Among the Dead

by Michael Tolkin

‘How do you know that?’ asked their mother.

  ‘It says so in the letter.’

  ‘So that’s what he was telling hi£ wife. Maybe he knew that someone was about to tell her about it, or else he suspected that she knew, so he was making a pre-emptive strike against her accusing him.’

  So this is where my mind comes from, thought Frank. From my mother, from the way her brain works and thinks about things.

  ‘I think he was being sincere,’ said his father.

  ‘Why is that?’ asked Frank.

  ‘It’s just a feeling. He wouldn’t have named her if it was still going on.’

  ‘Good point!’ shouted Lowell, in triumph. ‘He’s right, isn’t he, Mom?’ Lowell was glad to see his father outwit his mother.

  ‘Probably,’ she said.

  ‘Probably,’ his father said, repeating the word to show his frustration with her, for refusing to accept that he was right, that he had to be right.

  ‘He’s right, Mom,’ said Frank.

  ‘It’s not important,’ she said. ‘Let’s not talk about it any more. The whole thing is very depressing.’

  Frank wanted to ask her to divide the depression pie into sections, the size of each piece corresponding to the percentage she would assign to the different causes of the depression, so many degrees of depression for the general misery generated by the loss of daughter-in-law and granddaughter, so many degrees of depression generated by the son’s remarkably bizarre grief, so many degrees of depression generated by the continuous humiliation of living in a condominium instead of a mansion. He imagined the graphic rendering of this pie, each section shaded to give the impression of three dimensions. The Los Angeles Times could print this pie chart every day, allowing the world to record the changes in the marketplace of his mother’s emotions. Would there be a small wedge under the heading of ‘Miscellaneous Annoyances’, to cover such daily sources of pain as the publication of a mistress’s name? And would there be a futures market in which speculators could bet on the likelihood of certain minute problems becoming major issues deserving of their own pieces? The letter today means nothing more than the usual events of the unmerciful world (arson, rape, death squads, political scandals, serial murders, child molestations, the embezzlement of pension funds), but tomorrow, or even later today, when Frank’s name had been broadcast into the ether, the letter’s slice might swing past 180 degrees, might go as high as three-quarters of the whole pie, could even become, for a day, the entire pie, in which any other causes for unhappiness will have been so occluded as to be left statistically insignificant, or converted to crust, for statistical accuracy.

  And what of his mother’s rage when she recognized the extent of the shock to her life from the letter? Nothing would ever be the same for her. Nothing would ever be the same for the family. Would anyone blame her if she killed herself? Would anyone be surprised if the whole event ended when the Gales laced their pudding with poison and died together, dying of shame?

  As they left the coffee shop, they were approached by two men, one black, one white.

  ‘Mr Gale?’ said the black man.

  ‘Yes, Frank.’

  ‘Dave Armitage, and Bill Brewer, N.T.S.B.’ He showed a badge. ‘May we talk to you privately?’

  Frank looked to Lowell for help.

  ‘You better go with them,’ said Lowell.

  ‘I’d like my brother with me,’ said Frank.

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Lowell, ‘you can go without me.’

  ‘But what if I need you?’ asked Frank.

  ‘The days of rubber hoses are over,’ said Brewer. ‘We’re not going to hurt you.’

  ‘So if those days were still here, you’d be working me over?’ asked Frank. ‘Lowell, we really do need a public relations person now.’

  ‘Too late for that,’ said Lowell.

  ‘The hotel’s manager has given us his office,’ said Brewer. ‘We can go there.’

  Lowell told Frank he would get the car, and Frank could meet him outside when the interview was finished. They led him to a room behind the front desk. ‘So how can I help you?’ asked Frank. ‘Why did you visit the crash site?’ asked Armitage.

  ‘I wanted to see it.’

  ‘You’re the only one who went,’ said Brewer.

  ‘There were a lot of people there,’ said Frank.

  ‘None of the survivors went. You were the only one of the survivors who went.’

  ‘I can’t speak for anyone else.’

