Steve Kistulentz: Panorama

THIS HAPPENED on the last day of the last year when we still felt safe, with the American skyline brilliantine, the entire panorama still rendered in its familiar postcard wholeness.

The two years bisected by this particular New Year’s Eve would come and go without fanfare, no shock in the timeline, no Dealey Plaza or Ambassador Hotel, no Miracle Mets or miracles on ice, no archdukes or mad monks, no anarchists or secessionists, no Treaty of Versailles, no surrender, no peace, no Sputnik or man on the moon, no heiresses turned into gun-toting molls, no Giants Win the Pennant! or Nixon Resigns!

The names of the infamous airports of the past became, at a distance, a roll call of crises: Tel Aviv, Kennedy, Sioux City, Hanoi, Tripoli, Athens, Entebbe, all those historical locales that conjured up grainy, United Press International photos of smuggled handguns, heroic pilots negotiating out the cockpit window while hijackers demanded unencumbered passage to Beirut, Havana. In San Juan, the narco dogs barked at every piece of luggage; in Geneva, armored personnel carriers stood sentry between the runways, a response to the vaguely threatening nature of our time.

We could have been anywhere. But for the purposes of this particular holiday and its hurried arrangements and contingencies, we need to choose a benign location. Salt Lake City, the middle of the Great Basin, in the valley sandwiched between the natural fortress of the Wasatch and Oquirrh Mountains. A sprawling city on the bottom of what was once a tremendous prehistoric lake.

Even on a holiday, the town rolled up its sidewalks just after dark. Whatever celebrating was to be done was likely a solitary pursuit. Disgruntled airport workers smoked their last cigarettes of the year alarmingly close to thirty-thousand-gallon tanks of jet-A fuel. The terminal was empty except for employees so close to the margins that these few hours of overtime meant the difference for the next month.

And what are New Year’s resolutions but our simplest prayers? Help me give this shit up, uttered by forty-eight-year-old airline mechanic Arnold Bright as he wandered the tarmac of the Salt Lake City International Airport these silent hours of late evening. A pledge to quit made for the fourth year in a row while digging behind his lip to remove an hour-stale pack of chewing tobacco, just a pinch between his cheek and gum. His wife would refuse to kiss him when he got home, and it was, after all, New Year’s Eve. He swirled tepid coffee in his mouth, trying to extract the grit of tobacco and coarse coffee grounds from his teeth, then spattered the mess onto the concrete.

This burden he carried: at home, everything he did or said was a disappointment. He was worn out, too, from family squabbles, a wife he could not seem to please either emotionally or sexually, a teenaged daughter who now refused to go to church, whose newest set of complaints included not getting a car for Christmas, not having her own cell phone. New Year’s Eve meant another night as last man on the tarmac, a duty his wife would see not as a practical effort to pay the bills but as just another way he had conspired to stay out of the house.

He hoped she could be assuaged with a nine-dollar bottle of champagne, a neck rub, and a pre-midnight arrival home. He was just four hours from union-mandated double time, and besides, every conversation at home reminded him how much they needed the money. But his week already included sixteen hours of overtime, so his decision to cut corners seemed without consequence. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten to do something; instead, he’d actively decided not to roll out the ladder, not to take a closer look at the entire tail rudder assembly. This human gesture—Arnold Bright’s inclination toward home and family on the last night of the year—set in motion a series of events with their own unstoppable momentums.

Arnold busied himself initialing the ground crew’s preflight checklist, making cursory marks with a twenty-nine-cent BIC pen. One of tomorrow afternoon’s early departures, one of the airline’s decades-old workhorses, a 727, was already attached to the Jetway at gate B14. He picked up the basic tool of his job: a clipboard, its metal jaw straining to hold the nearly inch-thick pile of recent airworthiness directives and safety bulletins. There was newfound concern about the older 727s, the potential malfunction of a servo control valve that might cause the sudden deflection of the rudder. A known defect that could result in uncontrolled flight into terrain. The airline took these government-issued documents and translated them into new preflight inspection procedures. But today’s memos, written in the Esperanto of bureaucracy, appeared in commonplace batches of ten or twelve, which made Arnold Bright think none of them was cause for alarm.

He ought to have been more attentive. An understandable oversight, one that would no doubt have been corrected if he could only have seen the next afternoon’s breaking news.

A plane down on approach to Dallas–Fort Worth.

What Arnold Bright would see on television: ranchland scattered with the detritus of wreckage, briefcases, a lone running shoe, the live network feed from a camera stationed at a discreet-enough distance to insinuate a burning fuselage, its cyclone of smoke visible over the reporter’s right shoulder. In that field, the camera would find its narrative in garbage, air sickness bags and in-flight magazines, luggage thrown clear of the debris field, a teddy bear and some sort of melted personal electronic device, a leather portfolio stamped with the name of a property and casualty insurance company, its corporate logotype intact despite the presence of soot and ash and oozing plastic and blood spatter, the implied presence of human remains.

Those broadcast images would never leave him; the insurance logo would always evoke for him not the image of a blanket or a fireman’s hat or a piece of the rock, but an airplane short of the runway, the end of his career as a burning field.

Months after the accident, once reports had been written about the failure to notice the stain of bright-purple hydraulic fluid visible against the predominantly white and orange paint of the Panorama Airlines’ color scheme, and blame officially assigned, the livelihood of a forty-eight-year-old airline mechanic, a union and family man, would become the final casualty of Flight 503.

RICHARD MACMURRAY—moderately well-known television pundit, part-time gadfly, prized Washington cocktail-party guest, owner of more than a hundred neckties in a palette of screaming oranges and purples, forty-two years old and once divorced, a Capricorn, former criminal defense attorney turned professional advocate—sat in a director’s chair trying to regulate his breathing, hoping his forehead sweat wouldn’t pop through his makeup.

He was a guest, live and in studio, on a cable news show debating the issue of mandatory sentencing. Eight weeks ago, at the beginning of the November sweeps, he’d appeared on the same program supporting the inalienable right of a bakery owner in Madison, Wisconsin, to sell pastries shaped like human genitalia. A cupcake frosted to look like a breast was guaranteed airtime, guaranteed ratings, maybe a two-point spike in the overnight share. Tonight’s topic, legal and esoteric, meant that no one would watch. During the commercial break between segments, he found himself wondering what the lowest possible rating on the Nielsen scale could be. He wasn’t breaking news or making memorable television here, just cashing a check. He hadn’t even told his sister about it, and she recorded nearly all of his appearances.