Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

CHADLEY AND Cadence shared a silent cab ride to O’Hare that lasted thirty-five minutes. All his overtures to conversation had been answered with monosyllabic grunts or dismissive smirks that reminded him how often Cadence made him feel like a child. He’d never thought of their age difference as significant; his own parents had been a dozen years apart yet somehow became old at the same moment. But Cadence seemed serious where he was slight, the kind of shameful, gnawing knowledge that ate away at him like an ulcer. He was not serious and had no idea how to become that way. Even his clothes—a leather motorcycle jacket that looked too new to belong to anyone who actually rode a bike, jeans and a brand-new Ramones T-shirt that had been chemically distressed to resemble a twenty-year-old Ramones T-shirt—made him feel like he was wearing a costume.

At the gate, a harried attendant informed Chadley that the entire ebb and flow of air travel back east was clogged in a mess of occluded fronts, high-altitude thunderheads, defective equipment, and, of course, the temporary closure of the airline’s hub in Dallas. The crash was being discussed at length by newscasters whose images flickered on the soundless televisions at gate C73.

Cadence, however, had chosen to pursue détente and delivered a humongous Diet Coke and a lemon poppy-seed muffin. In between glances at the Chicago Tribune, she would lean over and avail herself of a long draught on the drink straw. The third time she did so, Chadley simply handed the drink to her, and she busied herself with a copy of Forbes and a bag of cherry licorice.

To get on an airplane in the aftermath of a crash, to watch the continuous live news coverage while sitting in the molded plastic chairs surrounding gate C73 at O’Hare International Airport—indeed, even to believe in the principles of thrust and elevation and the microprocessors that control the hundreds of infinitesimal calculations that manipulate the avionics—was the ultimate expression of faith.

The flight to DC was only half-full. Once the drink cart came around, Chadley ordered two screwdrivers and dug in his pocket for a ten-dollar bill, but the flight attendant waved off the money.

She put the drinks on the edge of Chadley’s tray, between his elbow and Cadence. “Someone said you two were newlyweds,” the flight attendant said.

Cadence looked at Chadley, then answered, “Not us.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. But you do have that look. Half-excited, half-scared.”

The flight attendant unlocked the cart with her foot and slid past, and Chadley thanked her before saying to Cadence, “She’s right about the half-scared part.”

Cadence raised the corner of her mouth. “Is that really all you have to say?”

“Before. In the hotel. I was going to ask for money, you know.”

She nodded. “I know.” And then a pause. “Why didn’t you?” She put her finger in the book she was reading to look him in the eye.

“Because I knew you wouldn’t help.”

“I’m saving my help,” Cadence said, “for someone who really needs it.”

He said nothing, then lowered the window shade and hoped he could sleep. They would land in late afternoon, and by Wednesday, he’d likely be out of a job, perhaps escorted out of the building by security. A week after that, his personal things would show up in a box at his door. The question was whether he was going to pay for his mistakes all at once, or if he could spread the cost out over time.

His most specific memory of Cadence would always be the touch of her right hand, their last moment of physical contact. Standing in the crush waiting to exit the plane, Cadence reached out to touch his cheek. Chadley thought that she was going to lean in for a kiss, but in the end all she did was some reflexive grooming, wiping away a stray eyelash, before condemning him with one remark: “You have been nothing but a scared child.”

And she was exactly right. He would remember her departure as the point when he knew he was going to have to ask for help. He pictured following her off the plane, down an escalator to the baggage carousel. Underneath the terminal they would slide into the line and wait for separate taxis. At some point, with their two cars veering off into opposite directions—Chadley’s home to his near-empty condo, on the margins of downtown, Cadence’s disappearing into the grids and diagonals of the city—she would begin to recede, back to whatever secret life she craved.

THE TAXI Don and Richard hailed outside Metro Center smelled of incense and bitter orange. The driver, white, wore his hair piled high under a tam knitted in the colors of the Jamaican flag.

As Richard entered the cab, he noticed a plastic bottle filled with what was almost certainly urine rolling around on the front seat. Downside of the job, he guessed. The radio coughed out a thirty-second report on the plane crash: Federal authorities are on the scene in Dallas, where a passenger jet has crashed just minutes before its scheduled arrival, etc., and a few minutes of local news, Traffic and weather, together on the eights, and Don Keene listened to the broadcast intently, eyes closed, a sommelier sampling a wine for the first time. He nodded his agreement, then winced when the announcer stumbled over a live read of a commercial for a local mattress dealer.

“I didn’t know anyone still listened to AM,” Don said. “Other than me, that is.”

The driver headed across town on I Street. Don’s immersion in the news made Richard glad they hadn’t taken a more southerly route that would have sent them past the Treasury Department or closer to the White House. The statuary and fountains of the parks often felt oppressive to Richard, ever since the Reagan-era homeless appeared in Lafayette Park with their army surplus blankets and five-pound blocks of cheese and signs proclaiming that we were living in the end times—John on Patmos warning about the coming apocalypse—hand-lettered signs with the simplest of declarations, all in the imperative voice: Repent! Peace!

The past year had been the year of taxis. Richard took taxis everywhere. Taxis to and from work, taxis at the lunch hour to meet the four or five other men in the city who performed this same indescribable work. At lunch, they mocked each other for ordering a salad or not ordering a drink. Over steaks and potatoes, the men talked about what they would that night talk about on television, practicing their phraseology, coming up with the rhetoric of the week. They used to joke about it: if you took away the medium-rare fillet and the midday cocktail, the conventional wisdom would disappear like the passenger pigeon. They coughed out these little catchphrases in the bluster of a buzzy lunch, and later that afternoon, production assistants transformed the words into the flyover graphics and chyron’ed letters that appeared during the five o’clock hour superimposed over their chests as the men talked on and the screen reminded everyone that it was Day Seven of the Budget Impasse, that they were discussing Breaking News, or that Congress was still debating The Repeal of the Death Tax. Then a taxi back to the office, later a taxi to the news bureau and an appearance on the five p.m. national broadcasts, followed by a taxi to a fund-raiser for a gentleman who represented the good people of Tennessee’s ninth congressional district, a few more drinks. Some insouciant flirting with the endless crop of twenty-two-year-old congressional staff assistants. Then a taxi to a bar where a veteran lobbyist from the cement industry who preferred his gin and tonics in a pint glass could be counted on to provide a decent steak, a bottomless bourbon and ginger ale, a Marlboro 100, a Montecristo No. 2 cigar handed over with a conspiratorial laugh: Here, this is the kind that Castro smokes . A taxi home.