by Noah Hawley
“Hey, buddy,” Scott tells him, “go grab my bag from upstairs, huh? I got a present for you.”
The boy runs upstairs, hair flying behind him, footsteps a sloppy cascade on the stairs. Eleanor watches him go, then turns, her face pale.
“What’s wrong?” Scott asks.
“My mother,” she says, looking for the TV remote.
“What—”
She is pawing through the junk drawer below the TV. “Where’s the remote?”
He spies it on the coffee table, grabs it. She takes it, turns on the TV, pushes buttons. The black screen blinks on, a center star coming to life, becoming sound, birthing an elephant on a savanna looking for water. Eleanor flips channels, searching.
“I don’t understand,” Scott says.
He throws a glance at the stairs. Overhead, he can hear the boy’s feet on the ceiling, the closet door opening in the guest room.
Then there’s a sharp intake of breath from Eleanor, and Scott turns back. Onscreen is a flanneled and bearded Doug, sitting across from the red-suspendered Bill Cunningham. They are on a newsroom set, behind an anchor desk. It is a surreal sight, as if two different programs have been spliced together, side by side. A show about money and a show about trees. Doug’s voice fills the room, mid-sentence. He is talking about Scott and how Eleanor threw her own husband out of the house, and maybe Scott is in it for the money, and Bill Cunningham is nodding and interrupting, and restating Doug’s points—at one point even stepping in to tell the story himself.
—a washed-up painter who beds married women and glorifies disaster scenes.
Scott looks at Eleanor, who is clutching the remote to her chest, her knuckles white. For some reason he thinks of his sister lying in her coffin, a sixteen-year-old girl who drowned on a late-September day, swallowed by the murky deep, air bubbles rising. A virginal body that had to be dried and cleaned, muscled into its best dress by a forty-six-year-old mortician, a stranger who coated her skin with blush and brushed her waterlogged hair until it shone. And how her hands were raised to her chest, a spray of yellow daisies laced between her unfeeling fingers.
And how his sister was allergic to daisies, which upset Scott to no end, until he realized that it didn’t matter anymore.
“I don’t understand,” Eleanor says, then repeats it—more quietly this time, to herself, a mantra.
Scott hears footsteps on the stairs, and turns. He intercepts the boy as he spills down the stairs carrying Scott’s bag, a confused (potentially hurt) look on his face, as if to say I can’t find the present. Scott approaches him at a raking angle, mussing his hair and detouring him smoothly into the kitchen.
“Couldn’t find it?” he says, and the boy shakes his head.
“Okay,” says Scott, “let me look.”
He sits the boy at the kitchen table. Outside a mail truck pulls up to the driveway. The mail carrier wears an old-school pith helmet. Past him, Scott can see the raised dishes of the news trucks, parked at the end of the cul-de-sac, waiting, watching. The mailman opens the mailbox, puts in a supermarket circular and some bills, oblivious to the drama inside.
From the living room, Scott hears Doug say, “We were fine before he showed up. Happy.”
Scott digs through his bag, looking for something he can claim is a present. He finds the fountain pen his father gave him when he left for college. A black Montblanc. It is the one thing Scott has kept through the years, his fortunes rising and falling, the one constant as he fumbled his way through spells of drinking, through his great painter phases, kamikaze-ing into periods of abject terror, numbing himself with booze, zeroing in on failure. And then through his rise from whatever ashes were left to a new body of work. A fresh start.
Through his lowest point, when he threw all his furniture out the window, every plate and dish, everything he owned.
Except the pen.
He signs his paintings with this pen.
“Here,” he tells the boy, pulling it out of his bag. The boy smiles. Scott unscrews the cap, shows the boy how it works, uses it to draw a dog on a paper napkin.
“My father gave it to me when I was young,” he says, then realizes the implication, that he is now passing the pen on to his own son. That he has adopted the boy somehow.
He has the thought and pushes through it. Life can paralyze us, freeze us into statues if we think about things too long.
He hands the pen to the boy, arguably the last piece of the man he once was, his spine, the only thing about him that has stayed straight and true, unfailing, reliable. He was a boy once himself, an explorer setting out for undiscovered lands. Not a single cell of that boy remains now, Scott’s body changed at the genetic level, every electron and neutron replaced over the decades by new cells, new ideas.
A new man.
The boy takes the pen, tries it on the napkin, but can’t get a line.
“It’s—” says Scott, “—it’s a fountain pen, so you have to hold it—”
He takes the boy’s hand, shows him how to hold it. From the kitchen he hears Bill Cunningham say, “—so first he befriends the sister—a wealthy woman—and now that she’s dead and the money has passed to her son—suddenly he’s in your house, and you’re sleeping in an old truck.”
The boy gets a black line out of the pen, draws another. He makes a happy sound. Watching him, something inside Scott snaps into place. A sense of purpose, a decision he didn’t even know he was making. He walks to the phone, like a man on hot coals, determined not to look down. He dials information, gets the number for ALC, then asks for Bill Cunningham’s office. After a few misdirects, he finds his way to Krista Brewer, Bill’s producer.
“Mr. Burroughs?” she says, sounding breathless, as if she has run a great distance to reach the phone.
