Before the Fall

by Noah Hawley

  “Everything okay out here?” James asked, more to her than the kid.

  She smiled at him in a far-off way, keeping her eyes down. He looked at Charlie.

  “All good, Captain,” said Charlie. “Just singing a song I shouldn’t have been singing.”

  “Well, I don’t know what that means, but I don’t tolerate funny business on my bird. Do I need to call the front office, get another man?”

  “No, sir. No funny business. Just here to get the job done. Nothing else.”

  James studied him. The kid held his eyes. A rogue of sorts, he decided. Not dangerous, just used to getting his way. He was handsome in a crooked sort of fashion, with a Texas twang. Loose. That’s how James would describe him. Not a planner. More of a go with the flow sort. And James was okay with that, in principle. He could be flexible when it came to staff. As long as they did what they were told. The kid needed discipline was all, and James would give it to him.

  “Okay then, take your seat and get on with control. I want to be wheels-up in five. We’ve got a schedule to keep.”

  “Yessir,” said Charlie with an unreadable grin, and got to work.

  And then the first passengers came aboard, the client and his family—plane shifting as they climbed the gangway—and James made himself available for conversation. He always liked to meet the souls he flew, to shake hands and put faces to names. It made the work more meaningful, especially when there were children. He was captain of this ship, after all, responsible for all lives. It didn’t feel like servitude. It felt like a privilege. Only in the modern world did people believe that they should be the ones receiving. But James was a giver. He didn’t know what to do when people tried to pamper him. If he caught a seat on a commercial flight, he always found himself getting up to help the flight attendants stow baggage or grabbing blankets for pregnant passengers. Someone had once said to him, It’s hard to be sad when you’re being useful. And he liked that idea. That service to others brought happiness. It was self-involvement that led to depression, to spiraling questions about the meaning of things. This had always been his mother’s problem. She thought too much of herself, and not enough of others.

  James had built himself to be the opposite. Often he considered what his mother would do in any situation—what the wrong decision was—and it clarified for him what he should do instead. In this way he used her as the North Star on a journey where you always want to go south. It was helpful, aligning himself in this way. It gave him something to tune to, like a violin to a piano.

  They were in the air five minutes later, taking off to the west and banking back toward the coast. The yoke still felt a little sticky when he moved it starboard, but he put it down to an idiosyncrasy of the plane.

  Chapter 36

  The Blacks

  The first night, Scott sleeps on a pullout sofa in the sewing room. He hadn’t planned on staying, but in the aftermath of the day’s news he felt Eleanor might need the support, especially since her husband seemed to have disappeared.

  He turns off his phone when he’s working, said Eleanor, though the way she said it seemed to indicate that the word working really meant drinking.

  Now, on the verge of a dream, Scott hears Doug come home around one, the sound of tires on the driveway waking him with a jolt of adrenaline. There is that animal surge of primitive nerves, eyes opening in an unfamiliar room, unsure for a long moment of where he is. A sewing table sits under the window, the machine a strange, looming predator in the shadows. Downstairs, the front door closes. Scott hears feet on the stairs. He listens as they approach, then stop outside his door. Silence again, like a breath held. Scott lies coiled, tense, an unwanted guest in another man’s house. Outside he becomes aware of Doug breathing, a bearded man in overalls, drunk on artisanal bourbon and microbrews. Outside the window the cicadas are cutting a bloody racket in the yard. Scott thinks of the ocean, filled with invisible predators. You hold your breath and dive into the closing darkness, like sliding down a giant’s throat, no longer even human in your mind. Prey.

  A floorboard pops in the hall as Doug shifts his weight. Scott sits up and stares at the doorknob, a dim copper ball in the darkness. What will he do if it turns? If Doug enters drunk, ready for a fight?

  Breathe. Again.

  Somewhere the air conditioner’s compressor kicks on, and the low duct thrust of forced air breaks the spell. The house is just a house again. Scott listens as Doug walks down the hall to the bedroom.

  He exhales slowly, realizing he’s been holding his breath.

