Love and Other Ways of Dying
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Love and Other Ways of Dying is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details in “The Accident” have been changed. Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
Copyright © 2015 by Michael Paterniti
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
THE DIAL PRESS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
The following essays have been previously published:
“The Long Fall of Flight One-Eleven Heavy,” “He Might Just Be a Prophet,” “Eating Jack Hooker’s Cow,” “The American Hero (in Four Acts),” “11:20,” “The House That Thurman Munson Built,” and “The Last Meal” in Esquire; “The Giant,” “The Accident,” “The Fifteen-Year Layover,” “The Most Dangerous Beauty,” “The Suicide Catcher,” “Mr. Nobody,” “Never Forget,” and “The Man Who Sailed His House” in GQ; “Driving Mr. Albert” in Harper’s; “City of Dust” in The New York Times Magazine.
ISBN 978-0-385-33702-1
eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9751-4
www.dialpress.com
Cover design and illustration: Chelsea Cardinal
v3.1
Well, here’s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts—the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation.… And still the box is not full.
John Steinbeck
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction
The Long Fall of Flight One-Eleven Heavy
He Might Just Be a Prophet
Eating Jack Hooker’s Cow
The Giant
Driving Mr. Albert
The Accident
The Fifteen-Year Layover
The Most Dangerous Beauty
The American Hero (in Four Acts)
City of Dust
The Suicide Catcher
11:20
Mr. Nobody
Never Forget
The Man Who Sailed His House
The House That Thurman Munson Built
The Last Meal
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
DOWN HERE IN THE BASEMENT WE’VE built a city out of blocks, divvied up the Matchbox cars, the toy soldiers and model planes, and begun yet again what we call The Game. We’ve been playing it for years now, my brother and I, on the cool tile floor in humid summer, on the warm shag come frigid winter. In our city anything can happen—and does. We’ve fought back alien incursions, faced down an armed opposition, lost citizens and mighty warriors to various calamities. We’re a widowed, wounded race, living moments of beauty and hardship. Allies have been found out to be spies—and have thus been eliminated. Strange creatures have appeared (one of our AWOL gerbils among them), muttering in gruff tones, here to crush or help us, we don’t know which. Cars collide; planes crash. Everything’s going great in our city, and then, a split second later—blam!—it all unravels. A giant kicks down a building in the north sector, and police and fire come screaming in to repair the damage, check the crime scene.
What gets televised in our house through the evening news filters into The Game, too. An evil group known as Black September takes hostages. A bad guy named Brezhnev is hell-bent on destroying us. There’s a Matchbox that can fly, driven by a great man named Muhammad Ali. Every moment waits expectantly for a hero, and usually we oblige. Ours is a Manichean universe, in which light must eventually triumph over darkness, angels over devils.
Of course, our parents are forbidden from entering when we play, in part because we don’t want their explanations or lessons. Stuff happens in The Game, heavy, unknowable stuff, that baffles even us. Sometimes when we arrive at a pause in the action, one of us wonders aloud about what should happen next. Then, in the western sector, the giant drops a block bomb, or karate-kicks a building—and it all bullies into action again.
The Game is our supersaturated, hypermediated reflection of a world we don’t understand—and the opposite of our peaceful suburban town. Upstairs our mom is drinking Tab, getting dinner ready as she watches a jowly man on TV preside over the Watergate hearings. Where we live, there seems to be little sentiment about this, or about the war in Vietnam. Meanwhile, in the basement, among the massacres and raids, we channel all of our emotion and drama into The Game. We spend hours down here, making a stand, waiting for deus ex machina to arrive.
There must come a day when we play for the last time, but I don’t remember it. After all those hours, days, years, there’s no goodbye. No final triumph, no clinking glasses of grape juice. Perhaps we’ve come to the realization that the world isn’t quite so Manichean, or that the stakes here will never be high enough to make it real, that this indeed is a game—and we want to be lifted by some huge hurricane, or swept away by a powerful ocean wave. We want to stand on some distant shore where the answers are written in a strange new language of whale bones and scattered mussel shells.
In revisiting the pieces in this essay collection—both old and up-to-the-minute, seventeen in all, spanning almost two decades—I’ve been reminded of The Game, because what I’ve chosen to do with my life ends up being similar in some ways to what transpired in our childhood playroom all those years ago. For better or worse, I’ve continued building block cities, only out of words, and as reflections of events shaped by the fist of a more cosmic hand. If The Game was fantasy and The Work has been cold reality, in both cases they’ve come to represent, at least for me, the same underlying need to make sense of the way that love and loss, justice and devastation, and beauty and pain can fuse to make some bearable, or at least fathomable, whole.
It can be unsettling for any writer to go back and reread his or her work. It’s like watching yourself age right before your eyes. Or like seeing a batch of photographs, some in which the fashions and automobiles seem retro. It’s like unearthing so many time capsules, and wondering why you buried them in the first place. You begin to see your obsessions laid bare, certain themes repeating. At the beginning, none of this is clear. You don’t set out saying, It’s time again to go on that quest for the ecstatic! Or: Hey, let’s memorialize the underdog! Or: Anyone for an elevator ride down into darkness? These themes crop up later, when you sit down to write an introduction like this one.
