Sole Survivor

found the nearest restaurant in the terminal. He ordered a club sandwich with french fries and a bottle of Heineken.
        Bacon had never tasted half as good as it did now. He licked mayonnaise from his fingertips. The fries had a satisfying crunch, and the crisp dill pickle snapped with a spray of sour juice. For the first time since another August, he not only consumed his food but relished it.
        On his way to the boarding gate, with twenty minutes to spare, he suddenly took a detour to the men's room. He thought he was going to be sick.
        By the time he got into a stall and latched the door, his nausea passed. Instead of throwing up, he leaned his back against the door and wept.
        He hadn't cried in many months, and he didn't know why he was crying now. Maybe because he was on the trembling edge of happiness with the thought of seeing Nina again. Or maybe because he was scared of never finding her or of losing her a second time. Maybe he was grieving anew for Michelle and Chrissie. Maybe he had learned too many dreadful details about what had happened to Flight 353 and to the people on it.
        Maybe it was all those things.
        He was on a runaway rocket of emotion, and he needed to regain control of himself. He wasn't going to be effective in his search for Rose and Nina if he swung wildly between euphoria and despair.
        Red-eyed but recovered, he boarded the plane for Los Angeles as they issued the final call.
        As the 737 took off, to Joe's surprise his heart made a hollow racket in his ears, like running footsteps descending stairs. He clutched the arms of his seat as though he might tumble forward and fall headlong.
        He had never been afraid on the flight to Denver, but now he was in the lap of terror. Coming eastward, he would have welcomed death, for the wrongness of outliving his family had been heavy on his mind-but now, westward bound, he had a reason to live.
        Even when they had reached cruising altitude and levelled off, he remained edgy. He could too easily imagine one of the pilots turning to the other and saying, Are we recording?
        Since Joe could not get Captain Delroy Blane out of his mind, anyway, he withdrew the three folded pages of the transcript from an inner jacket pocket. Reviewing it, he might see something that he had missed before-and he needed to keep his mind occupied, even if with this.
        The flight wasn't heavily booked, a third of the seats empty. He had a window seat with no immediate neighbour, so he was afforded the privacy he needed.
        In response to his request, a flight attendant brought a pen and note pad.
        As he read through the transcript, he extracted Blane's dialogue and printed it on the note pad. Standing apart from First Officer Victor Santorelli's increasingly frantic statements, and shorn of Barbara's descriptions of sounds and pauses, the captain's words might allow for the discovery of nuances otherwise not easy to spot.
        When he was done, Joe folded the transcript and returned it to his coat pocket. Then he read from the note pad:
        
         One of their names is Dr. Louis Blom.
         One of their names is Dr. Keith Ramlock.
         They're doing bad things to me.
         They're mean to me.
         Make them stop.
         Are we recording?
         Make them stop hurting me.
         Are we recording?
         Are we recording?
         Make them stop or when I get the chance… when I get the chance, I'll kill everybody. Everybody. I will. I'll do it. I'll kill everybody, and I'll like it.
         This is fun.
         Whoooaaa. Here we go, Dr. Rumlock. Dr. Blom, here we go.
         Whoooaaa. Are we recording?
         Are we recording?
         Oh, wow.
         Oh, yeah.
         Oh, yeah.
         Now. Look.
         Cool.
        Joe didn't see anything new in the material, but something he had noticed before was more obvious when Blane's dialogue was read in this extracted format. Although the captain was speaking in the voice of an adult, some of the things he was saying had a distinct childlike quality.
         They're doing bad things to me. They're mean to me. Make them stop. Make them stop hurting me.
        This was neither the phrasing nor the word choice most adults would use to accuse tormentors or to ask for help.
        His longest speech, a threat to kill everybody and like it , was petulant and