Spiral

figured her flight would still be hours east of the city. I left a message for Nancy that I might be able to join her after all and would call back at a reasonable hour in the morning.
    I remember going to bed that night feeling pretty good. $ For the last time in a long time.

    Nancy’s boss had bought her plane ticket in addition to making her hotel reservation, so the airline contacted the D.A.’s office first. A secretary there who knew about us reached me at 6:50 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday morning, just before I would have awakened to the clock radio.
    And the frantic bulletins about Flight #133, en route from Boston to San Francisco.

    Trying to look back on it with some objectivity, the people at the airline were pretty good about handling what had to be their worst nightmare, too. They made every effort to contact each passenger’s family/friends/lovers and shepherd us to a ballroom in one of Boston’s bigger hotels. They set up bottomless urns of coffee and laid out a buffet for every meal. And all the while, they marched a rotating cast of experts to the podium on a raised stage ”for the purpose of providing information as it becomes available.”
    The exact sequence of the next twenty-four hours is still pretty hazy. And for someone who supposedly makes his living by being observant, I have almost no memory—almost no inkling, in feet—of the other stunned and grieving people sitting or standing with me in that ballroom. All I remember doing is watching the experts ascend the platform, each contributing one more piece to a puzzle that couldn’t be solved.
    Somebody told us that bizarre wind and rain conditions caused by El Nino made the San Francisco control tower ask incoming flights to stay aloft a while longer, finally forcing many to circle over the ocean off the peninsula. Somebody else said the problem for Nancy’s plane was almost certainly caused by El Nino as well, perhaps in a parallel way to the incredible turbulence that had rocked a Japanese airliner only weeks before, even killing one person on board.
    However, nobody was sure just what the problem for Flight #133 actually had been.
    The tower tapes of radio transmissions from the aircraft held the voice of a man (identified to us as the copilot), screaming, ”We’re tumbling!” A woman (the pilot) then gave half an order to ”Kill the—.” After that came an earsplitting noise, like a car shredder ripping an old wreck apart for scrap.
    Probably the sound of the starboard wing shearing off.
    Somebody in a uniform explained why weather conditions kept rescue planes and helicopters on the ground out there until almost twelve hours later. A different somebody in a similar uniform described how the boats that could brave the wind and rain got bounced around ”like so many apples in a punchbowl.” A genuinely empathetic somebody related how hard it was on the crews to find the floating, often mutilated bodies of eighty-six passengers, and—to his credit—he nearly cried when he let slip an acronym for the other seventeen people who’d been on board Flight #133.
    ”BNR” was the acronym, by the way. Standing for, Body Not Recovered.”
    A nerdlike somebody at the podium said the reason so many bodies weren’t found is that they might have been carried away by the crazy currents churning off the coast. A pompous somebody else felt more strongly that given the likely magnitude and uncertain angle of the aircraft’s impact on the water, some of the bodies (”... and believe me, I know ® how hard it is for all of you out there to hear this...”) were probably dismembered to the point of being... pulverized. ,I Finally one somebody had the guts to climb the ballroom’s platform and say that, in her opinion, the warm waters brought in by El Nino probably contained roving schools of sharks.
    All I really cared about, though, was that ”Meagher, Nancy Eugenia” had been listed among the BNRs.

    The following days were, if possible, even worse. After I’d lost Beth to her cancer, I’d ”adjusted” with alcohol, to the point of nearly creaming a kid on a bike with my car. This time around, I was a lot smarter.
    No establishments beyond walking distance.
    Bellied up to one bar or another, I’d stare raptly at the screens of their television sets, usually with the audio muted so that sporting events or CNN became pantomime ] experiences. Only a few news stories not about Flight #133 registered on me, and even they had to