Before the Fall

by Noah Hawley

  He is thinking about the wave. Its silent rumble. The loom of it. A towering hump of ocean brine exposed by moonlight, sneaking up on them from the rear, like a giant from a children’s story. Eerie and soundless it came, an enemy without soul or agency. Nature at its most punishing and austere. And how he grabbed the boy and dove.

  His mind shifts to the image of cameras—leering mechanically, thrust forward on anonymous shoulders, judging with their unblinking convex eyes. Scott thinks of the lights in his face, the questions overlapping, becoming a wall. Were the cameras a tool for the advancement of man, he wonders, or was man a tool for the advancement of the cameras? We carry them, after all, valeting them from place to place, night and day, photographing everything we see. We believe we have invented our machine world to benefit ourselves, but how do we know we aren’t here to serve it? A camera must be aimed to be a camera. To service a microphone, a question must be asked. Twenty-four hours a day, frame after frame, we feed the hungry beast, locked in perpetual motion as we race to film it all.

  Does television exist for us to watch, in other words, or do we exist to watch television?

  Overhead, the wave crested, teetering, a five-story building on the verge of smooth collapse, and he dove, squeezing the boy to him, no time to take a breath, his body taking over, survival no longer trusted to the abstract functions of the mind. Legs kicking, he entered the blacks, feeling the spin-cycle tug of the wave pulling all things to it, and then the tilt and inevitable gravity of descent, grabbed by a monster’s hand and thrust deeper, and now it was all he could do to hold the boy to his body and survive.

  Was Scott having an affair with Maggie? That’s what they asked. A married mother of two, a former preschool teacher. And to them she was what—a character on a reality show? A sad and lusty housewife from post-modern Chekhov?

  He thinks of Layla’s living room, the late-night OCD of an insomniac transforming it into some kind of memory palace. And how this charcoal rendering will most likely be the last picture of Maggie ever created.

  Would he have slept with her if she’d asked? Was he attracted to her, and perhaps her to him? Did he stand too close when she came to view his work, or did he bounce nervously on his toes, keeping his distance? She was the first person he’d shown the work to, the first civilian, and his fingertips were itchy. As she walked the barn he felt the urge for a drink, but it was a scar, not a scab, and he didn’t pick it.

  This is his truth, the story he tells himself. Publicly, Scott is just a player in a drama not his own. He is “Scott Burroughs,” heroic scoundrel. It’s just the hint of an idea now, a theory. But he can see how it could blossom, becoming—what? A kind of painting. Fact turned to fiction step by step.

  He thinks of Andy Warhol, who used to make up different stories for different journalists—I was born in Akron. I was born in Pittsburgh—so when he spoke to people he would know which interviews they’d read. Warhol, who understood the idea that the self was just a story we told. Reinvention used to be a tool of the artist. He thinks of Duchamp’s urinal, of Claes Oldenburg’s giant ashtray. To take reality and repurpose it, bend it to an idea, this was the kingdom of make-believe.

  But journalism was something else, wasn’t it? It was meant to be objective reporting of facts, no matter how contradictory. You didn’t make the news fit the story. You simply reported the facts as they were. When had that stopped being true? Scott remembers the reporters of his youth, Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Woodward and Bernstein, men with rules, men of iron will. And how would they have covered these events?

  A private plane crashes. A man and a boy survive.

  Information versus entertainment.

  It’s not that Scott doesn’t understand the value of “human interest.” What was his fascination with the King of Exercise, if not a fascination with the power of the human spirit? But he could count on one hand the things he knows about Jack’s love life, his romantic history. There was a wife, a decades-long marriage. What more did he need to know?

  It’s fascinating to him, as a man who concerns himself with image, to think of how his own is being fabricated—not in the sense of being faked, but how it’s being manufactured, piece by piece. The Story of Scott. The Story of the Crash.

  All he wants is to be left alone. Why should he be forced to clarify, to wade into the swamp of lies and try to correct these poisoned thoughts? Isn’t that what they want? For him to engage? To escalate the story? When Bill Cunningham invites him on the air, it is not to set the story straight so the story ends. It is to add a new chapter, a new twist that propels the narrative forward into another week of ratings cycles.

