by Noah Hawley
People like this idea, that in a time of true mass media, they could have a unique experience. But not everyone. Some take his picture brazenly, as if it is their right. And others get upset when he refuses to pose for a photo with them. An older woman calls him an asshole outside Washington Square Park, and he nods and tells her she’s right. He is an asshole and he hopes she has a great day.
“Fuck you,” she tells him.
Once anointed a hero by your fellow man, you lose the right to privacy. You become an object, stripped of some unquantifiable humanity, as if you have won a cosmic lottery and woke one day to find yourself a minor deity. The Patron Saint of Good Luck. It stops mattering what you wanted for yourself. All that matters is the role you played in the lives of others. You are a rare butterfly held roughly at a right angle to the sun.
On the third day he stops going outside.
He is living in Layla’s third-floor guest apartment. It is a space of pure white—white walls, white floor, white ceiling, white furniture—as if he has died and moved on to some kind of heavenly limbo. Time, once mired in hard-fought routine, becomes fungible. To wake in a strange bed. To make coffee with unfamiliar beans. To lift rich bath towels from self-closing cupboards and feel their hotel texture against your skin. In the living room there is a bar filled with Scottish malts and clear Russian courage. A cherrywood, mid-century case with an elaborate folding lid. Scott stared at it for a long time that first night, the way a man in a certain mental state regards a gun cabinet. So many ways to die. Then he covered the bar with a blanket, moved a chair in front of it, never to look at it again.
Somewhere, the Kipling wife and that beautiful flight attendant are lying faceup on a steel slab. Sarah, that was her name, and the model in the short skirt was Emma Lightner. Several times a day he reviews the names like a Zen koan. David Bateman, Maggie Bateman, Rachel Bateman…
He thought he had come to terms with this thing, its full import, but there was something about the news that bodies had been found that threw him off balance. They’re dead. All of them. He knows they’re dead. He was there, in the ocean. He dove beneath the wave. There could be no survivors, but hearing the news, seeing the footage—first bodies recovered from Bateman crash—made the whole thing real, the way your legs go out from under you only after a crisis is over.
The mother is still out there, the father and sister. So are the pilots, Charlie Busch and James Melody. So is Kipling, the traitor, and the Batemans’ security man, buried somewhere deep beneath the waves, swaying in permanent black.
He should go home, he knows, back to the island, but he can’t. For some reason he finds himself unable to face the life he once lived (once, in this case, being just days ago, as if linear time means anything to a man who’s survived what he’s survived. There is before and there is after), unable to approach the little white gate on a quiet sandy road, to step over the old slip-on shoes left absently by the door, one behind the other—the toe of the back shoe still resting on the heel of the front, where he stepped out of it. He feels unable to return to the milk in the fridge gone sour, and his dog’s sad eyes. That is his home, the man on TV who wears Scott’s shirts and squints into the lens of old photographs—are my own teeth that crooked? Unable to face the gauntlet of cameras, the endless barrage of questions. Talking to people on the subway is one thing, but addressing the masses—that’s something he can’t handle. A statement becomes a pronouncement when delivered to the crowd. Random observations become part of the public record to be replayed for all eternity, Auto-Tuned and memified. Whatever the reason, he feels unable to retrace his steps, to withdraw to the place he lived “before.” And so he sits on his borrowed sofa of the now and stares out at the treetops and brownstones of Bank Street.
Where is the boy at this moment? In a farmhouse somewhere in the country? At a breakfast table surrounded by spiky green strawberry tops and calcifying oatmeal splotches? Every night before bed, Scott has the same thought. In sleep he will dream of the boy lost in an endless black ocean, dream of his Dopplered cries—nowhere and everywhere at once—as Scott splashes around, half drowning, searching but never finding. But the dream does not come. Instead there is only the deep vacuum of sleep. It occurs to him now, sipping cold coffee, that maybe these are the boy’s dreams. A projection of his anxiety, floating on the jet stream like a dog whistle only Scott can hear.
Is the bond between them real or implied, a product of guilt, an idea he has contracted like a virus? To save this child, to have him cling to you for eight exhausting hours, to carry him in your arms to the hospital—did that create new pathways in the brain? Isn’t the life saved enough? He is home now, this child the world knows as JJ, but whom Scott will always think of simply as the boy. Safe and cared for by a new family, by the aunt and her—well, let’s be honest—shifty husband. An instant millionaire hundreds of times over who will never want for anything, and him not even five. Scott saved his life, gave him a future, the chance of happiness. Isn’t that enough?
He dials information and asks for the aunt’s number in Westchester. It is nine p.m. He has sat alone in the apartment for two days straight. The operator connects him and as he listens to the phone ring he wonders what he is doing.
On the sixth ring she answers, Eleanor. He pictures her face, the rosy cheeks and sad eyes.
“Hello?”
She sounds wary, as if only bad news comes after dark.
“Hey, it’s Scott.”
But she’s already talking.
“We already made a statement. Can you please respect our privacy?”
“No, it’s Scott. The painter. From the hospital.”
Her voice softens.
“Oh, sorry. They just—they won’t leave us alone. And he’s just a boy, you know? And his mom and dad are—”
“I know. Why do you think I’m hiding out?”
A silence as she switches from the call she thought it was to the reality—a human moment with her nephew’s savior.
“I wish we could,” she says. “I mean, it’s hard enough going through this all in private, without—”
“I’m sure. Is he—”
A pause. Scott feels he can hear her thinking—how much should she trust him? How much can she say?
“JJ? He’s, you know, he’s not really talking. We took him to a psychiatrist—I mean, I did—and he said, just—give him time. So I’m not pressing.”
“That sounds—I can’t imagine what it’s like—”
“He doesn’t cry. Not that he—I mean, he’s four, so how much can he really understand? But still, I thought he’d cry.”
Scott thinks about this. What’s there to say? “He’s just processing, I guess. Something that—traumatic. I mean, for kids whatever they go through is normal, right? I mean, in their heads. They are learning what the world is, so that’s what he thinks now. That planes crash and people die and you end up in the drink. Which, maybe he’s having second thoughts about the whole thing if that’s what life on this earth is all—”
“I know,” she says. And they sit for a minute in a silence that is neither awkward nor uncomfortable. Just the sound of two people thinking.
“Doug doesn’t talk much either. Except about the money. I caught him the other day downloading spreadsheet software. But—emotionally? I think he’s freaked out by the whole thing.”
“Still?”
“Yeah, he’s—you know, he’s not good with people. He had a hard childhood too.”
“You mean, twenty-five years ago?”
He can hear her smile over the phone.
“Be nice.”
Scott likes the sound of her voice, the pace of it. There is an implication of intimacy to it, as if they have known each other a long, long time.
“Not that I’m one to talk,” he tells her. “Given my track record with women.”
“That is bait I will not take,” she says.
They talk for a while about the daily routine. She gets up with the boy w
hile Doug sleeps—he goes to bed late, it seems. JJ likes toast for breakfast and can eat a whole container of blueberries in one sitting. They do art projects until nap time and in the afternoons he likes to look for bugs in the yard. On trash days they sit on the porch and wave at the haulers.
“A normal kid, basically,” she says.
“Do you think he really understands what happened?”
A long pause, then she says:
“Do you?”
Chapter 20
On Wednesday the funerals begin. Sarah Kipling is first, her remains buried at Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens, a graveyard in the shadow of looming pre-war smokestacks, as if there is a factory next door manufacturing bodies. Police hold the news trucks to a cordoned area on the south side of the wall. It’s a cloudy day, the air stilted, tropical. Thunderstorms are forecast for the afternoon and already you can feel the unsettled electricity in the atmosphere. The line of black cars stretches all the way to the BQE, family, friends, political figures. There will be eight more before this is through—assuming all the bodies are recovered.
