The Best American Short Stories 2015 by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Dear John, my father writes. I write to tell you that I have discovered my Nanook. It is attaining the North Pole by way of a balloon. He writes the head of the science department at the university. He writes the great explorer Adolphus Greely, recently returned from an expedition to Ellesmere Island—the trip for all intents and purposes a disaster, all but six of the twenty-five-man crew dead. Dear Mr. Greely, my father writes. Before I begin my application for your counsel in earnest, may I express to you my utmost admiration for the bravery demonstrated by you and your crew on your most recent Polar Expedition. This is no easy road, he writes. God help all of us who have chosen to journey it. He writes the celebrated British balloonist Henry Tracey Coxwell, the architect and pilot of such spectacular specimens as Mars and Mammoth: Dear Mr. Coxwell, my father writes. It is with great respect for your many accomplishments in the field of aeronautics that I write to you today in search of guidance pertaining to all things balloon.
He writes Alfred Nobel, whose generosity has made him a coveted contact among adventurers Arctic and other. Dear Mr. Nobel, my father writes. I have not had the pleasure of making your acquaintance, but I understand we hold a similar passion for invention close to our heart. I have a number of ideas pertaining to the recent and unfortunately failed ventures to the North Pole and ways in which I might, with my breadth of experience in the region in question and my extensive knowledge of the conditions related to said region, improve (considerably) upon these failures and, indeed, triumph where others have failed.
He writes the president of the United States, reasoning that in the off chance some excitable underling may, as he sifts through the mail, find my father’s letter and scent the crisp odor of adventure, it will be entirely worth the effort. Dear Mr. President, I am writing to inform you of a thrilling new development in the field of Arctic exploration, a field in which our brave nation might and indeed by all rights should, I believe, excel. Sir, he writes, it is my humble opinion that if given the opportunity I can and shall lead us into the future. Under his signature he writes “Seasoned Arctic Explorer.” At the last minute, he adds: “and Inventor.”
This is what my father sees when he looks out over the lake: balloon after balloon, rising toward the heavens. A fish flips out of the lake. Balloon! In the arc of the fish’s body as it leaps out and reenters there is a fluidity that sends him back to his notebook, sketching furiously. That he is entirely unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of ballooning gives him little pause: he knows the terrain, he knows the cold. He is intimately acquainted with the brutal physics of heat loss and hope. Over the years, he has lined the cabin walls with stacks of books—a vast assortment of weathered encyclopedias, primarily, collected along his journeys and carried back at the expense of more practical acquisitions: canned goods, a sharp knife, warm clothes for my mother, who has darned and re-darned her skirts so many times the mending yarn now blots out the original fabric entirely. No matter. The latest spoils yielded a reasonably well-preserved and fairly recent edition of the Britannica, which he flips through with growing impatience.
When he finds what he is looking for, he hesitates only an instant before ripping the page from the spine. The prize? A drawing of the late Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard’s balloon—the specifics of its construction antiquated by now but still useful. The drawing itself is quite elegant, a bit of fancy my father had admired in passing and then promptly forgotten—its beauty, he had thought, the indulgence of a fool.
My father bends over his notebook. He begins to sketch.
Here is the envelope, here is the burner, here are the drag ropes, here is the basket. The observation platform in Blanchard’s diagram is spare but functional; placed below the burner, it will allow two men to stand watch and take notes on the weather, the clouds, the view as they peer down from their perch. The basket will need to be lined with something warm—sealskin? Something that repels water would be helpful. Rope that can double as ballast. His pen flies over the pages, making a scratching sound as he draws. He turns the page, fills it; turns to another, another.
On her weekly trips to the dry goods store in Coolin, my mother collects stacks of old newspapers and practices her reading at night, one laborious page at a time. My father takes the papers she has already read and draws preliminary sketches across the brittle pages, scrawling through headlines with abandon. MAN DEAD AT TWENTY becomes M N DE D AT TW NTY. STORM APPROACHES COEUR D’ALENE becomes T RM AP O CHES C UR D’ALE E. He uses three entire newspapers in a single afternoon, going through a dozen sketches, two dozen, calculating and recalculating various heights and weights before settling on the proper dimensions for one of the ballast ropes, which he then meticulously copies down into his notebook. My mother watches him take a stack of fresh papers out to the beach and wipes her hands on her apron, takes a loaf of bread from the stove. She puts it in the window to cool, leans forward. Presses her forehead to the glass.
