Among the Dead

by Michael Tolkin

  Frank realized that there was no law compelling him to stay. He wanted to see if they would uncover the three bodies, but he knew that there would be others, and better. He said goodbye to the ambulance driver.

  ‘Have a good one,’ said the driver.

  He wanted to see the plane. He wanted to see the dead. But which dead? A flight attendant stuck in a tree, or a postman crushed by the tip of a wing? As he thought of the dead, he discovered himself grading the dead, giving them more points if they were passengers, giving them no credit if they were on the ground. The passengers were the ones to blame, of course, but if there was something noble in their deaths, there was also something stupid and annoying about the deaths of the people on the ground. What was noble? The sudden catastrophe immediately recognized by everyone on the plane. But did he mean noble, why noble? Because of a better vantage point, higher station. Elevation. In the air. And what was seen from the vantage point? Why, life, of course. And what about life? Its brevity. And from this knowledge of life’s brevity, what lesson are we then free to take to heart? Why, to act on impulse, to act without fear, the freedom of the nobility, the freedom of power, of seeing through the collective futility of the masses.

  And what was so insipid about the deaths on the ground? To be on the plane was to be part of a bomb, to be the bomb, to be the killer. And to be on the ground? Was to be another stupid innocent victim. Another victim of massacre.

  And if someone on the plane was sleeping when the plane exploded? Or is nobility reserved only for those who see their deaths coming to them?

  Yes, only that.

  Frank walked back to the street he had come down on, the name stencilled on the kerb, Dana Street. So he continued along on Dana, parallel to the main road, the next block. There were big dump trucks rumbling along in formation, and overhead there were helicopters searching the ground with strong lights. It was impossible not to feel excited by all of this, and in the excitement, which was the sheer thrill of being a part of something large, something military, something that was better than entertainment. The little run he had given himself had awakened something in his body, and the numbness of his sorrow and the boredom of the train trip were small now, disappearing. There was smoke in the air, and the sounds of a hundred different engines. People shouted to each other. There was purpose to everything around him. No further danger could touch anyone inside this zone now, no other planes would crash, and so everyone was like a surgeon, brilliant with determination in this operating room that was also a neighbourhood. And if it was like his neighbourhood, it had never really been that, either, it had just been a place with a lot of houses next to each other, but it hadn’t been a community. That would change. Everyone who came back to their houses would be friendly with their neighbours now, they would treat them with respect, and if they saw each other in distant parts of the city they would wave, stop, chat. There would be a community here after the crash. Frank was happy with his thoughts; they were clear and moved forward with an agility he had forgotten. He was having a good time.

  He heard himself say, ‘Madeleine, Anna,’ to bring them back.

  Dana Street led him to Cohassett, two blocks away. He thought of the house destroyed by the engine as a small junior college compared to this great university, this Harvard of lights and noise ahead of him. Dana had been spared, and there were families at home, some of them eating dinner, others watching television. The older children were out with their fathers, and the fathers were talking to each other in their driveways.

  Frank fell in beside a few men and women. One of the men looked at him with doubt. ‘Are you from here?’ he asked. Frank understood. The man didn’t recognize him, and knew, didn’t guess, that Frank had jumped a wall somewhere to get past the police, that he was here to see the gore. But Frank held a better card than this man’s pseudo-cop pose, no one could trump him tonight.

  ‘My name is Frank Gale. My wife and daughter were on the plane.’

  Behind him he heard a woman say to someone else, ‘His wife and daughter were on the plane.’

  ‘Dear God,’ said the block’s protector. He said it with force, and Frank thought that the man must be a Christian, a true believer.

