Among the Dead

by Michael Tolkin

  ‘Your father is taking this very hard.’

  ‘And you?’ Frank asked.

  ‘What can anyone say?’

  His father was on the phone in the living room. In the old house they didn’t have a phone in the living room, or a television either, but in the apartment there was a telephone on a table next to the couch, which faced a tall black cabinet that held the television. Frank was sure that his parents watched during the day. Not a lot, but they never watched television in the old house, when the television was in the bar, a room that was almost the size of this living room. And this living room wasn’t even a separate room, the kitchen was open to the dining room over a counter, and then the room turned at the corner of the building and became the living room. L-shaped. His father was talking to one of his brothers, telling him what had happened. He reached out a hand, and Frank touched it.

  ‘Lonnie Walter,’ said Frank’s father.

  ‘Who?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Lonnie Walter, he’s the one who blew up the plane. That’s what they think.’

  No one from the airline had ever officially announced what Frank had been told privately.

  ‘Did the airline call to tell you this?’ asked Frank.

  ‘It was on the radio,’ said his mother.

  ‘Let me tell you about the airline,’ said his father. ‘We called them last night because I wanted them to let us know of any late-breaking developments.’

  ‘Leon,’ said Frank’s mother, ‘this can wait.’ She was like Frank with Lowell, cautioning, trying to keep him from making a scene.

  ‘I had to call the regular reservations number. Nobody there was allowed to say even if there had been a crash. They would not give me the number of the airline’s business office. I called the airport, not the airline, and they gave me a general office number, which was closed, of course, it was after nine. Finally, on the ten o’clock news, they gave out a number to call.’

  ‘For families and friends,’ said Frank’s mother. She was with him in the story now.

  ‘And I called it, and the thing was busy for an hour. I got through at eleven o’clock, and the woman on the phone told me she couldn’t give out anyone’s names, nothing had been released yet, but she took my number, and that was last night, and no one has called me yet. And I think that’s a disgrace.’

  ‘But you know they’re dead,’ said Frank, ‘so why do you need the airline to tell you? They were on the plane, and it crashed. No one survived. I think they need to keep that line open for people whose families were on the ground in San Diego, in the houses that the plane crashed into. That’s where the doubt is.’

  ‘Fine, be on the airline’s side,’ said his father. This came out in a little gust of petulance. ‘Identification with the aggressor.’ He said this with a blend of pity for Frank’s muddied view of things; were he not so grief-stricken, he would not be identifying with the aggressor, and also hatred for Frank’s refusal to share his anger, because Frank was always quietly telling Leon that he was too angry. If Leon said something bitter about a politician, or a bad movie, or a wealthy builder he had known when both were starting out, Frank would tell his father that he was too angry. His mother told Frank that it was unfair of him to stop his father like this, that he had a right to his anger. Frank had told her that what annoyed him wasn’t his father’s anger, but the free-floating rage that came into view every time he talked about any human being with more power or money.

  Lowell screamed at their father, ‘What? What are you saying? Identification with the aggressor? What does that mean? I don’t believe you,’ said Lowell. ‘You just lost Anna and Madeleine, and you’re arguing about things that you don’t know about. This is some psychological term. Identification with the aggressor. You’re showing off something that you know? How can you show off at a time like this? Identification with the aggressor? What does that mean?’

  ‘It means that Frank is already defending the airline. They’ve had him in their hands for the first fifteen hours and they fed him and gave him a bed, and he’s grateful to them, and it’s clouding his perception of who they are, and what they really want out of all of this.’

  ‘I think they just want good publicity,’ said Ethel.

  ‘Wrong,’ said Lowell. ‘I mean, maybe that’s part of it, but the issue is publicity and cost, and also the industry. They have to obscure the event, they have to confuse everyone so that the event is never in focus, and then in a few weeks the only ones who will remember it will be the next of kin, that’s what they have to do.’

  ‘And why can’t they return your father’s phone calls?’ she asked.

  ‘Because then they would be taking responsibility. And the idea is to avoid responsibility at every level.’

  Frank didn’t know if his brother was right, but as usual, after his father attacked Frank and his mother tried to stop him, Lowell pushed Leon into his corner. Frank wondered if the brothers’ early success with the stores had not challenged his father into a competition he never announced but to which he devoted himself and through which he lost his house.

  ‘Does anyone want anything to eat?’ said Frank’s mother.

