Among the Dead (21 page)

‘I'm sorry, I shouldn't have called.'

Frank said nothing, but breathed into the phone. What did Ron Godfrey think of this?

‘Mr Gale, are you all right?'

‘What do you think?' and then he hung up.

‘What did he say?' asked Lowell.

‘He wants to know how I feel about missing the plane. Maybe I should have told him the truth.'

‘Did he know about the arrest?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘You should probably talk to them, just say something short and don't think about it.'

‘But why?'

‘Because you got arrested. If you just go along with them, you'll disappear in all of this, but if you cause them trouble, they'll come after you, they'll think you have something to hide, they'll make a freak out of you.'

‘How did you get to be such an expert in this?'

‘I read the papers.'

‘Does it have an effect on a lawsuit?'

Why?'

‘Because that's why you want me to play along. Not to hurt a lawsuit.'

‘Maybe a little.'

There was another phone call, from Dale Beltran, the grief counsellor.

‘Mr Gale, I've just been contacted by the county coroner's office. They're ready to begin the identification of the bodies.'

‘I'm ready,' said Frank.

‘But I have to warn you,' he said, ‘not all the bodies are ready now. You may have to go back a second time.'

‘That's OK,' said Frank. ‘It's something I need to do.'

‘Yes,' said Beltran. ‘The denial of the reality of the situation only prolongs the healing process. At the same time, some of the more gruesome aspects of the results of a crash can be so horrifying that they linger in the mind, and we develop a morbid obsession with what we've seen. Then we exhibit the symptoms of posttraumatic stress syndrome. And that requires an even longer time to heal.'

‘So I shouldn't go.'

‘It's your choice, Frank.'

I'm coming. And I'll bring my brother.'

‘That's a good idea, Frank.'

Everyone gathered in the command centre, where the chefs stood behind a display of salads, fruits and cheeses. Bettina and her deputies, Chris and Kelly, handed red passes to the mourners, tickets for the transportation.

Frank and Lowell joined the crowd. People talked quietly, Lowell joined in a few little chats, but Frank said nothing. The names of a few lawyers were mentioned.

Downstairs at the hotel entrance, the group was led to a tour bus.

‘Where's the limousine?' asked Lowell. ‘What limousine?' asked Bettina.

‘You promised us a limousine would take us to the coroner.'

‘I said there'd be limos to the memorial service, not the coroner.'

Frank touched Lowell's shoulder. ‘That's what she said.'

They got on the bus. Frank recognized in Lowell's hesitation upon entering the bus, and seeing the relatives of the dead in their printed T-shirts, a little fear of contamination from the mob. The bus could have been carrying tourists, nothing about the way they looked as a group, except for their eyes, most of them red, tired, swollen, suggested the terrible landscapes waiting for them. Lowell's pause at the top of the stair, which could have been read by some on the bus as the normal surveillance for a good seat, was a second too long, and his dismay was obvious. Frank whispered to him, ‘We don't need the limo. Let's sit down.'

There was another bus behind them, and the mournful caravan left the hotel, the grieving survivors shielding their eyes from the press. The paper would report on the
GRIM TASK
.

The bus drove through the entrance to the naval yards, and the mood of the passengers changed as they came to the docks. None of them could continue to play with their reflections in the windows, as the road took them through the shadow of an aircraft carrier. The driver reached for his microphone and announced, over a public address system that was surprisingly clear and free of static, ‘That's the
Kennedy.
Thirty-five hundred sailors call the
Kennedy
home for voyages that take them out to sea for as long as a year. The refrigerators in the
Kennedy
are ten times the size of this bus.' Then he pointed out a destroyer, and a small house on a hill where Douglas Mac Arthur had been billeted. Across the bay was the Coronado Island, ‘and that grand old lady, the Hotel Del
Coronado, where Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon made
Some Like It Hot.'
Lowell rolled his eyes, but Frank was grateful for the information.

