The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (64 page)

Both of the men had felt all along, on certain evenings as they hurried from the transmitter tower or the Hangar back toward the hatch that led to safety and warmth, a stirring at the fringes of the station, a presence, something struggling to be born out of the winds, the darkness,
the looming towers and jagged teeth of the ice. The hair on the back of the neck stood erect and you ran, in spite of yourself, ribs ringing with panic, certain as a child running up the cellar stairs that something very bad was after you. Antarctica was beautiful—even Joe, who loathed it with every fiber of his being as the symbol, the embodiment, the blank unmeaning heart of his impotence in this war, had felt the thrill and grandeur of the Ice. But it was trying, at every moment you remained on it, to kill you. They could not let their guard down for a moment; they had all known that from the start. Now it seemed to Joe and the pilot as if the evil intent of the place, the glittering ripples of dust gathering in the darkness, would find a way to get them no matter how warm their berth or full their bellies, no matter how many layers of wool and hide and fur they put between them and it. Survival, at that moment, seemed beyond the reach or agency of their plans.

“I don’t like having the dogs in here, messing up my airplane,” said Shannenhouse, studying the struts of the Condor’s left wing with an approving frown. “You know that.”

T
HE WINTER DROVE THEM MAD
.
It drove every man mad who had ever lived through it; there was only ever the question of degree. The sun disappeared, and you could not leave the tunnels, and everything and everyone you loved was ten thousand miles away. At best, a man suffered from strange lapses in judgment and perception, finding himself at the mirror about to comb his hair with a mechanical pencil, stepping into his undershirt, boiling up a pot of concentrated orange juice for tea. Most men felt a sudden blaze of recovery in their hearts at the first glimpse of a pale hem of sunlight on the horizon in mid-September. But there were stories, apocryphal, perhaps, but far from dubious, of men in past expeditions who sank so deeply into the drift of their own melancholy that they were lost forever. And few among the wives and families of the men who returned from a winter on the Ice would have said that what they got back was identical to what they had sent down there.

In the case of John Wesley Shannenhouse, the winter madness was merely a kind of modulation, a deepening of his long-standing involvement with his Curtiss-Wright AT-32. The Condor seaplane was ten years old, and had been hard used by the navy before finding her present billet. She had seen action and taken fire, hunting steamship pirates on the Yangtze in the mid-thirties. She had flown thousands of cargo runs in and out of Honduras, Cuba, Mexico, and Hawaii, and enough of the plane and her engines had been replaced over the years, according to the dictates of local expediency, parts shortages, and mechanics’ ingenuity and neglect, from the tiniest bolts and wire clasps to one of the big Wright Cyclone engines and entire sections of the fuselage
and wings, that it was a metaphysical question long pondered by Shannenhouse that winter whether she could fairly be said to be the same plane that had rolled out of Glenn Curtiss’s plant in San Diego in 1934.

As the winter wore on, the question so vexed him—Joe was certainly well sick of it, and of Shannenhouse and his stinking cheroots—that he decided the only way to gain surcease would be to replace every replaceable part, making himself the guarantor of the Condor’s identity. The navy had provided Kelly and Bloch, the dead mechanics, with an entire tractor-load of spare parts, and a machine shop equipped with a toolmaker’s lathe, a milling machine, a drill press, an oxyacetylene welding outfit, a miniature blacksmith’s shop, and eight different kinds of power saw from jig to joiner. Shannenhouse found that simply by dint of drinking sixty-five to eighty cups of coffee a day (with everyone dead, there was certainly no need to stint) he could reduce his sleep requirements to half their former seven hours, at least. When he did sleep, it was in the Condor, wrapped in several sleeping bags (it was cold in the Hangar). He moved in a dozen crates of canned food and took to cooking his meals in there, too, crouching over a Primus stove as if huddled out on the Ice.

