‘Yes, we had a lot of insurance with him. I did.’
‘You better call him,’ said Brenda. ‘Maybe your brother should call him.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ said Lowell.
‘Why?’ asked Frank.
Brenda kept her stare. ‘Because if you call him, he’ll think if s a ghost.’
‘Even if he doesn’t believe in ghosts,’ said Geoffrey.
‘People get heart attacks that way,’ said Brenda.
‘What’s his number?’ asked Lowell. He took a pen from his jacket, and then a little notebook he always carried.
‘I don’t know,’ said Frank. ‘I’ll call him, I think I should.’
‘You don’t need to,’ said Lowell.
‘Let your brother call,’ said Brenda. ‘It would be a blessing, for your friend to hear about this from your brother. Then you could call him. You could even be in the room with him.’
‘That’s a great idea,’ said Lowell. The issue of Mark Sifka was clearly his first relief from the catastrophe in three days, he had a focus for his anger that did not call out for more anger, but for compassion, and at the same time gave him the privilege of belonging to the heart of the story, to be a part of the disaster. ‘Let’s go upstairs.’
‘Can I ask one question?’ said Brenda.
Frank said yes.
‘How much were they insured for?’
‘That’s kind of a personal question,’ said Frank.
‘Listen,’ said Lowell, ‘we’re all going through this together, it may help them to know.’
‘My wife was insured for one million dollars. I was insured for two million. The baby wasn’t insured at all.’
‘Of course not,’ said Brenda.
‘Well,’ said Frank, trying to stop all of this.
Geoffrey offered his hand. Frank took it, and held on. ‘You know/ said Geoffrey, ‘I have to say you seem a little ahead of yourself.’
‘How so?’ asked Frank.
‘I think you’ve raced a little too quickly from anger into depression. Maybe you need to go back to denial for a bit. After the period where you tell yourself it isn’t true, you get really mad. I think you need to be really mad at the airline, at God, at everything.’
‘Maybe,’ said Frank. He thought this might be true and, thinking back, could not recall any real anger yet. So perhaps he was still denying.
‘Let’s go,’ said Lowell.
In the elevator Frank had a clear vision of what to do. When they got to the room, he called information in Los Angeles, and asked for, and spelled, Mark Sifka. There was only one Sifka, an M. Sifka. That was Mary, of course. He then made up a number and wrote it down on the hotel’s memo pad. He gave it to Lowell. Lowell dialled the number.
Someone answered, and Lowell asked for Mark Sifka. Lowell then said, ‘Are you sure?’ And then he read the number that he had dialled. He had dialled correctly. He thanked the person and hung up. ‘I got a wrong number.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Frank. ‘We’ll call him later.’
‘No,’ said Lowell, dialling again. Then he said, ‘Yes, I’d like the number for Mark Sifka, please. In Los Angeles, or West Long Angeles.’ After a moment he was told, as Frank knew, that there was only one M. Sifka. ‘That’s it.’
This time he dialled again, and this time when the phone was answered he said, ‘Is Mark Sifka there?’ There was a pause. Frank couldn’t hear the other’s voice. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Lowell, I called information for Mark Sifka, and they gave me this number. I’m sorry to bother you.’ He hung up. Then he dialled again. He looked at Frank while he waited for someone to answer.
‘What happened?’ asked Frank.
‘The wrong Sifka. I’m calling Karen.’ Karen was Frank’s secretary. ‘She’ll have the number in your address book.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Frank. ‘I just met him, I mean we just started doing business together. I don’t think I ever gave her the number.’
‘Jesus, Frank.’ Meaning: what kind of a businessman are you? Meaning: is this chaos, this disorganization, typical of how you run things when I am not around? Can I trust you?
‘Sifka’s not going to do anything with his company’s money until someone files a claim.’
Lowell moved away from the phone. Frank was safe. Then the phone rang. Frank rushed for it, in case Mary Sifka had found him. He didn’t want Lowell to ask who was calling, and hear her last name.
