Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Jeris never once gave any indication that it might be strange that this woman was giving him the key to a motel room for the express purpose of fucking her sister. He was using Jenny, but he was also safe because he didn’t drink and lived pretty straight-edge, spent most of his time reading about whey-protein isolates and carried around a plastic gallon jug of spring water as if his mantra were Gotta stay hydrated.

Inside the room, Jeris turned on the air conditioner. The unit rattled at the same tenor as the steady roar of incoming jets. He took a seat at the desk and started fussing with the display of his new digital video camera. The camera was a combination peace offering and Christmas gift from his mother because he had spent the past two weeks on restriction, after a day-long suspension from school for a shoving match about a girl—the same girl who sat next to him now on a double bed, flipping absentmindedly through twenty-eight channels of cable TV. Mama expected Jeris home by 3:00 in the afternoon; she kept warning him not to do anything that might fuck up his scholarship, his free ride to A&M that started next fall, but he kept getting in these little skirmishes at school. Last Friday his mother’s workday had ended with a phone call from an assistant principal, warning her that Jeris was associating with undesirables, which by the principal’s definition meant that Jeris had suddenly turned into an actual, verifiable teenager and was no longer behaving like a Cosby kid.

Jeris ordered Jenny to turn off the television and then tried to get her to pose for him on the orange-and-brown polyester bedspread. The motel was the only real place they could fuck, what with the way Jeris’s mother watched over him and the sideways looks he had always gotten for dating white girls, from his mother and from everyone else.

Jenny’s mother certainly did not like her daughter keeping up with a young black man, could not stomach that Jeris liked to tease her about his being black, loud and proud. Jenny’s sister became their accomplice, but she could swing the young couple only an hour in one of those empty rooms, and Jeris was trying to both keep an eye on the time and not once look at his watch.

“You’re not going to take pictures of me,” Jenny said, her eyes following along with the movements of the lens as Jeris panned down past her breasts, toward the floor, pausing to slowly consider the length of her legs.

In the viewfinder, Jeris perfected a close-up of Jenny’s lips and told her, “Let me see your tongue,” and then moved in closer and said, “When are you going to show me something good? I’m going to need to see that shit.”

He thought Jenny looked like a beer commercial come to life. Healthy. Jeris loved her name too; he’d never met a black girl named Jenny. She was a ticket to a life of pool tables and hot tubs and raunchy suburban sex in her parents’ king-size bed while they spent the weekend at the casinos in Gulfport. A girl named Jenny could never live in a place like his mom’s, with its orange countertops and striped wallpaper and plastic carpet protectors. In a few months, Jeris would figure out for himself that Jenny’s family had neither money nor prospects, but on that New Year’s Day he still remained enough in her thrall that the silver blouse she wore, a little glittery thing left over from the night before, looked to him like the very promise of better days.

She worked at the buttons, slowly and from the bottom hem, peering up at Jeris with each one as if pantomiming a training film she’d seen on how to seduce a boy. Jeris knew that she required this, that her effort to be sexy eventually passed into something that made her feel wanton and lusty; for now, she just mimicked what she had seen in the movies she and Jeris had watched, nothing too hard-core, a few late-night cable things with looped minutes of simulated bumping and grinding. They had already talked about watching themselves. In the early days of their dating, Jenny admitted that she wanted to see them fuck on tape, but he misread her curiosity for abject desire. She did not necessarily want to perform, she would explain to him whenever he raised the subject; she only wanted to see what she looked like, what it was that he saw when he looked at her in that animalistic way (he didn’t know that with every movement she made, every button undone, every base that he went racing past, his tongue announced itself with an unconscious dart out over his lips, a reaction that Jenny registered as unthinking and reptilian).

By now they had wasted fifteen minutes of their hour together scouting out the angles, finding a place on the motel dresser where Jeris could set down the camera and still see most of the queen-size bed through the viewfinder. Jenny’s slow maneuvering made Jeris anxious, impatient. When her blouse fell open to her waist, revealing a red-and-black bra with intricate embroidery, she stood at the foot of the bed and said, “Can you close the drapes? If I’m going to do this, I need some more darkness. I need it to be just us.”

Jeris loved the way the motel drapes turned the room into a sensory deprivation tank, but he wanted to see all of Jenny, worried there would not be enough light for the camera. Too much of their sport fucking happened in the dark, in cars and basements, illuminated by televisions and dashboards. And at the most basic level, since she had asked, Jeris did not want to do it. Not without some negotiation. He pointed the camera at Jenny, who playfully ran her hands across her chest, then lowered first one bra strap, then the other, across her tanned and greatly freckled shoulders.

He stood at a ninety-degree angle to the window, looking at Jenny through the camera. “That looks so good. Are you going to put on a show for me? Are you going to suck me?” And then Jeris, in his peripheral vision, caught a glimpse of something moving across the brightness of a flat blue sky, as if the large window had turned into a television; the image blurred across the screen, moving downward diagonally from the upper right, a trail of black and orange. And before he realized that the contrail he saw was smoke, the surest sign of distress, he raised the camera, never even conscious that he was recording the incident. Jenny rushed to the window behind him and said, “What is that?” and then one or both of them were swearing repeatedly, almost autonomically, “Holy shit” and “Oh my fucking God,” their words picked up by the open microphone. Across north-central Texas, at least a hundred people looked toward the sky, pointing, wondering. But Jeris was the first to understand what he saw and the only one to catch this moment on tape.

He was shirtless and shoeless and wearing only a pair of jeans, still rigid with their unwashed sizing, so it was hard for him to move with any speed, but he ran out the door, down the open staircase, and into the motel parking lot, and Tara, working the room next door, came out to see him running half-naked, his camera pointed almost at the sun. And the last thing Jeris said before the moving blur disappeared behind a horizon crowded with warehouses and office parks was, “That has to be a plane.”

TEXAS, MIDAFTERNOON on New Year’s Day, about to add another sad chapter to its history.

A commercial airliner on approach to Dallas–Fort Worth International, at that moment the world’s fifth-busiest airport. Bathed in the strobing winter sun, the plane’s fuselage glittered, a futuristic costume jewel left over from the night before. The passengers took in the perfect day, and the cabin crew, who put faith in technology above observation, scanned the associated readouts that provided scientific proof of what they saw outside their windows. Doppler radar confirmed the forecasts: no threat of microbursts, wind shear, thunderstorms, or sudden crosswinds. The temperature was nearly seventy, and visibility matched the prospects for the New Year—unlimited.