Before the Fall

by Noah Hawley

  At first it looks like a blank canvas. A long white rectangle covered in gesso. But stepping closer you can see there’s a topography to the white, shadows and valleys. White paint has been built up in layers, and there are hints of colors underneath, the blush of something hidden. And you think, maybe the canvas isn’t blank after all. Maybe the image has been covered, erased by white. The truth is, the naked eye alone will never be able to uncover the story. But if you take your hand and run it over the valleys and ridges of gesso, if you close your eyes and allow the topographic truth to seep through, then maybe the contours of a scene begin to leak through.

  Flames. The outline of a building.

  Your imagination does the rest.

  Chapter 28

  Public / Private

  A car horn wakes him, long and insistent. Layla is gone. The horn comes again. Scott gets to his feet, walks naked to the window. There is a news crew outside, satellite van parked on the curb, dish deployed.

  They have found him.

  He steps back from the curtain, finds the remote, turns on the television. The image of a house appears, a white three-story with blue windows and black stars on a tree-lined street in New York City. It is the house he’s standing in. A news scroll slides along under the house, displaying words and numbers—the NASDAQ down 13 points, Dow Jones up 116. On the left-hand side of the screen, Bill Cunningham occupies his own box, leaning into the lens.

  “—he’s shacking up, apparently, with the famous radical heiress, whose father gave over four hundred million dollars to lefty causes last year. You remember, dear viewers, the man who tried to buy the 2012 election. Well, this is his little girl. Although—not so little anymore—look at these pictures of her from a film festival in France earlier this year.”

  Onscreen, the house slides to a smaller box, replaced in the main window by still images of Layla in a series of revealing ball gowns, clipped from style sheets and scandal rags. There is a bikini shot long-lensed from an actor’s yacht.

  Scott wonders if Layla is in the house, watching this.

  As if hearing his thoughts, the apartment door opens. Layla comes in. She is dressed for a day of meetings, it appears.

  “I didn’t tell anyone,” she says. “I swear.”

  Scott shrugs. He never assumed she did. In his mind they are both an endangered species, discovered mid-molt by a curious child with poor impulse control.

  Onscreen, he watches fifteen curtained windows, a narrow front door painted blue, two garage doors, also blue. The only thing shading his safe house from view is a narrow sapling, just a stick really with a halfhearted spray of green leaves. Scott studies the house he’s in on TV, concerned but also strangely fascinated, like a man watching himself being eaten alive. It seems he cannot avoid becoming a public figure now. That he must participate in this commercial dance.

  How strange, he thinks.

  Layla stands beside him. She is thinking about saying more, but doesn’t. After a moment she turns and wanders out of the apartment again. Scott hears the apartment door close, then the sound of her heels on the staircase. He stands staring at the house on television.

  Bill Cunningham, looking energized, says:

  “—movement in an upstairs window just moments ago. Sources tell us that Ms. Mueller lives in the house alone, which—how many bedrooms are there, dear viewers? Looks like at least six to me. And I can’t help but make some connections here—the head of a conservative news network dies in mysterious circumstances, and then the lone survivor of the plane crash shacks up with the daughter of a left-wing activist. Well, some people might call it a coincidence, but I do not.”

  Onscreen one of the garage doors starts to open. Scott leans forward, watching more than just television now. He half expects to see himself pull out, but instead a black Mercedes emerges, Layla behind the wheel wearing oversize sunglasses. The news cameras move in, looking to block her way, but she pulls out quickly—more than willing to run them over—and makes a left turn, roaring off up Bank Street toward Greenwich before they can pen her in.

  In her wake, the garage door closes.

  “—the homeowner, definitely,” says Cunningham. “But I’m wondering, potentially, was this Burroughs fellow crouched down in the rear seat well, like some jailbreaker from a Peckinpah film.”

