Upon A Pale Horse (5 page)

None of which he said. He didn’t have to. Both he and Jeffrey knew the game.

“Thank you,” Jeffrey said, glancing at his watch in what he hoped was an obvious manner. “I’m on my way to the airport right now. I appreciate the sentiment.”

“Anything you need, you can rely on us for.”

“That’s comforting, sir. I appreciate it. Now, not to be rude…”

“Go do what you need to do. I just wanted to convey my deepest condolences. I’ve lost as well, so I know what it’s like.”

There wasn’t anything to say to that, so Jeffrey nodded in what he hoped was a suitably grateful manner and averted his eyes – the bow-tie trembling ever so slightly from the partner’s breathing was suddenly irritating beyond belief, and he was afraid to speak in case he fell apart. His older brother was dead, blown to bits over the Atlantic, and this pseudo-academic mouthed shallow aphorisms, expecting him to be appreciative? He was suddenly enraged, but choked the sentiment down. He wasn’t thinking clearly. The little man was just trying to show that the firm cared. Obligatory, perhaps, but a kind gesture nonetheless.

The partner stepped out of the way, belatedly realizing that he’d delayed the young associate at an inopportune time, and Jeffrey pushed past him, trying to cover the ground between his office and the elevators without any further interruptions. He could feel the eyes of his coworkers boring into him as he passed, the news having obviously spread on the office tom-toms almost as soon as he’d called his boss. Nothing was quite as fascinating as tragedy, and Jeffrey was as close as you could get without being on the list of victims. He did his best to ignore the scrutiny and muttered a silent thanks to Providence when the elevator pinged and the highly polished stainless steel doors opened to admit him.

After a brief talk with security about his bicycle, he practically ran out the front entrance and waved to one of cabs rushing down the street. The taxi pulled to the curb a few yards past him with an almost comic screech of rubber, and Jeffrey jerked the rear door open and shouted his address as he slid onto the cracked vinyl seat.

Finally immobilized, with no more distractions, the harsh reality of his brother’s death slammed into him with the force of a sledgehammer. He and Keith had been close growing up; his older sibling had been his best friend throughout their school years, when he’d guided Jeffrey and acted as a father figure when theirs had died when Jeffrey was nine, the victim of a massive coronary. Over the years they’d grown apart, a casualty of living on different sides of the country as well as both their schedules growing increasingly hectic, with Jeffrey in law school and then pulling long hours paying his dues as a freshly-minted attorney, and Keith busy building a career with the State Department. The trip to D.C. where Jeffrey had met Becky had been the first time he’d seen his brother in three years, since their mother’s funeral. Long years of closeted problem drinking had finally caught up to her in the form of massive hemorrhaging, and she’d died alone, too weak and drunk in her home in Santa Cruz to get to the phone to call for help.

And now Keith was gone. Forever.

He watched as they rolled up Lombard on the way to Van Ness, groups of homeless junkies loitering on the sidewalks only steps from some of the most impressive edifices in the Bay Area, and he shook his head, hoping to clear it. In his mind’s eye the same scene kept replaying over and over – his brother’s silent scream as he plummeted thousands of feet to his death in the shattered fuselage of the plane, the end of his life a foregone conclusion, but taking endless seconds to drop to the frothing surface of the cold ocean below. It was a hellish image of his own devising, the very worst-case scenario. For all he knew everyone had been killed instantly, no awareness at all that their existences had just reached an abrupt conclusion, one moment alive and fiddling with laptops and pillows, the next simply…no longer of this world.

But the certainty that the lingering horror his imagination had created for his personal viewing enjoyment was the truth wouldn’t be banished to the recesses of his mind. The vision of Keith’s mouth, forever frozen in a panicked O as he freefell to certain death in the towering waves below, skittered through his consciousness like an errant pinball. He closed his eyes and moaned, then opened them with a start as the driver, a turbaned immigrant who’d seen everything, by the look on his face, glanced at him in the rearview mirror.

“Hey, buddy, you okay?” he called out. The heavy Plexiglas barrier between the front seat and the rear muffled his voice, but his accent still made the second word sound like “body” to Jeffrey.

Jeffrey wondered what film the driver had picked up the seemingly obligatory cabbie phrasing from, but quickly lost interest.

“Yeah, sure. Just a bad day, is all,” he said with a look that ended further inquiry.

When they reached his building, he paid the fare and told the driver that he’d want a ride to the airport in ten minutes – with his mind somewhere else, the last thing he needed was to get into an accident on the way, which was a possibility given how his morning had gone. They agreed the taxi would wait for him off the clock, and Jeffrey thanked him as he hopped out of the car and trotted to the front door, keys in hand.

Packing was easy, if morbid – a black suit, an overcoat and some underwear, along with a change of casual clothes. He still had the somber outfit from his mother’s funeral, and after a quick trial of the pants to confirm that they fit, he quickly folded the garments and put them into his bag. His loafers clicked on the dull hardwood floor as he moved to the bathroom and retrieved a shaving kit, and when he stepped into the living room, ready to leave, the clock on the coffee machine confirmed he’d only been there for eight minutes.

Traffic to the airport was light, most of the cars headed the opposite direction, and Jeffrey busied himself with answering his email on his phone – mainly expressions of sympathy from his colleagues, with a few instructions from clients peppering the stream. Although he kept drifting back to the image of his brother dropping from the sky, he forced himself to respond to everyone, welcoming any diversion from his nightmarish replay.

A flock of starlings winged by overhead as the car took the airport off-ramp, the sun now out in force, glistening off their ebony feathers as they defied gravity. The driver was mercifully silent, having lost any enthusiasm for interaction, and contented himself with a dissonant tape of atonal music that most closely resembled a phalanx of car horns honking arrhythmically while a woman yowled over the din.

