Among the Dead (32 page)

‘Hoping that you would get better, of course.'

‘Thinking or hoping?'

‘Thinking hoping,' said Bernays. He wouldn't be trapped, even with a few drinks inside him.

‘May I join you?' asked Frank.

‘Of course,' said Bettina. Her training battled with whatever she'd been drinking, but she could not hide her impatience with him, and she knew it and tried to fight it, she tried to be nicer to him, which only made her that much more false.

‘We were just ...' said Bernays, unable to complete the sentence, lost, guilty, because he suspected that Frank had listened to all their impersonations.

‘We were just having a drink,' said Bettina. ‘But if you need anything, anything at all, I'm here for you.' She was back on track.

‘Do you want a drink?' asked one of the women. What were their names? It was making him desperate, that he had forgotten their names. Well, they had only been introduced once. Why weren't they wearing some name-tags? But Frank had to answer her, name or not.

Frank, very quietly, to sound ruminative and deferential, said,
‘Nnnngggg. Mnnnnggg.' He hoped it was the kind of ‘no' that comes under the breath, full of exhaustion and shame.

‘Are you sure?' asked one of the women.

No one acknowledged his parody of their parody. But if they had, what would have been the appropriate reaction? A sudden shower of blood from every pore? Or a ghastly release of crap in their pants? Frank imagined the four of them sitting there, and then, in shame and fear, discovering how little control they really had over their intestines clogged with rotten meat, their fetid colons.

‘I think so,' he said. ‘It's been a hard day.'

‘A drink might be good for you,' said Bernays, and Frank was sure he wanted to slit his own throat for having given him the chance to accept, that his good breeding, his manners, had for a second overcome his cunning. Frank considered accepting the drink, just to sit at the table with them. If he did, he would say nothing, he would answer their questions as briefly as possible, or not answer at all, no, answer briefly, and let them try to talk to each other without including him in the conversation. If Bernays had any hope of fucking any one of them tonight, or all three, Frank's ghoulish silence at the table would have dampened the possibility of an orgasm for any of them.

‘Don't you drink beer?' asked Bettina, surprising Frank with her memory. Yes, he'd had a beer in Los Angeles. So she'd been watching him. He fought against feeling a little respect for her.

‘Why don't we see what's on tap?' said Bernays.

‘Oh, that's OK,' said Frank, which didn't really mean anything. It could go on like this for ever, he thought, I can stand here, and we can talk like this, about nothing, yet aware of everything, not just for another three minutes, but until time is finished, until everyone knows everything about everything. I can keep us alive for eternity if I stand here, all of us forever afloat on frustration. Death from boredom? Never.

This is how to torture them, thought Frank, and then he wanted to say to them, ‘You see, after all, I can hate! I am capable of reflecting back all the hate that is beamed to me. I can stand here, ten feet away from you, so that you have to raise your voices just a little, which must irritate you, and I like that, I like to see the strain of forcing this geniality when the last thing you want to do is work, since being nice to me is what you've been paid to do. And yet you do not fully comprehend the source of this irritation.
You think you are uncomfortable because the social traffic among people always hurts. You do not know that were I standing next to you, the power you have as a group would override my weak force, so I stand here, just this far away, and it gives me great pleasure. You may think that I am some pathetic loser of a brother, some kid brother to my younger brother, some kind of desperate loser –
loser at work, loser at airplane lottery
– but I am the king of these few seconds of your lives, the moment belongs to me, I am the master, I am in control.'

He came close to saying to Bernays, ‘God, I can't believe it, I thought you were gay.' And what would Bernays say? ‘Maybe I am, maybe I'm not, what's it to you?' And Frank would say, ‘Well, what are you doing with these women?' And Bernays would say, ‘Would you pursue this if your brother were here?' And Frank would collapse with shame. Frank felt himself wavering, and he needed to regain his balance.

‘Are you going back to Los Angeles tomorrow?' asked Bettina.

‘I don't know,' said Frank.

