by Jim Hanas
“This,” he said, indicating one of the pictures with a nod.
“I’ll need a hand signal,” she said. “For the cameras.”
The man tapped an electrode-wrapped forefinger on one of the photos. The woman propped her glasses on her nose and recorded his response before arranging two more photographs on the tray.
“This, or this?” she repeated, tapping her nails to draw the man’s attention back from what must have been Boulder. The man was tired of answering questions and was glad it wouldn’t be much longer before they landed. The knot of his tie had slid to half-mast and moist stains bloomed where his arms met his torso. He wanted to change his shirt. How much longer, exactly, would it be?
“I’ll ask the questions,” the woman said, again tapping her nails on the tray.
The young woman’s lab coat was sexy, the man thought without considering the pictures. The hum of the engines was sexy and the woman’s incessantly tapping nails — these were sexy, too. He considered her knees, which were the color of carrot cake, as they appeared between her blue lab coat and her tall, tight boots. He contemplated having sex with her — right then and there — in the aisle of the modified Airbus 320 in which he now found himself more or less imprisoned.
“It’s time for your taste test,” said another woman who appeared at his side with a serving cart. She placed two tiny paper cups of fizzy, brown liquid on the fold-out tray. The man took a sip from each cup before the woman opposite him tapped their rims with her nails.
“This, or this?”
He smiled but the young woman did not smile back.
Simmons awoke in the middle of the night, terrified. The bed and the world pressed coldly against his damp skin. He felt empty. It occurred to him that something bad had happened — perhaps something awful — and this was why he was waking up feeling terrified and empty. Maybe it was the worst, he thought. Maybe the Can had gone down.
He considered this for a moment before reminding himself that he didn’t believe in things happening elsewhere that could wake a man up in the middle of the night. He got up and crept through the house, unlocking and relocking the window in the kitchen and peeking in at the twins. He talked back to his wife as she mumbled in her sleep, and then returned to unconsciousness, forgetting all about this nocturnal episode until the following morning, when the Admiral convened an emergency meeting.
The Admiral was unshaven and his clothes were jumbled. His epaulets bulged conspicuously. He stammered for half a minute before breaking the news.
“Gentlemen,” he said, swabbing his forehead with a crinkled length of paper towel. “The Can has gone down.”
A hush fell over the room, followed by a violent slurping, sucking sound as everyone present gasped for air. Simmons surveyed the ashen faces around the table: the bloated, ashen face of Reynolds; the irritable, ashen face of Stevens; the dull, ashen face of Jameson; and the fresh, ashen faces of Plimpton and Castle — two faces that were usually young and eager, but were now, like the rest, suddenly and noticeably ashen. Though he couldn’t see it, Simmons was ninety-five percent certain that his own face, too, was ashen. He wondered, only for an instant, if he should start believing in things terrible enough to wake a man up in the middle of the night.
“This is no good,” the Admiral said. “This is no good at all.”
Even Plimpton and Castle, who were always proposing solutions to things that were not even problems, could not disagree. In addition to being young and eager, Plimpton and Castle were ambitious — but ambition was of no use in this situation.
“It’s hitting the monitors now,” the Admiral continued. “The news.”
This, everyone knew, was bad. The Can was the flagship and hallmark — the complete and total meaning — of FreeBird Airlines. If it went down, everything went down with it.
“We’re notifying our customers, of course,” the Admiral said, returning to a tone of practicality. “But then there are the subjects. Families need to be informed.”
Although everyone called him the Admiral, the Admiral had never attained this rank. He left the navy an ensign and had not been on a boat — or in a body of water larger than a Jacuzzi — in twenty years. He was known as the Admiral because he called other people “Admiral” as sort of a joke. When he met someone — especially if he was attempting to sell them something — he called them “Admiral,” tipped his head in mock deference, then shook their hand with both his hands. The title had attached itself to him via boomerang effect.