  A trap, in other words. They are setting a trap. And if he is smart he will continue to ignore them, move forward, live his life.

  As long as he doesn’t mind the fact that nobody on earth will ever again see him as he sees himself.

  Chapter 33

  The house is small and hidden by trees. There’s a port lean to it, as if the wide-plank slats on the left end of the building have given up over the years, slumping from exhaustion or boredom or both. Driving in, Scott thinks it has a kind of shadowy charm, with its blue trim and scalloped white window shutters, a postcard childhood you remember in your dreams. As he pulls in over rough paving stones and parks under an oak tree, Doug comes out of the house carrying a canvas tool bag. He throws it in the open back of an old Jeep Wrangler with some force and moves to the driver’s door without looking up.

  Scott waves as he climbs out of the rental, but Doug doesn’t make eye contact, slapping the truck in gear and pulling out in a spray of wood chips. Then Eleanor comes to the front door, holding the boy. Scott finds he has butterflies in his stomach seeing them (her red-checked dress framed against the blue trim and scalloped white shutters, the boy matched in a plaid shirt and short pants). But unlike Eleanor, whose eyes are on Scott, the boy seems distracted, looking back into the house. Then Eleanor says something to him and he turns. Seeing Scott, his face breaks into a smile. Scott offers him a little wave (When did I become such a waver? he wonders). The boy offers a shy wave back. Then Eleanor puts him down and he half runs, half walks over to Scott, who bends a knee and thinks about scooping him up, but ends up just putting his hands on the boy’s shoulders and looking him in the eye, like a soccer coach.

  “Hey, you,” he says.

  The boy smiles.

  “I brought you something,” says Scott.

  He stands and goes to the trunk of the rental car. Inside is a plastic dump truck he found at the gas station. It’s bound to a cardboard box by unbreakable nylon ties, and they spend a few minutes trying to wrestle it free before Eleanor goes inside and fetches some scissors.

  “What do we say?” she asks the boy, once the truck is free and the subject of vigorous digging.

  “Thank you,” she offers after a moment, when it’s clear the boy isn’t going to speak.

  “I didn’t want to show up empty-handed,” says Scott.

  She nods.

  “Sorry about Doug. We had—things are hard right now.”

  Scott musses the boy’s hair.

  “Let’s talk inside,” he says. “I passed a news van on the way in. My feeling is I’ve been on TV enough this week.”

  She nods. Neither of them wants to be on display.

  They catch up at the kitchen table while the boy watches Thomas and Friends and plays with his truck. It will be bedtime soon and the boy is fidgety, his body flopping around on the sofa, his eyes glued to the screen. Scott sits at the kitchen table and watches him through the doorway. The boy’s hair has been cut recently, but not completely—so the bangs are blunt, but the back is bushy. It seems like a junior version of Eleanor’s hair, as if he has adapted in order to fit into the family.

  “I thought I could do it myself,” Eleanor explains, putting the kettle on the stove, “but he was so agitated after a few minutes I had to give up. So now every day I try to cut a little bit more, sneaking up on him when he’s
playing with his trucks, or—”

  As she says it she grabs the scissors from the drawer by the stove and pads in toward the boy, trying to stay out of his field of vision. But he sees her and waves her off, making a kind of primal growl.

  “Just—” she says, trying to reason with an unreasonable animal. “It’s longer on the—”

  The boy makes the sound again, eyes on the TV. Eleanor nods, comes back into the kitchen.

  “I don’t know,” says Scott. “There’s something perfect about a cute kid with a bad haircut.”

  “You’re just saying that to make me feel better,” she says, dumping the scissors back into the drawer.

  She pours them both a cup of tea. Since they sat, the sun has dropped into view at the top edge of the window frame, and when Eleanor leans in to pour his tea, her head slips into the creamy light, creating an eclipse. He squints up at her.

  “You look good,” he tells her.

  “Really?” she says.

