The World to Come Read online

  ALSO BY JIM SHEPARD

  The Book of Aron

  You Think That’s Bad: Stories

  Like You’d Understand, Anyway: Stories

  Project X

  Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories

  Nosferatu

  Batting Against Castro: Stories

  Kiss of the Wolf

  Lights Out in the Reptile House

  Paper Doll

  Flights

  AS EDITOR

  You’ve Got to Read This (with Ron Hansen)

  Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs (with Amy Hempel)

  Writers at the Movies

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2017 by Jim Shepard

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Several stories were previously published in the following publications:

  Electric Literature: “Safety Tips for Living Alone”; One Story: “The World to Come”; McSweeney’s: “The Ocean of Air”; Tin House: “Positive Train Control,” “Wall-to-Wall Counseling”; Zoetrope: “Cretan Love Song,” “HMS Terror,” “Telemachus”

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Shepard, Jim, author.

  Title: The world to come : stories / by Jim Shepard.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016038353 (print) | LCCN 2016044230 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524731809 (hardback) | ISBN 9781524731816 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Family Life.

  Classification: LCC PS3569.H39384 A6 2017 (print) | LCC PS3569.H39384 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016038353

  Ebook ISBN 9781524731816

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photograph by Orietta Corradi / EyeEm / Getty Images

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Jim Shepard

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Safety Tips for Living Alone

  Wall-to-Wall Counseling

  HMS Terror

  Cretan Love Song

  The World to Come

  The Ocean of Air

  Positive Train Control

  Telemachus

  Forcing Joy on Young People

  Intimacy

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  For Karen, yet again—

  Safety Tips for Living Alone

  Twenty-five years before Texas Tower no. 4 became one of the Air Force’s most unlikely achievements and most lethal peacetime disasters, marooning nineteen wives including Ellie Phelan, Betty Bakke, Edna Kovarick, and Jeannette Laino in their own little stewpots of grief and recrimination, the six-year-old Ellie thought of herself as forever stuck in Kansas: someone who would probably never see Chicago, never mind the Atlantic Ocean. Her grandfather wore his old brown duster whatever the weather, and when riding in her father’s convertible he always insisted on sitting in the dead center of the backseat with a hand on each side of the top to maintain the car’s balance on the road. This was back when the Army was running the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Navy exploring the Pole with Admiral Byrd, and the Air Corps still flying the mail in open-cockpit biplanes. Gordon had reminded Ellie of her grandfather, and this had stirred her up and set her teeth on edge. She’d first noticed him when he’d stood on the Ferris wheel before the ride had begun, to make certain another family’s toddlers had been adequately strapped in, and when they were introduced she’d said, “Who made you the Ferris wheel monitor?” And then after he’d answered with a grin, “Isn’t it amazing how much guys like me pretend we know what we’re doing?” she’d been shocked by how exhilarating it was to catch a glimpse of someone who saw the world exactly as she did.

  She’d always been moved and appalled by the confidence that men like her grandfather and Gordon projected when it came to getting a handle on their situations. But they each also had a way of responding to her as if she’d come around to the advantages of their caretaking, and she surprised herself by not saying no when after a few months of dating he asked her to marry him. That night she stood in her parents’ room in the dark, annoyed at her turmoil, and then switched on their bedside lamp and told them the news. And when they reacted with some of the same dismay she was feeling, she found herself more instead of less resolved to go ahead with the thing.

  Her father had pointed out that as a service wife she might see exotic places and her share of excitement, but she’d also never be able to put down roots or buy a house, and year after year she’d get settled in one place and then have to disrupt her life and move to another. Her children would be dragged from school to school. Her husband would never earn what he could as a civilian. And most of all, the Air Force would always come first, and if that seemed too hard for her, then she’d better back out now.

  When her mother came into her bedroom a few nights later and asked if she really understood what she was getting herself into, Ellie said that she did. And when her mother scoffed at the idea that her Ellie would ever know why she did anything, Ellie said, “At least I understand that about myself,” and her mother answered, “Well, what does that mean?” and Ellie said she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

  “Now that we see you’re not going to change your mind, we give up,” her father announced a few days later, and she chose not to respond to that, either. His final word on the subject was that he hoped this Gordon realized just how selfish she could be. She lived with her parents for two more months before the wedding and they exchanged maybe ten words in total. Her mother’s mother came for a visit and didn’t congratulate Ellie on her news but did mention that the military was no place for a woman because the men drank too much and their wives had to raise their children in the unhealthiest climates. She offered as an example the Philippines, that sinkhole of malaria and vice.