The founding investors of FreeBird Airlines found this charming, however, which is why they named the Admiral president, a role for which he suddenly felt comically ill equipped. He was not so unlike a real admiral, he often thought, what with the handshaking and nicknaming. People — the founding investors of FreeBird Airlines, in particular — often told him he should run for office. He had entertained the thought as recently as yesterday, although that now seemed like a long time ago.
“The clients are taking it well,” he noted with what sounded like optimism, considering the circumstances. “And the data files have all been recovered.”
Everyone nodded, especially Plimpton and Castle, who both believed that optimism was eternally, unwaveringly good.
“I’m afraid notifying the families falls to us, however,” he said as he sent sheets of paper into circulation around the conference table. “I’ve divided up the list.”
The ashen faces at the table turned more ashen still.
“Be sure to take their files with you,” he added, almost cheerfully. “You know what a comfort they can be. And remember: people, unlike airplanes, look larger from farther away.”
Simmons made his way through the maze of phone banks, where a dozen reservationists busied themselves with the company’s prayers. Their lips moved in unison as they read from their monitors, sending up a murmur that hovered above the cubicle walls like a cloud. There wouldn’t be many reservations today. Plenty of time for prayers.
Prayers had become cheap, the way jokes used to be cheap. Before the prayers, Simmons remembered, it had been hard to get work done for all the jokes, while the jokes, in turn, brought out the worst in everyone. People hated co-workers who distributed jokes that weren’t funny or that everyone had already read a million times, and ultimately the jokes created an atmosphere of fear. If you were laughing, other people were laughing. The next thing you know, they could be laughing at you.
Prayers, however, never got old. People forwarded them without guilt (or fear) and kept them secure with pieces of software that floated them across their monitors like stock quotes. Prayers had become official FreeBird policy, and there were suddenly prayers for everything. Prayers for cold calls gone wrong. Prayers for slow-paying clients. Prayers for quarterly reports. There were prayers for the hard sell, the soft sell, the courtesy call. There were prayers for stock drops, and options, and splits, and 401Ks, and IPOs, and, of course, there were prayers for crashes — of both markets and airplanes — and some of each floated in the air as Simmons closed his office door behind him.
People, unlike airplanes, look larger from farther away.
The Admiral’s parting words formed the unofficial motto of FreeBird Airlines. Like most mottos, it meant different things to different people. To FreeBird’s clients, it meant that consumers’ cherished preferences might seem inscrutable from a distance, but never fear, they could be made clear by well-conceived batteries of tests administered to captive audiences of air travelers who agreed to submit to such scrutiny in exchange for free flights to demographically rich destinations like Indianapolis, Chicago, and (until this morning) Los Angeles. To FreeBird’s army of commission-starved account executives, it meant that a client might seem unapproachable — unsellable — from a distance, but close up, each was as vulnerable as the next to FreeBird’s ingenious sales pitch. And to FreeBird’s passengers? Great care was taken to ensure that
FreeBird’s passengers never heard the unofficial motto.
As for how the motto applied to informing the loved ones of subjects that the subjects were now dead as the result of a fiery crash that, no, did not have anything to do with the subjects undergoing many tests in accordance with FreeBird’s innovative business model — how it applied to this situation was not immediately obvious to Simmons as he watched the news crawl across his monitor.
“At 3:32 this morning, FreeBird Flight 192 crashed west of Grand Junction, Colorado. The flight was FreeBird Airlines’ inaugural voyage to Los Angeles from its hub in Columbus, Ohio, after five years of serving destinations in the Middle West.”
Simmons watched as the bulletin ticked by, appearing as a reporter, somewhere, typed it.
“Approximately 120_
“Approximately 12_
“Approximatel_ . . .”
The reporter was keying in a live correction.
“. . . 122 people, including crew and personnel are thought to be lost,” the bulletin continued. “Survivors are not expected.”
