Panorama

by Steve Kistulentz

  “Do you think he has a peanut allergy? He looks like the type of kid who might have a peanut allergy.”

  “He’s had a hard time. His dad is out of the picture,” Sarah said.

  Then Gabriel said, “Tell the general that Tokyo is a goner,” before forcing the bear to kick over the truck again, this time adding the sound of mock-human screams.

  When the big-screen television went to commercial, then returned to network-news headquarters, Carter said, “Shit. I thought the games went back to back. Walter-to-Walter coverage.”

  “What? What’s that?”

  “Something my granddad used to say.”

  Sarah shook her head. “Whatever. We’ve got time. There’s this news thing. Maybe a half hour.” Behind her, the giant screen split into two boxes, each filled with a nearly identical white male, around forty, one pristine in navy suit, white shirt, yellow tie, the other in a more traditional Washington uniform, gray suit, blue button-down oxford shirt, burgundy foulard-print tie.

  Gabriel looked up from his toy bear’s path of wanton destruction and pointed at the screen. “Uncle Richie.”

  Sarah stood. “Check it out,” she said, catching herself before she uttered a more expletive-laden interjection in front of the kid. “It’s actually the kid’s uncle.” The caption confirmed his identity: Richard MacMurray, Free-Speech Advocate. Sarah listened for the anchorman, who promised a spirited debate right after these words, and an update from the college football scoreboard. “How about a margarita, a beer, something?” she called over her shoulder.

  Carter pulled Sarah through the hallway by her hand, leading her toward the open bathroom door. He pirouetted neatly behind her, shutting the door with a thrown-out hip. “I’ll settle for something.”

  24

  THE BLUE ROOF INN nearest the Dallas–Fort Worth airport was a squat, two-story motel that looked like it had been built from the same blueprint as every other 1970s-era motel, with its outside staircases, rusting aluminum railings, and doors alternately painted in forest green and pumpkin orange. The squat architecture and the safety railings and the L shape of the building gave off a bad vibe, as if it had been conjured from that picture taken just moments after Dr. King had been shot, men in crisp suits all pointing in the direction of the shooter.

  Jeris McDougal and his girlfriend, Jenny Wilkins, walked along the second floor’s outermost corridor, followed by Jenny’s sister. Tara Wilkins worked at the motel as a part-time housekeeper, weekends and holidays. She’d gotten the job through a connection from the sober-living house she’d stayed in for a few months when she’d gotten out of the hospital.

  “One hour. Don’t pick up the phone. Don’t take the matches from the ashtray and don’t smoke and don’t piss and, really, just don’t leave a single sign that you were even here,” Tara said, and she stepped forward to punctuate her comments with a finger to Jeris’s chest. He caught her hand, turned her by the wrist until her palm opened, and because he laughed a deep and profound laugh, she did not take it as anything malevolent. Her whole life had been full of questionable choices, and this was one of the smaller ones, so she dropped the key into his other hand.

  Jeris never once gave any indication that it might be strange that this woman was giving him the key to a motel room for the express purpose of fucking her sister. He was using Jenny, but he was also safe because he didn’t drink and lived pretty straight-edge, spent most of his time reading about whey-protein isolates and carried around a plastic gallon jug of spring water as if his mantra were Gotta stay hydrated.

  Inside the room, Jeris turned on the air conditioner. The unit rattled at the same tenor as the steady roar of incoming jets. He took a seat at the desk and started fussing with the display of his new digital video camera. The camera was a combination peace offering and Christmas gift from his mother because he had spent the past two weeks on restriction, after a day-long suspension from school for a shoving match about a girl—the same girl who sat next to him now on a double bed, flipping absentmindedly through twenty-eight channels of cable TV. Mama expected Jeris home by 3:00 in the afternoon; she kept warning him not to do anything that might fuck up his scholarship, his free ride to A&M that started next fall, but he kept getting in these little skirmishes at school. Last Friday his mother’s workday had ended with a phone call from an assistant principal, warning her that Jeris was associating with undesirables, which by the principal’s definition meant that Jeris had suddenly turned into an actual, verifiable teenager and was no longer behaving like a Cosby kid.