  ‘I’d like an apple,’ said Frank. Anna hated apples and never bought them. It was a funny thing to hate, but she had grown up in Philadelphia, where the first apples of the year announced the end of summer, and the beginning of cold weather. She hated the cold. How cold was it outside when the plane opened up? Almost thirty thousand feet. Higher than Everest. Thin, cold air. Does the shock take the breath away so quickly that you pass out before you know that you’re falling to your death? And all the debris, something could knock you in the head, knock you out, or kill you right there, cut off an arm. Falling dead. Or dying in the air, after a fifteen-thousand-foot fall, with fifteen thousand feet to go. A heart attack, a seizure. Asthma. Falling through a cloud of pollen. Hitting a bird. Being followed by a bird. Eyes to eyes. I had a dream last night that a large bird told me how to take care of him. Or answered my questions.

  ‘We should go to the house,’ said Leon.

  ‘No,’ said Frank. ‘I don’t want to, not today. I’m going to San Diego this afternoon, I’ll go to the house when I come back. I’m taking the train.’

  ‘I’ll drive you down,’ said Lowell.

  ‘No,’ said Frank. For a moment he regretted the decision, he thought he might need the company, but he didn’t want to give in to their concerns.

  ‘He’s taking the train,’ said Lowell, as Ethel came back into the room.

  ‘You should go with him,’ she said. ‘You can leave the car here.’

  ‘No,’ said Frank. ‘I’d like to be alone for a few hours.’ ‘Are you sure?’ his mother asked him.

  He was.

  The apple was on a blue plate. She put it down on the glass coffee table and set beside it three green cloth napkins. Frank studied the colours. The luxury of vision astonished him. He saw the dark green, the colour of his father’s Jaguar, but the green was made of the cloth, and the napkins were made of long strings tied together so ingeniously that they could lie flat, or be folded, or be soiled and then washed and then folded and ironed again. He saw the tight weave, and the fuzz of the ciliated cotton threads. It had been shiny, when it was new, now the cloth was slowly disintegrating, and he saw that decay in the colour. The colour of the cloth was changing as he watched it. It was so different from the blue on the plate, which was buried under the glaze. The cotton napkin was old, he could vaguely remember a dinner at the house when his mother set the table with the napkins, and he had found a price sticker, a white dot with a handwritten ‘4 – ‘. The memory was not vague, it was as clear to him as the shining plate, which was new to him. A gift? Or had she seen it and bought it? Did Ethel hate Leon? Was it beautiful or was it ugly? He voted for beauty, because it existed, because he could see it, because he could imagine a device fine enough to measure the depth of the moist crescents left by the slices of apple as his mother and his father and his
brother took their snack from the plate.

  Frank watched his parents and his brother eat their apples. Was it a miracle, or was it repulsive?

  ‘Life’s a bitch,’ said Lowell.

  ‘Where do you get your philosophy, from reading T-shirts?’ said Leon.

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Lowell.

  ‘Leon, Lowell,’ said Ethel, flatly.

  ‘My family is dead,’ said Frank. ‘They were killed in a plane crash. If anyone in this room raises his or her voice, I am going to leave, and I will never come back, and you will never see me again.’

  ‘Frank,’ said his father.

  ‘I’m going to San Diego,’ said Frank. ‘And I want to go alone. I want to be alone. I’m going to the train station. I’m going to take the train.’

  He ran out the door, and in the building’s lobby he called for a cab. He bought a first-class ticket at the station, and he was in his seat with a few minutes to spare.

  As the train passed slowly through the rail yards, Frank concentrated on the sounds of the wheels, the orchestra of couplers and springs pushing and pulling without rhythm, and trying to make sense of the industrial concerto, he found a simple pattern, a few clicks within the heaving frame of the car, but another set of noises intruded on the music, and in desperation, to have something of his own, something private that belonged to no one else, he tried again to separate the sounds. Easier to put smoke in a cage than re-create the shattered harmonies, but he let his mind absorb every vibration, and then, with relief, inside the roar he found something that was constant, determined, and promised at any moment that the train would surprise him, make him suddenly happy as it went at full speed, in a rush that would be the train’s pleasure in itself.

  They were beside a freeway, and the slowest lane of traffic was still faster, though only by a little, than the train. So he was going, how fast? Thirty miles an hour? It was a doubling that he wanted, and he felt himself urging the train ahead. He thought he could hear a change in the ratchet, a promise that the sounds that Frank could separate into units would soon blur into an indistinct hum that would disappear as the comforting blend of all the little movements of the railroad car gathered together in the one great movement of going forward to San Diego, but nothing changed. However fast it would go, he knew it could never go as fast as he wanted, as fast as a jet plane.

  Now it was almost six. The day had been filled with people. The airline had discouraged the next of kin from coming to San Diego, the bodies were going to be returned to Los Angeles as they were found, but a few wanted to go. The flight was short, thirty minutes, but Frank pleaded fear of flying.