  Frank wanted them to introduce themselves, but no one did. Maybe they think I’m lying, he thought. It was odd, all that suspicion, the preparation for a fight, or a lynching – This man is not from here!- or would they have just denounced him to the police: ‘Officer, arrest this man, we don’t know him!’ The officer says, ‘Who are you?’ Frank says, ‘Frank Gale.’ The officer says, ‘So what is that to me?’ And Frank repeats the story of the day, but already the story sounds old to him, and the policeman, hearing Frank’s stale delivery, seeing Frank’s annoyance at being trapped in this story, doubts it, and doubts Frank. The policeman screams at him, ‘You prey on our sympathy!’ And Frank says, ‘Pray?’ And the policeman hits him. ‘No,’ says the policeman, ‘you come here to see what you have no right to see.’ ‘And what is that?’ asks Frank. ‘That is all this death,’ says the policeman. ‘This death is our privilege! It belongs to the people who live inside the police barricades.’ ‘But those lines were drawn arbitrarily,’ says Frank. ‘They could have been a block further or closer in each direction, and the plane hit the neighbourhood randomly, did not choose to fall here.’ The policeman hits Frank again. The neighbours put away their video-recorders. A group of children chants: It is our luck to have been spared, and if it is our luck, then we must be deserving!’ And Frank asks them, ‘And did my wife and daughter deserve to die?’ And the children chant, ‘It is our luck to have been spared, and if it is our luck, then we must be deserving!’ In this mild reverie the street disappeared for a moment, but the trance passed, and Frank settled again into his body.

  They walked together, like a crowd on its way into a stadium, with the occasional strangers trading speculations. Someone, anyone, could have lost friends in the crash, all those families wiped out, and told Frank that he had no special claims on anyone’s sympathy tonight, but no one did. Well, it’s a neighbourhood, thought Frank, and who really knows anyone in their neighbourhood, except the kids? And these days, aren’t the kids told not to ride their bikes too far?

  They wore T-shirts with the pictures of the famous, or dirty jokes. A man wearing a ‘SHIT HAPPENS’ T-shirt carried a small video-tape camera. Frank wanted to ask him if this was the Hi-8 kind, with the improved resolution that made the tapes almost broadcast quality. Frank had been thinking of getting a new camera, but he supposed there was no need for it now. There would be no more birthday parties filled with screaming little girls.

  They came to the barrier, and the man who believed in God showed his driver’s licence to the policeman standing guard. Frank saw the licence; the man’s name was Tim Westerberg, and his address was 2851 Cohassett. They were on the 2700 block, and there were no houses standing from the middle of the block on for the next two blocks, on the other side of the street, which was odd-numbered. The policeman stepped aside. Frank passed him. Now he was in the zone of devastation. They turned at the corner, one house away, and saw it all.

  There was an engine in the middle of the street, the blades of the fan six feet long. Pieces of wing were on the sidewalk. There were suitcases everywhere, spilled from the burst containers. And the shells of the houses. The friendly smell of wet charcoal. Bad smells, carpets made of nylon, and pressboard kitchen cabinets cured in formaldehyde had burned. Cars had burned, and there was that gasoline smell, and the paint in garages too, and the stacks of bundled newspapers, most of which had not burned, and were now soaked from the spray of fire trucks. And the smell of the airplane’s burned fuel, heavier than gasoline smells, or was it broader? All those smells, layered like a rotting club sandwich (or pastry? a pastry). It was an exciting smell. Yes, and wasn’t part of the thrill the knowledge that each breath carried with it a little lung damage? Frank had heard of the sweet smell of decaying bodies, or worse, a disgusting smell, from the expl
oding intestines, the rot of meat-eaters. He looked for that smell here, but the bodies were only thirty hours old, and the weather had been cool.

  The circling helicopters threw their searchlights on the ground. Two trucks from the county animal shelter, and men and women, Mexicans and blacks. They carried baited traps, cages with doors that dropped down. A few cats had already been picked up. A woman from the neighbourhood quarrelled with one of the women from the shelter. Frank heard her wail, ‘Every day is Auschwitz for the animals.’

  They came to the end of the block, and another police barricade, yellow tape strung between Stop signs on opposite corners, with a warning not to cross the line. There was a water-filled crater in the middle of the street. One of the neighbourhood experts explained. ‘He must have been alive, because you can see that he was trying to set the plane down in the middle of the street, but his wing hit the ground, and the plane spun over to the left, here, and then cartwheeled along the block.’