First he rebuilt the engines, machining new parts where he found the originals worn or their replacements substandard or borrowed from some alien breed of plane. Then he went to work on the frame of the aircraft, milling new struts and ribs, replacing every screw and grommet. When Joe finally lost track of Shannenhouse’s labors, the pilot had embarked on the long and difficult job of doping, repairing the airplane’s canvas sheathing with a sickly-sweet bubbling compound he cooked up on the same stove he used to make his dinner. It was tough work for one man, but he refused Joe’s halfhearted offer of help as if it had been a proposal that they share wives.

“Get your own airplane,” he said. His beard stuck straight out from his chin, bristling and orange-blond and seven inches long. His eyes were pink and glittering from the dope, he was thickly covered in a reddish pelt of reindeer fur from his sleeping bag, and he stank more than any human Joe had ever smelled (though there would come worse), as if he had been dipped in some ungodly confection of Camembert and
rancid gasoline brewed up in a spit-filled cuspidor. He punctuated this remark by hurling a crescent wrench, which missed Joe’s head by two inches and gouged a deep hole out of the wall beside him. Joe quickly climbed back up through the hatch and went topside. He did not see Shannenhouse again for nearly three weeks.

He had his own madness to contend with.

Radio service at Naval Station SD-A2(R) had been restored seventeen hours after the Waldorf disaster. Joe did not sleep during that entire period, making a fresh attempt every ten minutes, and finally managed to raise Mission Command at Guantánamo Bay at 0700 GMT and inform them, transmitting in code, painfully slowly without Gedman there to assist him, that on April 10 every man at Kelvinator but Kavalier and Shannenhouse, and all the dogs but one, had been poisoned by carbon monoxide resulting from poor ventilation in quarters. The replies from Command were terse but reflected a certain amount of shock and confusion. A number of contradictory and impractical orders were issued and remanded. It took Command longer than it had Joe and Shannenhouse to realize that nothing could be done until September at the earliest. The dead men and dogs would keep perfectly well until then; putrefaction was an unknown phenomenon here. The Bay of Whales was frozen solid and impassable and would be for another three months, at least. In any case, Drake Passage, as Joe’s own monitoring of short-burst transmissions to BdU had confirmed, was teeming with U-boats. There was no hope of being rescued by some passing whaler without the help of a military escort—the whalers and chasers had, by and large, abandoned the field by now—and even then, not until the barrier ice began to warm and fracture. At last, five days after Joe’s first message, Command somewhat superfluously ordered them to sit tight and wait for spring. Joe was, in the meantime, to stay in regular radio contact and continue, so far as he was able, the primary mission (apart from the more elemental one of maintaining an American presence at the pole) of Kelvinator Station: to monitor the airwaves for U-boat transmissions, to transmit all intercepts back to Command, which would relay them to the cryptanalysts back in Washington, with their clacking electronic bombes, and finally to alert Command of any German movements toward the continent itself.

It was in the furtherance of this mission that Joe’s sanity entered its period of hibernation. He became as inseparable from the radio as Shannenhouse from his Condor. And, again like Shannenhouse, he could not bring himself to inhabit the rooms that they had formerly shared with twenty other living, breathing men. Instead, Joe made the radio shack his principal lodgings, and although he continued to cook his meals in the Mess Hall, he carried them through the tunnels to the radio shack to eat them. His direction-finding observations, and intercepts of short-burst transmissions of the two German submarines then active in the region, were extensive and accurate, and in time, with some coaching from Command, he learned to handle the quirky and delicate navy code machine nearly as well as Gedman had.