There’s something else that comes up, a couple of questions that keep nagging. What are these stories trying to say, anyway? Or better: What have I been trying to say through them?
Well, here’s a stab: Perhaps no matter how bad it gets—or good—we’re beholden not to look away from the things we fear or revere. The more we examine the grooves and scars of life, the deeper we go in our forensic investigations by trying to name the thing that appears before us, the more free and complete we become, the more capable of identification and compassion and opposition. But it’s not just that. The more willing we are to suffer pain and loss and even great throes of happiness, to live fully inside these big emotions, the closer we come to—what?
The folded hands of the universe?
Our humanity?
Infinity?
It must be something.
We each have our way of finding meaning: work, faith, family, sport, avocation, etc. I guess mine has been this everyday ritual of reporting and writing, these trips into other worlds. I know I ate Fr
ançois Mitterrand’s last meal including its famous birdie, or visited the Sudan during a vicious famine, or that I found true happiness one night in Catalonia, Spain, after consuming the food of Ferran Adrià, because I’ve written it down here. I know that nearly two million people vanished in a country called Cambodia, and that I picked apples with a real giant, named Leonid Stadnik, one autumn afternoon in Ukraine. I know I once stood on a suicide bridge in Nanjing, China, wrestling with a hopeless man who had come to jump, just as I know that one winter, feeling particularly lost in the world, I drove cross-country with Einstein’s brain in the trunk of my rental car, all because these stories now tell me so.
For me, writing is a vital act of memory, and every once in a while, with a lot of hard labor, it can also be means for transcendence. Like a runner’s high, you keep running to get it. And sometimes, with the help of great editors, assiduous fact-checkers, and trusted readers—sometimes you can feel the words lift ever so slightly, and something you never thought before, some Ouija messsage, briefly reveals itself.
When I left that basement for good all those years ago, little did I know all the wondrous and horrible things that lurked in those other worlds beyond, all of them real. On those faraway shores, armies clashed, planes fell from the sky, giants stomped their feet.
I was lucky to be there.
And the greatest gift, for me at least, was that I got to write about it.
THE LONG FALL OF FLIGHT ONE-ELEVEN HEAVY
IT WAS SUMMER; IT WAS WINTER. The village disappeared behind skeins of fog. Fishermen came and went in boats named Reverence, Granite Prince, Souwester. The ocean, which was green and wild, carried the vessels out past Jackrock Bank toward Pearl Island and the open sea. In the village, on the shelf of rock, stood a lighthouse, whitewashed and octagonal with a red turret. Its green light beamed over the green sea, and sometimes, in the thickest fog or heaviest storm, that was all the fishermen had of land, this green eye dimly flashing in the night, all they had of home and how to get there—that was the question. There were nights when that was the only question.
This northerly village, this place here of sixty people, the houses and fences and clotheslines, was set among solid rocks breaching from the earth. It was as if a pod of whales had surfaced just as the ocean turned to land and then a village was built on their granite backs. By the weathered fishing shacks were rusted anchors like claws and broken traps and hills of coiled line. Come spring, wildflowers appeared by the clapboard church. The priest said mass. A woman drew back a curtain. A man hanged himself by the bridge. Travelers passing through agreed it was the prettiest earthly spot, snapping pictures as if gripped by palsy, nearly slipping off the rocks into the frigid waves.
Late summer, a man and woman were making love under the eaves of a garishly painted house that looked out on the lighthouse—green light flashing—when a feeling suddenly passed into them, a feeling unrelated to their lovemaking, in direct physical opposition to it: an electrical charge so strong they could taste it, feel it, the hair standing up on their arms, just as it does before lightning strikes. And the fishermen felt it, too, as they went to sea and returned, long ago resigned to the fact that you can do nothing to stop the ocean or the sky from what it will do. Now they, too, felt the shove and lock of some invisible metallic bit in their mouths. The feeling of being surrounded by towering waves.
Yes, something terrible was moving this way. There was a low ceiling of clouds, an intense, creeping darkness, that electrical taste. By the lighthouse, if you had been standing beneath the flashing green light on that early-September night, in that plague of clouds, you would have heard the horrible grinding sound of some wounded winged creature, listened to it trail out to sea as it came screeching down from the heavens, down through molecule and current, until everything went silent.
That is, the waves still crashed up against the granite rock, the lighthouse groaned, a cat yowled somewhere near the church, but beyond, out at sea, there was silence. Seconds passed, disintegrating time … and then, suddenly, an explosion of seismic strength rocked the houses of Peggy’s Cove. One fisherman thought it was a bomb; another was certain the End had arrived. The lovers clasped tightly—their bodies turning as frigid as the ocean.
That’s how it began.
