Among the Dead (15 page)

Now the train descended from the canyon south of La Jolla, and there was Mission Bay. It was almost pretty. It had the elements of romance; lights reflected in water, water, the silhouettes of masts and riggings, but Frank was overcome with his feeling of hatred for San Diego, which always seemed to him a stupid city. Lowell liked it because it was an easy place to sell records; the navy was here and the sailors brought music, compact discs and lots of recorded tapes. And there were other homosexuals in San Diego, and in Del Mar, and up the coast in La Jolla. What did Lowell do at night? He never talked about sex with Lowell. His brother used to have boyfriends, but in the last few years, though he gave money and some time to help people with AIDS, he seemed to live alone and rarely talked of the men in his life. Frank felt sad for him now, and realized that Lowell was surrounded by death these days, and with so much misery, so many funerals, so many eulogies, so much rage, he still had the grace to shed tears for his sister-in-law, and his niece, and not just for himself. My brother is a better man than I am, thought Frank.

The train passed the airport. If there were signs of special activity because of the crash, he could not read them.

And then downtown, and then the station. Chris Bentine and the marines were already at the door.

Everyone followed an indistinct line, trusting those among them who knew where they were going. It was typical of San Diego not to have arrows or signs pointing the way to the station, or even to name the station, not to have a sign above the station that said, simply, ‘San Diego'.

I am in a foul mood, thought Frank, and I should be careful now.

And then there were no signs in the station, and no one to answer questions at the information booth. He was tired of his dull angers.

He went out the wrong door looking for a cab and then had to pass through the station again and out another door. On this second time through he wanted to stay inside, to hide in public, as he had hidden in full view at the airport, before he had been told of the death of his wife and daughter. He would stay here with the obese and the ancient and never leave the station, and cause no trouble, and become a witness. He would ask no questions, beg for no money. He would start no conversation. He would make no friends of the men and women who cleaned. He would spend only as much money as he needed to eat small meals. He would sleep on the benches, until rousted by policemen with shiny hair, and when they threw him out at night, to share the misery of the insane and the out-of-work, he would rent a small room in a motel that he would walk to, where he could always have a change of clothing. He would stay here for ever, until he died. How long would it take to die this way, if he gave himself over to a destiny of stubborn silence, day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day, asking only for a cup of coffee and a tuna sandwich, grilled, with a slice of cheese? No one would find him. He could tell his lawyer to send him money. If his lawyer said no, he would find someone who would indulge him in this, in conspiracy. He could set up some
kind of complicated system of bank accounts, through which he could draw funds without anyone knowing where he was living. Money from Los Angeles would be wired to an account in ... where? ... somewhere, even Switzerland, and then wired back to ... to ... to a bank in Tijuana, and he could cross the border once a month to get enough cash. If he had an account in Tijuana, he would not have to give his social security number. That was the way to stay hidden in America, never to give his social security number to anyone. And what would this scheme give him? He would be able to live in suspension in the San Diego train station, and there, perhaps, learn something about something. He didn't know what, but whatever it was, he felt that the reason for this impulse to make such an arbitrary hermitage would be, over time, revealed to him. He felt this as a calling, almost as something filled with light, to stay inside the San Diego train station until he died, or until he knew for certain that he had learned something important. He would pay attention to the life of the station. If he concentrated on the station's life, he would be closer to God, he thought.

Outside, three black cab-drivers asked for his business. Again, this was so typical of San Diego; there was no organization to the line. The drivers were Africans or Jamaicans, he couldn't tell. What difference did it make? None.

One of them touched his arm, having won Frank in some kind of competition that was over quickly. Frank went with him to a car without official emblems, and for a second worried that he was going to be murdered, but he got into the car anyway, thinking to himself, Maybe he'll kill me.

He was asked where he was going.

‘I want to go to where the plane crashed,' he said. He wasn't sure until he said it that this was what would come out, but it was the truth.

‘Cohassett Street,' said the cab-driver. ‘But they got that closed off. They won't let anyone near for a mile.'

‘My wife and my daughter were on the plane.'

The driver looked at him in the rear-view mirror; Frank supposed he was looking in his eyes to see if this was true. Frank turned his eyes away, in case the driver would see something else in him, but that was also, he knew, some fear of what he imagined was a black man's superior wisdom, that the man would see the grief, and also all the other things, the weakness, all the bad reasons for doing everything he did, and then the fear of losing his privileges.

‘There's nothing that you'll be able to see over there now – why don't you go to where all the people in the neighbourhood who had their houses burned are? There's a school near the crash, and they have it set up for helping the people.' So the man believed him.

‘I want to go to the crash. I want to see it for myself.'

The driver nodded, and then they were on the freeway, following the signs to the Mexican border.

A few minutes of silence. There was the harbour, and battleships and an aircraft carrier. He wondered what it was about the species that needed grief. There was something so useless and old-fashioned about the grief he felt now, if this was grief at all, a thin layer of resentment and then another one of tenderness, and then longing, and then old pictures that came up to him from childhood, of losing something to a bully, or picking a fight for no reason with his mother, and slamming the door, that kind of violent, self-pitying love of loneliness, making a religion of his loneliness, biting into the windowsill and tasting the dust and dry paint, and the surprising freshness of the pine underneath, after all these years, after all these years, and hiding under a desk and hugging the reluctant dog.

