Among the Dead

by Michael Tolkin

  Bettina Welch and Dennis Donoghue led the mourners out of a back door of the hotel to three buses parked by the kitchen loading dock. Piet Bernays was there to hand out black armbands, each with a strip of elastic sewn inside, and Frank welcomed the slight pressure of this mild tourniquet.

  ‘Buses,’ said Lowell. ‘They promised us limousines.’ But he was too tired to complain any more, or Dennis Donoghue had worked his corporate magic on him and taken out the fight.

  When Bernays held Frank’s hand to slip the band up his arm, he winked at him. ‘Have a nice day,’ he said, in the manner of someone whose mastery of sarcasm was complete.

  On the bus Frank sat next to Lowell, across the aisle from their parents. Had the family ever been on a bus together except when the brothers were young, and they were in Europe, taking guided trips through famous cities? Their father leaned across the aisle. ‘How do you get the seat to go back?’ Their mother found the button on her arm rest, and the back went back, just far enough to fulfil the promise of whatever advertisement promised reclining seats, so no one could sue, even though the reclination was insufficiently advanced to offer compensation for the uncomfortably short seat. She tried the button on their father’s seat, but it was broken. He looked around the bus for someone from the airline. ‘Do you think anyone can help me with this?’ he asked Lowell. Lowell tried the button, and this time the seat went back.

  ‘I guess I’m not very strong,’ said their mother.

  The bus left the hotel and followed the road along Mission Bay for a while, before turning towards the city and Balboa Park.

  There were two conversations on the bus. One was about the lawsuits, and the other was about Lonnie Walter.

  Someone knew someone who knew someone. The last someone worked for the airline, and was best friends with one of the girls who died. That phrase again. And this person, a woman, what division of the airline, ground crew, knew Lonnie Walter. And Lonnie Walter had been fired. Someone asked why. Because he drank. No, someone else knew part of the story, because of layoffs. Or did he think it was because he was black? That may have been a part of the problem. But did you know his supervisor, the one he went on the plane to kill, was also black? I heard a Mexican. No, a black. There were some blacks on the bus. Frank watched them, nervous and embarrassed for them. A stupid resurgence of pity for the race whose collective failure to help themselves had driven their cousin, this one indignant lush, to murder hundreds. Fuck them all, thought Frank, another group to see fucked. Fuck them all for killing my family.

  Someone asked if they had identified the letter writer. Someone else said no, someone else said yes. Someone said what difference did it make, and someone said, Well, the letter gave me comfort, and then others agreed, even Lowell and Frank’s father. Someone asked if the women on the bus would have forgiven their husbands, and then the women were polled. One woman said she didn’t want to talk about it, and then she cried, and Lowell whispered to Frank, ‘I think her husband was on the plane with his mistress.’

  Frank said, ‘Really?’

  Lowell, said, ‘No, but that would be great, wouldn’t it?’

  Frank wanted to ask Lowell how he could make jokes at a time like this, he wanted to take the black armband and strangle Lowell with the elastic, but he knew that he would have made the same joke, that something like it had occurred to him at the same time. The process by which the gruesome, through time, becomes a joke.

  Piet Bernays left his seat in the front of the bus to hold the crying woman’s hands. He stood in the aisle and then bent one knee to the floor. The woman rested her head against his chest, and he stroked the back of her neck. It seemed to Frank that the others on the bus tried not to watch, but Frank couldn’t help himself. He wanted to look into Bernays’s eyes, to see what else Bernays knew about him. Bernays looked everywhere, with his placid eyes, except at Frank. Frank studied him: was he homosexual or not?

  After a few minutes, while everyone on the bus was quiet, the woman looked around and, without words, begged to be loved. More of the same: sad-clown-eyes-tear-filled-streaking-mascara-grief-as-excuse-to-justify-indulgence-for-all-the-other-shit-in-her-life. A wave of repulsion washed over Frank, with such force that he almost screamed out to the woman, ‘You’re ugly! We hate you! All of us hate you! We know what you were like in high school! You were unloved then! Why should we love you? So what if your alcoholic mother vomited on the rug every night, and you had to clean it up! So what if you had three younger brothers to feed and dress and send off to school while your alcoholic mother exposed herself to the mailman! So your father died of pancreatic cancer when you were ten! So what! You’re alive!’

