Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

When I wasn’t working, I did pretty much whatever I wanted, thanks to Mitch’s negligence. In her book, Marian Graves wrote: As a child, my brother and I were largely left to our own devices. I believed—and no one told me otherwise for some years—that I was free to do as I liked, that I had the right to go any place I could find my way to.

In my blip of higher education, I had time to take Intro to Philosophy and learn about the panopticon, the hypothetical prison Jeremy Bentham came up with, where there would be one itty-bitty guardhouse at the center of a giant ring of cells. One guard was all you needed because he might be watching at any time, and the idea of being watched matters way more than actually being watched. Then Foucault turned the whole thing into a metaphor about how all you need to discipline and dominate a person or a population is to make them think it’s possible they’re being watched.

He rarely gleaned pleasure from conversation, certainly not from the self-congratulatory chitchat demanded by passengers wealthy or important enough to wrangle seats at the captain’s table.

Light is the medium of his beauty. In person, he is excessively handsome, obviously, but on film he transfixes. Between the projector and the screen he is changed into something almost unbearable to look at.

We is safer than I when you’re inside it, but it’s a tippy thing, unreliable, ready at any moment to toss you away and leave you exposed as an I after all.

I lay in bed smoking weed and watching a reality show where face-lifts in Hervé Léger bandage dresses slop martinis around and talk shit on each other. Some of these women have had so much work done their words come out all mushy because they can’t move their lips. With their spooky round eyes and stubby little snouts, they look like cats transformed into humans by an incompetent wizard.

Maybe she had needed the dangerous proximity of the plane, its roar and the red flash of its wings to jolt her from obliviousness. Or maybe the moment was simply right. She was at an age when the future adult rattles the child’s bones like the bars of a cage.

She ran her hand over her shorn head again, felt a stirring of pride mixed up with the pressure that was tightening in her like a bolt being turned into place. Her hair was a declaration, not an admission. All things should be declarations, not admissions.

but we were lying there talking, making those first big careless, gleeful excavations when everything about someone is new and unknown, before you have to get out your little picks and brushes, work tediously around the fragile, buried stuff.

“There’s something so offensive about an ugly woman. An ugly man—that’s unfortunate, but there still could be aesthetic interest there. An ugly woman is disturbing.”

She was particularly sharp-eyed for mentions of women pilots, studying their exploits as though reading tea leaves. She didn’t idolize them, the way she did male pilots, but envied them with a rawness that sometimes curdled into dislike. The obligatory photos of them powdering their noses in the cockpit disgusted her, and the fuss around Amelia Earhart, who was given credit for being the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air even though she’d merely been a passenger on the Friendship, baffled and annoyed her. You might as well celebrate a sack of ballast.

A man, blindfolded and spun slowly in a rotating chair, will think when the chair slows that it has stopped. When it has stopped, he will think it has begun to spin the other way. The mistake happens deep in his ear, among the tiny hair cells and drifting fluid inside the semicircular canals of the bony labyrinth. These are the minute, impossibly fragile internal instruments that detect the yaw, pitch, and roll of the human head—wondrous little gizmos to be sure but poorly evolved for flight.

“I told you I have a sister? Kate? I wish I could hold her life in my hands like an egg, make everything good for her. It’s a burden—the wish itself, and the fact it’s impossible.” “That’s what I mean. Things might be better without anyone to worry about.” He leans forward, his folded arms sliding on the table. “That’s not true. That would be the most terrible loneliness.”

In February, Amelia Earhart had married George Palmer Putnam, her publisher and promoter, some say her Svengali. He’d proposed six times. On their wedding day, she wrote him a letter saying neither should expect fidelity and that sometimes she would need to be apart from him and from the confinements of marriage. She asked him to promise to let her go in a year if they weren’t happy together.

What follows is not entirely different from what had come before, but he is more decided. He holds her by the head, the hips, the wrists. He puts his penis in her mouth, something Caleb had never done. She is lost in a state of perpetual transition: exhilarated then nauseated, fearful then reckless, debased then venerated. He seems to want so profoundly. She thinks he might destroy her, break her like some small animal and not even notice because what he wants is not actually in her but beyond her, somewhere else, or perhaps doesn’t exist.

When you’re a movie star, you’re basically a good-looking dingbat running around with headshots, but people don’t see the dingbat. They see the sum of the characters you’ve played: someone who’s time-traveled, who’s saved civilization, who’s been chosen by a beautiful, powerful man as the object of his undying devotion, who’s been rescued from terrorists by her father, Russell Crowe.

Jamie found he liked how the people he drew gave him permission to look closely and without hurry at their faces. He liked how people became vulnerable when they were about to be drawn, revealed more than they intended with their little adjustments. They sat up straighter or slouched, met his eye or evaded it. They seemed to become more themselves under his scrutiny, to radiate their most essential qualities.

I’d like to think I will remember this particular moon, seen from the particular angle of this balcony on this night, but if I forget, I will never know that I’ve forgotten, as is the nature of forgetting. I’ve forgotten so much—almost all I’ve seen. Experience washes over us in great waves. Memory is a drop caught in a flask, concentrated and briny, nothing like the fresh abundance from which it came.

Maybe I wanted him to kiss me just so I could confirm he wanted to. Maybe I wanted him to fall in love with me so I could decide whether or not I wanted to be in love with him. You get used to people falling in love with the idea of being with you. You think you should always have their feelings in hand like a down payment.

I thought about how the medium of music is time, how if time stopped, a painting would exist unchanged but music would vanish, like a wave without an ocean.

“I think about it like this,” Bart said. “We are confined to the present, but this moment we’re living now has, for all of history, been the future. And now, forever more, it will be past. Everything we do sets off unforeseeable, irreversible chain reactions. We are acting within the constraints of an impossibly complex system.” He paused and stared

Barclay mates with her grimly, daily. She doesn’t think he makes her suffer out of hate. She thinks he believes pregnancy will come as a kind of cure, convert her entirely and immediately into the woman he thinks she should be, prove he’s been right all along.

Her self, her interior habitat, once full of purpose, has become hollow and inert and uncanny, as though she is a hermit crab who has somehow mistakenly shed the inner animal instead of the shell.

In Missoula, when he’d lost track of things, he’d been tormented by the knowledge that Sarah Fahey’s life was continuing without him, that she would go to UW and meet a boy and get married and do all the things she was going to do anyway if he’d never shown up at all.

From Marian’s response: It’s been too long a silence. For now let’s not try to fill in everything that we’ve missed but continue fresh from the present.

After the war, his marriage frays but endures. Anne writes books, chafes under his efforts to control her and the children when he is home, which is not often. He secretly takes up with three German women, has seven secret children with them. Does he want to repopulate the world with little Lindberghs? He tells his children again and again that they must be mindful of genetics when choosing mates.