by Noah Hawley
And yet even Gus has to admit, there is an unsettling power in the room now, a haunting specter of mass death that comes from the volume and character of images.
It is in the acknowledgment of this thought that something else strikes him.
In each painting there is a woman.
And all the women have the same face.
“What do you think?” Agent Hex of the OFAC asks him.
Gus shakes his head. It’s the nature of the human mind to look for connections, he thinks. Then Marcy approaches and tells them that divers have found what they believe to be the missing wreck.
The room erupts with voices, but Gus stares at the painting of drowning men in a hangar full of drying debris. One thing is real. The other is fiction. How he wishes it was the painting that were death and the truth fiction. But then he nods and crosses to a secure phone line. There is a moment in every search, he thinks, when it feels like the hunt will never end. And then it does.
Agent Mayberry coordinates with the Coast Guard ship that found the wreck. Divers with helmet cameras, he tells Gus, are being deployed. The feed will be sent to them via a secure channel, already in place. An hour later, Gus sits before a plastic card table inside the hangar. This is where he has taken most of his meals for the last two weeks. The other members of his team stand behind him, drinking Dunkin’ Donuts coffee from Styrofoam cups. Mayberry is on a satphone, talking directly to the Coast Guard cutter.
“The feed should be coming up now,” he says.
Gus adjusts the angle of monitor, though rationally he knows this will do nothing to help speed the connection. It is a nervous busyness. For a moment there is just a video window with no connection—FEED MISSING—then a sudden snap of blue signal. Not ocean blue, but an electronic blue, pixilated. Then that hue gives way to the soundless green of an underwater lens. The divers (Gus has been told there are three) are each projecting light from a head rig, and the video has an eerie handheld quality. It takes Gus a moment to orient himself, as the divers are already very close to what appears to be the fuselage—a scratched white shell bisected by what appears to be thick red lines.
“There’s the airline logo,” says Royce and he shows them a photo of the plane. GULLWING is scripted on the side of the plane in slanting red letters.
“Can we communicate?” Gus asks the room. “See if they can find the ID number.”
There is a scramble to try to reach someone on the Coast Guard cutter. But by the time word gets to the divers they are already moving, floating on, working their way—Gus intuits—toward the rear of the aircraft. As they pass over the port wing, Gus can see that it has snapped off with great force. The metal around the tear is twisted and curved. He looks over to the partial wing lying on the hangar floor next to a tape measure grid.
“The tail’s gone,” says Royce. Gus looks back at the screen. White lights are passing over the fuselage, moving in a slow nod as the divers kick their fins. The rear of the jet is gone, the aircraft reclining in the silt, so that the jagged tear is half buried—a machine consumed by nature.
“No,” says the woman from the airline. “It’s there, isn’t it? In the distance?”
Gus squints at the screen, and believes he can make out a glimmer on the edge of the light, man-made shapes tilted and swaying gently in the current. But then the diver’s camera turns and they are looking at the hole in the back of the plane, and as the camera tilts up, the full length of the fuselage is revealed for the first time. And suddenly they have perspective.
“I’ve got a crumple zone,” says one of the engineers.
“I see it,” says Gus, wanting to cut off speculation. The craft will have to be raised and transported back here for a full examination. Lucky for them it’s not too deep. But another hurricane is anticipated next week, and the seas are already becoming unpredictable. They will have to move fast.
A diver appears before the camera, his legs moving. He points to the blackness at the back of the plane, then to himself. The camera nods. The diver turns.
Gus sits forward in his chair, aware of the power of the moment.
They are entering the cemetery.
How to describe the things we see onscreen, experiences we have that are not ours? After so many hours (days, weeks, years) of watching TV—the morning talk shows, the daily soaps, the nightly news and then into prime time (The Bachelor, Game of Thrones, The Voice)—after a decade of studying the viral videos of late-night hosts and Funny or Die clips emailed by friends, how are we to tell the difference between them, if the experience of watching them is the same? To watch the Twin Towers fall and on the same device in the same room then watch a marathon of Everybody Loves Raymond.
To Netflix an episode of The Care Bears with your children, and then later that night (after the kids are in bed) search for amateur couples who’ve filmed themselves breaking the laws of several states. To videoconference from your work computer with Jan and Michael from the Akron office (about the new time-sheet protocols), then click (against your better instincts) on an embedded link to a jihadi beheading video. How do we separate these things in our brains when the experience of watching them—sitting or standing before the screen, perhaps eating a bowl of cereal, either alone or with others, but, in any case, always with part of us still rooted in our own daily slog (distracted by deadlines, trying to decide what to wear on a date later)—is the same?
Watching, by definition, is different from doing.
