Panorama

by Steve Kistulentz

  They introduced themselves to the desk sergeant, produced laminated identification in the manner of so many films and detective shows, and Nessen explained their purpose. The sergeant escorted the Adam and Eve Team out through the Police Officers Only exit. Nessen started heading back toward the car, but the sergeant restrained her, gently, at the wrist, saying, “No place to park. It’s faster on foot. In this neighborhood, everything’s faster on foot.”

  When they again reached Richard’s building, at the summit of the small hill on California Street, Lemko had to hunch over, hands on knees, and catch his breath. He checked his pulse against the dial of his diver’s watch and thought about upping the intensity of his cardiovascular conditioning. He’d hardly realized their pace.

  The sergeant radioed back to the station for someone to try Richard’s phone. Through his Motorola handheld unit, he could hear his colleague, a second-year policewoman, mumbling over and over, “Pick up the phone.”

  Lemko thought to dial another apartment on the entry console, and the person who answered did not say a word, just pressed the entry buzzer. They bounded up the stairs. At the door to apartment 33, the sergeant had the disconcerting sensation of knocking on the door and then hearing the report of his knocks again, with the slight delay of transmission, through his radio. The policewoman’s voice told whoever had answered the phone, “You need to go to the door now.”

  The voice on the walkie-talkie kept saying, “You should be talking to one of my officers,” whatever that meant. Lemko worried about not having his briefcase. It was his security blanket. He’d left it in the car. He carried in his briefcase intelligence estimates on the average life span of a plane, its hours of service, its entire history. He knew he could pull out the papers in a practiced bit of theater and use them to calm a particularly agitated family member. He knew from his experience as a litigator that so much of what he did, day to day, was performance; the papers were a prop, but a useful one, and almost always had the desired effect—anything in writing made it true. I can tell you the last person who put in a roll of toilet paper, he’d planned to say. If someone touched that plane with any tool, tightened this or loosened that, or even spat on the windshield and rubbed it off with the sleeve of his coveralls, I can tell you who it was and when, and certify that his saliva was drug- and alcohol-free.

  But encountering vitriol was rare. He tried hard not to be taken as the typical asshole lawyer and served up such serious attitude only to plaintiff’s attorneys, the guys who represented the passengers in the lawsuits that Lemko tried to make disappear: the morbidly obese passenger who could not buckle his seatbelt even with the seatbelt extender and sued the airline for causing his acute embarrassment; the child whose peanut allergy meant that his flight to Toronto had ended with an injection of epinephrine in his neck at thirty thousand feet and an emergency landing in Cincinnati; the sales manager who suffered a mild concussion when another passenger’s trumpet case sprang from an improperly closed overhead bin.

  Lemko’s briefcase contained the file folder with the page of information about Richard MacMurray and his relationship to Mary Beth Blumenthal of Garland, Texas. In the Comment field of the form, someone from the corporate office would have written the reason that Richard MacMurray of California Street Northwest merited in-person notification. After all, the Adam and Eve Teams were performing a service required by exactly none of the fifteen thousand pages of federal regulations that outlined what was and was not necessary in the aftermath of an incident. If Lemko had reviewed that form, remembered to bring that form with him, had that form with him now, he would see that Richard MacMurray was not only the next of kin but the only one left. Only known living relative. Somewhere in the byzantine world of the main corporate office, it had been decided: Some things could only be said face to face. Sometimes death merited looking a man in the eye.

  But inside the airline offices, no one had to be told why they did it; Lemko knew it boiled down to a cost-control measure: put a human face on the corporation, and it became a lot harder for someone to sue.

  Then there was the matter of the half-awake man on the other side of the apartment door, this confusion in the hallway and the dull tintinnabulus of bells and alarms in the background. None of it disturbed Richard’s continuing dream. During his unintentional nap, Richard’s mind had constructed a dreamscape that was an impossibly confused pastiche of his past: a child playing in Richard’s childhood bedroom, with its blue walls and the laundry chute that dropped straight to the basement and the closest thing Richard had to a secret lair, a window seat. In both the dream and later in his memory of it, he would assume he had been watching himself.

