The Map of the Sky (24 page)

The first thing he did was visit his fiancée, Josephine, with the intention of jilting her, as he had decided during the expedition. But, to his surprise, he left her house having agreed on a wedding date. At the outset, Reynolds had studied her with inscrutable intensity, expecting to feel something akin to repulsion welling up inside him, for, having discovered a renewed and boundless lust for life, he did not wish to spend another day in the company of someone who was able to breathe without being moved to joy by such a miracle. There was a time when he might have resigned himself to that, but now he no longer needed money, respect, glory, or social status. He needed something more; to experience love, to fall passionately, everlastingly in love. He did not want to die without having tasted what suddenly struck him as the most sublime of all emotions.

Reynolds was certain Josephine was not the woman to stir such feelings in him. Yet, when he saw her sitting there, wearing the appropriate dress for that time of afternoon and listening to his exploits with demure politeness, but without the slightest interest in a world which for her had no validity or substance simply because it was not the one she lived in, Reynolds came to doubt the existence of another world at the Earth’s core or in the depths of outer space. Perhaps it would be more precise to say that he preferred not to know, because, for the very first time, the self-evident world before him, filled with things that not only could he touch but that were devoid of all mystery, such as the porcelain teapot on the table or the young woman’s choker, was enough for him. And Josephine, the empress of that falsely true reality inhabited by the uncurious, seemed to him to offer the perfect refuge from the horror pulsating beneath the surface. All at once, he realized that the only escape from being overwhelmed by fear or madness was to become as ordinary as she was, to shelter behind the ignorance and apathy of singularly uncomplicated souls. As he contemplated the young woman, he told himself it was up to him to find her more beautiful and interesting than she really was. And so he set himself to the task, helped by his relentless pragmatism,
and after half an hour of sparkling conversation he managed to make Josephine forget the desultory manner in which he had previously courted her and to surrender her heart to the surprisingly ardent lover whom the frozen wastes had delivered back to her. What better way to secure his place in this innocuous world that Man had constructed than to apply himself to making sure it ran smoothly? thought Reynolds. Having planted his first heartfelt kiss on Josephine’s lips, he threw his belongings into a trunk, bade Allan farewell, and set off for New York to study the law.

However, despite taking shelter behind the façade of an ordinary life, each time Reynolds lowered his guard he was plagued by memories of his experiences in the Antarctic. For that to happen he need only examine the tiny burn mark on the palm of his right hand, the letter or symbol whose meaning he would never know, which was a constant reminder of the hidden mysteries that lay beyond the visible world. Some nights, this thought would keep the explorer awake, and he would gaze out of the window at the star-speckled sky, wondering what had become of the Martian. Had they really managed to kill it, or had it survived and contrived to follow him to America? Was it keeping watch on him, having usurped the appearance of one of his fellow students? He realized this was unlikely, but it did not stop him from feeling a stab of fear whenever he noticed one of his classmates staring at him more intently than usual. He had even stopped speaking to a certain Jensen, who had invited him to his room for a brandy. Reynolds realized he was being overly cautious, yet he could not help such fears affecting his life. He felt alone, gripped by a strange, absurd sense of his own isolation. Only Allan’s letters managed to dispel his unease, as the gunner was the sole person who could understand him.

