Panorama

by Steve Kistulentz

  Cut to the New York–based anchorman giving the briefest possible introduction: “We go now to the crash site, on the outer edges of the Dallas–Fort Worth International airfield, where Graciela Martín is standing by.”

  In front of the truck, the reporter began her stand-up, with the tail-rudder section of the plane visible over her left shoulder and the bright American sunlight of the plains now fading into a more seasonally appropriate grayness. Her Michelangelo-veneered teeth glowed with such radiance that they looked almost blue under the camera light. “You are looking—” she started a second time and stopped herself; she had the nervous habit of smiling when reading copy over stories about flesh-eating bacteria, colleges struck with outbreaks of viral meningitis, tourists robbed and dismembered in Colombia, explosions in a corn elevator, forty-car pileups on the interstate, four promising teens killed in a crash involving alcohol and excessive speed. She was still smiling broadly, and someone in the control room said into their headset, “You better frame her up. Or give me some field shots. Don’t shoot that fucking smile talking about dead people.”

  She had it cold, first on the scene. The airport police had established their perimeter, which meant FBN would be the only team on site for at least the next hour. Her report went through the basics, Flight 503, departed earlier this afternoon from Salt Lake City. Obligingly, the broadcast monitor filled with reference shots: firemen milling around with no specific duties. This was a recovery operation, not a rescue now, an entirely different protocol. The reporter read what little copy she’d written down, then couldn’t figure out any exit line beyond “Back to you.”

  Max Peterson reset the situation, and the cameraman turned to record the departure of the first-responding engines and the firefighters stacking plastic-bagged bodies in an open field; the largest part of the fuselage had come to rest in the grazing lands of a ranch just off the flight path five miles to the west, and now the aircraft-rescue and firefighting teams stood around their equipment, wiping foreheads and cadging cigarettes, little left to their mission except the recovery of body parts and personal effects. Forty-seven wallets, twelve purses, carry-on bags, four laptop computers, an array of small electronic devices melted from the heat of impact’s fireball, one miniature replica license plate from the state of Utah, stamped with the name Gabe.

  Richard wasn’t really paying attention anymore; he stared at a shot from the still store, a briefcase with a doe-colored stuffed bear beside it. The monitor audio broadcast the anchor saying, “Here is what we know so far,” and Richard answered him half-aloud, “Nothing. We know nothing.”

  And nothing for him to do except head home.

  He turned his collar up and ventured to Pennsylvania Avenue. Finding the wide promenade empty save for the odd Metrobus and the white-and-red cars of the District police, he decided to walk until he reached a Metro station or spotted a roaming taxi.

  A plane crash was enough to shake anyone.

  Special report. Six blocks up Pennsylvania, Richard found himself ducking into a CVS drugstore for some Camel Lights, hard pack. When he was a kid, CVS had a more honest name, Peoples Drug, which seemed a perfect place—the only place—to buy cigarettes. Back outside, he struggled with the cellophane and foil of the pack, then tried to remember which pocket held his matches; halfway through the survey, he produced a single copy of his own business card from the right-hand pocket of his suit coat. A gift from Cadence. Richard MacMurray, Defender of the Republic.

  The card, his matches, the muck of subway fare cards and membership IDs that filled his wallet—his personal effects—were the sundries that defined who he was. He thought of the crash, how tonight workers would hit the grazing field under the glow of diesel-powered mercury lights to gather the surviving briefcases, shoes, earrings, and cuff links. Some unlucky relative would get them in the mail once the investigation was complete, another unwanted reminder of just how fleeting the optimism of a New Year truly was.

  One thought of Cadence and one unsatisfying cigarette, his first in a year and a day, and Richard found he had wandered west maybe a dozen blocks. At the gothic tower of the Old Post Office, he turned north, toward the welcoming cacophony of the subway. The morning’s weather had begun to turn. An insulating blanket of clouds rolled in from the west, dense, thick, a light gray that seemed more in tune with January, more in tune with his mood. She wouldn’t approve of the midday cigarette any more than she would approve of his morose mood, and he found himself wadding the pack into a ball and tossing it in one of the brown garbage barrels that stood sentry at the exit to the Metro Center station.

  As he turned, the eldest from a group of Japanese tourists huddled around a laminated map shyly approached Richard, seeking directions to the Smithsonian in fractured yet competent English.

  Richard took the map and turned it over and, through a combination of elementary sentences and Marcel Marceau gestures, showed the man and his group how to take the Blue and Orange Lines the few stops to touristland. As they departed—the men in the group all offering the same slight bow—Richard turned and took his first step smack into the black-suited chest of Don Keene.

  “A bravura performance,” Don said. “Overcoming the language barrier to communicate in precise and effective terms.”

  Richard laughed and shook Don’s offered hand. “It’s not like I’m the great communicator. In this neighborhood, people only want to find two things, Metro or the museums.” Richard started to walk, expecting Don Keene to follow him, but Don did not move. He stopped, asked, “Headed back to the hotel?”

