Before the Fall

by Noah Hawley

  “I think he fell asleep,” says Hex, studying him.

  “You know who sleeps in a police station?” says O’Brien.

  “The guy who did it,” says Hex.

  “You boys should get your own radio station,” says Gus. “Morning sports. Traffic and weather together on the eights.”

  O’Brien taps Scott’s chest.

  “We’re thinking of getting a warrant to look at your paintings.”

  Scott opens his eyes.

  “What would that look like?” he asks. “A warrant to look at art?” He pictures a drawing of a document, an artist’s rendering.

  “It’s a piece of paper signed by a judge that lets us seize your shit,” says O’Brien.

  “Or maybe come over Thursday night,” says Scott. “I’ll serve white wine in paper cups and put out a tray of Stella D’oro breadsticks. Have you been to a gallery opening before?”

  “I’ve been to the fucking Louvre,” snaps O’Brien.

  “Is that near the regular Louvre?”

  “This is my investigation,” says Gus. “Nobody’s seizing anything without talking to me.”

  Scott looks out the window. All the mourners are gone now. The grave is just a hole in the ground, filling with rainwater as two men in coveralls stand under a canopy of elm and smoke Camel Lights.

  “What practical value could my paintings have, in your mind?” he asks.

  He truly wants to know, as a man who has spent (wasted?) twenty-five years smudging color on canvas, ignored by the world, chasing windmills. A man who has resigned himself to impracticality and irrelevance.

  “It’s not what they are,” says O’Brien. “It’s what they’re about.”

  “Disaster paintings,” says Hex. “That’s from your agent. Pictures of car wrecks and train crashes.”

  “Which,” says O’Brien, “putting aside the intrinsic fucked-upness of that as an art form, is interesting to us on a procedural level. As in, maybe you got tired of looking for disaster to paint, decided to cause your own.”

  Scott looks at them with interest. What fascinating brains these men have, creating plots and deception from whole cloth. His eyes move to Gus, who is pinching the bridge of his nose as if in great pain.

  “How would that work?” Scott asks. “On a practical level. A penniless painter with a three-legged dog. A man who spends his days chasing something he can’t define. A story with no verbs. How does this man—I don’t even know how to put it—turn?”

  “It happens all the time,” says O’Brien. “Small men in small rooms thinking big thoughts. They start thinking things, going to gun shows, looking up fertilizer bombs online.”

  “I don’t go online.”

  “The physical fucking library then. Notice me, is the point. Revenge.”

  “On who, for what?”

  “Anyone. Everyone. Their mothers, God. The kid who buggered them in gym class.”

  “In the actual class?” says Scott. “In front of everybody?”

  “See now you’re joking, but I’m being serious.”

  “No. It’s interesting to me is all,” says Scott. “How your mind works. Like I said, I walk on the beach. I sit in coffee shops and stare into my cup. I think about image, about color and mixing media. This is new to me, this kind of television projection.”

  “Why do you paint what you paint?” asks Gus quietly.

  “Well,” says Scott, “I mean, I’m not sure really. I used to do landscapes and then I just started putting things in them. I guess I’m trying to understand the world. I mean, when you’re young you expect your life to go well, or at least you accept that that’s possible. That life can be navigated. If you choose a path, or even if you don’t, because how many people do you know who end up on top by accident? They fall into something. But what I fell into was bourbon and my own asshole.”

  “I’m falling asleep over here,” says O’Brien.

  Scott continues because Gus asked, and, because he asked, Scott assumes he actually wants to know.

  “People get up in the morning and they think it’s another day. They make plans. They move in a chosen direction. But it’s not another day. It’s the day their train derails or a tornado touches down or the ferry sinks.”

  “Or a plane crashes.”

  “Yes. It’s both real, and—to me—a metaphor. Or it was—ten days ago. Back when I thought painting a plane crash was just a clever way to hide the fact that I’d ruined my life.”

  “So you did paint a plane crash,” says Hex.

