Among the Dead (33 page)

‘That was me,' said Frank. And if it was someone else, let them call her. He was sure that no one else in the entire world had his wacko courage.

‘So you haven't read the papers, or seen the news.'

'The news is not my strong suit,' said Frank. ‘I used to have Lonnie tell me who to vote for, even in New York elections, you know, the mayor and stuff. He was always up on that.' This was such a specific lie that if she had never seen her brother read the paper, now she would add this to the collection of
THINGS SHE NEVER KNEW ABOUT HIM
, that he had a friend in New York, that they talked politics, that Lonnie had someone in the world who looked up to him, a white man, a Jew.

‘Did you hear about the plane crash?'

‘The one in Argentina?' He didn't know if there really had been a crash in Argentina, but it seemed like the thing to say, to keep the flow of credibility going. And don't the planes in Argentina always crash?

‘The one in San Diego.'

‘What are you saying?' asked Frank.

‘They say Lonnie shot up the plane.'

‘With the Colt?'

‘You knew about the gun?'

‘Goddamn it. I told him not to get that gun.'

‘He got it.'

‘My God.'

‘The plane was full. A seven-three-seven.'

‘A seven-three-seven, standard configuration, eight rows first-class, thirty-two in coach?' He made a crazy face, this was the most fun he had ever had in his life.

‘A seven-three-seven, a lot of people. And it went into a crowded neighbourhood.'

‘Oh my God. And they think Lonnie shot down a plane from the ground, with his gun?'

‘They say he got on the plane and shot the pilot.'

‘No! Lonnie? No! But you don't believe that. I don't believe that. Lonnie? No! Not Lonnie.'

He let her stop his rant. ‘That's what they say.'

‘No.'

‘Mr Levy, I think it's true.'

‘But you can't get a gun past security. The girls who run those machines may not look it, but they're awfully sharp. And call me Larry.'

‘They say he did. They say he used his old pass to get into the airport, where they didn't have a metal detector.'

‘And you believe this.'

‘I'm afraid it's impossible not to. How long did you know him?'

‘I've known him,' said Frank, not wanting to speak of Lonnie in the past tense, ‘for about five years. I lived in LA for a while. I worked with him.'

‘How well did you know him?'

‘Well, he did have his demons,' Frank said, shaking his head, remembering, as did his sister, the man described in the papers, a man who could drink all night, a man who started fights for no reason, a man whose wife left him because of his pathological jealousy.

‘That's no comfort to the families of all the dead.'

‘Terry, I can't know how you feel, but I'm not talking to the families of the dead. I'm talking to you. And you need to remember the man we both knew as someone who was troubled, but also capable of love. You need to remember the love he had for you. I know I will. And you didn't pull the trigger, he wasn't you, he was your brother. Someone has to remember him, you know, as
he was, most of the time, when he wasn't, you know ... I mean, he never killed anyone before.'

‘It's a terrible burden.'

‘He was a good friend, that's what I want to say.'

‘No one else has called.'

‘Bastards.'

‘You can't blame them,' said Terry.

‘But he was a friend. I haven't read anything, so I don't know. And maybe he did this just as they say he did, maybe it was even worse, but he was a friend. And whatever happened to him, whatever happened to his mind, he was in a lot of pain. Maybe we could have given him more help, more love, maybe he wouldn't have done this. So he was lonely. He needed me, and damn it, I failed him. I don't know about his other friends, but I know about me, and I can blame myself.'

‘No,' said Walter's sister.

‘Yes. I knew how upset he was. He told me about the gun. He had fantasies. I heard him, but I didn't listen. I didn't listen with my third eye.' What? thought Frank. Hear with my eye? Is his sister listening to me? He went on. ‘I just don't know if I ever told him. Told him that I really liked him. Damn it.'

She started to cry again. The sobs built to something too painful for Frank to hear, and he was ashamed of his joke.

‘Maybe you could call another time. I need someone to talk to. I need a friend.'

‘Goodbye,' he said. He didn't know if she could hear him, but he hung up.

