Before the Fall

by Noah Hawley

  A knock.

  “Captain.” A female voice comes in. The flight attendant, Emma Lightner. “Can I bring you anything?”

  “No,” says Melody.

  “What about me?” asks the copilot.

  A pause. What was happening? What looks were being exchanged?

  “He’s fine,” says Melody. “It’s a short flight. Let’s stay focused.”

  * * *

  Bill Cunningham leans forward in his seat. They are on a set designed to be seen from a single direction. This means that the walls behind him are unpainted on the backside, like a set built for an episode of Twilight Zone, where an injured man slowly realizes that what he thinks is real is actually theater.

  “And on the flight,” says Bill. “Describe what happened.”

  Scott nods. He doesn’t know why, but he’s surprised that the interview is unfolding in this way, as an actual interview about the crash, what happened. He assumed they’d be trading body blows by now.

  “Well,” he says, “I was late. The cab never came, so I had to take the bus. Until we reached the runway, I assumed I’d missed it, that I’d get there just in time to see the taillights lifting off into the sky. But I didn’t. They waited. Or not waited—they were folding in the door when I—but they didn’t leave. So I—got on—and everyone was already—some people were in their seats—Maggie and the kids, Mrs. Kipling. David and Mr. Kipling were still on their feet, I think. And the flight attendant gave me a glass of wine. I’d never been on a private jet before. And then the captain said, Take your seats, so we did.”

  His eyes have moved off Bill’s by now, and he finds himself staring directly into one of the lights, remembering.

  “There was a baseball game on, Boston. It was the seventh inning, I think. And the sound of that, the announcer’s voice, was going the whole time. And I remember Mrs. Kipling was next to me and we were talking a little. And the boy, JJ, was asleep. Rachel was on her iPhone, maybe choosing songs. She had headphones on. And then we were up.”

  * * *

  Gus snails past LaGuardia, incoming and outgoing flights roaring past overhead. He has the windows up and the air off so he can hear better, even though it’s ninety degrees out. He sweats as he listens, tendrils running down his sides and back, but he doesn’t notice. He hears James Melody’s voice.

  “I’ve got a yellow light.”

  A pause. Gus can hear what sounds like tapping. Then Melody again.

  “Did you hear me? I’ve got a yellow light.”

  “Oh,” says Busch. “Let me—that’s got it. I think it’s the bulb.”

  “Make a note for maintenance,” says Melody. Then a series of unidentifiable sounds, and then Melody exclaims, “Merde. Hold on. I’ve got a—”

  “Captain?”

  “Take over. I’ve got a goddamn nosebleed again. I’m gonna—let me get cleaned up.”

  Sounds from the cockpit that Gus assumes are the captain getting up and going to the door. As this happens, Busch says:

  “Copy. Taking control.”

  The door opens and closes. And now Busch is alone in the cockpit.

  * * *

  Scott listens to the sound of his own voice as he speaks, both in the moment and outside of it.

  “And I was looking out the window and thinking the whole time how unreal it felt—the way you sometimes feel like a stranger when you find yourself outside the limits of your experience, doing something that feels like the actions of another person, as if you’ve teleported somehow into someone else’s life.”

  “And what was the first sign that something was wrong?” says Bill. “In your mind.”

  Scott takes a breath, trying to make logical sense of it all.

  “It’s hard, because there was cheering and then there was screaming.”

  “Cheering?”

  “For the game. It was David and Kipling, they were—something was happening onscreen that had them—Dworkin and the longest at bat—and their seat belts were off by that point, and I remember they both stood up, and then—I don’t know—the plane—dropped—and they had to scramble to get back in their seats.”

  “And you’ve said before, in your interview with investigators, that your seat belt was off.”

  “Yeah. That was—it was stupid really. I had a notebook. A sketchbook. And when the plane pitched down my pencil flew out of my hands and I—unbuckled and went after it.”

  “Which saved your life.”

