Before the Fall

by Noah Hawley

  In the chair he’s starting to sweat. The makeup lady blots his forehead.

  “Maybe take off your coat,” she suggests.

  But Doug is thinking about Scott, about the snake in his home, and how this fucking guy just drives up like he owns the place, like just because he’s got this bond with the kid he’s invited somehow to move in. And what did Doug ever do to deserve being thrown out of his own home? Yeah, okay, he came home drunk after midnight and maybe he was a little pissed off and yelling, but it’s his house, after all. And she’s his woman. And what kind of bizarro world are we living in if some has-been painter has more of a right to be in a man’s home than he does? So he says all this to Eleanor, orders her to send the guy packing as soon as the sun comes up. Tells her that she’s his wife and he loves her, and they have a beautiful thing, a thing worth protecting, cherishing, especially now that they’re parents, right? That he’s a father.

  And Eleanor listens. Just listens. Sits very still. Doesn’t get upset. Doesn’t seem scared or pissed or—anything. She just listens to him rant and stomp around the bedroom, and then—when he runs out of gas—she tells him she wants a divorce and that he should go sleep on the couch.

  Krista comes back smiling. They’re ready for him, she says. Bill is ready, and Doug is so brave for coming in, and the country, the world, is so grateful that there are men like Doug out there who are willing to tell the truth about things, even if it’s hard. And Doug nods. This is him in a nutshell. He is the common man, noble, hardworking. A man who doesn’t complain or demand, but one who expects the world to be square with him. Who expects a day’s work to earn a day’s pay. Expects that the life you build, the family you make, is your life, your family. You earned it and nobody should be able to take that away from you.

  A lottery won should stay won.

  So he takes off the paper bib and goes to meet his destiny.

  * * *

  “Doug,” says Bill, “thank you for being here today.”

  Doug nods, trying not to look into the camera. Just focus on me, Bill has told him. And this is what he does, focuses on the other man’s eyebrows, the tip of his nose. He’s not handsome, Bill Cunningham, not in the traditional sense, but he has that alpha bravado—the indefinable nexus of power, charisma, and confidence, the unblinking gaze and crotch-forward carriage of a man at the height of his visceral global impact. Is it physical? Pheromonal? An aura? For some reason, Doug thinks of the way a school of reef sharks will scatter when a great white appears. The way some woodland deer will simply surrender to the jaws of the wolf, ceasing their struggles and lying still, subdued by inevitable and irresistible forces.

  And then he thinks, Am I the deer?

  “These are troubling times,” says Bill. “Don’t you agree?”

  Doug blinks.

  “Do I agree that the times are troubling?”

  “For you. For me. For America. I’m talking about loss and injustice.”

  Doug nods. This is the story he wants to tell.

  “It’s a tragedy,” he says. “We all know it. The crash and now—”

  Bill leans forward. Their feed is being beamed by satellite to nine hundred million possible screens worldwide.

  “For people who don’t know the story as well as me,” he says, “give a little background.”

  Doug fidgets nervously, then becomes conscious that he’s fidgeting and gives an odd shrug.

  “Well, uh, you know about the crash. The plane crash. And how only two people survived. JJ, my nephew. My, uh, wife’s nephew. And this painter, Scott, uh, something, who supposedly swam to shore.”

  “Supposedly?”

  “No,” says Doug, backpedaling. “I’m just going off something you—I mean, it was heroic—definitely, but that doesn’t—”

  Bill shakes his head imperceptibly.

  “And so you took him in,” he says, “your nephew.”

  “Yes. Of course. I mean, he’s only four. His parents are—dead.”

  “Yes,” says Bill. “You took him in ’cause you’re a good man. A man who cares about doing the right thing.”

  Doug nods.

  “We don’t have much, you know,” says Doug. “We’re—I’m a writer, and Eleanor, my wife, she’s a, like a physical therapist.”

  “A caregiver.”

