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    The Latest Illusion
    The Latest Illusion
    The Latest Illusion
    Ebook128 pages46 minutes

    The Latest Illusion

    By Donald Everett Axinn

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A poet and novelist, Donald Everett Axinn is also a major real estate developer in the New York area who personally experienced the dizzying heights and gaping depths of business in the 1980s and survived to tell the tale.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcade
    Release dateApr 6, 2012
    ISBN9781611456677
    The Latest Illusion

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      Book preview

      The Latest Illusion - Donald Everett Axinn

      ODYSSEYS

      We walk through volumes of the unexpressed and like snails leave behind a faint trail excreted out of oneself.

      —John Updike

      BYRD, RICHARD EVELYN, REAR ADMIRAL, U.S.N.

      —FROM HIS DIARY

      Alone; 92nd day,

      July 1933

      winter, 24-hour night

      Advance Base, Antarctica

      I want my death to begin hot,

      like early morning warmth that once

      reflected off the waters of San Diego Bay

      when I first learned to taxi seaplanes.

      Dammit! I am owed at least that. Listen to me:

      I will trade it without hesitation far all

      eternity, whatever you request of me.

      I am a naval aviator, an Annapolis man,

      a Virginian, an explorer. We do not

      like to express our feelings, but I am

      finished, dead already, here in this

      white hell where the cold sets fire

      to your skin, then races to

      every joint, every muscle before strangling thought,

      freezing it into this diary I will

      carefully place next to this, my last bed.

      I will die soon surrounded only by my

      old companions, arrogance and ambition,

      who cleverly kept from me the insidious

      yet recognizable warnings. I should have felt

      the Antarctic terrors that make the Arctic

      seem like a weekend jaunt into the Smokies.

      Every solitary thing consists of darkness,

      all light gone from domed sky, from thinned mind,

      pulling with it whatever is left of faith.

      The voices of Scott and Shackleton clank

      through the howl like the ghost of Hamlet’s father,

      their wails the suffering and frustration

      of missions staked into the conspiring ice.

      I cannot even zip open my sleeping bag,

      weakness overwhelming like the pain

      that searched everywhere before settling

      in my eyes that once looked down on soft,

      plowed fields of the South where

      children would hear my biplane, shout

      and run to their mothers, who would watch me

      circle as I rocked my wings through spirited air,

      the joy of wafting an exquisite, sensual

      gift I took for granted, but never should have.

      Sleep is not sleep, but floats in carbon

      monoxide, torpors, then nightmares demanding actions

      from me; but I am defenseless, trapped and doomed

      in this vise, timed to catch insolence.

      I lust for light, any light, but possess

      no energy to pump air into the pressure lamp.

      The roof is caving in, the tunnel

      smashed and barren, lost fantasies of survival.

      Could I have been the man who convinced

      Edsel Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Vincent Astor

      to give me all that money to mount exotic

      expeditions that would make me far more celebrated

      than Amundsen and, especially, Ellsworth and Wilkins?

      Ha! Could they take three months of minus seventy

      degrees? No! Especially alone.

      What? … Yes. Do you remember

      when I lost that bid in 1919 to cross the Atlantic

      in the NCs? And how I struggled to graduate from

      Annapolis?

      The yearbook said, "Go where he may, he cannot

      hope to find the truth, the beauty pictured in his mind."

      What I wrote about has finally come down on me:

      the Arctic, lonely as a tomb, remote and detached

      as a star. I have never experienced fear like this.

      Please, let me go topside one last time,

      observe the uncanny dark radiance of whiteness,

      take readings (you know I must take readings!),

      face the indifferent wind, plead with my wife

      and children to forgive me, forgive my selfishness.

      My colleagues at Little America, Poulter

      and Murphy, are wondering what kind of leadership

      caused Byrd, that meticulous organizer, to require

      this trial. Trying to prove he can do it, alone?

      I will not tell them anything, how impossible,

      how much trouble I am in—but, yes, they do know.

      If those men decide they must make an attempt

      to rescue me, I will order them to stay put.

      But if they manage through the night, I will report

      it only got bad when I elected not to

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