fortressed port of San, where he’d built—and had last week launched—his historic, purposefully primitive little boat.
'He’ll make it,' Jeff said with assurance.
Linda’s filmy dress fluttered in the wind from the approaching storm, and she held tightly to the ship’s railing. 'Why does he fascinate you so?' she wanted to know.
'For the same reason Michael Collins and Richard Gordon fascinate me,' he told her. And Roosa, he could have added, and Worden and Mattingly and Evans, and the POWs who’d start returning three years from now, in 1973. 'The isolation, the utter apartness from the rest of humanity…'
'But Heyerdahl has a seven-man crew with him,' she pointed out. 'Collins and Gordon were completely alone in those capsules, for a while, anyway.'
'Sometimes isolation can be shared,' Jeff said, looking at the billowing ocean. The warm smell of the oncoming tropical disturbance made him think of the Mediterranean, of a day when that same scent had drifted through the open window of a villa in Majorca. The peppery savor of paella, the lacerating wistfulness of Laurindo Almeida’s guitar, the mingled joy and grief in Pamela’s eyes, her dying eyes.
Linda saw the shadow that had crossed Jeff’s face, and she moved her hand to his, gripped it as firmly as she had the ship’s railing. 'I worry about you sometimes,' she said. 'All this talk about loneliness and isolation … I don’t know if this project is such a good idea. It seems like it’s getting you too depressed.'
He pulled her to him, kissed the top of her head. 'No,' he reassured her with a smile full of affection, 'it’s not depressing me. Just making me thoughtful, that’s all.'
But that wasn’t entirely true, he knew; his meditative state had brought about the undertaking that obsessed him now, not the reverse. Linda’s presence, her unaccustomed loving openness, had calmed his battered senses since that day in August 1968 when he had resumed this life to find her waiting at his door with an armful of fresh-cut daisies. But not even the unexpected rebirth of all they’d shared so long ago had been enough to make him forget the torments he had indirectly inflicted on the world through Russell Hedges in that previous life, or the estrangement all of that had forced between him and Pamela. Guilt and remorse were inescapable; they formed an unremitting undercurrent that seemed to constantly erode the foundations of his resurrected love for the woman he once had married. And that ongoing diminution led to new modes of remorse, a present guilt made all the worse by his conviction that he should be able to change his feelings, let go the past and give himself as fully to Linda as she now did to him.
He’d immediately quit his reporter’s job at WIOD in Miami, couldn’t stomach the daily task of seeking and observing and describing human tragedy, not after all he held himself responsible for during those dead years at the government retreat in Maryland. That October, Jeff had waited until Detroit was down three games to one; then he’d put his savings on the Tigers to sweep the last three games of the Series. Mickey Lolich had brought it home for him, as Jeff had known he would.
The stake had enabled him to get a new apartment on the water at Pompano Beach, closer to where Linda still lived with her parents and attended college. He’d met her every afternoon when she was done with classes, swam with her in the gentle ocean or sat beside her by the pool at his place as she studied. She’d moved in with him that spring, told her parents she was 'getting a place of my own.' They endured the fiction, never visited the tenth-floor oceanfront apartment that Jeff and Linda shared, and continued to welcome him into their home for Sunday dinner every week.
It had been that summer, 1969, when he’d conceived the project that now consumed him. Linda’s father had planted the seed in his mind one Sunday evening over coffee at the dinner table. Jeff’s habit by then had become to ignore the news, to politely tune out any discussion of national or world events. But that week, his former father-in-law had seized on a single topic, wouldn’t let it go: the just-aborted voyage of Thor Heyerdahl and the Norseman’s quixotic attempt to prove that early explorers, sailing in papyrus-reed boats/could have brought Egyptian culture to the Americas more than three thousand years before Columbus.
Linda’s father had ridiculed the concept, dismissing Heyerdahl’s near-success as outright failure, and Jeff had kept quiet his knowledge that the adventurer-anthropologist would triumph with a second expedition one year later. Still, the conversation set him thinking, and that night he had lain awake until dawn, listening to the churning surf beneath his apartment windows and envisioning himself adrift on that dark sea in a flimsy vessel of his own making, a fragile craft that might succumb to this year’s storms but would return to vanquish the ocean that had claimed it.
That same month he and Linda had driven up to the Cape, as they had before, to witness the controlled fury of the massive Saturn V rocket that lifted Apollo 11 to the moon. After the launch, as they’d inched their way back down the already overdeveloped Gold Coast with a hundred thousand other cars full of spectators, Jeff’s mind was filled with thoughts of insularity, of removal from the day-to-day affairs of humankind. Not the sort of seclusion and retreat that he had once sought in Montgomery Creek, but a voyage of isolation, an epic journey of aloneness toward a goal as yet unproven. I
Heyerdahl knew that feeling, Jeff was certain, as did the crew of the mission they had just watched depart, and none among that crew more than Michael Collins. Armstrong, and to a lesser extent Aldrin, would receive the glory, take those historic first step, speak the garbled first words, plant the flag in lunar soil … But for those dramatic hours that his crewmates were on the surface of the moon, Michael Collins would be more alone than anyone had ever been: a quarter of a million miles from earth, in orbit around an alien world, the nearest humans somewhere beneath him on that hostile demi-planet. When his command module took him past the moon’s far side, Collins wouldn’t even have radio contact with his fellow beings, would be unable even to see the faraway blue-and-white globe of his birth. He would face the bleak infinity of space in an utter solitude and silence that only five other human beings would ever experience.
Jeff had known then, as he sat stalled in that thirty-mile traffic jam on U.S. Highway 1 near Melbourne, that he must meet these men, must understand them. Thereby, perhaps, he would come to a better understanding of himself and the solitary voyage through time that he and Pamela had been thrust upon.
The following week he’d begun the first of many trips to Houston. On the strength of his Earl Warren interview the previous year, Jeff persuaded NBC to help him obtain NASA press credentials as a freelance journalist. He interviewed and gradually befriended Stuart Roosa and, through him, Richard Gordon and Alfred Worden and the others. Even Michael Collins proved relatively accessible; the world’s attention and adulation remained focused on the men who had actually set foot on the moon, not on the one who had been, and the others who would be, left behind in lunar orbit.
What had begun as a personal quest for insight into his own state of mind soon grew beyond that. For the first time in many years, Jeff was applying his talents as a journalist, delving skillfully into the thoughts and memories of his subjects, interviewing them best at moments when they had ceased to think of the conversation as an interview, when they had let down their guard in the face of his obviously genuine interest and begun to speak with him on a deeply human level. Pathos, humor, anger, fear: Jeff somehow elicited from these men the fully textured range of emotions that the astronauts had never before revealed. And he knew that their special vision of the universe was part of something he could no longer keep to himself, but had to communicate to the world at large.
He’d written to Heyerdahl that autumn, arranged the first of several meetings with the explorer in Norway, then in Morocco.
As the initial impulse that had led Jeff to seek out these special individuals expanded in his mind, as the images and feelings that he gleaned from them took on a power of their own, he realized at last what he was unconsciously but determinedly developing: a book about himself, using the metaphor of these separate lonely voyagers as a means to grapple with his own unique experience, to explain the marbled tapestry of his accumulated gains and losses and regrets.
A fresh chain of lightning illuminated the far-off storm clouds, its dim white reflection playing across the contours of Linda’s angelic face.