  “We’re gonna wanna see that,” says O’Brien.

  Through the window, Scott watches the men drop their cigarette butts in the mud and grab their shovels. He thinks about Sarah Kipling, who humored him on a sunny day in August, a weak handshake, a perfunctory smile. Why is she in the ground and not him? He thinks of Maggie, of her daughter, nine years old. They’re both at the bottom of the ocean somewhere and he is here, breathing, having a conversation about art that is really a conversation about death.

  “Come by anytime,” he tells them. “The paintings are there. All you have to do is turn on the lights.”

  * * *

  He has the cab drop him at Penn Station, figuring that with all the press at the funeral someone will have followed the cab, and as he pushes through the doors he sees a green SUV pull up to the curb and a man in a denim jacket jump out. Scott moves quickly to the subway, descending to the downtown number 3 train platform. Then he doubles back and makes his way to the uptown platform. As he does he sees his pursuer in the denim jacket appear on the downtown side. He has a camera out and as the uptown train sharks in, the man sees Scott and raises his camera to get a shot. Scott turns on his heels as the train screeches past him, obscuring his face. He hears the sluice of air and the subway ding and backs through the doors. He sits, holding his hand in front of his face. As the doors close he peers through his open fingers, and as the train pulls out he catches a glimpse of denim on the far track, camera still raised, praying for a shot.

  Scott rides uptown three stops, then gets out and takes the bus going downtown. He is in a new world now, collision city, filled with suspicion and distrust. There is no room for abstract thought here, no room to ruminate on the nature of things. This is the other thing that died in the turbulent Atlantic. To be an artist is to live at once in the world and apart from it. Where an engineer sees form and function, an artist sees meaning. A toaster, to the engineer, is an array of mechanical and electrical components that work together to apply heat to bread, creating toast. To the artist, a toaster is everything else. It is a comfort creation machine, one of many mechanical boxes in a dwelling that create the illusion of home. Anthropomorphized, it is a hang-jawed man who never tires of eating. Open his mouth and put in the bread. But poor Mr. Toaster Oven. He’s a man who, no matter how much he eats, is never truly fed.

  * * *

  Scott eats cereal for dinner, still dressed in his borrowed suit, tie askew. It feels disrespectful to take it off somehow. Death, so permanent for the dead, should be more than just an afternoon activity for the mourners. So he sits and shovels and chews in all black, like a breakfast undertaker.

  He is standing at the sink, washing his single dish and spoon, when he hears the front door open. He knows without looking that it’s Layla, the sound of her heels and the smell of perfume.

  “Are you decent?” she says, coming into the kitchen.

  He lays his bowl on the dish rack to drain.

  “I’m trying to figure out why you need place settings for thirty,” he says. “Cowboys used to travel the country with a single plate and fork and spoon.”

  “Is that what you are?” she asks. “A cowboy?”

  He goes to the living room and sits on the sofa. She pulls the blanket off the roll-top bar and pours herself a drink.

  “Are you keeping the booze warm or—?”

  “I’m an alcoholic,” he tells her. “I think.”

  She sips her drink.

 
; “You think.”

  “Well, probably a safe bet, given that when I start drinking I can’t stop.”

  “My father is the richest alcoholic on the planet. Forbes did an article, how he probably drinks three hundred thousand a year in top-shelf booze.”

  “Maybe put that on his tombstone.”

  She smiles, sits, her shoes dropping from her feet. She curls her right leg under her left.

  “That’s Serge’s suit.”

  He reaches for the tie.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No,” she says. “It’s fine. He’s in Romania now, I think. On to his next epic fuck.”

  Scott watches her drink her scotch. Outside the rain smacks and streaks the windows.

  “I ate a peach once,” he says, “in the Arizona desert, that was better than any sex I’ve ever had.”

  “Careful,” she tells him. “I may take that as a challenge.”