A chipmunk knocks a pinecone down from a nearby tree. My father squints: balloon! They will need more ballast than anyone has ever thought necessary. If the balloon is to stay afloat for a matter of days rather than hours, and if it is required of the balloon that it be able to be controlled tightly once they approach the yawning territory of ice and bitter winds, then they will need to harness not only the power of the sun and the air currents but also that of gravity. Sand, my father reads, is the usual thing, but when he draws a sketch of the basket he includes three five-pound sacks of sugar. They can use it in their coffee, pitch what’s not needed over the side. He has heard that the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, tales of whose recent forays into Greenland have begun to assume the size and heft of myth, takes coffee on every expedition, never mind the vehicle of motion: sled, boat, foot. My father finds the thought of coffee in the air appealing: it is as though, flying, he need not be any less at home than he is on the ground. He sips the coffee my mother has made him and starts a preliminary list:
Coffee, five pounds
Sugar, twelve pounds
Meat, ten pounds
Fowl, ten pounds
When his hand begins to cramp, my father closes his eyes. (His right hand he has abandoned, the work too fine, the degree of control required too high.) The sun burns through his lids, producing a shimmering red glow. Balloon! Hot air fills the envelope. The hydrogen hisses like a snake.
If he rounds the bottom of the basket, will it bounce lightly along the ground rather than smash to smithereens? If he can control the drag ropes the way he controls the ropes that guide the sled dogs, keep them from tangling up in one another, what is to stop him from landing the balloon lightly as a feather? Anyone who knows ice knows it must be treated like a beautiful woman: gently, warily, with a firm but respectful hand. He flips the newspaper over and wets the nub of the pencil against his tongue.
A dragonfly lights on his knee, wings quivering as it cleans its front legs.
Balloon!
A letter from Henry Tracey Coxwell arrives. My father takes the envelope down to the lake and opens it there, his heart fluttering girlishly. The letter is brief but cordial. In it Coxwell expresses his enthusiasm for my father’s venture and outlines the specific ways in which he would like to be of service: the names of a few potential crew members, a wealthy benefactor acquaintance with a taste for the exotic, a seamstress willing to purchase reams of silk on credit. My father stands a minute, pressing the letter to his lips. It is sunset, and the air has taken on an exquisite shimmer, a wash of blues and violets and pale petal-pinks.
I wish you the very best of luck in your ventures, Coxwell writes. Godspeed.
It is only when my father goes to put the letter back in the envelope that he discovers the second sheet tucked into one corner, folded neatly into quarters. He unfolds the quadrants, smoothes it against his arm.
In the dusky quiet, my father lets out a whoop. A single meticulous diagram covers the page: a balloon, perfect as a pearl.
Winter comes and goes. Spring.
&
The ice melts. The stream that empties into the lake swells and groans, the rushing of its overflow so loud it wakes my mother up at night. She lies there a moment, shivering a little under the thin quilt, then turns onto her side and lifts her nightgown so she can press her bare skin against my father’s back. He is burning up all the time now, his body running on some strange, inexhaustible fuel.
She is out clipping the laundry on the line to dry one morning when my father steals all the pillowcases from the linen closet and spends an entire afternoon at the edge of the lake, tossing them into the air, where they billow and collapse like lungs. He pulls the leaves off her favorite alder and sits by the water for days, clumsily sewing them together, blunting her needle until it is unsalvageable. He takes all the silverware from the kitchen drawers; he spends the rest of the week building strange, gleaming cities in the sand. At mealtime they eat with their hands and my mother wonders idly if my father is going insane.
He disappears into the water for hours, swimming toward the horizon until the lake closes behind him. Not so much as a ripple to show where he’s gone.
A mallard beats its wings, pitching its feet forward as it slows, flapping hard as it comes down to rest on the shore. Its body is sleek and fat, the feathers glossy. My father rubs his eyes and turns to a fresh page.
Balloon! Balloon! Balloon!
My mother begins spending all her time inside. She stops going into town. Stops wading in the stream, surprising unlucky trout. Stops walking the trails up to where the huckleberries cluster in fat blue-black globes, leaves her needlepoint to languish on the bedside table, the thread slowly unspooling. Instead, she stands in the kitchen, stirring sugar into cup after cup of tea, watching my father through the window. The spoon hitting the cup over and over again makes a sound like a little bell.
One evening, when my father finally emerges from one of his marathon swims, the sun hits him from behind just so; he is golden, glowing. The light is so strong it has the peculiar effect of drawing a second, shimmering man around the first, as though my father has doubled himself, gone into the water and emerged with a twin.
He lifts a hand to his forehead, squinting at something in the trees, and his twin does the same, his hand drawing a streak against the sky like a shooting star.
The spoon falls to the floor with a clatter, my mother’s pulse suddenly wild.
That night while my father snores, my mother slips her hands under his nightshirt. She runs her fingers across his ribs, up and down the knobby articulation of his spine. He is so thin these days she might see through him. If she lit a candle and brought it under the sheets, she might see straight in to the mess of organs, that dense, wet tangle. She might see through to his heart, the tireless muscle of his desire.
And her?
In one swift motion, she yanks her nightgown up over her head.
At a certain point he clutches her around the waist and she freezes, her hips lifted a quarter-inch above his. But his hands fall away almost immediately. He groans; once, he murmurs her name. Or maybe it is sorry. Maybe it is glory. Or goodbye. She watches his eyes flutter open, the whites of them in the dark startling. After, she lies back against her pillow and folds her arms across her chest. Warmth rises from her like the mist that comes off the lake in early morning. Or like there is something dangerous running through her, both of them burning up from the same fever.