  In the morning, he takes the boy out looking for rocks to skip. They scour the grounds of the riverbank, looking for flat, smooth stones—Scott in his city shoes and the boy in little pants and a little shirt, each shoe smaller than Scott’s hand. He shows the boy how to stand, cockeyed to the water, and sidearm projectiles across the surface. For a long time the boy can’t do it. He furrows his brow and tries over and over, clearly frustrated, but refusing to give up. He chews his tongue inside his closed mouth and makes a working sound, half song, half drone, selecting his stones carefully. The first time he gets a two-hopper, he jumps in the air and claps his hands.

  “Nice, buddy,” Scott tells him.

  Energized, the boy runs off to collect more stones. They are on a thin strip of brambly bank on the edge of the woods at a wide bend in the Hudson. The morning sun is behind them, blockaded by trees, on the rise, its first rays cresting the far shore. Scott sits on his heels and puts his hand in the moving water. It is cool and clear, and for a moment he wonders if he will ever go swimming again, ever fly on another plane. He can smell silt in the air and somewhere a tinge of cut grass. He is aware of his body as a body, muscles engaged, blood flowing. Around him, unseen birds call to each other without urgency, just a steady interchange of heckle and woop.

  The boy throws another stone, laughing.

  Is this how healing starts?

  Last night Eleanor came into the living room to tell him he had a call. Scott was on his knees, playing trucks with the boy.

  Who would be calling me here?

  “She said her name was Layla,” Eleanor said.

  Scott got to his feet, went into the kitchen.

  “How did you know I was here?” he asked.

  “Sweetie,” she said, “what else is money for?”

  Her voice dropped, moving to a more intimate octave.

  “Tell me you’re coming back soon,” she said. “I’m spending, like, all my time on the third floor sitting inside your painting. It’s so good. Did I tell you I’ve been to that farmers market? When I was a kid. My dad had a place on the Vineyard. I grew up eating ice cream in that courtyard. It’s eerie. The first time I ever handled cash was to go buy peaches from Mr. Coselli. I was six.”

  “I’m with the boy now,” Scott told her. “He needs me—I think. I don’t know. Kids. Psychology. Maybe I’m just in the way.”

  Through the phone, Scott heard Layla take a sip of something.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ve got buyers lined up for every painting you make in the next ten years. I’m talking to the Tate later about mounting a solo show this winter. Your rep sent me the slides. They’re breathtaking.”

  These words, once so coveted, were Chinese to him now.

  “I have to go,” he told her.

  “Hold on,” she said, purring, “don’t just run. I miss you.”

  “What’s going on?” he asked. “In your mind. With us.”

  “Let’s go to Greece,” she told him. “There’s a little house on a cliff I own through, like, six shell companies. Nobody knows a thing. Complete mystery. We could lie in the sun and eat oysters. Dance after dark. Wait till the dust clears. I know I should be coy with you, but I’ve never met anyone whose attention is harder to get. Even when we’re together it’s like we’re in the same place, but different years.”

  After he hung up, Scott found JJ had moved to the desk in the living room. He was using Eleanor’s computer, playing
an educational game, moving letter tiles.

  “Hey, buddy.”

  The boy didn’t look up. Scott pulled up a chair and sat down next to him. He watched the boy drag the letter B onto a matching square. Above it a cartoon bug sat on a leaf. The boy dragged the U, then the G.

  “Do you mind if I—” said Scott. “Could I—”

  He reached for the mouse, moved the cursor. He didn’t own a computer himself, but he had spent enough time watching people on laptops in coffee shops to understand what to do, he thought.

  “How do I—” he asked, after a moment, more to himself than the boy, “—search for something?”

  The boy took the mouse. Concentrating, chewing his tongue, he opened a browser window, went to Google, then gave the mouse back to Scott.

  “Great,” said Scott. “Thanks.”

  He typed Dwo—then stopped, not knowing the spelling. He erased the word, then typed, Red Sox, video, longest at bat, hit ENTER. The page loaded. Scott clicked on a video link. The boy showed him how to maximize the window. He felt like a caveman staring into the sun.

  “You can—it’s okay to watch I think,” he told the boy, then hit PLAY. Onscreen the video began. The quality was pixilated, the colors saturated, as if—rather than record the game the normal way—the poster had filmed their own television screen. Scott imagined that, a man sitting in his living room filming a baseball game on TV, creating a game within a game, the image of an image.

