Love and Hydrogen Read online

  I sat with her the whole day and night. I called my parents to tell them I’d be late. Her husband never showed up. The nurses called and then I called a few times. I found out her name was Anne DiCicco. She had no kids. She was in a lot of pain and slept on and off. She told me again about her husband’s sweater.

  I told Stephanie about it on one of our dates. She especially liked the part about my going to see the bereaved husband afterward, and my asking to see the sweater. She touched my fingers, on the tablecloth.

  A little while later, before we got married, we were lying around in a bed-and-breakfast in Winsted one morning and she started volunteering what she liked about me. I had a sense of humor, I handled instruction well, and I had a good heart. She mentioned the woman in the hospital, and the sweater.

  I told Chick how much the story meant to her. That’s also what he meant when he said, “Don’t forget Orchard Street.”

  I fall asleep seeing him climb a balloon, with Stephanie not far behind. Their faces are peaceful.

  In the morning when I come out of my doze, I’m alone.

  I lie still, listening. The bedroom window’s right there: all I have to do is climb out on the garage roof.

  The whole house is quiet. It’s quiet outside.

  When I come downstairs, she’s at the kitchen table leafing through the little notebook she kept the first time we tried to get pregnant.

  “I made tea,” she says, like her heart’s going to break.

  We can tell that the sunlight’s amazing even with the shades pulled. On the street, things are stirring. The sound’s off on the TV but lots of vehicles are backing up and moving out. We’ve been Breaking News for a full four and a half days, and the forces of order are probably getting antsy.

  On the next channel, the SkyView Eye on Connecticut shows a lot of activity in the rear echelons. Stephanie and I are quiet about it, just watching.

  “I think this may be it,” she says, like my corn muffin’s ready. She throws the bolt on the Uzi.

  From the helicopter view someone who looks like Chick is squatting near a hydrant. Guys fan out from dark blue vans. Then the coverage switches to something suspiciously bland, a little stretch around our front door. You can see in the blurry foreground our mailbox, all shot to pieces when she hamstrung the mailman. The next channel’s showing only talking heads.

  Around us outside we can hear the thumping on the lawn of big heavy guys trying to be catlike. There’re leaves all over the ground, too, so the whole surprise thing is really out the window.

  “Hey, Roger,” Stephanie says: a nice hello.

  Glass shatters and there’s a white, chest-thumping concussion of flash grenades and the sound of all three doors caving in, like four or five breakfronts being cannonaded. We’re propelled out of our seats, spinning, moles in sunlight. The Ingram sounds like a portable jackhammer and the Uzi like manic static.

  I have a hold of Stephanie’s ankle. For the longest time I’m not hurt. Her rate of fire is spectacular. The ordnance coming back at us sets everything in the kitchen into electric life. Our overhead fixture’s doing a tarantella.

  There are events in which every second can be taken out of line, examined this way and that, and then allowed to move along. This is one of them. What I think are hits are shell casings cascading down my head and shoulders. A flash grenade bumps and hisses and teeters on the floor by my cheek. Two guys are down in the hallway and one seems to be napping on the sofa. A second concussion separates us, and then there’s the gift of resumed fire everywhere, and my foot and leg are grated and chopped. The house is a festival of small-arms fire. Stephanie’s on her side, under the kitchen table. The .25 caliber’s come down her forearm mount but isn’t firing. The linoleum deforms and sprouts. This is my way of finding her, and her way of finding me. I have the time to think, and in that time I think that we failed not because of what we didn’t have but because of what we wanted: one more look into those old hearts, the ones we turned our backs on, the ones we owed everything to.

  LOVE AND HYDROGEN

  Imagine five or six city blocks could lift, with a bump, and float away. The impression the 804-foot-long Hindenburg gives on the ground is that of an airship built by giants and excessive even to their purposes. The fabric hull and mainframe curve upward sixteen stories high.

  Meinert and Gnüss are out on the gangway ladder down to the starboard #1 engine car. They’re helping out the machinists, in a pinch. Gnüss is afraid of heights, which amuses everyone. It’s an open aluminum ladder with a single handrail extending eighteen feet down into the car’s hatchway. They’re at 2,000 feet. The clouds below strand by and dissipate. It’s early in a mild May in 1937.

  Their leather caps are buckled around their chins, but they have no goggles. The air buffets by at eighty-five miles per hour. Meinert shows him how to hook his arm around the leading edge of the ladder to keep from being blown off as he leaves the hull. Even through the sheepskin gloves the metal is shockingly cold from the slipstream. The outer suede of the grip doesn’t provide quite the purchase they would wish when hanging their keisters out over the open Atlantic. Every raised foot is wrenched from the rung and flung into space.

  Servicing the engines inside the cupola, they’re out of the blast, but not the cold. Raising a head out of the shielded area is like being cuffed by a bear. It’s a pusher arrangement, thank God. The back ends of the cupolas are open to facilitate maintenance on the blocks and engine mounts. The engines are 1,100-horsepower diesels four feet high. The propellers are twenty-two feet long. When they’re down on their hands and knees adjusting the vibration dampers, those props are a foot and a half away. The sound is like God losing his temper, kettledrums in the sinuses, fists in the face.

  MEINERT AND GNÜSS are both Regensburgers. Meinert was in his twenties and Gnüss a child during the absolute worst years of the inflation. They lived on mustard sandwiches, boiled kale, and turnip mash. Gnüss’s most cherished toy for a year and a half was a clothespin on which his father had painted a face. They’re ecstatic to have found positions like this. Their work fills them with elation, and the kind of spuriously proprietary pride that mortal tour guides might feel on Olympus. Meals that seem giddily baronial— plates crowded with sausages, tureens of soups, platters of venison or trout or buttered potatoes—appear daily, once the passengers have been served, courtesy of Luftschiffbau Zeppelin. Their sleeping berths, aboard and ashore, are more luxurious than any other place they’ve previously laid their heads.

  Meinert and Gnüss are in love. This complicates just about everything. They steal moments when they can—on the last Frankfurt to Rio run, they exchanged an intense and acrobatic series of caresses 135 feet up inside the superstructure, when Meinert was supposed to have been checking a seam on one of the gasbags for wear, their glue pots clacking and clocking together—but mostly their ardor is channeled so smoothly into underground streams that even their siblings, watching them work, would be satisfied with their rectitude.

  Meinert loves Gnüss’s fussiness with detail, his loving solicitude with all schedules and plans, the way he seems to husband good feeling and pass it around among his shipmates. He loves the celebratory delight Gnüss takes in all meals, and watches him with the anticipatory excitement that an enthusiast might bring to a sublime stretch of Aïda. Gnüss has a shy and diffident sense of humor that’s particularly effective in groups. At the base of his neck, so it’s hidden by a collar, he has a tattoo of a figure eight of rope: an infinity sign. He’s exceedingly well proportioned.

  Gnüss loves Meinert’s shoulders, his way of making every physical act worthy of a Johnny Weissmuller, and the way he can play the irresponsible daredevil and still erode others’ disapproval or righteous indignation. He’s openmouthed at the way Meinert flaunts the sort of insidious and disreputable charm that all mothers warn against. In his bunk at night, Gnüss sometimes thinks, I refuse to list all his other qualities, for fear of agitating himself too completely. He calls M
einert Old Shatterhand. They joke about the age difference.

  It goes without saying that the penalty for exposed homosexuality in this case would begin at the loss of one’s position. Captain Pruss, a fair man and an excellent captain, a month ago remarked in Gnüss’s presence that he’d throw any fairy he came across bodily out of the control car.

  Meinert bunks with Egk; Gnüss with Thoolen. It couldn’t be helped. Gnüss had wanted to petition for their reassignment as bunk-mates—what was so untoward about friends wanting to spend more time together?—but Meinert the daredevil had refused to risk it. Each night Meinert lies in his bunk wishing they’d risked it. As a consolation, he passed along to Gnüss his grandfather’s antique silver pocket watch. It had already been engraved To My Dearest Boy.

