by Noah Hawley
“Well,” she said, and sipped her drink. “I always thought it was a little silly.”
“The harmonica?”
“No. Music. And God knows I had my share of musicians. I mean, the things I did to Mick Jagger would make a hooker blush.”
“Mother,” he said, looking around, but they were far enough from the other diners that no heads had turned.
“Oh please. Don’t be such a prude.”
“Well, I like it. The harmonica.”
He took it out of his jacket pocket, showed it to her.
“It’s portable, right? So I can take it anywhere. Sometimes I play quietly in the cockpit with the autopilot on.”
“Is that safe?”
“Of course it’s safe. Why wouldn’t it be—”
“All I know is I can’t keep my phone on for takeoff and landing.”
“That’s—they changed that. And also, are you suggesting the sound waves from the harmonica could impact the guidance system, or—”
“Well, now—that’s your area—technical understanding—I’m just calling it like I see it.”
He nodded. In three hours he was scheduled to take an OSPRY to Teterboro and pick up a new crew. Then a short jaunt to Martha’s Vineyard and back. He’d gotten a room reserved at the Soho House downtown, with a one-night layover, then tomorrow he flew to Taiwan.
His mother finished her second drink—they pour them so small, dear—and ordered a third. James noticed a red string on her right wrist—so she’s back on Kabbalah. He didn’t need to check his watch to know that it had only been fifteen minutes since she arrived.
When he told people he’d grown up in a doomsday cult he was only partially kidding. They were there—he and Darla—for five years, from ’70 to ’75, there being a six-acre compound in Northern California. The cult being The Restoration of God’s Commandments (later shortened to simply The Restoration), run by the right reverend Jay L. Baker. Jay L. used to say that he was the baker and they were his bread. God, of course, was the baker who’d made them all.
Jay L. was convinced the world would end on August 9, 1974. He had had a vision on a river rafting trip—family pets floating up to heaven. When he came home, he consulted the scriptures—the Old Testament, the Book of Revelation, the Gnostic Gospels. He became convinced there was a code in the Bible, a hidden message. And the more he dug, the more notes he took in the margins of religious texts, the more he banged out sums on his old desktop calculator, the more convinced he became that it was a date. The date.
The end of the world.
Darla met Jay L. on Haight Street. He had an old guitar and a school bus. His followers numbered exactly eleven (soon to grow to just under a hundred), mostly women. Jay L. was a handsome man (under all that hair), and he’d been blessed with an orator’s voice, deep and melodious. He liked to gather his followers in intertwining circles, like the symbol for the Olympics, so that some sat face-to-face, and he’d wander among them espousing his belief that when the rapture came only the purest souls would ascend. Purity in his eyes meant many things. It meant that one prayed at least eight hours a day, that one committed oneself to hard work and to caring for others. It meant that one ate no chicken or chicken-related products (such as eggs), that one bathed only with soaps made by hand (sometimes cleaning one’s face with the ash of a birch tree). Followers had to surround themselves with only pure sounds—sounds straight from the source, no recorded materials, television, radio, film.
Darla liked it, these rules, for a while. She was a searcher at heart. What she claimed to be looking for was enlightenment, but really what she wanted was order. She was a lost girl from a working-class home with a drunken father who wanted to be told what to do and when to do it. She wanted to go to bed at night knowing that things made sense, that the world was the way it was for a reason. Though he was young, James remembers the fervor his mother brought to this new communal way of life, the headlong way she threw herself in. And when Jay L. decided that children should be raised collectively and had them build a nursery, her mother didn’t hesitate to add James to the group.
“So are you here now or what?” his mother said.
“Am I here?”
“I can’t keep track of it. All your comings and goings. Do you even have an address?”
“Of course I do. It’s in Delaware. You know that.”
“Delaware?”
“For tax purposes.”
She made a face as if thinking about things like that were subhuman.
“What’s Shanghai like?” she asked. “I always thought it would be magical to see Shanghai.”
“It’s crowded. Everybody smokes.”
She looked at him with a certain bored pity.
“You never did have a sense of wonder.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Just—we’re put on this earth to revel in the majesty of creation, not—you know—live in Delaware for tax purposes.”
“It’s just on paper. I live in the clouds.”
He said this for her benefit, but it was also true. Most of his best memories were of the cockpit. Colors seen in nature, the way light bends around the horizon, the cathartic adrenaline rush of a storm ceiling bested. And yet what did it mean? That had always been his mother’s question. What does it all mean? But James didn’t worry about that. He knew deep down in the core of his being that it didn’t mean anything.
A sunrise, a winter squall, birds flying in a perfect V. These were things that were. The truth, visceral and sublime, of the universe, was that it existed whether we witnessed it or not. Majesty and beauty, these were qualities we projected upon it. A storm was just weather. A sunrise was simply a celestial pattern. It’s not that he didn’t enjoy them. It’s that he didn’t require anything more from the universe than that it exist, that it behave consistently—that gravity worked the way it always worked, that lift and drag were constants.
As Albert Einstein once said, “What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.”
