Before the Fall(89)
Watching, by definition, is different from doing.
To be a diver 150 feet below the surface of the ocean, your oxygen and nitrogen levels regulated, encased in the slim cocoon of a wet suit, face mask on, feet kicking in a steady pulse, seeing only what your headlamp reveals. To feel the pressure of the deep, focused on the effort of your own breathing—something previously mechanical and automatic that now requires foresight and effort. To wear weights—literal weights—to keep your otherwise buoyant body from floating to the surface, and the way this makes your muscles strain and your breath feel bigger than your chest. In this moment there is no living room, no deadlines at work, no dates that must be dressed for. In this moment you are connected only to the reality you are experiencing. It is, in fact, reality.
Whereas Gus is simply another man seated before a desktop monitor. But even so, as the divers slip into the dark mechanical chasm that holds the dead, he experiences something visceral, outside his own room-bound reality, something that can only be described as dread.
It is darker here inside the confines of the plane. What has been lost in the crash, along with the tail, is the rear lavatory and galley, and there is a pinch to the fuselage where it has torqued from the impact. Directly ahead of the camera, flickering in the headlamp, the flippers of the forward diver move in a rhythmic paddle. That diver also wears a headlamp, and it is in the vaguer light of that diver that the first headrest becomes visible, and floating around it like a halo, a seaweed spray of hair.
The hair is visible for only a second before the forward diver blocks it with his body, and in that moment everyone watching leans to the right trying to see past him. It is an instinctive move, one the rational brain knows is impossible, but so great is the desire to see what has been revealed that each person leans as one.
“Move,” says Mayberry under his breath.
“Quiet,” Gus snaps.
Onscreen, the camera pans as the operator’s head turns. Gus sees that the cabin’s wood paneling has splintered and warped in places. A shoe floats past. A child’s sneaker. Behind Gus, one of the women draws a quick breath. And then there they are, four of the remaining five passengers, David Bateman, Maggie Bateman, daughter Rachel, and Ben Kipling, floating futilely against the reinforced nylon bonds of their lap belts, their bodies bloated.
The body man, Gil Baruch, is nowhere to be found.
Gus closes his eyes.
When he opens them, the camera has moved past the bodies of the passengers and is facing the darkened galley. The forward diver turns and points at something. The camera operator has to swim forward to find it.
“Are those—what are those holes?” Mayberry asks as Gus leans forward. The camera moves closer, zooming in on a grouping of small holes around the door’s lock.
“They look like—” one of the engineers says, then stops.
Bullet holes.
The camera goes tighter. Through the watery light, Gus can make out six holes. One of them has shorn the door lock away.
Someone shot up the cockpit door, trying to get in.
Did the shots hit the pilots? Is that why the plane crashed?
The camera moves off the door, floating to the right and up.
But Gus remains focused. Someone shot up the cockpit door? Who? Did they make it inside?
And then the camera finds something that makes everyone in the room suck in their breath. Gus looks up, sees Captain James Melody, his dead body trapped in a pocket of high air in the rounded ceiling of the forward galley.
On the wrong side of the locked cockpit door.
Chapter 35
James Melody
March 6, 1965–August 23, 2015
He met Charles Manson once. That’s the story James Melody’s mother tells. You were two. Charlie held you on his lap. This was Venice, California, 1967. James’s mother, Darla, was over from Cornwall, England, on an expired travel visa. She’d been in the country since 1964. I came with the Beatles, she used to say, though they were from Liverpool and took a different flight. Now she lived in an apartment in Westwood. James tried to visit whenever he was on a layover at any of the Greater Los Angeles airports—Burbank, Ontario, Long Beach, Santa Monica, and on and on.
Late at night, after a few sherries, Darla sometimes intimated that Charles Manson was James’s real father. But then there were lots of stories like this. Robert Kennedy came to Los Angeles in October ’sixty-four. We met in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel.
James had learned to ignore them mostly. At fifty, he had resigned himself to never knowing the true identity of his biological dad. It was just another of life’s great mysteries. And James was a believer in mystery. Not like his mum, who never met a phantasmagorical ideology she didn’t embrace instantly and completely, but in the manner of Albert Einstein, who once said, “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”
As a pilot, James had seen the vastness of the air. He had flown through tumultuous weather with no one between him and catastrophe but God.
Here’s something else Einstein said: “The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.”
James was a great fan of Albert Einstein, the former patent clerk who divined the Theory of Relativity. Where James’s mother looked for answers to life’s mysteries in the great spiritual miasma, James preferred to think that every question is ultimately answerable by science. Take, for example, the question Why is there something and not nothing? For spiritualists, of course, the answer is God. But James was more interested in a rational blueprint of the universe, down to the subatomic level. To be a pilot required advanced math and scientific understanding. To become an astronaut (which James once fancied he’d do) required these even more so.