The Skeleton of the Fish

Conrad wanted to meet outdoors, which surprised me. I had assumed he would prefer something closed and lamplit, a room where the shadows could do the work he usually assigned them in prose. But he named a place — a bench at the edge of a small airfield south of Nairobi, disused now, the wind sock hanging limp in the late-afternoon heat and the hangar doors open onto nothing but a Cessna with its cowling off and a mechanic sitting on an oil drum, eating a sandwich.

Markham chose the place. Or rather, Markham was the reason the place existed as a possibility at all. She had flown from strips like this when strips like this were the only infrastructure the colony had, when the word “airfield” meant a stretch of ground that someone had walked to check for warthog holes. She arrived on foot from the direction of the hangar, and I realized she had been there before us, perhaps for hours, perhaps checking the strip from habit, a reflex older than any conversation about fiction.

She sat on the bench without greeting us. Her legs crossed at the ankle. Her hands rested on her knees. She looked at the sky the way certain people look at the sky — not for weather, not for beauty, but for information.

Conrad sat at the other end of the bench and placed his hat on his knee. Between them, I occupied the middle with my notebook and a growing awareness that I was the least qualified person present to discuss anything that mattered.

“So,” I said. “An expedition story. A journey that is also a journey inward. A protagonist who endures alone against something larger, and who arrives somewhere — or fails to arrive — and what’s left afterward.”

“You have given me the whole catalogue,” Conrad said. “The journey inward, the solitary endurance, the arriving-or-not. These are not the same story. They are three stories wearing the same boots.”

“They might be the same story if the person taking the journey is specific enough,” Markham said. She was watching a bird — a crowned eagle, I think — making slow circles above the tree line to the west. “You can talk about journeys inward all afternoon. I did not experience any journey inward when I flew the Atlantic. I experienced fuel calculations, headwinds, ice on the wings, and the absolute necessity of staying awake. The inwardness was a consequence, not a destination. If the fuel holds, you arrive. If it doesn’t, the inwardness is academic.”

Conrad looked at her with an expression I would learn to recognize over the next two hours — a kind of careful, unsmiling respect that contained within it the seeds of serious disagreement. “Fuel calculations. Yes. Marlow, too, concerned himself with rivets. The rivets were real. The steamboat needed them. But the story was not about rivets.”

“The story was about what you decided the story was about, which is a different thing from what happened,” Markham said. “I have read your Marlow. He sits on the deck of a yawl in the Thames estuary and tells a story about going upriver in the Congo, and by the time he is finished, the river and the darkness and poor doomed Kurtz have become — what? An allegory. A philosophical position. The horror, the horror. But someone had to pilot that steamboat. Someone had to read the water and avoid the snags and keep the boiler from exploding, and that person’s experience of the journey was not allegorical. It was practical and terrifying and required every faculty they possessed, and at the end of it they were not enlightened. They were exhausted.”

“You are describing competence,” Conrad said.

“I am describing survival.”

“They are not the same.”

“They are closer than you think. You are a sailor. You know this. The man at the helm in a gale does not philosophize. He steers. If he steers well, he lives. If he steers badly, the philosophy takes care of itself.”

I tried to steer, since neither of them seemed inclined to let me philosophize. “The story I want to write has both. Someone who is competent — genuinely, practically skilled — on an expedition that collapses. And the question isn’t whether they survive. The question is what surviving costs them. Or maybe what it doesn’t cost them. The old man in Hemingway’s boat — he catches the fish and loses it and comes home with the skeleton, and the skeleton is not a symbol of failure. It’s a symbol of — I’m not sure what.”

“It is a symbol of nothing,” Markham said. “That is the error people make with Hemingway. The skeleton is a skeleton. The man caught a fish too large to bring home, and the sharks ate it, and he returned to port with the remains because that is what happens when you are alone on the sea and the sea does what the sea does. Hemingway knew this. He wrote it clean. The people who came after him and decided the skeleton meant something — they are the ones who ruined it.”

“I disagree entirely,” Conrad said, and there was in his voice a heat that had been absent before — a personal stake being driven into ground. “The skeleton means everything. Not because Hemingway intended it as a symbol, but because all writing means more than it says. The old man returning with the skeleton is not a report on a failed fishing trip. It is a man displaying the evidence of his suffering to a world that will misread it. The tourists at the end of the story see the skeleton and think it is a shark. They do not know what it cost. They cannot. And that gap — between what the man endured and what the witnesses understand — is the meaning. Not the skeleton. The gap.”