  After she’s gone he carries her glass to the sink. There is still a finger of scotch inside and before he pours it into the sink he holds it to his chin and smells, transported by that familiar earthy peat. The lives we live, he thinks, are filled with holes. He rinses the glass and lays it upside down to drain.

  Scott goes into the bedroom and lies down on the bed, suit still on. He tries to imagine what it’s like to be dead, but can’t, and so he reaches over and turns off the light. The rain drums against the window glass. He stares at the ceiling, watching shadow streaks moving in reverse, raindrops slithering from down to up. Tree branches splayed in a Rorschach weave. The whiteness of the apartment is an empty canvas, a place waiting for its occupant to decide how to live.

  What will he paint now? he wonders.

  Chapter 21

  Threads

  There was an answer. They just didn’t have it yet. This was what Gus told his bosses when they pressed. It had been ten days since the crash. There was a hangar on a naval base out on Long Island where they collected the debris they’d recovered. A six-foot section of wing, a tray table, part of a leather headrest. It’s where the remaining bodies would be brought when they were recovered—assuming they were found with the wreckage and didn’t wash up on a beach like Emma Lightner or get pulled from a lobsterman’s net, like Sarah Kipling. Those bodies had been sent to local morgues and had to be recovered by federal mandate over a period of days. Jurisdiction was one of the many headaches you dealt with when investigating a crash into coastal waters.

  Every day the divers put on wet suits, the pilots gassed their choppers, and captains divvied up the grid. Deep water is dark. Currents shift. What doesn’t float, sinks. Either way, the more time that went by, the less likely it was that they would find what they were looking for. Sometimes, when the waiting was too great, Gus would call in a chopper and fly out to the lead ship. He’d stand on the deck and help coordinate the search, watching the gulls circle. But even in the middle of the action Gus was still just standing around. He was an engineer, a specialist in airplane design who could find the flaw in any system. The caveat was he needed a system to analyze—propulsion, hydraulics, aerodynamics. All he had was a torn piece of wing, and the top-down pressure of a man being buried alive.

  And yet even a small piece of wreckage tells a story. From the wing fragment they’d determined that the plane hit the water at a ninety-degree angle—diving straight down like a seabird. This is not a natural angle of descent for an airplane, which wants to glide on contoured wings. That suggested pilot error, even possibly a deliberate crash—although Gus reminded everyone of the possibility that the plane had actually descended at a more natural angle, only to impact a large wave head-on, simulating a nose-down crash. In other words, We don’t know anything for sure.

  A few days later, a chunk of the tail section was spotted off Block Island. From this they got their first look at the hydraulic system—which appeared uncompromised. The next day two more pieces of luggage were found on a Montauk beach—one intact, the other split open, just a shell. And so it went, piece by piece, like searching a haystack for hay. The good news was that the wreckage seemed to be breaking up underwater, revealing itself a little at a time, but then, four days ago, the finds stopped coming. Now Gus is worried they might never find the bulk of the fuselage, that the remaining passengers and crew are gone for good.

  Every day he faces pressure from his superiors in Washington, who, in turn, face mounting demands from the attorney general and from a certain angry billionaire to find answers, recover those missing, and put the story to rest.

  There is an answer. We just don’t know it yet.

  On Thursday he sits at a conference table reviewing the obvious with twenty-five bureaucrats, going over the things they already know they know. This is in the federal building on Broadway, home turf for Agent O’Brien of the FBI and Hex of the OFAC, plus the half dozen subordinates they control. To O’Brien this crash is part of a larger story—terrorist threats and splinter cell attacks targeting American interests. To Hex the crash is only the latest piece in a war story about the US economy and the millionaires and billionaires who devote massive capital to the breaking of rules and laws. Gus is the only one in the room thinking about the crash as a singularity.

  These people on that aircraft.

  Beside him, the CEO of the private security firm responsible for the Bateman family is describing the process they use to assess threat levels. He’s brought a six-man team with him, and they hand him documents as he speaks.