  “Right, but, you know, whatever we have is his—he’s family, right? JJ? And look—”

  Doug takes a breath, trying to focus on the story he wants to tell.

  “—look, I’m not perfect.”

  “Who is?” asks Bill. “Plus, you’re—how old are you even?”

  “I’m thirty-four.”

  “A baby.”

  “Not—I mean—I work hard, okay? I’m trying to start a restaurant, to rebuild—while also—and, okay, sometimes I have a few beers.”

  “Who doesn’t?” says Bill. “At the end of a long day. In my book that makes a man a patriot.”

  “Right, and—look, the guy’s a—hero—Scott—clearly, but—well, he kind of moved in—”

  “Scott Burroughs? He moved into your house.”

  “Well, he—he showed up a couple of days ago to see the kid, which—again—he saved him, right? So that’s—nobody’s saying he can’t see JJ. But—a man’s home is supposed to be his—and my wife—you know, it’s a lot to handle, with the boy—a lot to process—so maybe she’s just—confused, but—”

  Bill bites his lip. Though he doesn’t show the audience at home, he’s losing his patience with Doug, who is clearly a basket case and who—left to his own devices—will implode without communicating the story Bill has brought him here to tell.

  “Let me see,” he interrupts, “not to interrupt, but let me see if I can clarify a few things here, because, well, you’re clearly upset.”

  Doug stops, nods. Bill turns slightly so he’s speaking into the camera.

  “Your wife’s sister and her husband were killed, along with their daughter, under very suspicious circumstances in a private plane crash, leaving their son, JJ, an orphan at four. So you and your wife took him in, out of the goodness of your hearts, and have been trying to give him some kind of family, help him through this terrible time. And then another man—Scott Burroughs—a man rumored to have been romantically involved with your sister-in-law, who was last seen leaving the home of a loose and notoriously single heiress—has moved into your house, while you—meanwhile—have been asked to leave by your wife.”

  He turns to Doug.

  “You were thrown out,” he says, “to call it what it is. Where did you sleep last night?”

  “In my truck,” Doug mumbles.

  “What?”

  “In my truck. I slept in my truck.”

  Bill shakes his head.

  “You slept in a truck, while Scott Burroughs slept in your house. With your wife.”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know if there’s—that it’s something romantic—I’m not—”

  “Son, please. What else would it be? The man saves the boy—allegedly—and your wife takes him in, both of them, as if to make, what? A new family? Who cares that her actual husband is now homeless? Heartbroken.”

  Doug nods, the urge to cry suddenly unstoppable. But he pulls himself together.

  “Don’t forget about the money,” he says.

  Bill nods. Bingo.

  “What money?” he says innocently.

  Doug wipes his eyes, aware that he is slumped over. He straightens, trying to regain control.

  “So—David and Maggie, JJ’s parents—they were—well, you know—he ran this network. That’s not to say anything shady, but—I mean, they were very wealthy people.”

  “Worth what? Approximately.”

  “Uh, I don’t know that I should—”

  “Ten million, fifty?”

  Doug hesitates.

  “More?” asks Bill.

  “Maybe double,” says Doug reluctantly.

  “Wow. Okay. A hundred million dollars. And this money—” />
  Doug rubs his beard a few quick times with his hand, like a man trying to sober up.

  “A lot of it goes to charity,” he says, “but then, of course, the rest is JJ’s. In a trust. Which—you know—he’s four, so—”

  “You’re saying,” says Bill, “I think you’re saying, that whoever gets the boy, gets the money.”

  “That’s, I mean, a coarse way of—”

  Bill stares at him with disdain.

  “I prefer the word blunt. My point is—and maybe I’m being dumb here—but there are tens of millions of dollars at stake for whoever parents this kid—my godchild, I should add. So—yeah—I’m not—in the spirit of full transparency—I’m not objective here by a long shot. After what he’s been through, the death of his—everybody he loves—that this kid would become a pawn—”

  “Well, I mean, Eleanor’s not—she’s a good person. Means well. I just—my thought is, she must be—it’s manipulation somehow.”

