Noah Hawley - Before the Fall

“Early reports on the pilot and copilot look clean,” says Gus. “Melody was a twenty-three-year veteran who flew with GullWing for eleven years. No black marks, no citations or complaints. Kind of an interesting childhood, though, raised by a single mom who took him to live with a doomsday cult when he was little.”

“Like a Jim Jones Guyana cult?” asks Scott.

“Unclear,” says Gus. “We’re doing some digging, but most likely it’s just a detail.”

“And the other one?” asks Scott. “The copilot?”

“A little bit more of a story there,” says Gus. “And obviously none of this is to be repeated, but you’ll probably see a lot of it in the press. Charles Busch was Logan Birch’s nephew. The senator. Grew up in Texas. Did some time in the National Guard. Sounds like he was kind of a playboy. A couple of citations, mostly for appearance — showing up to work unshaven. Probably partied too hard the night before. But no red flags. We’re talking to the airline, trying to get a clearer picture.”

James Melody and Charles Busch . Scott barely even saw the copilot, has only a vague memory of Captain Melody. He tries to commit the details to memory. These are the people who died. Each had a life, a story.

Around them the sea has turned choppy. The Coast Guard cutter ramps and banks.

“Looks like a storm is coming,” says Scott.

Gus holds the rail and stares out at the horizon.

“Unless it’s a class four hurricane,” he says, “we don’t abandon the search.”

* * *

Scott has a cup of tea inside while Gus manages the search. There is a TV on in the galley, pictures of the ship he is on from a news helicopter, the search in progress live. Scott feels like he’s in one of those mirrored rooms, his image reflecting off into infinity. Two sailors on break drink coffee and watch themselves on TV.

The image of the search party is replaced by a talking head — Bill Cunningham in red suspenders.

“—watching the search as it progresses. Then at four p.m. don’t miss a special broadcast, Are Our Skies Safe? And look — I’ve held my tongue long enough — but this whole thing smells more than a little fishy to me. ’Cause if this plane really did crash, then where are the bodies ? If David Bateman and his family are really — dead — then why haven’t we seen the — and now I’m hearing, and ALC broke this story just hours after the event, that Ben Kipling, the notorious money manager rumored to be on board the flight — that Kipling was about to be indicted by the Treasury Department for trading with the enemy. That’s right, folks, for investing money illegally obtained from countries like Iran and North Korea. And what if this disaster was an enemy nation tying up loose ends. Muzzle this Kipling traitor once and for all. So we have to ask — why hasn’t the government characterized this crash for what it is — a terrorist attack?”

Scott turns his back to the TV and sips his tea out of a paper cup. He tries to tune out the voices.

“And just as important, who is this man? Scott Burroughs.”

Hold on, what? Scott turns back. Onscreen is a photo of him taken sometime last decade — an artist portrait that accompanied a gallery show he did in Chicago.

“Yes, I know, they’re saying he rescued a four-year-old boy, but who is he and what was he doing on that plane?”

Now a live image of Scott’s house on the Vineyard. How is that possible? Scott sees his three-legged dog in the window, barking soundlessly.

“Wikipedia lists him as some kind of painter, but has no personal information. We contacted the Chicago gallery where Mr. Burroughs allegedly held his last show in 2010, but they claimed never to have met him. So ask yourself, how does a nobody painter who hasn’t shown a painting in five years end up on a luxury plane with two of the richest men in New York?”

Scott watches his house on TV. A shingled, single-story home rented from a Greek fisherman for nine hundred dollars a month. It needs a paint job — and he waits for Cunningham’s inevitable joke, the painter’s house that needs a paint job — but it doesn’t come.

“And so now, live on this network, this journalist is asking — if there’s anyone out there who knows this mystery painter, please call the station. Convince me that Mr. Burroughs is real and not some sleeper agent posing as a has-been who just got activated by ISIS.”

Scott sips his tea, aware of the stares of the two soldiers. He feels a presence behind him.

“Looks like going home is out of the question,” Gus says, having wandered up behind Scott.

Scott turns.

“Apparently,” he says, feeling a completely foreign disconnect — who he is inside versus this new idea of him, his new identity as a public persona, his name pronounced with vitriol by a famous face. And how if he goes home he will walk out of his life and onto that screen. He will become theirs.

Gus watches the TV for a moment, then goes over and turns it off.

“You got anywhere you can crash for a few days,” he says, “under the radar?”

Scott thinks about it, comes up blank. He has called the one friend he has and ditched him in a gas station parking lot. There are cousins somewhere, an old fiancé, but he has to believe that these people have already been discovered in the Google search of modern curiosity. What he needs is someone nonlinear, a name generated seemingly at random, that no private eye or computer algorithm could ever predict.

Then a name enters his head, some cosmic synapse firing. Two words spoken with an Irish lilt that paint a picture: a blond woman with a billion dollars.

“Yeah, I think I know who to call,” he says.

Eleanor remembers when they were girls. There was no yours and mine . Everything she and Maggie owned was communal, the hairbrush, the striped and polka-dot dresses, the hand-me-down Raggedy Ann and Andy. They used to sit in the farmhouse sink, facing the mirror, and brush each other’s hair — a record on in the living room — Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie or the Chieftains — the sounds of their father cooking. Maggie and Eleanor Greenway, eight and six, or twelve and ten, sharing CDs, swooning over the same boys. Eleanor was the younger, towheaded and spritely. Maggie had a dance she did, twirling with a long ribbon until she got dizzy. Eleanor would watch and laugh and laugh.

For Eleanor there was never a time where she thought in terms of I . Every sentence in her head began with we . And then Maggie went to college and Eleanor had to learn how to be singular. She remembers that first three-day weekend, spinning in her empty room, listening for laughter that never came. And how that feeling, of being alone, felt like bugs in her skeleton. And so on Monday, when school started, she threw herself off the cliff of boys, opening her eyes for the first time to the idea of couplehood with someone else. She was going steady with Paul Aspen by Friday. And when that ended three weeks later, she switched to Damon Wright.

It was the lightbulb behind her eyes guiding her, this idea — never be alone again.

Over the next decade there was a series of men, crushes and infatuations, surrogates. Day in and day out Eleanor dodged her central defect, locking the door and rolling up the window, eyes doggedly forward, even as its knocks became louder and louder.

She met Doug three years ago in Williamsburg. She had just turned thirty-one, was working a temp job in Lower Manhattan and doing yoga in the evenings. She lived with two roommates in a three-story walk-up in Carroll Gardens. The most recent love of her life, Javier, had dropped her a week earlier — after she found lipstick stains on his boxers — and most days she felt like a rain-soaked paper bag. Her roommates told her she should try being alone for a while. Uptown, Maggie said the same, but every time she tried Eleanor felt that same old feeling, those bugs climbing back into her bones.