What wrong did I do? he asked himself. I gave her comfort just now. Has anyone else been nice to her in the last week? Maybe she can sleep now. Maybe I can finally sleep.

He turned off the light. It was quiet in the hotel room. It wouldn't have been quiet like this in Mexico. If there really is a heaven, he thought, and if my wife and daughter are angels now, and belong to God, can they see me? Did they watch me call Terry Walter? Are they watching her now? Do they forgive me?

It was 3 in the morning, and he wanted to let his family know that his voice was back. He called his mother's room. The phone rang five times, and then she answered, with sleep in her voice.

‘Hi,' said Frank.

‘Lowell?' she asked.

‘No, Frank.'

‘Frank,' she said. He thought she was trying to remember if she knew any Franks. ‘Frank,' she said again, after a frightening pause, and then again, ‘Frank,' and this time her voice indicated the surprise he expected.

‘Yep, it's back,' he said, pleased with the creepiness of his ‘yep', which was too full of excitement, as though his voice were a puppy returned from a day's exploration. If his family was turning on him, he would make them pay for it, with an unpleasant friendliness that would make them worry that this ugly, forward part of his character was something so deeply a part of his structure that he was revealing to them something they all shared, something fundamental in the Gale genetic design; the thing that marked them, and now was revealed by their son, would be the thing they would all, against their will, express to the world, this oily, insistent blindness to the privacy of others, to their hatred of the Gales and their Gale-ness. He was sure that his mother was so scared that in the morning she would call Bettina Welch and ask her what she really thought of her.

‘Well, I just wanted to say that I was OK.'

‘The doctor said you were.'

‘Yes, but doctors are wrong sometimes. I mean, I could have really been deaf.'

‘But they said there was no physical reason for that, nothing caused it.'

‘But maybe it could have been something unrelated to everything that's happened this week. Maybe it could have been some kind of virus, or microbe, that had been growing for a long time, and had cut the optic nerve.'

‘That's to the eyes.'

‘Maybe that could have been next. To the ear canal, you know. Something inside the ear. It could have been that.'

‘But it wasn't. Because you're fine now.'

‘For now, yes. But how much longer? Maybe it'll come back.'

‘The doctor was certain.'

‘Are you taking his side or mine?'

‘Frank, he's a doctor, he ran the tests.'

‘Oh, and was he the world's expert on S-H-L-S?'

‘What?'

‘Sudden hearing-loss syndrome? S-H-L-S?' He spelled it out for her again.

‘SHLS? Is that something real?'

‘I don't know,' said Frank, ‘but maybe I have it.'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Just admit it's possible.'

‘Of course it's possible,' she said.

‘Goodnight, Mom,' said Frank, as though nothing had happened, not the hearing loss, not the plane crash, not his marriage, not this ridiculous phone call, nothing.

He hung up the phone and turned off the light. He studied the darkness, the pulses of light inside of it, and he thought that it was getting darker; he was sure it was getting darker.

He turned on the light to make sure he still had his vision. Everything was there, in colour. He let his eyes take in the details of the room, and for the second time in a week, since looking at the blue plate in his parents' condominium, he felt the pure gift of sight. Everything had the aura of the greatest luxury. The brown imitation wood-grain veneer on the television cabinet had never been so rich, and not only that, but the right-angle around the door jamb had a precision that made his teeth ache, it was so beautiful, so appropriate, and it was white! He studied the far corner of the bed, with the rotten avocado-green blanket hovering above a canyon of shadows at the bottom of which lay the carpet, its brown nubs alive with vibrations that were as pure as any in the universe. Nothing is ugly if you really get to know it, thought Frank. He needed to call Lowell and tell him this thing he had finally learned. That might be the title for the poem about the pillow. ‘Nothing Is Ugly If You Really Get To Know It.'

He picked up the phone, and after four rings the machine answered. He heard the message, but after the tone he hung up. Would he really tell his brother something he no longer believed?

