Panorama

by Steve Kistulentz

  41

  THESE WERE Richard’s preoccupations on his way home: his self-congratulations at walking off the two drinks he’d had with Don, adhering to one of his lesser resolutions, to walk more through a city that had been built for the traveler on foot or horseback; his loneliness; and the gathering of clouds that had thickened into the heavy blanket he had come to know as a harbinger of snow. The unpredictability of the weather itched like a bite. He felt a trickle of sweat loosen itself along his spine, pass down through his waistband and into the crack of his ass. He wished that he could turn toward the river and feel the drop of the barometer in his knees or his arthritic pinkies. The ache of a twenty-year-old boxer’s fracture in his hand predicted the weather almost as well as the guy on channel 4. Richard wanted muffler-and-topcoat weather, the silence of heavily swaddled commuters padding through the Metro. He longed for a cold snap brutal enough to feel in the framework of his bones. Instead, as he rounded the corner toward home, he saw the blinking bank clock at the circle of Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues, a block from Cadence’s old place. Time and temperature: 5:05 p.m., forty-eight degrees, the wind picking up and the temperature beginning a precipitous drop.

  A few years back, Richard would have walked up the avenue to wait at a neighborhood bar for a familiar face, someone interested in watching the tail end of the Rose Bowl while pretending to celebrate his new job. But when you were forty-two and not twenty-two, holiday obligations meant that friends were out of the city, the bars in the afternoon filled only with the odd tourist and bored waitstaff.

  He took the steps to the fourth floor two at a time. He thought he’d put his feet up and settle into his couch. The room’s only window let in a dim gray light, the few recognizable parts of Washington’s skyline occluded by an oncoming bank of clouds. By evening, they’d collapse into a low ceiling, insulating the city, a sure sign of the end of three days of springlike weather. He expected the forecast on the Eyewitness News at 6 to hedge its bets, use nonspecific language, “a wintry mix.” Richard liked the idea of a catastrophic storm, schools and stores closed, the government on liberal leave, the radio broadcasting calls for volunteers with four-wheel-drive vehicles to escort doctors and nurses to and from work.

  He turned the television on and lowered the volume until it provided only the slightest of background noise, then picked up the copy of his new contract from his cluttered desktop. It contained all the usual contingencies: a personal-appearance clause in which Richard was asked to guarantee that he’d never gain weight, that he would be obligated to endure both medical and surgical options if necessary to keep his lustrous hair. A further rider prohibited him from profiting from endorsements, while a disturbingly vague “morals clause” suggested that nearly any misbehavior could result in termination.

  Underneath the contract were the two discs Don Keene had given him, the greatest hits of a retiring local icon. Inside the jewel case, Richard found a folded piece of paper in what he assumed to be Don’s handwriting: Good. You’ve already proven that you’re willing to do your homework. Disc one is a career retrospective. Disc two is all local, all recent. Watch them in order, please. Call me when you’re done.

  The disc player whirred to life, and a saturated color video appeared, a man standing in front of a building, wearing a gray suit, a beige trench coat belted at the waist. “Jack Shea reporting tonight from Paris.” He wore combat fatigues in tiger-stripe camouflage. “From the Mekong Delta with First Marines, this is Jack Shea reporting.” From San Clemente, from the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach. A denim jacket and khakis at a free concert in Golden Gate Park. From the Pentagon. From the campus of Kent State University. From the Johnson Space Center in Texas. From Cape Canaveral. Then from the same spot, now called Cape Kennedy. From Plains, Georgia. The picture wobbled a bit. Jack Shea was wading through three feet of muck on a city street somewhere, the familiar floodscape of rescue boats and dogs barking on rooftops and helicopters hovering over the scene. Shea held the microphone cord out of the water as he spoke. Forecasts said the damage from Hurricane Agnes was expected to be almost insignificant. But the first storm of the Atlantic season stalled last night over the mid-Atlantic region, and residents in this corner of northeastern Pennsylvania awoke this morning to a Susquehanna River eight feet past flood stage, and the city of Wilkes-Barre under two feet of water. Richard used the remote to speed through the stories at double time, from NATO headquarters in Brussels, from Tel Aviv, from Jerusalem, from Cairo, from the Sinai Peninsula, from Camp David, from the Golan Heights (each time appearing on camera wearing a beige safari jacket and a powder-blue shirt dotted with sweat). Jack Shea watching President Carter walk the route of his inaugural parade. Reporting via satellite from Phnom Penh. Jack Shea, reporting live from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in the early hours of Three Mile Island. It was history’s cavalcade, Jack Shea reporting.

  And there it was. The sudden jolt of memory.

  Richard pounded the Play button, let the video resume at normal speed.

  Jack Shea standing on the tarmac of a military airstrip in Guyana, in the immediate aftermath of Jonestown, narrating the video as the panel truck pulled up and the elected gunmen of the People’s Temple opened fire on the escape plane. Wounded in the firefight: an NBC News cameraman, reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner. Dead: one member of Congress, four departing Temple members, one congressional aide. Even in Jack Shea’s reports, they didn’t mention Lew by name.

  Jack Shea in his safari jacket and, behind him, the gray-and-white United States Air Force jet that would be used to repatriate the bodies. A pair of corpsmen wheeling the aluminum caskets up the cargo ramp of the jet. Jack Shea began, They came from the tree line—gesturing toward the edge of the airfield—shouting for the visitors to stop. Members of the People’s Temple, asking to be taken home. Followed by a second jeep, this one filled with gunmen intent on letting no one leave.

  Jack Shea’s voice-over narrating filmed helicopter shots, the famous shot of corpses linked arm in arm. A quarter century on, and Richard found he could recite the narration from memory: They came in search of a new life in a new land, a place they thought might be nirvana. What they found instead can only be described as hell.

  Richard shook his head, tried to force out the memory.

  He hit the Forward button. Jack Shea in Geneva, talking about the Iranian revolution. Jack Shea at the Winter Olympics, 1980. And then, the longest cut, Jack Shea calmly walking across the street to stop a robber, as cool as any television detective. He’d even paused to stub out his cigarette first. He watched that scene, thirty-one seconds of it, again and again, Jack Shea handing the purse back to a grateful old woman; Richard imagined her purse filled with coupons and an uncashed Social Security check and lipstick and tissues and wild-cherry Life Savers, his mother’s purse. He didn’t even realize that he was tearing up until he had to blot at the corner of his eye.

  Nor did Richard remember turning off the disc or the television, but he had, falling into the elastic narrative of an unplanned and nightmare-riddled nap.

  42

  THE EMERGENCY plan for Panorama Airlines involved deploying a series of response teams, each armed with duties and procedures sanctioned by consultants and executives who had extensively gamed every scenario. Each responder had received special training in crisis management, grief counseling, bilateral negotiating tactics, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, first aid, federal privacy laws, and martial arts tactics of leverage and hand-to-hand self-defense. The enemies of orderly airport operation are unanticipated crowds, gossip, and speculation.

  It fell to the Angel Team to clear the terminal—locate the stricken and grieving, then discreetly usher them out of the sight line of passengers who were waiting to board a passenger jet of the exact make, model, and vintage as the one that had just fallen from the sky. They herded the family members and friends into the controlled and sterile environment of a conference room; here, s
ustained by doughnuts and watery coffee, the bereaved could listen to the news or seek comfort in the waiting platitudes of members of the clergy from every imaginable denomination. This part of the plan was executed nearly simultaneously at the departure and arrival airports.

  The airline itself required answers, and ideally before anyone else had them. Getting the information first meant staying ahead of the story. This was where the Go Team—mostly midlevel executives from the flight-operations division—came in. They worked with federal investigators to determine exactly who was on board the flight, whether they had checked a bag, and where they had been headed, preparations for the messy business of notifying the family.

