by Joan Didion
I myself learned to be specific during this period.
I myself learned to be careful.
I myself learned the art of the conditional.
I recall asking Treat Morrison, during the course of my preliminary interviews with him at his office in Washington, if in fact, to his knowledge, anyone in the United States government could have knowledge that one or more such flights could be supplying arms to the so-called contra forces for the purpose of overthrowing the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
There had been a silence.
Treat Morrison had picked up a pen and put it down.
I flattered myself that I was on the edge of something revelatory.
“To the extent that the area in question touches on the lake,” Treat Morrison said, “and to the extent that the lake has been historically construed as our lake, it goes without saying that we could have an interest. However.”
Again he fell silent.
I waited.
We had gotten as far as claiming the Caribbean as our lake, our sea, mare nostrum.
“However,” Treat Morrison repeated.
I debated with myself whether I would accept an off-the-record or not-for-attribution stipulation.
“We don’t track that kind of activity,” Treat Morrison said then.
One of those flights that no one was tracking lifted off from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport at one-thirty on the morning of June 26 1984. The aircraft was a Lockheed L-100. The official documents filed by the pilot showed a crew of five, two passengers, a cargo of assorted auto parts, and the destination San José, Costa Rica.
The U.S. Customs official who certified the manifest did not elect to physically inspect the cargo.
The plane did not land in San José, Costa Rica.
The plane had no reason to land in San José, Costa Rica, because an alternative infrastructure was already in place: the eight-thousand-foot runways laid by the 46th Combat Engineers during the aftermath of the Big Pine II maneuvers were already in place. The radar sites were in place. The water purification and delivery systems were in place. “You got yourself a regular little piece of U.S.A. here,” the pilot of the Lockheed L-100 said to Elena McMahon as they waited on the dry grass off the runway while the cargo was unloaded.
“Actually I’ll be going right back.” She felt a sudden need to distance herself from whatever was going on here. “I mean I left my car at the airport.”
“Long-term parking I hope,” the pilot said.
What was also in place was the deal.
We don’t track that kind of activity.
No comment. Thank you. Goodbye.
Two
1
The persona of “the writer” does not attract me. As a way of being it has its flat sides. Nor am I comfortable around the literary life: its traditional dramatic line (the romance of solitude, of interior struggle, of the lone seeker after truth) came to seem early on a trying conceit. I lost patience somewhat later with the conventions of the craft, with exposition, with transitions, with the development and revelation of “character.” To this point I recall my daughter’s resistance when asked, in the eighth grade at the Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles, to write an “autobiographical” essay (your life, age thirteen, thesis, illustration, summary, just try it, no more than two double-spaced pages neatly typed please) on whatever event or individual or experience had “most changed” her life. I mentioned a few of the applicable perennials (trip to Europe, volunteer job in hospital, teacher she didn’t like because he made her work too hard and then it turned out to be worth it), she, less facile, less careful, more sentient, mentioned the death of her best friend in fourth grade.
Yes, I said, ashamed. Better. You have it.
“Not really,” she said.
Why not, I said.
“Because it didn’t actually change my life. I mean I cried, I was sad, I wrote a lot about it in my diary, yes, but what changed?”
I recall explaining that “change” was merely the convention at hand: I said that while it was true that the telling of a life tended to falsify it, gave it a form it did not intrinsically possess, this was just a fact of writing things down, something we all accepted.
I realized as I was saying this that I no longer did.
I realized that I was increasingly interested only in the technical, in how to lay down the AM-2 aluminum matting for the runway, in whether or not parallel taxiways and high-speed turnoffs must be provided, in whether an eight-thousand-foot runway requires sixty thousand square yards of operational apron or only forty thousand. If the AM-2 is laid directly over laterite instead of over plastic membrane seal, how long would we have before base failure results? (How long would we need before base failure results was another question altogether, one I left to the Treat Morrisons of this world.) How large a base camp will a fifteen-hundred-kilowatt generator service? In the absence of high-capacity deep wells, can water be effectively treated with tactical erdlators? I give you Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 1844–1900: “When man does not have firm, calm lines on the horizon of his life—mountain and forest lines, as it were—then man’s most inner will becomes agitated, preoccupied and wistful.”
Tactical erdlators have been my mountain and forest lines.
This business of Elena McMahon, then, is hard for me.
This business of what “changed” her, what “motivated” her, what made her do it.
I see her standing in the dry grass off the runway, her arms bare, her sunglasses pushed up into her loose hair, her black silk shift wrinkled from the flight, and wonder what made her think a black silk shift bought off a sale rack at Bergdorf Goodman during the New York primary was the appropriate thing to wear on an unscheduled cargo flight at one-thirty in the morning out of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, destination San José Costa Rica but not quite.
Her sunglasses are pushed up but her eyes are shut tight.
A dog (underfed, mangy, of no remarkable size) is bursting from the open door of a concrete structure off the apron and racing toward her.
