Love and Other Ways of Dying Read Free

reclined and felt the air move beneath them—a Saudi prince, the world-famous scientist, the UN field director, the boxer’s son, the woman with Persian eyes—an awesome feeling of power, here among the stars, plowing for Europe, halfway between the polar cap and the moon, gambling and guzzling and gourmandizing, oblivious as even now, the pilot was on the radio, using the secret language of the sky to declare an emergency:
    Pan, pan, pan, said Urs. We have smoke in the cockpit, request deviate, immediate return to a convenient place. I guess Boston. (Toggles, lights, check, breathe.)
    Would you prefer to go in to Halifax? said air traffic control, a calm voice from a northern place called Moncton, a man watching a green hexagon crawl across a large round screen, this very flight moving across the screen, a single clean green light.
    Affirmative for one-eleven heavy, said the pilot. We have the oxygen mask on. Go ahead with the weather—
    Could I have the number of souls on board … for emergency services? chimed in Halifax control.
    Roger, said the pilot, but then he never answered the question, working frantically down his checklist, circling back over the ocean to release tons of fuel to lighten the craft for an emergency landing, the plane dropping to nineteen thousand feet, then twelve thousand, and ten thousand. An alarm sounded, the autopilot shut down. Lights fritzed on and off in both the cockpit and the cabin, flight attendants rushed through the aisles, one of the three engines quit in what was now becoming a huge electrical meltdown.
    Urs radioed something in German, emergency checklist air conditioning smoke. Then in English, Sorry … Maintaining at ten thousand feet, his voice urgent, the words blurring. Thesmoke was thick, the heat increasing, the checklists, the bloody checklists … leading nowhere, leading—We are declaring emergency now at, ah, time, ah, zero-one-two-four … We have to land immediate—
    The instrument panel—bright digital displays—went black. Both pilot and copilot were now breathing frantically.
    Then nothing.
    Radio contact ceased. Temperatures in the cockpit were rising precipitously; aluminum fixtures began to melt. It’s possible that one of the pilots, or both, simply caught fire. At air traffic control in Moncton, the green hexagon flickered off the screen. There was silence. One controller began trembling, another wept.
    It was falling.
    Six minutes later, SR111 plunged into the dark sea.
    The medical examiner woke to a ringing phone, the worst way to wake. Ten-something on the clock, or was it eleven? The phone ringing, in the house where he lived alone, or rather with his two retrievers, but alone, too, without wife or woman. He lived near the village with the lighthouse, had moved here less than three years ago from out west, had spent much of his life rolling around, weird things following him, demons and disasters. Had a train wreck once, in Great Britain, early in his career, a Sunday night, university students coming back to London after a weekend at home. Train left the tracks at speed. He’d never seen anything like that in his life—sixty dead, decapitations, severed arms and legs. These kids, hours before whole and happy, now disassembled. Time disintegrating in the small fires of the wreckage. After the second night, while everyone kept their stiff upper lips, he sobbed uncontrollably. He scared himself—not so much because he was sobbing, but because he couldn’t stop.
    There’d been a tornado in Edmonton—twenty-three dead. And then another train wreck in western Canada, in the hinterlands fifty miles east of Jasper. Twenty-five dead in a ravine. He’d nearly been drummed out of the job for his handling of that one. The media swarmed to photograph mangled bodies, and the medical examiner, heady from all the attention and a bit offended by it, knowing he shouldn’t, stuffed some towels and linens on a litter, draped them with a sheet, and