  Someone said that the governor was going to read the letter at the ceremony and someone asked, ‘What letter?’ Frank’s father said, ‘The letter, the husband’s letter.’ Someone wondered if they’d found the name of the lover yet. Lowell said, ‘I bet she knows about it already,’ and his mother said she must want to kill herself. Someone else wondered if she had a husband. Piet Bernays finally looked towards Frank, and a little energy ran across his lips, bringing them together, in the tiniest piece of a gesture that would, if completed, be named a kiss. Or else it wasn’t a kiss, and Bernays was just breathing with his mouth closed.

  Someone else said that security would be tighter than ever at airports now and Lowell said, ‘You can always get through if you want.’ Everyone agreed with him, there was a quiet lowing of assent to this.

  The bus moved up the hill to Balboa Park, where an escort of police on motorcycles pulled in front of them and then behind them. Frank wondered why they had not started with the buses at the hotel. Of course, there was a simple answer. There were no cameras there, no need to attract attention, but now the show begins. As the motorcycles rode in file with the two buses, the mourners stopped talking. Piet Bernays walked to the front of the bus and took the microphone from the hook beside the driver. ‘We’re at Balboa Park now,’ he said. ‘The service will last about an hour. The governor is here, so is the mayor of San Diego, of course, and the city council. We’ve reserved the first three rows in front of the podium. The Bishop of San Diego, a Protestant minister, and a Conservative rabbi will be giving benedictions. They drew lots, to choose the order of the prayers. This way there’s no implied opinion expressed, on behalf of the airline, either respecting or disrespecting the superior or inferior importance of any one of the religions by the order of the appearance of their ordained representative.’

  The bus drove up to the back of the band shell. Frank’s father cut in front of a woman who was in the row before them, and she looked at him with some disgust and said something to him, but quietly, so Frank couldn’t hear her. He tapped her on the arm. ‘What did you say?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing.’ Frank saw that for a moment she forgot where she was and why, because this stranger had just discovered her muttering, and she was too embarrassed, even though she was right to be angry.

  ‘I thought you said something to my father.’

  The woman shook her head, no.

  ‘It’s not important,’ said Frank, and then they were off the bus. Lowell asked him, ‘What did you say to her?’

  ‘I think she swore at Dad.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He cut ahead of her in line.’

  Lowell didn’t know what to say, he just shrugged, but it was more in surprise that Frank would bother himself with this, and at the same time accepting that Frank had every reason to be sensitive to everything around him.

  Bernays and then Bettina Welch, who was on the other bus, led the mourners around the band shell to their seats, in rows that had been saved for them.

  The sun was high and strong, and the air smelled of eucalyptus and freshly watered lawns. There was something else in the air too, the smell of hay and animals, from the zoo, which was just beyond a stand of eucalyptus trees. And then there was a bit of the ocean on the breeze too. So there was something to San Diego after all, thought Frank, to
make people want to live here, something pleasant and forgiving.

  Until he saw the two or three hundred strangers waiting in the sun for the ceremony to begin, Frank didn’t know he had expected a large crowd, thousands and thousands. He thought of the crowds that used to gather for public funerals, in black and white, before television, when all the men wore hats. Now everyone waited to see these things on television. Not even wait, not expect anything, just see it when it comes. He supposed these people, Mexicans and blacks, in T-shirts, carrying paper bags with beer, smoking, had not even come to the park for whatever was going to happen, but had been there already, had slept there during the night, as they must have now for as long as they had been able to stay away from the police. Most of them sat beside bedrolls, a few had backpacks, and parked along the fringes of the scene there were shopping carts filled with plastic garbage bags stuffed with old crap. Then in the rows just behind him, Frank recognized a few people from Dana Street. There was the man whose house he had passed through to get beyond the police line, and a few others too, the neighbours of the dead. And in the front row men and women in suits, officials. The man who let him through nodded his head with tight lips, his face a quick mask of compassion, eyebrows drawn together, eyes to the side and down, but then everything emptied, and Frank saw the man’s shame for his inability to offer more than a nod.

