Before the Fall(77)

“Hello,” he says.

He is a man starting a conversation with a crowd. Questions are hurled toward him, everybody speaking at once. Scott thinks of what this street once was, a forested stream winding toward a muddy river. He holds up his hand.

“What’s the goal here?” he asks.

“Just a few questions,” says one of the journalists.

“I was here first,” says another, a blond woman holding a microphone with the letters ALC embossed on a rectangular box. Her name, she says, is Vanessa Lane, and she has Bill Cunningham speaking into her ear from mission control.

“Scott,” she says, pushing to the front, “what are you doing here?”

“Here on this street?” he asks.

“With Ms. Mueller. Is she a friend of yours, or more maybe?”

Scott thinks about this. Is she a friend or more maybe. He’s not sure what the question means really.

“I’d have to think about that,” he says. “Whether we’re friends. We just met really. And then there’s her point of view—how she sees things—because maybe I get it wrong, the meaning, which—who hasn’t done that before, thinking something is black when it’s really white.”

Vanessa frowns.

“Tell us about the crash,” she says, “what was it like?”

“In what sense?”

“Out there alone, the raging ocean, and then you hear the boy crying.”

Scott thinks about this, his silence peppered by other questions, shouted in 5/6 time.

“You’re looking for a comparison. This is like that. An analogy to help you understand.”

“Scott,” yells a brunette with a microphone, “why did the plane crash? What happened?”

A young couple approaches from the east. Scott watches as they cross the street to avoid the spotlight. He is the accident now, rubbernecked by pedestrians.

“I suppose I’d have to say it was like nothing,” Scott tells Vanessa, not ignoring this new question, but simply focused on the last. “Certainly there’s no comparison for me. The size of the ocean. Its depth and power. A moonless sky. Which way is north? Survival, at its basest form, isn’t a story. Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s the only story.”

“Have you spoken to the boy?” someone shouts. “Was he scared?”

Scott thinks about that.

“Wow.” he says. “That’s—I don’t know that that’s a question for me to—the four-year-old brain—I mean, that’s an entirely different conversation. I know what the experience was for me—a speck in a vast and hostile darkness—but for him, at this moment in development, biologically, I mean. And with the nature of fear—at a certain level—the animal power of it. But again, at his age—”

He breaks off, thinking, aware that he is not giving them what they want, but concerned that their questions are too important to answer in the moment, to define in passing, simply to meet some kind of arbitrary deadline. What was the experience like? Why did it happen? What does it mean going forward? These are subjects for books. They are questions you meditate over for years—to find the right words, to identify all the critical factors, both subjective and objective.

“It’s an important question,” he says, “and one we may never really know the answer to.”

He turns to Vanessa.

“I mean, do you have kids?”

She is twenty-six at most.

“No.”

Scott turns to her cameraman, in his forties.

“You?”

“Uh, yeah. A little girl.”

Scott nods.

“And see, then there’s gender, and the time of night, how he was asleep when the plane went down, and did he think it was a dream maybe? At first. Like maybe he was still sleeping. So many factors.”

“People say you’re a hero,” shouts a third reporter.

“Is that a question?”

“Do you think you’re a hero?”

“You’d have to define the word for me,” says Scott. “Plus, what I think doesn’t really matter. Or—that’s not true—what I think about myself hasn’t always proven to be accurate, according to the world at large. Like, how in my twenties I thought I was an artist, but really I was just a kid in his twenties who thought he was an artist. Does that make sense?”

“Scott,” they shout.

“I’m sorry,” says Scott, “I can tell I’m not giving you what you want.”

“Scott,” says Vanessa. “This is from Bill Cunningham directly. Why were you on that plane?”

“You mean, in a cosmic sense, or—”

“How did you end up on the plane?” she says, correcting herself.

“Maggie invited me.”

“Maggie is Margaret Bateman, wife of David.”

“Yes.”

“And were you having an affair with her, with Mrs. Bateman?”

Scott frowns.

“Like a sexual affair?”

“Yes. Just as you are now having an affair with Ms. Mueller, whose father donates millions to liberal causes.”

“Is that a real question?”

“People have a right to the truth.”

“Just because I’ve been inside her house, you’re saying I’ve had—that she and I have had sex. This is your Einstein conclusion.”