Because of the nature of time, the next moment is both endless and instantaneous.
“Tell him I accept,” says Scott.
“Pardon?”
“The interview. I’ll do it.”
“Wow. Great. Should we—I know we have a news truck nearby. Do you want to…”
“No. Stay away from the house, from the boy. This is between me and the gargoyle. A conversation about how maybe bullying and belittling people from a distance is a bullshit coward’s way to be a man.”
The quality of her voice, in the next moment, can only be described as elated.
“Can I quote you on that?”
Scott thinks of his sister, her hands crossed, eyes closed. He thinks of the waves, towering, and the struggle to stay afloat, one arm dislocated.
“No,” he says. “I’ll see you this afternoon.”
Chapter 41
Painting #5
We are sorry for your loss.1
1(White letters on black canvas.)
Chapter 42
The History of Violence
Gus is on Second Avenue headed back to the hangar when the call comes.
“Are you following this?” Mayberry asks.
“Following what?” he says. He has been lost in thought, ruminating about his meeting with the state attorney general and heads of the FBI and the OFAC. The copilot was high. He crashed the plane deliberately.
“It’s turned into a real soap opera,” Mayberry says. “Doug, the uncle, went on TV to say he’d been thrown out of the house and that Burroughs had moved in. And now they’re saying Burroughs is headed into the studio for an interview.”
“Jesus,” says Gus. He thinks about calling Scott to warn him off, but then remembers that the painter has no cell phone. Gus slows for a red light, a taxi merging signal-less in front of him, forcing him to slam on the brakes.
“Where are we on the flight recorder?” he asks.
“Close,” says Mayberry. “Ten minutes maybe.”
Gus joins a line of traffic headed for the 59th Street Bridge.
“Call me the second you have it,” he says. “I’m on my way back.”
* * *
Sixty miles north, a white rental car
threads its way through Westchester, toward the city. It’s greener here, the parkway surrounded by trees. Unlike Gus’s route, the road here is mostly empty. Scott changes lanes without signaling.
He tries to exist solely in the moment he’s living, a man driving a car on an Indian summer day. Three weeks ago, he was a speck of dust in a raging sea. A year before that he was a hopeless drunk waking on a famous painter’s living room rug, staggering out into the harsh sunlight and discovering an aquamarine swimming pool. Life is made of these moments—of one’s physical being moving through time and space—and we string them together into a story, and that story becomes our life.
So as he is sitting in his rented Camry on the Henry Hudson Parkway, he is also sliding into a chair in studio 3 of the ALC Building an hour later, watching a young man with glasses hide a wire microphone under Bill Cunningham’s lapel. And simultaneously he is a teenager home from college, sitting on a ten-speed Schwinn beside a country road at night, waiting for his younger sister to finish her swim in Lake Michigan. Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on?
A man in a car, and on a bike, and in a television studio. But also in the front yard of Eleanor’s house thirty minutes earlier, walking to the car, and Eleanor is asking him not to go, telling him that he’s making a mistake.
“If you want to tell your story,” she says, “fine, call CNN, call the New York Times. Not him.”
Not Cunningham.
In the ocean, Scott grabs the boy and dives beneath a wave too big to comprehend.
And at the same time, he slows behind a dented station wagon, then puts on his turn signal and changes lanes.
In the dressing room, Scott watches Bill Cunningham grimace, hearing him roll his r’s and execute a succession of quick voice exercises, trying to decide if the feeling in his stomach is fear or dread or the thrill of the boxer before a fight he thinks he can win.
“Will you come back?” Eleanor asked him in the driveway.
And Scott looked at her, the boy on the porch behind her, eyes confused, and he said, “Is there a pool around here? I think I should teach the boy to swim.”
And how Eleanor smiled and said, “Yes.” There was.
In the hair and makeup room, Scott waited for Bill. It would be wrong to say he was nervous.
What was the threat of one man after he had faced down the entire ocean? So Scott simply closed his eyes and waited to be called.
“First of all,” says Bill, when they’re across from each other and the cameras are rolling. “I want to thank you for sitting down with me today.”
The words are kind, but Bill’s eyes are hostile, so Scott doesn’t respond.
“It’s been a long three weeks,” says Bill. “I don’t—I’m not sure how much any of us has slept. On the air—me personally—more than a hundred hours, on the hunt for answers. For the truth.”
“Am I supposed to look at you or the camera?” Scott interrupts.
“At me. It’s like any other conversation.”
“Well—” says Scott. “I’ve had a lot of conversations in my life. None of them was like this.”
“I’m not saying the content,” says Bill. “I’m talking about two men talking.”
“Except this is an interview. A damn interview isn’t a conversation.”
Bill leans forward in his chair.
“You seem nervous.”
“Do I? I don’t feel nervous. I just want to be clear on the rules.”
“What do you feel then, if not nervous? I want viewers at home to be able to read your face.”
Scott thinks about this.
“It’s strange,” he says. “You hear the word sleepwalking sometimes. How some people sleepwalk through life and then something wakes them up. I don’t—that’s not how I feel. Maybe the opposite.”