  Jeris ordered Jenny to turn off the television and then tried to get her to pose for him on the orange-and-brown polyester bedspread. The motel was the only real place they could fuck, what with the way Jeris’s mother watched over him and the sideways looks he had always gotten for dating white girls, from his mother and from everyone else.

  Jenny’s mother certainly did not like her daughter keeping up with a young black man, could not stomach that Jeris liked to tease her about his being black, loud and proud. Jenny’s sister became their accomplice, but she could swing the young couple only an hour in one of those empty rooms, and Jeris was trying to both keep an eye on the time and not once look at his watch.

  “You’re not going to take pictures of me,” Jenny said, her eyes following along with the movements of the lens as Jeris panned down past her breasts, toward the floor, pausing to slowly consider the length of her legs.

  In the viewfinder, Jeris perfected a close-up of Jenny’s lips and told her, “Let me see your tongue,” and then moved in closer and said, “When are you going to show me something good? I’m going to need to see that shit.”

  He thought Jenny looked like a beer commercial come to life. Healthy. Jeris loved her name too; he’d never met a black girl named Jenny. She was a ticket to a life of pool tables and hot tubs and raunchy suburban sex in her parents’ king-size bed while they spent the weekend at the casinos in Gulfport. A girl named Jenny could never live in a place like his mom’s, with its orange countertops and striped wallpaper and plastic carpet protectors. In a few months, Jeris would figure out for himself that Jenny’s family had neither money nor prospects, but on that New Year’s Day he still remained enough in her thrall that the silver blouse she wore, a little glittery thing left over from the night before, looked to him like the very promise of better days.

  She worked at the buttons, slowly and from the bottom hem, peering up at Jeris with each one as if pantomiming a training film she’d seen on how to seduce a boy. Jeris knew that she required this, that her effort to be sexy eventually passed into something that made her feel wanton and lusty; for now, she just mimicked what she had seen in the movies she and Jeris had watched, nothing too hard-core, a few late-night cable things with looped minutes of simulated bumping and grinding. They had already talked about watching themselves. In the early days of their dating, Jenny admitted that she wanted to see them fuck on tape, but he misread her curiosity for abject desire. She did not necessarily want to perform, she would explain to him whenever he raised the subject; she only wanted to see what she looked like, what it was that he saw when he looked at her in that animalistic way (he didn’t know that with every movement she made, every button undone, every base that he went racing past, his tongue announced itself with an unconscious dart out over his lips, a reaction that Jenny registered as unthinking and reptilian).

  By now they had wasted fifteen minutes of their hour together scouting out the angles, finding a place on the motel dresser where Jeris could set down the camera and still see most of the queen-size bed through the viewfinder. Jenny’s slow maneuvering made Jeris anxious, impatient. When her blouse fell open to her waist, revealing a red-and-black bra with intricate embroidery, she stood at the foot of the bed and said, “Can you close the drapes? If I’m going to do this, I need some more darkness. I need it to be just us.”

  Jeris loved the way the motel drapes turned the room into a sensory deprivation tank, but he wanted to s
ee all of Jenny, worried there would not be enough light for the camera. Too much of their sport fucking happened in the dark, in cars and basements, illuminated by televisions and dashboards. And at the most basic level, since she had asked, Jeris did not want to do it. Not without some negotiation. He pointed the camera at Jenny, who playfully ran her hands across her chest, then lowered first one bra strap, then the other, across her tanned and greatly freckled shoulders.

