Visible Empire, page 2
“Come to bed. Hold me.”
“I need to make a few phone calls before my flight.”
“Wait,” she said. “Let me catch my breath.”
“Catch your breath.”
“It’s Mindy, then?”
“Mindy is gone.”
“Mary and Tom? Peter and Carol and, oh god, but that means it’s also Sue Hill and—”
“Stop now. Shhh. Don’t torture yourself.”
“But it is torture,” she said. “It is. I can’t breathe, I tell you. I can’t breathe.”
“Think of our children. Think of me and think of our children. We need you. The city needs you. They’ll be looking to us. We have to be strong, Lulu. We have to be very strong. That’s right. Close your eyes. Hush. Good girl, yes. Good girl. Sleep now. Dear sweet girl, sleep now.”
“But it’s everyone,” she murmured as he slipped out of the room. “It’s everyone. It’s everyone.”
And it was everyone. It was Mindy Johnson, who went to prom four years in a row with Bobby Hanson but then married George Johnson instead, which meant it was George who was sitting beside her on the plane, but Bobby was there too, a few rows back, next to Sally Jean, the woman he finally settled on after Mindy broke his heart. And it was Nance Bentley, the wife of lovely Raif Bentley and the mother of three handsome boys who all attended Westminster and looked dashing on Sundays at First Presbyterian in their matching blue seersucker suits. And it was Nance’s mother, Gillian Joyce, longtime widow and consummate drunk. It was Mary and Tom Beaker and his parents, Morris and Virginia. It was the Beakers’ best friends, Peter and Carol Cummins, and their neighbor Sue Hill Cleaver. It was four trustees of the Art Association and a former president of Oglethorpe University and half the members of the Junior League and both cofounders of the Atlanta English-Speaking Union and seven volunteers of the Humane Society and twenty members of the Druid Hills High School PTA and another twelve of Westminster’s PTA and three faculty members of Emory University, not to mention the very first female clerk of the Georgia Supreme Court. It was every member of the ad hoc all-female croquet team that had been founded on a whim by Sheila Stowe, and it was sixty members of Piedmont Country Club and another forty-five of the Cherokee Driving Club. It was twenty doctors, nine architects, thirteen lawyers, and too many mothers and fathers to count.
In short, it felt like everyone because to the mayor’s wife, it was everyone; it was everyone she cared about, and they were all gone in a single, heartbreaking, unbelievable whop.
Everyone
In preparation for their flight home—having toured the art and architecture of Switzerland, Zurich, Lake Lucerne, Venice—the Atlantans returned to Paris. The trip had been a success. Money had been raised for the Art Association and the Women’s Committee. There was talk that the Cultural Arts Center in Piedmont Park would finally be made a reality. Spirits were more than high, but by the end of their visit, those who weren’t hung-over were laid low with a virus that had started first in Rome. Don’t drink the water, they’d been reminded so many times. Don’t drink the water. The virus had passed from spouse to spouse, friend to friend, lover to lover. Fifty of them had been in the lobby of the Hotel du Louvre the night before their scheduled departure. There’d been champagne, dancing, deliberately inappropriate suggestions about partner swapping always met by giggles and blushing and the momentary quiet wherein everyone considered but then, nearly as immediately, forgot, because the booze was that good, that strong. They’d seen Paris. They’d seen Rome. They’d seen the Mona Lisa and Whistler’s Mother, for chrissakes. There was a mood of accomplishment and authority. Del Paige floated about the lobby as if on air, as if a feather re-lofted by the current of one conversation after another. He schmoozed and danced and vaulted about that last night with the best of them, with the heaviest of the drinkers. He’d been spared the Roman contagion. He’d heeded the warning about the water . . .
