Love and Other Ways of Dying (3 page)

The television reporter stood on the shore, with a growing cabal of other reporters, fellow parasites. He stood apart, shifting from foot to foot, antsy, squinting out at the ocean. Shit, where? Others worked their cell phones, frantically scrounging for the story, but still nobody knew anything. Someone living in a trailer home nearby claimed to have seen a huge fireball on the horizon; another said the plane had come so close to the village that you could see inside, cabin lights flickering on and off, people lit, then black, see those last moments playing out from the ground.

These waters were his, that’s what the reporter thought. He’d sailed these coves and inlets all summer long, sailed past the lighthouse so many times it seemed a natural outcropping of the landscape. He was a solid, good-looking man who spoke quickly, moved at a clip, all of forty-two, with just-thinning hair. He’d worked twenty years on the nautical beat, covering the navy and ship sinkings and whatever else came along. He never forgot to register a name, and then never forgot it, kept a card catalog in his head that connected everyone to everyone else. One of his great strengths. And when he saw what looked like falling stars in the distance, parachute flares, he knew that was where the plane was. He turned to the cameraman.

We need to be under those, he said, pointing to the falling stars.

Before he left the office, he’d stashed extra cell-phone batteries in his pocket. You never knew, or maybe you already did. And now, in this night, in the seamless dark (there was no marking land but for the lighthouse, green light flashing), he was on his way in a hired boat with a cameraman. The wind blew, heavy swells, ten-foot waves, on his way, to see what? And why? He was as bad as the others, wasn’t he? A fucking parasite. There were a lot of people on that plane, he knew that. At the UN, they called it the diplomatic shuttle: dinner meeting in Manhattan, breakfast meeting in Geneva. And now here they were, lost off the coast of this forgotten place.

It took an hour in those seas. The parachute flares and spotlights were blinding at first, the smell of diesel overwhelming. Sea King helicopters whirred overhead, aiming white beams; boats drifted through the wreckage aimlessly, the water a bottomless black. They couldn’t see anything, just heard it on the VHF radio, fishermen talking to one another: I got something over here. I think she’s alive. Then thirty seconds passed. I need a body bag. And then other voices, this morbid call and response:

We got another one.

Over here, too.

Need a body bag, now!

Jesus, we got a foot in the water.

We have an arm.

We need a body bag! Who’s got body bags?

Then the reporter saw a half-inflated life raft. Alive—someone was alive! But when they came upon it, it was empty, had inflated on impact. There were shoes fanning everywhere around them, hundreds and hundreds of shoes, in procession, riding the water’s windrows—some with the laces still tied up. And underwear and ripped shirts, Bibles and stuffed animals.
Money floating on the surface of the ocean now. Dollars and marks, rupees and francs and drachmas. You’d haul up a purse and expect to find a wallet, a driver’s license, lipstick, anything, and it would be empty.

The plane had hit the water at more than four hundred miles per hour, nose first, two engines still firing, very unusual, extremely rare; the jet was two hundred feet long, and the tail rammed straight into the nose, everything exploding into more than a million pieces. Later, someone would be in charge of counting pieces at the military base, in a hangar where bits of the plane would fill thousands of crates and cardboard boxes. At impact, the bodies on board had been what the medical examiner would call degloved, simply shorn from the bones. You couldn’t pick them up in your hands. You had to scoop them in nets.

No one has survived this crash, the television reporter told the world. From what we are seeing, there are no survivors.

But, said an anchorperson, the coast guard is calling this a search and rescue.

There are no survivors.

Until dawn, he was the only reporter under the parachute flares, a bizarre, surreal time, no believer in God, but you could feel something, 229 of them in this place. There were body parts and shoes—he’d dream about them for a long time. He was beamed into television sets around the world. No survivors. He told the pilot’s wife that her husband was dead. He told the famous boxer that his son was dead. He told the father of the woman with Persian eyes that his daughter was dead.

When he finally came to shore the next day, when he stood near the lighthouse, under the green light, doing more live feeds, carefully choosing his words for the world, running on adrenaline, he noticed a large man glaring at him. The man was a very
big man, with a pockmarked face and greased-back hair, scary-looking, glaring. And the reporter, exhausted and paranoid, thought, He’s going to kick my ass for being a parasite, for feeding off all these bodies.

