I Was Amelia Earhart (Vintage Contemporaries) (12 page)

Planes were not like ocean liners. They were not sprawling, they were intimate. They were not like towns with all the amenities of towns, they were like cars, or covered wagons. I think it was this, the intimacy of planes, the isolation, the privacy, the antisocial nature of flying a plane, this appealed to me. Everything that made ocean liner travel appealing ceased to exist in a plane. It was uncomfortable, you couldn’t eat well, you couldn’t dance or read a book. This was before many people started using planes for travel. Planes were mostly for mail, or for stunts. Many people still thought that airplanes were not for real people. That they were somehow ridiculous.

Takeoffs were not like ship departures. They were riveting, unpredictable, dangerous. There was not yet a ritual way of taking off in a plane, and each ascent was fraught with its own adventures. People have always departed, by land or sea, but to leave by air is still new, it is still a cause for wonder. Now, maybe by now, that’s not true anymore. But at the time I’m describing, to leave in an airplane is as magical as taking off on a spaceship. It’s a resurrection.

•

The Electra looked beautiful. She sat on the reef flat, enormous, expectant, waiting to take us away. But she didn’t seem to want to go any more than we did. When it was time to go I climbed into the cockpit, and Noonan sat next to me, in the cockpit. He didn’t go in back into the navigator’s cabin because his instruments were mostly lost or broken and we needed to be closer to each other. Before he climbed in he checked everything one last time. He made sure that there were no birds trafficking our makeshift runway. Then he shut the hatch behind him. I tied on my scarf. I put on my goggles. Then I waved one last wave to the island, a cheerful wave, but the kind that always made everyone weep, with excitement and with the sadness of saying goodbye. Then, very slowly, as if it were remembering how with all its might, the Electra lifted herself into the air. For a long time her distinctive shape could be seen rising toward the clouds. Many animals congregated on the beach and looked on, their heads lifting to follow the mysterious angel. And I thought I could see G.P. standing off to the side, the outline of the jungle juxtaposed archly behind him, his tie fluttering in the wind.

It was when we lifted above the first clouds, when the earth disappeared below us and the sky seemed to
take up more space than the sea or the land, that I cried. I cried without letting Noonan see, because we were leaving together and there really wasn’t anything to cry about. I tried to cry without letting him know and then I couldn’t anymore and I just cried. He was silent and dark, sitting with his charts on his lap. I could feel that he was trembling. He was holding his glasses in his hand, and the glasses, they were trembling. He was overcome. I couldn’t bear to look. I stared straight ahead, like before, so long ago, that night, our last night in the sky. I knew he was thinking the same thing.

There was the mindless roar of the engine, the quivering of the fuel gauge, the hot white sunlight reflecting off the windshield, but there was no more bamboo fishing pole, there was no need for that. Above all there was the sky. The widest, the most serene, the Pacific sky, as empty as a mind at peace. Sometimes it stretched out before us with the clarity of a single thought. There seemed to be nothing between us and our flight.

Very late at night, during the flight across the Pacific sky, they had a talk. She was tired, the moon was dim, Noonan was quiet. He was resting with his eyes closed. Then he started talking. He said he’d once known a fellow who’d set himself on fire. He was a sailor. They
were sailors together. He’d been shipwrecked, alone, for ten days on a raft in the Indian Ocean, but had managed to survive. He’d eaten the money in his pockets and killed a seagull. He’d finally drifted toward land. That was years before. When Noonan knew him, he was a gambler. They gambled together. One night, in port, they were in the south of France, they were at a casino, a first-class casino, playing roulette. And all of a sudden the sailor excused himself, put out his cigarette, walked out of the casino, and shot himself in the head. But he didn’t die. He went on living. The bullet lodged somewhere in his skull, but it didn’t kill him. A few years later, after more seafaring, he set himself on fire.

The story was incredible to her, and for a moment it seemed as if everyone’s story was fictional, as if all that was real were the bystanders, the people who told and retold the stories, not the characters themselves.

Later, she heard music. Not the music of Noonan’s harmonica, but a celestial music, the music of the night. It was a sarabande. There was a gentle trade wind blowing across the emptiness, and it carried the music on its back and spread it like stardust over the ocean. She heard it clearly, vividly—it was written on the wind with the elliptical clarity of a telegram. It was playing very slowly, deliberately, each note dropping evenly, inevitably, after the one before. And she thought about
the man setting himself on fire, to music, the music she was hearing. It seemed so morbid and melodramatic a thing to be thinking. But then she thought of her own life, just for a moment, and she thought that it could be seen that way too, operatic, overblown. But it didn’t feel that way to her. It felt simple, and now, perfectly natural, as if it were an everyday river about to open onto a new sea.