Markham uncrossed her ankles and recrossed them in the opposite direction. A small adjustment that I read, possibly wrongly, as the physical signature of a concession she was not yet ready to make in words.

“The gap,” she said. “Fine. There is a gap. I will grant you the gap. When I landed in Nova Scotia after crossing the Atlantic — nose-down in a bog, the propeller bent, the fuel tank empty — the farmers who pulled me out of the cockpit wanted to know if I was hurt. They did not want to know what the ice had looked like on the wings at twelve thousand feet over the mid-Atlantic, or what it is to watch your altimeter wind down in the dark and know you are descending into water and the water is black and the water is cold and there is no one to radio because your radio is dead. They wanted to know if I could walk. I could walk. So the story was over for them.”

“But not for you,” I said.

“The story is never over for the person who lived it. That is not philosophy. That is a medical fact. The body remembers what the listeners do not ask about.”

Conrad leaned forward. “This is what I mean. The gap between the experience and the telling. Marlow tells his story on the yawl and his listeners fall asleep — one of them, at least. They cannot receive it. The story passes through them like light through water, and what settles on the bottom is not the story but a residue of it, a discoloration. You are describing the same phenomenon. The farmers cannot receive your crossing. They see the broken propeller and the muddy woman and they think: accident, survival, tea. They do not see the hours.”

“But your Marlow chooses to tell the story,” Markham said. “He elects to sit on that deck and speak into the darkness. I did not elect anything. I was pulled from a bog. The gap you describe is not between the teller and the listener. It is between the event and any language applied to it afterward. Including yours. Including mine.”

This was the moment I had been waiting for — the moment when they agreed while believing they disagreed. The gap. The insufficiency of the telling. The endurance that outlasts its own narrative. I wrote quickly in my notebook, not because I would forget but because the physical act of writing was the only way I could participate without breaking the current.

“Your protagonist,” Conrad said to me, not unkindly. “This competent person on the collapsing expedition. What is the expedition?”

“I don’t know yet. A flight, maybe. A long flight over bad country. Or a river journey — something with a destination that turns out to be the wrong destination, or no destination at all.”

“If you write a river journey, you will write my story,” Conrad said. “I am not forbidding it. But you should know what you are standing on.”

“A flight,” Markham said. “Write a flight. Not because I flew. Because a pilot alone in a single-engine aircraft over the Rift Valley or the Serengeti or the Chalbi Desert is the most solitary creature on earth. More solitary than a sailor, because a sailor has the sea, and the sea is a kind of company — hostile company, but company. The pilot has air. Air is nothing. Air is the absence of everything solid, and you are relying on it to hold you up, and it does this not out of generosity but out of physics, and the physics can stop working at any moment, and when it does you do not sink gradually like a ship. You fall.”

“A flight over colonial Africa,” I said. “Someone carrying — something. A cargo, a message, a person. The destination matters, but what they find there —”

“What they find there is less than what they expected,” Conrad said. “This must be true. The destination must disappoint. Not dramatically — no Kurtz raving in the jungle, that was my indulgence and it is not repeatable. Quietly. The arrival must reveal that the journey was the thing, and the thing at the end of the journey was never worth the journey, and the protagonist must know this and must have known it for some time and must have persisted anyway. This is Hemingway’s old man. He knows the fish is too large. He knows the sharks will come. He does not turn back.”

“Because turning back is not something he can do,” Markham said. “You are making it sound like a choice. Like the old man weighs his options and elects to persist. He does not. He persists because he is a fisherman and the fish is on his line and the line is in his hands and the relationship between the man and the fish has passed beyond the point where choice is possible. The endurance is not heroic. It is mechanical. The body does what the body has been trained to do, and the mind follows, or doesn’t, and either way the hands keep working.”

“Mechanical endurance is not a story,” Conrad said.

“It is the truest story there is.”

“It is a report.”

“And what is wrong with a report?”

“A report does not illuminate. It records. The light in a story comes from the difference between what is recorded and what is understood. You are a beautiful writer — I say this without flattery, because flattery would be an insult to someone who writes as you do. West with the Night is a beautiful book. But its beauty comes not from the recording but from what the recording conceals. You write about flying in sentences so clean they seem transparent, and what makes them art is that they are not transparent at all. They are opaque. You are hiding yourself inside your own clarity.”

Markham said nothing for a long time. The crowned eagle had landed somewhere in the trees and the sky was empty. The mechanic had finished his sandwich and gone back inside the hangar, and we could hear the distant sound of a wrench on metal, rhythmic, almost musical.

