Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

I thought I would believe I’d seen the world, but there is too much of the world and too little of life. I thought I would believe I’d completed something, but now I doubt anything can be completed. I thought I would not be afraid. I thought I would become more than I am, but instead I know I am less than I thought.

Not that I even really knew what wanting meant. I mostly experienced desire as a tangle of impossible, contradictory impulses. I wanted to vanish like Marian; I wanted to be more famous than ever; I wanted to say something important about courage and freedom; I wanted to be courageous and free, but I didn’t know what that meant—I only knew how to pretend to know, which I guess is acting.

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.

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.”

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. Marian knew nothing of this, of course, could not dream of such a bargain.

Does she regret the flight? She decides she doesn’t. She would have peered out of the cockpit and into something bottomless and unfathomable sooner or later. At some point she would have found the edge of her own courage. There is nothing for it but to adjust, be humbled. So she is not exactly who she had thought. So what. She will be someone different.

She leaned forward. “Would you draw her for me? Your sister? I’d like to see what she looks like.” So he summoned Marian from a blank page. He forced himself to draw her as she was, with her cropped hair and her sharp, almost insolent gaze. As he drew, he felt a tug deep in his guts, like he’d swallowed a hook and the reel was back in Montana. Mrs. Fahey looked at the drawing for a long time. “Yes, I see. She’s formidable.” She sighed and patted his forearm. “You’ve had to take care of each other more than most children and grow up quickly. It must have been very hard sometimes.” When he was safely in the attic, he sat on the floor and wept. He had not known how badly he had wanted someone to say exactly that.