Noah Hawley - Before the Fall

“Back door?” Scott asks her.

She points.

Scott walks down a short hall, past the restrooms. He pushes open a heavy fire door and stands squinting in the sun. There is a chain-link fence a few feet away, and behind that the start of a residential neighborhood. Scott puts the twenty in his front pocket. He tries to climb the fence one-handed, but the sling gets in the way so he ditches it. A few moments later he is on the other side, walking through a vacant lot, his flip-flops slapping against his heels. It is late August, and the air is thick and broiled. He pictures Magnus behind the wheel. He will have turned on the radio, found an oldies station. Right now he’s probably singing along with Queen, arching his neck on the high notes.

Around Scott, the neighborhood is lower-class, cars on blocks in driveways, aboveground pools sloshing in backyards. He is a man in hospital scrubs and flip-flops walking through the midday heat. A mental patient for all anybody knows.

Thirty minutes later he finds a fried chicken joint, goes inside. It’s just a counter and stove with a couple of chairs in front.

“You got a phone I could use?” he asks the Dominican guy behind the counter.

“Gotta order something,” the guy tells him.

Scott orders a bucket of thighs and a ginger ale. The clerk points to a phone on the wall in the kitchen. Scott takes a business card from his pocket and dials. A man answers on the second ring.

“NTSB.”

“Gus Franklin, please,” says Scott.

“Speaking.”

“It’s Scott Burroughs. From the hospital.”

“Mr. Burroughs, how are you?”

“Fine. Look. I’m — I want to help — with the search. The rescue. Whatever.”

There is silence on the other end of the line.

“I’m told you checked out of the hospital,” says Gus, “somehow without being seen by the press.”

Scott thinks about this.

“I dressed up like a doctor,” he says, “and went out the back door.”

Gus laughs.

“Very clever. Listen. I’ve got divers in the water searching for the fuselage, but it’s slow going, and this is a high-profile case. Is there anything you can tell us, anything else you can remember about the crash, what happened before?”

“It’s coming back,” Scott tells him. “Still just fragments, but — let me help with the search. Maybe being out there — maybe it’ll shake something loose.”

Gus thinks about this.

“Where are you?”

“Well,” says Scott, “let me ask you this — how do you feel about chicken thighs?”

The first thing that catches your eye is the light, or rather two lights angled toward a single focal point, becoming a figure-eight flare at the center of the canvas. It is big, this painting, eight feet long and five feet high, the once white tarpaulin transformed into a smoky gray glitter. Or maybe what you see first is calamity, two dark rectangles slicing the frame, jackknifed, their metallic skeletons glowing in the moonlight. There are flames on the edge of the picture, as if the story doesn’t end just because the painting stops, and people who view the image have been known to walk to the far edges looking for more information, microscoping the framing wood for even a hint of added drama.

The lights that flare out the center of the image are the headlights of an Amtrak passenger train, its caboose having come to rest almost perpendicular to the twisted iron track that bends and waves below it. The first passenger car has disconnected from the caboose and now makes the trunk of a T, having maintained its forward momentum and smashed the engine dead center, bending its bread-box contours into a vague V.

As with any bright light, the headlight glare here obscures much of the image, but upon further examination a viewer might discover a single passenger — in this case a young woman — dressed in a black skirt and torn white blouse, her hair tousled across her face, matted by blood. She is wandering shoeless through the jagged wreckage, and if you squint past the illusion of light you can see that her eyes are wide and searching. She is the victim of disaster, a survivor of heat and impact, cantilevered from her resting position into an impossible parabola of unexpected torture, her once placid world — gently rocking, click clack, click clack — now a screeching twist of metal.

What is she looking for, this woman? Is it merely a way out? A clear and sensible path to safety? Or has she lost something? Someone? In that moment, when gentle rocking turned into a cannonball ricochet, did she go from wife and mother, from sister or girlfriend, from daughter or paramour to refugee? A fulfilled and happy we to a stunned and grieving I ?

And so, even as other paintings call to you, you can’t help but stand there and help her look.

The life vest is so tight it’s hard to breathe, but Scott reaches up and pulls the straps again. It is an unconscious gesture. One he’s been doing every few moments since they got on the helicopter. Gus Franklin sits across from him, studying his face. Beside him is Petty Officer Berkman in an orange jumpsuit and glassy black helmet. They are in a Coast Guard MH-65C Dolphin racing over the wave caps of the Atlantic. In the distance Scott can just make out the cliffs of Martha’s Vineyard. Home. But this is not where they’re going. Not yet. Sneeze, the three-legged dog, will have to wait. Scott thinks of her now, a white mutt with one black eye. An eater of horse shit, a connoisseur of long grass, who lost her back right leg to cancer last year and was climbing stairs again within two days. Scott checked in with his neighbor after he got off the phone with Gus this morning. The dog was fine, his neighbor told him. She was lying on the porch panting at the sun. Scott thanked her again for watching the dog. He said he should be home in a couple of days.

“Take your time,” his neighbor said. “You’ve been through a lot. And good for you. What you did for that boy. Good for you.”

He thinks of the dog now, missing a limb. If she can bounce back, why can’t I?

The helicopter bucks through chunky air, each drop like a hand slapping a jar, trying to dislodge the last peanut. Except in this case Scott is the peanut. He grips his seat with his right hand, his left arm still in a sling. The trip from the coast takes twenty minutes. Looking out the window at the miles of ocean, Scott can’t believe how far he swam.

Scott was at the barbecue joint sipping water for an hour before Gus arrived. He drove up in a white sedan— company car , he told Scott — and entered the restaurant with a change of clothes in hand.

“I took a guess at the size,” he said and threw the clothes to Scott.

“I’m sure they’ll be great. Thanks,” said Scott and went into the bathroom to change. Cargo pants and a sweatshirt. The pants were too big in the waist and the sweatshirt too tight in the shoulders — the dislocated shoulder made changing clothes a challenge — but at least he felt like a normal person again. He washed his hands and pushed the scrubs deep into the garbage.

On the helicopter, Gus points out the starboard side. Scott follows his finger to the Coast Guard Cutter Willow , a gleaming white ship anchored in the sea below.

“You ever been on a helicopter before?” Gus yells.

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.