  They were married by a justice of the peace in Gordon’s childhood home in Pasadena, and her parents came all the way out for the ceremony and left before the reception, their wedding present a card that read, “Take care and all best wishes, Mom.” The following week Gordon was posted to a base in upstate New York and Ellie spent a baffled month alone with his parents before taking the Air Force Wives’ Special across the country: Los Angeles to Boston for one hundred and forty dollars, with stops everywhere from Fresno to Providence and seats as hard as benches and twenty infants and children in her compartment alone. The women traveling solo helped out the most overwhelmed mothers, and Ellie spent the trip crawling under seats to retrieve crayons and shushing babies whose bottles were never the right temperature.

  In upstate New York, the place Gordon found for her while they waited for quarters on the base was a rooming house that instead of fire escapes had ropes coiled beneath the bedroom windows. She had only a room to herself, with kitchen privileges. “At least it’s quiet,” he told her when he first saw it, and then asked a few days later if her nightly headaches were related to what he’d said about her room.


  She was relieved that he mostly served his time on the base. Larry was born, and Gordon worked his way up to captain, and when in 1957 he was offered the command of some kind of new offshore platform, he wanted to request another assignment—what Air Force officer wanted to squat in a box over the ocean?—but told Ellie that it was her decision, too. “You have a family now,” she answered. “I just want anything that keeps you closer.” “I wouldn’t get home any more often,” he pointed out. “And safer,” she added. So after sleeping on it, he told her he’d take the command, though afterward he was so disappointed that he wasn’t himself for weeks.

  —

  By 1950 the Department of Defense had determined that the radar arrays carried on Navy picket ships and Air Force aircraft on station were not powerful enough to detect incoming Russian bombers sufficiently far offshore to enable fighter interception. The radar stations comprising the Distant Early Warning system across the far north of the continent provided some security in that direction, but given that nearly all of America’s highest-priority targets were situated inside its northeastern metropolitan corridor, protection from an attack across the Atlantic seemed both essential and entirely absent. In response, the Air Defense Command urgently ordered the construction of five platforms along the coast from Bangor to Atlantic City. The platforms were called Texas Towers because of their resemblance to oil rigs, were numbered from north to south, and cost eleven million dollars apiece.

  They faced engineering problems as unprecedented as the space program’s. Tower no. 4 in particular had presented a much greater challenge than the others since its footings would stand in 185 feet of water, more than three times as deep as the others. In 1955 the maximum depth at which anyone had built an undersea structure was sixty feet, and that had been in the Gulf of Mexico. Because of that, the Air Force had decided that this tower would require bold new thinking in its conception and hired a firm known for bridge design. The firm had had no experience at all in the area of ocean engineering for marine structures.

  Tower no. 4 stood on three hollow legs nearly three hundred feet long. The legs were only twelve feet in diameter and braced by three submarine tiers of thirty-inch steel struts, and topped with a triangular triple-leveled platform that stood seventy feet above the waves. From its concrete footings on the seafloor to the top of its radomes it was the equivalent of a thirty-story building out in the ocean.

  Though oil-drilling platforms had for the most part weathered the storms and seas of the Gulf, the Gulf at its worst was nothing like the North Atlantic.

  And something was already wrong with Tower no. 4. Unlike the others, it moved so much in heavy weather or even a good strong wind that everyone who worked on it called it Old Shaky or the Tiltin’ Hilton.

  —

  The first time Gordon set foot on it he’d stood at the edge of the platform hanging on to the rope railings designed to catch those blown off their feet by wind gusts or prop wash, looked down into the waves so far below, and then out at the horizon, empty in all directions, and asked the officer he was relieving, “What the hell am I doing here?”

  The tower housed seventy men. Besides crew and officer quarters and work stations it had a ward room, bakery, galley, mess, recreation area, and sick bay. Seven locomotive-sized diesel engines provided electricity, and on the lower level ionizing machines converted salt water to drinking water. Fuel was stored in the hollow legs.

  The crew was half Air Force and half civilian welders and electricians and technicians. For every thirty days on you got thirty days off. The military guys liked it because they got more time than they were used to with their families, but the civilians hated the isolation and complained they were always away for the big holidays, everybody seeming to be stuck out on the platform for New Year’s and home for Groundhog Day.

  But the tower shuddered and flexed so much in bad weather that whoever had painted “Old Shaky” over the door in the mess hall hadn’t even been able to get the letters straight, and the floors moved so visibly in the winter that everyone was too seasick to eat. In his first phone call, Gordon told Ellie that the medic who’d flown out with him hadn’t even served out his first day; that when he saw how much the platform was pitching he refused to get off the helicopter and took it right back to shore on the next flight out. Once he left, Gordon found a crow hunkered down on the edge of the helipad, its tail feathers pummeled back in the wind. They got blown out here sometimes, the captain he was relieving had explained. Gordon boxed the crow up and carried it to his stateroom and made sure it was ferried back on the last copter out that night. “Well, at least the crow is safe,” Ellie told him. “Unless he comes back,” her husband answered.