The way of life is wonderful, she remembered. It is by abandonment.

Around her, the stars slept, not troubled or touched by the music. She felt a strong love for the night, and at the same time she realized that if her happiness were taken away from her, even Noonan, she would still be whole, with the same capacity for easy enjoyment from the world. She would not grieve. She had already done that. But she wished she could make everyone else feel how she felt, wished she could be sure that without her, he would still feel the perpetual revelations she felt. Then she would be happy. It was this feeling, and only this, that made her sad. That she might be leaving him with an unhappiness that he would not know how to cure. It was while she was thinking this that he opened his eyes and looked at her. His face was heavy.

Then he said, What are we having for dinner tonight?

Coconut, she said.

She doesn’t know how long it was after they left the island that they ran out of fuel, found themselves lost once again over the Pacific Ocean. It happened in the morning. The heat was terrible. Everything happened as it had happened before: the plane stalled, then sputtered, then seemed to stop. She was frightened for a moment but then her sense of humor returned, and she guessed that somewhere, someone might be thinking she was a heroine.

When she woke from the lucid dream that carried her three thousand feet down, in a tumbling parade of images from the farthest reaches of her memory, her first impression was that she had died a violent death and gone directly to hell.

But this time she wasn’t afraid. She knew that when she opened her eyes she would find a new island, more beautiful than the last, with the palm trees taller and more elegant, the beach wider and softer, the surf more accepting, calm.

•

It was true. Their brains intoxicated with the familiar smell of the sea, their bodies weak with hunger and exhaustion, they crawled out of the wreckage and looked around. It was just what she had expected. The wind was gentle. The air smelled like gardenias. The Electra had had a bad fall, but she was still standing. Her wings gleamed in the sunlight and cast long, graceful shadows, as if they were resting on the sand. Noonan walked down to the water and waded in up to his knees. She thought that with his long dark hair, his brown skin, and his long, brown limbs, he looked like a horse, naturally regal, looking out over the water.

I’ve told my story. I’ve written it in my pilot’s log. I’ve read it to Noonan, who likes it very much. But he says that if anyone ever read it, they wouldn’t believe it. They’d say that it was a fantasy.

I’d say to them, If it is, then what have I been doing all these years?

But sometimes I ask myself just that. And then I feel the cold, ethereal strangeness of existence.

One day, years later, when they were relaxing in their hammocks on a hot afternoon, he brought up the subject
of their flight around the world. It seemed a distant memory. He apologized to her for what had happened. Please don’t worry about it, she said. It was my fault too. Anyway, she smiled, I forgive you for it. Thank you, he said, and in his voice she heard something. It was the sound of the Electra. Then he said, What a day. It was hot, but she’d known worse. He said maybe later they’d go for a swim in the lagoon. Then they were silent for a long time. And then she broke down. Broke down in tears, tears of joy, mysterious tears, and said, Yes, this must be real, I believe in this life. I believe that it continues.

This story is a work of fiction. It was inspired by the life and disappearance of Amelia Earhart; however, the portraits of the characters who appear in it are fictional, as are many of the events described.

Several books were important to me during my research.
Amelia Earhart: A Biography
by Doris L. Rich was especially useful for factual information. Earhart’s own
Last Flight
provided a description of her final journey, and the lines in italics on
this page
are from her book. The lines in italics on
this page
are from Charles Lindbergh’s memoir,
The Spirit of St. Louis
. Richard Gillespie’s article “The Mystery of Amelia Earhart” was also useful for factual information. The lines in italics on
this page
are from Robert A. F. Thurman’s commentary in his translation of
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
.

Many friends read versions of this book in manuscript form, and I am grateful to all of them for their insights and encouragement. In particular, special thanks to James Wood, Andrew Solomon, Seth and Joanna Hendon, and Melissa Marks. For their faith in this book and their efforts on its behalf, I would like to thank Ann Close, Nelly Bly, Joy Harris, Robin Robertson, and Sonny Mehta. I’d also like to thank my family for their support, especially Evelyn Driesen and Martha Mendelsohn.

And finally, most of all, thank you to my mother and father, with gratitude and love.