Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  The full severity of the crash dawned on the medical examiner only the morning after, when he rode a Sea King out to the debris field. The fishermen and others in Zodiacs kept shuttling body parts to a huge command ship, the captain on the radio to these men talking in calm tones. (Many would later say it was that voice, that reassuring voice, that pulled them through the night.) The media had already begun a body count, based on the bags coming ashore, and yet there were no bodies out here whatsoever, not one intact body in those bags, which were running out fast. But for one, they couldn’t identify a single soul visually.

  Back at the military base, the medical examiner set up in Hangar B, refrigerated trucks called reefers parked outside to hold the remains. There were huge fans and scented candles to mask the smell, the whole place lit and guttering like a church. Like the strangest church. On one wall hung a huge diagram of the plane, a seating chart, and as the remains of a passenger were identified by dental records or DNA, by a distinctive tattoo or a wedding ring, a blue dot was placed on the passenger’s seat. The medical examiner would eventually be in charge of four hundred people here—a cadre of pathologists and DNA experts, morticians, media liaisons, and staff. But when he came back to the hangar after having been at sea that first time, he thought, What if I go now, bugger off right now? But where? Back to his dogs? No, what he realized as the parts began to fill the hangar and the reefers, as the stench became overpowering, was that he was too afraid to leave. With each passing day inside the hangar, there was nowhere to vanish but inside these people, these bodies.

  One day he was waiting to go on the stand in dead-end New Glasgow, killing time, and the next this complete Armageddon. There were three hundred family members gathered now at a hotel, and the medical examiner was asked to address them. Others spoke first—officials, the president of the airline, offering their deepest sorrow to these people—and then he stood up nervously, cleared his throat, perhaps recalling that day years before when he’d made a body out of rolled-up towels for the media, how simple and, well, hilarious that had been. At least to him. But how do you tell grieving family members the average body is now in one hundred pieces, one hundred little stars? (A fisherman saw a human heart on the surface of the water.) You will never see your loved ones again, he said. Those were the first words out of his mouth, and the crowd let out a massive exhalation, as if hit in the stomach. One man began sobbing uncontrollably and was led from the room. Not only are they dead, you will never see them again.

  He’d said it. However painful, he knew this much: If you look away, if you self-justify or obfuscate, then you’re stuck with the lie. You may make it through the moment, but in a day, a week, a year, it will bring you down, like cheetahs on a gazelle. Yes, he told them. If anything, they could see their own fear in his eyes, feel their quaver in his voice, their tears welling in his eyes. No stiff upper lip here. Fuck the macho and whatever it was that made you a man. (There was a heart on the surface of the water.) He vowed he would not betray these people, there’d be no fake body under a sheet. He’d try to talk to each of them, answer their concerns and desires, treat each body as if he himself were the next of kin: the father, the son, the lover, the brother.

  Inside the hangar, days and nights of horrific work, checking dental records, X-rays, fingerprints. And on several occasions the medical examiner took fingers from which they could not get accurate prints, decomposed fingers, made an incision, and stuck his own finger inside, went inside these bodies, became them, so that he could lay an accurate mark of them on paper, return them to their rightful place. He knew each passenger by name and blood type. He found himself intensely identifying with one in particular, a newspaper executive named John Mortimer—couldn’t shake him and his wife from his mind. He put himself in that seat next to John Mortimer’s wife, tried to imagine the dreadful plummet, the smash of atoms. He tried to do the math: A loving couple falls through the sky at four hundred miles per hour, with maybe six minutes until impact. What did they say? What could be done?

  Day after day, more blue dots came to fill the seats of the imaginary plane. He was not a believer in God, but a priest had come to the hangar, and the medical examiner said, Do you feel it? And the priest said, The souls are hovering. And the medical examiner looked up and said, Yes. Yes they are.

  Then that November day came when they were done. There would be more dredging, hundreds of pounds of remains to come, jagged bones in piles (the plane hitting so hard some were embedded with quarters and nickels), clean as a whistle from the currents of the sea, but they were basically done. There were only a few technicians left in the hangar and they were going to shut it down, and the medical examiner came in early, when no one was there.

  He knew it was perverse, but he didn’t want it to end. He was convinced that his entire life, one full of mistakes and masterstrokes, had been leading to this moment. He was exhausted, flirting with a breakdown. He knew that, could feel it, but he knew, too, that if he’d run, the cheetahs would have caught him, somewhere out there on the veldt they would have dragged him down. It was fall, the leaves off the trees. A season had passed. How many seasons had passed? Nothing made sense. He was going back to his life (his dogs, the daughter who thought he was grandstanding now, saw his public empathy as something he’d never once offered her), his best self traded back for his flawed self, and he stood for a long while in silence, time disintegrating. When he turned to walk away—even later when he retired and packed up and moved back west—most of him stayed right here.

  The passengers were blue dots now, and yet they were still alive. After that first night, even as time passed and the story fell from the news, the television reporter had been driven deeper into it; he learned the names, who connected to whom. He tracked the possible causes of the crash: a spark thrown from the wiring of the elaborate entertainment system, the flammability of the Mylar insulation. He was haunted by the prospect that if the pilot had landed immediately, hadn’t gone by the book, dallying with checklists, just put the jet down, everyone might be alive.

  But then he met the pilot’s wife. He went to Zurich, flew in the cockpit of the same kind of jet that had crashed, with one of the dead pilot’s best friends, an awesome feeling of power up in that kingdom of sky, plowing for Europe. He met the pilot’s wife at her expensive home in a ritzy neighborhood with a lap pool and lots of sunlight inside. The woman was startlingly attractive, especially when she smiled, which wasn’t often these days. In her former life, when she wanted to go to Manhattan or Hong Kong or Tokyo, she didn’t go first class, she went in the cockpit. And when her husband spoke, a dozen people jumped. They’d met when she was a flight attendant, and now here she was describing how she and her three children were trying to carry on without their father, her husband, Urs.

  She told a story about going to the crash site, on board a boat that took the families there, about how hard it had been for everyone, how the kids were down, very down, and coming back, over the side, in the water, there were suddenly dolphins running in the ocean, an amazing vision, like electrical currents, these dolphins up from the deep and slipping alongside them. Not too long after, she decided that she was going back to work as a flight attendant, for the same airline. Her first flight was the New York–Geneva route, on the same type of aircraft as the one her husband had ridden into the sea.

  There were others, too, people so moved by the graciousness of those in this northern place that they returned or even bought property to be closer. One man sailed his sloop here, in honor of the brother who’d taught him to sail in the first place, the brother trying to save the world. The boxer, now an old man of seventy-eight but once a world champion, came despite himself and said he felt lighter when he left, after looking out from the lighthouse at the spot where his son’s life ended. It somehow made him feel lighter. Others came and saw the hangar where the remains had been, the hangar where the million pieces of plane were still boxed and numbered, seats over here, armrests over there. The three
jet engines were there, too, big, hulking things with mangled rotors.

  How did these people do it? How did they go on? How could they? One woman whom the reporter had interviewed in New York had a box of stuff that had once been her daughter’s: a French-English dictionary, a cup, a pair of binoculars, some glasses, a locket that she, the mother, had given her. She spent hours touching these things. And then another woman, who lost her husband, heard that they had found parts of his hand, had tested its DNA, and she asked that the remains be sent directly to her, though usually the remains were sent to funeral homes or hospitals. The reporter knew a counselor who spent four hours on the phone with the wife who had her husband’s hand, and she finally sent the police because the woman was trying to put it back together. I can get the thumb, she said, but I can’t get the next part.

  The reporter didn’t have the luxury of a breakdown, what with three kids. He still had the nightmares—shoes and body parts. He saw a therapist a few times, and she told the reporter to put the dream in a box, take the image of that black, bottomless sea and the debris field with its body parts and shoes, the smell of fuel drenching everything, and place it all in a box, take the box and put it high on a shelf. He did that, and he got past it. Yes, in an imaginary closet somewhere in his head, in an imaginary box, was everything that had actually, really, horrifically happened, and now sometimes, on a very good day, after some beers, maybe watching the news or roughhousing with the kids, he could imagine for a moment that it hadn’t.

  One day, the man from Geneva boarded a plane and came back to the village, left his wife behind, riffled through his closet of finely tailored suits and ridiculous leather dress shoes and packed some jerseys and books and left, for good, the only remnant of his former life that wristwatch with the stunning blue face, the same color as the sea here on certain windswept days, the color of his daughter’s eyes.

  The man left his wife, yes, but to save her from him. It sounded odd, but it was true. They’d made a promise and he’d broken it. He kept following his daughter into the ocean.

  On his last visit to the village in this northern place, he’d seen a roadside restaurant and convenience store for sale nearby, and now, knowing nothing about restaurants or convenience stores, he bought it. It was a barnlike building with living quarters on the second floor, in some disrepair, but if grief was schizophrenic, then maybe here he could find a balancing point for his life before he lost his daughter and his life after. He had never conceived of the possibility that anything he did could be undone, let alone that he himself would become undone. But he’d become undone.

  So he set to work, seven days a week, up at five thirty, readying the coffee, cleaning the grill, playing opera on the stereo, checking the weather in the cove that let onto the ocean, a stunning place, and his daughter in this place. He’d open the doors at seven, and at seven thirty a man named Leroy came to clean. They said he’d been half a man, a backward boy, before he’d been given this job, mopping floors and cleaning toilets at the restaurant. Now he was coming into his own. When the man asked him to do something, he smiled and saluted and said, Okay, copy ya!

  The man redid the walls, opened up the dining space, began to build a large deck. He’d once traveled to the Middle East to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of watches at a time, and now he cooked Surf ’n’ Turf burgers ($5.52) and Bacon & Egg Double Deckers ($2.99) just to hear someone, anyone, say, I think I’ve been sufficiently sufficed. Thank you kindly. He joked and laughed with the fishermen and the construction crews and the older men, too, who came just to sit and drink coffee. He stood in the middle of his restaurant in a rugby jersey, wearing a white apron, near a photograph of his daughter, and told a story about her.

