Scott shakes his head. He is a painter. Who would bring a painter on a helicopter? But then again, that’s what he thought about private planes, and look how that turned out.
Looking down, Scott sees the cutter has company. Half a dozen ships are spread out on the ocean. The plane, they believe, has crashed into an especially deep part of the sea. The something trench. That means, Gus tells him, it may take weeks to locate the submerged wreckage.
“This is a joint search-and-recovery operation,” Gus says. “We’ve got ships from the navy, the Coast Guard, and the NOAA.”
“The what?”
“National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.”
Gus smiles.
“Sea nerds,” he says, “with multibeam and side scan sonar. Also the air force lent us a couple of HC-130s, and we’ve got thirty navy divers and twenty from the Massachusetts State Police ready to go into the water if and when we find the wreckage.”
Scott thinks about this.
“Is that normal when a small plane goes down?” he asks.
“No,” says Gus. “Definitely a VIP package. This is what happens when the president of the United States makes a phone call.”
The helicopter banks right and circles the cutter. The only thing keeping Scott from falling out the open door and into the sea is his seat belt.
“You said there was wreckage on the surface when you came up,” yells Gus.
“What?”
“Wreckage in the sea.”
Scott nods. “There were flames on the water.”
“Jet fuel,” says Gus. “Which means the fuel tanks ruptured. It’s lucky you weren’t burned.”
Scott nods, remembering.
“I saw,” he says, “I don’t know, part of a wing? Maybe some other debris. It was dark.”
Gus nods. The helicopter drops with another quick jerk. Scott’s stomach is in his throat.
“A fishing boat found pieces of wing near Philbin Beach yesterday morning,” Gus tells him. “A metal tray from the galley, a headrest, toilet seat. It’s clear we’re not looking for an intact aircraft. Sounds like the whole thing came apart. We may see more wash up in the next few days, depending on the current. The question is, did it break up on impact or in midair?”
“Sorry. I wish I could say more. But, like I said, at a certain point I hit my head.”
Scott looks out at the ocean, endless miles of open water as far as his eye can see. For the first time he thinks, Maybe it was good that it was dark. If he had been able to see the vastness around him, the epic emptiness, he may never have made it.
Across from him, Gus eats almonds from a ziplock bag. Where the average person appreciates the beauty of surf and waves, Gus, an engineer, sees only practical design. Gravity, plus ocean current, plus wind. Poetry to the common man is a unicorn viewed from the corner of an eye—an unexpected glimpse of the intangible. To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function over form. It’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, a glass half full or half empty.
To an engineer, the glass is simply too big.
This was how the world looked to Gus Franklin as a young man. Raised in Stuyvesant Village by a trash collector father and a stay-at-home mom, Gus—the only black kid in his AP calculus class—graduated summa cum laude at Fordham. He saw beauty not in nature, but in the elegant design of Roman aqueducts and microchips. To his mind, every problem on earth could be fixed by repairing or replacing a part. Or—if the operational flaw was more insidious—then you tore the whole system apart and started again.
Which is what he did to his marriage after his wife spit in his face and stormed out the door on a rainy night in 1999. Don’t you feel anything, she’d shouted moments earlier. And Gus frowned and thought about the question—not because the answer was no, but because he so clearly did have feelings. They just weren’t the feelings she wanted.
So he shrugged. And she spit and stormed out.
To say his wife was emotional would be an understatement. Belinda was the least engineering-minded person Gus had ever met—she once said the fact that flowers had Latin names robbed them of their mystery. This, he decided (spit running down his jaw), was the fatal error in his marriage that could not be fixed. They were incompatible, a square peg in a round hole. Instead, his life required a systemic redesign, in this case a divorce.