  “By the painter.”

  “Or—I don’t know—maybe the money made her—the idea of it—changed her somehow.”

  “Because you thought you had a happy marriage.”

  “Well, I mean, there’s some struggle, right? We don’t always—but that’s—in your twenties, thirties—it’s hard work—life. Making your mark? And you’re supposed to—stick by each other, not—”

  Bill nods, sits back. In his right pant pocket, his phone vibrates. He slips it out and looks at the text message, his eyes narrowing. As he does, a second message comes in, then a third. Namor has been bugging the wife’s home phone, and is writing to say he heard something.

  Calls btwn swimmer and heiress last night. Sexy stuff.

  And then…

  Also swimmer and NTSB. Flight recorder damaged.

  Followed by …

  Swimmer admits bedding heiress.

  Bill pockets his phone, pulls himself up to his full sitting height.

  “Doug,” he says, “what if I told you we had confirmation that Scott Burroughs bedded Layla Mueller, the heiress, just hours before driving out to your home?”

  “Well, I mean—”

  “And that he is talking to her still, calling her from your home?”

  Doug feels his mouth go dry.

  “Okay. But—does that mean—do you think—is he with my wife, or—”

  “What do you think?”

  Doug closes his eyes. He’s not equipped for this, for the feelings he’s having, the sense that somehow in the last two weeks he has gone from winner to loser, as if his life is a practical joke the world is playing on him.

  In the studio, Bill reaches out and pats Doug’s hand.

  “We’ll be right back,” he says.

  Chapter 39

  Bullets

  Who among us really understands how recording works? How an Edison machine, in the old days, laid grooves in a cylinder of vinyl and from those grooves, when played back with a needle, came the exact replica of the sounds recorded. Words or music. But how is that possible, for a needle and a groove to re-create sound? For a scratch in a plastic wheel to capture the exact timbre of life? And then the change to digital, and how the human voice now passes through a microphone into a hard drive and somehow is codified into ones and zeros, translated to data, and then reassembled through wires and speakers to reconstruct the precise pitch and tone of human speech, the sounds of reggae or birds calling to each other on a summer day.

  It is just one of a million magic acts we have mastered over the centuries, technologies invented—from anatomical stents to war machines—their origins traced back to the dirty days of the Neanderthal and the creation of fire. Tools for survival and conquest.

  And how ten thousand years later, men in skinny jeans and Oliver Peoples eyeglasses can disassemble a black box inside a sterile case and probe it with wiry pentalobes and penlights. How they can replace damaged ports and run diagnostic software, itself created from binary code. Each line simply a version of on or off.

  Gus Franklin sits on the back of his chair, feet on the seat. He has been awake for thirty-six hours, wearing yesterday’s clothes, his face unshaved. They’re close. That’s what they tell him. Almost all of the data has been recovered. He’ll have a printout any second, the flight recorder data detailing every move the plane made, every command entered. The voice recorder may take longer, their ability to go back in time—the translation of ones and zeros into voices—hampering their ability to float inside that ghost cockpit and bear witness to the flight’s final moments.

  Ballistics shows that the bullet holes are consistent with Gil Baruch’s service weapon. Agent O’Brien—tired of looming over NTSB techs and asking How much longer?—is in the city, trying to find out more about the Batemans’ body man. Because his body is missing, Agent O’Brien has floated a new theory. Maybe Gil turned on his employer, sold his services to another buyer (al-Qaeda? the North Koreans?), then—after the flight was under way—pulled his weapon and somehow crashed the plane, then escaped.

  Like a villain in a James Bond movie? Gus asked to no response. He offered O’Brien the more likely theory that Baruch, whom they know wasn’t buckled in, was killed in the crash, his body thrown clear, swallowed by the deep or eaten by sharks. But O’Brien shook his head and said they needed to be thorough.

