Noah Hawley - Before the Fall

“Have you spoken to the boy?” someone shouts. “Was he scared?”

Scott thinks about that.

“Wow.” he says. “That’s — I don’t know that that’s a question for me to — the four-year-old brain — I mean, that’s an entirely different conversation. I know what the experience was for me — a speck in a vast and hostile darkness — but for him, at this moment in development, biologically, I mean. And with the nature of fear — at a certain level — the animal power of it. But again, at his age—”

He breaks off, thinking, aware that he is not giving them what they want, but concerned that their questions are too important to answer in the moment, to define in passing, simply to meet some kind of arbitrary deadline. What was the experience like? Why did it happen? What does it mean going forward? These are subjects for books. They are questions you meditate over for years — to find the right words, to identify all the critical factors, both subjective and objective.

“It’s an important question,” he says, “and one we may never really know the answer to.”

He turns to Vanessa.

“I mean, do you have kids?”

She is twenty-six at most.

“No.”

Scott turns to her cameraman, in his forties.

“You?”

“Uh, yeah. A little girl.”

Scott nods.

“And see, then there’s gender, and the time of night, how he was asleep when the plane went down, and did he think it was a dream maybe? At first. Like maybe he was still sleeping. So many factors.”

“People say you’re a hero,” shouts a third reporter.

“Is that a question?”

“Do you think you’re a hero?”

“You’d have to define the word for me,” says Scott. “Plus, what I think doesn’t really matter. Or — that’s not true — what I think about myself hasn’t always proven to be accurate, according to the world at large. Like, how in my twenties I thought I was an artist, but really I was just a kid in his twenties who thought he was an artist. Does that make sense?”

“Scott,” they shout.

“I’m sorry,” says Scott, “I can tell I’m not giving you what you want.”

“Scott,” says Vanessa. “This is from Bill Cunningham directly. Why were you on that plane?”

“You mean, in a cosmic sense, or—”

“How did you end up on the plane?” she says, correcting herself.

“Maggie invited me.”

“Maggie is Margaret Bateman, wife of David.”

“Yes.”

“And were you having an affair with her, with Mrs. Bateman?”

Scott frowns.

“Like a sexual affair?”

“Yes. Just as you are now having an affair with Ms. Mueller, whose father donates millions to liberal causes.”

“Is that a real question?”

“People have a right to the truth.”

“Just because I’ve been inside her house, you’re saying I’ve had — that she and I have had sex. This is your Einstein conclusion.”

“Isn’t it true that you wooed your way onto that plane?”

“In order to what — crash into the sea and have to swim ten miles to shore with a busted shoulder?”

He feels no anger, just bafflement at the line of questioning.

“Isn’t it true the FBI has questioned you multiple times?”

“Does two count as multiple?”

“Why are you in hiding?”

“You say in hiding like I’m John Dillinger. I’m a private citizen, living his life in private.”

“You didn’t go home after the crash. Why not?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Maybe you feel you’ve got something to hide.”

“Staying out of sight is not the same thing as hiding,” says Scott. “I miss my dog. That’s for sure.”

“Tell us about the paintings. Is it true the FBI has seized them?”

“No. Not that I — they’re just pictures. A man stands in a shed on an island. Who knows why he paints what he paints? He feels like his life is a disaster. Maybe that’s where it starts. With irony. But then — he sees something greater there, a key maybe to understanding. Is this—? Am I answering your—”

“Is it true you painted a plane crash?”

“Yes. That’s one of the — it feels like, to me, I mean, we’re all gonna die. That’s — biology. All animals — but we’re the only ones that — know. And yet we — somehow we manage to put this profound knowledge into some kind of a box. We know, but at the same time we don’t. And yet in these moments of mass death — a ferry sinks, a plane crashes — we are brought face-to-face with the truth. We too will die one day, and for reasons that have nothing to do with us, our hopes and dreams. One day you get on a bus to go to work and there’s a bomb. Or you go to Walmart looking for savings on Black Friday and get crushed by a mob. So — what started as irony — my life, the disaster — opened a door.”

He chews his lip.

“But the man in the shed is still just a man in a shed, you know?”

Vanessa touches the plastic in her ear.

“Bill would like to invite you to come to the studio for a one-on-one interview.”

“That’s nice of him,” says Scott. “I think. Except the look on your face doesn’t seem like you’re being nice. More like the police.”

“People are dead, Mr. Burroughs,” she says. “Do you really think now is the time for nice?”

“Now more than ever,” he tells her, then turns and walks away.

It takes a few blocks, but eventually they stop following him. He tries to walk normally, aware of himself both as a body in space and time, and as an image viewed by thousands (millions?). He takes Bleecker to Seventh Avenue and jumps in a cab. He is thinking about how they found him — a man in a locked apartment with no cell phone. Layla says she didn’t talk, and he has no reason to doubt her. A woman with a billion dollars doesn’t lie unless she wants to, and from the way she acted it seemed like Layla liked having Scott as her own little secret. And Magnus, well, Magnus lies about a lot of things, but this doesn’t feel like one of them. Unless they gave him money, but then why did Magnus end their phone call by hitting Scott up for a hundred bucks?

The universe is the universe, he thinks. I suppose it is enough to know there is a reason without having to know what it is. Some new kind of satellite maybe? Software that burrows into our bones while we sleep? Yesterday’s science fiction becomes today’s IPO.

He was an invisible man and now he’s not. What matters is that he runs toward something and not away. Sitting in the back of a cab, Scott pictures the boy eating cereal in front of the television late at night — unable to sleep — watching a dog drawn from the letters d-o-g talk to a cat drawn from the letters c-a-t . If only real life were that simple, where everyone we met and every place we went was fashioned from the pure essence of its identity. Where you looked at a man and saw the letters f-r-i-e-n-d , and looked at a woman and saw the word w-i-f-e .

The screen is on in the cab, playing clips from late-night television. Scott reaches forward and turns it off.

There were legends about him, stories, but more than stories. Theories might be a better word. Gil Baruch, forty-eight, Israeli expat. (Though one of the theories was that he owned a home on the razor’s edge of the West Bank, an edge he himself had forged single-handedly from Palestinian land, driving up one day in an old jeep and setting up his tent, enduring the stares and taunts of the Palestinians. Rumors he had chopped the wood himself, poured the foundation, a rifle strap over his chest. That the first house had been torched by an angry mob, and Gil — rather than using his prodigious sniper skills or hand-to-hand prowess — had simply watched and waited, and when the crowd dispersed he urinated his disdain into the ashes and started again.)