Ghost Infrastructure and the Woman Who Flew Over It

We met in a borrowed house in Suffolk, which was Conrad’s doing. He had read Sebald — or claimed to have read Sebald, which with Conrad was sometimes the same thing — and insisted that this particular stretch of English coast was relevant. The house belonged to someone’s niece’s friend, a woman who restored furniture and had gone to Portugal for the winter, leaving behind a kitchen that smelled of linseed oil and a view of the North Sea through windows that did not quite close. The draft was constant. I kept my jacket on.

Markham arrived last, having taken the wrong train from London, or possibly the right train to the wrong station. She did not apologize. She stood in the doorway and looked at the sea and then at us and then at the kitchen table, which was covered in Conrad’s maps — ordnance surveys, a nautical chart of the Alde estuary, a photocopied page from Sebald showing the Suffolk coastline marked with the sites of vanished estates.

“You’ve been busy,” she said.

“I have been preparing,” Conrad said. He pulled out a chair for her. She ignored it and sat in the one across from him, the chair with its back to the window. The light was behind her. I could not read her face well for the first hour, which I came to think was deliberate.

“Sebald,” she said. “I have not read him. Tell me why I should care.”

This was characteristic. Markham did not pretend. If she hadn’t read the man, she said so, and the admission carried no embarrassment — only the implication that the man had better be worth her time.

Conrad smoothed the photocopied page with both hands. “Sebald walked the coast of Suffolk in the early 1990s. He wrote a book about it — The Rings of Saturn. It is not a novel. It is not a travel book. It is a walk that keeps falling through the surface of the present into the past. He passes a manor house and tells you about the family that built it, and the family that lost it, and the herring industry that paid for it, and the herring that vanished from the sea, and the nets that rotted on the beach. Everything is connected by loss. The landscape is saturated with the memory of things that are no longer there.”

“A melancholy walk,” Markham said.

“Profoundly melancholy. But precise. The melancholy is not sentimental. It is structural. He is documenting what remains when purpose has departed. Abandoned airfields — he writes about abandoned airfields, in fact. The American bomber bases from the war. The concrete runways cracking in the fields. The control towers with the windows gone.”

Markham’s posture changed at this. Not dramatically — a slight adjustment of her shoulders, the way a horse shifts when it hears something in the brush.

“Abandoned airfields,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And this is what we are to write about. A walk through some dead landscape, cataloguing the ruins.”

“Not a walk,” I said. “A flight. Or a journey that contains flying. The Sebald structure — the digressive meditation, the landscape saturated with the past — applied to an African expedition. The protagonist moves through country that is full of ghost infrastructure. Abandoned stations. Renamed rivers. Airstrips that were cleared by one empire and overgrown by the time the next administration arrived. And the protagonist sees all of this from above, or moves through it at ground level, and the question is what relationship she has to the ruins. Whether she is part of them. Whether she built some of them. Whether she benefited from the clearing of the ground.”

The kitchen was quiet except for the draft and the distant sound of the sea, which at Suffolk is less a roar than a kind of persistent sighing, as though the water were tired of meeting the shore.

“You said ‘she,’” Markham said.

“I did.”

“A woman pilot. In Africa. Flying over the ruins of empire.” She looked at me, and the light from the window behind her made her expression unreadable, but her voice was clear enough. “You are writing about me.”

“Not about you. Informed by you. Your position — the woman who belongs in a place that was built by people who did not expect women to belong anywhere. The competence that proves something the landscape doesn’t want proven. But also the colonial question — which Conrad brought, and which you lived inside of, whether you wanted to or not.”

“Whether I wanted to or not,” she repeated. “That is a phrase that does a great deal of work while appearing to do none.”

Conrad had been listening with his head tilted slightly, the way he listened when he was waiting for the conversation to reach the point where he could drive his stake in. “The colonial question is not an addendum,” he said. “It is the ground. Every airstrip cleared in East Africa was cleared by African labor for European use. Every river named on a European map already had a name. Sebald understands this. His walkers — and he is always walking, always on foot, always slow — his walkers pass through landscapes where the English gentry built their great houses on the profits of the sugar trade, and the sugar trade was slavery, and the houses are now ruins, and the ruins are beautiful, and the beauty is obscene. He holds all of this in a single sentence without resolving any of it.”