  “—in constant contact with dedicated agents of Homeland Security,” he is saying. “So if there was a threat, we knew about it within minutes.”

  Gus sits at the conference table, looking at his reflection in the window. In his mind he is on a Coast Guard cutter, scanning the waves. He is standing on the bridge of a naval frigate reviewing sonar imagery.

  “I supervised a comprehensive review of all intel and activity myself,” the CEO continues, “for a full six months before the crash, and I can say with complete confidence—nothing was missed. If somebody was targeting the Batemans, they kept it to themselves.”

  Gus thanks him, hands off to Agent Hex, who begins a review of the government’s case against Ben Kipling and his investment firm. Indictments, he says, were handed down as planned the day after the crash, but Kipling’s death gave the other partners the perfect scapegoat. So to a man, all have said that any trades with rogue nations (if they existed) were the brainchild of a dead man, laundered through their books as something else. They were duped, in other words. I’m as much of a victim here as you, they said.

  Eighteen of the firm’s accounts have been frozen. Total value, $6.1 billion. Investigators have tied the money to five countries: Libya, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. They know from Kipling’s phone records that Barney Culpepper called him fifty-one minutes before the flight departed. Culpepper has declined to comment on what they discussed, but it’s clear the call was to warn Kipling about the indictment.

  As far as Agent Hex and his superiors at the OFAC are concerned, the crash was a move by a hostile nation to silence Kipling and hamper their investigation. The question of exactly when the Kiplings were invited to fly back with the Batemans arises. The CEO of the security firm checks the logs. There’s a communiqué from the Batemans’ body man at eleven eighteen the morning of the flight, reporting a conversation with the principal (David Bateman, aka Condor) in which Condor stated Ben and Sarah would be flying back with them.

  “Scott,” says Gus absently.

  “What?” says Hex.

  “The painter,” Gus clarifies. “He told us Maggie invited Sarah and her husband—it was earlier that morning at the farmers market, I think. And he’d already been invited—check the notes, but I think it was sometime Sunday morning. He ran into Maggie and the kids.”

  Gus thinks about his last conversation with Scott, sitting in a taxi at the cemetery. He’d hoped to have a more detailed discussion, going minute by minute through Scott’s memories of the flight, boarding
, the subsequent takeoff, and what he remembered from the air, but the conversation was hijacked by men looking for faces in the clouds.

  In the absence of facts, he thinks, we tell ourselves stories.

  This is clearly what the news media is doing—CNN, Twitter, Huffington Post—the twenty-four-hour cycle of speculation. Most of the reputable outfits are sticking to facts and well-researched op-eds, but the others—Bill Cunningham at ALC being the worst offender—are building legends, turning the whole mess into some giant soap opera about a lothario painter and his millionaire patrons.

  Gus thinks of the boy, settled in now with his aunt and uncle in the Hudson River Valley. He drove out to meet them two days ago, sitting in their kitchen and drinking herbal tea. There is never a good time to question a young child, no perfect technique. Memories, which are untrustworthy even in adults, are unreliable at best in children, especially after a trauma.

  He’s not talking much, Eleanor said, bringing him his tea. Ever since we got him home. The doctor says that’s normal. Or, not normal, but not abnormal.

  The boy sat on the floor playing with a plastic front loader. After letting him get used to Gus’s presence in the room, Gus settled on the floor beside him.

  JJ, he said, my name is Gus. We met before. At the hospital.

  The boy looked up, squinting, then went back to playing.

  I thought we could talk about the airplane, when you went on the plane with your mommy and daddy.

  And sissie, the boy said.

  That’s right. And your sister.

  Gus paused, hoping the child would fill the silence, but he didn’t.

  Well, said Gus, do you remember the plane? I know you were—Scott tells me you were asleep when it took off.

  The boy looked up at Scott’s name, but didn’t speak. Gus nodded to him encouragingly.

  But, he said, did you—do you remember waking up at all, before—

  The boy looked over at Eleanor, who had taken a place behind him on the floor.