Before the Fall(29)

To an engineer, the glass is simply too big.

This was how the world looked to Gus Franklin as a young man. Raised in Stuyvesant Village by a trash collector father and a stay-at-home mom, Gus—the only black kid in his AP calculus class—graduated summa cum laude at Fordham. He saw beauty not in nature, but in the elegant design of Roman aqueducts and microchips. To his mind, every problem on earth could be fixed by repairing or replacing a part. Or—if the operational flaw was more insidious—then you tore the whole system apart and started again.

Which is what he did to his marriage after his wife spit in his face and stormed out the door on a rainy night in 1999. Don’t you feel anything, she’d shouted moments earlier. And Gus frowned and thought about the question—not because the answer was no, but because he so clearly did have feelings. They just weren’t the feelings she wanted.

So he shrugged. And she spit and stormed out.

To say his wife was emotional would be an understatement. Belinda was the least engineering-minded person Gus had ever met—she once said the fact that flowers had Latin names robbed them of their mystery. This, he decided (spit running down his jaw), was the fatal error in his marriage that could not be fixed. They were incompatible, a square peg in a round hole. Instead, his life required a systemic redesign, in this case a divorce.

He had tried in the lonely year of their marriage to apply practical solutions to irrational problems. She thought he worked too much—but in truth he worked less than most of his colleagues, so the term too much seemed misplaced. She wanted children right away, but he believed they should wait until his career was more established, meaning his pay had increased, resulting in an expanded living allowance, ergo a bigger apartment—in finite terms: one with room for children.

So Gus sat with her one Saturday and walked her through a PowerPoint presentation on the topic—complete with bar graphs and spreadsheets—which concluded with an equation proving that their perfect moment of conception (assuming, of course, a set of givens—his hierarchical advancement, graduated income, et cetera) would be September 2002, three years in the future. Belinda called him an unfeeling robot. He told her that robots, by definition, were unfeeling (at least currently), but he was clearly not a robot. He had feelings. They just didn’t control him the way they controlled her.

Their divorce proved much simpler than their marriage, mostly because she hired an attorney driven by a bottom-line desire for monetary gain—that is, someone with a clear and rational goal. And so Gus Franklin went back to being a solitary human being, who—as he had projected in his PowerPoint presentation—advanced quickly, rising up the ranks at Boeing, and then accepting a lead investigative role at the NTSB, where he had been for the last eleven years.

And yet, over the years, Gus found his engineer’s brain evolving. His previously narrow view of the world—as a machine that operated with dynamic mechanical functionality—blossomed and grew. Much of the change had to do with his new job as an investigator of large-scale transportation disasters—which exposed him to death and the urgency of human grief on a regular basis. As he had told his ex-wife, he was not a robot. He felt love. He understood the pain of loss. It was just that as a young man those factors seemed controllable, as if grief were simply a failure of the intellect to manage the body’s subsystems.

But then his father was diagnosed with leukemia in 2003. He passed away in 2009, and Gus’s mother died of an aneurysm a year later. The void their deaths created proved to be beyond the practical comprehension of an engineer. The machine he believed himself to be broke down, and Gus found himself immersed in an experience he had witnessed for years in his job with the NTSB, but never truly understood. Grief. Death was not an intellectual conceit. It was an existential black hole, an animal riddle, both problem and solution, and the grief it inspired could not be fixed or bypassed like a faulty relay, but only endured.

And so now, at fifty-one, Gus Franklin finds himself leaving simple intelligence behind and approaching something that can only be described as wisdom, defined in this case by an ability to understand the factual and practical pieces of an event, but also appreciate its full human import. A plane crash is not simply the sum total of time line + mechanical elements + human elements. It is an incalculable tragedy, one that shows us the ultimate finiteness of human control over the universe, and the humbling power of collective death.

So when the phone rang that night in late August, Gus did what he always did. He snapped to attention and put the engineer part of himself to work. But he also took the time to think about the victims—crew members and civilians, and worse: two small children with their whole lives ahead of them—and to reflect on the hardship and loss that would be endured by those they left behind.

First though, came the facts. A private jet—make? model? year built? service history?—had gone missing—departing airport? destination airport? last radio transmission? radar data? weather conditions? Other planes in the area had been contacted—any sightings?—as had other airports—has the flight been diverted or contacted another tower? But no one had seen or heard from the flight since the precise second that ATC at Teterboro lost track of it.

A daisy chain of phone calls were made, a Go Team assembled. In daylight, telephones rang in offices and cars. In the middle hours of the night, they rang in bedrooms, shattering sleep.

By the time he was in the car, a passenger manifest had been assembled. Projections were made—this much fuel × maximum speed = our potential search radius. At his command the Coast Guard and navy were contacted, helicopters and frigates deployed. And so, by the time Gus reached Teterboro, a nautical search was already under way, everyone still hoping for a radio malfunction and a safe landing somewhere off the grid, but knowing better.