A sea of brake lights greeted them as they rounded a long curve, and they stopped at a hastily erected checkpoint manned by highway patrolmen with long faces and nervous dispositions – no doubt in response to the accident that had taken Keith’s life, which struck Jeffrey as simultaneously typical and depressing. Never in the history of air travel had any terrorist event been foiled by police staring into cars and randomly pulling people over to search them, and yet that was unhesitatingly one of the useless responses any state of alert was met with. Because those chartered with protecting the population had to appear to be doing something, even if it was wholly pointless.

Eventually they reached the terminal. Jeffrey pushed a wad of dollars through the Plexiglas receptacle and eased out of the taxi, pulling his bag with him. Inside, a pronounced armed presence announced itself as officers with bomb-sniffing dogs moved through the lines of passengers waiting to check in. A particularly exhausted-looking beagle brushed by him, and for a moment Jeffrey and the animal locked eyes, the dog’s baleful gaze resigned to a thankless shift sniffing for something it would likely never find. The sense of futility was palpable, and then the beast was past, moving to the next line, its heavily armed minder scanning the throng like he could spot trouble on looks alone.

Jeffrey swiped his credit card at the automated ticket machine, selected a seat, and collected his boarding pass, and then moved to the counter to have his ID checked. The ticket agent was courteous but mechanical as she tapped at her terminal with the warmth of an animatronic figure at an amusement park, and Jeffrey wondered whether she despised her job or was merely heavily medicated. He had watched her process the person in front of him, the transaction as impersonal as feeding change into a parking machine, and he was struck by how many interactions he had with that same dynamic. What was it that drove people to take jobs they disliked so profoundly that their only recourse was to treat their charges like objects, a subtle but unmistakable slight that was obvious yet completely deniable?

The woman handed back his ID and over-enunciated a gate number, pointing to where it was printed on the pass, lest remembering the number thirty-two overload his cognitive abilities and doom him to wandering the airport aimlessly in search of a flight that had left without him.

Why so negative and judgmental?
he wondered to himself, and realized that it was his brain’s way of dodging the image of his brother’s final moments, combined with a healthy dose of self-loathing for not having tried harder, not having spent more time with him or called more often.

There’s no rewind in life
. That had been one of his brother’s pet sayings, and it sprang to mind as he followed the crowd to the TSA checkpoint on the way to the gates. Indeed not. The problem with reality was that it was for keeps. As his brother knew.

The line was moving at a snail’s pace, the passengers coagulated in a clump where a humorless security worker checked ID and boarding passes before the travelers sent their bags, jackets, and shoes through the X-ray machine and waited their turn to be irradiated by scanning systems that a child could defeat. Jeffrey watched as a rotund officer stood by observing one of the security team pulling a sixty-year-old Vietnamese woman aside for a more intrusive search, and bit his tongue rather than ask whether anyone really believed that going through her belongings like honey badgers after grubs would keep the skies safer.

The internal dialogue was unlike him, and once he was through he stopped at the bar and paid twelve dollars for twenty cents’ worth of slightly flat draft beer, seeking the relief it would bring with a greedy, bottomless thirst. Ten minutes later he was feeling less anxious, less like he was a spectator at a bad version of the film rendition of his life, and he left a generous tip as he slid off the bar stool and went in search of his flight.

Once on board, he watched as his fellow passengers wedged their belongings in overhead bins and then closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to interact with his seat mate, a nervous-looking man with a bad oily-black comb-over who smelled vaguely of onions and peat.

As the plane gathered speed and launched up into the sky, the vision of his brother’s mangled body falling into the Atlantic sprang fresh into his mind’s eye, and for the rest of the five-hour flight he gladly paid a small fortune for the slim respite promised by sparkling mini-bottles of vodka, delivered by an unsmiling stewardess who clearly wished she was anywhere on the planet but tending to him.

FIVE

In Memoriam

When Jeffrey arrived at his hotel, ten minutes from the funeral home in Georgetown where the memorial service would take place the following morning, his breath smelled tainted to him, a sticky film of impending hangover coating his mouth like rancid oil. The clerk didn’t seem to notice, processing his credit card with one eye on the ball game playing on an oversized flat screen monitor in the bar at the far end of the lobby. Jeffrey declined the offer of assistance with his bags, found his room on his own, and barely got his suit hung up before collapsing on the bed, the alcohol and plastic airplane food having taken their toll.

Two hours later he cracked an eye open and glared at the overhead lamp, and then rolled over and willed himself to his feet, his head pounding from the unaccustomed chemical bludgeoning he’d dealt it on the plane. He checked the time and saw that it was almost midnight, and reconciled himself to ordering room service at nosebleed prices.

After a seemingly endless wait his meal turned up, an omelet that would have been an embarrassment at any fast food restaurant, and he chewed the soggy tasteless mess with sedulous resignation, the fitting end to the worst day of his life. He set the alarm clock for eight before going into the cheerless bathroom and brushing his teeth, and then spent the rest of the night tossing and turning, each dream worse than the last.

The following morning he awoke before the buzzer went off. He took his time showering, hoping that the tepid stream would both revive him and wash his hopelessness away. Coffee in the lobby helped some, but when he caught sight of his reflection in one of the decorative mirrors by the front desk he almost didn’t recognize the haunted figure staring back at him. He looked like complete shit, the travel and bad night compounding the grief etched into his young face like war wounds.

He decided to walk to the funeral home, figuring the exercise would do him good. When he stepped out into the crisp spring morning air, the chill pinched at his skin, and he pulled his overcoat tighter around him. He had an hour to get to the service, which would be just about right if he hurried, he thought. More importantly than taking his mind off his grim destination, it would ensure that he didn’t have scads of extra time where he’d have to greet his brother’s entourage, none of whom he knew, other than Becky.