It began before that, too, in other cities of the world, with plans hatched at dinner tables or during long-distance calls, plans for time together and saving the world, for corralling AIDS and feeding the famine-stricken and family reunions. What these people held in common at first—these diplomats and scientists and students, these spouses and parents and children—was an elemental feeling, that buzz of excitement derived from holding a ticket to some foreign place. And what distinguished that ticket from billions of other tickets was the simple designation of a number: SR111. New York to Geneva, following the Atlantic coast up along Nova Scotia, then out over Greenland and Iceland and England, and then down finally into Switzerland, on the best airline in the world. Seven hours if the tailwinds were brisk. There in time for breakfast on the lake.
In one row would be a family with two grown kids, a computer-genius son and an attorney daughter, setting out on their hiking holiday to the Bernese Oberland. In another would be a woman whose boyfriend was planning to propose to her when she arrived in Geneva. Sitting here would be a world-famous scientist, with his world-famous scientist wife. And there would be the boxer’s son, a man who had grown to look like his legendary father, the same thick brow and hard chin, the same mournful eyes, on a business trip to promote his father’s tomato sauce.
Like lovers who haven’t yet met or one-day neighbors living now in different countries, tracing their route to one another, each of them moved toward the others without knowing it, in these cities and towns, grasping airline tickets. Some, like the Swiss tennis pro, would miss the flight, and others, without tickets, would be bumped from other flights onto this one at the last minute, feeling lucky to have made it, feeling chosen.
In the hours before the flight, a young blond woman with blue, almost Persian eyes said goodbye to her boyfriend in the streets of Manhattan and slipped into a cab. A fifty-six-year-old man had just paid a surprise visit to see his brother’s boat, a refurbished sloop, on the Sound, just as his two brothers and his elderly mother came in from a glorious day on the water, all that glitter and wind, and now he was headed back to Africa, to the parched veldts and skeletal victims, to the disease and hunger, back to all this worrying for the world.
Somewhere else, a man packed—his passport, his socks—then went to the refrigerator to pour himself a glass of milk. His three kids roughhoused in the other room. His wife complained that she didn’t want him to fly, didn’t want him to leave on this business trip. On the refrigerator was a postcard, once sent by friends, of a faraway fishing village—the houses and fences and clotheslines, the ocean and the lighthouse and the green light flashing. He had looked at that postcard every day since it had been taped there. A beautiful spot. Something about it. Could a place like that really exist?
All of these people, it was as if they were all turning to gold, all marked with an invisible X on their foreheads, as of course we are, too, the place and time yet to be determined. Yes, we are burning down; time is disintegrating. There were 229 people who owned cars and houses, slept in beds, had bought clothes and gifts for this trip, some with price tags still on them—and then they were gone.
Do you remember the last time you felt the wind? Or touched your lips to the head of your child? Can you remember the words she said as she last went, a ticket in hand?
Every two minutes an airliner moves up the Atlantic coast, tracing ribboned contrails, moving through kingdoms in the air demarcated by boundaries, what are called corridors and highways by the people who control the sky. In these corridors travel all the planes of the world, jetliners pushing the speed of sound at the highest altitudes, prop planes puttering at the lowest, and a phylum in between of Cessnas and commuters and corporate jets
—all of them passing over the crooked-armed peninsulas and jagged coastlines and, somewhere, too, this northern village as it appears and disappears behind skeins of fog.
The pilot—a thin-faced, handsome Swiss man with penetrating brown eyes and a thick mustache—was known among his colleagues as a consummate pilot. He’d recently completed a promotional video for his airline. In it, he—the energetic man named Urs—kisses his beautiful wife goodbye at their home before driving off, then he is standing on the tarmac, smiling, gazing up at his plane, and then in the cockpit, in full command, flipping toggles, running checks, in command, toggles, lights, check, command.
So now here they were, in their corridor, talking, Urs and his copilot, Stephan. About their kids; both had three. About the evening’s onboard dinner. It was an hour into the flight, the plane soaring on autopilot, the engine a quiet drone beneath the noise in the main cabin, the last lights of New England shimmering out the west side of the aircraft, and suddenly there was a tickling smell, rising from somewhere into the cockpit, an ominous wreathing of—really, how could it be?—smoke. Toggles, lights, check, but the smoke kept coming. The pilot ran through his emergency checklists, switching various electrical systems on and off to isolate the problem. But the smoke kept coming. He was breathing rapidly, and the copilot, who wasn’t, said, We have a problem.
Back in the cabin, the passengers were sipping wine and soda, penning postcards at thirty-three thousand feet. In first class, some donned airline slippers and supped on hors d’œuvres while gambling on the computer screens in front of them. Slots, blackjack, keno. Others reclined and felt the air move beneath them—a Saudi prince, the world-famous scientist, the UN field director, the boxer’s son, the woman with Persian eyes—an awesome feeling of power, here among the stars, plowing for Europe, halfway between the polar cap and the moon, gambling and guzzling and gourmandizing, oblivious as even now, the pilot was on the radio, using the secret language of the sky to declare an emergency: