Love and Other Ways of Dying Read online

  Pan, pan, pan, said Urs. We have smoke in the cockpit, request deviate, immediate return to a convenient place. I guess Boston. (Toggles, lights, check, breathe.)

  Would you prefer to go in to Halifax? said air traffic control, a calm voice from a northern place called Moncton, a man watching a green hexagon crawl across a large round screen, this very flight moving across the screen, a single clean green light.

  Affirmative for one-eleven heavy, said the pilot. We have the oxygen mask on. Go ahead with the weather—

  Could I have the number of souls on board … for emergency services? chimed in Halifax control.

  Roger, said the pilot, but then he never answered the question, working frantically down his checklist, circling back over the ocean to release tons of fuel to lighten the craft for an emergency landing, the plane dropping to nineteen thousand feet, then twelve thousand, and ten thousand. An alarm sounded, the autopilot shut down. Lights fritzed on and off in both the cockpit and the cabin, flight attendants rushed through the aisles, one of the three engines quit in what was now becoming a huge electrical meltdown.

  Urs radioed something in German, emergency checklist air conditioning smoke. Then in English, Sorry … Maintaining at ten thousand feet, his voice urgent, the words blurring. The smoke was thick, the heat increasing, the checklists, the bloody checklists … leading nowhere, leading—We are declaring emergency now at, ah, time, ah, zero-one-two-four … We have to land immediate—

  The instrument panel—bright digital displays—went black. Both pilot and copilot were now breathing frantically.

  Then nothing.

  Radio contact ceased. Temperatures in the cockpit were rising precipitously; aluminum fixtures began to melt. It’s possible that one of the pilots, or both, simply caught fire. At air traffic control in Moncton, the green hexagon flickered off the screen. There was silence. One controller began trembling, another wept.

  It was falling.

  Six minutes later, SR111 plunged into the dark sea.

  The medical examiner woke to a ringing phone, the worst way to wake. Ten-something on the clock, or was it eleven? The phone ringing, in the house where he lived alone, or rather with his two retrievers, but alone, too, without wife or woman. He lived near the village with the lighthouse, had moved here less than three years ago from out west, had spent much of his life rolling around, weird things following him, demons and disasters. Had a train wreck once, in Great Britain, early in his career, a Sunday night, university students coming back to London after a weekend at home. Train left the tracks at speed. He’d never seen anything like that in his life—sixty dead, decapitations, severed arms and legs. These kids, hours before whole and happy, now disassembled. Time disintegrating in the small fires of the wreckage. After the second night, while everyone kept their stiff upper lips, he sobbed uncontrollably. He scared himself—not so much because he was sobbing, but because he couldn’t stop.

  There’d been a tornado in Edmonton—twenty-three dead. And then another train wreck in western Canada, in the hinterlands fifty miles east of Jasper. Twenty-five dead in a ravine. He’d nearly been drummed out of the job for his handling of that one. The media swarmed to photograph mangled bodies, and the medical examiner, heady from all the attention and a bit offended by it, knowing he shouldn’t, stuffed some towels and linens on a litter, draped them with a sheet, and rolled the whole thing out for the cameras. Your dead body, gentlemen.

  Later, when they found out—oh, they hated him for that. Called for his head.

  This had been a frustrating day, though, driving up to New Glasgow, waiting to take the stand to testify in the case of a teenage killer, waiting, waiting, four, five, six hours, time passing, nothing to do in that town except pitter here and there, waiting. Got off the stand around six, home by nine, deeply annoyed, too late to cook, got into the frozen food, then to bed, reading the paper, drifting, reading, drifting. And now the phone was ringing, a woman from the office: A jet was down. Without thinking, he said, It’s a mistake. Call me back if anything comes of it. Set the phone in its cradle, and a minute later it rang again.

  There’s a problem here, she said.

  I’ll get on my way, he said, and hung up. He automatically put a suitcase on the bed, an overnight bag, and then it dawned on him: There’d been no talk about numbers yet, the possible dead. There could be hundreds, he knew that, yes, he did know that now, didn’t he? He walked back and forth between his cupboard and his bed, flustered, disbelieving, maybe hundreds, and then the adrenaline released, with hypodermic efficiency. Hundreds of bodies—and each one of them would touch his hands. And he would have to touch them, identify them, confer what remained of them to some resting place. He would have to bear witness to the horrible thing up close, what it did up close, examine it, notate, dissect, and, all the while, feel what it did, feel it in each jagged bone.

  Flustered, disbelieving, it took him forty minutes to pack his bag with a couple of pairs of khakis, some underwear, shirts, a pair of comfortable shoes, some shaving gear, should have taken five minutes.

  He was a sensitive, empathetic man—at least he thought so (did his ex-wife? did his two faraway daughters?)—with a sharp if morbid sense of humor, a kind of loner in this northern place, Nova Scotia, where clans had carved out their lives over centuries and generations, where someone’s great-great-grandfather had once fished someone else’s great-great-grandfather from a storm at sea. He was an outsider, had always been, which qualified him for what was now coming, lurching toward him at the speed it would take him to drive in that thick night, in the warm rain that now fell like pieces of sky, from his home to his office.

  No, he didn’t know then, as he left his retrievers, Dan and Deputy, behind, as he closed the door on his house, everything freezing in time as he did, magazines fanned on a table, milk in the refrigerator, didn’t know that summer would pass and fall would arrive, that the leaves would vanish from the trees before he returned.

  But now all he did was drive, doing the math: There were twelve in the office and six in the morgue. The local hospitals might be able to cough up thirty more, but that didn’t even begin to cover it. Where the hell were they going to find enough body bags?

  More phones rang, more people woke. The coast guard, the Mounties, ministers, presidents. The navy, the airline, the media, everyone scrambling to figure out what was going on; without realizing it, everyone was now caught in the spreading fire. In the village, boats left for sea. The fishermen rolled from their beds, threw on rain gear, buddied up, and started out, unquestioning, reflexively. (You couldn’t keep the sea and sky from what it would do.) Many of the fishermen thought they were going in search of survivors, were convinced of it, owing to the legacy of shipwrecks in these parts, which often meant someone was out there somewhere in all that inky black, in a yellow raft, waiting for help, cold, shivering, alive, waiting for someone, waiting for them.

  The television reporter stood on the shore, with a growing cabal of other reporters, fellow parasites. He stood apart, shifting from foot to foot, antsy, squinting out at the ocean. Shit, where? Others worked their cell phones, frantically scrounging for the story, but still nobody knew anything. Someone living in a trailer home nearby claimed to have seen a huge fireball on the horizon; another said the plane had come so close to the village that you could see inside, cabin lights flickering on and off, people lit, then black, see those last moments playing out from the ground.

  These waters were his, that’s what the reporter thought. He’d sailed these coves and inlets all summer long, sailed past the lighthouse so many times it seemed a natural outcropping of the landscape. He was a solid, good-looking man who spoke quickly, moved at a clip, all of forty-two, with just-thinning hair. He’d worked twenty years on the nautical beat, covering the navy and ship sinkings and whatever else came along. He never forgot to register a name, and then never forgot it, kept a card catalog in his head that connected everyone to everyone else. One of his great strengths.
And when he saw what looked like falling stars in the distance, parachute flares, he knew that was where the plane was. He turned to the cameraman.

  We need to be under those, he said, pointing to the falling stars.

  Before he left the office, he’d stashed extra cell-phone batteries in his pocket. You never knew, or maybe you already did. And now, in this night, in the seamless dark (there was no marking land but for the lighthouse, green light flashing), he was on his way in a hired boat with a cameraman. The wind blew, heavy swells, ten-foot waves, on his way, to see what? And why? He was as bad as the others, wasn’t he? A fucking parasite. There were a lot of people on that plane, he knew that. At the UN, they called it the diplomatic shuttle: dinner meeting in Manhattan, breakfast meeting in Geneva. And now here they were, lost off the coast of this forgotten place.

  It took an hour in those seas. The parachute flares and spotlights were blinding at first, the smell of diesel overwhelming. Sea King helicopters whirred overhead, aiming white beams; boats drifted through the wreckage aimlessly, the water a bottomless black. They couldn’t see anything, just heard it on the VHF radio, fishermen talking to one another: I got something over here. I think she’s alive. Then thirty seconds passed. I need a body bag. And then other voices, this morbid call and response:

  We got another one.

  Over here, too.

  Need a body bag, now!

  Jesus, we got a foot in the water.

  We have an arm.

  We need a body bag! Who’s got body bags?

  Then the reporter saw a half-inflated life raft. Alive—someone was alive! But when they came upon it, it was empty, had inflated on impact. There were shoes fanning everywhere around them, hundreds and hundreds of shoes, in procession, riding the water’s windrows—some with the laces still tied up. And underwear and ripped shirts, Bibles and stuffed animals. Money floating on the surface of the ocean now. Dollars and marks, rupees and francs and drachmas. You’d haul up a purse and expect to find a wallet, a driver’s license, lipstick, anything, and it would be empty.

  The plane had hit the water at more than four hundred miles per hour, nose first, two engines still firing, very unusual, extremely rare; the jet was two hundred feet long, and the tail rammed straight into the nose, everything exploding into more than a million pieces. Later, someone would be in charge of counting pieces at the military base, in a hangar where bits of the plane would fill thousands of crates and cardboard boxes. At impact, the bodies on board had been what the medical examiner would call degloved, simply shorn from the bones. You couldn’t pick them up in your hands. You had to scoop them in nets.

  No one has survived this crash, the television reporter told the world. From what we are seeing, there are no survivors.

  But, said an anchorperson, the coast guard is calling this a search and rescue.

  There are no survivors.

  Until dawn, he was the only reporter under the parachute flares, a bizarre, surreal time, no believer in God, but you could feel something, 229 of them in this place. There were body parts and shoes—he’d dream about them for a long time. He was beamed into television sets around the world. No survivors. He told the pilot’s wife that her husband was dead. He told the famous boxer that his son was dead. He told the father of the woman with Persian eyes that his daughter was dead.

  When he finally came to shore the next day, when he stood near the lighthouse, under the green light, doing more live feeds, carefully choosing his words for the world, running on adrenaline, he noticed a large man glaring at him. The man was a very big man, with a pockmarked face and greased-back hair, scary-looking, glaring. And the reporter, exhausted and paranoid, thought, He’s going to kick my ass for being a parasite, for feeding off all these bodies.

  When the reporter finished, the oversized man started for him and the reporter could do nothing but ready himself for the blow. But it never came. Something else did.

  I want to thank you, he said. You told me my fiancée was dead. I got a phone call last night, in New York, and I was told there might be survivors, and I thought, Well, if anybody survived this it was her, because we’re gonna get married—and everyone was saying there are survivors, and you told me she was dead. You told me the truth. I needed to hear that.

  Needed to hear that? This man needed to hear that? Yesterday the reporter had been covering some minor promotion ceremony at the military base; today he had told the world they could say goodbye to these 229 human beings, the ones with X’s on their foreheads, the ones turning to gold, once wearing shoes, ghosts now, goodbye. And then the big man was gone, too, before the reporter could offer thanks back, or rather condolences, before he could think to ask the living man’s name.

  It was early morning in Geneva, and the father of the woman with the blue Persian eyes—a slight, erudite man with fine hair turning from orange to gray, turning at that very moment even—sat before a television, watching the reporter, in disbelief. He woke his wife and asked, Did she phone last night? And his wife said, She’ll be phoning soon to have you fetch her in Zurich. And he said, She won’t; the plane has crashed.

  His wife roused herself, still half tangled in sleep, and stared at the reporter, listening, trying to grasp words that made no sense. It’s all right, she said. There’s nothing to worry about. We’ll wait for her call.

  The phone rang. It was her boyfriend in New York. What plane did she take? he asked. And the father said, But you tell me. No, he said, because we parted company at four in the afternoon, and she didn’t know which plane she was on. And can you please tell me that she was on the Zurich flight?

  No, the father said. And then he called the airline and insisted they tell him whether his daughter had been on the Zurich flight or the crashed Geneva flight. We cannot, a voice said. But you must. You must … There was silence, then a rustling of papers. We have to tell you, the voice said, she is not on the Zurich list.

  Thank you, said the father.

  Then he told his wife, and she said, Until they phone us with the news, we have to believe. And the man said, But darling, they’re not going to phone with news like that. They’d come to the door—

  And before he’d finished his sentence, the doorbell rang.

  Grief is schizophrenic. You find yourself of two minds, the one that governs your days up until the moment of grief—the one that opens easily to memories of the girl at six, twelve, eighteen—and the one that seeks to destroy everything afterward. The man was fifty-eight and he’d given his daughter every advantage he could afford; the circumstances of his life—his work for a luxury-car company and then a fine-watch company—had provided the riding lessons and top-notch education and summer home in France. But then she’d given so much of herself, too. She’d been a championship swimmer and show jumper. She had a great knack for simplifying things, for having fun, for enjoying the moment so fully that those around her wanted to live inside those moments with her. She was contagious and beautiful and twenty-four, with those amazing eyes. She was about to come home and take a job.

  After she was gone, the husband and wife made a promise to each other: They would stop their imaginations at that place where their daughter had boarded the plane, their minds would not wander past that particular rope. As usual, he broke the promise, unable to divert his mind from picturing his daughter at the end—it’s possible she, like all of them, was unconscious at impact from the crushing g-forces inside the aircraft. Or that she suffered horribly, screaming, her entire life playing before her eyes. Whom did she sit next to in those moments? What was said?

  The man couldn’t help but imagine the pilots, too, their fate connected to a recurring dream he’d had for many years of himself as a pilot, trying to land a jet on a motor launch and not knowing what the hell he was doing. Though his wife stopped her mind on the gangway as her daughter stepped into the jet, he followed his girl into the sea.

  Nothing made sense, time was disintegrating, everything was a confusion, chaos. Walking throu
gh town, he’d see the river and have to keep himself from slipping into it. He’d go to the station and hold back from throwing himself before a train: how good it would feel, a matter of time now, not whether but when—Today? Tomorrow? What would it feel like?

  Since he couldn’t sleep, he drank a bottle of Scotch daily, then couldn’t remember anything. He followed the news accounts, halfheartedly reading words like investigation, black box, recovery effort, debris field. There had been a Picasso on board the plane and millions in rubies and diamonds. One day a postcard arrived from his daughter, detailing her stay in New York. Authorities called, wanting to send some of her effects (others now slept with ripped shirts and favorite sweaters, passports and stuffed animals), but the thought horrified him. What was worse, what the man could never have foreseen after thirty years of marriage, after having done so much to put a life together, was how quickly it became undone. He’d spent those decades stitching up a beautiful life—the watch on his wrist, a mysterious blue, cost the same as a small house. Now he didn’t want to be with anybody, just alone, and his wife, his best friend—his wife had stopped at the gangway. How could she? How could she not follow their beloved daughter into the ocean? Silly words comforted her while they enraged him; having family nearby was a source of strength for her, torment for him. This response or that response of hers seemed so … wrong. In his mind he was asking: What’s the point of this life? And she said, We must forget.

  There was one thing that made him feel better. He flew alone to the northern village a few days after the crash, thinking he’d have to identify his daughter, drove down along the coast road to the lighthouse. (The media was now encamped here, among the houses and rocks and clotheslines, long-range lenses trained on anybody shedding a tear, beaming the image to the world.) He came to this village, and he felt something, some part of him rising, too. He knew he was going mad—and yet he could feel these waves churning inside him, his daughter there, too. When he returned to Geneva, he simply went back to devising ways to kill himself.