The next morning, they rose—the partygoers and the merely unwell—and finished their final bits of packing. There were last-minute purchases to squeeze into already overfull luggage (that boar-hair brush with the silver-tipped handle! those Laguiole steak knives with the razor-thin blades!), but there were also—from room to room, tourist to tourist, couple to couple, individually and together—so many scraps of paper to be dealt with. There were names on the papers, numbers, fanciful utterances, and now they were being tallied, smoothed one by one into small flat stacks throughout the hotel—
Danced until three, full moon, feel like a newlywed
Brown sugar to make a red sauce
One part bitter, two parts sweet . . .
Delilah: 01-45-34546
Mark my words: next summer, purple everything!
Meet me at midnight; don’t tell Kay. Signed, You Know Who!
Tell Stewart: Buy Coke; Buy Gold
Je suis le roi de Denmark et j’aime manger les fraises!
The scraps were meaningless, except to their owners. They were reminders, promises, recipes, epiphanies. They had been tucked all month into pockets, slipped into wallets, sandwiched between books’ pages, and now it was time for all to collect, to gather, to assess and reassess and pack neatly into an interior pouch of a valise or an attaché case or possibly even a hat box, where—if the plane hadn’t been mere hours away from catching fire, smoldering, sizzling angrily and hotly against the chilly Parisian air—they would eventually have been forgotten by all but one or two, to be found years later: by a daughter, by a husband, by a maid preparing to pack up her employer for the next overseas voyage.
Nearly to the person, the Americans were dragging on the morning of departure. In the lobby, around 9 a.m., there was an air not of frantic hurry but of devil-may-care. Wives lounged in sunglasses and complained of headaches; husbands sucked on cigars and indulged in shots of clam juice and vodka. The Bentleys alone, with cafés au lait and croissants in hand, appeared unfazed by the effects either of the toxic water or the merriment the night before. Only Mrs. Bentley and her mother would be boarding the chartered jet that morning. Mr. Bentley would be taking a commercial flight a few hours later. Their boys were at home, waiting for them, and so they would not risk flying together. Though it seemed a performative superstition, possibly even macabre, it was one they both tolerated and even revered. It was a matter of practicality, responsibility. If a plane crashed, the boys would still have one parent. And their boys were everything to them, and so they flew apart, though in every other way they were joined at the hip. It was a marriage not of convenience but of genuine and mutual admiration. Raif Bentley insisted on going to the airport with his wife, though his flight wasn’t for another six hours. He wanted to watch, and did, from the window of the café, as his wife and mother-in-law boarded the plane. He watched everyone board that morning, including a young woman called Rita, whom he didn’t know personally or even by name, and yet he witnessed as she, too, walked across the tarmac and climbed the stairs to the aircraft somewhere in the middle of the pack.
Rita, for her part, took the assigned window seat with a small flourish, aware of a bustle of nerves in her stomach. The night before she’d written another letter. She’d written it after the farewell gala, after several glasses of champagne. She’d sealed the letter without rereading it in a fit of—of what? A fit of passion, a fit of youth, a fit of joie de vivre and insouciance. “Bully,” she’d said to herself before pulling back the covers. “Bully, why not?” She popped a little piece of chocolate between her lips and turned off the lights, falling asleep with the soft candy pressed by her tongue to the roof of her mouth.
In the morning, the letter was still there, on the bedside table. If not for the tangible proof, she might have forgotten she’d ever written it. But there it was. She was most amused with herself. Between tidying and packing—the curling iron she’d brought, not remembering also to bring the conversion attachment, the postcards she’d collected (like a tourist, but who cares? Call it what it is, she’d always believed, and never regret it)—she picked up the letter, looked again at its sealed back, then dropped it in the trash can. “Silly, silly,” she said to herself. “Silly girl.”
Still, thirty minutes later, after her luggage was successfully buckled and she’d acquiesced herself into the dreaded winter coat she’d been obliged all May to wear, just as she was about to call for the bellboy to take down her bags and add them to those of the other Atlantans, she allowed herself a brief glance at the trash can. There was the letter, unmarred and unopened. “But I meant every word,” she said, again aloud, though truly she remembered not a single thing she’d written. She plucked it from the top of the trash, tucked it into the breast pocket of her coat, and rang for the boy.
