“And you’ve said before, in your interview with investigators, that your seat belt was off.”
“Yeah. That was — it was stupid really. I had a notebook. A sketchbook. And when the plane pitched down my pencil flew out of my hands and I — unbuckled and went after it.”
“Which saved your life.”
“Yeah. I guess that’s true. But in the moment — people were screaming and there was this—banging. And then—”
Scott shrugs, as if to say, That’s all I really remember.
Across from him Bill nods.
“So, that’s your story,” he says.
“My story?”
“Your version of events.”
“That’s my memory.”
“You dropped your pencil and unbuckled to grab it, and that’s why you survived.”
“I have no idea why I survived, if that’s even — if there is a why, and not just, you know, the laws of physics.”
“Physics.”
“Yes. You know, physical forces that picked me up and threw me from the plane and somehow let the boy survive, but not — you know — anyone else.”
Bill pauses, as if to say, I could go deeper, but I’m choosing not to.
“Let’s talk about your paintings.”
* * *
There is a moment in every horror movie that hinges on silence. A character leaves a room, and rather than go with him, the camera remains in place, focused on nothing — an innocuous doorway perhaps, or a child’s bed. The viewer sits and watches the empty space, listening to the silence, and the very fact that the room is empty and the fact that it is silent convey a dawning sense of dread. Why are we here, waiting? What’s going to happen? What will we see? And so, with a creeping fear, we begin to search the room for something unusual, to strain against the silence for whatever whispers live beneath the ordinary. It is the room’s very unremarkableness that adds to its potential for horror, what Sigmund Freud called the Uncanny. True horror, you see, comes not from the savagery of the unexpected, but from the corruption of everyday objects, spaces. To take a thing we see every day, a thing we take for granted as normal — a child’s bedroom — and transform it into something sinister, untrustworthy — is to undermine the very fabric of life.
And so we stare into the normal, the camera motionless, unwavering, and in the tension of that unblinking stare, our imagination produces a feeling of fear that has no logical explanation.
It is this feeling that comes over Gus Franklin as he sits in his car on the LIE, surrounded by commuters on their way to points east, men driving home from work, families heading home from school or to the beach for a late-afternoon adventure. The silence in his car has a crackle to it, a hiss that fills the recycled air. It is machine noise, impenetrable, but unignorable.
Gus reaches over and turns up the volume, the hiss becoming deafening.
And then he hears whispering, a single word, whispered over and over again.
Bitch.
* * *
“Let’s not talk about my paintings,” says Scott.
“Why? What are you hiding?”
“I’m not — they’re paintings. By definition everything relevant about them is there for the eye to see.”
“Except you’re keeping them secret.”
“The fact that I haven’t shown them yet is not the same as me keeping them secret. The FBI has them now. I have slides at home. A few people have seen them, people I trust. But the truth is, my paintings are literally irrelevant.”
“Let me get this straight — a man who paints disaster scenes, literal plane crashes, is in a plane crash and we’re supposed to think, what? That it’s just a coincidence?”
“I don’t know. The universe is filled with things that don’t make sense. Random coincidences. There’s a statistical model somewhere that could work out the odds of me being in a plane crash or a ferry accident or a train derailment. These things happen every day, and none of us is immune. My number came up is all.”
“I spoke to an art dealer,” says Bill, “who said your work is now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“Nothing’s been sold. That’s theoretical money. Last time I checked I had six hundred dollars in the bank.”
“Is that why you’ve moved in with Eleanor and her nephew?”
“Is what why I’ve moved in with Eleanor and her nephew?”
“Money. The fact that the boy is now worth close to a hundred million dollars?”
Scott looks at him.
“Is that a real question?” he says.
“You bet your ass.”
“First of all, I haven’t moved in.”
“That’s not what the woman’s husband told me. In fact, she threw him out of the house.”
“Just because two things happen in sequence, doesn’t mean there’s a causal relationship.”
“I didn’t go to an Ivy League school, so you’re gonna have to explain that one.”
“I’m saying the fact that Eleanor and Doug have separated — if that’s what happened — has nothing to do with the fact that I came to visit.”
Bill pulls himself up to his full height.
“Let me tell you what I see,” he says. “I see a failed painter, a drunk, who’s floating along ten years past his prime and then life hands him an opportunity.”
“A plane crashed. People are dead.”
“He finds himself in the spotlight, a hero, and suddenly everyone wants a piece of him — he starts banging a twenty-something-year-old heiress. His paintings are hot shit all of a sudden—”
“Nobody’s banging—”
“And then, I don’t know, maybe he gets greedy and thinks, Hey, I’ve got a good thing going with this kid, who’s suddenly worth a fortune, and who has a beautiful, a very attractive, aunt and a kind of loser uncle — so I can come in like the hot shit I am, and take over. Get a piece of that.”
Scott nods, amazed.
“Wow,” he says. “What an ugly world you live in.”
“It’s called the real world.”
“Okay. Well, there’s maybe a dozen mistakes in what you just said. Do you want me to go through them in order, or—”
“So you deny you’ve been sleeping with Layla Mueller.”
“Am I having sex with her? No. She let me stay in an unused apartment.”
“And then she took off her clothes and got in bed with you.”
Scott stares at Bill. How does he know that? Is it a guess?
“I haven’t had sex with anyone in five years,” he says.
“That’s not what I asked. I asked if she got naked and jumped in the sack with you.”
Scott sighs. He has nobody to blame but himself for being in this position.
“I just don’t understand why it matters.”
“Answer the question.”
“No,” he says, “tell me why it matters that an adult woman is interested in me. Tell me why it’s worth outing her in public for something she did when she was under her own roof that she would probably want to keep quiet.”
“So you admit it?”
“No. I’m saying, what possible difference does it make? Does it tell us why the plane crashed? Does it help us process our grief? Or is it something you want to know because you want to know it?”
“I’m just trying to figure out how big a liar you are.”
“About average, I’d say,” says Scott. “But not about things that matter. That’s part of my sobriety, a vow I took, to try and live as honestly as possible.”