  Scott turns off the TV. He is alone in the house now, standing naked in a white room, sun casting shadows on the floor. If he rations what he has, eats one meal a day, he can stay in this apartment for six days. Instead, he takes a shower, dresses for the day. Magnus, he thinks. If anyone talked, it was him. But when he calls Magnus, the Irishman claims ignorance.

  “Slow up,” says Magnus. “What house is on television?”

  “I need you to rent me a car,” Scott tells him after talking in circles around it. Magnus is uptown in what used to be Spanish Harlem, half in the bag, though it’s only ten in the morning.

  “You put in a good word, yeah?” says Magnus. “With Layla? Whispered a little something in that beautiful ear. Magnus is the best painter. Something along those—”

  “Last night. I went on at length about your use of color and light.”

  “Right on, boyo. Right fecking on.”

  “She was hoping to come by this weekend, maybe see the new work.”

  “I’ve gone full chubby,” says Magnus, “just in the last few seconds. The head is purple and engorged, like a snakebite.”

  Scott crosses to the window. The curtains are sheer, but not see-through. Scott tries to look down, aware that people are out there looking back at him. He catches a glimpse of a second news van pulling into the curb.

  “Doesn’t have to be a big car,” he says. “I just need it for a couple of days to drive up to Croton.”

  “Want me to come?” says Magnus.

  “No. I need you here,” Scott replies. “Holding down the fort. Layla likes to stay up all night, if you get my meaning.”

  “Consider it held, my friend. I’ve got enough Viagra to last until Halloween.”

  After they hang up, Scott grabs his jacket, walks into the living room, then stops short. In all the chaos he has forgotten the hours he spent last night eradicating the white. He stands now in a cube of charcoal and lipstick, beet stains dried in ruby streaks. The Martha’s Vineyard farmers market surrounds him—a study for a painting in three dimensions—so that the room’s furniture appears to be set in the middle of the open square. There is the fishmonger on the far wall, open coolers of ice below a long white card table; rows of vegetables, triple trays of berries. And faces, reconstructed from memory, sketched quickly with crumbling coal.

  And there, seated on a white canvas chair, is Maggie, her head and shoulders sketched on the wall, her body outlined on the fabric of the chair. She is smiling, eyes shadowed by a big summer hat. Her two children flank her on either side of the chair, the girl, standing to her shoulder, on the right. The boy, half obscured behind a side table, on the left—just his tiny arm visible, attached to a slice of shoulder, a striped shirt, stripes the color of beets, stopping in the middle of his biceps, the rest of him hidden by wood.

  Scott stands frozen in the middle of this scene, out of time, surrounded by ghosts. Then he goes downstairs to face the crowd.

  Chapter 29

  Jack

  I never liked to exercise,” said Jack LaLanne. “But I like results.”

  This was clear from his triceps definition alone, not to mention the Clydesdale heft of his beer-barrel thighs. A man of average height, bursting at the seams of his short-sleeved jumpsuit. In his house he kept an exercise museum, packed with obscure tech, most of it self-made. Jack invented the leg extension machine in 1936, you see. His approach was to work a muscle until it failed, believing, as he did, in the power of transformation through deep-tissue annihilation.

  In the beginning, he wore a T-shirt and your standard pair of pants to train. He liked the feeling he got from stressing the weave. Then he had the idea to display himself
in fitted jumpsuits—a uniform of self-improvement—so he went to the Oakland Pants Factory. He gave them sketches, an array of color choices. Blues and grays mostly. An African American woman took his measurements with a cloth tape, rolling around him on a squeaky metal chair. In those days wool was the only fabric that would stretch, and so they made the jumpsuits out of that, milled as thin as the material would allow. Jack liked them shiny, he told her, peacocking, and sleeveless to show his rolling arms, and tapered at the waist.

  Jack wore them so tight you could see what he ate for breakfast.

  A local health store paid Jack to create a local access show for KGO-TV. He taught people about the power of diet, designing workouts for every muscle, from toe to tongue. Six years later, the show went national. People ate breakfast to images of Jack bouncing on his tiptoes. They ran in front of their television, aping what they saw, bending at the waist and rotating their arms in bird-like windmills. As things picked up steam, certain words and phrases entered the American lexicon. Jumping jack, squat thrust, leg lift.