  “You’re still standing. You made tea.”

  She thinks about that.

  “He needs me,” she says.

  Scott watches the boy flip around, absently chewing on the fingers of his left hand.

  Eleanor stares into the setting sun for a moment, stirs her tea.

  “When my grandfather was born,” he says, “he weighed three pounds. This was in West Texas in the ’twenties. Before ICUs. So for three months he slept in a sock drawer.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “As far as I know,” he says. “People can survive much more than you think is my point. Even kids.”

  “I mean, we talk about it—his parents. He knows they’re—passed—as much as he understands what that means. But I can tell from the way he looks to the door whenever Doug comes home that he’s still waiting.”

  Scott thinks about that. To know a thing and not know it at the same time. In some ways, the boy is the lucky one. By the time he is old enough to truly understand what happened, the wound will be old, the pain of it faded with time.

  “So you said Doug—” says Scott, “—some problems?”

  Eleanor sighs, dips her tea bag absently in the cup.

  “Look,” she says, “he’s weak. Doug. He’s just—and I didn’t—I thought it was something else at first—how insecurity, you know, defensiveness, can seem like confidence? But now I think his opinions are louder because he’s not really sure what he believes. Does that make sense?”

  “He’s a young man. It’s not a new story. I had some of that myself. Dogma.”

  She nods, a ray of hope returning to her eyes.

  “But you grew out of it.”

  “Grew? No. I burned it all down, drank myself into a stupor, pissed off everyone I knew.”

  They think about that for a moment, how sometimes the only way to learn not to play with fire is to go up in flames.

  “I’m not saying that’s what he’ll do,” says Scott, “but it’s not realistic to think he’ll just wake up one morning and say, You know what? I’m an asshole.”

  She nods.

  “And then there’s the money,” she says quietly.

  He waits.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “It’s—I get nauseous just thinking about it.”

  “You’re talking about the will?”

  She nods.

  “It’s—a lot,” she says.

  “What they left you?”

  “Him. It’s—it’s his money. It’s not—”

  “He’s four.”

  “I know, but I just want to—couldn’t I just keep it all in an account until he’s old enough to—”

  “That’s a version,” says Scott. “But what about food or housing? Who’s going to pay for school?”

  She doesn’t know.

  “I could—” she says, “I mean, maybe I make two meals. A fancy one for him or—I mean, he gets nice clothes.”

  “And you get rags?”

  She nods. Scott thinks about walking her through all the ways that her idea makes no sense, but he can tell she knows it. That she is working her way toward accepting the trade-off she’s been given for the death of her family.

  “Doug sees it differently, I’m guessing.”

  “He wants—can you believe?—he thinks—we should definitely keep the town house in the city, but I don’t know, we could probably sell London and just stay in a hotel whenever we visit. Like when did we turn into people who go to London? The man owns half a restaurant he’ll never open because the kitchen’s not done.”

  “He could finish it now.”

  She grits her teeth.

  “No. It’s not for that. We didn’t earn it. It’s not—the money is for JJ.”

  Scott watches the boy yawn and rub his eyes.

  “I’m guessing Doug doesn’t agree.”

  She worries her hands together until the knuckles are white.

  “He said we both want the same thing, but then I said, If we both want the same thing, why are you yelling?”

  “Are you—scared—at all?”

  She looks at him.

  “Did you know that people are saying you had an affair with my sister?”

  “Yes,” he says. She narrows her eyes. “I know that. But I didn’t.”

  He reads her eyes, her doubt, not knowing who she can trust anymore.

  “Someday I’ll tell you what it means to be a recovered alcoholic. Or recovering. But mostly it’s about avoiding—pleasure—about staying focused on the work.”

  “And this heiress in the city?”

  He shakes his head.

  “She gave me a place to hide, because she liked having a secret. I was the thing that money couldn’t buy. Except—I guess that’s not true.”

  Scott is about to say something when JJ pads in. Eleanor straightens, wipes her eyes.

  “Hey there, boo. Is it over?”

  He nods.

  “Should we go read some books and get ready for bed?”