  Frank wanted to say, ‘But what can you give me?’ And then Frank felt shame and turned away.

  His mother nudged him. ‘There’s the governor, and the mayor.’

  His father said, about the governor, ‘I met him at a fundraiser years ago, when he was running for the state assembly.’

  ‘He looks well,’ said his mother.

  The rabbi made an invocation.

  The governor, who was sitting next to Dennis Donoghue, walked to the podium. He took a piece of paper from his jacket pocket. He scanned the crowd, and his eyes met Frank’s. They held them as he began to talk. He knows, thought Frank. Donoghue told him that the letter is mine. And he’s going to read the letter now.

  ‘There are times when it is impossible to say anything,’ he began. ‘And those are the times when we have to speak.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Frank’s father. ‘That’s very true.’

  Lowell touched his father’s hands, to be quiet.

  The governor had not stopped talking. ‘What do we gain from this? We know what we lose. We lose a bit of our heart when God throws us this kind of test. So we have to face the test. We have to draw strength from wherever we find it. And in the middle of this catastrophe, we find a miracle. We find the miracle of love. I’d like to read something to you.’

  He picked up the piece of paper. ‘I suppose by now most of you have read the letter that was found on the ground. We don’t know who wrote it, or to whom it was sent, but the letter asks for something that all of us need to give, and that’s forgiveness. I’d like to read it to you. It begins, “I love you.” And it continues, “You asked me a few weeks ago why I was so desperate to take this vacation and I said that I needed to get away from the office for a while, and that’s true, but there’s more. For six months you’ve noticed that I’ve been distant, and I have been. You asked me if there was another woman, and I said no, but I was lying. I had an affair.” ‘ Frank saw the governor skip past the line that named Mary Sifka, but he hesitated, and looked at Frank again. ‘ ‘It’s over now. I wanted to take this trip so that we could find a way to heal ourselves. I don’t know how you’ll take this, and all I can say is that I beg you to forgive me, but if you don’t want to, I will understand. I love you.’ ‘ He stopped. He began again. ‘I think that’s one of the most beautiful letters ever written, because it tells the truth and asks for nothing in return except the truth. And forgiveness. And so we have to begin now, to forgive.’

  Reading the letter in the newspaper, Frank saw only the viciously clever adjustments he had made towards bludgeoning Anna with the example of his self-sacrifice.

  ‘What about the fucking lawsuit?’ Lowell asked under his breath. ‘It’s a little too soon to forgive. No mercy without justice. And look who he’s sitting next to, the president of the fucking airline.’

  This time it was Frank who touched Lowell’s hands, and Lowell shut up. Frank needed to think; he was filled with a big idea, an inspiration bright enough to illuminate the meaning and consequence of his life. Listening to the governor, Frank heard something new in the letter, something pure, and he liked it. Look at how I have touched so many people. Something in this letter means something to them, something I wrote comforts them. Do all writers struggle with their lies when they tell the truth, and regret the failure to tell the complete truth, which sits there, just beyond the reach of language, and mocks them as they smudge the truth, as they favour themselves? Of course they do! The balance that I wanted, between begging for Anna’s mercy by telling the truth and not giving her too much ammunition to use against me, didn’t that emotional design also give to the letter the grace of something that, if pursued further, might lead to art? What I did, in my own way (and I could have said ‘little’ way, but why qualify?), is what all creative people do. I wrestled my demons to the mat. If I didn’t win, it was at least a draw. Maybe that old dream of music is a mistake, maybe I should become a writer. I could take a course! I could write a novel composed of letters. I could write one letter a day, and in a year I’d have a book! If the letters are long enough! Or plays! The way the governor read the letter, there was so much emotion in the language, and everyone listened. I could write a series of dramatic monologues, they could be autobiographical. I could write a series of confessions, just like the letter, a confession cycle! And then someone, a composer, a real artist, might set them to music! An opera! In New York City! And I would have everything.