On the plane, watching the others find their seats and dispatch their jackets to the stewardess for safe keeping, she was aware most alertly of the envelope that seemed to beat against her chest with a pulse all its own. A woman behind her, thickly accented with the syrup of the South, sang, “Here we go into the pale blue yonder.” And then louder, “Here we go into the pale blue yonder!” To her seating companion—it was the Pepperdine sisters—she said, “I’m ready to be silly. I’m ready to be really silly. If it isn’t fun, then what’s the point?” Her sister said, “Your hair looks great.” “No. It’s awful,” said the chanteuse. “No, no!” said the sister. “I like it. I like it.” The women howled. It would be a long flight.
When the stewardess made another pass down the aisle, Rita coughed. To herself, she whispered, “Damn it all, why not?” To the stewardess—lovely, French, haughty, Rita thought her sublime—she said, “Can you post this before takeoff? Would you mind too terribly?”
The stewardess, looking already at the next wave of Americans preparing to find their seats and remove their blazers, said, “Oui. Mais, oui. Of course.”
Rita sat back and closed her eyes, a marvelous wave of simultaneous relief and panic washing over her still-drunk brain. If only she could remember what she’d written.
The stewardess, whose name was Camille, put the letter in the pocket of her apron. She meant to leave it before takeoff with one of the uniformed pageboys who regularly traversed the tarmac taking last-minute requests from captains for items forgotten in the terminal. But as she leaned back into her seat—the plane beginning to taxi—she realized the letter was still in her pocket. Ça ne fait rien, she thought. Je vais le poster moi-même quand je retournerai chez moi.
She closed her eyes, the engines roared, and at the coordinated universal time of 11:32 a.m. on June 3, 1962, the plane was finally cleared for takeoff. The pilots aligned the aircraft with runway 08, waited exactly six seconds, then applied full thrust. Acceleration, at first, was typical.
By 1,500 meters, the plane had achieved Vı, the speed after which a takeoff couldn’t safely be aborted, which for this flight had been determined as a knots-indicated airspeed of 147. But this jet, this Boeing 707-328, with the registration numbers F-BHSM, whose first flight ever had been in 1960 and was known by the name Chateau de Sully—it not only achieved Vı, but then surpassed it.
At forty-eight seconds, the pilot-in-command pulled back on the control column.
The force on the wheel immediately felt off. Instead of smooth, easy pressure, he felt something substantial, something extra and unwanted.
Either the aircraft had been mistrimmed—but how could anyone have missed that?—or there was some sort of jam in the controls. Regardless of cause, both pilots agreed that the pitch of the nose felt low and heavy.
Something was wrong. That much was undeniable.
The pilot-in-command, in spite of having now reached a speed of 179 kt IAS—32 kt beyond Vı—made the decision to abort. He must have hoped, by some grace of god, that the runway (though he would have known from training that it wasn’t) would be long enough after all for the aircraft to come safely to a stop.
For a period of time between four and six seconds, the jet left the ground. But already the pilots were aborting. Already they were realigning with the runway, returning those ill-prepared tires to the earth, tires that only moments earlier had been traveling fast enough to launch the metal behemoth into the air.
They left the ground; they returned to the ground.
The tires—that heat! that speed!—exploded almost instantly into flames that, to the people who were watching from the terminal, looked like clouds of dust; looked, in fact, like the natural consequence of any 300,000-pound beast attempting to fly. The plane kept moving, now on its belly.
There were only 680 meters of runway left, about 1,300 meters shy of what they might have needed for a successful rejected takeoff. Smoke from the torn wheels and from the fire generated by the underbelly’s fast drag against the tarmac made its way quickly into the fuselage.
For Camille, the pressure was everywhere and immediate, as though her own body had been submerged suddenly into a pool of water. She saw a plate rattle then lift into the air. She closed her eyes, or maybe they’d been closed for her.