  The bookshelves of that bedroom had been filled with oversize volumes of children’s tales, The Three Little Pigs, the only one Richard could actually remember, and so in the dream, all the books became The Three Little Pigs, in hundreds of different editions, embossed leather covers and glossy consumer paperbacks with cartoonish drawings wherein the Big Bad Wolf wasn’t so much a villain as a charming and obsequious neighbor; he’d somehow morphed into a cartoon, more Wile E. Coyote than anything else, a huckster, a con man, a rogue and a rake, a wolf neither big nor bad.

  But the house that contained his room was no house Richard had ever seen, a center-hall colonial built on maybe forty acres of land, with a stocked pond and three chocolate lab puppies romping across an expansive, rolling lawn. The child called to the dogs by name—Sonny, Sam, and Frank—and even in his disquiet, Richard recalled that those were the names of the guys who called the Redskins games on the radio. The dream slowed as Richard tried to remember whether Frank was the one who did the play-by-play, the one who for twenty years could be counted on to botch the name of the Redskins’ punter.

  The backyard was huge, with a deep carpet of bluegrass and natural sideline of pine trees, and a woman was calling him in for dinner. Richard had the awareness that he was watching himself as a child, saying something about his dad, and he thought and maybe said Lew as this woman waved to him. In her outstretched hand was a metal spatula, and the dream filled with the smells of charcoal and cinnamon as he waved back. The arm that waved the spatula became the arm that rang a dinner bell, back and forth as the clapper slammed into the brass and the peal became constant, then doubled in intensity, a ringing and a buzzing, and in the distance, he heard the howl of his alarm and maybe even a banging inside his head that he felt obligated to investigate. He opened his eyes to see his navy suit trousers over the desk chair. He was wearing only his white shirt and his boxers and a pair of high-rise wool socks that had dug into his calves and made him itch, and he scratched out of instinct, and the ringing wasn’t an alarm clock at all but a phone, the cordless handset that he couldn’t locate.

  He could not locate the phone because it had been in his right hand the entire time. He pressed the Talk button, and a voice identified itself. “This is the Metropolitan Police. You need to answer the door. You should be talking to one of my officers now.”

  He harrumphed. He put on pants. The voice on the phone kept speaking. “Sir. Sir? You’re going to need to open the door.”

  Richard uncracked the door slowly. Lemko was surprised there was no security chain, if only because most of the neighborhood looked as if it were still deciding whether or not to reject its recent, sketchy past.

  Richard looked rumpled. A bit of white gunk littered the corners of his mouth. “What’s all this? What’s this about?”

  Still on the line, the police sergeant said, “Sir, could you identify yourself for these people?”

  “MacMurray. Richard MacMurray. What’s wrong? What time is it?” He looked at his wrist but wore no watch.

  Nessen thought she had heard the last name somewhere, MacMurray. “It’s a little after six. May we come in?” Her training instructed her to inventory the scene when she arrived, and now she was doing just that: couch, desk, armoire containing a large television and various home-entertainment equipment. Speakers ha
nging from brackets in the high corners, walls of horsehair plaster, not just a prewar building but pre–the war before that. Framed posters from a handful of exhibitions and charity events and political campaigns, and only two pictures—Washington standard-issue grip-and-grin, autographed photos of Richard MacMurray with each of the last two presidents. In the second one, the president had his hand on Richard’s shoulder and leaned in close, looked to be talking directly into Richard’s ear with the whisper of a conspirator. The contact looked familiar, like someone she’d known in college. No pets. No pictures of family. No potential weapons.

  The contact turned and walked deeper inside the apartment and stopped at the point where the wide hallway spilled into a cave-like living room. “I’m not big on the small talk, so why doesn’t someone tell me what’s going on here?”

