Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Sarah slipped out of the bathroom first and headed instinctively for the kitchen, away from this Carter guy and away from the hum of the party. She’d never known a man who had refused a blow job. She made herself a stiff margarita, doubling up on the Herradura Silver. She gathered her drink, wrapping the stem of her glass in a paper napkin, and when she returned to the great room, the spectators, her party guests, were all standing around the television. We’re getting reports of the disappearance of a passenger jet, a Boeing 727 bound from Salt Lake City to Dallas, vanishing from the screens of air traffic controllers just moments before its scheduled landing at Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport, apparently crashing into the Texas countryside at approximately 2:05 Central Standard Time.

She felt the tension in the muscles of her jaw, her teeth tight, one deck against the other; she used two fingers to inspect the racing of her drug-afflicted heart as it announced itself in her carotid pulse.

Sarah managed to think about the child. Who can say what he saw?

She did not think of herself as maternal, but surely Mary Beth would have wanted to shelter the kid from news of the disaster du jour that he couldn’t possibly understand. He was a curious one, that Gabriel. Just a few minutes before, passing idly through the den, he looked up at the football game long enough to ask the room the difference between field turf and regular old grass, and no one knew to answer him. That was his M.O. He’d been watching those end-of-year wrap-up shows and pestering her with questions: What is the Palestine Liberation Organization? Who is Al Gore? Where’s Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Vanuatu, Kashmir? What’s the euro? He’d watched the weather and explained the polar vortex and the jet stream to Sarah, and seemed to have at his disposal a tremendous amount of useless information for a first-grader, the kind of things that couldn’t help you at all in the real world but made you a hit at parties and a wizard at Trivial Pursuit.

Gabriel stopped playing with the Lincoln Logs and the Legos and the pack of cards and the Matchbox cars and the blanket, ignored the small plate of nacho-cheese tortilla chips and the plastic cup filled with America’s number-four-bestselling soft drink. Instead he stared at the television as the anchor repeated the lede.

A Boeing 727 bound from Salt Lake City to Dallas has crashed on approach to Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport, some thirty-eight minutes ago. You are watching continuous live coverage of the crash of Panorama Airlines Flight 503, lost on approach to Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport. We have crews on the way, and we’ll continue to bring you the most news and information on this developing story after a short break.

The news seemed to stop the party. A handful of people moved closer to the television, and a voice, indistinct, demanded that they turn the volume up. The silence stunned the child.

Minutes before, he had himself prescribed the deaths of the entire civilian population of one of Asia’s largest cities, but now he stood in front of the screen as it showed an aerial shot, the news helicopter hovering at a discreet distance from the crash site, the only sign of tragedy the presence of fire and rescue vehicles, the men in their turnouts loitering truckside in the midday sun. Gabriel stood there, in front of the television, mouth open with the intent of making noise. The helicopter shot moved higher to show a scar, a burning field. Who can say what the child saw?

RICHARD WATCHED.

He hadn’t removed his IFB device, so he could hear the New York producer narrating the story into the anchorman’s ear. “What we know,” the voice said, “Panorama 503. A Boeing 727 en route to DFW from Salt Lake. The rest is going to come at you hot.” Richard knew enough to deduce: crash.

His interview canceled, he unplugged himself and made his way into the tight quarters of the control room. He mouthed, We’re done? and Toni nodded, paused her shuffle of phones to point up at the large monitors and turn on their audio feed. A fly-in graphic, then introductory music, ten seconds of backing track, long enough for a voice-over to say, “From FBN World News Headquarters in New York, this is a special report. Reporting from our Washington bureau, here is FBN News Now anchor Max Peterson,” and on the camera monitor, Richard saw the anchorman fiddling with his lapel microphone. A third hand, some technician, reached in from stage left to make one final adjustment of the mic before a voice in the background, bleeding through on the control room audio, said, “You’re in the goddamn frame!”

The anchor said quietly, “Steady, people.” The guy was unflappable. Another newsman of the trench-coat-and-safari-jacket era; he’d covered George Romney’s quixotic 1968 run for the White House right up to the moment the governor claimed he’d been brainwashed; he’d found time to smoke hash with the fine gentlemen of Second Battalion, Fifth Marines on a few days of mop-up patrol in one of South Vietnam’s hottest sectors. A plane crash wasn’t going to make him lose his shit.

On the main monitor, the graphic dissolved, the animation fading as the anchorman lowered his head to begin: “Good afternoon. We’re interrupting to bring breaking news out of our Dallas bureau. This afternoon, Panorama Airlines Flight 503, a Boeing 727 passenger jet bound from Salt Lake City to Dallas, vanished from the screens of air traffic controllers just moments before its scheduled landing at Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport. Weather in the area has been reported as clear. And now FBN is confirming”—he pushed his earpiece farther in—“based on police and fire department sources, that Panorama 503 has crashed on approach. A crew is en route to the scene, and we’ll take you there for a live report. But first, a short break. Stay with us, this is FBN.”

A bumper. If it’s news, FBN is there.

Television, Richard thought. The perfect messenger of death. Plane crash, but first a word from our sponsors. He’d seen this movie before. His own father, facedown on the tarmac of a military airfield in a third world country he’d never heard of. The tableau he remembered: his father’s body in the foreground, surrounded by plain men in sack suits who had conjured up handguns and automatic weapons. One guy barked orders, a Secret Service earpiece dangling against his collar. This was a special report, rendered in the grainy realism of 16-millimeter film. For emphasis, one of the agents waved around a compact submachine gun—a weapon he was not supposed to have, a gift of fealty from a Mossad colonel—and no one, not even the millions who saw the film (it was still on film) a day later on television, noticed the proscribed weapon. His father’s body, followed by a commercial. How’d you like a nice Hawaiian Punch?

Richard made his way to what he hoped was an unobtrusive spot in the rear of the control room and watched the live feed. The room pulsed with the urgency of disaster, people making and receiving phone calls, doing the leg work of solid reporting, figuring the capacity of the aircraft, its flight schedules and maintenance history, obtaining a copy of the passenger manifest. The familiar faces of on-air personalities scurrying back and forth to the desks in the newsroom.

One of the other monitors showed a young female reporter milling around the crash site, flipping pages in a reporter’s notebook, trying to push flying tendrils of her hair behind her ear. At the edge of the two-lane road that led to the airport fire station, a sterile area had been carved out by lines of yellow caution tape running between a perimeter fence and an idling fire truck. A firefighter in full turnout gear was pushing the reporter gently toward the truck.