The man beside her, his head shaved, cutoff jeans slung below his navel, is singing the theme from Bonanza as he crouches and beckons to the dog.
We got a right to pick a little fight—
Bo-nan-za—
If anyone fights with any one of us—
He’s got a fight with me—
Her eyes remain shut.
On second thought I am not sure what would be, in this context, “appropriate.”
Possibly the baseball cap lent her by one of the refueling crew. The cap was lettered NBC SPORTS, its familiar peacock logo smeared with diesel fuel.
“Actually I think somebody was supposed to meet me,” she said to the pilot when the man with the shaved head had disappeared and the last pallet been unloaded and the refueling completed. Over the past dozen hours she had come to see the pilot as her partner, her backup, her protection, her single link to the day before.
“Looks like somebody didn’t give you the full skinny,” the pilot said.
Smell of jasmine, pool of blue jacaranda.
Coincidentally, although not really, since it was in the role of mother that I first knew Elena, Catherine Janklow was also in that eighth-grade class at the Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles. Elena’s performance as a Westlake Mom (so we were called in school bulletins) was so attentive to detail as to be impenetrable. She organized benefits for the scholarship fund, opened her house for picnics and ditch days and sleepovers, got up every Friday at four hours before dawn to deliver the Astronomy Club to remote star-watching locations in Lancaster or Latigo Canyon or the Santa Susana Mountains, and was duly repaid by the attendance of three eighth graders at her Westlake Career Day workshop on “Getting Started as a Reporter.”
“You’re at an age right now when it’s impossible even to imagine how much your life is going to change,” Elena told the three eighth graders who turned up for h
er Career Day workshop.
Two of the eighth graders maintained expressions of polite disbelief.
The third jabbed a finger into the air, then crossed her arms truculently across her chest.
Elena looked at the child. Her name was Melissa Simon. She was Mort Simon’s daughter. Mort Simon was someone Wynn knew who had improved the year by taking a motion picture studio private and spinning off its real assets into various of his personal companies.
“Melissa.”
“Excuse me,” Melissa Simon said. “But I don’t quite see why my life is supposed to change.”
There had been a silence.
“That’s an interesting point,” Elena had said then.
Catherine had not attended her mother’s workshop on Getting Started as a Reporter. Catherine had signed up for a workshop conducted by a Westlake Mom who happened to be a business affairs lawyer at Paramount (“Motion Picture Development—Where Do You Fit In?”), then skipped it to finish her own eighth-grade autobiographical essay on the event or individual or experience that had “most changed” her life. “What is definitely most changing my life this semester is my mother getting cancer,” Catherine’s autobiographical essay began, and continued for two neatly typed double-spaced pages. Catherine’s mother, according to Catherine, was that semester “too tired to do anything normal” because every morning after dropping the car pool at school she had been going to UCLA for what Catherine knowledgeably described as “radiation zapping following the exsishun [sic] of a stage 1 good prognose [sic] breast lesion.” That this was not a fact generally known does not, to me, suggest “motivation.”
Treat Morrison knew it, because he recognized the scar.
Diane had had the same scar.
Look, he said when Elena fell silent. What difference does it make. You get it one way or you get it another, nobody comes through free.
She sat on the dry grass in her black silk shift and the cap lettered NBC SPORTS and watched the L-100 taxi out for takeoff and tried to think what to do next. The cargo had been loaded onto flatbed trucks. Whoever was supposed to make the payment had not appeared. She had thought at first that the man with the shaved head and the cutoff jeans was her contact but he was not. He was, he said, on his way home to Tulsa from Angola. He was, he said, just lending a little expertise while he was in this particular area.
She had not asked him how this particular area could reasonably be construed as on the way to Tulsa from Angola.
She had not asked him what expertise he was lending.
During the ten minutes she had spent trying to talk the pilot into waiting for her contact the flatbed trucks had been driven away.
She was going to need to rethink this step by step.
She was going to need to reconnoiter, reassess.
The L-100 and the zone of safety it represented were about to vanish into the cloud cover.
Fly it down, fly it back, the pilot had said. That’s my contract. I get paid to drive the bus. I get paid to drive the bus when the engines are overheating. I get paid to drive the bus when the loran goes down. I don’t get paid to take care of the passengers.
Her partner, her backup, her protection.
Her single link to the day before.
He had flown it down and now he was flying it back.
Per his contract.
She did not think it possible that her father would find himself in exactly this situation, yet she had done exactly what he said he had to do. She had done exactly what her father said he had to do and she had done exactly what Barry Sedlow said to do.
Just do it my way for a change.
This would very soon be all right.
She would very soon know what to do.
She felt alert, a little light-headed. She did not yet know where she was, and the clearing in which the strip had been laid down had suddenly cleared of people, but she was ready, open to information.
This should be Costa Rica.
