“Do I? I don’t feel nervous. I just want to be clear on the rules.”
“What do you feel then, if not nervous? I want viewers at home to be able to read your face.”
Scott thinks about this.
“It’s strange,” he says. “You hear the word sleepwalking sometimes. How some people sleepwalk through life and then something wakes them up. I don’t—that’s not how I feel. Maybe the opposite.”
He watches Bill’s eyes. It’s clear Bill doesn’t know yet what to make of Scott, how to trap him.
“The whole thing feels like some kind of—dream,” says Scott. He too is striving for truth. Or maybe he alone.
“Like maybe I fell asleep on the plane and I’m still waiting to wake up.”
“Unreal, you’re saying,” says Bill.
Scott thinks about that.
“No. It’s very real. Too real maybe. The way people treat each other these days. Not that I thought we lived on Planet Hugs, but—”
Bill sits forward, not interested in a conversation about manners.
“I’d like to talk about how you came to be on that plane.”
“I was invited.”
“By who?”
“Maggie.”
“Mrs. Bateman.”
“Yes. She said call her Maggie, so I call her Maggie. We met on the Vineyard last summer. June maybe. We went to the same coffee shop, and I’d see her at the farmers market with JJ and her daughter.”
“She came to your studio.”
“Once. I work out back of my house in an old barn. There were workmen in her kitchen, she said, and she needed something to do for the afternoon. The kids were with her.”
“You’re saying the only time you saw her outside of the market or a coffee shop, the kids were with her.”
“Yes.”
Bill makes a face to indicate maybe he thinks that’s bullshit.
“Some of your work could be considered pretty disturbing, don’t you think?” he says.
“For children you mean?” says Scott. “I suppose. But the boy was napping, and Rachel wanted to see.”
“So you let her.”
“No. Her mother. It wasn’t my—and it’s not like—for the record—the pictures aren’t—graphic. It’s just—an attempt.”
“What does that mean?”
Scott thinks about that, what he’s trying to say.
“What is this world?” he says. “Why do things happen? Does it mean something? That’s all I’m doing. Trying to understand. So I showed them around—Maggie and Rachel—and we talked.”
Bill sneers. Scott can tell that the last thing he wants to do is talk about art. In the cacophony of time he is sitting in a television studio, but part of him is still in his car, driving into the city—the wet road smeared with the red trails of taillights, and he is also somehow sitting on the plane, trying to get oriented—a man who minutes earlier had been running from the bus stop.
“You had feelings for her, though,” says Bill. “Mrs. Bateman.”
“What does that mean, feelings? She was a nice person. She loved her children.”
“But not her husband.”
“I don’t know. It seemed that way. I’ve never been married, so what do I know. It’s not something we ever—she was very comfortable, it seemed, as a person. They had fun, her and the kids. They laughed all the time. He worked a lot it seemed, David, but they were always talking about him, the things they’d do when Daddy got there.”
He thinks for a moment.
“She seemed happy.”
*
Gus is on the Long Island Expressway when the calls comes. The flight recorder is fixed. There is some degradation, they tell him, but it’s in the quality of sound, not the content of the recording. His team is about to listen back and does Gus want them to wait for him?
“No,” he says, “we need to know. Just put the phone up to the speaker.”
They hurry to comply. He sits in his brown government vehicle in stop-and-go traffic. He is mid-island, past LaGuardia, not yet to Kennedy. Through the car’s speakers he can hear hurried activity as they prepare to review the tape. It is a record of another time, like a jar that holds the last breath of a dying man. The actions and voices of the tape are secret still, but in moments they will be out. The last unknown thing will become known. And then everything that can be clear, will be clear. Any other mysteries are there for the ages.
Gus breathes recycled air. Rain dots his windshield.
The tape begins.
It starts with two voices from within the cockpit. The captain, James Melody, has a British accent. Charles Busch, the copilot, has a Texas drawl.
“Checklist, brakes,” says Melody.
“Are checked,” responds Busch after a moment.
“Flaps.”
“Ten, ten, green.”
“Yaw damper.”
“Checked.”
“Little crosswind here,” says Melody. “Let’s keep that in mind. Flight instrument and annunciator panels?”
“Uh, yeah. No warnings.”
“Okay then. Checklist complete.”