Among the Dead (6 page)

He watched the crowd gather for the arrival of a flight from Hawaii. The plane arrived, and the gate attendants opened the door to the ramp. What were the emotions of the people waiting? Envy for the travellers? When he came back from Mexico, would he be transfigured, if only for a few days? What is so terrible about tourism? he asked himself, or asked his friends who made fun of him because he always took his family to resorts instead of taking them closer to where the real people were. But who were the real people except the maids who worked at the resorts? Frank loved resorts, he loved everything about them. He loved how safe they were. He loved how they shut out the world. He particularly loved the resorts after the sun went down, when the harsh lines of the hotels disappeared into the night sky, and you could walk through the gardens and over the bridges that crossed the huge swimming pools and think about honeymooning lawyers from provincial capitals falling in love all over again as they stared at the gold and blue lights surrounding the bases of palm trees. And the bars of the resorts. He liked resorts with three bars, one of them wood-panelled, with a pianist playing classical music, and the thatched bar with the native band, and the disco that opened late, where the tennis players went to dance, and after dancing, to fuck each other. Frank never saw anyone in a resort who looked like a musician, who had beautiful eyes and long hair, men who were skinny, and
wore jewellery and had tattoos, and were straight. Or even who were not straight.

One of the women working at Gate 47 was on the phone, and she was crying. Another gate attendant came to her and put her arms around her, and they hugged, and they were both crying.

The woman on the phone did not give it up; she held on even while attendants from other gates came over to her. The abandoned passengers herded together trading indignations, but the gate attendants seemed oblivious of them. More than oblivious: in their concern for the crying woman, they fluttered with shock. Had she been fired? Was this a strike? Why were the men and women working all of the gates gathering around her? And as they ignored the passengers waiting on the lines, where they had been servants, they were now superior, their indifference to the passengers, and their attention to the crying woman, gave them power, and on the fringes of this cluster there was disdain for the passengers who pleaded with the departed agents to help get them on to their flights. There were now twenty gate attendants, all of them in the airline's regulation blue jackets, hugging the woman who still held on to the phone, and if they couldn't wrap their arms around her, they touched her shoulders, or even hugged those who had just had the full embrace, passing along the hug from the centre of the group. This is so obvious, someone has died, thought Frank. He was delighted with his perception. He could have strolled with a certain insolence through the nodes of now frustrated travellers, offering them his observation, and letting the truth sink in, so they would regret their tantrums, and instead offer condolence to the woman just touched by death.

He kept this to himself though, and enjoyed the show. Passengers were yelling at the gate attendants. Someone, hidden by a column, shouted at an agent, ‘What the fuck is going on? I have a connection in San Francisco!' And then, with a surprising speed, the swarm of irate travellers around the gate agents was quiet, something had been said to them. There was an apology.

The quiet whine of an electric cart, which was usually in service when crippled passengers needed help getting to the plane, passed Frank. A black driver and his passenger, a woman in a suit. Frank assumed that she was a corporate officer. Her hair was better cut than the gate attendants', looser. The cart stopped at Gate 47. The woman in the suit got out and took the crying woman in her arms, but where the gate attendants all tried to burrow into the crying
woman's misery and share it, her hug showed discipline. She spoke quietly to these passive mutineers, and she seemed to be giving them what Frank would have said was the obvious talk, that they would be better people for containing their sorrow, for remembering that they had important jobs, that an airline depended on them, that an airport needed the planes out of the gates at the right times, and that nothing could move without these attendants, that they had real power. ‘Guys,' Frank heard the woman say, ‘you have the real power here.' She took the crying woman with her, and the electric cart disappeared around a bend in the terminal. The hard rubber tires, on the clean pavement of the terminal floor, an imitation marble, sounded as if they were going through a thin layer of water. This was supposed to be the sound of the future, thought Frank, when the whole world was going to be electric; this was the world promised him when he was ten. A quiet city with no pollution, and everyone driving little electric carts, greeting each other with good manners.