  He stood at a ninety-degree angle to the window, looking at Jenny through the camera. “That looks so good. Are you going to put on a show for me? Are you going to suck me?” And then Jeris, in his peripheral vision, caught a glimpse of something moving across the brightness of a flat blue sky, as if the large window had turned into a television; the image blurred across the screen, moving downward diagonally from the upper right, a trail of black and orange. And before he realized that the contrail he saw was smoke, the surest sign of distress, he raised the camera, never even conscious that he was recording the incident. Jenny rushed to the window behind him and said, “What is that?” and then one or both of them were swearing repeatedly, almost autonomically, “Holy shit” and “Oh my fucking God,” their words picked up by the open microphone. Across north-central Texas, at least a hundred people looked toward the sky, pointing, wondering. But Jeris was the first to understand what he saw and the only one to catch this moment on tape.

  He was shirtless and shoeless and wearing only a pair of jeans, still rigid with their unwashed sizing, so it was hard for him to move with any speed, but he ran out the door, down the open staircase, and into the motel parking lot, and Tara, working the room next door, came out to see him running half-naked, his camera pointed almost at the sun. And the last thing Jeris said before the moving blur disappeared behind a horizon crowded with warehouses and office parks was, “That has to be a plane.”

  Part II

  25

  TEXAS, MIDAFTERNOON on New Year’s Day, about to add another sad chapter to its history.

  A commercial airliner on approach to Dallas–Fort Worth International, at that moment the world’s fifth-busiest airport. Bathed in the strobing winter sun, the plane’s fuselage glittered, a futuristic costume jewel left over from the night before. The passengers took in the perfect day, and the cabin crew, who put faith in technology above observation, scanned the associated readouts that provided scientific proof of what they saw outside their windows. Doppler radar confirmed the forecasts: no threat of microbursts, wind shear, thunderstorms, or sudden crosswinds. The temperature was nearly seventy, and visibility matched the prospects for the New Year—unlimited.

  The plane took its numbered position in an orderly conga of incoming aircraft. Panorama Airlines Flight 503, as indicated on the strip placed directly underneath the oscillating screen of approach radar, the relevant details written on a piece of paper denoting the airline, flight number, type of equipment (a 727-200 with nearly four thousand hours of service), seventy-seven passengers and six crew, scheduled for arrival at 2:18 p.m. Central Standard Time, all in the heavily abbreviated jargon of flight control. Flight 503 was about to be shepherded from regional traffic control to the tower, and the controller offered the sort of unscripted good-bye that was against regulations: “This is TRACON passing you over to DFW tower control. Godspeed, 503, and happy New Year.”

  The pilot responded with a snippet of song—“Should auld acquaintance be forgot”—in a clear and steady tenor, surprising even himself; the tower controller and copilot joined in, everyone’s headsets on that particular frequency filling with song.

  Nearly one-fourth of the commercial-service airliners in the skies over Texas that afternoon were variations on the 727, but the one that wavered on approach to DFW seemed to the eyes of its captain a venerable lady, a dance-hall matron, filled with the kind of erotic flaws that could be appreciated only by old men wistful for lost chances. She might have been past her prime—the assembly line that built her was now devoted to making her unsightly and bulkier successors—but this old lady was a once-famous chanteuse known in nightclubs from Paris to Saigon, a celebrity slowly going to seed.

  Dallas control signaled final approach, and Panorama 503 circled, two hundred miles out, beginning its final descent from flight level two-six-zero, twenty-six thousand feet.

  Visual landing indicated.

  The passenger in 3B was deadheading, a second-seat pilot returning to DFW to work an evening flight to Washington National. She slept soundly.

  3E and 3F were colleagues of convenience, a developer and a moneyman intertwined in an elaborate plan to convert midrange apartments in the North Dallas exurbs into condominiums; they had spent the nearly two hours since boarding going over ad copy that promised a luxury lifestyle, the banner that hung from an overpass on the Thornton Freeway and swore, If you lived here, you’d be home by now.

  4E, remembering his most minor assignation from the night before, a kiss with a stranger. He thought languorous thoughts—why had he never acted on his feelings for men before last night? The mere prospect of touching another man’s skin left a taste like metal high in his throat.

