Before the Fall(54)
A hero. They are calling him a hero. It is not a word he can handle right now, being so far outside his own sense of himself, the narrative he has created that allows him to function—a broken man with modest ambitions, a former blackout drunk who lives moment-to-moment now, hand-to-mouth. And so he keeps his head down, dodging the cameras.
Occasionally he is recognized on the subway or walking down the street. To these people he is something more than a celebrity. Yo, you saved that kid. I heard you fought a shark, bro. Did you fight a shark? He is treated not like royalty—as if his fame is based on something rare—but more like a guy from the neighborhood who got lucky. Because what did he do really, except swim? He is one of them, a nobody who did good. And so when he is recognized, people approach smiling. They want to shake his hand, take a picture. He survived a plane crash and saved a kid. There is juju to touching him, the same boost you get from a lucky penny or a rabbit’s foot. By doing the impossible he—like Jack—proved that impossible is possible. Who wouldn’t want to rub up on that?
Scott smiles and tries to be friendly. These conversations are different from what he assumes it will feel like to talk to the press. They’re contact on a human level. And though he feels self-conscious he makes sure he is never rude. He understands that they want him to be special. It’s important to people that he be special, because we need special things in our lives. We want to believe that magic is still possible. So Scott shakes hands and accepts the hugs of random women. He asks that they not take his picture, and most respect that.
“Let’s keep this private,” he says. “It means more when it’s just you and me.”
People like this idea, that in a time of true mass media, they could have a unique experience. But not everyone. Some take his picture brazenly, as if it is their right. And others get upset when he refuses to pose for a photo with them. An older woman calls him an * outside Washington Square Park, and he nods and tells her she’s right. He is an * and he hopes she has a great day.
“Fuck you,” she tells him.
Once anointed a hero by your fellow man, you lose the right to privacy. You become an object, stripped of some unquantifiable humanity, as if you have won a cosmic lottery and woke one day to find yourself a minor deity. The Patron Saint of Good Luck. It stops mattering what you wanted for yourself. All that matters is the role you played in the lives of others. You are a rare butterfly held roughly at a right angle to the sun.
On the third day he stops going outside.
He is living in Layla’s third-floor guest apartment. It is a space of pure white—white walls, white floor, white ceiling, white furniture—as if he has died and moved on to some kind of heavenly limbo. Time, once mired in hard-fought routine, becomes fungible. To wake in a strange bed. To make coffee with unfamiliar beans. To lift rich bath towels from self-closing cupboards and feel their hotel texture against your skin. In the living room there is a bar filled with Scottish malts and clear Russian courage. A cherrywood, mid-century case with an elaborate folding lid. Scott stared at it for a long time that first night, the way a man in a certain mental state regards a gun cabinet. So many ways to die. Then he covered the bar with a blanket, moved a chair in front of it, never to look at it again.
Somewhere, the Kipling wife and that beautiful flight attendant are lying faceup on a steel slab. Sarah, that was her name, and the model in the short skirt was Emma Lightner. Several times a day he reviews the names like a Zen koan. David Bateman, Maggie Bateman, Rachel Bateman…
He thought he had come to terms with this thing, its full import, but there was something about the news that bodies had been found that threw him off balance. They’re dead. All of them. He knows they’re dead. He was there, in the ocean. He dove beneath the wave. There could be no survivors, but hearing the news, seeing the footage—first bodies recovered from Bateman crash—made the whole thing real, the way your legs go out from under you only after a crisis is over.
The mother is still out there, the father and sister. So are the pilots, Charlie Busch and James Melody. So is Kipling, the traitor, and the Batemans’ security man, buried somewhere deep beneath the waves, swaying in permanent black.
He should go home, he knows, back to the island, but he can’t. For some reason he finds himself unable to face the life he once lived (once, in this case, being just days ago, as if linear time means anything to a man who’s survived what he’s survived. There is before and there is after), unable to approach the little white gate on a quiet sandy road, to step over the old slip-on shoes left absently by the door, one behind the other—the toe of the back shoe still resting on the heel of the front, where he stepped out of it. He feels unable to return to the milk in the fridge gone sour, and his dog’s sad eyes. That is his home, the man on TV who wears Scott’s shirts and squints into the lens of old photographs—are my own teeth that crooked? Unable to face the gauntlet of cameras, the endless barrage of questions. Talking to people on the subway is one thing, but addressing the masses—that’s something he can’t handle. A statement becomes a pronouncement when delivered to the crowd. Random observations become part of the public record to be replayed for all eternity, Auto-Tuned and memified. Whatever the reason, he feels unable to retrace his steps, to withdraw to the place he lived “before.” And so he sits on his borrowed sofa of the now and stares out at the treetops and brownstones of Bank Street.