by Noah Hawley
Every doctor who saw him swore the problem was his heart. But in medicine you have to look past the easy assumptions. The facts can be misleading. There is a tendency to recognize only the symptoms that add up to the diagnosis in your head, but it is the symptom that doesn’t fit you should be following.
We drove north on I-95. My cell rang. I answered. It was Dean.
“You’re booked on a flight from JFK to LAX. It leaves in an hour. Can you make it?”
I looked at Murray.
“JFK,” I said.
Murray swerved across three lanes of traffic, took the exit at fifty, blew a stop sign, made a U-turn, and merged back onto the highway going the opposite direction. My heart was somewhere in my armpit.
“They’ve taken Danny to Cedars-Sinai Hospital,” said Dean. “In the morning they’ll move him to a federal penitentiary, and then it will take weeks to see him. I have assurances that if you arrive before then you will be allowed to see him.”
“Thank you, Dean.”
“Keep my name out of this,” he said. “I’ve spent my life serving the Democratic Party. The last thing I need is the press to get hold of this.”
“I’ll take it to my grave,” I said.
“Well,” said Dean, “maybe not to the grave. None of us should carry anything that far.”
We made JFK with fifteen minutes to spare. Dropping me off, Murray said he would drive straight to my house. He told me he would protect my family as if they were his own. In his eyes I could see him calculating the billable hours. To reach the terminal we had to pass through three security checkpoints. Murray was told to pop the trunk, not once but twice. One of the officers explained that Homeland Security had raised the threat level from yellow to red.
“ ’Cause that kid shot the senator,” he said.
That kid. Already the story was taking hold. It had a hero and a villain. How long before my son’s life was beyond saving?
Inside, the terminal was a chaotic, bubbling cauldron of madness. A bug-eyed hysteria had gripped the crowd. Armed guards and soldiers were everywhere. Modern air travel had already become a metaphor for the refugee experience. Tonight there was an added sense of desperation to our flight. We, the nation’s travelers, were Africans chased into the desert by drought, Albanians running toward tent cities, hounded by the deafening whumpa of bombs. We were herded together clutching our things, menaced by men with guns. We stripped off our clothes, passed through scanners, our every possession analyzed, our bodies wanded by humorless men in uniform, watched over by soldiers and bomb-sniffing dogs. We showed our travel documents, our IDs, praying our names had not made it onto some kind of list.
As the father of the country’s most notorious gunman, I knew it was just a matter of time before I was recognized, before men in white shirts with automatic weapons pulled me aside and escorted me into the dark bowels of the machine. But bureaucracies are notorious for their slowness, their incoherence. And so, though I waited to be pulled aside, I passed through every checkpoint with little more than a second look. In fact, it would be weeks before my name made it onto any kind of watch list, a fact that would serve as both a relief and a caution for all the implications it carried about our government’s true ability to keep us safe.
I flew to L.A. nonstop, the 747 punching its way through the jet stream. Dean had booked me a first-class ticket. There were warm nuts and a pillow for my neck. I tried to sleep, but my head was too busy with thoughts of my son. Being on an airplane brought back memories I had long tried to suppress. Memories of fear and grief. Memories of panic and guilt. Daniel had almost died on an airplane when he was eight. It was on a flight to Los Angeles from New York. It was the first year of my divorce from his mother, and he had visited me for Christmas. As usual he flew alone, entrusted to the care of busy flight attendants. At the airport he had been paired with another child, a young girl, also traveling between divorced parents for the holidays. Jenny Winger. Jenny had turned eleven one month earlier. The kids sat together in the middle of the plane, Daniel in the window seat, Jenny by the aisle.
I had often wondered what these flights were like for my son. I suppose I had romanticized them in my mind: picturing a young boy on his own, enjoying an adventure. Though separation had been difficult, I liked to think that I was helping my son become a world traveler, that as a result of his parents’ divorce he would reach his teens mature beyond his years. When other parents criticized me for shipping him off, I would point out how much more self-sufficient my son was becoming than their coddled brood. And wasn’t that what we, as parents, were supposed to do? Prepare our children as best we could to function on their own in the outside world?
