Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it. I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I’ve been circling for thousands of years and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song? —Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours

If you were to put a blade through any sphere and divide it into two perfect halves, the circumference of the cut side of each half would be a great circle: that is, the largest circle that can be drawn on a sphere. The equator is a great circle. So is every line of longitude. On the surface of a sphere such as the earth, the shortest distance between any two points will follow an arc that is a segment of a great circle.

I thought I would become more than I am, but instead I know I am less than I thought.

We started in Sault Sainte Marie and drove clockwise all the way around, thirteen hundred miles in a rented soft-top Jeep Wrangler, the noisy discomfort of which was a just punishment for us being too cool for an economy sedan.

By the time Lindbergh landed, he had spent thirty hours and thirty minutes in the air and been awake for fifty-five.

She tried not to show how startled she was. “All because I like your face,” he said. “Even now, when you’re disguised as a boy, however unconvincingly, I like it very much. There’s something Shakespearean about your appeal. You won’t know what I mean.”

Everyone knows Los Angeles is a city of deniers. Everyone knows this is a city of silicone and Restylane, of charismatic stationary-bike preachers and kettlebell gurus, of healing crystals and singing bowls, of probiotics and juice cleanses and colonics and jade eggs you stick up your vag and exorbitantly expensive snake-oil powder you sprinkle on your coconut chia pudding. We purify ourselves for life as though it were the grave. This is a city that’s more afraid of death than any other. I said that to Oliver once, and he told me I was being a little negative. I said it to Siobhan, and she gave me the name of a shrink. I said it to the shrink, and he asked me if I thought people were wrong to fear death. I said I didn’t think the fear was the problem as much as the struggle. I said I thought the struggle should be to accept death, not to defy it.

The world unfurls and unfurls, and there is always more. A line, a circle, is insufficient. I look forward, and there is the horizon. I look back. Horizon. What’s past is lost. I am already lost to my future.

freeway looks like a ruby bracelet stretched alongside a diamond one, looks like a river of lava flowing counter to a river of champagne bubbles. People talk about the sprawl, and, yeah, the city is a drunk, laughing bitch sprawled across the flats in a spangled dress, legs kicked up the canyons, skirt spread over the hills, and she’s shimmering, vibrating, ticklish with light. Don’t buy a star map. Don’t go driving around gawking because you’re already there, man. You’re in it. It’s all one big map of the stars.

She hadn’t anticipated how much of her behavior after marriage would be motivated by a wish not to argue.

One thing I learned is that you don’t just love a person, you love a vision of your life with them. And then you have to mourn both. I always thought I’d go to the U and join the Forest Service, but now I’m having trouble imagining myself there. My vision of life with Sarah has made my old ideas look shabby in comparison.

We think each new romantic prospect, each new lover, is a fresh start, but really we’re just tacking into the wind, each new trajectory determined by the last, plotting a jagged yet unbroken line of reactions through our lives. That was part of the problem: I was always just reacting, always just getting buffeted along, never setting a destination. After

A brief detour into the future: After Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh shuts up. He tries to go to work for PanAm or Curtiss-Wright, and his offers are at first eagerly accepted then awkwardly rescinded because the White House disapproves. Eventually he persuades the marines to send him to the South Pacific as an observer, asks to go to the front lines. He flies dawn patrols and rescue missions, fires on Japanese planes though he isn’t really supposed to, figures out methods of reducing fuel consumption, which expands fighters’ ranges. He’s genuinely helpful. His reputation is rehabilitated somewhat, but he will never be as he was. After the war, his marriage frays but endures.

None had appeared, but the Turner watercolors he’d discovered in their attic had been on display, arranged in a luminous row on an otherwise empty wall with a plaque beneath: On Loan from the Fahey Collection. They are only simple washes of color on small rectangles of textured paper, and yet they seem to convey sprawling vistas of the sea and sky, infinite space.

They help pay for Earhart’s 1937 circumnavigation attempt,

She’d come to rely on Ruth to swing her into conversations like a trapeze artist tossing her partner into another’s grip. When an air force captain tried to strike up a conversation in the snack bar, she managed only the most stilted chitchat and fled at the first opportunity.

For a week, he saw only water. Despite the spreading V of the wake, despite the shifting colors of the sky and the low passage of the winter sun, the ship seemed to be just churning in place, always at the center of the same flat disk of empty sea. The rest of the world seemed irrelevant. His father’s life had been spent at the center of such disks. Over time, what did that do to a person?

In October, Jamie landed on an atoll recently reclaimed from the Japanese and stayed for a while in the tented camp there. He painted a row of Corsairs out on the baking-hot runway that had been made by crushing and smoothing coral, millions of years of work by tiny animals, into a flat, hard surface. When he swam in the sea, he wore sandals made from tires salvaged off crashed Japanese planes so the living, uncrushed coral didn’t slice up his feet.

“I had a shrink once,” I said, “who told me to imagine a glowing tiger that ate all my doubts. The crazy thing is that it works if you believe it will. But does that mean the tiger is real? Or does it mean my doubts aren’t?”

“What a delicate dance of seduction,” I said.

After Pearl Harbor, it had been her idea to print thousands of cheap paperbacks off the Wenceslas backlist and donate them to the troops. The gesture was one of genuine goodwill, but, as she’d thought might happen, the boys hadn’t stopped wanting books after they came home. Sales were strong. Thanks partly to her, paperbacks weren’t considered trashy anymore, just affordable and convenient.

Transplanted sullenly to a navigation classroom after he’d washed out of pilot training, he’d heard more words he liked. Celestial observation. Dead reckoning. Drift. Vector. Point of recognition.

Without the war, he tells her, he probably would have spent his whole life in Montana, hunting. It never would have occurred to him to leave. But when he came back, he found he didn’t like walking in the mountains anymore. He didn’t like being cold or sleeping outside or shooting things. He’d had enough of all that. He got confused sometimes. “One minute I’d be out for elk,” he says, “and the next I’d be hunkered down somewhere, hiding

from the Germans, all mixed up about past and present.”

The aurora occupies huge swathes of sky in a blink. One moment an arc of light hangs from horizon to horizon, bleeding up into the stars; the next it is gone. You feel you are receiving messages from an unknown sender, of indecipherable meaning but unquestionable authority.

If they crash, survival will be impossible, but there are other perils, too. So far north, the compass wanders. Lines of longitude pinch together like bars at the top of a birdcage. To make sense of the place, the idea of true north must be banished, the ways in which they have previously oriented themselves against the planet forgotten. The birdcage must be lifted up and away, navigation done by specialized charts under a flattened grid where north is set artificially and lines of longitude wrenched parallel.

It might be odd to thank an inanimate entity, but I could not have surmounted the organizational challenges of this novel without the writing application Scrivener.