At the end of a long pier was a refrigerated warehouse that the navy had given to the coroner's office. Bettina Welch made a little speech about following the coroners, and staying together as a group. Frank wanted to say, ‘Doesn't this feel like a high-school field trip?' But he thought no one would appreciate the humour.

A delegation of coroners met the buses, and the mourners gathered in smaller clusters around their assigned guides. They were given heavy white jackets, and taken inside.

The warehouse was cold, like a day early in the winter, before the snow, after the first real freeze, and the jackets were welcome. Frank played with his buttons but saw that the workers in the room kept theirs open. So he kept his jacket open too, and came to appreciate the chill.

His guide, Dr Kashiwa, told them that the
GRIM BUSINESS
of identifying the dead took place around the clock. For some of the dead, identification would be impossible. Dr Kashiwa described the condition of the bodies in the cockpit as being ‘the consistency of strawberry jam'. Some of the dead on the ground may have been incinerated when the fuel tanks of the left wing exploded in a
MASSIVE FIREBALL
. Several large sections of the fuselage remained intact, including the rear of the plane. The pilot had turned off the Fasten Seatbelt signs, and though it was unlikely that many passengers were in the single aisle of the 737, most of the passengers had unbuckled themselves. As the plane crashed, they were tossed out of their seats.

The coroner told them, ‘Even with their seatbelts on, the bodies were not protected from violent distress. Some seatbelts held firm while the passengers they embraced were torn in half by the force of the crash. Unfortunately, some of you will have to come back here again, but our systems are not yet so refined that we can tell you in advance who is ready for identification and who is not.'

The group came to a table of small arms and legs. How could he choose among them, which were his daughter's?

A few sharp chemical smells rose from the tables of body parts in the large, cold room, partly of chlorine, from the bleach with which the floor was washed, and partly from whatever soup they sprayed over the tables. A row of a dozen left arms was being matched with right arms. Many of the dead lost their feet as the
metal sheared their legs. Right feet and left feet, on separate tables. Frank learned that most clothing was burned off, or blown off, as the bodies tumbled.

Though the attendants washed and drained the blood from the arms and feet, pieces of legs, the torsos in shallow plastic caskets, they could not erase the burns, the deep gashes, and the disgusting mutilations within mutilations, the fingerless hands without arms, like chicken breasts ready for the frying pan, which Frank could identify only because someone had collected these puffy shards on one long tray, unmistakable with their stumps of wrist or thumb. And on every piece of flesh someone had taped a strip of paper with computer bar-coding, so that as each piece was identified, the system would eventually reconstruct as much of the body as possible. The computers knew where each piece of a body had been found, and then to which bin it had been remanded.

‘The reconstruction will be simple,' said Dr Kashiwa. ‘After the crash we laid a detailed grid over the entire crash zone. Each body, or each body part, was then labelled according to the grid, so that we will be able to simulate, precisely, the dissemination of the bodies across the crash zone, and since we know the seat assigned to each passenger, eventually the computers will be able to replay the entire crash, in any speed we want, and we will know exactly how each person was affected by the destruction of the plane.'

They all died, thought Frank. That's how they were affected. And those on the ground too. And I was affected, but if I say that, they'll make fun of me.

‘It's amazing, isn't it?' said someone else. ‘What they can do. The crash won't have been in vain.'

‘Yes,' said a man, ‘they'll have the whole crash on computer, and they'll know how the plane broke apart, which will tell them what they have to do to strengthen the next generation of aircraft.'

‘That's her,' someone cried, and everyone watched a dark-haired woman in her twenties as a coroner covered a body on a steel table. Frank wondered who she had seen, a sister or a mother. The woman seemed too young to have lost a daughter on the flight, since Acapulco was not a destination for teenagers travelling alone, or even in groups with other teenagers. Unless of course the woman had found her own three-year-old, who had been on the plane with the woman's ex-husband, who had visitation rights this week, and he was taking his kid on a trip where he could let
her hang out by the pool during the day, and then at night he could get her a baby-sitter while he went out looking for action. So it could be a little girl, thought Frank. But I doubt it. The story would have been in the news, and so far nothing has taken the spotlight from me. So I'm still the most famous person in the disaster.