Overhead, helicopters circle. Scott arrives in a yellow cab. He’s wearing a black suit found in Layla’s guest closet. It’s a size too big, long in the sleeves. In a dresser drawer he found, conversely, a small white shirt, too tight in the neck, that leaves a noticeable gap under his necktie. He’s shaved badly, cutting himself in two places. The sight of his blood in the bathroom mirror and the sharp slice of pain startled him back to a kind of reality.
He can still taste salt water in the back of his throat, if he’s being honest, even in sleep.
Why is he alive and they dead?
Scott tells the driver to leave it running and steps out into the mug. For a moment he wonders if the boy will be here—he forgot to ask—but then he thinks, Who would bring a toddler to a stranger’s funeral?
The truth is, he doesn’t know why he came here. He is neither family nor friend.
Scott can feel the eyes on him as he walks up. There are two dozen guests in black ringing the grave. He sees them see him. He is like lightning that has struck twice in the same place. An anomaly. He lowers his eyes out of respect.
Standing at a respectful distance he sees half a dozen men in suits. One is Gus Franklin. He recognizes two of the others, Agent O’Brien from the FBI and the other is—Agent something or other from, what is it, the Treasury? They nod to him.
As the rabbi talks, Scott watches dark clouds move over the skyline. They are on a planet called Earth at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy. Spinning, always spinning. Everything in the universe appears to move in a circular pattern, celestial objects rotating in orbit. Forces of push and pull that dwarf the industry of man or beast. Even in planetary terms we are small—one man afloat in an entire ocean, a speck in the waves. We believe our capacity for reason makes us bigger than we are, our ability to understand the infinite vastness of celestial bodies. But the truth is, this sense of scale only shrinks us.
The wind kicks up. Scott tries not to think about the other bodies still buried with the plane—Captain Melody, Ben Kipling, Maggie Bateman and her daughter, Rachel. He pictures them there, like a lost letter in the lightless deep, swaying silently to unheard music as the crabs consume their noses and toes.
When the funeral ends, a man approaches Scott. He has a military carriage and a handsome, leathery face, as if he spent years of his life in the hot Arizona sun.
“Scott? I’m Michael Lightner. My daughter was—”
“I know,” says Scott softly. “I remember her.”
They stand among the tombstones. In the distance there is a domed mausoleum, topped by the figure of a man, one leg raised, walking staff in hand, as if to say even now the journey was not done. He is dwarfed by the city skyline, gleaming in the late-afternoon sun, so that if you unfocused your eyes you could convince yourself that all the buildings are just tombstones of a different kind, towering edifices of remembrance and regret.
“I read somewhere that you’re a painter,” Michael says. He takes a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, taps out a smoke.
“Well, I paint,” says Scott. “If that makes me a painter, I guess I’m a painter.”
“I fly airplanes,” says Michael, “which I always thought made me a pilot.”
He smokes for a moment.
“I want to thank you for what you did,” he says.
“Living?” says Scott.
“No. The boy. I ditched once in the Bering Strait on a life raft, and that was—I had supplies.”
“Do you remember Jack LaLanne?” asks Scott. “Well, I went to San Francisco when I was a kid and he was swimming across the bay pulling a boat behind him. I thought he was Superman. So I joined the swim team.”
Michael thinks about that. He is the kind of man you wish you could be, poised and confident, but salty somehow, as if he takes things seriously, but not too seriously.
“They used to broadcast every rocket launch on TV,” he says. “Neil Armstrong, John Glenn. I’d sit on the living room rug and you could almost feel the flames.”
“Did you ever make it up?”
“No. Flew fighter planes for a long time, then trained pilots. Couldn’t bring myself to go commercial.”
“Have they told you anything?” asks Scott. “About the plane?”
Michael unbuttons his jacket.