The gate attendants stood about for another minute, and then they returned to their posts. Frank invented this story to explain what he had just seen: the crying woman had just heard that someone close to her had died. Her friends, her co-workers, out of sympathy, had rushed to her. Someone had called upstairs, although upstairs in this case probably meant a room somewhere below them, and management had quickly sent the woman in the jitney to restore peace. He might describe the scene to Anna, although he didn't think she would care. She might ask him why he wasted his time telling her about something that bored her, and he would tell her that if something unusual happens, it's nice to talk about it. In the spirit of his rededicated marriage he would rather talk about too many things than have to contain himself.

There was a flight ready to leave for San Francisco from Gate 51. A woman who had received her boarding pass before the breakdown at Gate 47 was yelling at the attendant. Everyone could hear her.

‘I'm not getting on that plane. I want my money back! I'm not getting on the plane.'

The attendant spoke quietly to her. Frank couldn't hear him. He couldn't imagine her problem, unless she'd just had a psychic vision of her plane going down in flames.

A blond guy in a T-shirt with a surfing logo sat down next to Frank. He was so typical that Frank could hardly see him. How
old, thirty-five? He had a job he liked, just a job, somewhere in the city, it wasn't his life. He made enough money. Was the shirt for a trip to Hawaii, or just his shirt?

‘I don't blame her,' he said.

‘For what?' asked Frank.

‘Well, they're not saying exactly, but it seems like the plane that left that gate at three' – and he pointed to Gate 47 – ‘just went down.' He seemed to like the way he said ‘just went down', it gave him a measure of participation in the event; he said it with the sober experience of a flight deck commander on an aircraft carrier.

‘The plane to Acapulco?' asked Frank.

‘Adiós, amigos.'
He held his hand parallel to the ground, and then, making the sound of a falling bomb, tilted his fingers towards the floor, over the falls, and the hand went down.

‘You're sure?' asked Frank.

‘That's what I hear.
Adiós, amigos.'

Of course he didn't know that Frank had family on the plane, so Frank thought it would be unfair of him to strangle the man right there, to kick him in the face, to bite off his ears.

Frank wasn't sure what to do. He thought of Anna and Madeleine, thought of a plane crashing, and his wife and daughter pitching forward, facing the nose as the plane pointed to the ground three miles down. Five miles. He said goodbye to the man in the Hawaiian shirt, and walked to Gate 51.

The gate attendant, a thin man with the damaged eyes of someone who had lost his last two good jobs for drinking, was getting a flight ready for Salt Lake City. He seemed to be homosexual, and Frank wondered how he guessed. What was it? So many small signs. Frank went to the front of the line.

‘Excuse me, I have to ask you something.'

The man didn't look up.

‘What happened to the flight to Mexico? The one that left at three?'

The attendant said nothing for a moment, but looked at Frank, and now Frank felt himself liking the man. He wanted to tell him the truth, which he already knew, but he'd been ordered not to say anything, and he didn't want to lose this job. ‘If you have any questions, sir, would you please wait. Someone will be here in a few minutes.'

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

Frank could see that the attendant wondered why Frank was still there if his family had left an hour ago. He held a finger in the air, to hold himself up, Frank supposed, the effort let him forget his feelings. ‘Just a second.' But he looked sad. He got on the phone. ‘Hi, Betsy, there's a gentleman here who says that his wife – whose wife and child were on flight two-twenty-one.' He studied Frank with suppressed awe. ‘What's your name?'

‘Frank Gale. And my wife's name is Anna Klauber, and my daughter is Madeleine.' He wanted to say ‘was', but something held him back. He knew the plane was down, there was no mistake, and he knew his family was dead, but the moment demanded a certain form, and the time for the past tense had not arrived.

