Her Last Flight(2)

I flip through the pages. A logbook.

I am not a pilot—this is the first time in my adult life that I’ve boarded any kind of airplane, intact or otherwise—and the entries, written in faded purple-black letters, might as well be Latin. Still I pass my fingers over them. Because whose hands touched this last? Whose pen wrote those letters and numbers? In one column, the farthest left, I recognize dates. The last one is 13 MAY 1937. To the right, in the next column, reads 0522. Five twenty-two a.m.?

I set the logbook on the seat and sweep the flashlight once more around the cabin, and as I do, an object catches my eye at the rear, near the tail, tucked in the seam between deck and wall.

It is a pile of something. A pile of clothes, attached to a boot.



Of course I’ve always understood that there should be a body inside the wreckage of this airplane. A desert climate like this one has the same effect as mummification, doesn’t it? A set of bones might be preserved for years or decades. Still. It’s one thing to tell yourself to expect this skeleton, to know that this airplane came down with a human being inside and that the remains of that person did not disappear into the air, that those remains are just that—remains—and not the actual person, the human being, the living soul. It’s another thing to see a boot attached to some trousers, to run your flashlight beam along the outline of those trousers and see the whiteness of bone, or rather the yellowness of bone, covered in dirt like everything is covered in dirt.

But you can bear this, like you have borne all other things. You can bear this skeleton. You can pretend it belongs to anybody, it’s just a skeleton like you find in an anatomy laboratory. The person who lived inside this skeleton, who animated these bones, is long dead. As for his eternal soul, if he had one, God knows it’s moved on by now, out of sheer boredom.

So. Let’s imagine I’m an archaeologist. Isn’t that what they’re called, these people who dig bones and artifacts out of the earth, who mine the soil for the secrets of the past? Say I’ve arrived in this morbid landscape to investigate the remains of a brand-new human species, a previously undiscovered branch of our ancestral tree. Mere scientific curiosity prompts me to step forward, to keep the beam of my flashlight trained on the boot of my subject, to observe its physical characteristics and note that it seems to be an army boot, a type of footwear with which I happen to be familiar. A large boot, sturdy, worn, desiccated, leather edges curled by the passage of time.

I drag the beam upward, from boot to trouser to tunic. The skeleton rests on its side, in an almost fetal position, except not quite so tightly curled as a fetus. Like a man who’s gone to sleep in a cold place, without a blanket. A skeleton that has gone to sleep. I come to stand near its chest. The tunic isn’t familiar to me, but then it wouldn’t be. This man would have been an airman in the Republican Armed Forces of Spain at the time of his death, a Republic that no longer exists, a brutal war that has since been eclipsed by wars even more brutal. How quaint and idealistic the Spanish fight seems now. This fellow in his tunic, this American fighting for a foreign cause, curled up to die.

Some nerve returns to me, some guts. I’ve progressed from boot to trouser to tunic, I’ve braved the skeletal phalanges without a quiver. There’s nothing left to do now but see its face. That is to say, its skull.

His skull.

I move the beam, and it’s not the grinning jaw that does it, or the tufts of hair still attached to the bone, or the cap that hangs over what once was an ear. It’s the sockets of the eyes. They’re black and empty, staring into nothing. I sink to my knees and gasp for enough air to cry with.



After I bury him in the soil next to the airplane, and mark the spot with a cross made out of some broken propeller blades—it’s a shallow grave, because that’s all I can do with my two hands and a makeshift spade, so someone must return with men and tools to bury him properly—I enter the cabin to sweep the interior a final time with the beam of my flashlight.

In the corner where the body lay, there sits a small leather book.

Because it’s been sheltered all this time, and because the climate’s so dry, this book is in perfect condition. Unlike everything else, it’s not coated in dust. The leather is clean and unstained, and when I lift it and open the pages, I find that it’s not a printed book but a journal of some kind, in which someone has written in a firm black hand, notes and sketches and scrappy thoughts, until he stopped, about two-thirds of the way through.

Even with the help of the flashlight, I can’t read it well, and anyway it’s awkward to hold flashlight and book at the same time. I move outside and stand near the turned earth, the crude metal cross, and open the book again.

Against the cold afternoon light, the words jump from the page in a hand so familiar, it’s as if I wrote it myself. But I did not. This is a story I never knew, a man I never knew. The mule brays at me; I don’t have time to sit and read this through. I’ll slip it in my pocket and read it when I return to my room in the primitive pension in Pamplona.

But I won’t wait that long to find out how the story ends. Of course not. No one alive has that kind of patience, and certainly not me. I turn to the final entry, 5/15/37 in black numbers. His last thoughts, this lone, forgotten man; the last words his fingers would form before annihilation. A single line that wobbles and slants across the page, so you must squint your eyes and pick out the letters and put them together again in your head.