This particular flight was early in our divorce. Possibly even Daniel’s third solo trip. If he had ever been scared by these airport adventures, he had not shared it with me. It was a night flight, leaving New York around six. The skies were clear over JFK, but storms had been gathering over the Midwest for days, pounding the region with heavy rain, sleet, and snow. I took Daniel to the airport in a cab, paying the driver to wait. I walked Daniel through security and all the way to his gate, where a flight attendant checked us in. I told her that my son was flying alone, that I wanted to make sure he got to Los Angeles in one piece. The flight attendant pointed to Jenny, who sat alone, watching the flashing lights of the tarmac through the large plate-glass window. The flight attendant said children often traveled better in pairs. She winked at Danny. Maybe he’d even end up with a girlfriend.
I was single myself back then, a divorced man with a conflicted hunger for women, and I have to admit that I studied the stewardess’s profile when she turned. I noted the tightness of her skirt, the multiple piercings in one ear—which indicated a rebellious streak, a slight hint of sexual anarchy. She was young and busty and blond. She laughed easily. I mentioned I was a doctor, and that my son was going to visit my ex-wife. The attendant told me she would take extra-special care of Daniel. She gave his shoulder a squeeze.
On the plane Daniel had a Sprite and some animal crackers. He had a backpack stuffed with clothes, games, comic books. Anything I could think of that might keep him occupied for the long flight. The movie on the flight was Titanic, an odd choice for a mode of transportation fueled by prayer and the suspension of disbelief. It was over Ohio that the turbulence hit, a great sudden jerk, like the plane had dropped off a ledge. After the first jolt the captain put on the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign and instructed flight attendants to take their seats. He tried to find a smoother altitude. A second jolt hit the plane, then a third. The fourth jolt opened several overhead compartments, loosing luggage. Drinks spilled. A passenger was struck in the head by a woman’s laptop. This was when the first scream rang out.
Outside the windows, passengers could see lightning strikes. Rain buffeted the wings and fuselage. My son sat alone in a plane full of strangers. The lights flickered and went out. The plane’s electrical system had shut down. In the cockpit warning sirens came on. The plane started an uncontrolled descent, a free fall. What must that feel like? To fall from the sky? The terrifying, weightless plunge. The violence of speed. An airplane without propulsion tumbles like a mountain through space. In the main cabin, the screams multiplied. People began to shout and beg.
In the cockpit, the captain fought to bring the plane out of its dive. He knew he had seconds to correct the situation before the plane and all aboard were lost. His first officer had frozen. Without electrics, the captain knew he would never keep the plane in the air. His only chance was to turn everything off and restart the engines, hoping that this would reset the electrics. It was an insane risk. Once off, the engines might not restart. The ground was, at most, seven to ten minutes away. But the captain was out of options. Every second that passed they lost more and more altitude, descending into the heart of the storm. So the captain barked orders to his crew. He said a little prayer, and then he reached over and turned off the plane.
In the main cabin my son sat gripping h
is armrests. He was eight years old. For his last birthday we’d had cake from Carvel and played racing games at the arcade. The icing from the cake stained his lips blue, like a corpse, turning him into a tiny, pale-faced zombie. Danny thought it was funny and I agreed. I was used to the look of death. I wasn’t superstitious about it. I knew the difference between a living child with sugar-blue lips and a corpse.
For his birthday, Daniel had gotten a skateboard from his mother, a science kit from me. He seemed happy. He appeared untroubled by the fact that his mother and father couldn’t stand each other. That they needed to put three thousand miles between them in order to have a civilized conversation on the phone. He went to bed that night with sticky fingers, still in his clothes, long after his bedtime. He was happy, he said. But was that true? Or had he already begun to tell me what I wanted to hear?
