Love and Hydrogen Read Online Free PDF Page B

that both radios were smashed, not that it mattered, both radiomen being dead. And that both outboard engines were beyond repair, not that
that
mattered, since they had no fuel.
    AROUND FOUR A.M., the passengers start exclaiming at the lights of Long Island. The all-night party has petered out into knots of people waiting and chatting along the promenade. Gnüss and Meinert set out the china, sick with worry. Once the place settings are all correct, they allow themselves a look out an open window. They see below that they’ve overtaken the liner
Staatendam,
coming into New York Harbor. She salutes them with blasts of her siren. Passengers crowd her decks waving handkerchiefs.
    They’re diverted north to avoid a front of thunderstorms. All morning, they drift over New England, gradually working their way back to Long Island Sound.
    At lunch Captain Pruss appears in the doorway for a moment, and then is gone. They bus tables. The passengers all abandon their seats to look out on New York City. From the exclamations they make, it’s apparently some sight. Steam whistles sound from boats on the Hudson and East Rivers. Someone at the window points out the
Bremen
just before it bellows a greeting. The
Hindenburg
’s passengers wave back with a kind of patriotic madness.
    The tables cleared, the waiters drift back to the windows. Gnüss puts an arm around Meinert’s shoulders, despair making him courageous. Through patchy cloud they can see shoal water, or tide-rips, beneath them.
    Pelicans flock in their wake. What looks like a whale races to keep pace with their shadow.
    In New Jersey they circle over miles of stunted pines and bogs, their shadow running along the ground like a big fish on the surface.
    It’s time for them to take their landing stations.
    Sauter passes them on their way to the catwalk and says that they should give the bracing wires near Ladder #4 another check and that he’d noticed a bit of hum.
    By the time they reach the base of #4, it’s more than a bit of a hum. Gnüss volunteers to go, anxious to do something concrete for his disconsolate beloved. He wipes his eyes and climbs swiftly while Meinert waits below on the catwalk.
    Meinert’s grandfather’s pocket watch bumps and tumbles about his testicles while he climbs. Once or twice he has to stop to rearrange himself. The hum is near the top, hard to locate. At their favorite perch, he stops and hooks on his harness. His weight supported, he turns his head slightly to try and make his ears direction finders. He runs a thumb and forefinger along nearby cables to test for vibration. The cables are covered in graphite to suppress sparks. The slickness seems sexual to him. He’s dismayed by his singlemindedness.
    On impulse, he takes the watch, pleasingly warm, from his pants. He loops it around one of the cable bolts just so he can look at it. The short chain keeps slipping from the weight. He wraps it once around the nut on the other side of the beam. The nut feels loose to him. He removes and pockets the watch, finds the spanner on his tool belt, fits it snugly over the nut, and tightens it, and then, uncertain, tightens it again. There’s a short, high-pitched sound of metal under stress or tearing.
    BELOW HIM, his lover, tremendously resourceful in all sorts of chameleon-like self-renovations, and suffused with what he understands to be an unprecedented feeling for his young young boy, has been thinking to himself,
Imagine instead that you were perfectly
happy.
Shivering, with his coat collar turned up as though he was sitting around a big cold aerodrome, he leans against a cradle of wires and stays and reexperiences unimaginable views, unearthly lightness, the hull starlit at altitude, electrical storms and the incandescence of clouds, and Gnüss’s lips on his throat. He remembers his younger brother’s iridescent fingers after having blown soap bubbles as a child.
    Below the ship, frightened