  Procedure meant Nessen was supposed to offer an explanation, but, saying his name over and over silently, she could think only of My Three Sons and Fred MacMurray. Twice already today she had braced herself to be the airline’s appointed messenger of death—to show up unannounced on someone’s doorstep and present a business card and ask to be let inside—and twice the next of kin had already received the news. This was in the briefing books too. People already knew; they heard radio broadcasts, saw special reports, watched the plume of smoke trailing out the fan exhaust of engine 3, overheard the first responders on police scanners. In their most common iteration, they simply showed up at the airports and wandered without purpose or direction until an airline employee could corral them and get them into a conference room, out of the sight of the general public.

  Lemko thought only of their duty; the purpose of an Adam and Eve Team was to round up the stray family member, a next of kin to sign the requisite paperwork for the acceptance of the body, someone of close-enough relations and standing in the family and/or community that their signature was legally enforceable.

  Then Richard made an offer of some hospitality. He poured three glasses of orange juice, handed them around, then put a small ramekin of cashews on the corner of his cluttered desk. “I’m sorry, but I don’t really have much more,” he said.

  Nessen murmured a thank-you. She sometimes wondered how she’d even gotten into this career; her degree was a master’s of social work, and she had done enough clinical work to identify Richard MacMurray as a man under severe stress, perhaps indeed shock, but it was not likely caused by the plane crash or the afternoon’s events. Her mind flashed to a case study she’d read in graduate school, and here she was, perhaps a bit unprofessionally, diagnosing Richard MacMurray, forty-two, as someone who existed in a constant state of trauma. He absently touched his pained forehead and adjusted a nonexistent necktie. He suffered the look of the afflicted.

  Before Nessen could say, Perhaps you’d like to sit down and talk to us for a moment, Richard moved to the couch and took a seat on top of a week’s worth of newspapers and asked, “Now what can I do for you?”

  Lemko whispered at her, “Procedure,” which Nessen took as a reminder that there should be no shortcuts here, no mistakes.

  She started to read from the small laminated card that contained a series of statements that had been prepared by the general counsel and vetted by outside attorneys. The lawyers asked the Adam and Eve Teams to read from the card verbatim, but Nessen preferred to make eye contact; the instructions in the procedures binder specifically warned against this, as did the lessons of her training. The contacts’ reactions were wild and varied; no application of science or reason could predict who would cry, who would argue. The card was supposed to suit every contingency. Yet already today she had read it to two contacts who already knew everything she had to say, and here on an enormous couch was a man who clearly didn’t know what was about to hit him, and the card couldn’t possibly tell him what he needed to know.

  We are working in concert with local, state, and federal authorities. Our primary purpose in these difficult hours is to assist the family members of the passengers and crew of Flight 503 in any reasonable way.

  She had a script but could not say the words. Lemko whispered at her again, “The card.” This was how mistakes were made, how cops who’d said the Miranda warnings a few thousand times ended up watching a criminal skate because they didn’t feel like reading what was on the card. She tried to chase the irrelevant details from her mind but instead kept thinking of a movie in which the cop kept his Miranda card inside his hat.

  “On behalf of the chairman of Panorama Airlines, Ellison Gem—” she began, and Lemko showed her a palm.

  “You’re forgetting the confirmation,” he said, pulling a piece of paper from inside his jacket pocket. He still sounded out of breath.

  “Right. Forgive me.” She took and unfolded the paper and read from it instead. “You are Richard Llewellyn MacMurray, brother of Mary Elizabeth MacMurray Blumenthal, age forty-seven, lately a resident of Garland, Texas?” Nessen was aware that she had just identified the deceased in the exact manner of newspapers and anchormen.

  Richard nodded.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but our procedure requires that you verbally answer the question. She is your sister?”

  Richard said, “Yes. My sister. Where are you going with all this? I’m going to need you to spell it out.”