  On a parallel track, the autopsy results on Charles Busch came back about an hour ago. Toxicology was positive for alcohol and cocaine. Now there’s an FBI team digging deeper into the copilot’s history, interviewing friends and family, reviewing work history and school records. There’s no evidence of any mental health issues in his files. Did he have a psychotic episode, like the Germanwings copilot? Had Busch always been a time bomb, and somehow managed to keep it secret?

  Gus stares at the art gallery on the far side of the hangar. A train derailed. A tornado approaching. He was a married man once, two toothbrushes in the medicine cabinet. Now he lives alone in a sterile apartment by the Hudson, hermetically sealed inside a glass cube. He owns one toothbrush, drinks from the same glass at every meal, rinsing it afterward and placing it on the rack to dry.

  A tech comes over carrying a clutch of papers. The printout. He hands it to Gus, who scans it. His team assembles around him, waiting. Somewhere the same information is being brought up onscreen, a second group gathered around that. Everyone is looking for narrative, a story told in latitude and altitude, the literal rise and fall of Flight 613.

  “Cody,” says Gus.

  “I see it,” says Cody.

  The data is pure numbers. Vectors of thrust and lift. They’re clean. They graph. To trace a journey mathematically, all you need are coordinates. Reading the data, Gus relives the final minutes of the airplane’s journey—data divorced from the lives and personalities of the passengers and crew. This is the story of an airplane, not the people on board. Engine performance records, flap specifics.

  Forgotten is the disaster scene around him, the art gallery and its patrons.

  The data shows that the flight takes off without incident, banking left, then straightening out, the plane rising to twenty-six thousand feet over a period of six minutes and thirteen seconds, as ordered by ATC. At minute six, the autopilot is switched on and the flight heads southwest along a planned route. Nine minutes later, control of the plane is switched from pilot to copilot, Melody to Busch, for reasons the data can’t project. Course and altitude remain constant. Then, sixteen minutes into the flight, the autopilot is turned off. The plane banks sharply and dives, what started as a slow port turn becoming a steep spiral, like a mad dog chasing its tail.

  All systems were normal. There was no mechanical error. The copilot turned off the autopilot and took manual control. He put the plane into a dive, ultimately crashing into the sea. Those are the facts. Now they know the root cause. What they don’t know is (a) why? and (b) what happened next? They know Busch was drunk, high. Was his perception or judgment altered by drugs? Did he think he was flying the plane normally, or did
he know he had begun a death spiral?

  More important, did the copilot wait for the pilot to go and then deliberately crash the plane? But why would he do that? What possible grounds would lie behind such an action?

  Gus sits for a moment. Around him there is a sudden rush of activity, numbers fed into algorithms, double-checked. But Gus is still. He knows for certain now. The crash was no accident. Its origins lie not in the science of tensile strength or joint wear, caused not by computer failure or faulty hydraulics, but in the murky whys of psychology, in the torment and tragedy of the human soul. Why would a handsome, healthy young man put a passenger plane into a steep and irrevocable dive, ignoring the panicked pounding of the captain outside the cockpit and his own shrieking survival instinct? What sort of unsteady foundation had taken root in the gray matter of his brain—what previously undiagnosed mental illness or recent deafening gripe at the injustices of the world—could inspire a senator’s nephew to kill nine people, including himself, by turning a luxury jet into a missile?

  And can they conclude then that the shots fired were an attempt to reenter the cockpit and take control of the plane?

  The solution to this mystery, in other words, lies outside the purview of engineers, and in the realm of voodoo speculation.

  All Gus Franklin can do is grit his teeth and wade into the storm.

  He reaches for the phone, then thinks better of it. News like this, in the aftermath of multiple leaks, is best delivered in person. So he grabs his jacket and heads for the car.

  “I’m heading in,” he tells his team. “Call me when the techs crack the recorder.”

  Chapter 40

  Games

  They are playing Chutes and Ladders in the living room when the call comes. Doug is on TV. Eleanor comes back from the kitchen, phone shaking. She meets Scott’s eye, pantomimes that they need a way to keep the boy busy so they can talk.