Fearless (11 page)

“You’re not going to arrest me?”

“You haven’t done anything,” Agent Parsons said.

That’s what they think, Max answered silently.

7

He was taken to a hospital first. “I’m all here,” he told them, but they made sure anyway, X-raying and poking, evidently amazed by his wholeness.

“No concussion.” A woman doctor who looked as if she were only slightly older than his ten-year-old son. “But he’s definitely suffering from some sort of posttrauma reaction.”

“He’s in shock?” Agent Smith.

Max listened. While they discussed him his legs dangled on the examining table. His behind crinkled the light blue sanitary paper that covered it.

“No,” the child doctor said low, trying to whisper. “He’s having a stress reaction.”

I’m still high, you dummy, Max thought and giggled. The doctor raised her eyebrows to Agent Smith about the giggle with the air of a lawyer who had established the proof of his case.

The government men phoned the airline. Why the airline? Max wondered. It made the company seem very important, as if Transcontinental Corporation were the highest authority in the United States. Agent Smith asked him whether he wanted to call home.

“You do it,” he said. “Tell my wife I’m free.”

“What?” Agent Smith asked.

“I mean, fine. I’m fine and fancy-free.”

They put him in a darkened area, with a curtain drawn all around, something in between an examining room and a hospital bed. There was classical music playing through a speaker in the wall. He lay down and slept.

“Hello,” a freckled face said and smiled brightly, mouth wide, teeth showing white for a few seconds and then going out, like a camera’s flash. “Sorry to wake you. It’s about three-thirty now. You’re still at the hospital in Pittsburgh. I’m Cindy Dickens from Transcontinental Air. I’m here to help get you home. How do you want to go? We’ll arrange any flight or transportation you like. I’m sorry. You look tired. Can I get you some coffee?”

He felt much better for the nap. She got him coffee. Cindy watched him drink. When he was done he felt he had his brain back in residence. He asked Cindy if his family had been informed.

“Oh yes. We had someone from the New York office go personally to your home and give them the good news. We offered to fly them here but they said—”

“That it’s time for Max to come home,” he completed the statement for her.

For a moment Cindy’s performance of a human being was paused; she peered out into the audience like a puzzled actress wondering who had heckled her. She seemed about to ask a conversational question and then switched back to her efficient checklist: “Should I get you on the next flight to New York?”

Max waited for his terror of flying to appear in his head—but it didn’t come. His thoughts were merely practical. For the first time in his life he considered only how to get somewhere quickly, not safely. “Sure. Do I get to go first class?”

Cindy cocked her head to one side and a smile appeared briefly, but she answered in her role’s neutral tone: “All complimentary, sir, of course. May I book you on Transcontinental Air?”

“Definitely,” Max said. “And can I have some more coffee?” Caffeine increases the anxiety response of people who are fearful, a phobia specialist had once told Max. Before yesterday’s flight, Max had avoided any beverage with caffeine. He had drunk herbal tea instead of coffee at breakfast, ginger ale rather than Coke in the airport lounge.

That had helped a whole lot, hadn’t it?

Max laughed; Cindy skipped back a hop, startled. She had a very slight, almost nonexistent figure. She wore a gray suit, a pink shirt, and a partially tied yellow cravat. Max fantasized she would be wildly passionate if only you could unbutton her jacket and vest before she had a chance to call the police. Max was draped on a cot. Cindy had turned on the light. Max saw that he was in some sort of resting area, maybe for the residents, judging by the lockers and stuff right outside his curtained area. He was bare-chested, his jeans rumpled, his legs spread, vulnerable and emotionally disheveled. Cindy not only wore her suit for armor, she carried a fake leather folder stuffed with formal papers that she could take out and consult to avoid looking at Max’s sensual posture and emotional nudity. Max took the time to study Cindy’s legs, or what he could tell about them from the knee-length skirt and black stockings. They were thin and finely formed, her ankles as delicate as a bird’s. He didn’t think that sexy, although he admired its abstract beauty.

“They sent you here alone?” Max asked.

“Excuse me?” Cindy was writing on one of her papers.

“TransCon Air. They sent you alone?”

“Actually, someone else is supposed to be here,” Cindy finished writing. “I don’t know what’s happened to Mike,” she mumbled and then spoke up: “I’m going to make the arrangements. I’ll be right back.”

