THE NAVIGATOR

Once, when Max was a child, his family toured the ruins of Flossenbürg Castle while on vacation in Bavaria. They arrived early in the morning to find the crumbling stone walls shrouded in a fog so dense Max felt as though he could poke it with a stick. They moved slowly through the ruins, holding hands and trying to restrain the terrified laughter that pressed against their lungs—the irrational, frantic hilarity brought on by the sense of looming disaster. Max loved the foreboding that prickled the back of his neck as they picked their way amongst the rubble. Here and there a dark corner stood in sharp relief against the spectral mist, or a stately pine rose up from the gloom sprawled across the castle grounds, but apart from those occasional landmarks he and his family wandered blindly through the vestiges of a great fortress split asunder during the Thirty Years’ War. He sensed as though he was present in some bend in time and if he just took the right turn he might be able to step backwards and witness history with his own eyes. A siege. A slaughter. He was transported. Suspended. Sometime later, when the light began to shift and the sun turned warm enough to burn through the gloom, he felt a gnawing disappointment. By midmorning the air was crisp and clean and the magic had dissipated.

That day, however, was the beginning of Max Zabel’s love affair with fog. It is the reason that he wakes early and often volunteers for the first shift in any rotation. Max has been known to pray for fog the way some men pray for deliverance. So it is a great irony that today, of all days, should be the one when the airship flies into a swamp-like bank of mist off the coast of Newfoundland. Max has not seen the like since that day at Flossenbürg Castle. They have been drifting through heavy cloud cover since dawn. But this is different. He can feel the shift in air pressure as they pass through sparse clouds and into the wall of coastal fog. The air around him becomes solid. The roar of engines grows muffled, as though someone has stuffed them with cotton. Everything dulls. Max notes the change in atmosphere and the time on his flight log—force of habit—but no one else in the control car pays the transformation any mind. This is a normal part of flying. It just happens to be his favorite way to fly. Half-blind and mute. Max does not pretend this is rational or ideal. It’s rather dangerous, in fact—if one wants to take it at face value—but thrilling nonetheless.

Pity he can’t enjoy it. The remnants of his spectacular hangover are still present, like ball bearings rolling around his skull. If he moves his head too quickly they clang against one another, making him dizzy, making his eyes water and his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth. It’s little more than sixty degrees in the control car, but Max is sweating along his lower back, beneath his arms, and across his upper lip as his body works to expel the last traces of alcohol. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Dries his hand on his trousers.

Max is thirsty. But there’s little that can be done about that now. It isn’t time for his break. He will stay fixed at his station if it kills him. He will not flinch. He will not complain. He will not acknowledge his mistake last night or let it affect his ability to perform his duties today. The other officers must feel the static charge of his determination, for they do not speak to him unless necessary. They avoid eye contact. The gloom outside has permeated the control car and subdued every man on duty.

From where he’s standing at his chart table, Max cannot see the rudder wheel at the front of the bridge, though he knows that Helmut Lau is on duty at the moment. He can hear the intermittent calls between Lau, Commander Pruss, and Kurt Bauer, the elevator man, but they recede into background chatter as he watches the instruments on the panel before him. He makes adjustments for altitude and headwinds. Max slips carefully and purposefully into his private zone. This is a world of numbers and precision, a world where you do one thing and there is a specific, predictable outcome. And it is in this moment of deep concentration that he is struck by a thought: it is a pity that he cannot chart the human heart. Were it possible, he would spread Emilie’s heart out on the table before him. Smooth out the creases. Measure its latitude and longitude. And then, when he could see the unbroken whole, he would place himself directly in the center. He would draw himself there in red ink. Permanent. That might have been possible before he inadvertently betrayed her trust. But now her papers are confiscated and she is a breath away from being lost to him for good.

Max is broken from this trance by the panicked voice of Kurt Bauer.

“We are only a few kilometers from Cape Race.”

“No,” Max says, “that’s not possible. That would put us…” he turns to his chart and flips the pages three at a time. It is one long moment of suspended animation in which Max realizes what has happened. What he has done. And then the Hindenburg’s newly installed sonic altimeter begins to beep—two bright chirps with a five-second gap between them—indicating that the ground is rising fast.

“On the cliffs,” Bauer finishes for him.

There is a pause in the control car, no more than four seconds, as every man in the room looks at one another and then at the instruments in front of them. Denial. Shock. Fear. These emotions are evident on their faces, tumbling over one another like falling dominoes. When the next chirp sounds they all fly into action. But now the time between alarms is only three seconds.

The device is new and state-of-the-art and has been on board for less than a year. It measures the distance between the control car and the ground, much like the sounding line on a boat, but with the added benefit of an audible warning system that alerts crew when the distance begins to recede quickly.

There is a nervous tremor in Kurt Bauer’s voice. “Ground rising at approximately ten feet per second!”

“Bring it up!” Pruss shouts. “Lau, back at the rudder.”

Pruss takes two quick steps from where he has been stationed since they flew into fog and hovers over Bauer at the elevator wheel. His eyes are locked on the sonic altimeter, watching the needle climb. “Up. Now!” Pruss commands, and Bauer spins the wheel like a mad pirate at the helm of the ship. Max cannot help but think of Blackbeard and the Queen Anne’s Revenge, and he feels, in his post-drunken state, that he has been transported to a land of make-believe where pirates take to the skies in flying whales. He is brought back to reality when the nose of the Hindenburg tips upward abruptly as the fins at the back of the ship respond and direct the structure to rise. Max can feel the weight of his body shift into his heels as he adjusts his balance.

Two seconds between chirps now.

Then one.

“Faster!” Lehmann orders as the alarm merges into one unbroken, shrill tone indicating that they are flying directly into a landmass.

Max does not realize he has been holding his breath until his lungs begin to burn and the pounding of his heart echoes in his ears. He gasps, pulls in a panicked breath, and holds that one as well.

The screeching alarm continues its metallic warning. Max can feel the sharpness of the sound in his brain, like claws on metal. It is the sound of looming disaster. He watches the elevator wheel spin and waits for the sickening crunch of metal against rock. The officers are coiled, waiting for impact. They can see nothing outside the windows. They can hear nothing but the sonic altimeter. They are blind and deaf and hanging vulnerably beneath the Hindenburg in a cage of metal and glass.