There is a scramble to try to reach someone on the Coast Guard cutter. But by the time word gets to the divers they are already moving, floating on, working their way—Gus intuits—toward the rear of the aircraft. As they pass over the port wing, Gus can see that it has snapped off with great force. The metal around the tear is twisted and curved. He looks over to the partial wing lying on the hangar floor next to a tape measure grid.
“The tail’s gone,” says Royce. Gus looks back at the screen. White lights are passing over the fuselage, moving in a slow nod as the divers kick their fins. The rear of the jet is gone, the aircraft reclining in the silt, so that the jagged tear is half buried—a machine consumed by nature.
“No,” says the woman from the airline. “It’s there, isn’t it? In the distance?”
Gus squints at the screen, and believes he can make out a glimmer on the edge of the light, man-made shapes tilted and swaying gently in the current. But then the diver’s camera turns and they are looking at the hole in the back of the plane, and as the camera tilts up, the full length of the fuselage is revealed for the first time. And suddenly they have perspective.
“I’ve got a crumple zone,” says one of the engineers.
“I see it,” says Gus, wanting to cut off speculation. The craft will have to be raised and transported back here for a full examination. Lucky for them it’s not too deep. But another hurricane is anticipated next week, and the seas are already becoming unpredictable. They will have to move fast.
A diver appears before the camera, his legs moving. He points to the blackness at the back of the plane, then to himself. The camera nods. The diver turns.
Gus sits forward in his chair, aware of the power of the moment.
They are entering the cemetery.
How to describe the things we see onscreen, experiences we have that are not ours? After so many hours (days, weeks, years) of watching TV—the morning talk shows, the daily soaps, the nightly news and then into prime time (The Bachelor, Game of Thrones, The Voice)—after a decade of studying the viral videos of late-night hosts and Funny or Die clips emailed by friends, how are we to tell the difference between them, if the experience of watching them is the same? To watch the Twin Towers fall and on the same device in the same room then watch a marathon of Everybody Loves Raymond.
To Netflix an episode of The Care Bears with your children, and then later that night (after the kids are in bed) search for amateur couples who’ve filmed themselves breaking the laws of several states. To videoconference from your work computer with Jan and Michael from the Akron office (about the new time-sheet protocols), then click (against your better instincts) on an embedded link to a jihadi beheading video. How do we separate these things in our brains when the experience of watching them—sitting or standing before the screen, perhaps eating a bowl of cereal, either alone or with others, but, in any case, always with part of us still rooted in our own daily slog (distracted by deadlines, trying to decide what to wear on a date later)—is the same?
Watching, by definition, is different from doing.
To be a diver 150 feet below the surface of the ocean, your oxygen and nitrogen levels regulated, encased in the slim cocoon of a wet suit, face mask on, feet kicking in a steady pulse, seeing only what your headlamp reveals. To feel the pressure of the deep, focused on the effort of your own breathing—something previously mechanical and automatic that now requires foresight and effort. To wear weights—literal weights—to keep your otherwise buoyant body from floating to the surface, and the way this makes your muscles strain and your breath feel bigger than your chest. In this moment there is no living room, no deadlines at work, no dates that must be dressed for. In this moment you are connected only to the reality you are experiencing. It is, in fact, reality.
Whereas Gus is simply another man seated before a desktop monitor. But even so, as the divers slip into the dark mechanical chasm that holds the dead, he experiences something visceral, outside his own room-bound reality, something that can only be described as dread.
It is darker here inside the confines of the plane. What has been lost in the crash, along with the tail, is the rear lavatory and galley, and there is a pinch to the fuselage where it has torqued from the impact. Directly ahead of the camera, flickering in the headlamp, the flippers of the forward diver move in a rhythmic paddle. That diver also wears a headlamp, and it is in the vaguer light of that diver that the first headrest becomes visible, and floating around it like a halo, a seaweed spray of hair.
The hair is visible for only a second before the forward diver blocks it with his body, and in that moment everyone watching leans to the right trying to see past him. It is an instinctive move, one the rational brain knows is impossible, but so great is the desire to see what has been revealed that each person leans as one.
“Move,” says Mayberry under his breath.