Cindy accompanied Max to the airport in a limousine. He found it all interesting and comfortable: the interior of the limo and the new sights en route. At the terminal Cindy told Max another airline employee would be seated next to him on the plane. “His name is William Perlman. He’s had a lot of experience with people who’ve been through what you’ve been through. You’ll like him, he’s a great guy.”

Max was impressed. He thought: They found a Jew in the baggage pile to keep me company.

Cindy asked Max once again if he wanted to phone his wife before boarding.

“Do you know my wife?” Max asked, trying to figure out why she was so insistent. They were heading toward the gate. The telltale, usually unsettling smell of burning kerosene fuel penetrated the glass windows. In the distance a big-bellied 747 stumbled upward into a curved blue sky.

“Me…?” Cindy was astonished.

“I almost get the feeling she’s asked you to get me to call her.”

Cindy looked as if she’d been caught doing something underhanded. “I talked to her briefly,” she mumbled. They had reached Gate 5, which evidently was the departure point for his flight. “Want to board early?” she asked.

“First class boards early anyway,” Max answered.

“Of course,” Cindy said, “that’s right. Anyway, I told Mr. Perlman we would be right at the gate,” Cindy added. She guided Max toward the ramp. Max noticed the plane attached to it was a 727, which, like the DC-10, was another old jet.

“You folks at TransCon ought to upgrade your fleet.”

“Pardon me?” Cindy said, in exactly the tone Max thought she might use if he reached over to unbutton the top button of her navy vest.

“All your planes are twenty years old,” Max nodded at the 727. The burning kerosene was stronger here. He smelled the acrid death of the DC-10’s smoldering seats. He could see the infant seat suspended among the plane’s dissected electronic veins. He felt Byron pulling at him to hurry. “How come you don’t buy new planes? Too much junk-bond debt?”

“Sir,” Cindy rebuked him, showing her profile as she gestured toward the 727 with a righteousness that suggested Max had slandered it, “the design is twenty years old, but that plane has been completely rebuilt several times. I don’t know the exact figures on this particular 727, but the average TransCon 727 has no part older than eight years.”

“That’s not strictly true, Cindy,” Max answered, imitating her travel-brochure style of polite argument. “I’m sorry they told you a lie and I understand that you’ve repeated it to me innocently, but it’s not really accurate.”

“Mr. Klein, it
is
true,” Cindy was upset. She opened her folder and peered inside as she spoke: “I wish I had it here. In my office I could show you the repair records for the entire fleet and you’d see that no part is older than eight years.”

Max admired her pride and felt sorry for her commitment to TransCon’s integrity. She had that most vulnerable of human possessions: a faithful heart. Sadly, she had given her love to a corporation. He put his hand on hers, on the hand that had spread her folder open. Her fingers were cold. “Not everything. Just the engine parts. The skin of that plane, some of the bolts, some of the welding, little things here and there are original and more than twenty years old. Trust me. I know. And as for your maintenance crews and the records in your office, I guess you’ve never had construction done in your home or spent any time on a job site. What’s in everyone’s repair files and what’s out there is the difference between high school civics and Washington politics.”

“You must be Max Klein,” a male voice said behind him. The sound terrified Max. The voice was his dead father’s. As if a murderous hand had grabbed his throat, he shivered and couldn’t swallow or breathe. Max shut his eyes. He certainly couldn’t turn and face the ghost’s greeting. He reminded himself that his father had been dead for thirty years. He argued to himself, I don’t really remember what Dad sounded like. “Mr. Klein?” the specter insisted.

“This is William Perlman,” Cindy said softly in Max’s ear.

Max opened his eyes and saw a big frizzy red-haired man. He stood well over six feet and had the weight and thickness of a football player. His eyes were pale blue, his forehead as flat as if someone had meticulously starched and ironed it. “Did I startle you?” Perlman asked.

Perlman was a big cheerful man, a clown without makeup. Max relaxed. “I guess I’m still a little on edge,” Max apologized.

“Who wouldn’t be?” Perlman said.

Cindy said, “I’ll be going now, Mr. Klein.”