He watches Bill’s eyes. It’s clear Bill doesn’t know yet what to make of Scott, how to trap him.
“The whole thing feels like some kind of—dream,” says Scott. He too is striving for truth. Or maybe he alone.
“Like maybe I fell asleep on the plane and I’m still waiting to wake up.”
“Unreal, you’re saying,” says Bill.
Scott thinks about that.
“No. It’s very real. Too real maybe. The way people treat each other these days. Not that I thought we lived on Planet Hugs, but—”
Bill sits forward, not interested in a conversation about manners.
“I’d like to talk about how you came to be on that plane.”
“I was invited.”
“By who?”
“Maggie.”
“Mrs. Bateman.”
“Yes. She said call her Maggie, so I call her Maggie. We met on the Vineyard last summer. June maybe. We went to the same coffee shop, and I’d see her at the farmers market with JJ and her daughter.”
“She came to your studio.”
“Once. I work out back of my house in an old barn. There were workmen in her kitchen, she said, and she needed something to do for the afternoon. The kids were with her.”
“You’re saying the only time you saw her outside of the market or a coffee shop, the kids were with her.”
“Yes.”
Bill makes a face to indicate maybe he thinks that’s bullshit.
“Some of your work could be considered pretty disturbing, don’t you think?” he says.
“For children you mean?” says Scott. “I suppose. But the boy was napping, and Rachel wanted to see.”
“So you let her.”
“No. Her mother. It wasn’t my—and it’s not like—for the record—the pictures aren’t—graphic. It’s just—an attempt.”
“What does that mean?”
Scott thinks about that, what he’s trying to say.
“What is this world?” he says. “Why do things happen? Does it mean something? That’s all I’m doing. Trying to understand. So I showed them around—Maggie and Rachel—and we talked.”
Bill sneers. Scott can tell that the last thing he wants to do is talk about art. In the cacophony of time he is sitting in a television studio, but part of him is still in his car, driving into the city—the wet road smeared with the red trails of taillights, and he is also somehow sitting on the plane, trying to get oriented—a man who minutes earlier had been running from the bus stop.
“You had feelings for her, though,” says Bill. “Mrs. Bateman.”
“What does that mean, feelings? She was a nice person. She loved her children.”
“But not her husband.”
“I don’t know. It seemed that way. I’ve never been married, so what do I know. It’s not something we ever—she was very comfortable, it seemed, as a person. They had fun, her and the kids. They laughed all the time. He worked a lot it seemed, David, but they were always talking about him, the things they’d do when Daddy got there.”
He thinks for a moment.
“She seemed happy.”
* * *
Gus is on the Long Island Expressway when the calls comes. The flight recorder is fixed. There is some degradation, they tell him, but it’s in the quality of sound, not the content of the recording. His team is about to listen back and does Gus want them to wait for him?
“No,” he says, “we need to know. Just put the phone up to the speaker.”
They hurry to comply. He sits in his brown government vehicle in stop-and-go traffic. He is mid-island, past LaGuardia, not yet to Kennedy. Through the car’s speakers he can hear hurried activity as they prepare to review the tape. It is a record of another time, like a jar that holds the last breath of a dying man. The actions and voices of the tape are secret still, but in moments they will be out. The last unknown thing will become known. And then everything that can be clear, will be clear. Any oth
er mysteries are there for the ages.
Gus breathes recycled air. Rain dots his windshield.
The tape begins.
It starts with two voices from within the cockpit. The captain, James Melody, has a British accent. Charles Busch, the copilot, has a Texas drawl.
“Checklist, brakes,” says Melody.
“Are checked,” responds Busch after a moment.
“Flaps.”
“Ten, ten, green.”
“Yaw damper.”
“Checked.”
“Little crosswind here,” says Melody. “Let’s keep that in mind. Flight instrument and annunciator panels?”
“Uh, yeah. No warnings.”
“Okay then. Checklist complete.”
Traffic lightens ahead of Gus. He gets the Ford up to twenty-six mph then slows again as the line of cars ahead of him constricts. He would pull over to the side of the road and listen, except he’s in the center lane with no exits in sight.
The next voice is Melody’s.
“Vineyard flight control, this is GullWing Six Thirteen. Ready for takeoff.”
A pause, and then a filtered voice comes through their radio.
“GullWing Six Thirteen, cleared for takeoff.”
“Thrust SRS. Runway,” Melody tells Busch.
He hears mechanical sounds from the tape. The phone relay makes them hard to identify, but he knows that techs in the lab are already making guesses about which ones are yoke movement and which are increases in engine rpm.
“Eighty knots.” Busch?
More sounds from the tape as the plane leaves the ground.
“Positive rate,” says Melody. “Gear up, please.”
ATC comes over their radio.
“GullWing Six Thirteen, I see you. Turn left. Fly the Bridge. Climb. Contact Teterboro departure. Good night.”
“GullWing Six Thirteen, thanks much,” says Melody.
“Gear up,” says Busch.
The plane is in the air now, on its way to New Jersey. Under normal conditions it is a twenty-nine-minute flight. Less than a short hop. There will be a six-minute lull before they are in range of Teterboro ATC.