Outside, from the vantage of the terminal, none of this was immediately evident. The rejected takeoff seemed only a trifle. Witnesses assumed the plane would slow, perform a mannered U-turn, begin preparations for a second attempt . . .
When it didn’t stop, when it reached the end of the runway and continued atop the uneven pasture, toward the farmhouses, the trees—how many people saw the dog that ran from the airplane’s path, then turned to watch, just as a person might do?
The jet, going 160 kt but now across the rugged terrain, tilted starboard, one wing at a sharp 45 degrees with the earth, the other now being dragged, the other now obliterated by the drag, the other now detached, along with engine no. 2, which eventually broke free completely.
The aircraft moved clear across the road that surrounded the runway then collided into the approach lights. By then it had already started to disintegrate. The fuselage made contact with a farmhouse. The nose came loose.
Finally the bulk of the plane, what you could still call the plane, at its terrible final angle that would be captured in perpetuity first in photographs and then in a painting, came to a stop, some 550 meters beyond the end of the runway. It was still on its extended center line.
In the terminal, people who hadn’t been standing now stood.
In the terminal, there was a peculiar moment of silence. The last moment before the obvious sank in, the moment in which those who witnessed the accident had a chance to think—
Surely not
No it couldn’t be
But they must be fine
This isn’t how a plane crashes
No, no, surely not
Then they saw the fire. They heard the appalling internal explosions. Then there was no more silence. Screaming, crying, panic, yes, but the silence in the terminal and its sweet moment of hope were gone.
The plate was the only detail from the accident that Camille remembered upon waking in a field. There was the plate—rising, falling—then blackness, then—some time later or maybe since the beginning—the thunderous sound of metal and flames and then, later still, and still then in darkness, her eyes not yet open or adjusted, the tinnier, higher cries of Jacqueline and Francoise. The cries came close, then paused, then moved away.
Finally Camille’s eyes opened, or maybe the smoke had simply cleared by then. She looked in the direction of the cries—her friends’ cries—and she found them, Jacqueline and Francoise, running across a field toward a farmhouse.
“Francoise,” she called, and held up her arm, but even from where she sat, she could barely hear her own voice over the roar of the metal and flames. She lowered her hand and, only then, realized that she was still buckled into her seat.
She unclamped the belt and tried to stand, but there was something wrong. Her right leg was bloody, the hose torn, skin from the knee dangling outlandishly to the side. A piece of bone protruded from her shin. She had no chance of standing on her own. She looked instead at the grass by her side.
She thought again of the plate. Already, her memory seemed compromised. Already, no matter how hard she tried to recall the plate rise and fall in real time, already it moved in slow motion. Moments passed, minutes possibly, in which the plate gradually lifted into the air—as if an unseen hand had raised it in display—before crashing back to earth, now in real time, colliding with the sink and shattering to pieces.
Why she did not now think of Marcel, who should have been running through the field with Francoise and Jacqueline, or of Genevieve, who’d been stationed that afternoon in first class, but thought instead of that utterly American woman in the mismatched dress-suit who’d given her the envelope and asked her to post it, she didn’t know. But it was that woman, unquestionably still inside the fuselage, who now fully occupied her thoughts.
A sudden panic took hold of Camille and, almost drunkenly, she clawed at the pockets of her apron. The letter was still there.
She took one look at the blackened plane, its mangled wing, the curls of gunmetal-gray smoke spiraling from its engine, and lost consciousness.
Ivan & Lulu
“I won’t do it,” Lulu said. She moved from her vanity back to the bed. “You can’t make me. If I have to attend another service, I’ll die.”
“Think of Raif,” said Ivan. “Think how he’ll feel if you’re not there.”
“What about me?” she said.
“We do this to honor our friends.”
“I won’t honor Nance in this way. She wouldn’t like it.”
“Think of the boys.”
She put a hand to her mouth.
“He wouldn’t bring the boys? He wouldn’t stoop so low?”
“Of course the boys will be there. It’s their mother, their grandmother. They need to grieve.”
