The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [13]
“Anyway, a kite’s better. With the length of the line and the angle it presents, I can determine the exact height. It’s a standard equation, Pythagorean, using a sine table for the—
“Look,” he says to the woman, and he pulls her away from the table, the raccoon divided into a bowl of entrails, a pan of meat. He steps around the pelt, set fur-side down so as not to stain the floor. She’ll scrape it later, after he’s gone.
With a hand on either shoulder, he sits her on her bed. Then he opens his rucksack. She leans forward, curious. Has he brought another, different animal?
White fabric. He pulls it out, unfolds, unfolds, unfolds. It covers her lap, her bed, her table; it falls in rippling layers and washes up against the doorsill.
“A hundred and eighty square feet of muslin,” he says. “Lifting surface. And that’s just one cell’s worth. Do you know how much that is?” He throws his arms open. “Six by nine by twelve. Six feet tall, nine feet long, twelve feet wide. There’s never been a kite this big. Not on record.” He picks up the end of the fabric and wraps it around her naked shoulders, looks at her black eyes. She indulges him for a moment, holding still before shrugging it off so that it crumples around her on the bed.
Bigelow picks up a corner. “Every night I make myself sew another seam. God, but I’m slow. I don’t know how you do it. An hour every night, and not half, not a quarter as neat as you.” He finds the spot where he left off and pushes it into her hands. She examines the place, smudged gray, where his fingers gripped the cloth. The muslin is puckered in spots, and she pulls at the fabric, trying to smooth it.
“I found a tall fir. Dragged it two, maybe two and a half miles to the mill and had it cut. Thirty-four spars. The kite takes twenty-eight, but they can crack, sometimes they break in flight. And I’m nowhere near finished sanding.
“Here’s what I need,” he says. “I need to build a reel that includes some kind of timing device. A stationary reel that I can set to pause at five-, maybe ten-minute intervals. Then instruments can record at selected altitudes. The Nairobi balloon, it was—well, it was famous. Written up in all the papers . . .” Bigelow trails off.
“What I need,” he says after a minute, “is line that’s strong enough to go up for miles. And a reel that’s bolted down to some kind of platform. Because you can’t control a kite this big. Not manually. It would pull you off your feet.”
The woman hands the muslin back to Bigelow, and he sees a fleck of blood on it, from her hands.
“Silk. I thought silk,” he says. “But silk might fray on a reel. So it’s got to be metal, but flexible. Piano wire. Maybe that would work.
“It’s going to change everything. Forecasts—it will make long-range forecasts possible.”
He folds the muslin, folds it tight to fit back inside his rucksack. “See,” he says, laying the bag aside, “what they did in Nairobi was measure the air temperature over the equator. And found out that it isn’t hot.”
He takes her fingers and gives them a shake. “It isn’t even warm,” he says. “It’s cold. Cold the way you’d expect air to be here. Freezing.”
Bigelow releases the woman. He throws himself back on her bed, chewing his lower lip, thinking. “Everyone knows that winds move eastward around the globe, because of the earth, the rotating earth. That’s obvious. But it’s also true that heat rises.” He gets up, walks to the stove, holds a hand above its surface. “So you’d think air over the equator would be hot. Hot like it is near the ground. I mean, Nairobi! But. But.”
Bigelow steps out of his boots and onto the chair, and from chair to table, avoiding the bloody