Love and Other Ways of Dying Read Free Page B

ocean. Shit, where? Others worked their cell phones, frantically scrounging for the story, but still nobody knew anything. Someone living in a trailer home nearby claimed to have seen a huge fireball on the horizon; another said the plane had come so close to the village that you could see inside, cabin lights flickering on and off, people lit, then black, see those last moments playing out from the ground.
    These waters were his, that’s what the reporter thought. He’d sailed these coves and inlets all summer long, sailed past the lighthouse so many times it seemed a natural outcropping of the landscape. He was a solid, good-looking man who spoke quickly, moved at a clip, all of forty-two, with just-thinning hair. He’d worked twenty years on the nautical beat, covering the navy and ship sinkings and whatever else came along. He never forgot to register a name, and then never forgot it, kept a card catalog in his head that connected everyone to everyone else. One of his great strengths. And when he saw what looked like falling stars in the distance, parachute flares, he knew that was where the plane was. He turned to the cameraman.
    We need to be under those, he said, pointing to the falling stars.
    Before he left the office, he’d stashed extra cell-phone batteries in his pocket. You never knew, or maybe you already did. And now, in this night, in the seamless dark (there was no marking land but for the lighthouse, green light flashing), he was on his way in a hired boat with a cameraman. The wind blew, heavy swells, ten-foot waves, on his way, to see what? And why? He was as bad as the others, wasn’t he? A fucking parasite. There were a lot of people on that plane, he knew that. At the UN, they called it the diplomatic shuttle: dinner meeting in Manhattan, breakfast meeting in Geneva. And now here they were, lost off the coast of this forgotten place.
    It took an hour in those seas. The parachute flares and spotlights were blinding at first, the smell of diesel overwhelming. Sea King helicopters whirred overhead, aiming white beams; boats drifted through the wreckage aimlessly, the water a bottomless black. They couldn’t see anything, just heard it on the VHF radio, fishermen talking to one another: I got something over here. I think she’s alive. Then thirty seconds passed. I need a body bag. And then other voices, this morbid call and response:
    We got another one.
    Over here, too.
    Need a body bag, now!
    Jesus, we got a foot in the water.
    We have an arm.
    We need a body bag! Who’s got body bags?
    Then the reporter saw a half-inflated life raft. Alive—someone was alive! But when they came upon it, it was empty, had inflated on impact. There were shoes fanning everywhere around them, hundreds and hundreds of shoes, in procession, riding the water’s windrows—some with the laces still tied up. And underwear and ripped shirts, Bibles and stuffed animals.Money floating on the surface of the ocean now. Dollars and marks, rupees and francs and drachmas. You’d haul up a purse and expect to find a wallet, a driver’s license, lipstick, anything, and it would be empty.
    The plane had hit the water at more than four hundred miles per hour, nose first, two engines still firing, very unusual, extremely rare; the jet was two hundred feet long, and the tail rammed straight into the nose, everything exploding into more than a million pieces. Later, someone would be in charge of counting pieces at the military base, in a hangar where bits of the plane would fill thousands of crates and cardboard boxes. At impact, the bodies on board had been what the medical examiner would call degloved, simply shorn from the bones. You couldn’t pick them up in your hands. You had to scoop them in nets.
    No one has survived this crash, the television reporter told the world. From what we are seeing, there are no survivors.
    But, said an anchorperson, the coast guard is calling this a search and rescue.
    There are no