They left the freeway near Coronado and turned east. He knew the exit, one of Lowell's new stores was near, in a mall on a parallel road. It was a small store, Lowell supplied it with only the most popular discs, no more than a hundred titles, for impulse buyers with pocket money. Frank liked the idea and wanted to design the racks that would hold the titles. Lowell wanted to buy a modular system from a catalogue, but Frank had insisted on his right to supervise the design. If the store did well, Lowell wanted to open more in every mall in southern California, and then sell the idea to people who would buy distribution rights for different territories in the country. Their mother told them that one of their cousins, Julia Abarbanel (mother's sister's daughter, middle of three, about thirty, attractive in that side of the family's sullen way), had complained about this, that Lowell and Frank were doing something evil by selling only those records that were popular, by not supporting more obscure music, that they were fouling the whole idea of freedom of choice, if the choice offered was only the choice made by millions of others whose choices were established by a music industry that wanted to limit the choices to only a few, not to invest in so many unpopular records, so many dry holes. Frank
and Julia had been best friends, as cousins, for a long time, since they were children, but then he and Lowell started making money, and something happened. The friendship ended. Julia became angry about things that shouldn't have mattered to her. The colour scheme of the stores, grey and blue. She was angry with Lowell for not telling the record companies that the oversized packages in which the compact discs were sold wasted paper. Lowell had always hated Julia, and it was obvious to Frank why, because Julia had always favoured Frank. And then Julia turned on Frank. Because he had come under his brother's shadow.

He could have slept with Julia; one Thanksgiving in Yosemite, the two families stayed at the park's grand rock and timber lodge. Frank and Julia watched the moonlight on the rocks after dinner. The pines made their whispering sounds, and the river made its own noises, and the two cousins were drunk. It would have been easy. And she was pretty then. He had a fabulous erection; it was maybe the last great erection of his youth. It would have been interesting to kiss his cousin, someone he had known for so long. She would have been the only woman he kissed whom he had liked as a friend first, whom he had thought of as a friend for a long time, and not as someone to get naked with. There was something disgusting, he thought, some sign of weakness, when all the women he had slept with had been women he had wanted to sleep with from the beginning. But he had done nothing that night. Lowell would have done everything. They would have laughed about it. But she didn't like Lowell. Well, she would have if they had been under the Yosemite moonlight. She would have liked him more than Frank, if she had seen how really wonderful he was, how brilliant. She hated him for his faith in reality, in the basic truths of the marketplace, the laws of supply and demand. Lowell loved demand. He loved how people spent their money on things other than food and clothing and shelter. People made a necessity out of music. They could not live without the music they had heard on the radio. Now someone was inventing a store where a kid could grab a tape, could walk in blind from the street, could reach into a bin filled with tapes, and pull out music that lots of other people already liked. How could anyone not want to try this kind of business? It could make them wealthy, millions and millions.

But now he was going to be wealthy from the plane crash. Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, the airline's security was so remiss that
a fired worker with a gun ... etcetera, etcetera. It would be worth a few million dollars to him. Three or four.

‘There,' said the cab-driver. There were fire trucks beyond a barricade, and two policemen waved traffic away. A crowd stood at the barricade, watching the street. The cab-driver brought the car to one of the policemen.

‘You have to move the car,' he said.

‘His wife and daughter were on the plane,' said the driver. The policemen gave Frank a closer look.

‘My name is Frank Gale,' said Frank, in the voice he used to announce himself to the maitre d', going up at the end just a little, as though reminding the policemen of his lapse in forgetting the name of someone he should have recognized. ‘I just drove down from Los Angeles,' said Frank. He wasn't sure why he didn't mention the train.

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Can we go through?' asked Frank.

‘We've evacuated half the neighbourhood,' said the policeman, ‘and there's no traffic'

‘I'll walk.'

‘Your wife and daughter.'

‘Yes.'

‘We don't know how many people have died,' said the policeman. ‘The plane tore into the middle of a block, and took about fifty, maybe sixty houses with it, and an apartment house, fifteen units. There might be three hundred dead.'

These were the bleak facts, the facts that Frank had avoided all day, the facts that he had turned away from when he was in a room with a television, the facts that he had not wanted to know.

The policeman continued, ‘Go to the Red Cross command centre at the high school. There's people there to take care of you, Frank.'

It touched Frank that the policeman had remembered his name.

‘That's the best thing for now,' said the driver. ‘You should be with other people who have the same suffering now, to comfort your heart.'

‘I wanted to see the plane,' said Frank.

‘You can't get into the neighbourhood. And there's a really nothing to see. Go to the high school.' He asked the driver if he knew where it was. The driver said that he did. ‘I'm really sorry,' said the policeman. The driver turned the car around.

On the other side of the line, beyond the fire trucks, Frank
watched people walking in the middle of the street, and he thought of block parties or street fairs, with everyone given freedom to walk wherever they wanted, on the sidewalk or in the middle of the street, and how much fun it is just to do that, just to step off the sidewalk as though the sidewalk is nothing very special, how walking in the middle of a street, with a crowd, is a way of feeling rich. Wasn't the entrance to Disneyland nothing more than a street? So you could step off the kerb in the middle of the block and no one would punish you. The city as playground. Join the parade!

There was a crowd on his side of the line, and he was aware of them looking at him, something in the policeman's posture told them that Frank was in some way important. Before he was turned back they would have wanted him to be someone whose house had been destroyed, someone whose family had been killed. And were they disappointed when the car left? The people who live in the houses on the border of the crisis must be jealous of the people who lived inside.

‘We'll go to the high school now,' said the driver.

‘No,' said Frank. ‘Take me around the corner.' His flowing tenderness was dissolved in the heat of a plan.

‘Mister Gale,' said the driver, ‘let me take you to the high school.'

‘No,' said Frank. ‘Just drive me to the middle of the next block.' They were around the corner from the barricades now, and there was another barricade at the next intersection.