‘Frank Gale, wife Anna Klauber, daughter Madeleine.' The woman working beside the gate attendant was young, with bad skin under a thin crust of make-up. She had listened to the conversation and she came around the desk. There was still some word necessary from the person on the other end of the line. Was it the woman in the suit? The gate attendant said a few noncommittal ‘OKs' and then put the receiver down. ‘Amy, why don't you sit down with Mr Gale. Someone will be here in a few minutes.'

Amy put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Come over here with me.' She might have been enjoying the moment.

Frank asked her if the plane had really gone down. He felt something bubbling inside his heart, something giddy within the fire. He was starting to make a new relationship with time, which continued at its old beat while he was speeding up, separate from time. He probably had a temperature already, but there was no headache or pain. Amy took him to a seat and held his hand.

‘I was almost on the plane,' he told her. ‘I was late. That's why I'm here. I'm waiting for the six o'clock flight.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Do they know what happened?'

‘Right now I can't even say for sure that there was a crash.' ‘You mean you can't because you've been told not to talk about it?'

‘Mr Gale, I'm a Christian. I don't want to lie to you and tell you that there wasn't a crash if I know there was, but until the official word comes from upstairs, you know, it would be awful to tell you that there was a crash if there wasn't.' She didn't mean upstairs literally. ‘The best thing to do is to pray.'

‘I'm not really religious.'

‘The Lord can be a tremendous comfort. He has been for me.'

‘Maybe some day.'

‘You have to be patient.' He watched her, and she seemed now to be on television, she was a projection of herself into this space in front of him. What would I say to her if the situation were reversed? From whom did I inherit the obligation to be cordial? If this is true, what will I say to my mother and father? To my brother? To everyone? To Mary Sifka? If this is true, does that mean I will never again swim with my daughter in a hotel pool, never again give up the maraschino cherry?

He could hear the electric cart's erratic whine again. This time it was driven by a white man in a suit. They were coming for him; something big was about to start. The corporate woman sat next to him. The gate attendant nodded in Frank's direction.

Frank knew that by tomorrow he would be in the news, the husband who missed the flight of death. And they will suspect me, he thought. He hoped that the plane had hit another plane, anything but a bomb or an implosion from an indeterminate cause, so that no one's doubts about him would linger. I have an alibi. I was here, waiting for the next flight. Or is that too perfect? And am I capable of such a demonic strategy?

The electric cart stopped about ten feet away. The man got out and walked to Frank.

‘Mr Gale?'

‘Yes.'

‘My name is Ed Dockery. I'm a vice-president of operations with the airline. This is Bettina Welch, my assistant.' Now the woman in the suit had a name. Dockery looked like so many Americans, a persistent dumb guy promoted to a job with a little authority. Was he a lost man, a big baby with his big baby's beer belly, or was he a man comfortable with his job, comfortable with his pleasures, who liked to eat and watch his belly grow? And Bettina Welch, there was something slightly diminished about Bettina Welch now that she was close. She wore a thin gold chain around her left ankle, and her suit was cheap, a light purple that matched her lipstick. Like Dockery, she seemed to be someone who would forever stay in the middle of the corporate bureaucracy. But why? Another one of those collections of indications, unsophistications, but what did that mean? He was right, he knew he was right, but how did he know? Because she looked dumb? What does that mean, dumb? Because her fabric was stiff? Because the colour was
ugly? But why ugly? And how did senior management look at her? Frank imagined that if she ever went on weekend retreats with management, where the president and the senior staff would present the company's goals to the airline's regional managers, Frank was sure that in the competition for sex, she would go to the best-looking, highest-ranking executive, unless there was a band at the Saturday night cocktail party, in which case she would sleep with the bass player.

‘What happened to the plane?'

‘We don't know yet. But the N. T. S. B. boys are terrific, and when they're done with the investigation, they'll know the whole story. You'll just have to be patient.'

‘N. T. S. B.?' asked Frank.

‘National Transportation Safety Board,' said Bettina, in a voice that convinced Frank she voted Republican, something in her pride in knowing acronyms, and her superiority over those who don't.