But it was not just military and commercial shipping channels to which Joe tuned in. He listened through his powerful multiband Marconi CSR 9A set to anything and everything the three seventy-five-foot antenna towers could pull down out of the sky, at all hours of the day: AM, FM, shortwave, the amateur bands. It was a kind of ethereal fishing, sending out his line and seeing what he could catch, and how long he could hold on to it: a tango orchestra live from the banks of the Plate, stern biblical exegesis in Afrikaans, an inning and a half of a game between the Red Sox and the White Sox, a Brazilian soap opera, two lonely amateurs in Nebraska and Suriname droning on about their dogs. He listened for hours to the Morse code alarums of fishermen in squalls and merchant seamen beset by frigates, and once even caught the end of a broadcast of
The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist
, learning thus that Tracy Bacon was no longer playing the title role. Most of all, however, he followed the war. Depending on the hour, the tilt of the planet, the angle of the sun, the cosmic rays, the aurora australis, and the Heaviside layer, he was able to get anywhere from eighteen to thirty-six different news broadcasts every day, from all over the world, though naturally, like most of the world, he favored those of the BBC. The invasion of Europe was in full swing, and like so many others, he followed its fitful but steady progress with the help of a map that he tacked to the padded wall of the shack and studded with the colored pins of victory and setback. He listened to H. V. Kaltenborn, Walter Winchell, Edward R. Murrow, and, just as devotedly, to their mocking shadows, to
the snide innuendos of Lord Haw-Haw, Patrick Kelly out of Japanese Shanghai, Mr. O.K., Mr. Guess Who, and to the throaty insinuations of Midge-at-the-Mike, whom he quite often thought of fucking. He would sit, awash in the aqueous burbling of his headphones, for twelve or fifteen hours at a time, getting up from the console only to use the latrine and to feed himself and Oyster.

It may be imagined that this ability to reach out so far and wide from the confines of his deep-buried polar tomb, his only company a halfblind dog, thirty-seven corpses human and animal, and a man in the grip of an idée fixe, might have served as a means of salvation for Joe, connected in his isolation and loneliness to the whole world. But in fact the cumulative effect, as day after day he at last doffed the headphones and lowered himself, stiff, head buzzing, onto the floor of the shack beside Oyster, was only, in the end, to emphasize and to mock him with the one connection he could not make. Just as, in his first months in New York, there had never been any mention in any of the eleven newspapers he bought every day, in any of three languages, about the well-being and disposition of the Kavalier family of Prague, there was now never anything on the radio that gave him any indication of how they might be faring. It was not merely that they were never personally mentioned—even at his most desperate, he didn’t seriously imagine this possibility—but that he could never seem to get any information at all about the fate of the Jews of Czechoslovakia.

From time to time there were warnings and reports from escapees of camps in Germany, massacres in Poland, roundups and deportations and trials. But it was, from his admittedly remote and limited point of view, as if the Jews of his country, his Jews, his family, had been slipped unseen into some fold in the pin-bristling map of Europe. And increasingly, as the winter inched on and the darkness deepened around him, Joe began to brood, and the corrosion that had been worked on his inner wiring for so long by his inability to do anything to help or reach his mother and grandfather, the disappointment and anger he had been nursing for so long at the navy’s having sent him to the fucking South Pole when all he had wanted to do was drop bombs on Germans and supplies on Czech partisans, began to coalesce into a genuine desperation.

Then one “evening” toward the end of July, Joe tuned in to a shortwave broadcast from the Reichsrundsfunk directed at Rhodesia, Uganda, and the rest of British Africa. It was an English-language documentary program cheerfully detailing the creation and flourishing of a marvelous place in the Czech Protectorate, a specially designed “preserve,” as the narrator called it, for the Jews of that part of the Reich. It was called the Theresienstadt Model Ghetto. Joe had been through the town of Terezin once, on an outing with his Makabbi sporting group. Apparently, this town had been transformed from a dull Bohemian backwater into a happy, industrious, even cultivated place, of rose gardens, vocational schools, and a full symphony orchestra made up of what the narrator, who sounded like Emil Jannings trying to sound like Will Rogers, called “internees.” There was a description of a typical musical evening at the preserve, into the midst of which, to Joe’s horror and delight, floated the rich, disembodied tenor of his maternal grandfather, Franz Schonfeld. He was not identified by name, but there was no mistaking the faint whiskey undertones, nor for that matter the selection, “Der Erlkönig.”