Before the Fall(92)
She made a face as if thinking about things like that were subhuman.
“What’s Shanghai like?” she asked. “I always thought it would be magical to see Shanghai.”
“It’s crowded. Everybody smokes.”
She looked at him with a certain bored pity.
“You never did have a sense of wonder.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Just—we’re put on this earth to revel in the majesty of creation, not—you know—live in Delaware for tax purposes.”
“It’s just on paper. I live in the clouds.”
He said this for her benefit, but it was also true. Most of his best memories were of the cockpit. Colors seen in nature, the way light bends around the horizon, the cathartic adrenaline rush of a storm ceiling bested. And yet what did it mean? That had always been his mother’s question. What does it all mean? But James didn’t worry about that. He knew deep down in the core of his being that it didn’t mean anything.
A sunrise, a winter squall, birds flying in a perfect V. These were things that were. The truth, visceral and sublime, of the universe, was that it existed whether we witnessed it or not. Majesty and beauty, these were qualities we projected upon it. A storm was just weather. A sunrise was simply a celestial pattern. It’s not that he didn’t enjoy them. It’s that he didn’t require anything more from the universe than that it exist, that it behave consistently—that gravity worked the way it always worked, that lift and drag were constants.
As Albert Einstein once said, “What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.”
He walked his mother back to the apartment. She rode beside him waving to people she knew, like a mermaid on her very own holiday parade float. At the door, she asked James when he’d be back again, and he told her he had a layover in LA next month. She told him to watch for the signs. The red heifer had been born in the Holy Land. In and of itself this was not proof of God’s plan, but if the signs multiplied, then they should be ready.
He left her in the lobby. She would drive onto the elevator and then straight into her apartment. She had her book group later, she said, and then dinner with some friends from her prayer group. Before he left she kissed his cheek (he bent down to receive it, as one does to the pope or a cardinal) and told him she would be praying for him. She said she was glad that he was such a good son, one who bought his mother such a nice meal and never forgot to call. She said she’d been thinking about the commune a lot lately and did he remember that? The Reverend Jay L. Baker. What was it he used to say? I am the baker and you are all my bread. Well, she told him, I was your baker. I made you in my oven, and don’t you forget it.
He kissed her cheek, feeling the peach fuzz of old age against his lips. At the revolving door he turned and waved one last time, but she was already gone, just a flash of red in the closing elevator doors. He put on his sunglasses and spun out into the morning light.
In ten hours he would be dead.
*
There was chop—medium to heavy—dropping through the cloud ceiling into Teterboro. He was flying an OSPRY 700SL carrying four executives from the Sony Corporation. They landed without incident and taxied to meet the limousine. As always, James stood in the cockpit door wishing his disembarking passengers safe travels. In the past he sometimes said God bless you (a habit picked up in childhood), but he noticed it made the men in ties uncomfortable, so he switched to something more neutral. James took his responsibility as captain very seriously.
It was late in the afternoon. He had a few hours to kill before his next flight, a quick jog over to Martha’s Vineyard to pick up a payload of six. For this flight he’d pilot an OSPRY 700SL. He hadn’t flown the particular model before, but he wasn’t worried. OSPRY made a very capable airplane. Still, as he sat in the crew lounge waiting, he read up on the specs. The plane was just under seventy feet in overall length, with a wingspan of sixty-three feet, ten inches. It’d do Mach .083, though he’d never push it that hard with paying passengers aboard. It’d fly coast-to-coast on a full tank at a top speed of 554 mph. The specs said it topped out at forty-five thousand feet, but he knew from experience that that was a cautious number. He could take it up to fifty thousand feet without incident, though he couldn’t imagine needing to on this flight.
August 9, 1974, that was the day the world was supposed to end. At The Restoration they spent months preparing. God told Noah it would be the fire next time, so that’s what they prepared for. They learned to drop and roll, in case the rapture missed them. Jay L. spent more and more time in the woodshed channeling the Angel Gabriel. As if by unspoken agreement, everyone in the group gorged themselves for ten days and then ate only matzoh. Outside the temperature rose and dropped in significant measure.
In the crew lounge, James checked the prevailing weather conditions. Weather-wise they were looking at poor visibility around the Vineyard, with a low cloud base (two hundred to four hundred feet) and heavy coastal fog. Winds were out of the northeast at fifteen to twenty miles per hour. As James knew from basic meteorology, fog is just a cloud near or in contact with the earth’s surface—either land or sea. In simple terms, minute water droplets hang suspended in the air. The water droplets are so tiny that gravity has almost no effect, leaving them suspended. At its lightest, fog may only consist of wisps a few feet thick. At its worst, it might have a vertical depth of several hundred feet.