One of the women said there was going to be another memorial in Los Angeles, and the other woman said it would also be a funeral.

'A funeral,' said Frank, knowing that if he said nothing else the four of them would imagine that he was imagining the grim scene of all those caskets, some of them flag-draped, baking in the sun, dry-roasting the body parts inside.

‘We'll be there,' said Bettina. She played with her drink. The secret she carried, the truth about Frank Gale, was not, at this moment, the most important thing in her. She wanted to fuck Bernays, it was obvious, and she didn't want to be reminded of her duties. Frank nodded to the bartender, and made a circle with his finger, towards the table, meaning: another round. Everyone at the table protested.

‘No,' said Frank. ‘Please, you've all been so good to me.' He reached into his wallet and took out a twenty dollar bill. Would it be enough? He added another ten and walked to the table, knowing that if he stayed, he would lose the game he had invented.

‘That's too much,' said Bettina.

‘We'll give you the change when we see you,' said Bernays.

This was such a ridiculous self-imposed mission that for a quick moment Frank wanted to say, ‘Fine, I'll see you at the funeral,' just to put Bernays through the trouble of holding on to the change,
of keeping it in a separate envelope, but he had a better idea. ‘Don't give it back to me,' said Frank. ‘I don't need it. But if there's a charity, you know, for any of the children on the ground, or if the pilot had kids and someone sets up a trust fund for them, give them the money.' And then the most diabolical sentence bubbled up, and he heard himself say, ‘Unless you want another round.'

Frank thought the last suggestion was so hilarious, such an insult, that he had to turn quickly and run from the room. Let them think he wanted to cry, but when he got to the elevator, and the door closed, he leaned against the wall and shrieked with laughter, cackling like the madman he had become. But it isn't just insanity, he told himself. This is really very funny. What can they do now? They'll buy themselves another round, with the change that remains, and if there's not enough left over they'll add to the money with a little extra from their own pockets, and they will, each of them, have to forgive themselves for stealing a few dollars from charity, while they'll promise themselves, each of them, privately, to give, what, five dollars to the next bum they pass in a doorway, or maybe stuff five dollars into one of those collection cans with the coin slot, next to the cash register and the red strips of liquorice. And maybe a little extra to a collection plate the next time one is passed, if they ever go to church, but they'll also know that when they next see that plate, they won't put in any special supplement while thinking of Frank. Perfect, perfect, perfect.

Back in his room the message light flashed on his phone. He called the hotel operator, who told him that his brother had called, also someone from the National Transportation Safety Board, Guy Ingle. He left a number, but added that he would call in the morning. Frank supposed this was about the identification of the bodies, although the name was new, and wouldn't that call come from the coroner? There was nothing he could do now except worry about it, and he would try not to. And his brother: did Lowell think he was asleep, or still deaf? What had he wanted? Don't call him now, thought Frank. Write that poem about the pillow.

He picked up the notebook, to write the truth, and with the bad pen scraped into the page,
I woke up and I was happy to hear the pillow
. This was true, but he hated the way it looked on the paper. He crossed it out, and held the pen over the paper for a long time, and then closed the book. He opened it again and wrote,
I do not have to do this
. He liked that sentence more than the first one, and
thought it might be a good first line for something, but he had nothing that wanted to follow.

He turned the television on, to the news channel, and a picture of Lonnie Walter. This is the man who murdered my family, thought Frank. Another letter had been discovered in the wreckage of the plane, the reporter said. Walter had written a message on an airsickness bag to the boss who had fired him. It said, simply, ‘Hi Nick. I think it's sort of ironical that we end up like this. I asked for some leniency, remember? Well, I got none, and you'll get none.'

