Before the Fall(93)

Marine fog tends to be thick and long lasting. It can rise and fall over time, without fully dissipating. At altitude it becomes a low stratus cloud deck. In middle and higher latitudes (like New England), marine fog is primarily a summer occurrence. Low visibility isn’t the worst problem a pilot faces—the inboard HGS system can land the plane with zero visibility if it knows the runway GPS. The HGS converts signals from an airport’s Instrument Landing System into a virtual image of the runway displayed on the monitor. But if the wind shifts abruptly on manual approach, a pilot can be caught off guard.

“Come ye out from among them and be ye separate.” This was what the Bible said, the words that convinced Jay L. Baker to gather his flock and flee to the woods outside Eureka, California. There was an old abandoned summer camp there, without heat or electricity. They bathed themselves in the lake and ate berries from the trees. Jay L. began to filibuster, sermonizing for hours, sometimes days at a time. The signs were everywhere, he told them. Revelations. In order to be saved they had to renounce all sin, to cast venal wickedness from their hearts. Sometimes this involved inflicting pain on their genital areas and the genital areas of others. Sometimes it required visiting “the confessional,” a wooden outhouse that could reach interior temperatures of 105 degrees in the summer sun. His mother once stayed in there for three days, ranting that the devil had come to claim her soul. She was a fornicator and (possibly) a witch, having been caught in bald flagrante with Gale Hickey, a former dentist from Ojai. At night James would try to sneak her water, moving furtively from bush to bush, pushing his canteen through a hole in the pitch, but his mother always refused. She had brought this on herself and would endure the full purge.

James made a note to check the HGS system before takeoff. If he could he would talk to flight crews coming off inbound flights to get an anecdotal sense of conditions in the air, though things can change quickly at altitude, and pockets of turbulence move around.

He sipped a cup of Irish breakfast tea as he waited—he carried foil packets in his carry-on. Lifting the cup to his lips, he saw a drop of blood break the surface, creating ripples. Then another. His lip felt wet.

“Shit.”

James hurried to the men’s room, napkin to his face, head tilted back. He’d been getting nosebleeds recently, maybe twice a week. The doctor he saw told him it was the altitude. Dry capillaries plus pressure. He’d ruined more than one uniform in the last few months. At first, he’d been worried, but when no other symptoms arrived Melody chalked it up to age. He’d be fifty-one next March. Halfway there, he thought.

In the bathroom, he put pressure on his nose until the bleeding stopped, then cleaned himself up. He was lucky this time. There was no blood on his shirt or jacket, and James was back in the lounge drinking a fresh cup of tea before his seat was cold.

At five thirty p.m. he gathered his things and walked out to meet the plane.

The fact was, nothing ended on August 9, 1974, except the presidency of Richard M. Nixon.

*



He started his pre-flight check in the cockpit, running through the systems one by one. He checked the paperwork first—he’d always been a stickler for precision of detail. He checked the movement of the yoke, listening for any unusual sounds, eyes closed, feeling for any catches or chinks. The starboard motion felt a little sticky, so he contacted maintenance to take a look. Then he switched on the master and checked fuel levels, setting full flaps.

“Just, uh, give me a minute,” he said and went out again.

Instrument check complete, James climbed down the gangway steps and walked the perimeter of the plane, doing a visual inspection. Though it was a warm summer night, he checked for any ice that might have accumulated on the exterior. He looked for missing antennas, for dents, loose bolts, missing rivets, making sure the plane’s lights were all fully functional. He found some bird droppings on the wing, removed them by hand, then assessed the way the plane sat on its wheels—a leftward lean would mean the air in the rear port tire was low—inspecting the trailing edges of the wings and eyeballing the engines. He used both his rational left brain, running down a mental checklist, and his instinctual right brain, open to the sense that something felt off about the plane. But nothing did.

Back in the cabin, he conferred with the mechanic, who told him the altitude system checked out. He chatted with the flight attendant, Emma Lightner, with whom he hadn’t worked before. As seemed to be the case on these private flights, she was prettier than was reasonable for such a basic and menial job, but he knew it paid well and the girls got to see the world. He helped her stow some heavier bags. She smiled at him in a way he recognized as friendly, but not flirtatious. And yet her beauty in and of itself felt like gravity—as if nature had designed this woman to pull men to her, and so that’s what she did, whether she wanted to or not.

“Just a quick one tonight,” he told her. “Should have you back in the city by eleven. Where are you based?”

“New York,” she said. “I’ve got a place in the Village with two other girls. I think they’re gone now, though—South Africa, maybe.”

“Well, straight to bed for me,” said James. “I was in LA this morning. Asia yesterday.”

“They sure move us around, don’t they?”

He smiled. She couldn’t be more than twenty-five. For a moment he thought of the kind of men she must date. Quarterbacks and rock musicians—was that still a thing? Rock music? He himself was mostly celibate. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the company of women. It was more that he couldn’t stand the complications of it, the immediate sense of obligation, the expectation of complete intermingling. He was a man who lived out of a suitcase at fifty. He liked things the way he liked them. His tea, his books. He liked going to the movies in foreign lands, watching modern American films with subtitles in baroque old-world theaters. He liked walking cobblestone streets, listening to people argue in tongues. He loved the hot rush of desert air when one walked the gangway down onto Muslim soil. Yemen, the UAE. He had flown over the Alps at sunset, had battled thunderstorms over the Balkans. In James’s mind he was a satellite, graceful and self-sufficient, orbiting the earth, fulfilling its designated purpose without question.