Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Concurrently, a voice on the tape said, Oh, Jesus, look at that. The camera moved past the obstruction of an office building covered in mirrored glass panels and reacquired the target, a plane moving through the air; careening was a better word. The left wing turned skyward, a movement the engineers would study and alternately decide meant some system had either failed or just started to work again.

The plane continued its trajectory, its route expanding into circles that drew closer and closer to the ground; the sound from the tape became a litany of gasps and exhalations of disbelief from seventeen-year-old Jeris McDougal and his girlfriend, a soundtrack that contained numerous utterances of nearly all the FCC’s prohibited words, audible even over the anchorman’s narration.

At the Pilgrim Hotel, half a country away, Richard MacMurray watched the coverage on the bar television. The anchorman’s words, This isn’t happening —Richard had said the same thing at seeing his father’s body on the tarmac. But at the remove of two decades, he couldn’t remember if he’d said it while watching the special report, or if it was the phrase with which he’d begun to narrate the whole week’s worth of events: the air force officer who explained about the repatriation of his father’s body, the soldiers at attention as the aluminum casket was offloaded at Dover, the stricken look on his mother’s face in the American sunlight the afternoon of the funeral, the way he’d had to remind her to extend her hands to accept the offered flag, that symbol of thanks from a grateful nation.

The nation watched.

This isn’t happening, repeated by Max Peterson in the most studied and solemn version of his voice, and the thirty-two-second tape—the plane spiraling from the upper right-hand corner of the frame and disappearing behind a landscape of warehouses and two-story office parks and freeway overpasses, the moment of the crash obscured at the horizon, the video offering only the concussive shake of the impact, followed by the thick column of rising black smoke—was over.

The director went back to a one-shot, tight on the anchor, who had nothing to say. In his ear, the producer was telling him, “Twelve seconds to cutaway; we’ll take a break and then reset at the top of the next segment,” and she was counting, “Nine seconds, eight...” He vamped for time, shuffled the stack of papers in front of him; he was the only one who knew that they were a prop, the script to a newscast that was some twenty-one hours old, a useless artifact. The television critics who saw this continuous coverage would look at the anchor, his pausing and obvious effort to collect himself, and to a person they would comment on how refreshing it was to see this small demonstration of humanity, proof that at FBN, real people still populated the news division.

In the collective memory of everyone who watched this broadcast, the anchor had teared up. Whether it was emotion or the very real consequence of being on the air for thirty-nine consecutive minutes and the rush that came with an unscripted live broadcast, or the fact that there was no water under the desk, when the voice in his IFB told him, “Five seconds and we’re out,” he put the papers down, then said only, “This is not happening.” His voice broke, a slight adolescent waver. The anchor hadn’t even noticed the playback monitor showing the tape again: the fuselage beginning to separate, what the engineers writing in the incident report labeled Catastrophic failure of the airframe; the tongues of fire; the noise of the impact; and the smoke rising in three distinct columns of dark-blue haze, with the camera zoomed in to its mechanical limits. And then the tape, and the utterances of the two teenagers, went silent.

“This is not happening.” The voice recovered its usual stentorian tone and pace. “We’ll return after a break.”

THE EARLY afternoon at Salt Lake City International Airport should have been filled with just a handful of solemn (read: hungover) travelers and the occasional harried businessman. Now, in the immediate aftermath of the crash, the relatives of the dead began to congregate, wandering near the ticket counters, increasing in numbers, all coming to the only place where they could imagine finding an answer, standing together in the stunned silence of their grief.

The survivors moved in the disoriented and staggering steps of the near-dead. They wanted to huddle together for comfort. They’d driven a loved one to the airport, and the last thing they saw, the last image, was a tepid wave or the obligatory blowing of a kiss from the other side of the security checkpoint. They scanned the terminal in search of a sign that what they had been told was a mistake. The hope was that their loved one, just this once, had missed the plane. It must have been a different airline, a different flight, they told themselves. But their hearts were already becoming accustomed to the truth. They practiced the ways and means of saying it aloud. They made phone calls. They shared pictures from their wallets and purses. They wandered the corridors in the hope of random comfort. Their anxiety was a tangible thing that they carried and passed among themselves.

In the antiseptic hallway of terminal 2, around the displays that showed the arrival and departure times of every flight, a group began to gather, their murmuring conversations attracting the attention of Bob Denovo as he mopped the linoleum floor. Bob, like the rest of us, was a voyeur, inclined to eavesdrop. He often used an old push broom to cursorily sweep under the chairs of the waiting area just to hear one side of a telephone call. He looked around the gate and began making up stories for each distressed face that he saw. Bob craved to be connected, to be returned to the bosom of friendship; he wanted to be a confidant, an ambassador of consolation.

A large man in a navy blazer stared at the monitor, moved close enough to take his finger and run it along the screen at eye level. Bob couldn’t say why he felt drawn to this man, but he pushed his custodian’s cart toward the screens and began mopping in his general vicinity. Bob wrung out the mop in its metal press and placed down a bilingual caution sign, WET FLOOR/PISO MOJADO, even though most of the people who spoke Spanish at Salt Lake City International Airport were the Salvadorans who arrived each night to buff the floors.

As a few more people arrived, Bob gave up the charade of his headphones and simply joined the crowd, listening to the chatter as it became discernible: Panorama Airlines Flight 503 was no longer listed on the departure board. Not canceled or delayed. Just gone.

Bob thought about returning to his mop, but for some reason the image of his father passed into his head. Saturday afternoons of Bob’s childhood, watching NBC’s Game of the Week with Joe Garagiola and Tony Kubek. His father had been a catcher, and among the few things he’d taught Bob was the nickname for all his gear, the mask, the chest and shin guards, the protective cup; he called them “the tools of ignorance.” “The tools of ignorance”—Bob said it out loud as he looked at his mop and bucket; pushing a mop was what he would be doing for the rest of his shift. Twelve hours on and twelve hours off, he thought, the workaday rhythm of a loser. He was a grunt, unskilled labor, an afterthought. He tried to be a good worker, to distinguish himself by volunteering to work holidays in place of the guys who were married and had families, and absolutely no one had noticed. He could put his mop and bucket back in the custodial closet and drive out into the high desert, and someone else would take his place by the next day, as if the airport spontaneously regrew the people it needed to serve it.