Before the Fall(15)

“But you did.”

Scott nods.

“At the last minute. I threw some things together. They were actually closing the doors when I ran up.”

“Lucky for the boy you made it,” says Leslie from the FAA.

Scott thinks about it. Was it lucky? Is there anything lucky about surviving a tragedy?

“Did Mr. Kipling seem agitated to you?” Hex interjects, clearly impatient. He has his own investigation and it has little to do with Scott.

Gus shakes him off.

“Let’s do this in order,” he says. “I’m leading this—it’s my investigation.”

He turns to Scott.

“The airport log says the plane took off at ten oh six.”

“Sounds right,” says Scott. “I didn’t look at my phone.”

“Can you describe the takeoff?”

“It was—smooth. I mean, it was my first private jet.”

He looks at Frank, the OSPRY rep.

“Very nice,” he says. “Except for the crashing, I mean.”

Frank looks stricken.

“So you don’t remember anything unusual?” Gus asks. “Any sounds or jostling out of the ordinary?”

Scott thinks back. It happened so fast. Before he could even get his seat belt on they were taxiing. And Sarah Kipling was talking to him, asking him about his work and how he knew Maggie. And the girl was on her iPhone, listening to music or playing a game. The boy was sleeping. And Kipling was—what was he doing?

“I don’t think so,” he says. “I remember—you felt the force of it more. The power. I guess that’s what a jet is. But then we were off the ground and rising. Most of the shades were closed and it was very light in the cabin. There was a baseball game on the TV.”

“Boston played last night,” says O’Brien.

“Dworkin,” says Frank in a knowing way, and the two feds in the doorway smile.

“I don’t know what that means,” Scott says, “but I also remember music. Something jazzy. Sinatra maybe?”

“And did there come a time when something unusual happened?” Gus asks.

“Well, we fell into the ocean,” says Scott.

Gus nods.

“And how exactly did that happen?”

“Well—I mean—it’s hard to remember exactly,” Scott tells him. “The plane turned suddenly, pitched, and I—”

“Take your time,” says Gus.

Scott thinks back. The takeoff, the offered glass of wine. Images flash through his mind, an astronaut’s vertigo, a blare of sounds. Metal shrieking. The disorienting whirl. Like a movie negative that has been cut and reassembled at random. It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world—sights, sounds, smells—into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past. But what happens when those details crumble? Hailstones on a tin roof. Fireflies firing at random. What happens when your life can’t be translated into a linear narrative?

“There was banging,” he says. “I think. Some kind of—I want to say concussion.”

“Like an explosion?” asks the man from OSPRY, hopefully.

“No. I mean, I don’t think so. It was more like—a knocking and then—at the same time the plane kind of—dropped.”

Gus thinks about saying something then, a follow-up question, but doesn’t.

In his mind, Scott hears a scream. Not of terror, but an involuntary expulsion, a reflexive vocal reaction to something unexpected. It is the sound fear makes when it first appears, the sudden, visceral realization that you are not safe, that this activity you are engaged in is deeply, deeply risky. Your body makes the sound and immediately you break out in a cold sweat. Your sphincter clenches. Your mind, which up until this moment has been moving along at pedestrian speeds, suddenly races forward, running for its life. Fight or flight. It is the moment when the intellect fails and something primal, animal takes over.

With a sudden prickling certainty, Scott realizes that the scream came from him. And then blackness. His face pales. Gus leans in.

“Do you want to stop?”

Scott exhales.

“No. It’s fine.”

Gus asks an aide to bring Scott a soda from the machine. While they’re waiting Gus lays out the facts he’s managed to assemble.

“According to our radar,” he says, “the plane was in the air for eighteen minutes. It reached an altitude of twelve thousand feet, then began to descend rapidly.”

Sweat is dripping down Scott’s back. Images are coming back to him, memories.

“Things were—flying is the wrong word,” he says. “Around. Stuff. I remember my duffel bag. It just kind of levitated off the floor, just calmly floated up in the air like a magic trick, and then, just as I reached for it, it just—took off, just disappeared. And we were spinning, and I hit my head, I guess.”

“Do you know if the plane broke up in the air?” Leslie from the FAA asks him. “Or was the pilot able to make a landing?”

Scott tries to remember, but it’s just flashes. He shakes his head.

Gus nods.

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s stop there.”

“Hold on,” says O’Brien. “I still have questions.”