‘Hello,’ said Frank.
‘May I speak to Frank Gale?’
‘Who’s calling?’
‘This is Ron Godfrey.’
‘What is this about?’ asked Frank.
‘Is this Mr Gale?’ Neither would give anything away.
T need to know what this is about?’
‘I was calling to tell him how terribly sorry I am for him.’
‘Are you with the airline or the coroner’s office?’
‘I’m with the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego bureau. I wanted to talk to Frank Gale.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is this Mr Gale?’
‘Yes.’
‘I just wanted to tell you how terribly sorry I am for your great loss.’ It was interesting to Frank, this new perspective, to be in the centre of things, and see how human everyone was, how much trouble they had saying what they meant, how they lied to protect themselves from the shame they felt at the things they did in order to survive. Here was a reporter, a man doing his job, and his job called for him to speak to the victims of cruel fate. And he was repeating himself, because it hurt him to violate the victim’s privacy, but he persisted, because that was the nature of his job. Frank thought of sad-eyed Republicans, and how they live in Olympian distance from the mob, which gives them greater knowledge of the mob. And if knowledge is power, to know the mob is to control the mob, and so Frank would be able to control this reporter. Frank would become a Republican.
‘Yes,’ said Frank, again. Lowell asked him who it was. Frank covered the mouthpiece and whispered, ‘Newspaper.’
‘You know that you were listed as having been on the plane.’
He waited five seconds, which is a long time to be silent on the phone. ‘Yes.’ Leave him hanging.
‘We understand that you just missed the plane. That they took your ticket downstairs, but they made a mistake, and you were at the gate as the plane was pulling away.’
Another five seconds. He counted to himself, and then just made a sound. ‘Mmm-hmmm.’ Frank didn’t even have to say anything now.
‘I should call back,’ said Ron Godfrey. Whatever he had expected, this wasn’t it. He was probably used to hysteria, someone to whom he could offer comfort. But Frank would accept none from him.
Another long wait. ‘Yes,’ said Frank.
‘Maybe there’s someone in the family I can talk to,’ said Godfrey.
‘No, my family is dead.’ He said this quickly, without hesitation. Then he held his hand over the phone, because he wanted to let out the laugh that was building inside of him. He wanted to cackle into the phone.
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called.’
Frank said nothing, but breathed into the phone. What did Ron Godfrey think of this?
‘Mr Gale, are you all right?’
‘What do you think?’ and then he hung up.
‘What did he say?’ asked Lowell.
‘He wants to know how I feel about missing the plane. Maybe I should have told him the truth.’
‘Did he know about the arrest?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You should probably talk to them, just say something short and don’t think about it.’
‘But why?’
‘Because you got arrested. If you just go along with them, you’ll disappear in all of this, but if you cause them trouble, they’ll come after you, they’ll think you have something to hide, they’ll make a freak out of you.’
‘How did you get to be such an expert in this?’
&n
bsp; ‘I read the papers.’
‘Does it have an effect on a lawsuit?’
Why?’
‘Because that’s why you want me to play along. Not to hurt a lawsuit.’
‘Maybe a little.’
There was another phone call, from Dale Beltran, the grief counsellor.
‘Mr Gale, I’ve just been contacted by the county coroner’s office. They’re ready to begin the identification of the bodies.’
‘I’m ready,’ said Frank.
‘But I have to warn you,’ he said, ‘not all the bodies are ready now. You may have to go back a second time.’
‘That’s OK,’ said Frank. ‘It’s something I need to do.’
‘Yes,’ said Beltran. ‘The denial of the reality of the situation only prolongs the healing process. At the same time, some of the more gruesome aspects of the results of a crash can be so horrifying that they linger in the mind, and we develop a morbid obsession with what we’ve seen. Then we exhibit the symptoms of posttraumatic stress syndrome. And that requires an even longer time to heal.’
‘So I shouldn’t go.’
‘It’s your choice, Frank.’