  “Yeah. I guess that’s true. But in the moment—people were screaming and there was this—banging. And then—”

  Scott shrugs, as if to say, That’s all I really remember.

  Across from him Bill nods.

  “So, that’s your story,” he says.

  “My story?”

  “Your version of events.”

  “That’s my memory.”

  “You dropped your pencil and unbuckled to grab it, and that’s why you survived.”

  “I have no idea why I survived, if that’s even—if there is a why, and not just, you know, the laws of physics.”

  “Physics.”

  “Yes. You know, physical forces that picked me up and threw me from the plane and somehow let the boy survive, but not—you know—anyone else.”

  Bill pauses, as if to say, I could go deeper, but I’m choosing not to.

  “Let’s talk about your paintings.”

  * * *

  There is a moment in every horror movie that hinges on silence. A character leaves a room, and rather than go with him, the camera remains in place, focused on nothing—an innocuous doorway perhaps, or a child’s bed. The viewer sits and watches the empty space, listening to the silence, and the very fact that the room is empty and the fact that it is silent convey a dawning sense of dread. Why are we here, waiting? What’s going to happen? What will we see? And so, with a creeping fear, we begin to search the room for something unusual, to strain against the silence for whatever whispers live beneath the ordinary. It is the room’s very unremarkableness that adds to its potential for horror, what Sigmund Freud called the Uncanny. True horror, you see, comes not from the savagery of the unexpected, but from the corruption of everyday objects, spaces. To take a thing we see every day, a thing we take for granted as normal—a child’s bedroom—and transform it into something sinister, untrustworthy—is to undermine the very fabric of life.

  And so we stare into the normal, the camera motionless, unwavering, and in the tension of that unblinking stare, our imagination produces a feeling of fear that has no logical explanation.

  It is this feeling that comes over Gus Franklin as he sits in his car on the LIE, surrounded by commuters on their way to points east, men driving home from work, families heading home from school or to the beach for a late-afternoon adventure. The silence in his car has a crackle to it, a hiss that fills the recycled air. It is machine noise, impenetrable, but unignorable.

  Gus reaches over and turns up the volume, the hiss becoming deafening.

  And then he hears whispering, a single word, whispered over and over again.

  Bitch.

  * * *

  “Let’s not talk about my paintings,” says Scott.

  “Why? What are you hiding?”

  “I’m not—they’re paintings. By definition everything relevant about them is there for the eye to see.”

  “Except you’re keeping them secret.”

  “The fact that I haven’t shown them yet is not the same as me keeping them secret. The FBI has them now. I have slides at home. A few people have seen them, people I trust. But the truth is, my paintings are literally irrelevant.”

  “Let me get this straight—a man who paints disaster scenes, literal plane crashes, is in a plane crash and we’re supposed to think, what? That it’s just a coincidence?”

  “I don’t know. The universe is filled with things that don’t make sense. Random coincidences. There’s a statistical model somewhere that could work out the odds of me being in a plane cra
sh or a ferry accident or a train derailment. These things happen every day, and none of us is immune. My number came up is all.”

  “I spoke to an art dealer,” says Bill, “who said your work is now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

  “Nothing’s been sold. That’s theoretical money. Last time I checked I had six hundred dollars in the bank.”

  “Is that why you’ve moved in with Eleanor and her nephew?”

  “Is what why I’ve moved in with Eleanor and her nephew?”

  “Money. The fact that the boy is now worth close to a hundred million dollars?”

  Scott looks at him.

  “Is that a real question?” he says.

  “You bet your ass.”

  “First of all, I haven’t moved in.”

  “That’s not what the woman’s husband told me. In fact, she threw him out of the house.”

  “Just because two things happen in sequence, doesn’t mean there’s a causal relationship.”

  “I didn’t go to an Ivy League school, so you’re gonna have to explain that one.”

  “I’m saying the fact that Eleanor and Doug have separated—if that’s what happened—has nothing to do with the fact that I came to visit.”