“Thanks for everything,” Max said and offered his hand. He imagined she had very small breasts, that her freckles trailed down from her long neck until just below the bra line, where her skin was probably pure white. He had a conviction her nipples would be pink. “You were really nice,” he lied.

“My pleasure,” Cindy said. “And I hope someday you have a little more faith in people.”

“Me too,” Max said. He smiled but there were tears in his eyes.

Perlman watched Max the whole time they sat strapped into their first-class seats, sipping complimentary drinks and listening to the captain’s dutiful accounting of their position in the line for takeoff. Perlman also talked, cheerfully, about where he had grown up and so on, but his eyes were not in harmony with the light conversation. Instead they observed Max coolly, flickering only when Max seemed interested in the plane’s movements.

Such interest prompted Perlman into self-interruptions of his banter with curt bulletins of obvious information. “I used to love to travel. When TransCon hired me as a consultant—we’re taxiing now—they of course offered unlimited free travel for me, but they got me flying back and forth so much—that’s just the captain keeping the engines up to speed—that now my idea of a vacation is to stay put. Besides, TransCon doesn’t—we’re turning to be in position for takeoff—fly to Venice, which I’m romantic enough to want to go to again and again.”

“I’m not scared,” Max said. “But I’d like another drink when we’re airborne.” He smiled and elbowed Perlman. “Or should I say,
if
we’re airborne.”

“We’re beginning takeoff,” Perlman said as the large hands of the jet’s engines started to push from behind, giving them the bum’s rush out of Pittsburgh.

Max smiled at the window. “Look at us go!”

Perlman frowned, puzzled. “Your wife said you’re terrified of air travel.”

“Everybody seems to know my wife,” Max said. He leaned forward and across Perlman’s lap to watch the speeding runway. “Go, baby, go!” The front wheels released the earth with a slight thud of regret and the land tilted.

“I called her before meeting you—”

The pilot banked away from the areas of noise abatement, up through what he, the tower, and the passengers hoped was a cleared corridor to his flight path. “This is the most dangerous time,” Max interrupted Perlman with a bulletin of his own. “Right now every bolt on this plane is stressed, and the air is full of deadly obstacles, each one moving as blindly and as quickly as we are.”

“We’re safe.” Perlman’s voice was soft and smooth as a loving parent singing a lullaby.

“Why did you call my wife?”

“To gain some insight into who you were before we met.” Perlman had his head back, looking straight ahead. His hands were holding the armrests. Not desperately, but with a firm and worried grip. “I didn’t know, tell you the truth, whether you were going to be communicative or what. They told me
you
were the one who was stressed, not the bolts.”

Max chuckled. He tapped Perlman on the shoulder. “You’re a funny man, Dr. Perlman.” The jet’s engines were humming, cycling to their maximum, revving so fast there was a brief illusory moment of silence at the climax of their power. Max saw Stacy clutch the napkin to her forehead and remembered the thin line of blood trailing down. He saw Jeff’s eyes, sideways on the carpet, red and outraged by his fate.

What about Nutty Nick, god damn it, Max! You’re blowing off a million-dollar meeting!

Oh fuck off, Jeff. Money isn’t everything.

Perlman had his own concerns. “Who told you I was a doctor?” he asked.

“Nobody.” For once Max didn’t fight the captain’s maneuvers. The jet banked, turning to head to New York. Max relaxed his body into the seat, swaying in the air, a cradled baby lying in loose-limbed comfort. Perlman was a statue, neck twisted to see Max, but rigid in that position, his arms stuck to the rests. “And you’re not a doctor,” Max said, shutting his eyes to flow better with the graceful arc of the turn. “You’re a psychologist.”

“You’re right. How did you figure that out?”

This time, hearing only Perlman’s voice, unaccompanied by the clown’s bright red face, Max detected anxiety, not his dead father. “You talk like a shrink.” The pilot had completed the turn. The chime sounded. Max had survived again. He was going to survive everything. He felt he could outlive even the exhausted and defiled earth. Max opened his eyes and noticed Perlman’s shoes were expensive. In fact, his outfit was quite fashionable and costly, although casual. “What kind of shrink works for an airline? You said you consulted?”

“I specialize in posttraumatic stress reactions. I’ve written a book about it. I worked with a TransCon crew that survived a pretty rocky flight—”