  She was sent to convent school when she was six years old, her hair cut incredibly short, not like it was at the end, long and streaked blond. There was an open school day, a parents’ day, and they organized games for the kids. In one of the games you could fish for goldfish with a net, and his daughter came to him and said, Oh, can you imagine! All my life, my whole life, I’ve wanted a goldfish! I can’t remember when I haven’t wanted a goldfish! And the man looked at his daughter, who was beaming at him, her eyes lit all the blues of the world, and he laughed, her whole life and she was just six years old, sweet and precocious and it really was too funny. Well, a quarter of her life was over by then, doesn’t seem—but it was, it was funny.

  No, he hadn’t left his wife. He talked to her every day, his best friend. But Geneva was her home and this was his now, this village. His beard had gone more gray over the winter here. Who could ever imagine where life might carry you, humbled and hopeful, lost and found and lost again as a storm blew in from sea? There would be a day when he and his wife would be together again. They would reach an understanding, and they would perhaps travel down to Morocco, to Marrakech, a place they’d loved for its colors and light, for its people, together again, released, absolved, together.

  It would be a strange, wonderful resolution, thought the man, imagining it. They would make themselves clean. But now there were hungry men at a table, and so this man with the spectacular wristwatch tied on his apron, went to the grill. This man, though he was hungry, too, he fed the others first.

  It was summer; it was winter. The village disappeared behind skeins of fog. Fishermen came and went in their boats, boats that had been at the crash site all those seasons ago, under that dark ceiling of night clouds, in those swells of black, bottomless water. One of the men fished a baby from the sea, kneeling on deck, lit by the parachute tracers, holding fast to what was left of the child, time disintegrating. Those who braved the night said that something happened out there, something horrible, and then—and this is the odd part—something beautiful. In the strange, eerie silence, everything drenched in fuel, you could feel it, almost taste it, something rising up from this spot, up through the ocean, through the men who stood out there in boats, among the shoes, something rose through them, like electricity.

  At the edge of the rocks stood the lighthouse, green light flashing, flashing. Sometimes, in the 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. And there were other questions that lingered, too, when they dared to consider them. Even at noon on the brightest days of the year, especially on the brightest days of the year, when the wind whipped the laundry on the line, the questions lingered. Yes, what had happened here? And why did the clothes on the line look as if they were filled by bodies, though there were no bodies in sight anymore?

  HE MIGHT JUST BE A PROPHET

  1. [ON THE NATURE OF HAPPINESS]

  ONE NIGHT LAST SUMMER I went to dinner at El Bulli, a Michelin three-star restaurant famous for serving some of the world’s most curious food. It’s a long distance from where I live, so I had to fly to Paris, then south to Barcelona. From there, I drove another three hours north to a busy beach town near the French border called Roses, then turned onto a neglected, potholed road that led up a mountain—houses falling away, the stunted Johannesburg trees bent like old, shadowy men. On the other side was a forgotten inlet with a few boats bobbing at anchor, lights starring the water—reds and greens and whites blurring on the surface of the Mediterranean.

  If getting to El Bulli for dinner required crossing six time zones and a certain pilgrim’s leap of faith, actually getting in was even harder, as the restaurant rarely has an available table. I followed some stone steps from a dead man’s curve in the road down to the restaurant, a low-slung, whitewashed villa, where I was met by the smell of consommé and chocolate, rosemary and bacon, licorice and seawater. I passed the great lit window through which El Bulli’s kitchen appears as a gleaming space-age chamber. On the other side, forty white-coated chefs moved in a silent, surreal symphony, chopping and sautéing and mumbling to themselves, a ghostly machine. Black-coated waiters poured in and out with trays of strange, brightly colored concoc
tions: glowing lollipops and wobbly gelatin cubes and a plate simply dusted with colored spices.

  Amid the hurly-burly was a short, commanding man with dark, springy hair who wore old black shoes and a beaten red wristwatch. I watched him prowl the length of one silver counter, then turn on a heel and dive in among his pastry chefs, who were streaking what looked to be green paint over transparencies. He corrected the brushwork, then nosed his way to a bank of burners, took up a strainer, and inspected a yellow orb of yolk that he removed from boiling water. He slipped it into his mouth, nodded his approval, then spun to a station at the head of the kitchen to point out some deficiency in what appeared to be a dollop of bright red foam.

  The year was 2000, and the man’s name was Ferran Adrià. I instantly recognized him from photographs I’d seen in cooking magazines, but he was still more rumor than legend. It was said that he was opening a new culinary path, finding a new sea route, searching for India. And he was brash. He’d brazenly declared that it was over for the French chefs (in cuisine, that’s a little like announcing that it’s over for Jesus Christ) and that he and his food were the future. From him, it wasn’t so much a boast as a truth he held to be self-evident.

  It was also said that despite having money, he possessed no home, no car, no television, no mailbox, no stove of his own. During the six months that his restaurant was open, he supposedly slept nearby in a tiny, furnitureless room. The rest of the year, he lived out of hotels or at his parents’ small house in the Barcelona barrio of his childhood, in the very room in which he grew up. And like a child, he could be whimsical. Once, he flew to Brazil in response to an invitation from a very rich man who’d faxed a page with only three words: I am hungry.