  Egk is a fat little man with boils. Meinert considers him to have been well named. He whistles the same thirteen-note motif each night before lights out.

  How much happiness is someone entitled to? This is the question that Gnüss turns this way and that in his aluminum bunk in the darkness. The ship betrays no tremor or sense of movement as it slips through the sky like a fish.

  He is proud of his feelings for Meinert. He can count on one hand the number of people he’s known he believes to be capable of feelings as exalted as his.

  Meinert, meanwhile, has developed a flirtation with one of the passengers: perhaps the only relationship possible that would be more forbidden than his relationship with Gnüss. The flirtation alternately irritates and frightens Gnüss.

  The passenger is one of those languid teenagers who own the world. She has a boy’s haircut. She has a boy’s chest. She paints her lips but otherwise wears no makeup. Her parents are briskly polite with the crew and clearly excited by their first adventure on an airship; she is not. She has an Eastern name: Tereska.

  Gnüss had to endure their exchange of looks when the girl’s family first came aboard. Passengers had formed a docile line at the base of the main gangway. Gnüss and Meinert had been shanghaied to help the chief steward inspect luggage and personal valises for matches, lighters, camera flashbulbs, flashlights, even a child’s sparking toy pistol: anything that might mix apocalyptically with their ship’s seven million cubic feet of hydrogen. Two hundred stevedores in the ground crew were arrayed every ten feet or so around their perimeter, dragging slightly back and forth on their ropes with each shift in the wind. Meinert made a joke about drones pulling a queen. The late afternoon was blue with rain and fog. A small, soaked Hitler Youth contingent with two bedraggled Party pennants stood at attention to see them off.

  Meinert was handed Tereska’s valise, and Tereska wrestled it back, rummaging through it shoulder to shoulder with him. They’d given one another playful bumps.

  The two friends finished their inspections and waited at attention until all the passengers were up the gangway. “Isn’t she the charming little rogue,” Gnüss remarked.

  “Don’t scold, Auntie,” Meinert answered.

  The first signal bell sounded. Loved ones who came to see the travelers off waved and shouted. A passenger unbuckled his wristwatch and tossed it from one of the observation windows as a farewell present. Meinert and Gnüss were the last ones aboard and secured the gangway. Two thousand pounds of water ballast was dropped. The splash routed the ranks of the Hitler Youth contingent. At 150 feet the signal bells of the engine telegraphs jangled, and the engines one by one roared to life. At 300 feet the bells rang again, calling for higher revolutions.

  On the way to their subsequent duties, the two friends took a moment at a free spot at an observation window, watching the ground recede. The passengers were oohing and aahing the mountains of Switzerland and Austria as they fell away to the south, inverted in the mirrorlike expanse of the lake. The ship lifted with the smoothness of planetary motion.

  ALOFT, their lives had really become a pair of stupefying narratives. Frankfurt to Rio in three and a half days. Frankfurt to New York in two. The twenty-five passenger cabins on A deck slept two in state-room comfort and featured featherlight and whisper-quiet sliding doors. On B deck passengers could lather up in the world’s first airborne shower. The smoking room, off the bar and double-sealed all the way round, stayed open until the last guests said good night. The fabric-covered walls in the lounge and public areas were decorated with hand-painted artwork. Each room had its own theme: the main salon, a map of the world crosshatched by the routes of famous explorers; the reading room, scenes of the history of postal delivery. An aluminum bust of General von Hindenburg sat in a halo of light on an ebony base in a niche at the top of the main gangway. A place setting for two for dinner involved fifty-eight pieces of Dresden china and silver. The butter knives’ handles were themselves minizeppelins. Complementary sleeping caps were bordered with the legend An Bord Des Luftschiffes Hindenburg. Luggage tags were stamped Im Zeppelin Über Den Ozean and featured an image of the Hindenburg bearing down, midocean, on what looked like the Santa Maria.