  “Dworkin—struck out and singled to center field,” the announcer said. Behind him the roar of the crowd was loud, filtered through TV speakers and compressed further by the viewer’s camera. The batter stepped into the box. He was a tall Hoosier with a Mennonite beard, no mustache. He took a few practice swings. In the control room they cut to the pitcher, Wakefield, bobbling the rosin. Behind him, towers of floodlights flared the corners of the screen. A night game in summer, eighty-six degrees with winds out of the southwest.

  From Gus, Scott knew that Dworkin’s at bat started as the wheels of their plane left the tarmac. He thought about that now, the speed of the plane, the flight attendant in her jump seat, and how much more quickly the private jet left the ground than a commercial flight did. He watched Dworkin take a pitch low and outside. Ball one.

  The camera moved to the crowd, men in sweatshirts, kids with hats and gloves, waving at the lens. The pitcher wound up. Dworkin readied himself, bat hovering above his right shoulder. The ball was released. Scott clicked the mouse, pausing the image. The pitcher froze, back leg raised, left arm extended. Sixty feet away, Dworkin readied himself. From the news Scott knew that twenty-two more pitches were coming. Twenty-two pitches thrown over a span of eighteen minutes, pitch after pitch fouled into the stands, or back into the net. The slow drawl of baseball time, a game of lazy Sundays and dugout chatter. Wind up and pitch.

  But right now the game was paused, frozen, the ball floating in midair. Twenty-two pitches, the game already nearly three weeks old, but for a first-time viewer it was as if the events onscreen were happening for the first time. As if the whole earth had rewound. Who knew what would happen next? Dworkin could strike out or homer into deep left field, high above the green monster. Sitting there with the boy, Scott couldn’t help but think, What if everything else reset with the game? If the whole world cycled back to ten p.m. on the night of August 23, 2015, then stopped. He imagined the cities of the planet frozen, red-light traffic pressed in perfect unison. He pictured smoke hovering motionless above suburban chimneys. Cheetahs caught in mid-stride on the open plains. Onscreen the ball was just a white dot trapped between a point of departure and its destination.

  If it was true. If somehow the world had wound itself back, then somewhere he was on an airplane. They were all on an airplane. A family of four, the banker and his wife. A beautiful flight attendant. Children. They were alive. Paused. The girl listening to music. The men jawing, watching the game. Maggie in her seat, smiling into the face of her sleeping son.

  As long as he didn’t restart the game they would live. As long as he never clicked the mouse. The ball in midair was the plane in midair, its destiny unmet. He stared at it and was surprised to find his eyes watering, the pixels onscreen blurring, the man at the plate just a smudge, the ball a random snowflake, out of season.

  At the river, Scott lowers his hand into the water, lets the current pull at his wrist. He remembers looking out the window this morning and watching Doug pack his pickup truck with bags. He was yelling words that Scott couldn’t make out, and then he slammed the cab door and pulled out of the driveway, spraying gravel.

  What happened? Is he gone for good?

  A noise rises on the periphery. It starts as an industrial hum—a distant chain saw maybe, trucks on the interstate (except there is no interstate nearby)—and Scott pays it no attention as he watches the boy dig into the muddy shore and pull out coins of shale and quartz. He begins at a far point and works his way back, searching the mud first with his eyes, then his fingers.

  The chain saw gets louder, taking on a low bass rumble. Something is coming. Scott stands, becoming aware of wind, the westward lean of trees, leaves shimmering, mimicking the sound of applause. In the distance the boy stops what he’s doing and looks up. In that moment a Jurassic roar overtakes them as the helicopter comes in low over the trees behind them. Scott ducks his head reflexively. The boy starts to run.

  The helicopter swoops through bright sun, like a bird of prey, then slows as it reaches the far bank and begins to circle back. It is black and shiny, like a pincered beetle. JJ approaches at a full run, a look of fear on his face. Scott picks him up without thinking and moves into the trees. He runs in his city shoes through low brush, snaking between poplars and elms, poison ivy brushing his cuffs. Once again he is a muscle of survival, an engine of rescue. The boy’s arms are wrapped around his neck, legs around his waist. He faces backward, his eyes wide, chin on Scott’s shoulder. His knees dig into Scott’s sides.

