As Luck Would Have It (36 page)

And just then, for the first time, I could remember the flood of cold water sending shockwaves though my body. 
Most of the passengers seemed
quiet and still; I heard just distant sobbing at first. 
Oh my God, it was coming back to me clearly; Henry was still conscious, struggling in the water to breathe, crying out for help and gasping for air at the same time.  I was so cold I could hardly move my arms to help him, he kept going below the surface of the water, choking, calling out, help me please, someone help me.  I found his shirt sleeve somehow and held him to me, but the water kept filling the space around us, pulling me away from him no matter what I did.  I was on my back; yes, I can see everything, trying to keep my head up so I could breathe, trying to hang on to Henry.  He was gasping louder now, the sounds of his suffocating hammering my brain as I lay there freezing
.  There was a loud sound from above, something was falling down onto us, and that was all I could remember
until I woke up in the hospital two days later, not knowing where I was or even that I had been on an airplane.

Mercifully, I had forgotten every awful bit of it, until now that is; now I sat across from the sofa where Henry's parents sat more calmly, wanting to hear the details of what had happened to their beautiful child, an
d
me, not knowing how to tell them.  He was calm, I said; he was the one trying to comfort me, I lied.  He died quietly beside me, it was OK, he wasn't alone, he was at peace.  Oh, what a liar you are, Clifford; I hope you are not
thinking that
.  If you are, forgive me, but you don't know how it was
; you
didn't hear
his
cries
in the water,
you can't see the look on
his mother’s face
.

Lying is like
an art form
and should be viewed as such.  Like art, its variations are many and complex.  But lying is wrong, we've been told that since we we
r
e young; thou shall not lie, it's a commandment, set in stone.  Really?  Lies serve a variety of purposes and they span the range from helpful to evil.  There are what we commonly view as white lies that are good, or arguably do no harm.  The lie to Henry's parents would seem to fit into that category
; you may not agree with that, but it is.  Who was harmed?  Not Henry, he's dead and presumably didn't even hear the lie; not his parents, they could only feel better by not knowing the truth, even if they believed I was lying to spare their feelings.  Certainly not me; I'd have struggled for a long time, probably hating myself for enlightening them with the truth that their only child did not go quietly like most of the other passengers, was not killed on impact like I wish he had been, but had suffered a terrifying and painful death instead.

At the other end of the spectrum are evil lies, what I like to refer to as real lies, told for the duel purpose of both deceiving and harming someone.  We all know what those lies are for and shame on us for the times we have told them and wish we could take them back.  I will suggest to you that most lies fall between the extremes, some gradient between the white lie and the real lie.  Let's look at an example.  Suppose your girlfriend asks if you are seeing someone else, which you likely are
,
or the subject probably would never have come up.  Assuming she cares about you very much, the truth will hurt her, possibly harm her.  If you lie, you have deceived her, but maybe spared her
some harm
, or at least some pain.  If a real lie must have both prerequisites, that being the inten
t
to deceive and also to harm someone, arguably this example is something less than a real lie, and I would argue, better than telling the truth.

Here is a real life example that actually happened at work.  Tim once scheduled a manager’s meeting on a Friday at 4:00, during the summer no less, if you can believe that.  That’s not the lie, that really did happen, but stay with me.  I’d heard one of the other managers, Darnell Williams complaining about it because she wanted an early start on a long weekend she had planned in Mackinaw Island.  I knew that Tim would need to reschedule the meeting for the following week because one of our large accounts had requested that he and I get on a conference call with them at 4:00 and believe me, these things never went less than an hour.  I told Darnell that our meeting was to be postponed; go ahead and leave early, enjoy your weekend, the weather should be beautiful.  She took off at 3:00 and then quite unexpectedly; it was the account that decided to reschedule their meeting, rather than Tim rescheduling ours.  When Darnell returned the following week and took some heat for missing the manager’s meeting, she quite tastelessly referred to me as a liar.

I have to admit
I’ve
been called much worse, but let’s consider her allegation that I had lied to her.  Though the statement I had made concerning our meeting turned out to be untrue, I believed it when I said it.  Moreover, there was no purpose to mislead or deceive her, no motivation for that whatsoever
.  And
where was the intent to harm her? 
Quite the opposite actually, my intent was to have her enjoy the weekend rather than wait around for a meeting that wasn’t going to happen, even if it actually did.  These are subtle but important distinctions; if the weather man says it will be sunny and you go to the baseball game only to have it postponed by rain, has he lied?  No, he was mistaken.  If the president says the economy is improving and now you can’t pay your mortgage because you got fired, has he lied?  Yes, he probably did.

Given this logic, why would Darnell tell others that I had lied when it was so clear that I had not?  Here is the reason; whether something is a lie or not also depends on the perspective of the person who hears the lie, not just the one doing the lying, or in this example, accused of doing it.  Darnell believed that I lied about the meeting intentionally to get back at her for the time I accused her of stealing some of my ideas and running to Mr. Finnernan with them behind my back.  She lied then by denying that she had used my ideas at all, claiming that they were her ideas in actuality.  What if in her mind, some of the ideas really were hers?  Maybe she hadn’t lied then, even if I thought she had, and if not, was she lying now by saying that I had lied about the meeting, when from her perspective maybe it
w
as true and maybe I did have a reason to get her in trouble for missing the meeting, even if I didn’t?