Now, twenty-five thousand feet above Ohio and dropping, my son clung to the armrests of a dead airplane, falling like a ball of paper tossed into a garbage can. In the cockpit, the captain counted to fifteen, then flipped the switches to restart the engines. For a brief moment nothing happened. His prayers went unanswered. The crew and passengers were all dead. Then the port engine roared to life, followed by starboard. The electrical system flickered, once, twice, and came back on. He had power. The captain and first officer, working together, pulled the plane out of its dive. The world stabilized. The screaming in the main cabin slowly stopped, and cheers of disbelief rang out.
Did my son cheer? Did he feel relief? Did he cry? A small child all alone in the face of death. Did he vomit or urinate in his pants? I saw the story on the news later that night, a plane that had lost power over the Midwest. Heart in my throat, I called his mother, who said that Daniel seemed fine. The plane had landed on time, and when she asked him how the flight was he said, “Long.” I sat up all night crying, consumed by thoughts of my only son dying. My poor boy. No one should have to face that kind of fear alone.
I thought of him now, handcuffed to some hospital bed, a bullet in his leg, arrested for a crime he could not have committed. Was this fear worse? Did the perspective of age make the fear of death greater? In this respect, maybe, the child has the advantage over the man. And yet what father wouldn’t want to protect his son from all fear, to hide from him the truth about death? After that flight, I had vowed never to send him off alone again.
In the months that followed, we tried to get Daniel to talk about what happened, his feelings. But he was never interested. The most he ever admitted was that it had been “scary” when the plane went into a dive, but that he had stayed busy trying to keep Jenny from “freaking out too bad.” How heroic he had seemed to me at that moment, a boy who stayed calm under pressure, who thought of others first. I was proud of him, and felt in some ways rewarded for having raised such a strong, unflappable child.
But now, sitting in first class, flying into the unknown, I wondered if something else might have happened on that cross-country flight. Something tectonic. In the face of certain death had my son come face-to-face with the notion of abandonment? Had he, as the plane fell, understood in some deep-seated way that he was on his own in this life, that his parents, who were supposed to protect him from the dangers of the world, had instead thrown him into the void? Did something in this eight-year-old boy harden at that moment, something that was still meant to be soft and hopeful? Was a worldview born of that event, one that separated my son from the only people in the world he was supposed to feel close to? Was this why he had dropped out of school and taken to the road? Was this why he never called, never wrote? Was that the moment I had lost him?
And if it was, how could I have been too blind to see it?
It was three a.m. when I landed at LAX. The smut of car exhaust greeted me as I exited the terminal. Outside the airport I hailed a cab and gave the address to the driver. We rode in silence through city streets awash in yellow gloom. I had done my residency here in the eighties, at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica. It’s where I met Ellen, at a party thrown by a fellow resident. She was the green-eyed girl on the balcony, smoking a joint. I was the second-year resident who’d been up for thirty-six hours straight. I still wore my scrubs.
“No one told me it was a costume party,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I’m a doctor.”
She had the body of a girl who knows how to get into trouble.
“I bet you practice saying that in the mirror,” she said.
She offered me the joint. I shook my head.
“Well, I’m not a doctor,” she said, “but I am a hypochondriac.”
“A match made in heaven,” I told her.
Ellen was a photographer who worked in a clothing store. She had grown up in a communal-housing complex in Berkeley, eating flaxseed and carob, and celebrating martyrs of the Workers Party, until her father, Bertrand, left her mother, Molly, for the Hennessy sisters, proving once and for all that “free love” was just another way for men to follow their pricks.
Ellen ended up living with her newly single mother in a condo in Glendale. She was nine. They ate Crunch bars for breakfast and watched daytime TV in marathon sessions of disillusioned sloth. Ellen’s mother showed little interest in finding work or encouraging her daughter’s education. At least twice a week she invented reasons to keep Ellen home from school because she didn’t want to be alone.