“I need to make a few phone calls before my flight.”
“Wait,” she said. “Let me catch my breath.”
“Catch your breath.”
“It’s Mindy, then?”
“Mindy is gone.”
“Mary and Tom? Peter and Carol and, oh god, but that means it’s also Sue Hill and—”
“Stop now. Shhh. Don’t torture yourself.”
“But it is torture,” she said. “It is. I can’t breathe, I tell you. I can’t breathe.”
“Think of our children. Think of me and think of our children. We need you. The city needs you. They’ll be looking to us. We have to be strong, Lulu. We have to be very strong. That’s right. Close your eyes. Hush. Good girl, yes. Good girl. Sleep now. Dear sweet girl, sleep now.”
“But it’s everyone,” she murmured as he slipped out of the room. “It’s everyone. It’s everyone.”
And it was everyone. It was Mindy Johnson, who went to prom four years in a row with Bobby Hanson but then married George Johnson instead, which meant it was George who was sitting beside her on the plane, but Bobby was there too, a few rows back, next to Sally Jean, the woman he finally settled on after Mindy broke his heart. And it was Nance Bentley, the wife of lovely Raif Bentley and the mother of three handsome boys who all attended Westminster and looked dashing on Sundays at First Presbyterian in their matching blue seersucker suits. And it was Nance’s mother, Gillian Joyce, longtime widow and consummate drunk. It was Mary and Tom Beaker and his parents, Morris and Virginia. It was the Beakers’ best friends, Peter and Carol Cummins, and their neighbor Sue Hill Cleaver. It was four trustees of the Art Association and a former president of Oglethorpe University and half the members of the Junior League and both cofounders of the Atlanta English-Speaking Union and seven volunteers of the Humane Society and twenty members of the Druid Hills High School PTA and another twelve of Westminster’s PTA and three faculty members of Emory University, not to mention the very first female clerk of the Georgia Supreme Court. It was every member of the ad hoc all-female croquet team that had been founded on a whim by Sheila Stowe, and it was sixty members of Piedmont Country Club and another forty-five of the Cherokee Driving Club. It was twenty doctors, nine architects, thirteen lawyers, and too many mothers and fathers to count.
In short, it felt like everyone because to the mayor’s wife, it was everyone; it was everyone she cared about, and they were all gone in a single, heartbreaking, unbelievable whop.
Everyone
In preparation for their flight home—having toured the art and architecture of Switzerland, Zurich, Lake Lucerne, Venice—the Atlantans returned to Paris. The trip had been a success. Money had been raised for the Art Association and the Women’s Committee. There was talk that the Cultural Arts Center in Piedmont Park would finally be made a reality. Spirits were more than high, but by the end of their visit, those who weren’t hung-over were laid low with a virus that had started first in Rome. Don’t drink the water, they’d been reminded so many times. Don’t drink the water. The virus had passed from spouse to spouse, friend to friend, lover to lover. Fifty of them had been in the lobby of the Hotel du Louvre the night before their scheduled departure. There’d been champagne, dancing, deliberately inappropriate suggestions about partner swapping always met by giggles and blushing and the momentary quiet wherein everyone considered but then, nearly as immediately, forgot, because the booze was that good, that strong. They’d seen Paris. They’d seen Rome. They’d seen the Mona Lisa and Whistler’s Mother, for chrissakes. There was a mood of accomplishment and authority. Del Paige floated about the lobby as if on air, as if a feather re-lofted by the current of one conversation after another. He schmoozed and danced and vaulted about that last night with the best of them, with the heaviest of the drinkers. He’d been spared the Roman contagion. He’d heeded the warning about the water . . .