“Hiding is a strong word,” she said finally.

“It is the correct word.”

“Then it is a word I will neither accept nor refuse. A pilot does not explain what happens above the clouds to people who have never been above the clouds. Not out of arrogance. Out of — the impossibility of translation. You know this. Your Marlow spends an entire evening trying to make a group of comfortable men on a yacht understand what the Congo was, and at the end of it he has not succeeded, and you know he has not succeeded, and that failure is the point of the frame. The frame is a machine for demonstrating the failure of communication.”

“Yes,” Conrad said. “Exactly. And the failure must be in the story you write,” he said, turning to me. “The protagonist must try to convey what happened — to someone, anyone — and the conveyance must be incomplete. The skeleton brought to shore. The broken propeller in the bog. The evidence that something enormous occurred, presented to witnesses who can see the evidence but not the enormity.”

“You are both saying the same thing,” I said, and immediately regretted it, because they turned to look at me with expressions that suggested I had committed the gravest possible sin against the conversation — the sin of premature synthesis.

“We are not saying the same thing,” Conrad said.

“We are not,” Markham agreed.

And maybe they were right. Conrad was talking about the structure of storytelling — the frame, the listener who cannot hear, the meaning that lives in the gap between experience and narration. Markham was talking about the structure of experience — the body in the cockpit, the hands on the controls, the fact that the work of surviving does not pause so that meaning can be extracted from it. For Conrad, the journey inward was the journey. For Markham, the journey inward was what happened after the real journey was over, if it happened at all, and it was no one’s business but her own.

“The protagonist,” I said. “A woman. A pilot. Colonial East Africa, 1930s. She is carrying something — medicine, maybe, or a message — to a place that is far and the weather is turning. She knows the destination is not what she was promised. She has heard rumors, or she has been there before and found less than she expected. But the cargo must be delivered. The engine is reliable until it isn’t. The landscape below is beautiful and the beauty is not for her, it is the landscape being itself, and she is a small loud thing crossing it. She does not arrive in time, or she arrives and what she finds is not what was needed, or she arrives and the arrival changes nothing. And then she flies home with the skeleton.”

“With the skeleton,” Conrad repeated. “With the evidence.”

“With the knowledge that the evidence will not be read correctly. The gap.”

“The gap is yours to close or not close,” Markham said. “Don’t tell the reader what it means. Hemingway didn’t. The old man sleeps. The boy brings him coffee. The skeleton rots on the beach. That is the ending. The rest is what the reader does with it, and that is not your responsibility.”

“It is exactly your responsibility,” Conrad said. “The rest is the only thing that matters. You arrange the evidence so that the meaning is inevitable but unstated. This is craft. This is what separates the report from the story.”

They were not going to agree. I understood this now. Markham would insist on the primacy of the experience — the hands, the fuel, the wind, the body’s knowledge — and Conrad would insist on the primacy of the telling, the frame, the listener, the gap. And the story I had to write would need to live in both places at once, which was either an impossible assignment or the only assignment worth attempting.

The light was changing. The airstrip was losing its afternoon sharpness, the edges of things softening into that East African dusk that happens not gradually but all at once, as though someone had adjusted a dial. The wind sock stirred, finally. A thermal, maybe. Something rising from the heated ground.

“There is one more thing,” Markham said, and she was not looking at me or at Conrad but at the windsock. “The dignity of it. The old man’s dignity. People talk about his endurance, his suffering, the sharks and the marlin and the boy. But what I remember is the dignity. Not the dignity of winning. The dignity of returning with the skeleton and not explaining it. Not apologizing. Not interpreting. He sleeps. He dreams about the lions on the African beaches. And the story ends. He has not been defeated because defeat is a judgment made by people who were not in the boat.”

Conrad opened his mouth and then closed it. He sat with that for a while, his hat on his knee, his eyes on the darkening strip.

“The lions,” he said quietly. “Yes. Hemingway’s lions. I have never known what to do with those lions.”

“You don’t have to do anything with them,” Markham said. “That’s the point.”

The mechanic came out of the hangar and pulled the doors shut, the metal scraping on the concrete in a sound that carried across the flat ground like something being torn. He didn’t see us, or didn’t care. He got into a truck and drove away, and we sat in the gathering dark on a bench at the edge of an airstrip that nobody used anymore, and I thought about a woman flying alone over country that did not know her name, carrying something that would not be enough, and I did not yet know if the story was about the flying or the carrying or the coming home with less than she left with, and neither of them was going to tell me, and the not-telling was, I suspected, the last thing they agreed on.