Simmons opened his prayer folder and clicked an icon depicting a white plane with a blue stripe, its wings utterly engulfed in pixelized flame. He mouthed the words as they went by, fumbling only occasionally, despite his unfamiliarity with this prayer — the prayer for the Can having gone down.
Lord, bless the occupants of the Can,
And comfort them amid the fiery blaze in which they have now found themselves more or less engulfed.
Bless also the families of the occupants of the Can,
Comforting them as they face steep losses in the loved ones department,
And helping them to recognize their loved ones’ data files as unique and eternal imprints in which their loved ones live on, in a sense, if only as a familiar song in a beer commercial or a new way of thinking about auto insurance.
For people, unlike airplanes, look larger from farther away.
Simmons was no theologian, but he found it strange that the unofficial motto had somehow made it into the prayer for the Can having gone down. Wasn’t this in bad taste, or at least an invitation to bad luck? He put this quandary on hold as he looked at the list the Admiral had given him. There were five names on it. Once it had been modified with cameras and sensors, plus booths large enough to hold one subject and one researcher, the Can did not hold many passengers. Simmons’ eyes froze halfway down the list before he gathered his data files, locked his office door behind him, and passed through the hovering prayer-cloud on his way out the door.
Simmons had been in rooms like this before. Lots of times. As a teenager, he had groped at the breasts and buttoned flies of girls named Kat, and Kate, and Katie, and Katherine in rooms more or less exactly like this one. Such rooms — right inside the front door, just off the foyer — were never used, in his experience, except for such hapless late-night purposes. Children were forbidden from entering rooms like these, he remembered, and growing up he had witnessed many homes engulfed in jubilant chaos — littered with board games, piles of laundry, and slot-racing tracks — that somehow stopped at the threshold of this room. Looking through the doorway, then like now, was like staring into the soothing waters of an aquarium.
He had been shown in by a boy on the front lawn who was busy driving a softball deep into the freshly laid sod with a lacrosse stick. He was probably thirteen. His blond hair was tangled and he smelled like stale hockey equipment. He grudgingly stomped up the stairs to get his stepmother, while Simmons braced for her arrival.
He had never met Bill Hammerling’s wife before, not this one, and he had not seen Bill himself in ten years, although his name had still jumped off the page. Bill had done well. The faux Queen Anne in which Simmons now stood was among the first to be completed in the surrounding development, and the home — elevated on a slight hillock — was plainly visible from the Tudor model home that marked the entrance to the neighborhood. Simmons had weaved his way toward it carefully, slaloming through the wooden stakes that marked the future placement of streets and driveways. The streets were not yet marked, but Bill’s circular driveway was clearly labeled — with both name and address — on a mailbox poised atop a length of anchor chain welded to maintain the posture of an angry cobra.
Kitty Hammerling was girlish, Simmons noted as she appeared at the top of the steps.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
Her blond hair was pulled into a ponytail high on the back of her head, and she might have been mistaken for a college student — in her khaki capris and oversized T-shirt tied to the side — if not for an enormous trio of diamonds that hung from her wedding ring.
Simmons’ paramilitary appearance no doubt took her by surprise. The company’s founders were navy men, and they had imparted to FreeBird a martial structure. Everyone wore uniforms, although the one Simmons wore was barely distinguishable from those worn by pharmacists or busboys. It consisted of a crisp white shirt with basic cotton epaulets on the shoulders and an embossed crest positioned above his heart. The second Mrs. Hammerling (or was she the third?) might have easily mistaken him for the exterminator.
“There’s been an accident,” Simmons said. He held out an arm to suggest they might talk more comfortably in the forbidden room, the room that he had understood since childhood was for important matters only — the appearance of clergy, funerals and christenings, and matters like this.
Kitty Hammerling turned ashen as she understood, as surely as Plimpton and Castle had, that this was no good. She perched on the edge of the white couch while Simmons took one of the stiff chairs, his aluminum briefcase sandwiched between his ankles.
“Bill’s plane has gone down,” he said.