  WHEN HE CAN put Tereska out of his head, Gnüss is giddy with the danger and improbability of it all. The axial catwalk is 10 inches wide at its base and 782 feet long and 110 feet above the passenger and crew compartments below. Crew members require the nimbleness of structural steelworkers. The top of the gas cells can only be inspected from the vertical ringed ladders running along the inflation pipes: sixteen stories up into the radial and spiraling bracing wires and mainframe. Up that high, the airship’s interior seems to have its own weather. Mists form. The vast cell walls holding the seven million cubic feet of hydrogen billow and flex.

  At the very top of Ladder #4 on the second morning out, Meinert hangs from one hand. He spins slowly above Gnüss, down below with the glue pots, like a high-wire act seen at such a distance that all the spectacle is gone. He sings one of his songs from the war, when as a seventeen-year-old he served on the LZ-98 and bombed London when the winds let them reach it. His voice is a floating echo from above:

  In Paris people shake all over

  In terror as they wait.

  The Count prefers to come at night,

  Expect us at half past eight!

  Gnüss nestles in and listens. On either side of the catwalk, great tanks carry 143,000 pounds of diesel oil and water. Alongside the tanks, bays hold food supplies, freight, and mail. This is one of his favorite places to steal time. They sometimes linger here for the privacy and the ready excuses—inspection or errands—that all this storage space affords.

  Good news: Meinert signals that he’s located a worn patch, necessitating help. Gnüss climbs to him with another glue pot and a pot of the gelatin latex used to render the heavy-duty sailmaker’s cotton gas-tight. His erection grows as he climbs.

  THEIR REPAIRS COMPLETE, they’re both strapped in on the ladder near the top, mostly hidden in the gloom and curtaining folds of the gas cell. Gnüss, in a reverie after their lovemaking, asks Meinert if he can locate the most ecstatic feeling he’s ever experienced. Meinert can. It was when he’d served as an observer on a night attack on Calais.

  Gnüss still has Meinert’s warm sex in his hand. This had been the LZ-98, captained by Lehmann, Meinert reminds him. They’d gotten nowhere on a hunt for fogbound targets in England, but conditions over Calais had been ideal for the observation basket: thick cloud at 4,000 feet, but the air beneath crystalline. The big airships were much safer when operating above cloud. But then: how to see their targets?

  The solution was exhilarating: on their approach they throttled the motors as far back as they could while retaining the power to maneuver. The zeppelin was leveled out at 500 feet above the cloud layer, and then, with a winch and a cable, Meinert, as Air Observer, was lowered 2,000 feet in the observation basket, a hollow metal capsule scalloped open at the top. He had a clear view downward, and his gondola, so relatively tiny, was invisible from the ground.

  Dropping into space in that little bucket had been the most frightening and electric thing he’d ever done. He’d been swept along alone under the cloud ceil
ing and over the lights of the city, like the messenger of the gods.

  The garrison of the fort had heard the sound of their motors, and the light artillery had begun firing in that direction. But only once had a salvo come close enough to have startled him with its crash.

  His cable extended above his head into the darkness and murk. It bowed forward. The capsule canted from the pull. The wind streamed past him. The lights rolled by below. From his wicker seat he directed the immense invisible ship above by telephone, and set and reset their courses by eye and by compass. He crisscrossed them over the fort for forty-five minutes, signaling when to drop their small bombs and phosphorus incendiaries. The experience was that of a sorcerer’s, hurling thunderbolts on his own. That night he’d been a regular Regensburg Zeus. The bombs and incendiaries detonated on the railroad station, the warehouses, and the munitions dumps. When they fell they spiraled silently out of the darkness above and plummeted past his capsule, the explosions carried away behind him. Every so often luminous ovals from the fort’s searchlights rippled the bottoms of the clouds like a hand lamp beneath a tablecloth.