TransAtlantic

by Colum McCann

The Great War had concussed the world. The unbearable news of sixteen million deaths rolled off the great metal drums of the newspapers. Europe was a crucible of bones.

At the press briefings, Alcock took the helm. Brown navigated the silence by fiddling with his tie clip.

Emily likes the sound of the ink rising into her fountain pen, the noise of its body being screwed shut.

They are well aware that they could go deaf on the flight and that the roar could lodge itself inside them forever, their bodies carrying it like human gramophones, so that if they ever make it to the other side they will still, always, somehow hear it.

It is fierce work—he can feel the machine in his muscles. The sheer tug through his body. The exhaustion of the mind. Always avoiding cloud. Always looking for a line of sight. Creating any horizon possible. The brain inventing phantom turns. The inner ear balancing the angles until the only thing that can truly be trusted is the dream of getting there.

They both know the games the mind can play if caught in cloud. A man can think a plane is level in the air, even if laid on its side. The machine can be tilted towards doom and they might fly blithely along, or they could crash into the water, no warning. They must keep a lookout for any sight of moon or star or horizon line.

She doesn’t like herself at moments like this, her strange bearing, her shrill self-consciousness, her youth. She wishes she could walk outside of herself, out the window, into the air, and down. Ah, then, but that’s it, maybe? That, then, is the point of it all, surely? Yes. A salute to you Mr. Brown, Mr. Alcock, wherever you might be. She wishes she could take a photograph of the moment. Eureka. The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.

Down below, a sheep with a magpie sitting on its back. The sheep raises its head and begins to run when the plane swoops, and for just a moment the magpie stays in place on the sheep’s back: it is something so odd Brown knows he will remember it forever. The miracle of the actual.

Ireland. A beautiful country. A bit savage on a man all the same. Ireland.

The nerves unbuttoned the length of his spine. His hands grew clammy. His heart hammered.

There was something in the music of the accent that Douglass liked: it was as if the Cork people put long lazy hammocks in their sentences.

Sow my soul in the rugged red soil. Let me rest there, happy, watching the lift of the lobster pots, the slow saunter of seacaps, the curl of the gulls. But have some patience, please, Lord. Another twenty years at least. Thirty, even. Thirty-five, why not?

Where the Titanic had once been built. The vague hope of helping to turn the long blue iceberg, the deep underwater of Irish history.

It is one of their beauties, the Irish, the way they crush and expand the language all at once. How they mangle it and revere it. How they color even their silences.

He heard certain phrases and allowed them to take him out over the treetops, into what the Northern Irish called the yonder. Immersed in the words. Sitting at the plenaries, waiting. The brittleness in the room. The cramped maleness. A relentless solicitude about them, they would hold up a hand and tell people they did not deserve the reverence, but it was plain to see that they needed it.

The British are working on their culinary reputation, it seems.

Ha!

Bushmills was a Protestant whiskey. Jameson for Catholics. Nobody drove a green car. Your tie was never orange.

Noted.

He just wanted to land it. To take it down from where it was, aloft, like one of those great lumbering machines of the early part of the century, the crates of air and wood and wire they somehow flew across the water.

Ireland unwarred.

The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.

Hotel rooms sharpen his loneliness. The hum of others who were here before.

All around, the grass was exhausted by the shape of the war.

It had become for her a very ordinary sight, the way these soldiers disappeared beyond the trees, as if they had become mute assistants to their muskets.

She had formed a distrust of men who carried Bibles. It seemed to her that they believed their own voices were somehow embedded there.

She was baptized into the Protestant faith: it didn’t seem too different from what she had already chosen not to believe in.

Often Lily found the young girl asleep with her long hair inserted in the pages, a sort of bookmark.

She could see an orchestra in him, a whole range of instruments and sound. His voice was loud and booming.

The best moments were when her mind seemed to implode. It made a shambles of time. All the light disappeared. The infinity of her inkwell. A quiver of dark at the end of the pen.

Hours of loss and escape. Insanity and failure. Scratching one word out, blotting the middle of a page so it was unreadable anymore, tearing the sheet into long thin strips. The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well. Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft of the mind. Taking up empty bucket after empty bucket until, finally, at an unexpected moment, it caught hard and had a sudden weight and she raised the word, then delved down into the emptiness once more.

Her articles had created a good deal of interest, but she wondered if she owned a faint idea of many things, and a strong idea of only a few.

The gray of the water stretched endlessly. It fell into shapes like a child’s painting.

watched a falconer ply his art: the bird being trained on the end of a string, the long curl of his flight slowly learning its limits. It hovered a moment, then landed superbly on the falconer’s glove.

She would have to turn away from the obvious, bank her way back into it.

She wanted to bring him back, brush all the tickertape off his shoulders, return to the moment of raw experience, above the water, to chant the moment alive once more.

—Up there. Something else takes charge of your freedom. Do you understand what I mean? She heard him inhale. —Maybe a child, he said. Perhaps that equals it. Perhaps that is the only thing.

—One goes up in a plane knowing, sometimes, that not all of you is going to come down.