  His jumpsuits had a tone-on-tone belt that cinched at the waist.

  In his prime, Jack was a square-jawed hourglass of a man, his ink-black shag cut into a classic Italian wave on his head. Frankie Valli, for example. To most people in the early years he existed only in black and white, an ethnic fireplug pointing at anatomy charts, explaining what went on inside the human body. See, he seemed to say, we’re not just animals. We’re architecture. Bones and sinew and ligament as a foundation for a rolling musculature. Jack showed us that everything about the human anatomy was connected and could be used in glorious tandem.

  To smile was to use an entire system of muscles, powered by joy.

  One day he showed Americans how to get their faces “ath-u-letic looking,” opening and closing his mouth comically wide, to the take-me-out-to-the-ball-game lilt of a sports organ.

  Then, in the 1970s, Jack went full color, bounding onto a wood-paneled set in shiny blues and purples. He became a kind of talk-show host, interviewing bodybuilders about diet and lifestyle. It was the era of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Vietnam had been lost, American men had walked on the moon, and Nixon seemed poised to resign in disgrace. You tuned in because you liked his boundless energy. You tuned in because you were tired of looking down and seeing your own stomach. You tuned in to get your heart rate moving and turn your life around.

  “Now, direct from Hollywood,” boomed the announcer, “here’s your personal health and fitness instructor, Jack LaLanne.”

  For thirty minutes what you got was can do gumption. You got a corporate-sponsored attitude adjustment. You got mountains to climb, inspiration. You got skills.

  “Isn’t it better to be happy with a problem,” he said, “than to be miserable with it?”

  Don’t wallow, Jack told a nation stumbling under recession. When life gets hard, you need to get harder.

  This was during Jack’s inspirational phase, when he realized that what people needed was not just a muscular regimen, but a better way of looking at the world. The network would throw back from commercials and there he’d be, the jumping jack man, sitting backward on a metal chair, laying down the science.

  “You know,” he’d say, “there are so many slaves in this country. Are you a slave? You’re probably saying, Jack, how can you be a slave in this wonderful free country of America? I don’t mean a slave in the idea that you’re thinking of it. I’m talking about you’re a slave when you can’t do the things you want when you want to do them. Because you are a slave, just like the slaves of old who were captured and put in chains. They were shackled, you know, and not allowed to go anyplace.”

  Jack looked directly into the lens.

  “You’re a slave just about as much as that.”

  And at this point he leaned forward and pointed right at the camera, enunciating each syllable.

  “You’re a slave to your own body.”

  The mind, said Jack, remains active until the day you die, but it is a slave to the body—bodies that have become so lazy all they want to do is sit. The dawn of the couch potato. And you’ve allowed it to be that way.

  “Instead of you ruling your body,” he said, “your body is ruling you.”

  It was the dawn of the television age, and already the lethargy had set in, that flicker-glow hypnotism. The idiot box. And here was Jack speaking truth to power, trying to break you from the smothering shackles of the modern world.

  This is not complicated shit, he told you with his eyes, the movement of his body seeming to answer every question he asked. No French philosopher living or dead could convince Jack LaLanne that the problems of man were existential. It was a matter of will, of perseverance, of mind over matter. Where Sartre saw ennui, Jack saw energy. Where Camus saw pointlessness and death, Jack saw the board-breaking power of repetition.

  Jack rose to power in the era of Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, the age of John Wayne. America was the go-getter nation, as far as he was concerned. There was no challenge too great, no obstacle too big.

  Jack told us that America was the nation of the future, that we were all on the verge of traveling to a science-fiction nirvana in gleaming rocket ships.

  Except, as far as Jack was concerned, we should be running there.