  ‘We’ve got a bus,’ said Bettina Welch. ‘You don’t have to take the train. The bus is comfortable, and we’ll be taking it straight to the hotel.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Frank, ‘but I just don’t want to ...’ He let the sentence trail off. He meant her to understand that he could not imagine himself on the same kind of plane as his wife had flown, with engines and flaps and retracting wheels making the same kinds of noises she had heard, looking wistfully as she must have out the window at the same coastline. He wanted Bettina to think he was too uncertain now, not just grieving, but also unhappy, and if he could surround himself with the grace of unconditional mourning, he would be safe, protected by the purity of the emotion. Unhappiness was an older feeling, his humour before the plane had crashed, and this feeling was not being eclipsed by the mourning, and so, because there was something of himself lost in space between these two galaxies, he was alone, and he was scared. If pure grief was selfless, his unhappiness was too clearly to him a kind of petulance. In grief he would be tender. In grief he would be holding his daughter’s hand. In grief he would be begging forgiveness from his wife, and she would forgive him. In grief he would love his brother like a brother. In grief he would be a good son. In unhappiness he thought of himself. In unhappiness he thought of his mistress. In unhappiness he thought about money. In unhappiness he tasted the food he was eating. In unhappiness he looked at women. In the gap between unhappiness and grief, the space in which there was only his consciousness of the difference between the grief and the unhappiness, he was chilled by his solitude in the freezing universe, and it was this enormous fear that kept him from flying on a plane.

  ‘We’ll reimburse you, of course,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you. It’s not very expensive.’

  ‘We’ll buy your brother’s ticket, too,’ she said.

  He could have said that Lowell was driving, but he didn’t want her to give any more advice. She would tell Frank to stay with his brother.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and that was all she seemed to want from him, a formal closing.

  The freeway passed over the train, and as the train came to the concrete pylons of the road, the bridge rose and curved up and over the rails, and there was a feeling of disaster averted to triumph in the sudden uplift of the bridge, a heavy ribbon in the wind, as though it were not set in steel and hardened sand, but that the bridge had made a decision, was in fact a monument to pure decision, a monument commemorating that moment, the act and its monument, to save the train.

  Frank recoiled from this, this thinking of crashes.

  Through his reflection in the window, he saw the conductor come into the car. When Frank turned to hand him his ticket, he saw a strip of black cloth pinned to the conductor’s arm. Another conductor came into the train, and he wore the same band. Neither of them smiled. Now he felt an urge to tell them that they wore the black for his wife and daughter, and that it mattered to him, that it pulled him closer to that grief for which he felt such longing, and that seemed to him to stand like his wife, forever unattainable to him on the better side of a river.

  No, he would say nothing to them. If the conductors had been asked to wear black, he didn’t want to know that they felt no solidarity with his loss, and if they had asked to wear the black, because ... why? he wondered now. They must be wearing black because the crash was, what, part of the transportation system? It made no sense. This is not a nation of such deeply linked sympathies. Planes crash often. The country never cries. Perhaps a train official had been killed on the plane, or else one of them had lost someone. Or had Frank missed some news, and was the President dead? If there had been an assassination, the news of the plane crash would recede to the back pages. Frank felt, in his unhappiness again, something like annoyance, that the world would turn its eye from his misery. No, the President was not dead. Everyone in the train would have a loud opinion if the President were dead. Someone always plays a radio when a President is dead. It must be the crash, Frank decided, someone here is connected to the plane in some way, maybe not one of the conductors, maybe an engineer, or the bartender, but someone wanted to share someone else’s loss. He gave himself over to the possibility of tears. Nothing. He shook his head in dismay with himself because he could not cry. Now he was feeling sorry for his inability to feel sorry, and he blew a rush of air through his nose, it was the start of a laugh. He had not yet buried his wife and daughter, and already he was coming back to himself. This would be how he passed from mourning to amnesia; the sound of his laughter would cover the pain. He thought, So this is how we come to accept. We forget. He would acquit himself of all charges against his hateful self, he would absolve Frank Gale of the crime of a cold heart. He would plead to the jury of the peers of his inner realm that Frank Gale was only being Frank Gale, a crime for which they, as Frank’s peers, should have no trouble understanding, and if they looked into their own hearts, moderated by the juries of their own selves, they would know that Frank really did feel the loss of his family, really did miss them.

  The conductor came through the car, calling out, ‘Fullerton, next stop Fullerton.’ Frank had lived in Los Angeles his whole life, but how much of the city did he really know? Was Fullerton named for Fuller, or was it named for Fullerton, or was it named by some Iowan who bought the land, and built the town, and named it for his home in Iowa?
At least he knew Culver City, a little. He’d once fucked a woman in Culver City. Why was he thinking of her? Culver City, the drive through the morning. And the woman, yes, of course. He had met her on an aeroplane. He smiled, the circuits of his associations! Silly how they do that, charming.