When the reporter finished, the oversized man started for him and the reporter could do nothing but ready himself for the blow. But it never came. Something else did.

I want to thank you, he said. You told me my fiancée was dead. I got a phone call last night, in New York, and I was told there might be survivors, and I thought, Well, if anybody survived this it was her, because we’re gonna get married—and everyone was saying there are survivors, and you told me she was dead. You told me the truth. I needed to hear that.

Needed to hear that? This man needed to hear that? Yesterday the reporter had been covering some minor promotion ceremony at the military base; today he had told the world they could say goodbye to these 229 human beings, the ones with
X
’s on their foreheads, the ones turning to gold, once wearing shoes, ghosts now, goodbye. And then the big man was gone, too, before the reporter could offer thanks back, or rather condolences, before he could think to ask the living man’s name.

It was early morning in Geneva, and the father of the woman with the blue Persian eyes—a slight, erudite man with fine hair turning from orange to gray, turning at that very moment even—sat before a television, watching the reporter, in disbelief. He woke his wife and asked, Did she phone last night? And his wife said, She’ll be phoning soon to have you fetch her in Zurich. And he said, She won’t; the plane has crashed.

His wife roused herself, still half tangled in sleep, and stared at the reporter, listening, trying to grasp words that made no
sense. It’s all right, she said. There’s nothing to worry about. We’ll wait for her call.

The phone rang. It was her boyfriend in New York. What plane did she take? he asked. And the father said, But you tell me. No, he said, because we parted company at four in the afternoon, and she didn’t know which plane she was on. And can you please tell me that she was on the Zurich flight?

No, the father said. And then he called the airline and insisted they tell him whether his daughter had been on the Zurich flight or the crashed Geneva flight. We cannot, a voice said. But you must. You must … There was silence, then a rustling of papers. We have to tell you, the voice said, she is not on the Zurich list.

Thank you, said the father.

Then he told his wife, and she said, Until they phone us with the news, we have to believe. And the man said, But darling, they’re not going to phone with news like that. They’d come to the door—

And before he’d finished his sentence, the doorbell rang.

Grief is schizophrenic. You find yourself of two minds, the one that governs your days up until the moment of grief—the one that opens easily to memories of the girl at six, twelve, eighteen—and the one that seeks to destroy everything afterward. The man was fifty-eight and he’d given his daughter every advantage he could afford; the circumstances of his life—his work for a luxury-car company and then a fine-watch company—had provided the riding lessons and top-notch education and summer home in France. But then she’d given so much of herself, too. She’d been a championship swimmer and show jumper. She had a great knack for simplifying things, for having fun, for enjoying the moment so fully that those around her wanted to live inside those moments with her. She was contagious and beautiful
and twenty-four, with those amazing eyes. She was about to come home and take a job.

After she was gone, the husband and wife made a promise to each other: They would stop their imaginations at that place where their daughter had boarded the plane, their minds would not wander past that particular rope. As usual, he broke the promise, unable to divert his mind from picturing his daughter at the end—it’s possible she, like all of them, was unconscious at impact from the crushing g-forces inside the aircraft. Or that she suffered horribly, screaming, her entire life playing before her eyes. Whom did she sit next to in those moments? What was said?

The man couldn’t help but imagine the pilots, too, their fate connected to a recurring dream he’d had for many years of himself as a pilot, trying to land a jet on a motor launch and not knowing what the hell he was doing. Though his wife stopped her mind on the gangway as her daughter stepped into the jet, he followed his girl into the sea.

Nothing made sense, time was disintegrating, everything was a confusion, chaos. Walking through town, he’d see the river and have to keep himself from slipping into it. He’d go to the station and hold back from throwing himself before a train: how good it would feel, a matter of time now, not whether but
when
—Today? Tomorrow? What would it feel like?

