Some cracked, but most got it, and when the bodies started coming, we were a well-oiled machine. We didn’t talk about what happened to this aircraft—not our concern—but it was hard to miss the people crowding the pier every evening when our shift ended. The families. Second day into the operation, I was walking to the hotel shuttle bus when someone shoved a photograph in my hands. Before I had a chance to look away, I saw it was a picture of a smiling man, all messy black hair and a mustache. “This is my husband.” The voice was gentle—not accusing, like the others. It was almost as if she were introducing us at a party. I looked up and saw a short lady with frizzy brown hair and a pretty mouth. She wore a purple polka-dotted scarf ’round her neck. Her glasses made her big brown eyes look even bigger, and I noticed those eyes were dry. “Have you come across him yet?” she asked. I glanced down at the photo again before handing it back to her, and she told me his name. Didn’t want to know his name, but now I knew it: Kevin. She told me he was on his way to Cairo, that he was a journalist. “For a very prestigious periodical,” she told me, but I’d never heard of it. She seemed disappointed when I said this, but I told her not to worry, that I barely know how to read. That made her smile a little.
Gluck passed by with two of the divers and gave me a funny look. I knew I should leave, but I asked her name. I don’t know why I did. I never ask. But I wanted to know her name, even if I didn’t want to know her husband’s. She told me, “Denise,” and she asked mine. Before I knew what I was doing, I told her my Christian name, because suddenly Bozer didn’t sound good enough. She told me mine is a nice name, but when I told her everybody calls me Bozer, she said that it was “more fitting.” That’s when the shuttle bus driver laid on the horn.
Next morning, Denise was there at the pier, with a cup of coffee for me. Gluck gave me another funny look when he saw us talking, but I ignored it. I knew what he was thinking, that I’m going soft, and later, on the ship, he told me just that. Said I was setting a bad example for the rest of the team, talking to the families during a recovery operation, making it personal. But when she was there that evening, too, I knew Gluck was wrong, because I was feeling strong as a bull ox.
I took her to one of the chowder houses on the wharf, and let her talk about her man. Guy sounded pretty regular to me but to her he was a king. So I listened. But then she noticed my tat—the one on my forearm, of Antarctica with a roofing nail shot through the middle—and asked me about it. So I told her about Pole, that I’d been there since Floyd and me cleaned up Kuwait City—six years and counting. I tell her I’m a lifer.
“If you’re a lifer,” she said, quick as a flash, “what are you doing here?”
“I’m here to find your man.”
She needed time, and she had places to go. She told me what sociologists do and why they need to move around. At first, she wanted to go to Cairo, to see if she could understand why an Egyptian ex-military pilot would send a passenger plane into the Atlantic. “Perhaps he was traumatized by war,” she told me six months later, when I called her from Comms to see how she was doing. By that time we were talking every week, and I could feel my heart winging around in my chest as it got closer to Monday, when I knew I’d hear her voice. “I learned that many members of his squadron were killed in the Yom Kippur War,” she told me of the pilot who’d killed her husband. “I imagine there are many ex-military men grappling with the same awful memories.” I told her not to go to Cairo. I told her to come south. “If you want something to study, study us. Won’t find a weirder bunch of people anywhere else on earth.”
It took a season to convince her—she went to Brazil first to work with streetwalking trannies—but she came down, and when she came down, everything fit. I knew that was all she needed: a place where people don’t fly planes into the ocean just because. Me, well, I just needed her.
When I showed her the Man Without Country that day, she looked at him for a good long time. It had been five years since that day Floyd and me found him a mile off the skiway. He hadn’t changed a bit. For a minute, I worried I did the wrong thing. We never found her man—only a shoe, which she had to identify in an airplane hangar in Newport. True, no one knew who this man was, but at least he was whole. At least he was here.
When Denise got up from her knees, that beautiful smile was still on her face. I asked her what. She smiled wider. “He is everyone anyone has ever lost.”
That’s what I need to get Cooper to understand. We’ve all got our shit—me, Denise, the Man Without Country, who’s got the worst shit of all ’cause he’s stone-dead and ain’t nobody wants him. Everyone’s got it, and it don’t make you special. Still, she won’t walk in.
“You think I’m gonna go Dahmer on you?” I say to her. “Get in here.”
Now she’s in and it’s pitch dark, as it always is. I wave the flashlight around the room so she can see the four plywood walls, get oriented. I take her arm, and we walk toward the far wall, and she’s not asking questions—usually they’re asking by now. The flashlight ain’t hit him yet, but when it does, she stops short. I let her eyes get used to him. The drop-kick lands, and she backs up into me—her boots get tangled up with mine, and I have to catch her arm so she doesn’t fall.
Now she’s asking questions. “Bozer, what is this?”
“Go ahead,” I say, holding the flashlight on him steady.
“Go ahead, what?”
“Go look. He’s perfectly preserved.” She turns around and puts her face in my parka. No one’s done that before. I let her do this for a minute, and then I peel her off and set her on course again, and this time she walks toward him. He’s set on the berm we made back when we found him, snow and ice we scraped from the floor and walls. It was me who thought to wrap him in sheeting from Logistics, and it’s held up good.
“Who is he?” she asks.
“This here’s the Man Without Country. He ain’t got a home so we’re leaving him here in the Tomb until we get word.” She don’t understand, so I explain. “We found him about a mile off the skiway. He was wearing a Vostok parka, but the Reds said he wasn’t one of theirs. China, Chile, the Kiwis—nobody. The Program can’t claim him because he’s not a U.S. citizen. So here he lies.” She walks closer to him now, looks at him. I can tell she notices that he wasn’t wrapped hasty; it was done right. “You can see his beard,” she says. She asks me why I’m showing her this, and I tell her the Man Without Country is here to tell her something. She looks at me with those sad dark eyes and asks me what he wants to tell her. “He says you don’t come down here to commit suicide, honey. You come here so you don’t.”
*