  Nessen moved back to the card and read from it. “On behalf of the chairman of Panorama Airlines, Ellison Gem, and our entire family of employees, we wish to offer our sincere condolences. Your sister, Mary Elizabeth, was a passenger on board Flight 503.”

  Richard stood and smoothed his shirt and looked at Carol Nessen, held her gaze until she broke eye contact and lowered her head. He looked so familiar to her, but she still couldn’t place it. He went to step past her, but the police sergeant—who until this moment had busied himself with inspecting the books and magazines around the apartment as if conducting a forensic examination—was in his way, and they both stepped in the same direction, as if dancing.

  The sergeant said, “Sorry.”

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Richard mumbled, then headed out the door to the balcony.

  Nessen began gathering up the juice glasses, ate the last couple of cashews. She fidgeted when she was nervous, Lemko knew that. In a minute, she’d start fluffing pillows and dusting blinds.

  “Carol. Stop,” he said.

  She took the pile of newspapers at the edge of the couch and began ordering them all in the same direction. “I just can’t get over the feeling that I know this guy from somewhere.”

  The sergeant said, “You do. Television.”

  44

  GABRIEL HEARD everything, every mention of the words weird and strange. They were the words most familiar to him because he heard them at school, the daily mantra of his tormentors. He accepted them as an accurate definition of his personality.

  On his fifth birthday, when his mother asked what he thought he might want to be when he grew up, he knew enough to understand that she expected him to say something that would please her, astronaut or doctor or lawyer or even insurance man (those were really the only jobs he’d heard of). But he could not resist the truth, its awkward blurtings, and said, Lonely. When she questioned him, he repeated himself—I will always be lonely—because even then he equated lonely with strange. As an adult, he would remember those words not as a self-fulfilling prophecy but as deft insight. He was lonely on his fifth birthday, and so still he was lonely now, playing on the floor in the solitary games of his imagination.

  Weird and strange. He heard those words being whispered by the partygoers, and it made him want to be strange. He wanted to astound them with his acts of defiance, his weirdness.

  When his mother returned, he was going to propose a remedy, a manner in which he could pretend to be more like the other kids. He needed a sidekick. A dog, maybe, but more likely a brother. He’d have to look into this, see if it was possible somehow to have his mother find him such a protector. For now, what he needed was a friend. But there were some issues that ne
eded to be addressed. First, there was the fact that no kids lived around him. His mother’s apartment complex was filled with well-meaning young professionals who liked mixed drinks by the pool and loud music and spent most of the summer outside grilling burgers at one of the four built-in community grills; from them Gabriel had learned another word: mascot. He was the office mascot, too.

  He was smart enough to know that the women of the Mike Renfro Agency who surrounded him with minor affections did so because they felt sorry for him. He did not know enough yet of the larger world to understand why, but he knew he was treated differently, that his concerns were addressed with the utmost seriousness, that conversations in his presence frequently stopped or devolved into whispers. He suffered the truest indignities of being an only child: School became a safari into the unknown wilds of torment; an amusement park was a place where he was forced to sit next to strangers on rides that shook him until he was terrified. He feared showing his classmates the width and breadth of what he knew, how he could look around the room and see how they were going to end up. It wasn’t clairvoyance or any particular gift other than being observant; he spent hours lost in books and in the elaborate fantasias of his mind. His stuffed animals were chattering misfits. He was trailed by a cadre of imaginary friends. Herewith, his own prayers on New Year’s Day were not to be left alone, never again to be consigned to the care of the women from Mr. Mike’s office, who passed him around that afternoon enough that he embarrassed them all when he asked, “What’s a hot potato?”—another phrase he’d learned by observation and repetition. He wanted the camaraderie of team sports, the bonding and instruction that came with it. He prayed again for a sibling, someone with whom he could create the private language of brothers, someone to whom he could teach the intricacies of Legos and video games, someone he could volunteer to play with so that his mother would not have to leave either of them alone with these people. All of these things—he knew from six years’ experience watching television—required a father.