He walked his mother back to the apartment. She rode beside him waving to people she knew, like a mermaid on her very own holiday parade float. At the door, she asked James when he’d be back again, and he told her he had a layover in LA next month. She told him to watch for the signs. The red heifer had been born in the Holy Land. In and of itself this was not proof of God’s plan, but if the signs multiplied, then they should be ready.
He left her in the lobby. She would drive onto the elevator and then straight into her apartment. She had her book group later, she said, and then dinner with some friends from her prayer group. Before he left she kissed his cheek (he bent down to receive it, as one does to the pope or a cardinal) and told him she would be praying for him. She said she was glad that he was such a good son, one who bought his mother such a nice meal and never forgot to call. She said she’d been thinking about the commune a lot lately and did he remember that? The Reverend Jay L. Baker. What was it he used to say? I am the baker and you are all my bread. Well, she told him, I was your baker. I made you in my oven, and don’t you forget it.
He kissed her cheek, feeling the peach fuzz of old age against his lips. At the revolving door he turned and waved one last time, but she was already gone, just a flash of red in the closing elevator doors. He put on his sunglasses and spun out into the morning light.
In ten hours he would be dead.
* * *
There was chop—medium to heavy—dropping through the cloud ceiling into Teterboro. He was flying an OSPRY 700SL carrying four executives from the Sony Corporation. They landed without incident and taxied to meet the limousine. As always, James stood in the cockpit door wishing his disembarking passengers safe travels. In the past he sometimes said God bless you (a habit picked up in childhood), but he noticed it made the
men in ties uncomfortable, so he switched to something more neutral. James took his responsibility as captain very seriously.
It was late in the afternoon. He had a few hours to kill before his next flight, a quick jog over to Martha’s Vineyard to pick up a payload of six. For this flight he’d pilot an OSPRY 700SL. He hadn’t flown the particular model before, but he wasn’t worried. OSPRY made a very capable airplane. Still, as he sat in the crew lounge waiting, he read up on the specs. The plane was just under seventy feet in overall length, with a wingspan of sixty-three feet, ten inches. It’d do Mach .083, though he’d never push it that hard with paying passengers aboard. It’d fly coast-to-coast on a full tank at a top speed of 554 mph. The specs said it topped out at forty-five thousand feet, but he knew from experience that that was a cautious number. He could take it up to fifty thousand feet without incident, though he couldn’t imagine needing to on this flight.
August 9, 1974, that was the day the world was supposed to end. At The Restoration they spent months preparing. God told Noah it would be the fire next time, so that’s what they prepared for. They learned to drop and roll, in case the rapture missed them. Jay L. spent more and more time in the woodshed channeling the Angel Gabriel. As if by unspoken agreement, everyone in the group gorged themselves for ten days and then ate only matzoh. Outside the temperature rose and dropped in significant measure.
In the crew lounge, James checked the prevailing weather conditions. Weather-wise they were looking at poor visibility around the Vineyard, with a low cloud base (two hundred to four hundred feet) and heavy coastal fog. Winds were out of the northeast at fifteen to twenty miles per hour. As James knew from basic meteorology, fog is just a cloud near or in contact with the earth’s surface—either land or sea. In simple terms, minute water droplets hang suspended in the air. The water droplets are so tiny that gravity has almost no effect, leaving them suspended. At its lightest, fog may only consist of wisps a few feet thick. At its worst, it might have a vertical depth of several hundred feet.
Marine fog tends to be thick and long lasting. It can rise and fall over time, without fully dissipating. At altitude it becomes a low stratus cloud deck. In middle and higher latitudes (like New England), marine fog is primarily a summer occurrence. Low visibility isn’t the worst problem a pilot faces—the inboard HGS system can land the plane with zero visibility if it knows the runway GPS. The HGS converts signals from an airport’s Instrument Landing System into a virtual image of the runway displayed on the monitor. But if the wind shifts abruptly on manual approach, a pilot can be caught off guard.
“Come ye out from among them and be ye separate.” This was what the Bible said, the words that convinced Jay L. Baker to gather his flock and flee to the woods outside Eureka, California. There was an old abandoned summer camp there, without heat or electricity. They bathed themselves in the lake and ate berries from the trees. Jay L. began to filibuster, sermonizing for hours, sometimes days at a time. The signs were everywhere, he told them. Revelations. In order to be saved they had to renounce all sin, to cast venal wickedness from their hearts. Sometimes this involved inflicting pain on their genital areas and the genital areas of others. Sometimes it required visiting “the confessional,” a wooden outhouse that could reach interior temperatures of 105 degrees in the summer sun. His mother once stayed in there for three days, ranting that the devil had come to claim her soul. She was a fornicator and (possibly) a witch, having been caught in bald flagrante with Gale Hickey, a former dentist from Ojai. At night James would try to sneak her water, moving furtively from bush to bush, pushing his canteen through a hole in the pitch, but his mother always refused. She had brought this on herself and would endure the full purge.
James made a note to check the HGS system before takeoff. If he could he would talk to flight crews coming off inbound flights to get an anecdotal sense of conditions in the air, though things can change quickly at altitude, and pockets of turbulence move around.