I’m coming. And I’ll bring my brother.’
‘That’s a good idea, Frank.’
Everyone gathered in the command centre, where the chefs stood behind a display of salads, fruits and cheeses. Bettina and her deputies, Chris and Kelly, handed red passes to the mourners, tickets for the transportation.
Frank and Lowell joined the crowd. People talked quietly, Lowell joined in a few little chats, but Frank said nothing. The names of a few lawyers were mentioned.
Downstairs at the hotel entrance, the group was led to a tour bus.
‘Where’s the limousine?’ asked Lowell. ‘What limousine?’ asked Bettina.
‘You promised us a limousine would take us to the coroner.’
‘I said there’d be limos to the memorial service, not the coroner.’
Frank touched Lowell’s shoulder. ‘That’s what she said.’
They got on the bus. Frank recognized in Lowell’s hesitation upon entering the bus, and seeing the relatives of the dead in their printed T-shirts, a little fear of contamination from the mob. The bus could have been carrying tourists, nothing about the way they looked as a group, except for their eyes, most of them red, tired, swollen, suggested the terrible landscapes waiting for them. Lowell’s pause at the top of the stair, which could have been read by some on the bus as the normal surveillance for a good seat, was a second too long, and his dismay was obvious. Frank whispered to him, ‘We don’t need the limo. Let’s sit down.’
There was another bus behind them, and the mournful caravan left the hotel, the grieving survivors shielding their eyes from the press. The paper would report on the GRIM TASK.
The bus drove through the entrance to the naval yards, and the mood of the passengers changed as they came to the docks. None of them could continue to play with their reflections in the windows, as the road took them through the shadow of an aircraft carrier. The driver reached for his microphone and announced, over a public address system that was surprisingly clear and free of static, ‘That’s the Kennedy. Thirty-five hundred sailors call the Kennedy home for voyages that take them out to sea for as long as a year. The refrigerators in the Kennedy are ten times the size of this bus.’ Then he pointed out a destroyer, and a small house on a hill where Douglas Mac Arthur had been billeted. Across the bay was the Coronado Island, ‘and that grand old lady, the Hotel Del Coronado, where Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon made Some Like It Hot.’ Lowell rolled his eyes, but Frank was grateful for the information.
At the end of a long pier was a refrigerated warehouse that the navy had given to the coroner’s office. Bettina Welch made a little speech about following the coroners, and staying together as a group. Frank wanted to say, ‘Doesn’t this feel like a high-school field trip?’ But he thought no one would appreciate the humour.
A delegation of coroners met the buses, and the mourners gathered in smaller clusters around their assigned guides. They were given heavy white jackets, and taken inside.
The warehouse was cold, like a day early in the winter, before the snow, after the first real freeze, and the jackets were welcome. Frank played with his buttons but saw that the workers in the room kept theirs open. So he kept his jacket open too, and came to appreciate the chill.
His guide, Dr Kashiwa, told them that the GRIM BUSINESS of identifying the dead took place around the clock. For some of the dead, identification would be impossible. Dr Kashiwa described the condition of the bodies in the cockpit as being ‘the consistency of strawberry jam’. Some of the dead on the ground may have been incinerated when the fuel tanks of the left wing exploded in a MASSIVE FIREBALL. Several large sections of the fuselage remained intact, including the rear of the plane. The pilot had turned off the Fasten Seatbelt signs, and though it was unlikely that many passengers were in the single aisle of the 737, most of the passengers had unbuckled themselves. As the plane crashed, they were tossed out of their seats.
The coroner told them, ‘Even with their seatbelts on, the bodies were not protected from violent distress. Some seatbelts held firm while the passengers they embraced were torn in half by the force of the crash. Unfortunately, some of you will have to come back here again, but our systems are not yet so refined that we can tell you in advance who is ready for identification and who is not.’
The group came to a table of small arms and legs. How could he choose among them, which were his daughter’s?