Since Reynolds had left for New York, his friend would send him long missives keeping him abreast of his news, although it was obvious that his true reason for writing was to relate the sorry state of his soul. And so the explorer was able to observe the life of his only friend begin
to change shape. In his first letter, Allan told of his expulsion from West Point. This had caused a fresh altercation with his stepfather, of such violence that Allan had decided to seek refuge at the home of his aunt, Maria Clemm, in Baltimore. He made up his mind to devote himself to writing short stories, since he had been greatly discouraged by his relative lack of success with the publication of
Al Aaaraf,
the long poem he had written during his sojourn on the
Annawan.
However, Reynolds soon realized that those bland details were merely a polite preamble, and what Allan really wanted to share with him were the sinister nightmares his brain engendered in the dark. He told him of dreams filled with immeasurable horrors: ships crewed by dead men, ladies with dazzling teeth that, prey to some mysterious malady, rotted away in front of his eyes. He even saw himself tortured by the Spanish Inquisition or putting out the eyes of a cat with a quill pen, only to hang the creature without remorse. Such was his state of anxiety that sometimes when he ventured out of the house he thought he saw himself.
These monsters, which have with such subtlety infiltrated my dreams,
he wrote disconsolately,
cause me to awake in the middle of the night in a fit of anguish, my heart beating wildly, bathed in an icy sweat, although I confess I have never written as much as at present. Nor would I wish to banish these nightmares, for I fear they are the only way I have of diminishing the horror that fills my wretched soul, a horror which I have at last understood how to convey to paper, as authentically as if I were writing in my own blood.

Reynolds had smiled wistfully as he put away this letter from Allan. The Martian had cast an ominous shadow over their souls, and yet Reynolds could not help feeling glad that at least in Allan’s case this had fallen on astonishingly fertile ground. For his part, it merely prevented him from gazing innocently at the stars and caused him to be irrationally suspicious of anyone who looked at him with curiosity. It made Reynolds happy to imagine his friend in Baltimore, doted on by his aunt and intent upon making a name for himself as an author whilst trying to keep hardship from his door.

Two years later, when his own fears had all but faded, Allan wrote to him at last with some good news:
My dear friend, I am pleased to be able to tell you that one of my stories has won a literary prize. It seems that hard work does indeed pay off, something I had begun to doubt. Although in this instance, the prize has only filled me with a feeling of joy and confidence without delivering me from poverty, in whose grip I am now firmly held, for you should know that my stepfather has passed away and left me none of his money. And so, no inheritance will save me from the eternal shipwreck that is my existence. But do not concern yourself on my behalf, my friend, for although I do not even possess a suit in which to go out to eat, life has not beaten me yet. You, better than anyone, know that I am a survivor, and in a few days from now, I shall have found refuge in the best sanctuary possible: my cousin Virginia. Yes, my dear friend, I want you to be the first to know: Virginia and I are to be married, swiftly and in secret.

Reynolds was not surprised by the blow that Allan’s stepfather had dealt from the grave, yet he would never have guessed that the gunner would decide to marry his cousin Virginia, a girl scarcely thirteen years of age. However, such an extraordinary marriage seemed to bring Allan luck, for not long afterward he moved to Richmond, where he took up a post offered him on the magazine the
Southern Literary Messenger.
Even so, Reynolds soon learned that it was becoming increasingly common to see his friend stumbling drunk out of the seediest taverns, and his aunt and Virginia were finally forced to move to Richmond to keep him from the demon drink. Thanks to their loving ministrations, Allan appeared to return to normal.

It was then Reynolds received a letter in which the gunner announced that in view of the growing popularity of maritime adventure stories, he had begun writing a novel inspired by their experiences in the South Pole. The novel, which was called
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,
was serialized a few weeks later in the
Southern Literary Messenger.
Reynolds read each fresh installment with a heavy heart, for those pages obliged him to dredge up memories of their days in the Antarctic. And yet they no longer inspired fear in him, only a strange
regret, for he realized that the exhilaration of that horror was something he would never have experienced in the comfortable mediocrity of his life as a journalist: he had conversed with a Martian, chased it, fled from it, trapped it in the ice, not to mention killing a man and saving another one’s life. Those were not things people often did. And yet he, Reynolds, had done them, however dreamlike it seemed to him now, and although when the time came he would be buried as a simple lawyer, his body would face eternity with a mysterious Martian symbol engraved on the palm of its hand.