“And you admire this,” Markham said. “The holding without resolving.”

“I have spent my life attempting it.”

“You have spent your life circling it. Marlow circles and circles and the story emerges from the circling, but the circling itself is a kind of evasion. Marlow never says: I was complicit. He says: I saw things. I witnessed. The witnessing is real. But the witnessing is also a position — the position of the man on the deck who tells the story rather than the man in the story who had to act.”

I watched Conrad absorb this. He did not flinch, but something in his jaw tightened, the way a rope tightens when weight is applied.

“Complicity,” he said. “You wish to write about complicity.”

“I wish to write about a woman who does not have the luxury of witnessing,” Markham said. “A woman who is in the landscape, not passing through it. Who flies because she has no other means of earning a living, and the living is earned by serving the colonial administration, carrying their mail, scouting their elephant herds, finding their lost hunters. She is useful to them. Her usefulness is the condition of her freedom. And she knows this — I knew this — and the knowledge does not paralyze her because paralysis is a luxury available only to people who have other options.”

“The competence narrative,” I said. “From West with the Night. Proving yourself in a world that underestimates you. But here the proving is entangled with the machinery of empire. She proves herself by operating within a system that —”

“That she did not build and could not have refused,” Markham said. “Yes. This is the part that your Sebald does not address, because Sebald is walking through the aftermath. He arrives when the estates are ruined and the herring are gone and the airfields are overgrown. He is the mourner. I am not interested in the mourner. I am interested in the person who was there when the airfield was operational. When the tower still had windows. When the runway was being used, every day, by someone who had a cargo to deliver and an engine that needed checking and a weather report that might or might not be accurate.”

“The mourner arrives too late to be implicated,” Conrad said slowly. “Is that your point?”

“The mourner arrives at exactly the right time to be beautiful about it. That is my point. There is an aesthetics of ruin that I distrust. The crumbling wall. The vine growing through the window. The photograph of the abandoned ballroom. These images are comfortable because they do not require the viewer to ask who built the wall and who was kept out by it and who tore it down and why.”

Conrad stood up and went to the window. The North Sea was grey and the sky was grey and the line between them was a formality. He stood with his hands behind his back, and I thought of his sea captains — those men who stood at the rail and looked at water and understood that what they were looking at was the surface of something that went down and down.

“You are right,” he said, still facing the window. “And you are also wrong. The mourner is implicated. The mourner is implicated precisely because he arrives late and chooses to look. Sebald is not an innocent walker. He is a German man walking through England in the 1990s, and every ruin he encounters resonates with the ruin his own country made of Europe. He does not say this directly. He lets the resonance accumulate. The silk weavers who came to Suffolk as refugees. The bombing raids. Thomas Browne’s skull. These are not decorations. They are the return of the suppressed, laid out on a walking path like evidence at an inquest.”

“An inquest,” Markham said. “Now you are in your territory. The darkness, the moral inquest, the story that keeps turning over its own evidence. But inquests have verdicts. What is the verdict here?”

“There is no verdict. That is the point.”

“No. The point is that you want there to be no verdict because a verdict would require you to name who is guilty, and the guilty are also the people who built the ships you sailed on and the language you wrote in. You are not innocent of this, Conrad. Your Marlow goes up the Congo and what he finds at the end is Kurtz, who is a monster, and Marlow is appalled, and the reader is appalled, and everyone agrees: that was terrible. But Marlow also goes home. He goes back to Europe. He lies to Kurtz’s fiancee. He resumes his life. The inquest has no verdict because the verdict would indict the person conducting the inquest.”

The draft from the window lifted the corner of Conrad’s photocopied Sebald page and let it fall. Lifted it and let it fall. A small, repetitive sound, like something breathing.

“So your protagonist,” I said, because one of us needed to bring the conversation back to the story that did not yet exist. “She is not a mourner. She is not a witness. She is — operational. She flies. She carries what needs carrying. She knows the country from above, which is a kind of knowledge that the people on the ground do not have and that the people in London who drew the maps certainly do not have. She sees the abandoned stations and the renamed rivers and the ghost infrastructure, and she has a relationship to all of it that is neither innocent nor guilty. She was there when some of it was built. She used it. She benefited. And now she is flying over the ruins and the ruins are —”

“The ruins are not metaphors,” Markham said. “An abandoned station is an abandoned station. The roof has fallen in. The telegraph wire is down. The track is overgrown. Someone once lived there and sent dispatches and received orders and now the building is empty and the termites are eating the doorframe. If you make this into a symbol of the fall of empire, you have done what Conrad does, and what Sebald does more gracefully, and what I do not wish to do. The building is a building. The woman who flies over it remembers it when it was a building with people inside, and her memory is specific — the name of the stationmaster, the way the tea tasted, the particular sound the telegraph made — and the specificity is the thing. Not the fall. The specificity of what was there before the fall.”