  Bill pulls himself up to his full height.

  “Let me tell you what I see,” he says. “I see a failed painter, a drunk, who’s floating along ten years past his prime and then life hands him an opportunity.”

  “A plane crashed. People are dead.”

  “He finds himself in the spotlight, a hero, and suddenly everyone wants a piece of him—he starts banging a twenty-something-year-old heiress. His paintings are hot shit all of a sudden—”

  “Nobody’s banging—”

  “And then, I don’t know, maybe he gets greedy and thinks, Hey, I’ve got a good thing going with this kid, who’s suddenly worth a fortune, and who has a beautiful, a very attractive, aunt and a kind of loser uncle—so I can come in like the hot shit I am, and take over. Get a piece of that.”

  Scott nods, amazed.

  “Wow,” he says. “What an ugly world you live in.”

  “It’s called the real world.”

  “Okay. Well, there’s maybe a dozen mistakes in what you just said. Do you want me to go through them in order, or—”

  “So you deny you’ve been sleeping with Layla Mueller.”

  “Am I having sex with her? No. She let me stay in an unused apartment.”

  “And then she took off her clothes and got in bed with you.”

  Scott stares at Bill. How does he know that? Is it a guess?

  “I haven’t had sex with anyone in five years,” he says.

  “That’s not what I asked. I asked if she got naked and jumped in the sack with you.”

  Scott sighs. He has nobody to blame but himself for being in this position.

  “I just don’t understand why it matters.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “No,” he says, “tell me why it matters that an adult woman is interested in me. Tell me why it’s worth outing her in public for something she did when she was under her own roof that she would probably want to keep quiet.”

  “So you admit it?”

  “No. I’m saying, what possible difference does it make? Does it tell us why the plane crashed? Does it help us process our grief? Or is it something you want to know because you want to know it?”

  “I’m just trying to figure out how big a liar you are.”

  “About average, I’d say,” says Scott. “But not about things that matter. That’s part of my sobriety, a vow I took, to try and live as honestly as possible.”

  “So answer the question.”

  “No, because it’s none of your business. I’m not trying to be an asshole here. I’m literally asking what possible difference it makes. And if you can convince me that my personal life after the crash has any relevance to the events leading up to the crash and isn’t just this kind of parasitical vulture exploitation, then I’ll tell you everything I am, happily.”

  Bill studies Scott for a long moment, a bemused look on his face.

  And then he plays the tape.

  * * *

  Bitch.

  That fucking bitch.

  Gus realizes he’s holding his breath. The copilot, Charles Busch, is alone in the cockpit, and he is muttering these words under his breath.

  And then, louder, he says:

  No.

  And switches off the autopilot.

  Chapter 43

  Charles Busch

  December 31, 1984–August 23, 2015

  He was somebody’s nephew. That was the way people talked behind his back. As if he never would have gotten the job any other way. As if he was a bum, some kind of hack. Born in the final minutes of New Year’s Eve 1984, Charlie Busch had never been able to escape the feeling that he had missed something vital by inches. In the case of his birth what he missed was the future. He started life as last year’s news, and it never got much better.