A few sharp chemical smells rose from the tables of body parts in the large, cold room, partly of chlorine, from the bleach with which the floor was washed, and partly from whatever soup they sprayed over the tables. A row of a dozen left arms was being matched with right arms. Many of the dead lost their feet as the metal sheared their legs. Right feet and left feet, on separate tables. Frank learned that most clothing was burned off, or blown off, as the bodies tumbled.
Though the attendants washed and drained the blood from the arms and feet, pieces of legs, the torsos in shallow plastic caskets, they could not erase the burns, the deep gashes, and the disgusting mutilations within mutilations, the fingerless hands without arms, like chicken breasts ready for the frying pan, which Frank could identify only because someone had collected these puffy shards on one long tray, unmistakable with their stumps of wrist or thumb. And on every piece of flesh someone had taped a strip of paper with computer bar-coding, so that as each piece was identified, the system would eventually reconstruct as much of the body as possible. The computers knew where each piece of a body had been found, and then to which bin it had been remanded.
‘The reconstruction will be simple,’ said Dr Kashiwa. ‘After the crash we laid a detailed grid over the entire crash zone. Each body, or each body part, was then labelled according to the grid, so that we will be able to simulate, precisely, the dissemination of the bodies across the crash zone, and since we know the seat assigned to each passenger, eventually the computers will be able to replay the entire crash, in any speed we want, and we will know exactly how each person was affected by the destruction of the plane.’
They all died, thought Frank. That’s how they were affected. And those on the ground too. And I was affected, but if I say that, they’ll make fun of me.
‘It’s amazing, isn’t it?’ said someone else. ‘What they can do. The crash won’t have been in vain.’
‘Yes,’ said a man, ‘they’ll have the whole crash on computer, and they’ll know how the plane broke apart, which will tell them what they have to do to strengthen the next generation of aircraft.’
‘That’s her,’ someone cried, and everyone watched a dark-haired woman in her twenties as a coroner covered a body on a steel table. Frank wondered who she had seen, a sister or a mother. The woman seemed too young to have lost a daughter on the flight, since Acapulco was not a destination for teenagers travelling alone, or even in groups with other teena
gers. Unless of course the woman had found her own three-year-old, who had been on the plane with the woman’s ex-husband, who had visitation rights this week, and he was taking his kid on a trip where he could let her hang out by the pool during the day, and then at night he could get her a baby-sitter while he went out looking for action. So it could be a little girl, thought Frank. But I doubt it. The story would have been in the news, and so far nothing has taken the spotlight from me. So I’m still the most famous person in the disaster.
Everyone handling the bodies wore long rubber aprons and heavy rubber gloves, to protect themselves, the coroner said, from the threat of contamination with plague-infested blood. Was there a bucket with penises? Frank wondered. Or were there two trays, hidden even from this room of total exposure, marked ‘PELVIS: MEN’ and ‘PELVIS: WOMEN’?
In another room, jewellery. Plastic envelopes, each with a barcode tag. Every fingerprint had been taken from every hand or finger recovered. Teeth were being photographed and jaws were being X-rayed. The names of doctors and dentists had been taken from next of kin. Frank was asked and gave the names. And there were rows of computers linked to each other, sharing all of this information. What might have taken a month only a few years ago could be accomplished in twenty-four hours now, said Kashiwa.
The teams of coroners assigned reconciled all the pieces with each other, to be separated later into their own bins and stacked on shelves. Then three special machines, robots, now sitting idle in a corner of the huge room, would be programmed by the computers to roam the aisles, collecting the separate pieces from the shelves on one side of the room to stack them, body by individual body, on the other side of the room, leaving the job to a few workers of putting all the mangled pieces into their final containers, into their coffins.
Imagine the destruction to a body, to a face, exploded out of an airplane, and bounced against the roof of a house, or slammed into a chimney. What happens to a ten-year-old when he’s blasted through a hole in the wall, and then a thin sheet of metal from the plane’s tail catches him across the shoulders? How many pieces are left? What remains?
Among the Dead Page 16