The next morning, they rose—the partygoers and the merely unwell—and finished their final bits of packing. There were last-minute purchases to squeeze into already overfull luggage (that boar-hair brush with the silver-tipped handle! those Laguiole steak knives with the razor-thin blades!), but there were also—from room to room, tourist to tourist, couple to couple, individually and together—so many scraps of paper to be dealt with. There were names on the papers, numbers, fanciful utterances, and now they were being tallied, smoothed one by one into small flat stacks throughout the hotel—
Danced until three, full moon, feel like a newlywed
Brown sugar to make a red sauce
One part bitter, two parts sweet . . .
Delilah: 01-45-34546
Mark my words: next summer, purple everything!
Meet me at midnight; don’t tell Kay. Signed, You Know Who!
Tell Stewart: Buy Coke; Buy Gold
Je suis le roi de Denmark et j’aime manger les fraises!
The scraps were meaningless, except to their owners. They were reminders, promises, recipes, epiphanies. They had been tucked all month into pockets, slipped into wallets, sandwiched between books’ pages, and now it was time for all to collect, to gather, to assess and reassess and pack neatly into an interior pouch of a valise or an attaché case or possibly even a hat box, where—if the plane hadn’t been mere hours away from catching fire, smoldering, sizzling angrily and hotly against the chilly Parisian air—they would eventually have been forgotten by all but one or two, to be found years later: by a daughter, by a husband, by a maid preparing to pack up her employer for the next overseas voyage.
Nearly to the person, the Americans were dragging on the morning of departure. In the lobby, around 9 a.m., there was an air not of frantic hurry but of devil-may-care. Wives lounged in sunglasses and complained of headaches; husbands sucked on cigars and indulged in shots of clam juice and vodka. The Bentleys alone, with cafés au lait and croissants in hand, appeared unfazed by the effects either of the toxic water or the merriment the night before. Only Mrs. Bentley and her mother would be boarding the chartered jet that morning. Mr. Bentley would be taking a commercial flight a few hours later. Their boys were at home, waiting for them, and so they would not risk flying together. Though it seemed a performative superstition, possibly even macabre, it was one they both tolerated and even revered. It was a matter of practicality, responsibility. If a plane crashed, the boys would still have one parent. And their boys were everything to them, and so they flew apart, though in every other way they were joined at the hip. It was a marriage not of convenience but of genuine and mutual admiration. Raif Bentley insisted on going to the airport with his wife, though his flight wasn’t for another six hours. He wanted to watch, and did, from the window of the café, as his wife and mother-in-law boarded the plane. He watched everyone board that morning, including a young woman called Rita, whom he didn’t know personally or even by name, and yet he witnessed as she, too, walked across the tarmac and climbed the stairs to the aircraft somewhere in the middle of the pack.
Rita, for her part, took the assigned window seat with a small flourish, aware of a bustle of nerves in her stomach. The night before she’d written another letter. She’d written it after the farewell gala, after several glasses of champagne. She’d sealed the letter without rereading it in a fit of—of what? A fit of passion, a fit of youth, a fit of joie de vivre and insouciance. “Bully,” she’d said to herself before pulling back the covers. “Bully, why not?” She popped a little piece of chocolate between her lips and turned off the lights, falling asleep with the soft candy pressed by her tongue to the roof of her mouth.
In the morning, the letter was still there, on the bedside table. If not for the tangible proof, she might have forgotten she’d ever written it. But there it was. She was most amused with herself. Between tidying and packing—the curling iron she’d brought, not remembering also to bring the conversion attachment, the postcards she’d collected (like a tourist, but who cares? Call it what it is, she’d always believed, and never regret it)—she picked up the letter, looked again at its sealed back, then dropped it in the trash can. “Silly, silly,” she said to herself. “Silly girl.”
Still, thirty minutes later, after her luggage was successfully buckled and she’d acquiesced herself into the dreaded winter coat she’d been obliged all May to wear, just as she was about to call for the bellboy to take down her bags and add them to those of the other Atlantans, she allowed herself a brief glance at the trash can. There was the letter, unmarred and unopened. “But I meant every word,” she said, again aloud, though truly she remembered not a single thing she’d written. She plucked it from the top of the trash, tucked it into the breast pocket of her coat, and rang for the boy.