To be a diver 150 feet below the surface of the ocean, your oxygen and nitrogen levels regulated, encased in the slim cocoon of a wet suit, face mask on, feet kicking in a steady pulse, seeing only what your headlamp reveals. To feel the pressure of the deep, focused on the effort of your own breathing—something previously mechanical and automatic that now requires foresight and effort. To wear weights—literal weights—to keep your otherwise buoyant body from floating to the surface, and the way this makes your muscles strain and your breath feel bigger than your chest. In this moment there is no living room, no deadlines at work, no dates that must be dressed for. In this moment you are connected only to the reality you are experiencing. It is, in fact, reality.
Whereas Gus is simply another man seated before a desktop monitor. But even so, as the divers slip into the dark mechanical chasm that holds the dead, he experiences something visceral, outside his own room-bound reality, something that can only be described as dread.
It is darker here inside the confines of the plane. What has been lost in the crash, along with the tail, is the rear lavatory and galley, and there is a pinch to the fuselage where it has torqued from the impact. Directly ahead of the camera, flickering in the headlamp, the flippers of the forward diver move in a rhythmic paddle. That diver also wears a headlamp, and it is in the vaguer light of that diver that the first headrest becomes visible, and floating around it like a halo, a seaweed spray of hair.
The hair is visible for only a second before the forward diver blocks it with his body, and in that moment everyone watching leans to the right trying to see past him. It is an instinctive move, one the rational brain knows is impossible, but so great is the desire to see what has been revealed that each person leans as one.
“Move,” says Mayberry under his breath.
“Quiet,” Gus snaps.
Onscreen, the camera pans as the operator’s head turns. Gus sees that the cabin’s wood paneling has splintered and warped in places. A shoe floats past. A child’s sneaker. Behind Gus, one of the women draws a quick breath. And then there they are, four of the remaining five passengers, David Bateman, Maggie Bateman, daughter Rachel, and Ben Kipling, floating futilely against the reinforced nylon bonds of their lap belts, their bodies bloated.
The body man, Gil Baruch, is nowhere to be found.
Gus closes his eyes.
When he opens them, the camera has moved past the bodies of the passengers and is facing the darkened galley. The forward diver turns and points at something. The camera operator has
to swim forward to find it.
“Are those—what are those holes?” Mayberry asks as Gus leans forward. The camera moves closer, zooming in on a grouping of small holes around the door’s lock.
“They look like—” one of the engineers says, then stops.
Bullet holes.
The camera goes tighter. Through the watery light, Gus can make out six holes. One of them has shorn the door lock away.
Someone shot up the cockpit door, trying to get in.
Did the shots hit the pilots? Is that why the plane crashed?
The camera moves off the door, floating to the right and up.
But Gus remains focused. Someone shot up the cockpit door? Who? Did they make it inside?
And then the camera finds something that makes everyone in the room suck in their breath. Gus looks up, sees Captain James Melody, his dead body trapped in a pocket of high air in the rounded ceiling of the forward galley.
On the wrong side of the locked cockpit door.
Chapter 35
James Melody
March 6, 1965–August 23, 2015
He met Charles Manson once. That’s the story James Melody’s mother tells. You were two. Charlie held you on his lap. This was Venice, California, 1967. James’s mother, Darla, was over from Cornwall, England, on an expired travel visa. She’d been in the country since 1964. I came with the Beatles, she used to say, though they were from Liverpool and took a different flight. Now she lived in an apartment in Westwood. James tried to visit whenever he was on a layover at any of the Greater Los Angeles airports—Burbank, Ontario, Long Beach, Santa Monica, and on and on.
Late at night, after a few sherries, Darla sometimes intimated that Charles Manson was James’s real father. But then there were lots of stories like this. Robert Kennedy came to Los Angeles in October ’sixty-four. We met in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel.
James had learned to ignore them mostly. At fifty, he had resigned himself to never knowing the true identity of his biological dad. It was just another of life’s great mysteries. And James was a believer in mystery. Not like his mum, who never met a phantasmagorical ideology she didn’t embrace instantly and completely, but in the manner of Albert Einstein, who once said, “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”
As a pilot, James had seen the vastness of the air. He had flown through tumultuous weather with no one between him and catastrophe but God.
Here’s something else Einstein said: “The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.”
James was a great fan of Albert Einstein, the former patent clerk who divined the Theory of Relativity. Where James’s mother looked for answers to life’s mysteries in the great spiritual miasma, James preferred to think that every question is ultimately answerable by science. Take, for example, the question Why is there something and not nothing? For spiritualists, of course, the answer is God. But James was more interested in a rational blueprint of the universe, down to the subatomic level. To be a pilot required advanced math and scientific understanding. To become an astronaut (which James once fancied he’d do) required these even more so.