These examples illustrate the point I made earlier that lies are like an art form; they are intricate, they are understated, they are
misconstrued, and most of all, they are universal.  Everyone lies, no matter who they are.  Every human being will lie give
n
the right circumstances, and if you don’t believe me, well you should because I am telling the truth; that is unless I am lying instead, which is possible because everyone does it, including me.  Especially me, if the truth be told.  Lying at work
is a necessary part
of the job; getting away with something, letting someone else explain the mistakes, avoiding work, getting a raise, leaving early, gaining recognition, being promoted; all of these things either require or justify lying to some degree.  The key is where on the gradient do your lies most often fall; that is to say if they are too much to the right towards the real lies end of the spectrum, you are probably loathsome, whereas if they are more to the left, closer to the white lies end of the range, you may still be loathsome, but people will probably like you more an
d
you will probably get further ahead with your lies.

It is not just individuals who universally use lying as a vehicle for getting what they want; organizations, groups, associations, corporations, governments, especially governments routinely lie to their members and others to
argue
their cases and
promote
their agendas, or in some cases for more unsavory purposes.  This is nothing new of course and believing otherwise would be extremely naïve.  Once again, it is important to consider where on the continuum the lies may fall and what is the degree of deception and harm that results.

*****

Just four months had passed since the plane crash when the National Transportation Safety Board released its preliminary findings regarding the loss of flight 1123, the non-stop flight that left O’Hare airport on December 8, 2020, at 9:09 AM, approximately 16 minutes behind schedule, expected to arrive in Tampa, Florida at 11:25 that same morning.  The Airbus 320 lost power and crashed into Lake Michigan at 9:
20
AM, after reaching an altitude of 9,503 fe
et.  One hundred and fifty-eight
passengers and crew were killed in the incident and there was one surviving passenger,
Clifford Andrews, age 60 from Chicago, Illinois.  The NTSB and Homeland Security jointly announced that the investigation to date had indicated that the cause of the crash was not due to any mechanical failure or human error, but rather was a result of a terrorist attack; that a liquid explosive had been brought onto the aircraft and had been successfully detonated just
eleven
minutes into the flight.

I was
shocked to say the least to see this so-called report
released
this
quickly into the mainstream press, signaling to the vast majority of people
who
didn’t know any better, or had no reason to question what they were being told, or possibly had forgotten that they could even do something so impetuous, that this explanation was entirely true, that the United States had once again been
attacked on
our own soil, presumably by Islamic terrorists.  Given what we have just considered regarding lies, truth, perceptions and motives, you should be questioning, as I certainly was, how this conclusion
was
arrived at so quickly and so definitively a mere
120
days
following the incident, no more than 90 days after the final
remains
of the passengers and crew, along with their resultant personal items, not to mention all of
the other debris, were brought up from the bottom of the lake.

The plane had remained largely intact after hitting the water, though the starboard engine and a portion of the wing had separated, recovered later more than two miles northwest of the crash site.  The fuselage was essentially split in half near
the forward cabin
, much like a wishbone being pulled in opposite directions, though the only one with anything resembling good luck in this case was me, seated as it turned out more or less directly across from the opening that resulted, and in the best location possible once the rescuers arrived.  I learned later that I had simply floated, unconscious, right out of the plane and to the surface of the lake, my life vest in place and fully inflated, though to this day, even with my memory seemingly restored completely, I cannot tell you how that could be.

The investigators concluded that the explosives had been placed under a seat in either row 19 or 20, adjacent to the wing, or possibly in the cargo area directly below.  The explosion ripped a hole
through
the skin of the plane, ostensibly causing the engine to become dislodged and the aircraft to depressurize and descend.  There were to prove to be many contradictions with respect to this theory, but foremost from
my
point of view was simply this; I never heard any explosion, period.  I remember a frightening whining sound and some awful rattling noises, but a bomb, no way. 
How could an explosion with sufficient force to rip an engine free from its riveted flanges occur just a few feet away from where I sat without me hearing even a slight boom?

The one and only occasion I was interviewed was when two investigators showed up
at the hospital after I had regained consciousness on December 10.  The only things I could describe at that time were my headaches and the insistent vertigo.  Though my memory returned before long, the investigators never did.  Try to imagine this scenario if you possibly can; 158 people killed and the only survivor for all intents and purposes never questioned, the one living witness to this massive catastrophe not neglected mind you, but rather ignored.  For despite the two attempts I had made to contact someone at the NTSB to find out what they needed for me to do, the only response I was to
get
when someone finally bothered  to return my calls weeks later was that the investigation was ongoing; I’d be contacted if needed.  The one human being on the planet who might be able to shed some light on the events as they actually unfolded was told in effect, don’t call us, we’ll call you.  Now you understand why I was outraged when I turned on the TV and was told, or rather lied to, that a terrorist was responsible for the tragedy, which I never believed for one second.

I know what you are saying to yourself about now; how can you be so sure Clifford, they are the experts, there was panic on the plane, you were knocked out, and maybe you don’t remember all the details.  I don’t know what caused the crash, but I know this much, there was no terrorist.  That being the truth, why were we being lied to?  My anger gave way to an obsession to learn as much as I could about what had really happened on December 8, and in the process possibly gain some insight into the lie itself, and even more importantly, why an entire nation seemed to just swallow
it all up
without question, without hesitation, without scrutiny, without even acknowledging that there just might be some other explanation
for
the
enormous
tragedy.