The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [43]
During the long days, Bigelow does not think about the singer. His mind, drugged by hours of unremitting light, skips and flits, occasionally replaying a note, or revisiting a slash of white throat, two missing teeth, three lines on an outthrust chin. A coat of feathers hanging on a nail. But without commenting on these it hurries on to other impressions, to the violet shadows that fill the ruts in the street, the flashing legs of people walking past, the pressure of his unrelieved bladder.
The year he arrived, he was insulated by the Aleut woman’s flesh, for which exaggerated rhythms were natural. No matter how long or short the days, her body presented constancy— unlike Bigelow’s, whose heart seems to slow during the dark months, and, when it is relentlessly bright, beats too fast. Like one of the rabbits, he thinks: at the mercy of high latitude, traveling in waves across the land, strange helpless tides of animals breaking over hills and across roads. To eat, you don’t have to shoot one, just step on its neck as it washes past your boot.
He is hungry; he is thirsty, too. A June rabbit with its neck under Getz’s heel, his thoughts trembling in anticipation of release.
One afternoon, captive to a manic fugue, Bigelow conceives a brilliant scheme for numerical weather prediction, a series of thermodynamical equations to be performed simultaneously around the world—computations made at 3,200 kite stations connected by telegraph and tabulated together in a kind of central ganglia, a forecast factory whose brain is set up like an orchestra pit, with a conductor waving a slide rule and members clacking abacuses. But he has no paper and pencil, and the equations flare and then die, like sparks coming off a fire: ΔpG = sin λ cos φ (sin φ)2 × 105 dynes cm-2 for initial pressure distribution, and + div (wv) for the increase of water per volume and per time due to convection and precipitation, δME / δt = - H’(δpG/δe) + 2ω sin φ . MN to summarize vertical velocity on a rotating globe, and for the moment neglecting quadratic terms for reasons of simplification.
Bigelow feels that the top of his head is coming off, and that he is flying through it, right out of his own brain. He is a thought, a thought of himself, combustible, an equation traveling on an updraft, glowing brightly, about to be extinguished. His arms are numb, tingling; the records slide from his lap. One, Rossini’s Otello, shatters, and he falls off the barrel onto his knees, hearing the thunder of applause at the first kite symposium, Caruso in his plumed hat, bowing deeply at Bigelow.
“For fuck’s sake, let him see the girl,” someone says. The store is filled with voices.
“Let her down the stairs. You can’t lock her up.”
“How old is she? Thirty?”
“Who else is going to have her, I’d like to know?”
Bigelow lies on the floor, and somebody offers him a swig from a flask and, when he doesn’t drink it fast enough, pinches his nose shut and tips the bottle so that its contents pour into him in a choking, smoky rush, drowning the last of his incandescent thoughts, washing away the article featuring his equations, already, in his mind, typeset in the font used by the Monthly Weather Review. Around Bigelow’s head, legs ascend like columns into the towering, celestial realm of condensed milk and stacked tins of Postum, boxes of cornstarch, bottles of Lysol, Sapolio, cakes of P&G Naphtha, Ivory and Canthrox, Nadinola, and Snider Process pork and beans.
“Damn, but you’re a mean bastard.”
“I’m taking my business across to Charlie.”
“Yeah, I’ll spend the extra dime.”
Legs shift and boots scuff, a clumsy choreography, hands reaching down trouser fronts