Among the Dead (29 page)

‘The two lawyers. Different styles, but similar results. And they're experts at this sort of thing.'

‘No one has talked to me, but I thought you wanted to hire an independent lawyer. I thought you were going to hire Aaron Waramus.'

Lowell made a sound of discouragement. ‘These guys are good. I think it's better to join the fold.'

‘But I want to make the final decision.'

‘Of course, of course,' said Lowell. ‘And maybe also a publicist.'

‘Good,' said Frank.

‘I thought you said it was a bad idea.'

‘It might be good for the family.' Meaning: once the world knows the letter is mine, we'll need a press officer to keep the reporters and the cameras away from us. Could anyone buy this as a movie? Or is it too internal?

‘She'll call you later. Anyway, I'm coming up. I brought you a jacket and tie.'

He put the receiver down and the phone rang again. This time it was Bettina Welch. She told him that the buses would be leaving in half an hour.

‘Buses?' Frank said. ‘I thought you said we were going to get limousines.'

‘I'm sorry, Frank,' said Bettina. ‘I tried.'

Frank made a face, but he didn't know what it looked like. He supposed the airline knew that anyone's protest over the switch from limousines to buses would look awfully bratty, and this was a day for everyone to appear so occupied with grief that the material world was momentarily dissolved.

‘We'd really appreciate it if no one talks to the press today,' she said.

‘Why is that?'

‘We just think that with everything that's going on, people are losing sight of the tragedy, of the lives that were lost, of the respect that we should be paying to the victims of this terrible tragedy.'

He knew that she was really saying that the airline was trying to keep the families of the dead from taking centre-stage.

Lowell was at the door. Frank let him in while he was on the phone.

‘What's going to happen at the memorial?'

‘The governor will be there, and the mayor of San Diego.'

‘Why isn't this happening in Los Angeles?' he asked.

‘We'll have a memorial in Los Angeles too, maybe even a funeral, if I can say that, but this is where the tragedy occurred. And if we have a memorial service in Los Angeles, we'll be missing the opportunity to complete our bereavement for the innocent victims who died on the ground.'

Lowell made a face: who are you talking to? And Frank said, ‘Goodbye,' and hung up.

‘Who was that?' asked Lowell.

‘The front desk.' Frank didn't want to talk about anything.

‘What did they want?'

‘Do I have everything I need? Is there anything they can get for me?'

Lowell handed Frank a garment bag. Frank took it to the bathroom and put on the shirt and tie, and the jacket. While he was in the bathroom the phone rang, and he let Lowell answer. Frank heard him say, ‘Hello, Mother,' in a loud voice meant for Frank, and then his voice dropped.

Lowell knocked on the bathroom door to tell him that it was time to go.

They met their parents in the hallway, by the elevators. There were others there, new faces, and some Frank recognized from Los Angeles, late arrivals who had missed the morgue.

Someone said that they really shouldn't be going to this without first checking with a lawyer, someone else said, with tears, that this was no time to worry about the suit, that the suit would follow its own course whether or not the airline was managing this memorial. Someone added that there were already a few groups of lawyers circling the event. Yes, someone said, there's Dessick and Berberian. The Barbarian, someone else said, that's his nickname. And who was going with them? The people in the elevator called out their choices: Dessick Berberian Berberian Dessick Dessick Berberian. Frank had not made his choice yet. Someone told him that he should. Then another person said that he knew that the airline had been warned about this nigger, and someone said that wasn't nice, and the person who said ‘nigger' then said he didn't have to protect the niggers when a nigger killed his daughter and son-in-law on their honeymoon. Someone else said there were black people on the plane too, and the man who said ‘nigger' said, So what?

They took the elevator to the mezzanine floor, where they met Bettina Welch and Ed Dockery, and others, and were introduced to the president of the airline, Dennis Donoghue. Frank had seen the man's picture in the paper a few times. He lived somewhere else, maybe Texas – Frank vaguely remembered that he had worked at a few other airlines – and had rescued this one during difficult times. His confidence was so practised that he wasn't really there
in the room, he projected an image of himself; this was a hologram Dennis, not the real thing. When Bettina introduced him to Frank, Donoghue's smile changed. Something that looked like satisfaction replaced his relaxed concern,

‘Yes, Mr Gale. You've been through a lot, haven't you?'

‘I guess.'

‘No false humility here, Mr Gale.' And then he said, quietly, with a threat, ‘We know what happened.'

‘I just meant that I'm still alive.'

‘You don't really wish you had died, do you?'

‘It's very difficult.'

‘But you're not going to kill yourself over this, are you?' Where were these questions coming from?

‘It doesn't seem fair, does it?' asked Frank, drawn into Donoghue's orbit.

‘If you don't believe in God, these things have no meaning.'

‘Do you believe in God?' asked Frank.

‘Of course,' said Donoghue. ‘And I know that He's not fair.'

Frank turned to Lowell, panicked by this conversation. Why were they talking this way? Donoghue had dropped all pretence of grief, or interest, and the impatience with which he talked to Frank was personal, was directed at Frank as though he knew who he really was, as though Frank deserved a harsh judgement.

Lowell wasn't listening to him, any more than in the big room when that unhappy couple pressed Frank on his relationship with the insurance agent, and Frank had added to his lies.

‘What about you, Frank,' said Donoghue, ‘do you believe in God?'

‘I guess if you really believe in God, then you have to pray.'

‘And you don't pray?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Not even when you're alone? You don't hear yourself begging the Creator of the universe for mercy?'

‘I don't have an answer for that,' said Frank. Again the picture came to him, of getting sick like a dog. What did this mean, this urge to roll around the floor, shitting and pissing?

‘Start thinking of one,' said Donoghue, leaving Frank for someone else as Bettina came over and took his arm. She looked back at Frank, and Frank knew, without doubt, that she knew the letter was his.

What grace this knowledge gave her! And Donoghue, nothing
else could explain how miserably he treated Frank than the power he obtained from knowing Mary Sifka's name. He will turn this against me, thought Frank. Somehow this will be used to help the airline. He gave the letter to the press. He will give away Mary's name when he needs to.

Donoghue shook hands with Frank's parents. His mother showed him a picture of Madeleine, at a year old, lying on a Mexican blanket on the beach. Anna's foot was in the corner of the picture. He thought of her foot severed from her leg, sitting in a bin of feet in that cold warehouse by the bay.

Bettina asked everyone to start on their way down to the buses. Donoghue shook hands with Frank's father. Whatever secret feelings he held for Frank, they were not extended to his parents. Frank thought this was odd, but could not explain it to himself.

How did Frank feel? This is how he felt: tie a man's wrists to two posts. Nail his feet to the floor. Take a razor blade or a scalpel, and cut the skin in a circle around his neck. Then, from his neck down to his waist, cut a series of strips, an inch apart. Then pull each strip away from the body, and let them fall, making a loose skirt of flesh. Then throw boiling ammonia on this swamp of blood. Wait three minutes for the blisters to rise. Rub them with hard salt. This should overload the myelin sheaths that protect the nerves from agony. Better yet, don't find a surrogate, do this to yourself, or ask a friend to help.

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.