There are things my father wishes he could explain. Things he would like my mother to understand. The sky there is God, he wants to tell her. The ice is God. The fat, hideous walrus is God.
My mother places a pie in the window to cool, standing a few deliberate inches from the steam that rises from it, smelling of burnt sugar. The nausea has just come on. A little over two weeks ago now, but she’d known when the first day of her bleeding came and went without so much as a vague cramping. She has always been regular as a clock. Her body has never failed her. And now—well, now it has done only what she asked of it. She finds the nausea unpleasant but feels otherwise well enough; she is a little tired, occasionally dizzy. No appetite most of the day, though at times hunger comes upon her so suddenly, with such urgency, she finds herself racing to the kitchen to cram hunks of bread down her throat. It helps both nausea and fatigue to focus on a single point. Standing by the window, she pretends she is on a boat in the middle of a vast ocean, though she has never seen the ocean, never seen a body of water larger than this lake. She has never, truth be told, been anywhere. She grips the edge of the kitchen table, pressing her palms against the wood as her stomach rolls and flips. When she closes her eyes, she sees it: hope the size of a seed.
When my father comes in from chopping wood, cheeks red from exertion, she is standing over the pie, halving it, quartering, slicing it into eight. She does not turn around. All these months, he has never said one word about the balloon. He is like a child, afraid to speak his wish for fear of it never coming true. But of course it is ludicrous to pretend my mother doesn’t know. Even before the letters, before he began covering the pages of his notebook with sketches and calculations, filling it with the many blueprints of his dreams—long before any of that, she saw it, the glint in his eye.
She does not know when my father’s leaving turned from adventure to abandonment. Nor does she know when the freedom to do with her days what she pleases became its own oppression, but she pins some portion of the change to that afternoon up on the mountainside, picking berries. She had been happy tramping through the underbrush, the sun hitting her full-tilt. Her basket filled to the brim with fruit. She had been looking forward to the jam, to the elbow-deep immersion its making required, those many hours hers to do with as she wished. And then, as she turned halfway down to admire the view, something about the lake, the way it curled around the mountainside, still and unwieldy as a giant’s finger—something about that had stopped her in her tracks. She had to lie down right there in the bushes and wait until the roaring in her head subsided. This is what she had meant to tell my father. Not about the bears, but about the loneliness that struck her, sudden as a storm.
She places a slice of pie on his plate.
How many pairs of socks, she says, turning, does he think he’ll need this time?
At dinner he eats a little less each night. My mother serves him the same heaping plate, twice as much as covers hers, and he mentally quarters each portion and eats as slowly as he can, ignoring the groans of protest from his gut. They are both eating less and less. Pretending for very different reasons that everything is just as it has always been. She pushes her food around with her fork and drinks plain hot water, cup after cup. She has a headache, she says. She is just tired, she says.
My father stands on the shoreline in his undershirt, watching the moon glaze the frozen lake silver. He flips through his notebook, runs his finger across the pages covered top to bottom with his cramped print, his carefully detailed figures, the lists dutifully numbered and separated according to category. The few letters received in reply he keeps tucked into the back cover, the pages folded and refolded so many times the paper has been worn to unnatural softness, Coxwell’s balloon diagram the texture of velvet.
My mother has stopped crying. For this, he is grateful.
A loon calls somewhere not too far from where he stands and he squints into the glowing darkness, searching.
Behind him, the last candle gutters out in the cabin.
Bal-loon, cries the loon. Bal-loon, bal-loon.
The weather begins to turn again. The snow melts on the mountainside, sending down water like a biblical flood.
My mother wakes one night to a sensation so strange she nearly cries out: just below her rib cage, under the new softness in her belly, a small wave rolls through her. She lies there in the dark for hours after, pressing her hand against the memory.
The
She stands in the kitchen, whisking salt into the flour. Her heart is everywhere: in her throat, her chest, the heat she feels in her cheeks. She will tell him over breakfast. She will get up from her chair as he wipes the last of the syrup from his plate, take his hand and place his palm flat against her belly, the give where, soon enough, I will push the skin out, taut as a drum.
“John,” she will say. “After your father. Dorothy if it is a girl.”
What he is leaving behind is no different that what he is leaving for, she will tell him. A truth stranger than any magic: Inside her is the wildest land.
She stands and pours the first of the batter on the griddle, making a neat row of circles. She is humming loudly to cover up the noise of her heart, a tune she used to sing with her sisters—so long ago now she remembers no more than the refrain: my dear, my sweetheart, my hind. When my father walks in, she turns away to hide her smile.
“Mary,” he says, and when she hears the determination in his voice something that is not me flips over inside her. “Mary,” he says urgently. “Listen to me,” he says. “I am going to change the world.”
And just like that, her smile disappears.