On the plane, watching the others find their seats and dispatch their jackets to the stewardess for safe keeping, she was aware most alertly of the envelope that seemed to beat against her chest with a pulse all its own. A woman behind her, thickly accented with the syrup of the South, sang, “Here we go into the pale blue yonder.” And then louder, “Here we go into the pale blue yonder!” To her seating companion—it was the Pepperdine sisters—she said, “I’m ready to be silly. I’m ready to be really silly. If it isn’t fun, then what’s the point?” Her sister said, “Your hair looks great.” “No. It’s awful,” said the chanteuse. “No, no!” said the sister. “I like it. I like it.” The women howled. It would be a long flight.
When the stewardess made another pass down the aisle, Rita coughed. To herself, she whispered, “Damn it all, why not?” To the stewardess—lovely, French, haughty, Rita thought her sublime—she said, “Can you post this before takeoff? Would you mind too terribly?”
The stewardess, looking already at the next wave of Americans preparing to find their seats and remove their blazers, said, “Oui. Mais, oui. Of course.”
Rita sat back and closed her eyes, a marvelous wave of simultaneous relief and panic washing over her still-drunk brain. If only she could remember what she’d written.
The stewardess, whose name was Camille, put the letter in the pocket of her apron. She meant to leave it before takeoff with one of the uniformed pageboys who regularly traversed the tarmac taking last-minute requests from captains for items forgotten in the terminal. But as she leaned back into her seat—the plane beginning to taxi—she realized the letter was still in her pocket. Ça ne fait rien, she thought. Je vais le poster moi-même quand je retournerai chez moi.
She closed her eyes, the engines roared, and at the coordinated universal time of 11:32 a.m. on June 3, 1962, the plane was finally cleared for takeoff. The pilots aligned the aircraft with runway 08, waited exactly six seconds, then applied full thrust. Acceleration, at first, was typical.
By 1,500 meters, the plane had achieved Vı, the speed after which a takeoff couldn’t safely be aborted, which for this flight had been determined as a knots-indicated airspeed of 147. But this jet, this Boeing 707-328, with the registration numbers F-BHSM, whose first flight ever had been in 1960 and was known by the name Chateau de Sully—it not only achieved Vı, but then surpassed it.
At forty-eight seconds, the pilot-in-command pulled back on the control column.
The force on the wheel immediately felt off. Instead of smooth, easy pressure, he felt something substantial, something extra and unwanted.
Either the aircraft had been mistrimmed—but how could anyone have missed that?—or there was some sort of jam in the controls. Regardless of cause, both pilots agreed that the pitch of the nose felt low and heavy.
Something was wrong. That much was undeniable.
The pilot-in-command, in spite of having now reached a speed of 179 kt IAS—32 kt beyond Vı—made the decision to abort. He must have hoped, by some grace of god, that the runway (though he would have known from training that it wasn’t) would be long enough after all for the aircraft to come safely to a stop.
For a period of time between four and six seconds, the jet left the ground. But already the pilots were aborting. Already they were realigning with the runway, returning those ill-prepared tires to the earth, tires that only moments earlier had been traveling fast enough to launch the metal behemoth into the air.
They left the ground; they returned to the ground.
The tires—that heat! that speed!—exploded almost instantly into flames that, to the people who were watching from the terminal, looked like clouds of dust; looked, in fact, like the natural consequence of any 300,000-pound beast attempting to fly. The plane kept moving, now on its belly.
There were only 680 meters of runway left, about 1,300 meters shy of what they might have needed for a successful rejected takeoff. Smoke from the torn wheels and from the fire generated by the underbelly’s fast drag against the tarmac made its way quickly into the fuselage.
For Camille, the pressure was everywhere and immediate, as though her own body had been submerged suddenly into a pool of water. She saw a plate rattle then lift into the air. She closed her eyes, or maybe they’d been closed for her.