Frank turned the television off, and reconstructed the story. Walter must have passed the note to the boss just as he was getting his gun out. He shot the boss, shot a flight attendant, and then went to the cockpit and shot the pilots, and shot out the controls. How long had it taken from the time he pulled the gun out of, what, a briefcase? ... until the plane started to go down? Had he shot himself, or did he stand in the cockpit, over the bodies of the crew, to watch the ground come up? It was daylight. He had time to think about things. He would have heard the passengers screaming. And how did he feel as the plane went down? Had a bullet exploded the windows of the cockpit? He would have been sucked out of the plane and killed in the air. But if the windows had held, and the pilots were dead, and the flight attendants were crying, and the passengers were wailing, might Lonnie Walter, for an instant, in his exhaustion, regret what he had done? Might he have turned to the passengers and said that he was sorry? The last time Frank had fucked Mary Sifka, how much had he hated her after he had come?

Frank had an idea. The day's papers were on an end table. He looked for the article about Lonnie Walter.

Lonnie Walter was a forty-five-year-old native of Los Angeles. His parents had come to the city from Louisiana. His father, a plumber, died when Lonnie was fifteen. Lonnie had joined the Marines and had served in Vietnam. He was divorced, with a son and a daughter who lived with their mother in Phoenix. He had two sisters. His older sister (forty-seven), Teresa, lived in Los Angeles. His younger sister (thirty-one), Lovie, lived in Seattle. Frank thought of black children on a hike in the Cascade Mountains, their freedom, black faces, red parkas, green trees. And their uncle, who had destroyed an airplane, a Boeing, made in Seattle.

After leaving the Marines, Lonnie Walter's first job was with the
airline, and he'd stayed with them until he was fired two weeks ago.

Frank picked up the phone and called Information in Los Angeles, and asked for Lonnie Walter's phone number. It was listed! There he was! He could call and see if anyone was there.

He dialled. Someone answered! A woman!

‘Hello,' said the woman.

‘Is Lonnie there?' asked Frank.

‘Who is this?'

‘It's Larry Levy,' said Frank, taking the name of one of the dead from the list in the paper.

‘Do you know what time it is?'

‘I'm calling from New York, it's six in the morning here. Lonnie and I used to talk at this time, all the time.'

‘And you're in New York, and you haven't read the news.'

‘No, ma'am,' said Frank. ‘And you must be ...' Frank wanted her to complete the sentence.

‘If you know Lonnie so well, you should know who I am.'

‘You must be his sister, Terry.'

‘Yes. Terry.' Could she imagine that out in the world someone so diabolical would take her name from the
Los Angeles Times
and use it so coldly?

‘Where's Lonnie?'

‘Lonnie's dead.'

‘What?' asked Frank, sounding bewildered. ‘No.' ‘You don't know?' she asked.

Frank pretended not to understand that she was asking him if he knew about everything, and limited himself to acting as though she just meant that his not knowing about the death surprised her, not because the whole world knew, but because no one had called him yet, to tell him of the passing of a friend in such an awful way. He could let her think that he thought the death was ordinary, something at work, or a car crash. ‘Oh, my God,' said Frank. ‘I can't believe it. That's awful, what happened?'

‘I can't talk about it,' she said, and she hung up the phone. Frank waited a second and called her back.

‘It's me again, it's Larry.'

‘I can't talk now.'

‘Wait!' he shouted. There was all the command he had ever had in his life, in that one shout. No one could have refused him.
Finally he was stronger than his brother. ‘I have a terrible feeling about this right now. After he was fired, he was really upset.'

‘Yes,' said his sister.

‘Oh, my dear sweet Lord,' said Frank. ‘He used to joke about it, but did he kill himself?'

‘Yes,' said the sister. She was crying again.

‘Oh God, oh God, oh God,' said Frank. He was smiling now. Fuck the writing, thought Frank, I should be an actor!

‘I don't know who to talk to,' said Walter's sister. The part of her accent that was black, or the South, also had a brittle quality, and if she weren't tired, and her brother hadn't done what he had done, and she were just talking to Frank under whatever circumstances were normal in her life, she would have sounded arrogant.

‘You can talk to me. I spoke to him last week. I was away on vacation until last night. We'd talked about him coming with me. I went to Jamaica.'

‘He said something about that,' said his sister. ‘About a vacation with a friend.'