  “I’m at the Pilgrim. I was thinking about catching a cab,” Don said, using his head to point over his shoulder at the street behind him, a gesture that said he was worried about the weather, or maybe just in a hurry.

  Richard stepped to the curb, and a purple cab sidled over from the rear of the line at one of the other grand hotels a block away. Once they had settled into the backseat, Don opened his soft leather briefcase and extracted a file folder, placed the case on his lap and rested the folder on top. “You didn’t forget, did you? I’m here to hire an anchorman.”

  34

  CHADLEY AND Cadence shared a silent cab ride to O’Hare that lasted thirty-five minutes. All his overtures to conversation had been answered with monosyllabic grunts or dismissive smirks that reminded him how often Cadence made him feel like a child. He’d never thought of their age difference as significant; his own parents had been a dozen years apart yet somehow became old at the same moment. But Cadence seemed serious where he was slight, the kind of shameful, gnawing knowledge that ate away at him like an ulcer. He was not serious and had no idea how to become that way. Even his clothes—a leather motorcycle jacket that looked too new to belong to anyone who actually rode a bike, jeans and a brand-new Ramones T-shirt that had been chemically distressed to resemble a twenty-year-old Ramones T-shirt—made him feel like he was wearing a costume.

  At the gate, a harried attendant informed Chadley that the entire ebb and flow of air travel back east was clogged in a mess of occluded fronts, high-altitude thunderheads, defective equipment, and, of course, the temporary closure of the airline’s hub in Dallas. The crash was being discussed at length by newscasters whose images flickered on the soundless televisions at gate C73.

  Cadence, however, had chosen to pursue détente and delivered a humongous Diet Coke and a lemon poppy-seed muffin. In between glances at the Chicago Tribune, she would lean over and avail herself of a long draught on the drink straw. The third time she did so, Chadley simply handed the drink to her, and she busied herself with a copy of Forbes and a bag of cherry licorice.

  To get on an airplane in the aftermath of a crash, to watch the continuous live news coverage while sitting in the molded plastic chairs surrounding gate C73 at O’Hare International Airport—indeed, even to believe in the principles of thrust and elevation and the microprocessors that control the hundreds of infinitesimal calculations that manipulate the avionics—was the ultimat
e expression of faith.

  The flight to DC was only half-full. Once the drink cart came around, Chadley ordered two screwdrivers and dug in his pocket for a ten-dollar bill, but the flight attendant waved off the money.

  She put the drinks on the edge of Chadley’s tray, between his elbow and Cadence. “Someone said you two were newlyweds,” the flight attendant said.

  Cadence looked at Chadley, then answered, “Not us.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. But you do have that look. Half-excited, half-scared.”

  The flight attendant unlocked the cart with her foot and slid past, and Chadley thanked her before saying to Cadence, “She’s right about the half-scared part.”

  Cadence raised the corner of her mouth. “Is that really all you have to say?”

  “Before. In the hotel. I was going to ask for money, you know.”

  She nodded. “I know.” And then a pause. “Why didn’t you?” She put her finger in the book she was reading to look him in the eye.

  “Because I knew you wouldn’t help.”

  “I’m saving my help,” Cadence said, “for someone who really needs it.”

  He said nothing, then lowered the window shade and hoped he could sleep. They would land in late afternoon, and by Wednesday, he’d likely be out of a job, perhaps escorted out of the building by security. A week after that, his personal things would show up in a box at his door. The question was whether he was going to pay for his mistakes all at once, or if he could spread the cost out over time.

  His most specific memory of Cadence would always be the touch of her right hand, their last moment of physical contact. Standing in the crush waiting to exit the plane, Cadence reached out to touch his cheek. Chadley thought that she was going to lean in for a kiss, but in the end all she did was some reflexive grooming, wiping away a stray eyelash, before condemning him with one remark: “You have been nothing but a scared child.”

  And she was exactly right. He would remember her departure as the point when he knew he was going to have to ask for help. He pictured following her off the plane, down an escalator to the baggage carousel. Underneath the terminal they would slide into the line and wait for separate taxis. At some point, with their two cars veering off into opposite directions—Chadley’s home to his near-empty condo, on the margins of downtown, Cadence’s disappearing into the grids and diagonals of the city—she would begin to recede, back to whatever secret life she craved.

  35

  THE TAXI Don and Richard hailed outside Metro Center smelled of incense and bitter orange. The driver, white, wore his hair piled high under a tam knitted in the colors of the Jamaican flag.

  As Richard entered the cab, he noticed a plastic bottle filled with what was almost certainly urine rolling around on the front seat. Downside of the job, he guessed. The radio coughed out a thirty-second report on the plane crash: Federal authorities are on the scene in Dallas, where a passenger jet has crashed just minutes before its scheduled arrival, etc., and a few minutes of local news, Traffic and weather, together on the eights, and Don Keene listened to the broadcast intently, eyes closed, a sommelier sampling a wine for the first time. He nodded his agreement, then winced when the announcer stumbled over a live read of a commercial for a local mattress dealer.

  “I didn’t know anyone still listened to AM,” Don said. “Other than me, that is.”

  The driver headed across town on I Street. Don’s immersion in the news made Richard glad they hadn’t taken a more southerly route that would have sent them past the Treasury Department or closer to the White House. The statuary and fountains of the parks often felt oppressive to Richard, ever since the Reagan-era homeless appeared in Lafayette Park with their army surplus blankets and five-pound blocks of cheese and signs proclaiming that we were living in the end times—John on Patmos warning about the coming apocalypse—hand-lettered signs with the simplest of declarations, all in the imperative voice: Repent! Peace!

  The past year had been the year of taxis. Richard took taxis everywhere. Taxis to and from work, taxis at the lunch hour to meet the four or five other men in the city who performed this same indescribable work. At lunch, they mocked each other for ordering a salad or not ordering a drink. Over steaks and potatoes, the men talked about what they would that night talk about on television, practicing their phraseology, coming up with the rhetoric of the week. They used to joke about it: if you took away the medium-rare fillet and the midday cocktail, the conventional wisdom would disappear like the passenger pigeon. They coughed out these little catchphrases in the bluster of a buzzy lunch, and later that afternoon, production assistants transformed the words into the flyover graphics and chyron’ed letters that appeared during the five o’clock hour superimposed over their chests as the men talked on and the screen reminded everyone that it was Day Seven of the Budget Impasse, that they were discussing Breaking News, or that Congress was still debating The Repeal of the Death Tax. Then a taxi back to the office, later a taxi to the news bureau and an appearance on the five p.m. national broadcasts, followed by a taxi to a fund-raiser for a gentleman who represented the good people of Tennessee’s ninth congressional district, a few more drinks. Some insouciant flirting with the endless crop of twenty-two-year-old congressional staff assistants. Then a taxi to a bar where a veteran lobbyist from the cement industry who preferred his gin and tonics in a pint glass could be counted on to provide a decent steak, a bottomless bourbon and ginger ale, a Marlboro 100, a Montecristo No. 2 cigar handed over with a conspiratorial laugh: Here, this is the kind that Castro smokes. A taxi home.

  Apparently Don felt the same way, that taxis meant business, which meant he shared Richard’s reluctance to engage in small talk. He didn’t know Don well enough to engage in anything deeper, but had Don asked, he was ready to tell him everything he knew about his city.

  Washington wasn’t a city that you inhabited so much as one you survived. You told people you lived in the city and people shook their head and you knew they were thinking about the violent streets and the crack-smoking mayor. You endured the traffic as you did in any cosmopolis, and you endured the incompetent government that couldn’t remember to pick up the trash, couldn’t plow the streets when it snowed, couldn’t check to see whether its schoolteachers were criminals or had actually gone to college; the trains never ran on time, hardly ran at all in inclement weather.

  Don covered the taxi fare, and together, they walked through the revolving doors at the hotel’s Connecticut Avenue entrance and moved silently toward the bar. Its narrow entryway, lined with signed portraits of five decades’ worth of members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and presidential appointees, suggested an exclusivity that had always intimidated Richard, as if the waitstaff might accuse him of being an impostor and ask him to leave.

  He’d taken Cadence here on their first date, an occasion that seemed almost as distant in his mind as his marriage or passing the bar exam. It had been a strange place to suggest for a date. He’d been out of the game long enough to know that it was wrong, but Cadence never mentioned it. Richard liked the way she’d handled herself, the banter with the bartender who’d teased her about her fruity drinks and threatened to ID her. He remembered thinking that it wasn’t a date until he’d noticed the details, her fresh pedicure, her newish shoes, the way her lips looked with their well-appointed lushness and their gloss. Her mouth reminded him of the women he saw reading the news on television, a wide smile that started in one corner and spread until it lit the entire face.

  These hotel bars were where so much of Washington business got done; all the city’s nicer hotels made Richard feel the same way he had on that night with Cadence, as if he were a twelve-year-old boy dressed in one of his father’s suits, and mostly he wanted someone, another man, to explain to him why that was. Even now, at forty-two, he still felt as if he were playing dress-up, that an unbelievable stroke of good fortune had delivered him into a life of $2,500 bespoke suits and $150 ties of French silk. Sooner or later the grow
n-ups would come home and relieve him of his duties.

  Don Keene hardly looked like the type to sit idly by for these emotional unzippings. Men did not make friends in their forties; they had activity partners and drinking buddies. Richard had professional acquaintances and guys who were not much more than familiar faces at the bar, guys who were good for superficial conversation but did not know his last name or home phone number. The men who had once been the great patriotic confidants of Richard’s 2:00 a.m. musings now lived thousands of miles away, alienated from Washington and a decade removed from their few common bonds. A phone call from any of them was as likely as a total eclipse. What Richard got out of those long-term friendships now was an email on his birthday, a Christmas letter filled with pictures, dogs in Santa hats and children he had never met.

  Listening to whatever Don had to say would take half an hour, tops, and might give him a story to tell at the bar later that week. Of course, it bothered Richard that he could not think of anyone specific that he might tell the story to.