Kitty Hammerling started to cry.
Simmons didn’t know what to do. He had thought about it for the entire drive and had still failed to come up with an answer. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, like he might reach out and touch her if it became necessary, although he didn’t know when, exactly, that would be. He wondered what FreeBird’s legal department would recommend.
She covered her face and he could see that her fingers were unusually long and that the thin bones in the backs of her hands pulsed under her soft, tanned skin like gently throbbing veins. She had dark, fine hair on her forearms, he could now see, and also on her cheeks.
She got up and left the room. Simmons remained seated and wondered if he should leave. Maybe that’s what she expected — for him to leave. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the opening line of the prayer for the Can having gone down but could only remember the last: People, unlike airplanes . . .
Kitty Hammerling returned, clutching a wad of tissues.
“I brought Bill’s file,” Simmons offered as he eased it out of his briefcase. It was in a worn interoffice folder, its crimson string wound tightly around the two-ply fastening-disk. It had been carefully edited to preserve Bill’s preferences for salmon (the color) and Magneto (the font), and to redact his fascination with the tanning cream and tall black boots that had been indirectly tested (ambiently, as they say) on his ill-fated flight. (“Leering” was the word that appeared again and again in the qualitatives.)
“That’s nice,” his wife managed, although Simmons could tell it provided little comfort. While people often put great stock in their loved ones’ files, there was still this sting.
“Did you know him?” she asked quietly.
“We were in the navy.”
“In the gulf?”
“And the straits, too. Persian. Tonkin. Gibraltar. Hormuz.”
“You were close?” she asked.
“As close as you can be and not talk in ten years,” Simmons said.
She smiled weakly.
“That’s his son?” Simmons asked.
She nodded, grinding back more tears. It was clear that the boy’s only link to his step
mother was through his father and without him, they might not get along so well.
Mrs. Hammerling suddenly wilted, like she was about to faint, and Simmons forgot all about FreeBird’s lawyers as he leaned forward and grabbed her elbows, hoping to steady her, as the front door slammed and the scent of hockey equipment leaked into the clean white room.
“You’ve got to help me tell him,” she whispered, and Simmons realized that the boy — slouching into view now, smirking — was at once the largest and smallest creature in the known universe. Smaller than the whale, smaller than the elephant, yet still larger than the lowly airplane.
You Can Touch This!
Steven had just finished a cigarette and lofted the butt off the loading dock when Bitsy appeared and told him there was barf in the interrogation room. This was no surprise. There was always barf somewhere. In the interrogation room, in the supermarket, in the post office, in the dentist’s office. In the nail salon.
Steven arrived in the interrogation room to find a woman holding a crying child by the hand. Wherever children played and ate cake, some of them barfed. Usually the smaller ones. Steven threw a wad of paper towels down and told everyone to clear out. The name of the place was You Can Touch This! but barf was an exception. No one touched barf but Steven.
The interrogation room looked like a real interrogation room, only much shabbier. All the furniture — like most of the furniture at You Can Touch This! — had been donated, in this case by the local police precinct, on the (entirely true) premise that anything grown-ups did for real, kids would enjoy pretending to do. Bitsy and her partner, Tina, had done a reasonably good job of removing the rusty metal parts from donations like these — and covering the electrical outlets and fuse boxes, and so on — providing beleaguered parents a guilt-free environment in which they could let their children roam around like wild animals.
There was a table in the middle of the interrogation room surrounded by three aluminum chairs and a lamp that could be trained directly on the “suspect.” In one corner, there was a cart with wheels on it, on top of which sat a broken polygraph machine. The thin metal arms that had once recorded vital signs were bent like a tangled clot of coat hangers, but kids still loved attaching each other to it. Its surface was dappled with fruit juice and icing. The half dozen photocopied fliers posted around the room — featuring a clip art image of a tank — had failed to prevent this. They said: “Absolutely no food and/or drink in the Interrogation Room.”