All the Dead Yale Men (39 page)

“Oh,” I said. “Maybe I can.”

So, we left for Rome from California. Since this was a sort of honeymoon for Alexandra and me (and she promised me, too, that we would have fried zucchini flowers, as a way of sharing some romance of Rome with me), we went first class. And to Rome from California the best way was over the North Pole.

Our flight left early, around noon. I drank that good scotch and sat by the window, while Alexandra slept in her leather seat. Well, I thought. We will go to the Borghese gardens. We will eat a gelato and go to the Marcus Aurelius monument. It will not be that we are young, but that we are wise.

I couldn't sleep.

When I go somewhere, I want to check my pockets to see that I have my passport, my tickets, my confirmation of a rented car, a hotel room, directions to a house I have rented. It is a sort of ceremony of anxiety, and even now that I am all grown up and know better, I still do it, and that is how I took the twenty-celon note from my pocket. It had that nude woman riding a spiral galaxy, lightning bolts coming from her fists, her expression somehow more relaxed than usual. Still, as I put it in the pouch for trash, I saw, on the back, the Raver's script: “Be content to seem what you really are.”

I put my fingers to my neck and then looked at the second hand of my watch: the pulse was normal, as regular as it had been years before when I was rowing six miles a day. I'd have to send Dr. Stevenson a telegram: no toaster filament was going to be shoved into my heart after all.

This was early enough in the year so that the pole was still dimly lit when we got there. Everyone else in the plane was curled up with pillows or blankets and seemed to be sleeping deeply. I sat there with my scotch, trying to think of nothing at all, but I noticed the plane was losing altitude. Down below, the
whiteness had a gray cast, a sort of dusty quality as though something had burned nearby. The plane got closer to the ice.

The intercom came on. For a while it amplified some quiet but still excited breathing. Then the breathing stopped.

“Is anyone awake back there?” said the voice, which I guessed belonged to the pilot.

But, of course, I had no way to answer. Everyone was asleep, and I couldn't very well shout, Yes, yes, I'm awake. What's going on? In fact, I thought of getting up and walking through the dim aisle to knock on the cockpit door. But these days, with the marshals here and there, all armed, I thought that maybe it was best just to nod my head, which made me feel stupid.

The plane lost more altitude.

The voice said, “Look out the window.” The voice of the pilot was now intense, boy-like in its amazement, as though it had seen some previously forbidden thing but which was now visible for the first time.

Down below on the gray ice, which looked like the moon, something moved. It seemed gray, or gray-white, almost like the color of the ice, and yet it was brighter than that, more luminescent. And it seemed to move with a gait that was almost familiar.

The plane dropped a little more.

And then, as it lost even more altitude, the plane went into a long, slow turn, one wing dipped down. I was on the side of the airplane that was tipped down.

The thing on the ice kept moving. It seemed to be unconcerned with the texture of the ice cap: here and there cracked ice was pushed together into a kind of icy clutter, like a broken window that has been swept into a pile, and it appeared, too, that the wind had cut long gullies in the ice. It went forward in a straight line, only moving around a pile of ice that was almost
vertical: mostly the creature wanted to get away from the enormous thing that could be circling in for the kill.

“Do you know what that is?” said the pilot.

I shook my head, although I was beginning to have my suspicions.

The plane made a wide circle, at an altitude that was pretty low. Perhaps I couldn't really see the texture of the fur or the flab of the thing as it ran in a way that suggested not haste, not hurry, but a perfect horror. It wanted to get away. The shadow of the airplane made a large black cross on the ice, slipping over the dry riverbeds like a piece of gray silk, its movement, at once so smooth and seemingly remote from the nature of the landscape, made the bear's terror all the greater: whatever was pursuing it did so with an ease that had almost no concern for the obstacles the bear faced. Then the bear began to bound, its legs reaching out, its entire aspect like a creature that is trying to jump over the things in its way. It didn't look over its shoulder, just straight ahead since nothing was to be gained by looking back. And in that headlong rush, I thought of the bear my father and I had faced, and that Robert and I had faced, and the moment of realizing one's own capacity for the worst. Is that what my father meant when he passed over the rifle? And just who was it for? What self-loathing did that animal inspire in me by its dignity and perfection? Or maybe it is better to say: the animal let me look into the dark, the entire gloom, where all one's fears reside. At least I had given Robert the Mannlicher that had come down from my grandfather to my father to me and now to him. What else can I call it but the cascade of being a man?

The plane gained altitude, and as it did, as it made a long, deeply banked turn over those broken sheets of ice, the rills all disappearing into the perspective of distance, I looked back at
the creature that kept running. Then I went back to that drink and the gentle presence of Alexandra, who slept next to me.

Maybe, she had said, we'll get away from Rome. Let's rent a car and drive to Umbria. Hey, Frank, what do you say?

The plane landed. Since we were flying first class, we got off right away, right behind the pilots and the engineer, three of them altogether, dressed in blue jackets with gold buttons and gold strips on their sleeves. Two of them looked very sleepy, but one was wide awake.

“I saw the bear,” I said to this man.

“Did you really?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “I saw the bear.”