  ‘You haven’t joined the lawsuit either. That’s a form of speaking for someone, isn’t it? It’s a form of criticism, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is my lawsuit your business?’ asked Frank.

  ‘What were you looking for when you were arrested?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Frank.

  ‘But you found something.’

  ‘Yes, I found my wife’s suitcase.’

  ‘You had no business looking for it.’

  ‘I wasn’t really thinking about what was right or wrong at the time.’

  ‘When did that start?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not thinking about what was right or wrong.’

  ‘I don’t know how to answer that question.’

  ‘Try.’

  ‘Can I have a lawyer?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Berberian or Dessick?’ said Brewer. It might have been a joke, but he wasn’t smiling.

  ‘You were looking for the letter, weren’t you, Frank?’ asked Armitage.

  ‘What letter?’

  ‘Do you want to take that back? Do you want us to pretend that you don’t know what we’re talking about?’

  Brewer answered a knock on the door. He opened it only a crack, but Frank could see into the hall, where a few photographers were there, with reporters. Armitage said, ‘Soon,’ and closed the door.

  Frank said no.

  Armitage asked again, ‘Were you looking for the letter, Frank?’

  ‘No,’ he said. Then he added, with an attitude of what he hoped was reckless defiance, ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘But you knew it was in the suitcase.’

  ‘I packed it in my own.’

  ‘That’s not where we found it.’

  ‘She must have moved it.’

  ‘Anything is possible,’ said Armitage.

  Everyone was quiet for about a minute.

  ‘What are you really trying to get me to say?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Are you going back to Los Angeles today?’ asked Brewer.

  Frank said he was.

  ‘See you there,’ said Armitage, and then everyone left the room.

  There were photographers in the lobby, taking his picture.

  Someone asked if he had spoken yet to Mary Sifka. Someone else asked, ‘Where is she?’

  A reporter called out, ‘Did your wife read the letter?’

  Lowell’s Explorer was at the kerb. Frank ran to it as his father held the door open for him. Copper-haired Brenda and sad Geoffrey were putting their bags into a taxi, and Brenda cursed him as he ran past. ‘I hope you haven’t fucked this up for all of us!’

  Frank pulled his door shut, and as Lowell drove away, with the press taking pictures of them, Frank looked back at the hotel, trying to fix it so he would remember the place for ever. Was there such a thing as the mind’s eye, he wondered, something the vaguely mystical often talked about, the thing inside that is the true eternal self that controls destiny, that turns wishes into reality? Of course, the hotel was like eight hundred others just like it around the country, but he could fix the shapes of the clouds behind it, the usual zoo shapes of course, a few big puffs, a few small ones, animals, a castle, and a profile of Sherlock Holmes. He closed his eyes and saw the tan building, the two wings visible from this side with their slight angle embracing the thin strip of garden between the parking lot and the hotel. The cobbled pavement of the driveway underneath the archway to the lobby. The photographers and reporters hurrying away, off to deliver their video tapes or pro
cess their film. Frank wanted to remember them, and also the palm trees in the circular islands at the end of each row in the parking lot, and the twenty-passenger hotel bus that ferried businessmen to and from the airport, with the hotel’s name on both sides and the back. It was a stupid place, but Frank had felt deep emotions here, and so it was important to him. He opened and closed his eyes three times, taking in more space around the hotel, until the camera in his brain told him that the subject of the shot was too far away and would not register clearly on the emulsion of his memory. I will not forget this moment, thought Frank, I do not want to forget it.

  ‘There was never anyone named Mark Sifka, was there?’ asked Lowell.

  ‘No,’ said Frank.

  ‘You have made fools of us,’ said his mother.

  Frank didn’t say anything. He shut his eyes. He tried to remember what Anna and Madeleine looked like. He could picture their faces, but without emotions, like passport photographs. He tried to conjure an image of them smiling at him, but their smiles looked forced. Well, they are forced, he thought. I’m forcing them.