  Chapter 30

  Imago

  He is assaulted by artificial light, framed by cameras with halogen spots. Scott squints reflexively, ensuring that the first image the world sees of him is of a man wincing slightly, left eye bowed in squint. Bodies surge forward as he steps from the front door, men with shoulder-mounted cameras and women with balled microphones, trailing cords across the gum-stained sidewalk.

  “Scott,” they say. “Scott, Scott.”

  He settles in on the threshold, door half open, in case he needs an easy escape.

  “Hello,” he says.

  He is a man starting a conversation with a crowd. Questions are hurled toward him, everybody speaking at once. Scott thinks of what this street once was, a forested stream winding toward a muddy river. He holds up his hand.

  “What’s the goal here?” he asks.

  “Just a few questions,” says one of the journalists.

  “I was here first,” says another, a blond woman holding a microphone with the letters ALC embossed on a rectangular box. Her name, she says, is Vanessa Lane, and she has Bill Cunningham speaking into her ear from mission control.

  “Scott,” she says, pushing to the front, “what are you doing here?”

  “Here on this street?” he asks.

  “With Ms. Mueller. Is she a friend of yours, or more maybe?”

  Scott thinks about this. Is she a friend or more maybe. He’s not sure what the question means really.

  “I’d have to think about that,” he says. “Whether we’re friends. We just met really. And then there’s her point of view—how she sees things—because maybe I get it wrong, the meaning, which—who hasn’t done that before, thinking something is black when it’s really white.”

  Vanessa frowns.

  “Tell us about the crash,” she says, “what was it like?”

  “In what sense?”

  “Out there alone, the raging ocean, and then you hear the boy crying.”

  Scott thinks about this, his silence peppered by other questions, shouted in 5/6 time.

  “You’re looking for a comparison. This is like that. An analogy to help you understand.”

  “Scott,” yells a brunette with a microphone, “why did the plane crash? What happened?”

  A young couple approaches from the east. Scott watches as they cross the street to avoid the spotlight. He is the accident now, rubbernecked by pedestrians.

  “I suppose I’d have to say it was like nothing,” Scott tells Vanessa, not ignoring this new question, but simply focused on the last. “Certainly there’s no comparison for me. The size of the ocean. Its depth and power. A moonless sky. Which way is north? Survival, at its basest form, isn’t a stor
y. Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s the only story.”

  “Have you spoken to the boy?” someone shouts. “Was he scared?”

  Scott thinks about that.

  “Wow.” he says. “That’s—I don’t know that that’s a question for me to—the four-year-old brain—I mean, that’s an entirely different conversation. I know what the experience was for me—a speck in a vast and hostile darkness—but for him, at this moment in development, biologically, I mean. And with the nature of fear—at a certain level—the animal power of it. But again, at his age—”

  He breaks off, thinking, aware that he is not giving them what they want, but concerned that their questions are too important to answer in the moment, to define in passing, simply to meet some kind of arbitrary deadline. What was the experience like? Why did it happen? What does it mean going forward? These are subjects for books. They are questions you meditate over for years—to find the right words, to identify all the critical factors, both subjective and objective.

  “It’s an important question,” he says, “and one we may never really know the answer to.”

  He turns to Vanessa.

  “I mean, do you have kids?”

  She is twenty-six at most.

  “No.”

  Scott turns to her cameraman, in his forties.

  “You?”

  “Uh, yeah. A little girl.”

  Scott nods.

  “And see, then there’s gender, and the time of night, how he was asleep when the plane went down, and did he think it was a dream maybe? At first. Like maybe he was still sleeping. So many factors.”

  “People say you’re a hero,” shouts a third reporter.

  “Is that a question?”

  “Do you think you’re a hero?”

  “You’d have to define the word for me,” says Scott. “Plus, what I think doesn’t really matter. Or—that’s not true—what I think about myself hasn’t always proven to be accurate, according to the world at large. Like, how in my twenties I thought I was an artist, but really I was just a kid in his twenties who thought he was an artist. Does that make sense?”