  The general counsel had produced great sheaves of memoranda outlining the desirable qualities that members of each team should possess; Angel Teams were without exception men because they conveyed a competence and an authority that strangers responded to in predictable ways. Prematurely gray hair was seen as an asset.

  The requirements to be part of an Adam and Eve Team were more flexible, written in familiar human resource jargon; members should be self-starters, levelheaded, willing to work unpredictable schedules. The general counsel kept secreted in his safe printouts of correspondence from a consulting psychologist who claimed that the grieving were much more likely to confront people with obvious flaws in their skin, hair, teeth, or nails; inside the company, it was a widely known fact that members of Adam and Eve Teams needed to be attractive, proportionate, with a body mass index within the range defined as generally healthy. Finally, written in pencil at the bottom of a yellow legal pad, a page that would be produced as documentary evidence in at least two lawsuits that sprang from the crash of Flight 503, a final quality added by the general counsel himself: Needs to be good in a crisis.

  Adam and Eve Teams were dispatched to notify—in person whenever possible and practical—the next of kin. The Adam and Eve Teams also had to learn a new vocabulary—or anti-vocabulary—because they reported to the corporate general counsel, who had written a list of thirty words that any airline representative was prohibited from uttering. The most verboten was, in fact, next of kin. They could not say passenger, as in Seventy-seven passengers were killed, a word prohibited after a specific incident following a minor crash in Denver, when the father of one of the victims beat an airline-reservation clerk senseless, saying, “My son is not a passenger; his name is David,” each time his fist struck flesh. Airline employees could not say crash, as in Flight 503 crashed on approach, if only because in the mind of one astute litigator (a second-year associate who briefly had considered a career in personal injury law), the word crash implied a relationship between cause and effect, the ultimate judgment of who exactly was at fault. So it was that a crash became an incident; investigations and reconstruction became part of the incident report. And a crash like this afternoon’s—the disintegration of the airframe, the inability to precisely identify human remains, the concomitant likelihood of ongoing litigation—became not merely an incident but an incident of uncontrolled flight into terrain. The airline was willing to make extraordinary efforts following the death or injury of a loved one in an incident.

  Team members were prohibited from referring to themselves by name. They were prohibited from identifying themselves as anything other than representatives of Panorama Airlines. They spoke in the communal voice, using the plural personal pronoun we whenever possible. The singular I was prohibited. We want to know what we can do in this difficult time. We can accommodate any number of special requests. We stand ready to help. How can we serve you?

  They called the next of kin the contact, like an operative behind the Iron Curtain in an old spy thriller, someone who could materialize with an envelope and a smuggled weapon without attracting too much notice. Use of the words widow, widower, orphan, and especially victim was not tolerated, nor was the use of any word that described the relationship of the passenger to the next of kin, which abrogated husband, wife, child. The contact was an honorific that did not imply any power relationships, did not evoke a default response of sympathy.

  Among the fifty-odd people crowding the conference room of the tower offices of Salt Lake City International Airport, more than half were representatives of Panorama Airlines. The other half sat stunned and motionless. Some were grieving, some thinking of miracles.

  A folding table had been converted to a buffet, a mercy meal of hamburgers and barbecue sandwiches and pizza slices and cinnamon rolls and great, steaming urns of coffee that went almost untouched. Still, men in white uniforms came and went every half hour, carrying in a new urn, departing with the old one.

  At the front of the room, four Panorama employees outlined the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours on a series of handwritten posters that they taped to the wall and then read aloud.

  Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, accompanied by the Go Team, were en route to Dallas to take command of the incident scene.

  A ticket audit was under way to confirm who was on board the aircraft.

  Official notifications would begin within the hour.

  The Dallas County coroner had agreed to expedite the issuance of notarized death certificates for those needing documents for banking and insurance purposes.

  They did not mention the bodies, and it was Mike Renfro who raised his hand and asked, “There’s no delicate way to say this, so I’m just going to. Have they begun to recover the bodies? Are there even bodies? What exactly are you telling us?”

  “We’re not prepared to discuss that particular issue,” one of the men at the front said, and moved on to the next question. Mike saw the man’s suit, his continual habit of referring to his black binder, and guessed Corporate counsel.

  Mike was surprised at how docile the crowd was. He stood up. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to need more than that. We’ve been here for forty minutes, and you haven’t told us a damn thing. You’re behaving like we didn’t just see a burned-out jet smash into the ground on network television. Prepared? Prepared? None of us were prepared to discuss this today. It’s the holidays, for fuck’s sake. Excuse my language, but I need to know. We all do. We’ve all got questions. What exactly happened? When are we going to be told something that matters? Are there any survivors? We’ve ruled out bad weather and another plane being involved, but only because we watched it all on television. But are you going to take us to Dallas? Will we be able to see the site? I asked about the bodies. Have the bodies been recovered? Are there even bodies? Can we even tell if the people are who we think they are? I don’t have any idea how to get her dental records, but isn’t that what people do, they go get dental records? I don’t think any of us has any idea what to do, and so far, none of you seem to either. Can you tell us anything at all? Or does that notebook tell you just to come up here and bullshit until the lawyers arrive? You’re not telling us anything that I haven’t already heard on the news.” Mike took a deep breath and sat down. He thought he’d spoken in his usual, mannered tone, but the reactions of the people around him—the open mouths, the way the two women nearest him rocked back in their chairs—suggested that perhaps he hadn’t.

  One of the men from the front of the room walked to the buffet table, picked up two small plastic bottles of water, and then moved to Mike’s seat, took out the chair next to him and turned it around, straddled it. He handed one of the bottles of water to Mike. It was a ten-ounce bottle, narrow and thin, and it disappeared into Mike’s meaty hand.

  “I’m sorry that we haven’t had a chance to speak individually,” the man said. In his jacket pocket was the same laminated script that each member of the Angel Team was required to carry, offering an apology on behalf of the airline’s chairman, our shareholders, and, most important, the friends and family we work alongside each day. “But I’m sure you can understand that things are still very much in flux. There’s so much we don’t yet know, and it would be irresponsible to speculate. As a matter of fact, I am going to step outside a
nd say exactly the same things I’ve just told you to the reporters who are waiting in the hallway. But friends and family have to know these things first.”

  “I understand,” Mike lied. He did not understand. This man had one job, and it was to pacify him. This was new territory. Mike coughed out a small laugh: No one in this room had spent more of his life helping to prepare others for the unthinkable than he, Mike Renfro; hell, it was part of his sales spiel. But no one had ever helped him. He did not know how to ask for what he wanted and never had. After Mary Beth kissed him on the forehead, he had not known how to ask her to please not leave him with such a chaste and sisterly kiss. He wanted to have stayed up all night with her, to have had any conversation she wanted. He didn’t want to have found her as he had at 4:00 a.m.; he’d gone to take a leak in the middle of the night, and there she was, half-asleep in the bathtub, resistant to his efforts to wake her and relocate her back to the warmth of the bed.

  His shoulders were tight with the tension that came from knowing he wanted the impossible. He wanted kisses of reconciliation and reunion and a hero’s welcome at home and a begrudging hug from her kid. He had this feeling in his throat, as if he were coming down with something, allergies, maybe. His eyes felt dull, heavy lidded. Yes, his wants were much simpler now. He wanted a happy ending. The same faces that had looked on him in disgust at his outburst now looked away from his tears; there was nothing uglier than seeing a large man cry, his bulk heaving with sobs, his nose beaded with mucus and his breath coming in sharp snorts. As he cried, he could feel the skin of his face flush, the pink of rare meat.