  They drove through the gates of the naval yards, and then to the cold warehouse. Lowell turned to Frank, and stared at him. The look meant: do you really want to go through with this? Frank replied by opening the car door and stepping out, wordlessly.

  ‘OK,’ said Lowell, matching him in this fabrication of manliness. As they walked away from the car, Lowell said, ‘I can’t believe what you’ve done to the family. I can’t imagine a way to make all of this better. In the old days, if they didn’t kill you for bringing on shame, you would have been banished from the kingdom.’

  They gave their names at the door. A medical corpsman from the National Guard took them into the main room.

  Everything inside was different. A cadre of robots were lined up by the wall, like golf carts in winter. The buckets of flesh were gone, and all that remained were a few hundred stainless steel caskets, some of them draped with American flags, lined up in five rows. There were other corpsmen leading the bereft through the rows. A casket in the middle of the room was opened for a woman Frank did not recognize: she was fat, in her thirties, and she must have lived on Cohassett Street. She looked inside and nodded her head, and the casket was closed.

  Frank and Lowell were led to two caskets in the second row. ‘They’re all the same size,’ said Frank.

  ‘Yes,’ said the corpsman, ‘It’s the only size we have. You know, the military.’

  ‘Not much call for child size in the navy,’ said Frank.

  ‘No sir,’ said the corpsman.

  Frank stood by the first casket and put his hands behind his back, imitating something he thought was appropriately stoic, something that suited the room, the occasion, the rigid dignity of the silent robots.

  ‘Sir,’ said the corpsman, ‘your wife and daughter were in a plane that crashed. You know there were no survivors. We have done the best we could to maintain the physical integrity of the dead, as we found them, and to deliver the dead to these caskets with as much respect for their integrity as possible.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Frank.

  ‘He’s trying to tell you that it’s an ugly sight,’ said Lowell, with contempt.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said the corpsman.

  ‘I need to know.’

  ‘Sir, the bodies were hurt.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘There was fire.’ I know that.’

  ‘They were thrown against the ground from a great height.’

  ‘I’d like to see.’

  ‘They were identifiable only through tissue typing and medical and dental records.’

  ‘And you’ve done a remarkable job.’

  ‘Try to remember them as they were, sir.’

  ‘I do that.’

  ‘This is your wife, sir,’ said the corpsman, as he opened the first casket. Lowell grabbed Frank’s arm. A barrel of meat, with an arm and hand attached, lay on the bed of black plastic lining.

  ‘What happened to her head?’ asked Frank.

  ‘We have allocated to the proper casket, sir, every part that could be identified. Obviously with her fingerprints we were able to identify her. There were so many loose body parts, sir, you understand.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Frank, who understood the enormous difficulty of putting every last scrap of a person into one box.

  ‘But the hand, sir, the fingerprints match.’

  ‘Close it,’ said Lowell. ‘This is ridiculous. This is sick. This is more of your sickness, Frank.’

  ‘Sir?’ asked the corpsman, looking to Frank for the final word.

  ‘So what happened to her?’ asked Frank.

  ‘By the looks of it she was cut by debris.’

  ‘In the air or on the ground?’

  ‘When the plane hit it rolled a few times. That’s when it blew up. She could have been thrown out of the cabin and into the air, and then been cut down by whatever it was that hit her, before she came to rest. Or she could have been bounced on the ground a few times. She could have hit a chimney, or gone through a window.’

  ‘But you don’t know for sure,’ said Frank, not meaning to accuse, only to satisfy an assumption.

  ‘We’ll know soon. They can make a pretty close guess. They start with a computer model of the plane at impact, knowing where everyone was, and then a computer model of the plane and the bodies when all movement had stopped. When people sitting next to each other are scattered, we get a sense of the forces within the crash, the different directions of those forces.’

  ‘My daughter was sitting next to my wife. Is it the same with her? Is she this badly cut up?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. I haven’t seen everybody.’