If this was Costa Rica the first thing she needed to do was get to San José.
She did not know what she would do if she did get to San José but there would be a hotel, offices of American banks, an airport with scheduled carriers.
Through the open door of the concrete structure off the apron she could see, intermittently, someone moving, someone walking around, a man, a man with a ponytail, a man with a ponytail wearing fatigues. She kept her eyes on this door and tried to recall lessons learned in other venues, other vocations. One thing she had learned during her four-year sojourn at the Herald Examiner was how easy it was to get into places where no one was supposed to be. The trick was to attach oneself to service personnel, people who had no particular investment in who got in and who stayed out. She had on one occasion followed a telephone crew into a locked hangar in which an experimental stealth bomber was being readied for its first rollout. She had on more than one occasion gotten inside a house where someone did not want to talk to her by striking up conversation with the pool man, the gardener, the dog groomer who had run a cord inside the kitchen door to plug in a dryer.
In fact she had mentioned this during the course of her Westlake Career Day workshop.
Melissa Simon had again raised her hand. She had a point she wanted to make. The point she wanted to make was that “nobody from the media could have ever gotten into those houses if the families had normal security and their public relations people were doing their job.”
Which had prompted Elena to raise the Westlake Career Day stakes exponentially by suggesting, in words that either did or did not include the phrase “try living in the real world for a change,” that very few families in the world outside three or four well-defined neighborhoods on the West Side of Los Angeles County had either public relations people or what one very fortunate eighth grader might call “normal security.”
Which had caused Wynn Janklow, after this was reported to him the next day by three different people (Mort Simon’s partner, Mort Simon’s lawyer, and the young woman who was described as Mort Simon’s “issues person”), to leave half his lunch at Hillcrest uneaten in order to call Elena.
“I hear you’ve been telling our friends’ kids their parents live in a dream world.”
In the first place, she said, this was not an exact quotation.
He said something else but the connection was bad.
In the second place, she said, Mort Simon was not her friend. She didn’t even know Mort Simon.
Wynn was calling from his Mercedes, driving east on Pico, and had turned up Robertson before his voice faded back in.
“You want everybody in town saying you talk like a shiksa,” he had said, “you’re getting the job done.”
“I am a shiksa,” she had said.
“That’s your problem, not mine,” he had said.
In fact she did know Mort Simon.
Of course she knew Mort Simon.
The house in Beverly Hills where she sat on the sidewalk waiting for the pool report on the celebrity fund-raiser was as it happened Mort Simon’s house. She had even seen him briefly, lifting a transparent flap of the Regal Rents tent to survey the barricade behind which the press was waiting. He had looked directly at her but such was his generalized view of the world outside his tent that he had not recognized her and she had not spoken.
“Send out some refreshments,” she had heard him say to a waiter before he dropped the flap, although no refreshments ever materialized. “Like, you know, diet Pepsi, water, I’m not paying so they can tank up.”
The wife and daughter no longer lived in the house. The wife and daughter had moved to a town house just inside the Beverly Hills line from Century City and the daughter had transferred from Westlake to Beverly Hills High School. Catherine had told her that.
Living in the real world.
We had a real life and now we don’t.
She put that out of her mind.
Other lessons.
More recent venues.
Not long after m
oving to Washington she had interviewed an expert on nuclear security who had explained how easy it would be to score plutonium. The security for nuclear facilities, he said, was always contracted out. The contractors in turn hired locally and supplied their hires with minimum rounds of ammunition. Meaning, he had said, “you got multimillion-dollar state-of-the-art security systems being operated by downsized sheriff’s deputies with maybe enough ammo to take down a coyote.”
She remembered exactly what he said because the interview had ended up in the Sunday magazine and this had been the pull quote.
If she could think of the man with the ponytail as a downsized sheriff’s deputy, a downsized sheriff’s deputy lacking even a multimillion-dollar state-of-the-art security system, this would be all right.
All it would take was nerve.
All it would take was a show of belonging wherever it was she wanted to be.
She got up, brushed the grass off her legs and walked to the open door of the concrete structure off the apron. The man with the ponytail was seated at a wooden crate on which there was an electric fan, a bottle of beer and a worn deck of Bicycle cards. He drained the beer, lobbed the bottle into a metal drum, and, with two fingers held stiff, turned over a card.
“Shit,” the man said, then looked up.
“You’re supposed to see that I get to San José,” she said. “They were supposed to have told you that.”
The man turned over another card. “Who was supposed to tell me that.”
This was going to require more work than the average telephone crew, pool man, dog groomer.
“If I don’t get to San José they’re going to be wondering why.”
“Who is.”
She gambled. “I think you know who.”
“Give me a name.”
She had not been given names. She had asked Barry Sedlow for names and he had talked about compartmentalization, cutouts, need-to-know.
You wouldn’t give me their real names anyway, she had said. Just give me the names they use.