He sipped a cup of Irish breakfast tea as he waited—he carried foil packets in his carry-on. Lifting the cup to his lips, he saw a drop of blood break the surface, creating ripples. Then another. His lip felt wet.
“Shit.”
James hurried to the men’s room, napkin to his face, head tilted back. He’d been getting nosebleeds recently, maybe twice a week. The doctor he saw told him it was the altitude. Dry capillaries plus pressure. He’d ruined more than one uniform in the last few months. At first, he’d been worried, but when no other symptoms arrived Melody chalked it up to age. He’d be fifty-one next March. Halfway there, he thought.
In the bathroom, he put pressure on his nose until the bleeding stopped, then cleaned himself up. He was lucky this time. There was no blood on his shirt or jacket, and James was back in the lounge drinking a fresh cup of tea before his seat was cold.
At five thirty p.m. he gathered his things and walked out to meet the plane.
The fact was, nothing ended on August 9, 1974, except the presidency of Richard M. Nixon.
* * *
He started his pre-flight check in the cockpit, running through the systems one by one. He checked the paperwork first—he’d always been a stickler for precision of detail. He checked the movement of the yoke, listening for any unusual sounds, eyes closed, feeling for any catches or chinks. The starboard motion felt a little sticky, so he contacted maintenance to take a look. Then he switched on the master and checked fuel levels, setting full flaps.
“Just, uh, give me a minute,” he said and went out again.
Instrument check complete, James climbed down the gangway steps and walked the perimeter of the plane, doing a visual inspection. Though it was a warm summer night, he checked for any ice that might have accumulated on the exterior. He looked for missing antennas, for dents, loose bolts, missing rivets, making sure the plane’s lights were all fully functional. He found some bird droppings on the wing, removed them by hand, then assessed the way the plane sat on its wheels—a leftward lean would mean the air in the rear port tire was low—inspecting the trailing edges of the wings and eyeballing the engines. He used both his rational left brain, running down a mental checklist, and his instinctual right brain, open to the sense that something felt off about the plane. But nothing did.
Back in the cabin, he conferred with the mechanic, who told him the altitude system checked out. He chatted with the flight attendant, Emma Lightner, with whom he hadn’t worked before. As seemed to be the case on these private flights, she was prettier than was reasonable for such a basic and menial job, but he knew it paid well and the girls got to see the world. He helped her stow some heavier bags. She smiled at him in a way he recognized as friendly, but not flirtatious. And yet her beauty in and of itself felt like gravity—as if nature had designed this woman to pull men to her, and so that’s what she did, whether she wanted to or not.
“Just a quick one tonight,” he told her. “Should have you back in the city by eleven. Where are you based?”
“New York,” she said. “I’ve got a place in the Village with two other girls. I think they’re gone now, though—South Africa, maybe.”
“Well, straight to bed for me,” said James. “I was in LA this morning. Asia yesterday.”
“They sure move us around, don’t they?”
He smiled. She couldn’t be more than twenty-five. For a moment he thought of the kind of men she must date. Quarterbacks and rock musicians—was that still a thing? Rock music? He himself was mostly celibate. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the company of women. It was more that he couldn’t stand the complications of it, the immediate sense of obligation, the expectation of complete intermingling. He was a man who lived out of a suitcase at fifty. He liked things the way he liked them. His tea, his books. He liked going to the movies in foreign lands, watching modern American films with subtitles in baroque old-world theaters. He liked walking cobblestone streets, listening to people argue in tongues. He loved the hot rush of desert air when one walked the
gangway down onto Muslim soil. Yemen, the UAE. He had flown over the Alps at sunset, had battled thunderstorms over the Balkans. In James’s mind he was a satellite, graceful and self-sufficient, orbiting the earth, fulfilling its designated purpose without question.
“We were supposed to have Gaston on the other stick,” said James. “You know Peter?”
“Yes, he’s lovely.”
“Too bad.”
She smiled, showing teeth, and it was enough. To make a beautiful woman smile, to feel the warmth of her attention. He went into the cockpit and ran through the systems again, checking maintenance’s work.
“Ten minutes,” he called out.
As he rechecked the systems he felt the plane shift. That will be my copilot coming back, he thought. According to the roster, his wingman today was Peter Gaston, an idiosyncratic Belgian who liked to talk philosophy on long flights. James always enjoyed their conversations, especially when they delved into areas between science and ideology. He waited for him to enter the cockpit. But instead of coming forward, James heard whispering from the main cabin, and then something that sounded like a slap. He stood at the sound, frowning, and was almost to the cockpit door when a different man came in holding his left cheek.
“Sorry,” he said, “I got held up in the office.”
Melody recognized him—a glassy-eyed kid perhaps in his twenties, his tie askew—Charlie something. He’d flown with him once before and though technically the kid performed well, James frowned.
“What happened to Gaston?” he said.
“You got me,” said Charlie. “Stomach thing, I think. All I know is I got a call.”
James was annoyed, but he wasn’t about to show it, so he shrugged. It was the front office’s problem.
“Well, you’re late. I called maintenance about some stickiness in the yoke.”
The kid shrugged, rubbed his cheek.
James could see Emma behind him. She’d retreated into the main cabin and was smoothing the linens on the headrests.