Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Then there was the matter of the half-awake man on the other side of the apartment door, this confusion in the hallway and the dull tintinnabulus of bells and alarms in the background. None of it disturbed Richard’s continuing dream. During his unintentional nap, Richard’s mind had constructed a dreamscape that was an impossibly confused pastiche of his past: a child playing in Richard’s childhood bedroom, with its blue walls and the laundry chute that dropped straight to the basement and the closest thing Richard had to a secret lair, a window seat. In both the dream and later in his memory of it, he would assume he had been watching himself.

The bookshelves of that bedroom had been filled with oversize volumes of children’s tales, The Three Little Pigs, the only one Richard could actually remember, and so in the dream, all the books became The Three Little Pigs, in hundreds of different editions, embossed leather covers and glossy consumer paperbacks with cartoonish drawings wherein the Big Bad Wolf wasn’t so much a villain as a charming and obsequious neighbor; he’d somehow morphed into a cartoon, more Wile E. Coyote than anything else, a huckster, a con man, a rogue and a rake, a wolf neither big nor bad.

But the house that contained his room was no house Richard had ever seen, a center-hall colonial built on maybe forty acres of land, with a stocked pond and three chocolate lab puppies romping across an expansive, rolling lawn. The child called to the dogs by name—Sonny, Sam, and Frank—and even in his disquiet, Richard recalled that those were the names of the guys who called the Redskins games on the radio. The dream slowed as Richard tried to remember whether Frank was the one who did the play-by-play, the one who for twenty years could be counted on to botch the name of the Redskins’ punter.

The backyard was huge, with a deep carpet of bluegrass and natural sideline of pine trees, and a woman was calling him in for dinner. Richard had the awareness that he was watching himself as a child, saying something about his dad, and he thought and maybe said Lew as this woman waved to him. In her outstretched hand was a metal spatula, and the dream filled with the smells of charcoal and cinnamon as he waved back. The arm that waved the spatula became the arm that rang a dinner bell, back and forth as the clapper slammed into the brass and the peal became constant, then doubled in intensity, a ringing and a buzzing, and in the distance, he heard the howl of his alarm and maybe even a banging inside his head that he felt obligated to investigate. He opened his eyes to see his navy suit trousers over the desk chair. He was wearing only his white shirt and his boxers and a pair of high-rise wool socks that had dug into his calves and made him itch, and he scratched out of instinct, and the ringing wasn’t an alarm clock at all but a phone, the cordless handset that he couldn’t locate.

He could not locate the phone because it had been in his right hand the entire time. He pressed the Talk button, and a voice identified itself. “This is the Metropolitan Police. You need to answer the door. You should be talking to one of my officers now.”

He harrumphed. He put on pants. The voice on the phone kept speaking. “Sir. Sir? You’re going to need to open the door.”

Richard uncracked the door slowly. Lemko was surprised there was no security chain, if only because most of the neighborhood looked as if it were still deciding whether or not to reject its recent, sketchy past.

Richard looked rumpled. A bit of white gunk littered the corners of his mouth. “What’s all this? What’s this about?”

Still on the line, the police sergeant said, “Sir, could you identify yourself for these people?”

“MacMurray. Richard MacMurray. What’s wrong? What time is it?” He looked at his wrist but wore no watch.

Nessen thought she had heard the last name somewhere, MacMurray. “It’s a little after six. May we come in?” Her training instructed her to inventory the scene when she arrived, and now she was doing just that: couch, desk, armoire containing a large television and various home-entertainment equipment. Speakers hanging from brackets in the high corners, walls of horsehair plaster, not just a prewar building but pre–the war before that. Framed posters from a handful of exhibitions and charity events and political campaigns, and only two pictures—Washington standard-issue grip-and-grin, autographed photos of Richard MacMurray with each of the last two presidents. In the second one, the president had his hand on Richard’s shoulder and leaned in close, looked to be talking directly into Richard’s ear with the whisper of a conspirator. The contact looked familiar, like someone she’d known in college. No pets. No pictures of family. No potential weapons.

The contact turned and walked deeper inside the apartment and stopped at the point where the wide hallway spilled into a cave-like living room. “I’m not big on the small talk, so why doesn’t someone tell me what’s going on here?”

Procedure meant Nessen was supposed to offer an explanation, but, saying his name over and over silently, she could think only of My Three Sons and Fred MacMurray. Twice already today she had braced herself to be the airline’s appointed messenger of death—to show up unannounced on someone’s doorstep and present a business card and ask to be let inside—and twice the next of kin had already received the news. This was in the briefing books too. People already knew; they heard radio broadcasts, saw special reports, watched the plume of smoke trailing out the fan exhaust of engine 3, overheard the first responders on police scanners. In their most common iteration, they simply showed up at the airports and wandered without purpose or direction until an airline employee could corral them and get them into a conference room, out of the sight of the general public.

Lemko thought only of their duty; the purpose of an Adam and Eve Team was to round up the stray family member, a next of kin to sign the requisite paperwork for the acceptance of the body, someone of close-enough relations and standing in the family and/or community that their signature was legally enforceable.

Then Richard made an offer of some hospitality. He poured three glasses of orange juice, handed them around, then put a small ramekin of cashews on the corner of his cluttered desk. “I’m sorry, but I don’t really have much more,” he said.

Nessen murmured a thank-you. She sometimes wondered how she’d even gotten into this career; her degree was a master’s of social work, and she had done enough clinical work to identify Richard MacMurray as a man under severe stress, perhaps indeed shock, but it was not likely caused by the plane crash or the afternoon’s events. Her mind flashed to a case study she’d read in graduate school, and here she was, perhaps a bit unprofessionally, diagnosing Richard MacMurray, forty-two, as someone who existed in a constant state of trauma. He absently touched his pained forehead and adjusted a nonexistent necktie. He suffered the look of the afflicted.

Before Nessen could say, Perhaps you’d like to sit down and talk to us for a moment, Richard moved to the couch and took a seat on top of a week’s worth of newspapers and asked, “Now what can I do for you?”

Lemko whispered at her, “Procedure,” which Nessen took as a reminder that there should be no shortcuts here, no mistakes.

She started to read from the small laminated card that contained a series of statements that had been prepared by the general counsel and vetted by outside attorneys. The lawyers asked the Adam and Eve Teams to read from the card verbatim, but Nessen preferred to make eye contact; the instructions in the procedures binder specifically warned against this, as did the lessons of her training. The contacts’ reactions were wild and varied; no application of science or reason could predict who would cry, who would argue. The card was supposed to suit every contingency. Yet already today she had read it to two contacts who already knew everything she had to say, and here on an enormous couch was a man who clearly didn’t know what was about to hit him, and the card couldn’t possibly tell him what he needed to know.