“Mechanically it seemed sound. The pilot didn’t report any issues on an earlier run across the Atlantic that morning, and maintenance did a full service the week before. Plus, I looked over Melody’s record, your pilot, and he’s spotless—though human error—can’t rule it out. We don’t have the flight recorder yet, but they let me see the air traffic control reports and there were no maydays or alarms.”
“It was foggy.”
Michael frowns.
“That’s a visual problem. Maybe you get some turbulence from temperature variation, but in a jet like that, flying by instruments, it wouldn’t have been a factor.”
Scott watches a helicopter come in from the north, gliding along the river, too far away to hear the blades.
“Tell me about her,” he says.
“Emma? She’s—was—You have kids and you think I made you, so we’re the same, but it’s not true. You just get to live with them for a while and maybe help them figure things out.”
He drops his cigarette on the wet ground, puts a foot on it.
“Can you—” he says, “anything about the flight, about her, you can tell me?”
Her last moments, he is saying.
Scott thinks about what he can say—that she served him a drink? That the game was on and the two millionaires were jawing and one of the millionaire’s wives was talking about shopping?
“She did her job,” he says. “I mean, the flight was, what, eighteen minutes long? And I got there right before the doors closed.”
“No, I understand,” says the father, bowing his head to hide his disappointment. To have one more piece of her, an image, to feel one more time that he can learn something new, it’s a way to keep her alive in his mind.
“She was kind,” Scott tells him.
They stand there for a moment, nothing left to say, then Michael nods, offers his hand. Scott shakes it, tries to think of something to say that could address the grief the other man must be feeling. But Michael, sensing Scott’s turmoil, turns and walks away, his back straight.
The agents approach Scott on his way back to the cab. O’Brien is in the lead, with Gus Franklin on his heels—one hand on the agent’s shoulder as if to say, Leave the fucking guy alone.
“Mr. Burroughs.”
Scott stops, his hand on the taxi door.
“We really don’t want to bother you today,” says Gus.
“It’s not called bothering,” says O’Brien. “It’s called our job.”
Scott shrugs, no way around it.
“Get in,” says Scott. “I don’t want to do this on camera.”
The cab is a
minivan. Scott rolls the door back, climbs inside, and sits on the back bench seat. The agents look at each other, then climb in also. Gus in front, O’Brien and Hex in the middle jump seats.
“Thank you,” says Scott. “I’ve lived this long without being captured by helicopter camera—”
“Yeah, we noticed,” says O’Brien. “You’re not a big fan of social media.”
“Any media,” says Hex.
“How’s the search going?” Scott asks Gus.
Gus turns to the driver, a Senegalese man.
“Can you give us a minute?”
“It’s my cab.”
Gus takes out his wallet, gives the man twenty dollars, then another twenty when that doesn’t work. The driver takes it, climbs out.
“Hurricane Margaret is moving north from the Caymans,” Gus tells Scott. “We’ve had to call off the search for now.”
Scott closes his eyes. Maggie, Margaret.
“Yeah,” says Gus. “It’s a bad joke, but they name these things at the beginning of the season.”
“You seem pretty upset,” says O’Brien.
Scott squints at the agent.
“A woman died in a plane crash and now there’s a hurricane named after her,” he says. “I’m not sure how I’m supposed to seem.”
“What was your relationship with Mrs. Bateman?” asks Hex.
“You guys have a way of saying words that’s very judgmental.”
“Do we?” says O’Brien. “It probably comes from a deep-seated philosophical belief that everybody lies.”
“I might give up on conversation entirely, if I thought that,” says Scott.
“Oh no. Makes it fun,” says O’Brien.
“People are dead,” Gus snaps. “This isn’t a game.”
“With respect,” says O’Brien, “you focus on what made the plane go down. We’ll zero in on the human factor.”
“Unless,” says Hex, “the two things are actually the same.”
Scott sits back and closes his eyes. They appear to be having this conversation without him now and he feels weary. The ache in his shoulder has subsided, but there is a headache creeping up the rim of his brain, a deep-tissue echo of the swelling barometric pressure outside.