  Lowell grabbed Frank’s hand and held it in both of his. ‘If you ask to have that casket opened up, Frank, I can’t be responsible for what happens to you. It would be like trying to stop history.’

  ‘No one is forcing you to look,’ said Frank.

  ‘I don’t even want to know about it.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘No, I don’t even want to know about you knowing about it. Once I know what you have in your mind, then I have it in my mind, and I don’t want it there.’

  ‘I can handle it,’ said Frank.

  ‘You’re thinking only of yourself,’ said Lowell. ‘And if that’s how you want it ...’

  ‘What?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Lowell.

  Frank turned to the corpsman and told him to open the other casket. ‘I want to see my daughter.’

  When the casket was opened, Lowell hit Frank on the shoulder, hard. ‘That’s the end, Frank. That’s the end of you. You’re fired.’

  Her face was gone, from the jaw to the top of her head. A brain pan, scraped clean, with her dark hair still fixed to the neck. Her left arm below the elbow was missing, and her right hand was smashed flat, and her knees were almost gone. A little mole on her shoulder. That’s her.

  The corpsman studied her. ‘She must have been found in her seat. Some seats blew out of the plane as it broke up, and most of the people in them came out of the seatbelts, but I don’t think your daughter was one of them.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘The seat rolled on the ground, and that’s how she lost her face and knees, and I guess her hands were outside the seat, or something caught them. I think that’s what happened.’

  Frank touched his dead daughter’s hair. Hair is made of dead cells, he thought, and that’s why, dead, her hair feels no different than when she was alive. Do the worms feed on hair?

  ‘You can close it,’ he told the corpsman.

  The corpsman thanked him, and he asked Frank to sign a release form, which attested to Frank’s identification of the two bodies.

  They were told that the caskets would be delivered to a location to be determined, in Los Angeles, tomorrow or the next day. After that the caskets could be picked up by a mortuary and buried.

  Lowell asked
about the funeral in Los Angeles.

  ‘What funeral, sir?’

  ‘I heard there was supposed to be a big funeral, in LA, for everyone.’

  ‘I’m just based here, Mr Gale. I wouldn’t know about Los Angeles.’

  ‘Mom and Dad,’ said Lowell, meaning Mom and Dad are waiting for us, and we’ve taken too long on a bad mission.

  And so they went outside, and back to the car, and drove home to Los Angeles. They listened to the radio a few times, looking for news of the crash. The lead story was the search for Mary Sifka. By now everyone knew she was married, and where she worked. Reporters were camped outside her door, but no one was home. They went to her husband’s office, but he was gone, and no one knew where to find him. The police worried that he might have murdered her and then killed himself, out of shame. On the radio stations where people call and let their opinions be heard on the air, everyone had an opinion about Mary Sifka and the letter.

  One caller said that the crash was God’s punishment against the adulterers. Another caller defended Mary Sifka. ‘The man who wrote the letter lied to his wife, and he was probably lying to Mary Sifka. Maybe she didn’t even know if he was married. I think it was wrong of the press to publish her name.’

  ‘Finally,’ said Frank, meaning: here’s an intelligent person who has perfectly defined the real scandal of this sordid episode in all our lives, that none of this was anyone else’s business but mine.

  ‘Frank, I want to listen,’ said Lowell.

  ‘And besides,’ said Frank, ignoring his brother, feeling rather giddy about ploughing ahead against everyone’s hatred of him, ‘I never lied to Mary Sifka.’

  ‘But you lied to your wife, didn’t you?’ asked his mother.

  Lowell grunted in approval.

  Frank felt a surge of blood in his cheeks. Was this the final embarrassment? No. Now anything could happen. His mother had caught him. She was right. He should have kept his mouth shut. And then, as though the blood in his flushed cheeks was at a boil, and the steam melted all of his good sense, a petulance that he knew was wrong, that he knew would make him look even worse, incompetent and stupid, but that he could not resist, forced him to say, ‘Well, I’m not joining the lawsuit.’

  After that, he was silent for the rest of the trip home, although no one asked him any questions.