In the morning Frank found two letters on the carpet next to the door. One was from Berberian, the other was from Dessick. Each letter urged Frank to make a decision. The letters were personally addressed to him, and at first he assumed that they had been composed on a computer, merging his name from a list of addressees. The text of each letter was directed at no one but Frank. Both identified him as the only hold-out among all of the relatives of those who'd died in the crash, and while those who had survived the destruction on Cohassett Street had not yet signed up, most had, and anyway, as both letters averred, the lawsuit for those who lived on the ground would be filed separately, in a different jurisdiction, and would be more complicated. Berberian said, and Dessick echoed this, that associated attorneys in San Diego would handle the Cohassett Street suits.

Berberian's letter, in its first paragraph, urged Frank to sign:

We do not need to remind you of the importance of a fully pressed lawsuit. Worse than a lawsuit split between two firms, is a lawsuit not fully pressed by all of those eligible to sue.

Dessick said:

Of course I want you to join our lawsuit, but I understand that each of us has to make a choice. Not making a choice, in this case, would be a terrible mistake, one that would reflect badly, I think, on everyone else who has already decided which of the two teams to join. It is simply unfair to the rest of us for you to hold out like this.

Frank heard himself talking to the room, ‘But I need more information.' No, he thought, not quite sure of the idea, I need less. Berberian added a postscript to his letter:

I have to inform you, Mr Gale, that your reluctance to press
the suit against those individuals or institutions responsible for the deaths of so many people may put you in the position of impeding an effort to which everyone else is committed. If you are used by the airline or its representatives as a figure of compromise, if you make a separate settlement with the airline that forces all of those griefstricken survivors into settling the case themselves prematurely, then in our considered opinion this could be cause for action and we might be forced to find a remedy for our complaint against you.

While it may have been sentimentally appropriate for the airline's president to read, at a memorial service, that letter from the husband to his wife, I warn you not to succumb to those impulses to forgive and reconcile which everyone else connected to this incident, all of those who have so far joined one of the lawsuits, have admirably and with great difficulty, resisted.

Dessick's letter, in its second paragraph, had a similar thought:

We have heard and read a lot in the last two days about forgiveness. Now this is certainly a genuinely admirable goal for all of us, and perhaps some day, when this is all over, we will, each of us, according to our consciences, which must always be private, forgive. But, Mr Gale, don't be swayed by appeals to mercy until we know whom it is we ought to forgive. In other words, we need to know just who is guilty before we can forgive them, and the guilty will still have to accept their expensive punishment, not because we want to get rich, but because if we can scare the airline industry into cleaning up its shamefully lax practices, then the next time this happens, it won't happen. Your current refusal to participate in this process will be held against you by the future. Do not give us cause for action.

Frank held the letters next to each other. A pleasant smell came from them, and he sniffed Berberian's. The letter smelled nicely of horses, blended with pine, or incense, or smoke, something of a forest above a desert. The smell was exciting, comforting, American, a pungent cowboy smell, the wide and wild West. He brought Dessick's letter to his nose. There it was, that same remarkable spice! Some day I will have to ask these lawyers if any of their
workers stuff envelopes next to a fire made from the logs of piñon trees. The smell was too strong on both letters to have transferred osmotically from one to the other while he had been holding them. No, he was sure, each letter's smell was independent. And the same! And these were delivered by hand, presumably by two different hands. Again he missed his wife, who might have shown the two letters to their daughter and asked her to smell them.

If I had not written the letter, thought Frank, but I had still missed the aeroplane, what would have happened? I would have called Anna at the airport, she would have wished me a good flight, she would have let me talk to Madeleine, and then she would have died. Then I would have probably done everything as I did, except I wouldn't have crapped in my pants, and I wouldn't have collapsed at the memorial service, and there would have been no letter to publish. Or was I going crazy from the beginning because the existence of the thing weighed on me, because I felt the pressure of the letter, even before its discovery in print? No ... as soon as Anna discovered the letter, I was in trouble. And if I had never written the letter at all, and they had not died, what would Mexico have been like?