Allan’s tale began with the voyage of a whaler, the
Grampus,
to the South Seas. In addition to certain rhythmic similarity between the author’s name and that of his eponymous hero, there were other autobiographical elements in the story, some of which clearly referred to their journey: part of the action took place in a hold as suffocating as the one the monster from the stars had chosen as its hiding place, and one of the characters was an Indian named Peters. However, all comparisons between the novel and their failed expedition ended there, for in the second installment, which described their journey to the Antarctic Circle, Allan had let himself be guided solely by his imagination, perhaps fearing he would lose impetus were he to recollect the truth: after several lurid, violent passages, in which the ship avoided icebergs and various crew members showed symptoms of scurvy, they managed to reach an island where they encountered a tribe that tried to take them captive. The finale to that grisly show had the crew sailing south on a milk-white ocean beneath a fine shower of ash, and just before plummeting over a gigantic waterfall, they glimpsed a mysterious, dazzlingly white figure, larger than any creature living on Earth.

Reynolds wrote to Allan at length, telling him how much he had enjoyed his novel, and tried as subtly as he could to find out the meaning of that strange, allusive ending. But, to his astonishment, the writer himself did not seem to have the slightest idea what awaited his characters on the edge of that waterfall.
My novel’s abrupt ending has given rise to all manner of speculation, my dear friend,
he wrote.
Some critics maintain I did not know how
to end it, and so I gave up at the climax, possibly owing to indolence, or because the wellspring of my impoverished imagination had dried up, or because the story itself somehow obliged me to end it there. Let them speculate, poor wretches. The truth is, even I do not know the answer, for I wrote those final pages in what can only be described as a state of intense delirium, while being assailed by terrible nightmares in which a hideous creature invariably appeared, of which I remembered nothing upon waking but the horrific impression it had caused me. But do not worry yourself on my account. I know you well enough to suppose you are afraid your friend is losing his mind. Rest assured, that is not yet the case. Although I will not deceive you of all people: in some strange way I sense I am drifting ever closer to insanity. My nightmares have invaded even my waking hours. There are times when I ask myself: Am I sick? What will become of me? And I know you are the only one who can guess at the answer.

Reynolds read Allan’s last words with a sense of foreboding, as he revisited the doubts he had had about his friend’s mental health during the journey back to America. Perhaps the gunner’s brilliant, fragile, complex mind had been unable to cope with a life built upon a conscious act of forgetting. Such a life had posed no problem for Reynolds. Perhaps he had succeeded in forgetting because the workings of his mind were far simpler than those of the gunner, Reynolds thought unashamedly. Had he not managed to forget that he had murdered Symmes? In contrast, Allan was incapable of expunging those memories voluntarily and had been forced to wall them up behind a carefully constructed barricade, even though he had been unable to stop them seeping through the masonry and spilling onto the endless white expanse of the blank sheets he placed on his desk each day. Yes, that was where Allan had exiled all the monsters he wished to banish from his life. And yet, Reynolds feared his friend was finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between real life and his imaginings. Despite these disturbing conclusions, Reynolds filled his reply with clichéd words of comfort: he knew there was little else he could do to help his friend except to pray to God (in whom his belief was steadily waning) that the huge white figure awaiting Allan on the edge of the waterfall was not the specter of total madness.

Allan’s next letter was sent from Philadelphia, where the gunner had gone to try his luck after his continuous drinking had irreparably damaged his situation at work.
Yet like a faithful dog poverty has followed us here, too,
he wrote,
and I have been forced to employ my pen in more mundane activities than I would have wished. I was even commissioned to write a textbook on conchology, and you can imagine how little pleasure that afforded me. Although happily I still have time to write tales, tales so dark and menacing that I myself am horrified by them. Yet, I know they could not be otherwise, my friend, for they are fashioned from the sinister stuff of my nightmares. Not even the Auguste Dupin stories, which I strive to make less baleful, escape from the inevitable horror that envelops them all, like a dank moss. Only my beloved Virginia is able to cast a little light into my dark soul, when each day upon my return from work she greets me with a spray of freshly picked flowers.