  Someone else said, ‘He could have already been dead.’

  ‘No,’ said the first man, ‘because he was lined up with the street.’

  ‘That’s just chance,’ said someone else.

  ‘Well, I would prefer to see some heroics in this,’ said the first man. ‘It gives me comfort. Is that all right? Does anybody object to my wanting something positive in all of this? One thing? Is that too much to ask for?’

  ‘But why?’ asked a woman. ‘What difference does it make? They’re all dead.’

  Steam rose from the burned houses, where the helicopters had dumped water the night before. Large lights on tall cranes were set around the block. There were few shadows inside the light.

  Two blocks is really a small area, thought Frank. When you take the houses away, what do you have? The area of a football field. You can build thirty houses on a football field. We live in such small rooms. Fifty feet from the front of the house to the back door is generous. He thought of his parents’ house in Bel Air. But that was twenty thousand square feet. These houses were probably two thousand square feet. Yes, his parents had a large house. Even Julia Abarbanel liked it. The Abarbanels were just far enough outside the Gale orbit not to feel so threatened by the move to the condominium on Wilshire. Julia’s father owned a printing business. They made most of their money printing annual reports for big companies. How large was their house? Frank wondered. Eight thousand square feet? It was something like that. And they were temple Jews. He was the president of his synagogue. Her father was an angry man with a good sense of humour, and because he dressed neatly and walked quickly, with the happy look of a man delighted by the attention paid him in the performance of his responsibilities, he was often mistaken, by Jews, when on vacation, for a doctor. Julia’s sour contentiousness, her tendency to quarrel, was a misreading of her father’s wit. He was a bore about Israel, and naturally she took the Palestinian side, but without any effort. What she knew of their issues she had learned from newspapers and television; she was not full of facts. And for this her father seemed to hate her a little, that she could not muster an argument worthy of his intelligence. The Abarbanels and the Gales shared Passover seders a few times, and at the last one they had held in Bel Air, as conversation wafted into the usual mess of gossip and movie reviews, Julia’s father banged his spoon on the table, to remind everyone that this was not a family reunion but a religious service. Maybe I am praising him too much, thought Frank. Was he really so spiritual, or did he just like to drag everyone into a wallow of tribal self-congratulation? Maybe Julia was sour because she had seen through her father’s pretensions, including his charade as cardiologist, and hated him, and her mother, his aunt, for denying her, as a child, even the strength to make a strong enough character so that her parents’ flaws would not remind her so terribly of her own failings, so that she could make of herself something in the world, which she had not yet done, and knew that she would never. Aaaah, I should have just fucked her, thought Frank.

  A large van drove past them and stopped before the crater, where the pavement was shredded by the plane’s impact. The driver got out of the van and opened the back, and then he leaned against the truck, to smoke a cigar.

  Men in orange jump-suits, from the coroner’s office, came across a back yard and around the rubble of a demolished house. There were five teams of them carrying black zippered sacks with bodies inside. From where he stood, Frank could not see them load the bodies into the truck.

  Someone behind him said, ‘Yesterday I saw them plucking a few out of a tree.’

  Someone else said, ‘They say a lot of them aren’t in one piece. A lot of people in the plane got shredded up, and a lot of people on the ground too, and were burnt up.’

  Someone else said, ‘A lot of times people just die from smoke inhalation, but the bodies aren’t really all that damaged. On the ground. In the fires in the houses, when the plane hit the houses, and the fires, what caused the fires in some of the houses wasn’t getting hit, it was the fires from the house next door, and that caught, and then on, to the next house, the whole block, like that. And that fire was hot.’

  Frank wanted to get beyond this final barricade. He left the group and walked back up the block into a shadow. A coroner’s truck came by, slowly, and Frank ran beside it, and then behind it, across the street and into the debris of the first burned house on the block. The damp charcoal squeaked under his feet, like new snow.