  Lowell whispered in Frank’s ear. ‘The governor is working for the airline. Watch the news tonight, you’ll see, it’ll look like a commercial for the airline. Airline spokesmen everywhere.’

  Someone behind them said, ‘There’s Dessick.’ A few turned. There he was, the man who would represent the families. He stood to the side. He was just a white man, late forties, normal height, a suit of no distinction or flair, and a neat haircut. Someone else muttered ‘ambulance chaser’, and someone else said, ‘So who are you with, Berberian?’ And someone else said, ‘And it’s not an ambulance, it’s a hearse.’

  The Dessickite persisted. ‘He happens to be one of the greatest lawyers in the country.’

  ‘What difference does it make?’ asked the Barbarian.

  ‘Because we all have to have the same lawyer represent us.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because divide and conquer!’

  ‘So join our suit, then.’

  ‘I don’t trust Berberian.’

  ‘What is that supposed to mean? How do you know him?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He has an incredible reputation.’

  ‘He’s overrated.’

  ‘According to whose standards? You’ve been talking to the Dessick people, that’s all, you’re using their standards.’

  ‘I trust them. They feel right. Berberian’s people feel wrong.’

  ‘I’m one of Berberian’s people. Are you saying I feel wrong? In my hour of grief are you saying there’s something wrong with me?’

  ‘I don’t want to say that.’ ‘But you mean it.’

  ‘Most of us are going with Dessick. I’m sorry you’re not with us, but this isn’t the place to fight.’

  ‘I’m not fighting. I mean, the only fight I have is with the airline, and I’ve got the best man working for me. Berberian.’

  ‘Fine. You go with Berberian, I’ll go with Dessick. Don’t get in our way.’

  ‘You’ll back down. You’ll be afraid to let a jury decide the case, because you’ll be hearing a little voice in your head that says your lawyer didn’t do a good enough job. You’ll settle out of court before we do.’

  The governor introduc
ed the mayor. The hissing of accusation and counter-accusation, this gauntlet of rage in which Frank felt beaten and trapped, continued anyway.

  ‘If we do settle out of court, it’ll only be because the airline knew it would cost too much to go all the way.’

  ‘So if Dessick is so sure of winning, why not go all the way to a jury? Or is he scared that a jury might go against him?’

  ‘He’s not scared of anything or anyone.’

  ‘Then he doesn’t have to settle out of court.’

  ‘Berberian will settle before Dessick does, I promise you.’

  ‘You don’t have to promise me anything.’

  ‘Berberian will have to settle because he knows that juries think he’s sleazy. Do you know his percentage of wins before juries after settlements have been rejected? I have those figures!’

  ‘Yeah yeah yeah. You know what they say: there’s lies, there’s damned lies, and there’s statistics.’

  ‘That’s one of the stupidest quotes in the history of the English language. Berberian likes to come on like the full-court-press kind of guy he wants you to think he is, but in the last three years he’s lost forty per cent of those cases that could have been settled out of court. He’s an egomaniac’

  ‘And Dessick was threatened with a jury-tampering indictment last year, did you know that?’

  ‘So? Was he ever charged? No. And tell me you don’t know who engineered that threat. The lawyers working for the company he was suing. And do you know who the chief lawyer was?’

  ‘You can’t scare me or surprise me. I know who it was. It was Berberian.’

  ‘And you’ll still stay with him?’

  ‘These guys all play hardball, and I like Berberian’s style. And this case is open-and-shut. It’s not that complicated.’

  The mayor of San Diego stood at the lectern, but Frank couldn’t hear him. He couldn’t hear anybody now, not the mourners debating their lawyers, not the plane flying overhead, not the helicopter circling the park, not birds in the nearby trees, not police motorcycles cruising the roads near the band shell. Nothing. Mouths moved, and Frank saw how fiercely rigid we keep our faces, except for our lips. Frank’s mother whispered something to the man she had married so many years before, but what she said Frank thought he would never know. His father patted her hand, in silence.