Believing herself to be an artist and a spiritualist in the same vein as Gertrude Stein, Molly encouraged her daughter’s artistic side. But the lessons she taught were of whimsy, not hard work, and as a result Ellen never developed the kind of doggedness and perseverance that artists need to make it in the modern world. Without discipline, Ellen became the kind of person who waits endlessly for the right mood to strike, who battles a constant sense of failure and irrelevance. She was a dreamer, not a doer, and though that quality was attractive to me at first, I quickly came to find it maddening.
During my residency I lived in a cottage by the beach. On the rare mornings when I was home I would run on the sand, letting the waves break against my ankles. Ellen moved in after two months. She said it was the only way she’d ever see me. I used to stumble home asleep with my eyes open. Ellen would run me a bath, get me a drink, and pour me into bed. It seemed to suit her, this sensual nurturing. But the feeling didn’t last. She spent too much time by herself, haunted by the ghost of a depressed mother. As an only child her feelings of loneliness were pathological. If she hadn’t gotten pregnant, I doubt we would have lasted a year.
My taxi pulled up in front of Cedars-Sinai Hospital at 4:15 a.m. I had spent the flight picturing this moment. Danny was upstairs, scared, wounded. Between us was the titanic weight of the federal government and our own reluctant history. Would he be happy to see me? Relieved? Or would he view this as just another incidence of his father arriving too late? Whatever the failures of the past, I would fix them now. My son was going to survive this. He was going to thrive. There are times when all men have to pick up a banner and charge into battle. This was mine. The more my son became a villain to others, the more he would become a cause to me. His vindication would be my grail.
I paused outside the hospital to straighten my rumpled suit. As a doctor I knew that family members were often brushed off by medical personnel, trivialized. Given the high profile of the case it seemed best to enter the situation as Paul Allen, doctor, instead of Paul Allen, worried father.
Inside the lobby a young man in a blue suit stood up. He put a photograph in his pocket.
“Dr. Allen,” he said. “I’m David Tolan from State. Our friend sent me.”
I nodded, shook his hand. Dean was a good man. I felt bad that he’d risked so much for me. My hands were trembling. Now that I was here I had no idea what I would say to my son. I had talked to hundreds of patients in dozens of hospitals. I always knew just what to say, even if it was to pass on a death sentence. But this? What could I say that would possibly matter?
“Is he okay?”<
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“I’ll let the doctor tell you,” said Tolan, “but they got the bullet out and he seems to be resting comfortably. Or as comfortably as you can rest when you’re handcuffed to a bed.”
We rode the elevator alone.
“I have cleared your visit with the Secret Service,” said Tolan. “They are doing this as a courtesy to State. You will have ten minutes with your son. No longer. Anything he says that illuminates the crime we would ask you to share with us, but I won’t be surprised if you don’t. The one condition of your visit is that you keep it secret. If you tell the press that we let you see your son, we will deny it.”
I nodded.
“I want to tell the senator’s wife how sorry I am,” I said.
“She won’t take your call. After today, don’t be surprised if no one will. Your name is now mud.”
My mind was racing. What would Danny look like? What would he say? I considered the phrase your name is mud. I knew that it came from Dr. Samuel Mudd, the Civil War–era surgeon who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after he assassinated Abraham Lincoln. For helping Booth, Mudd was tried as an accomplice and jailed. His name became a symbol of disgrace, disgust.
As we rode in silence I realized I was still trying to press the wrinkles out of my suit. I wished I had a tie. I had gone to prep school, where we were taught that our appearance was our calling card. If I had a tie, I thought, I could handle anything.
“Dr. Allen,” said Tolan just before the elevator doors opened, “no offense. But if your son did this I hope he gets the chair.”
The north tower’s fifth floor had been emptied of patients. Danny had the whole wing to himself. I saw Secret Service agents standing at the nurses’ station, manning the exits. There were several Los Angeles police officers mingled with nurses and doctors, and men in suits I assumed to be Secret Service or FBI. I pulled my jacket tighter to cover the stain on my shirt, feeling small in that moment, outnumbered and outmatched.