  He was able to walk through five houses, or what had been five houses. Nobody stopped him, nobody saw him. I’m invisible, he thought. He kicked a pile of bricks, and saw a metal bed-frame. He walked on, and passed a vinyl cylinder, someone’s record collection, fused by the heat. Rooms are so small, he thought, houses are really so small, compared to the size of the world. He picked up a soup ladle and then put it down, having learned nothing from it.

  I miss them. Right now I miss them. I have no one to share this with. He watched himself have this feeling, and wanted to banish the watcher, just to be unhappy about it all, without knowing that he was unhappy.

  A luggage container, resting on its top, was just behind the base of a fireplace. This was what was left of the wall of a house; the chimney was gone, the wall was gone, the second floor was gone, but here was the fireplace, in all its annoying resilience. A thin-walled metal luggage container lay next to it, upside down, the cargo spilled out in a horrifying parody of cornucopia. And here was another pile of suitcases in front of him. Nothing had shaken the luggage tags off. Someone would pick them up soon, and then one day, in a week, two weeks, the airline would call the relatives of the dead, and the suitcases would be returned to them. Someone would have to unpack each bag, each bathing suit, each pair of sandals, each silly T-shirt, each tube of sun-tan lotion. Maybe I’ll just give them to the Salvation Army without opening anything up. Closer to the container, he saw his black suitcase on top of Anna’s.

  He stepped on a sports bag made of rip-resistant nylon, bending a tennis racquet. He threw aside a make-up case in the way, and tugged at the handle to his bag. There was his name! And below his bag, there was Anna’s, with the piece of red yarn she tied to the handle, to make it easier to find. It was like seeing someone famous, he was almost dissolved by the excitement, the shock.

  He pulled the suitcases out of the container and threw them on the ground. They were in perfect shape, there was no sign of damage. He smelled them. They didn’t even have the aroma of smoke and kerosene.

  He opened Anna’s bag, and when he did, he was caught in the light from a helicopter a few hundred feet above him. At the same time a National Guardsman called out to him, and Frank turned and saw that he was in the man’s gunsights. He was told to put his hands up, and he did.

  ‘My name is Frank Gale,’ he said. ‘My wife and daughter were on the plane. I just found her suitcase. Isn’t that incredible? I can’t believe it.’ He raised his hands, slowly.

  He was told to walk forward. Two police cars came down the block.

  ‘Really,’
said Frank. “They were on the plane. I came down to ...’ But Frank couldn’t finish his sentence. Why did he come down here? he wondered. To find their bodies. Could he say that? Or just to see. Wasn’t that enough, could he be arrested for wanting to see? He was told to put his hands on the police car, and when he did they were pulled behind his back, and then a hard plastic band was pulled tight around his wrists. He was pushed against the warm hood of the police car. The engine was running. He had never listened to a car so closely.

  6

  Among the Dead

  He was handcuffed by a black policeman who shoved him into the back of a police car. He knew there would be no trouble once he got to the station; his first call would be to Lowell, who would call the airline, and Frank would be released before the morning. He was afraid of having his picture taken with a number across his chest. Now he would have an arrest record. What would be the charge? They would accuse him of looting, even though his hands were clean of any of the soot that covered anything that might have been worth taking, if anything worth taking had not been burned, or soaked with water and ashes.

  He did not want to tell the cop that his wife and daughter had been on the plane. He felt bad that already he had won so much sympathy for this, that he had earned interest on the deposit of their lives. In the burned-over houses he thought of the pain of everyone who had died, everyone who had heard the engines falling so quickly and so closely, who thought, This is for me, and then thought, No. When you see it coming, is there any time to say to yourself, calmly, ‘So this is it’? And then the plane hit, broke up, all those pieces, this enormous pomegranate bursting with human seeds and suitcases and first-class seats with their reclining backs and the video-tape machines for the in-flight movie and hundreds of miniature vodka bottles and fiery jet fuel and wall modules and bulkheads, and killed them. How odd for a ball of fire to suck all the air from where you live, and then burn it all. He asked the cop, ‘What’s the worst way to die?’