  When they get back to the house, Scott sees the helicopter settle in the backyard. Eleanor has come out onto the front porch and has a hand on her head, trying to keep her hair from blowing into her face.

  The pilot shuts off the engine, rotors slowing.

  Scott hands the boy to Eleanor.

  “What’s going on?” she says.

  “You should take him inside,” Scott tells her, then turns to see Gus Franklin and Agent O’Brien climb out of the whirlybird. They approach, O’Brien ducked low, hand on his head, Gus walking upright—confident that he is shorter than the blades.

  The engine whirl slows and quiets. Gus sticks out his hand.

  “Sorry for the drama,” he says. “But given all the leaks I thought we should reach you before the news got out.”

  Scott shakes his hand.

  “You remember Agent O’Brien,” says Gus.

  O’Brien spits into the grass.

  “Yeah,” he says. “He remembers.”

  “Wasn’t he off the case?” says Scott.

  Gus squints into the sun.

  “Let’s just say some new facts are moving the FBI to the front of the investigation.”

  Scott looks puzzled. O’Brien pats his arm.

  “Let’s go inside.”

  They sit in the kitchen. Eleanor puts on an episode of Cat in the Hat to distract the boy (too much TV, she thinks. I’m giving him too much TV), then sits on the edge of her seat, jumping up every time he stirs.

  “Okay,” says O’Brien. “This is me taking off the gloves.”

  Scott looks at Gus, who shrugs. There’s nothing he can do. The divers recovered the cockpit door this morning, lasering the hinges and floating it to the surface. Tests showed the holes were indeed bullet holes. This triggered a shift in procedural authority. Phone calls were made from government offices and Gus was told in no uncertain terms that he should give the FBI as much operational leeway as they required. Oh, and by the way, he was getting O’Brien back. Apparently, the brass was convinced that
O’Brien wasn’t their leak. Plus, it turned out, he was being groomed for big things—Gus’s liaison explained—so they were putting him back on the case.

  Ten minutes later, O’Brien walked into the hangar with a team of twelve men and asked for a “sit rep.” Gus saw no point in fighting—he was a pragmatist by nature, as much as he disliked the man personally. He told O’Brien that they’d recovered all remaining bodies except for Gil Baruch, the Batemans’ body man. It looked as if he had either been thrown clear of the others or had floated out of the fuselage in the days after the crash. If they were lucky his body would wash up somewhere, as Emma’s and Sarah’s had. Or, quite possibly, it was simply gone.

  The questions as Gus saw them were as follows.

  Who fired the shots? The obvious suspect was the security man, Gil Baruch, the only passenger known to be armed, but since none of the passengers or crew had gone through a security screening before boarding the plane, they were all potential shooters.

  Why had the shots been fired? Was the shooter attempting to force his way into the cockpit in order to hijack the plane? Or simply to crash it? Or was the shooter attempting to get inside the cockpit to avert the crash? Villain, or a hero? That was the question.

  Why was the captain in the main cabin and not the cockpit? If it was a possible hijack scenario, was he a hostage? Had he come out to defuse the situation? But if that was the case…

  Why was there no mayday from the copilot?

  Speaking of the copilot, divers had found Charles Busch strapped into his seat in the cockpit, hands still gripping the yoke. One of the bullets had buried itself in the floor behind him, but there was no evidence that anyone had made it inside the cockpit before the plane hit the water. Gus told the agent that autopsy results on Busch would be back that afternoon. None of them knew what they were hoping for. The best-case scenario, in Gus’s mind, was that the young man had suffered a stroke or heart attack. The worst case, well, the worst case was this was a calculated act of mass murder.

  All loose debris had been tagged and bagged and was here now, being cataloged. The good news was that the black box and data recorders had been recovered. The bad news was that it appeared one or both may have been damaged in the crash. Techs would work around the clock to recover every last trace of data. By the end of the day, Gus told him—barring an unexpected turn of weather—the fuselage should be up and on its way to the hangar.