  As a boy he loved to play. He wasn’t a good student. He liked math okay, but bore zero love for reading or science. Growing up in Odessa, Texas, Charlie shared the same dream as all the other boys. He wanted to be Roger Staubach, but he would have settled for Nolan Ryan. There was a pureness to high school sports, the knuckle slider and the backfield flea flicker, that got into your soul. Wind sprints and alligator drills. The low-shoulder kamikaze into heavy blocking sleds. The football field, where boys are hammered into men by pattern and repetition. Steve Hammond and Billy Rascal. Scab Dunaway and that big Mexican with hands the size of rib eyes. What was his name? A fly ball shagged on a cloud-free spring day. Pads and helmets shrugged on in jockstrap locker rooms, stinking of heat and the fight-or-fuck pheromones of hot teen musk. The oiled mitt between your mattress and box spring, and how you always slept better with it under there, hardball wrapped in a web of leather thumbs. Boys on the verge of what comes next, grappling in the dirt, using their heads to open alleys. And how it felt to run forever and never get tired, to stand in a dusty dugout trash-talking relief pitchers, your buddy Chris Hardwick lowing like a cow. The coffin corner and the crackback block. The primal monkey joy of picking dirt from your cleats with any old stick, a bunch of boys on a bench spitting sunflower shells and digging deep down in the rubber. The in-between hop and the lefty switch. Hope. Always hope. And how when you’re young every game you play feels like the reason the world exists. The pickoff and the squeeze play. And the heat. Always the heat, like a knee in your back, a boot on your neck. Drinking Gatorade by the gallon and chewing ice chips like a mental patient, bent at the knee sucking wind in the midday sun. The feel of a perfect spiral as it reaches your hands. Boys in shower stalls laughing at each other’s dicks, bell-curving the cheerleaders, and pissing on the next guy’s feet. The beanball and the brushback, and how it feels to round first base and dig for second, eyes on the center fielder, sliding headfirst, already safe in your mind. The panic of getting caught in a pickle, and how white chalk lines when they’re fresh gleam like lightning against the grass, itself a deep, impossible green. Heaven is that color. And the bright lights of Friday night, those perfect alabaster lights, and the roar of the crowd. The simplicity of the game, always forward, never back. You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball. And how after graduation nothing would ever be that simple again.

  He was somebody’s nephew. Uncle Logan, his mother’s brother. Logan Birch, a six-term US senator from the great state of Texas, friend to oil and cattle, longtime chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Charlie knew him mostly as a rye drinker with sculpted hair. Uncle Logan was the reason Charlie’s mother pulled out the fancy plates. Every Christmas they drove out to his mansion in Dallas. Charlie remembered the family all dressed in matching Christmas sweaters. Uncle Logan would tell Charlie to make a muscle, then squeeze his arm hard.

  “Gotta toughen this boy up,” he told Charlie’s mother. Charlie’s father had died a few yea
rs earlier, when Charlie was six. Coming home from work one night an eighteen-wheeler sideswiped him. His car flipped six times. They had a closed-casket funeral and buried Charlie’s father in the nice cemetery. Uncle Logan paid for everything.

  Even in high school, being Logan Birch’s nephew helped him. He played right field for the varsity team, even though he couldn’t hit as well as the other boys, couldn’t steal a base to save his life. It was unspoken, this special treatment. In fact, for the first thirteen years of his life, Charlie had no idea he was being elevated above his station. He thought the coaches liked his hustle. But that changed in high school. It was the locker room that woke him up to this conspiracy of nepotism, the wolf pack mentality of boys in jockstraps surrounding him in the shower. Sports is a meritocracy, after all. You start because you can hit, because you can run and throw and catch. In Odessa, the football team was notorious for its speed and precision. Every year veterans of the baseball team got a free ride to good colleges. West Texas sports were competitive. You put up lawn signs. Businesses closed early on game days. People took this shit seriously. And so a player like Charlie, mediocre in all things, stood out like a sore thumb.

  The first time they came for him, he was fifteen, a skinny freshman who’d scored the starting kicker spot after shanking a thirty-six-yard field goal. Six hulking ranch thugs, stripped down and sweaty, shoved him into a shower stall.

  “Watch your shit,” they told him.

  Cowering in the corner, Charlie could smell their sweat, the musky funk of half a dozen teenage linebackers, not one under 250 pounds, who’d just spent three hours steam-cooking in the August sun. He bent and vomited onto their feet. They beat him good for that, slapping him around with their cocks for good measure.

  In the end, huddled on the floor, he flinched when Levon Davies bent and hissed in his ear.

  “Tell a fucking soul and you’re dead.”