  5B, an accountant from a Big Six firm, admired the shapely legs of the woman across the aisle in 5E, who had removed her shoes and was stretching, pointing her stockinged toes in a variety of directions. Through the sheer hose, he could see that her toenails had been recently painted a brownish-red reminiscent of dried blood, a color 5B associated with the lips of a specific type of pale, raven-haired women. He was dreaming of what it might be like to sleep next to a woman with immaculately kept feet, all the calluses and corns soaked and shaved away with an array of potions and small tools. Then he waited for the shame, the self-admonishment that came whenever these mildly lewd thoughts entered his mind. This wasn’t a middle-class longing. Even to his therapist, he could not admit the depths of his desire; he thought he might like to try being a submissive, and here in the aisle beside him was a pair of feet that practically demanded his worship. His wife, home in Plano, had tremendously ugly feet, like she’d spent twenty years as a cop walking a beat. Her toenails had gone yellow-gray with a persistent fungus.

  In the window seat of the first row of coach, 6A felt the peculiar discomfort of travel, that pressing sensation in his bowels that meant, after three days of red wine and red meat, he desperately needed a good shit.

  6C slept the dreamless sleep of a Xanax zombie.

  7D turned to observe his children, a row behind (8A–C), and wondered how they could have possibly gotten so fat. 8D was the beleaguered mother enduring the withering glances of 8F, the unspoken signifiers that clearly spelled out his desire for the children to shut the hell up.

  9A and C looked silently over the same in-flight magazine, promising themselves a dinner at one of America’s top-ten steakhouses.

  9D waved for one last drink; 9E hissed at 9D, “Do you really need another?” before slumping across the empty seat to her right and staring out the window at the Texas flatlands.

  The in-flight entertainments pumped out popular music. Six people on board (10A and B, 13C, 17A, 20D, and 28F) chose a meditative program of classical favorites, but it was 17A who began to daydream once he recognized a familiar theme from Debussy’s Doctor Gradus; it wasn’t so much a specific memory as an image of his sister, the way months of experience get condensed into one picture: she’s at the piano bench, her long, straight hair parted in the middle (she would have been about eighteen, and this would have been the midseventies). She tried her best to teach him Debussy’s wandering left-hand movements, the rollicking song for children, but he’d been impatient. An image of himself then, age seven, at the top of the stairs, listening to his sister practicing her scales on their modest upright piano. His own music room, in a five-bedroom house in the north Dallas suburb of Addison, had been designed around a seven-foot baby grand, but its keys had never felt more than the insistent banging of his unschooled children, the occasional riffing of “Chopsticks.”

  1
3F stared out the window and contemplated the mail he knew would be waiting for him, the latest settlement proposal in a series of divorce negotiations that had now lasted longer than the actual marriage; he scribbled figures on a yellow pad, added and subtracted various columns, and was resigning himself to giving his estranged wife everything she asked for, no matter her rationale. Arms-control agreements had taken less time. 13F was tired of arguing, tired of revisiting decisions he’d made two or four or even eight months ago, all for the purpose of deciding who owed what, who would be held responsible. He’d always been the one responsible for this relationship, responsible for its ill-considered beginning, responsible for the whimsical decision to get married, responsible for sitting his estranged wife down at the dinner table to tell her he wanted out. He was guilty of laughing a bit too hard at jokes about overbearing wives, nagging mothers-in-law. Now it was going to cost him, and he could use this legal pad to put together an actual dollar-cost estimate. The result of his analysis: he wanted out at any price.

  14D dreamed of another trip, something that had nothing to do with the persistent movement required of him as a soldier of middle management, a week of repose poolside, dangling his feet into the edge of an ocean of warm, greenish water.

  Row 16 was filled with four consultants in seats A, C, D, and F, each irritated that their frequent-flyer miles and platinum status had not gained them entrée to first class.

  In 23A, a businessman pressed the buttons of his control panel indiscriminately, flipping through each channel until he settled on channel 14 to eavesdrop on the cockpit chatter, Flight 503, cleared for final approach to DFW.