Since he couldn’t sleep, he drank a bottle of Scotch daily, then couldn’t remember anything. He followed the news accounts, halfheartedly reading words like
investigation, black box, recovery effort, debris field.
There had been a Picasso on board the plane and millions in rubies and diamonds. One day a postcard arrived from his daughter, detailing her stay in New York. Authorities called, wanting to send some of her effects (others now slept with ripped shirts and favorite sweaters, passports and stuffed animals), but the thought horrified him. What was worse,
what the man could never have foreseen after thirty years of marriage, after having done so much to put a life together, was how quickly it became undone. He’d spent those decades stitching up a beautiful life—the watch on his wrist, a mysterious blue, cost the same as a small house. Now he didn’t want to be with anybody, just alone, and his wife, his best friend—his wife had stopped at the gangway. How could she? How could she not follow their beloved daughter into the ocean? Silly words comforted her while they enraged him; having family nearby was a source of strength for her, torment for him. This response or that response of hers seemed so … 
wrong.
In his mind he was asking: What’s the point of this life? And she said, We must forget.

There was one thing that made him feel better. He flew alone to the northern village a few days after the crash, thinking he’d have to identify his daughter, drove down along the coast road to the lighthouse. (The media was now encamped here, among the houses and rocks and clotheslines, long-range lenses trained on anybody shedding a tear, beaming the image to the world.) He came to this village, and he felt something, some part of him rising, too. He knew he was going mad—and yet he could feel these waves churning inside him, his daughter there, too. When he returned to Geneva, he simply went back to devising ways to kill himself.

The full severity of the crash dawned on the medical examiner only the morning after, when he rode a Sea King out to the debris field. The fishermen and others in Zodiacs kept shuttling body parts to a huge command ship, the captain on the radio to these men talking in calm tones. (Many would later say it was that voice, that reassuring voice, that pulled them through the night.) The media had already begun a body count, based on the bags
coming ashore, and yet there were no bodies out here whatsoever, not one intact body in those bags, which were running out fast. But for one, they couldn’t identify a single soul visually.

Back at the military base, the medical examiner set up in Hangar B, refrigerated trucks called reefers parked outside to hold the remains. There were huge fans and scented candles to mask the smell, the whole place lit and guttering like a church. Like the strangest church. On one wall hung a huge diagram of the plane, a seating chart, and as the remains of a passenger were identified by dental records or DNA, by a distinctive tattoo or a wedding ring, a blue dot was placed on the passenger’s seat. The medical examiner would eventually be in charge of four hundred people here—a cadre of pathologists and DNA experts, morticians, media liaisons, and staff. But when he came back to the hangar after having been at sea that first time, he thought, What if I go now, bugger off right now? But where? Back to his dogs? No, what he realized as the parts began to fill the hangar and the reefers, as the stench became overpowering, was that he was too afraid to leave. With each passing day inside the hangar, there was nowhere to vanish but inside these people, these bodies.

One day he was waiting to go on the stand in dead-end New Glasgow, killing time, and the next this complete Armageddon. There were three hundred family members gathered now at a hotel, and the medical examiner was asked to address them. Others spoke first—officials, the president of the airline, offering their deepest sorrow to these people—and then he stood up nervously, cleared his throat, perhaps recalling that day years before when he’d made a body out of rolled-up towels for the media, how simple and, well, hilarious that had been. At least to him. But how do you tell grieving family members the average body is now in one hundred pieces, one hundred little stars? (A fisherman saw a human heart on the surface of the water.) You will
never see your loved ones again, he said. Those were the first words out of his mouth, and the crowd let out a massive exhalation, as if hit in the stomach. One man began sobbing uncontrollably and was led from the room. Not only are they dead, you will never see them again.

He’d said it. However painful, he knew this much: If you look away, if you self-justify or obfuscate, then you’re stuck with the lie. You may make it through the moment, but in a day, a week, a year, it will bring you down, like cheetahs on a gazelle. Yes, he told them. If anything, they could see their own fear in his eyes, feel their quaver in his voice, their tears welling in his eyes. No stiff upper lip here. Fuck the macho and whatever it was that made you a man. (There was a heart on the surface of the water.) He vowed he would not betray these people, there’d be no fake body under a sheet. He’d try to talk to each of them, answer their concerns and desires, treat each body as if he himself were the next of kin: the father, the son, the lover, the brother.