  —

  Betty Bakke’s husband, Roy, was a medic who hadn’t insisted on flying back to the mainland the first time he’d set foot on Tower no. 4, because he believed a man fulfilled his responsibilities. He’d already made master sergeant and been nicknamed for his standard advice, as in “I thought I was coming down with something but Don’t Sweat It said I was okay.” He’d transferred from the Navy, where he’d served on a minesweeper in Korea. The only thing that fazed him, he told Betty in his phone calls, was his separation from her. She and their boy were still stuck in their old bungalow in Mount Laguna on the other side of the country. Roy had put his friend and commanding officer, Gordon Phelan, on the phone during one call, and the captain had regaled her with stories about Roy. Roy had stayed on duty eighty straight hours with an airman second class who’d had a heart attack, and was even better known for having stitched up his own eyebrow after a fall while everyone else watched. He’d organized fishing contests off the deck and also radioed passing trawlers so the guys could trade their cigarettes and beer for fresh fish and lobster. On top of all of that, he’d taken charge of the 16mm movies swapped from tower to tower and had scored big that Thanksgiving by having dealt The Vikings with Kirk Douglas for The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw with Jayne Mansfield.

  Betty had told the captain that her husband sounded like a one-man morale officer, and the captain said that was his point. And when Betty told him she’d heard that long separations were the reefs that sank military marriages, the captain had laughed and said he was going to pass the phone back to her husband. “Sounds like she needs a house call,” she heard him say to Roy.

  —

  The Navy Bureau of Yards and Docks had advised the engineers that Tower no. 4’s platform would need to withstand winds up to 125 miles per hour and breaking waves up to thirty-five feet, based on twenty years’ worth of data provided by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. The main deck’s planned seventy-foot elevation should then provide plenty of clearance. A few members of the design team dissented, wishing to put on record their belief that wave heights and wind speeds should be calculated on the basis of what might be expected once a century rather than once every twenty years. They were outvoted.

  To extend its radar coverage, Tower no. 4 had been given a location as close as possible to the edge of the continental shelf, which meant that just to its east the bottom dropped away thousands of feet and that waves coming from that direction or the north encountered that rising bottom and mounted themselves upward even higher. And in winter storms Tower no. 2, in much shallower water, had already recorded waves breaking over its deck.

  —

  But wait, Gordon told Ellie once he’d done a little more research: the news got even worse. Because the footings were so deep, no. 4’s hollow legs had been designed to be towed to their location, where they’d be upended and anchored to the caissons on the bottom before the main deck was attached and raised. But because the legs were so long, the designers had had to use pin connections—giant bolts—rather than welds in the underwater braces. Though bolts were an innovative modification, they failed to take into account the constant yet random motions of the sea. For that reason, oil rigs and the other towers had used welded connections. The moment the bolts had gone in, they began generati
ng impact stress around their connections. And Gordon had further discovered a storm had so pummeled two of the underwater braces during the towing that they’d sheared off and sunk during the upending, and that everyone had then floated around until the Air Force finally gave the order to improvise repairs at sea to avoid having to haul the entire structure back to shore.

  Then, in heavy swells, the five-thousand-ton platform kept smashing up against the legs, so reinforced steel had been flown out and welded over the damage.

  “Okay, I think it’s time to put in for a change of assignment,” Ellie told him in response. “Yeah, well, in for a penny, in for a pound,” he answered, by which she took him to mean, “You got me into this, so I don’t want to hear any complaints.”

  —

  As soon as the tower had gone operational, Wilbur Kovarick asked to be made its senior electrician so he could be closer to his family on Long Island, and Edna was so grateful that she kept him in bed the entire weekend.

  By the time Edna had turned twenty-six, all but two of her friends had married and she’d been a bridesmaid five times. She told Wilbur on their first date that at the last wedding, if the clergyman had dropped dead at the altar, she could have taken over the service. He’d been sweet, and thought she was a riot, but after they said good night, she found herself back in her little rented room with no radio or television and her three pots of ivy, wishing she’d thought to get his home address or telephone number. By the time he called her she had no patience for pretense and told him to come right over, and when he appeared at her door she kissed him until he finally pulled away and she pressed her cheek to his and said, “I’m not fast, I just know what I want,” and after a moment he squeezed her even harder than she was squeezing him. Their first apartment after the wedding was so small that neither could get dressed in the bedroom unless the other stayed in bed, and Wilbur swore to do better as a provider and joined the Air Force so they’d send him to electricians school.