  The boy nods, then points at Scott.

  “You want him to read?” asks Eleanor.

  Another nod.

  “Sounds good,” says Scott.

  * * *

  While the boy goes upstairs with Eleanor to get ready for bed, Scott calls the old fisherman he rents his house from. He wants to check in, see how the three-legged dog is doing.

  “It’s not too bad, is it?” he asks. “The press?”

  “No, sir,” says Eli. “They don’t bother me, plus—turns out they’re scared of the dog. But Mr. Burroughs, I gotta tell you. The men came. They had a warrant.”

  “What men?”

  “Police. They broke the lock on the barn and took it all.”

  Scott has a chill in the base of his spine.

  “The paintings?”

  “Yes, sir, all of them.”

  There’s a long pause as Scott thinks about that. The escalation. What it means. The work is out there now. His life’s accomplishment. What damage will come to it? What will they make him do to get it back? But there’s another feeling deep down, a giddy nerve jangling at the idea that finally the paintings are doing what they’re meant to do. They’re being seen.

  “Okay,” he tells the old man. “Don’t worry. We’ll get them back.”

  After teeth are brushed and pajamas acquired, and after the boy is in bed, under the covers, Scott sits in a rocking chair and reads from a stack of books. Eleanor hovers in the doorway, not knowing whether to stay or go, unclear of the boundaries of her role—is she allowed to leave them alone? Should she, even if she is?

  After three books the boy’s lids are droopy, but he doesn’t want Scott to stop. Eleanor comes over and lies on the bed, nestling in beside the boy. So Scott reads three more, reading on even after the boy is asleep, after Eleanor too has surrendered to it and the late-summer sun is finally down. There is a simplicity to the act, to the moment, a purity that Scott has never experienced. Around him, the house is quiet. He closes the last book, lays it quietly on the flo
or.

  Downstairs, the phone rings. Eleanor stirs, gets out of bed carefully, so as not to wake the boy. Scott hears her pad downstairs, hears the murmur of her voice, the sound of the hang-up, then she wanders back up and stands in the doorway, a strange look on her face, like a woman riding a roller coaster that’s plummeting to earth.

  “What?” says Scott.

  Eleanor swallows, exhales shakily. It’s as if the door frame is holding her up.

  “They found the rest of the bodies.”

  3.

  Chapter 34

  Screen Time

  Where is the intersection between life and art? For Gus Franklin, the coordinates can be mapped with GPS precision. Art and life collide in an aircraft hangar on Long Island. This is where twelve oversize paintings now hang, shadowed in the light that spills in through milky windows, the large hangar doors kept closed to keep out the prying eyes of cameras. Twelve photorealistic images of human disaster, suspended by wire. At Gus’s urging great care has been taken to ensure no harm comes to the work. Despite O’Brien’s witch-hunt dogma, Gus still isn’t convinced they’ve done anything except harass the victim, and he won’t be responsible for damaging an artist’s legacy or impeding a well-earned second chance.

  He stands now with a multi-jurisdictional team of agents and representatives from the airline and aircraft manufacturer, studying the paintings—not for their artistic pedigree, but as evidence. Is it possible, they ask themselves, that within these paintings are clues to the erasure of nine people and a million-dollar aircraft? It is a surreal exercise, made haunting by the location in which they stand. In the middle of the space, folding tables have been erected, upon which technicians have laid out the debris from the crash. With the addition of the paintings, there is now a tension in the space—a push/pull between wreckage and art that causes each man and woman to struggle with an unexpected feeling—that somehow the evidence has become art, not the other way around.

  Gus stands in front of the largest work, a three-canvas spread. On the far right is a farmhouse. On the far left, a tornado has formed. In the center a woman stands at the lip of a cornfield. He studies the towering stalks, squints at the woman’s face. As an engineer, he finds the act of art beyond him—the idea that the object itself (canvas, wood, and oil) is not the point, and that instead some intangible experience created from suggestion, from the intersection of materials, colors, and content has been created. Art exists not inside the piece itself, but inside the mind of the viewer.