On layovers, you could always find James Melody reading. He’d sit by the pool at a hotel in Arizona paging through Spinoza, or eat at the bar of a nightclub in Berlin reading social science texts like Freakonomics. He was a collector of facts and details. In fact, this was what he was doing now at the restaurant in Westwood, reading the Economist and waiting for his mother. It was a sunny morning in August, eighty-three degrees out, prevailing winds from the southeast at ten miles per hour. James sat drinking a mimosa and reading an article on the birth of a red heifer on a farm on Israel’s West Bank. The cow’s birth had both Jews and fundamentalist Christians in an uproar, as both Old and New Testaments tell us that the new Messiah cannot come until the Third Temple is constructed on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. And as everyone knows, the Third Temple cannot be built until the ground is purified by the ashes of a red heifer.
As the article explained (but which James already knew), Numbers 19:2 instructs us, “Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke.” The animal must not have been used to perform work. In the Jewish tradition, the need for a red heifer was cited as the prime example of a hok, or biblical law for which there was no apparent logic. The requirement was therefore deemed of absolute divine origin.
As the reporter wrote, the Economist published the story, not because of its religious significance, but because it had reignited the hot-button issue of ownership of the Temple Mount. They cited the region’s geopolitical significance without commenting on the religious validity of fundamentalist claims.
After he was done reading the article, James tore it out of the magazine and carefully folded it into thirds. He flagged down a passing waiter and asked him to throw it in the trash. The danger in leaving the article inside the magazine was that his mother would pick it up in passing, see the article, and go off on one of her “tangents.” The last tangent took her down the rabbit hole of Scientology for nine years, during which time she accused James of being a suppressive person, and cut all contact, which he didn’t mind so much, except he worried. Darla surfaced again years later, chatty and warm, as if nothing had happened. When James asked her what had happened, she said simply, “Oh, those sillies. They act like they know everything. But as the Tao Te Ching tells us, Knowing others is wisdom. Knowing the self is enlightenment.”
James watched the waiter disappear into the kitchen. He had the impulse to follow him and make sure the article was thrown away—in fact he wished he’d told the waiter to bury it under other refuse, or that he himself had torn it into small, unreadable pieces—but he resisted. These obsessive impulses were best ignored, a lesson he had learned the hard way. The article was gone. Out of sight. Unreachable. That was what mattered.
And just in time, for in rode his mother on her Ventura 4 Mobility Scooter with adjustable angle, delta tiller (bright red, of course). She rolled down the handicapped ramp, saw him, and waved. James stood as she approached, navigating past diners (who had to move their chairs so she could pass). It’s not that his mother was obese (in fact, just the opposite: She weighed no more than ninety pounds) or that she had a disability (she walked just fine). It’s that she liked the statement the fire-engine-red scooter made, the import it brought. This was clear from the entrance she’d just made, wherein everyone in the restaurant had to stand, and adjust their seats, as if for the entrance of a queen.
“Hi there,” said Darla as James held out a chair for her. She stood without effort and took it. Then, seeing his mimosa, “What are we drinking?”
“It’s a mimosa. Would you like one?”
“Yes, please,” she said.
He signaled to the waiter to bring another. His mother put her napkin in her lap.
“So? Tell me I look wonderful.”
James smiled.
“You do. You look great.”
There was a voice he used only with her. A slow and patient elucidation, as if speaking to a child with special needs. She liked it, as long as he didn’t go too big with it, pushing to the point of patronization.
“You seem fit,” she said. “I like the mustache.”
He touched it, realizing she hadn’t seen him with it.
“A little Errol Flynn, ay?” he said.
“It’s so gray, though,” she suggested with a wince. “Maybe a little boot black.”
“I think it makes me look distinguished,” he said lightly as the waiter brought her drink.
“You’re a darling,” she told him. “Have another ready, will you. I’m dreadfully thirsty.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, withdrawing.
Over the dec
ades, his mother’s British accent had morphed into something James had taken to calling pure affectation. Like Julia Child, she had a grandness about her that made the accent seem simply aristocratic. As in, This is just the way we speak, darling.
“I researched the specials,” he said. “I’m told the frittata is divine.”
“Ooh good,” she said. There was nothing she loved more than a good meal. I’m a sensualist, she told people, which was something that sounded sexy and fun when she was twenty-five, but now—at seventy—just sounded wrong.
“Did you hear about the red heifer?” she asked after they ordered. He had a brief, panicked flash that somehow she had seen the article, but then he remembered that she watched CNN twenty-four hours a day. They must have done a story.
“I saw it,” he told her, “and I’m excited to hear your thoughts, but let’s talk about something else first.”
This seemed to placate her, which told him that she hadn’t connected to the story completely yet, the way a plug connects to a socket, drawing power.
“I’ve taken up the harmonica,” he said. “Trying to get in touch with my musical roots. Although I’m not sure roots is the right—”
She handed her empty glass to the waiter, who arrived with another just in time.
“Your stepfather played the harmonica,” she told him.
“Which one?”
She either didn’t hear his quip or ignored it.
“He was very musical. Maybe you got it from him.”
“I don’t think it works that way.”
