Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [130]
The sounds of the rain forest—the din of cicadas. The newspaper in Port Moresby: Nu Gini Tok Tok. Is pidgin the language of the future? A mélange of languages. The sawtooth mountains against the blue blue sky. “Women and children do not carry spears.”
When the plane crashed into the Solomon Sea (it was not, alas, a Beaver, but a Grumman Goose), I was not scared. All my anticipation of fear—and when the crash came, I was calm.
The stall. The spin. The altimeter unwinding. The cloud castles. The radio crackling. My husband laughing. The plummet seaward. The blue water. The suspension of time. My life. The cosmos. The oneness of the two.
I found in myself a calm beyond calm—as if I had gone to hell and come back singing.
Adrenaline took over—the old animal part of the brain. Calmly, I disengaged from the wreckage. Calmly, I pushed open the door. Calmly, I swam past sharks.
Like childbirth, I can barely remember it. But what I did was the right thing. I am alive.
I was well aware that I was covering Amelia Earhart’s territory when I crossed the cloud cities between Port Darwin and Port Moresby. The cloud castles she described—full of misty gargoylish figures leering at a woman brazen enough to brave the skies—surmount strange rocky islands with stony digits pointing to the stars.
A woman who has her hand on the joystick, in effortless accord with the will of wind—or so it seems till the wind turns—has nothing to fear from any man. “I want to do it because I want to do it,” Amelia Earhart wrote to her husband from what proved to be her last flight. “Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be a challenge to others.”
A challenge to others!
The words rang in my ears as I spun downward through the cloud castles, centrifugal force pinning me to my seatbelt, my gyro instruments tumbling wildly.
My husband was laughing. He had always wanted a laughing death—as kuru is called in these parts—and he was all too delighted. He did not want to be saved.
This is what I have not said heretofore about “Julian” or “Sebastian” (call him what you will): he wanted desperately to die before decrepitude claimed him. That was one of the reasons the South Pacific lured him, why he was drawn inexorably to headhunters and cannibals. And why he was disappointed when no one ate us.
He was hoping for death, hoping to catch up with it before it caught up with him. The opera about the search for paradise was the merest excuse: he was seeking no opera, no film; he was seeking the last flickering light show of his life.
“Let it go!” he cried as we went into the spin. And he tried to wrestle my hand from the joystick, hoping to prevent me from recovering. Laughing madly, his white hair blowing in the wind, he began to toss things, life preservers, rations, fuel, out of the plane.
It was then and only then that panic seized me. Alone, I could have endured it—but the madness of a man would doom me, that much I knew. With one fell swoop (surely the only one fate would grant me), I brought a flashlight down on Julian’s snowy head and—amazingly—I knocked him cold!
He muttered and dozed and dreamed as I brought the plane out of its spin just before we hit the slanting water—but too late to prevent crashing. We splashed down, skipped, began to sink. I clambered out in time. Sebastian/Julian, against all his wishes, allowed me to pull him into the sea. Reluctantly he realized that God, not he, was in charge.
We swam away, watched the sinking craft out of an eye’s corner, and kept on swimming till coral snagged our knees and carved our toes.
The island beckoned. Was it a mirage? Is this my blazing hillside? Is everything? Yes.
About nine months later, we were rescued by an American billionaire and his Polish-born wife, sailing a schooner full of celebrities, a sort of ship of fools, into which we were welcomed as