Outside, from the vantage of the terminal, none of this was immediately evident. The rejected takeoff seemed only a trifle. Witnesses assumed the plane would slow, perform a mannered U-turn, begin preparations for a second attempt . . .
When it didn’t stop, when it reached the end of the runway and continued atop the uneven pasture, toward the farmhouses, the trees—how many people saw the dog that ran from the airplane’s path, then turned to watch, just as a person might do?
The jet, going 160 kt but now across the rugged terrain, tilted starboard, one wing at a sharp 45 degrees with the earth, the other now being dragged, the other now obliterated by the drag, the other now detached, along with engine no. 2, which eventually broke free completely.
The aircraft moved clear across the road that surrounded the runway then collided into the approach lights. By then it had already started to disintegrate. The fuselage made contact with a farmhouse. The nose came loose.
Finally the bulk of the plane, what you could still call the plane, at its terrible final angle that would be captured in perpetuity first in photographs and then in a painting, came to a stop, some 550 meters beyond the end of the runway. It was still on its extended center line.
In the terminal, people who hadn’t been standing now stood.
In the terminal, there was a peculiar moment of silence. The last moment before the obvious sank in, the moment in which those who witnessed the accident had a chance to think—
Surely not
No it couldn’t be
But they must be fine
This isn’t how a plane crashes
No, no, surely not
Then they saw the fire. They heard the appalling internal explosions. Then there was no more silence. Screaming, crying, panic, yes, but the silence in the terminal and its sweet moment of hope were gone.
The plate was the only detail from the accident that Camille remembered upon waking in a field. There was the plate—rising, falling—then blackness, then—some time later or maybe since the beginning—the thunderous sound of metal and flames and then, later still, and still then in darkness, her eyes not yet open or adjusted, the tinnier, higher cries of Jacqueline and Francoise. The cries came close, then paused, then moved away.
Finally Camille’s eyes opened, or maybe the smoke had simply cleared by then. She looked in the direction of the cries—her friends’ cries—and she found them, Jacqueline and Francoise, running across a field toward a farmhouse.
“Francoise,” she called, and held up her arm, but even from where she sat, she could barely hear her own voice over the roar of the metal and flames. She lowered her hand and, only then, realized that she was still buckled into her seat.
She unclamped the belt and tried to stand, but there was something wrong. Her right leg was bloody, the hose torn, skin from the knee dangling outlandishly to the side. A piece of bone protruded from her shin. She had no chance of standing on her own. She looked instead at the grass by her side.
She thought again of the plate. Already, her memory seemed compromised. Already, no matter how hard she tried to recall the plate rise and fall in real time, already it moved in slow motion. Moments passed, minutes possibly, in which the plate gradually lifted into the air—as if an unseen hand had raised it in display—before crashing back to earth, now in real time, colliding with the sink and shattering to pieces.
Why she did not now think of Marcel, who should have been running through the field with Francoise and Jacqueline, or of Genevieve, who’d been stationed that afternoon in first class, but thought instead of that utterly American woman in the mismatched dress-suit who’d given her the envelope and asked her to post it, she didn’t know. But it was that woman, unquestionably still inside the fuselage, who now fully occupied her thoughts.
A sudden panic took hold of Camille and, almost drunkenly, she clawed at the pockets of her apron. The letter was still there.
She took one look at the blackened plane, its mangled wing, the curls of gunmetal-gray smoke spiraling from its engine, and lost consciousness.
Ivan & Lulu
“I won’t do it,” Lulu said. She moved from her vanity back to the bed. “You can’t make me. If I have to attend another service, I’ll die.”
“Think of Raif,” said Ivan. “Think how he’ll feel if you’re not there.”
“What about me?” she said.
“We do this to honor our friends.”
“I won’t honor Nance in this way. She wouldn’t like it.”
“Think of the boys.”
She put a hand to her mouth.
“He wouldn’t bring the boys? He wouldn’t stoop so low?”
“Of course the boys will be there. It’s their mother, their grandmother. They need to grieve.”
