Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

BEFORE DAWN THIS MORNING I heard a dog in the passageway outside my cabin. The sounds were unmistakeable: running, panting, barking. It sounded like an animal of medium size, a pinscher or golden retriever. I pressed my ear to the metal door. The sound came, disappeared, came again. What was a dog doing on a boat? Who would bring a dog to sea?

My room was almost completely dark, just the porthole’s disc of morning light at the head of my cot. I strained to imagine the scene outside: the lone animal at the end of the corridor, tail wagging, waiting for something. For its owner? I rattled my locked door. I wanted to take the dog above deck, into the sunrise, to watch the brightening sky. The dog would leap and happily snap. We would be friends. We would be the only two friends on this great iron vessel.

When Red arrived with my meal, hours later, I asked him about the dog.

“What dog?” he said.

“The dog that was here.”

Red jerked straighter. “ Here ?” he said, peering around my room.

“Out there.” I gestured toward the corridor.

Red looked puzzled. “No,” he said.

“I heard it.”

“There is no dog,” he said.

“I am certain I heard a dog.”

He looked at me darkly. “You are making things up.”

WHEN I WAS LITTLE I used to carry an alarm clock. Despite my longing for a pocket watch, my mother and father made me wait for my tenth birthday. In the meantime, persistent little Lev convinced his aunt Eva to lend him a square, windup alarm clock, swimming-pool blue, which I carried with me wherever I went, like a talisman.

I couldn’t tell you quite what compelled me to haul around the device. At school, with my instructors’ tacit approval, I extracted the clock from my bookbag and placed it on my desk. Its ticking tallied the day. It quickened my pace. At home I sat in Father’s easy chair and read the newspaper. When the alarm went off, at ten after six, I vacated the seat. “What’s the story?” Father would ask as he took off his shoes, and I’d report the day’s headline.

I loved the clock’s mechanism and I loved to set the clock’s alarm. There was enormous satisfaction in the ordered, accurate outcome, the hammer striking its bell. And yet a separate feeling stalked and chased this pleasure. Fear. A trembling, embarrassing, childish terror, like needing to urinate. Despite the clock’s ticking it was never quite predictable: no second hand, no warning. Once or twice it went off randomly, through some error in the mechanism, for a bleating half a minute. The machine made its invisible countdown and abruptly the whole thing was seized, shrieking, shaking with torsions, until it stopped, or I stopped it, and I sat with heaving breaths, like a man just pulled ashore.

A love of timers’ timing, a hatred of alarms’ alarms. A stupid circumstance, but I was just a kid. Living with the clock, I would find myself holding my breath, tightening fists, imagining an any-second shrill. Walking down the street, the thing in my bag, I imagined its plain tin shell and the coiled springs inside. I woke from nightmares, heart thumping, and stared at the placid face beside my bed, tick tick tick , that harmless metal panic. It was an awful companion.

So at a certain point I stopped setting the alarm. I pretended I simply didn’t want to. And a little while after that, I stopped carrying the clock. It was enough to know it was at home, unattended, counting.

IN THE DAYS AFTER you gave up the violin, I wondered whether it had been the same for you with your arm. Had you been frightened of it? Had you carried the fear with you?

We were sitting on the floor in the workshop, legs before us, one of those show-and-tell mornings — leafing through art books, keepsakes, last week’s Sunday Times . You found my packet of anagram poems; I felt strangely shy.

“What are these?” you asked.

I didn’t have a name for them. Silly couplets, the same letters on each line.

I watched you pass from one page to the next.

You said they should be called leonids , like the meteor shower.

I was in love, sipping ginger ale. With sunlight folding over us I got up and went to the icebox.

“Here,” I said. The ice gave little fizzing sounds as it dropped into our tumblers.

I sat back down beside you. Every time I took a sip, my tongue touched the dusty cold taste of snow.

After a moment I said, “Do you want to visit the North Pole?”

You were staring into your cup, a serious look on your face, as if you were remembering something sad. You raised your eyes. “What?”

“Would you like to visit the North Pole?”

You smiled. “Are you planning something?”

I shook my head.

You felt the rim of the glass with your thumb. “Not by foot,” you said. “But maybe by air, like Nobile.”

Now I was the one who must have looked serious. You were just naming a man from the newspapers, but Umberto Nobile’s name meant more to me than that. His first polar airship, the Norge , came through Leningrad on its way to Svalbard. I had stood in its long shadow at Palace Square, watched the foot of its rope ladder wave, magical, above the paving stones. That night there was a reception by the Electro-Technical Society. Amundsen would have been there, and Ellsworth. I was not interested in Norwegian explorers and American tycoons so much as I was by the Italian engineer who was to pilot his own airship to the Pole. But I was knotting my tie when Katia came and asked where I was going, and I said to the Society, and she began to cry. I did not go out. As the adventurers sipped cherry brandy, I nursed a dying thing.

Nobile reached the Pole in his airship. Two years later he returned with the Italia , built with the assistance of the city of Milan. This airship was blessed by the Pope. Six hundred miles past the Pole, buffeted by winds, with ice-jammed controls, the dirigible began to plunge. It banked into a spire of blue ice and the Arctic tore up through the floor of the control gondola, at once a blizzard and an electric saw. Nobile and nine others were thrown onto the ice. One man, an Italian mechanic, bled to death as they waited for the rescuers. Six more, trapped in the envelope of the Italia , were lifted up, and up, and up, and they disappeared.

But Nobile lived.

I took a sip of ginger ale.

You said, “Leon, I’m not going to play the violin anymore.”

I looked at you with a start. “What?”

“It’s my arm.”

Your arm, your right arm. I stared at it, resting on your thigh. It was docile. It was lovely. You held it out before you, as though someone had taken your hand to kiss. “It hurts,” you said.

“It hurts badly?”

“The doctors say it is from when I was an infant. There was not enough to eat, and my bones did not form correctly.”

“In Vilnius.”

“In Vilnius.”

“They can’t do anything?”

“It is an old wound.”

“They are certain they cannot do anything?”

You circled your wrist with your fingers. “It used to ache when I played. They gave me exercises. The exercises made it worse. The ache became a sting. Bending my elbow, drawing the bow; it’s as if there are hot pins in my joints.”

“You never told me.”

You shook your head. “I’m telling you now.”

I asked you, “What will you do?” The ice cubes had melted in my glass.

You flared suddenly. “All these questions!” You climbed to your feet. I got up as well.