margins raked by mechanized war, I felt the presence far south of Libreville, Mbeya, and Lourenço Marques, all places that I did not know but for their names, all under the same ocean of sky. And as I was walking on the Mediterranean littoral, other men were walking under the stars on longer coasts and in quieter hinterlands—on the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic.

What could be more poignant than a place where history has been lost, for there all value flows into the present. There, the present actually exists. We who have invented writing and planning have disinvented immediacy, but in Africa immediacy is everywhere. I had stepped into its realm when I left the coast and started walking in the direction of Senegal (never to reach it) and under the same blazing stars that lit warm and humid Brazzaville. Though I was in very poor physical condition, just thinking of what lay south made my heart full.

Then the sun came up, the orange clock of Africa, and lit the red desert before me. The way was flat now, with the rocks few and far between and most of them no bigger than grapefruit. The horizon at dawn jumped from an inexplicable union of black and gray inks to a sharply penned line, and as if to echo this newfound resolution, the road suddenly appeared before me. Had I been five minutes ahead of myself, I would never have seen it, because it consisted of two rows of rocks placed at intervals of about fifteen feet, with nothing in between the rows but a rutted track.

Had not the sun risen just then, I would have crossed the road in two strides and disappeared forever in the desert. By the time I was destined to meet Constance, my bones would have been bleached entirely white and half buried in sand. The only memory of me would have been in various registers here and there, culminating in a perfectly ironic listing in the Pentagon stating that I had been lost at sea.