Everyone handling the bodies wore long rubber aprons and heavy rubber gloves, to protect themselves, the coroner said, from the threat of contamination with plague-infested blood. Was there a bucket with penises? Frank wondered. Or were there two trays, hidden even from this room of total exposure, marked ‘
PELVIS: MEN
' and ‘
PELVIS: WOMEN
'?

In another room, jewellery. Plastic envelopes, each with a barcode tag. Every fingerprint had been taken from every hand or finger recovered. Teeth were being photographed and jaws were being X-rayed. The names of doctors and dentists had been taken from next of kin. Frank was asked and gave the names. And there were rows of computers linked to each other, sharing all of this information. What might have taken a month only a few years ago could be accomplished in twenty-four hours now, said Kashiwa.

The teams of coroners assigned reconciled all the pieces with each other, to be separated later into their own bins and stacked on shelves. Then three special machines, robots, now sitting idle in a corner of the huge room, would be programmed by the computers to roam the aisles, collecting the separate pieces from the shelves on one side of the room to stack them, body by individual body, on the other side of the room, leaving the job to a few workers of putting all the mangled pieces into their final containers, into their coffins.

Imagine the destruction to a body, to a face, exploded out of an airplane, and bounced against the roof of a house, or slammed into a chimney. What happens to a ten-year-old when he's blasted through a hole in the wall, and then a thin sheet of metal from the plane's tail catches him across the shoulders? How many pieces are left? What remains?

They told Frank that his wife and daughter's seats were in the tail section. When the plane broke up, the roof peeled away. At the same time the tail flipped upside down, crushing the fin, nothing to brace the inverted fuselage, and the passengers, unbuckled, fell. Here comes the plane, scraping the passengers along the road and into first one house and then out the back yard and across the next
back yard into another house. These bits and pieces of people, squeezed into nothing by the weight of the plane, masticated by metal bed-frames and stucco walls, and nails, and chimneys, and the jumble of stuff that a second before had been a car filled with children and groceries, now packed tall metal drums lined with plastic. There were probably things other than ruined human body parts in the drums. Anything fleshy had been collected for examination, classification, and that would include what was left of dogs and cats, the meat from freezers, and pieces of the dinners from the airline's kitchen, choices of fish, chicken, beef or cheese, now fused by the heat with the skin of burn-ravaged flight attendants. Let the coroner's sophisticated laboratories divide the blended proteins from each other and say with great assurance that this was passenger and this was enchilada.

Frank heard a worker joke with another worker as he pushed one of those barrels in front of him. ‘Come on, honey, let's eat out tonight, I'm tired of leftovers.'

Frank went back to the hotel. He knew he was in that state of grief that was denial. Knowing this, could he still deny?

Frank watched himself become famous on the news that night, the story was the same on every channel: man misses plane, evades police barriers at crash site, is arrested for looting on Cohassett Street. As he listened to them talking about this man who had been arrested, as he felt the thrill of fame, a disturbing high-pitched tone vibrated through their reports, linking the basic elements of the story, implying a relationship, an intention, some subtle marriage between the crashed plane and his walk through the ravaged houses, his arrest. He wanted to know what they really meant by the implicit connections – ‘
PLANE CRASHES
'; ‘
MAN WHO MISSED PLANE SEARCHES THROUGH RUBBLE
'; ‘
ARRESTED
' – and why they were frightening him. He wanted to call up the radio and television stations, and the newspapers that would print the story in the morning, but he couldn't think of anything to say that would help his cause. Don't they care how it makes me feel? What do they mean when they say I was
searching
through the rubble? Searching? As though I had a goal.