“Memory against abstraction,” Conrad said, returning to the table. “This is where we diverge. You want the particular. The stationmaster’s name. The tea. I want the pattern. The fact that every empire builds stations and every empire abandons them and every abandoned station looks the same — the roof caved in, the termites, the wire down. The pattern is the meaning. The particular is the texture.”

“The particular is the meaning,” Markham said. “The pattern is the evasion.”

I wrote this down. They were not going to reconcile it. I knew this already, but the shape of the disagreement was becoming clearer — Markham pulling toward the specific, the embodied, the woman in the cockpit who remembers the taste of the stationmaster’s tea; Conrad pulling toward the structural, the recurring pattern, the fact that empires always do this, that the ruins are always the same ruins dressed in different vegetation. And somewhere in the space between them, the story would have to live.

“Sebald does both,” I said. “That’s what makes The Rings of Saturn work. He gives you the particular — the silk moths, the precise dimensions of the Dunwich ruins, the name of the doctor he visits in the hospital — and he gives you the pattern. The decay is universal but the instances are singular. The melancholy comes from the friction between them.”

“Sebald had the advantage of walking slowly,” Markham said. “A pilot does not have this advantage. A pilot sees the pattern from the air — the grid of the roads, the cleared land, the boundaries that someone drew — and the particular is lost at altitude. You cannot see the stationmaster’s face from two thousand feet. You cannot smell the tea. You see the station as a shape, a rectangle of corrugated iron in a clearing, and then it is behind you and the next clearing is ahead. Speed is the enemy of the particular.”

“Then the story must slow down,” Conrad said.

“Or the story must find a way to make speed into a form of knowledge. Not the same knowledge as walking. A different knowledge. The knowledge of the woman who has seen the country from above and carries the aerial view inside her — the pattern — and also carries the ground view from the times she landed and refueled and spoke to the people and drank the tea. Both views. Neither complete. The story lives in the failure to reconcile them.”

This was the closest they came to agreement all afternoon, and neither acknowledged it. Conrad began folding his maps. Markham stood and went to the window where he had stood and looked at the same grey sea and said nothing for a long time.

“The woman lands,” she said at last. “Somewhere. At one of these ghost stations. She lands because the engine forces her down, or because she sees something from the air that she needs to see from the ground. And what she finds is — not what Kurtz was. Not the heart of anything. Just the remains. A place where people lived and worked and sent messages and received orders, and now the place is empty and the emptiness is not symbolic. It is just empty. And she stands there. And the wind comes through the broken walls. And she knows that she helped build this. Or that she used it. Or that she flew over it a hundred times and never once thought about the people inside. And that knowledge is not an epiphany. It is a fact. Like fuel calculations. Like wind speed. Like the weight of the cargo. Another variable to carry.”

Conrad had his hat on. He was ready to leave. But he paused at the door.

“Another variable to carry,” he said. “Yes. But the variable changes the flight. This is what you will not concede. The knowledge changes her. Not dramatically, not with revelation or the shattering of innocence — I agree with you there, we are past that. But the way a headwind changes a flight. The same aircraft. The same route. But the ground speed is different, and the fuel burns faster, and the destination is farther than it appeared on the chart.”

Markham turned from the window. “Possibly,” she said.

It was the most she would give him, and he took it, and they did not shake hands. Conrad went out into the Suffolk cold. Markham stayed at the window. I sat at the table with my notebook and the maps and the photocopied page from Sebald with its corner still lifting and falling in the draft, and I thought about a woman who carries two kinds of seeing — the aerial and the ground-level — and cannot make them into one, and does not stop flying because of it, and the country below her is full of things she built and things she used and things she overlooked, and she is running out of fuel, and the next landing strip may or may not still exist.