THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BEING A SURVIVOR, in the case of Air France Flight 801, for a long time lay in the simple fact that there should have been no survivors. At least, for a long time, that’s what Catherine Bach considered the crucial element of the story. The press felt differently. News accounts in the aftermath of the doomed Chicago-bound flight focused on the unexplained circumstances surrounding the crash, the possibility of lightning or some other external impact, the failure for six weeks to find the flight recorder until it was eventually fished out of Brittas Bay off the east coast of Ireland not at all far from where the big plane went down. One account of the incident hinged on the rumour that an extra, unauthorized pilot was in the cockpit of the Airbus A380-800 at the time. And that gave rise to a storm of follow-up press and blog speculation all addressed to the mysterious and tantalizing possibility of a fifth man. #AF801TheFifthMan.
The public meanwhile—and Catherine knew this term to be a polite cover over the more accurate description complete strangers—seemed interested only in the perceived life-dividend of survival. As the months stretched to a year, and then on out towards two full years afterwards, Catherine became wearily familiar with a common line of questioning, maybe linked to the fact that the accident had happened just before New Year’s. Didn’t she feel very blessed? Was she not now filled with purpose and meaning? Did life not shimmer with possibility in the wake of those moments when possibility itself was so very nearly snuffed out entirely?
Catherine, who generally did not mind disappointing people, nevertheless struggled to be as direct as she might have liked in response to these questions. She’d be stopped on the street. She’d find a hand on her arm in the lineup to pay at the grocery store. Cab drivers caught her in the rear-view mirror, did a double take before launching in. And she’d find herself smiling weakly, wondering if she was perhaps projecting some insufficiency of gratitude.
But as important as all that speculation might have been to those people and to those newspapers and magazines, their voracious curiosity missed the feature of the crash that would never be explained by data or the evidence of any one survivor’s life. And that was the fact (and Catherine considered it a fact) that the six survivors of AF801 were supposed to be dead. Statistically speaking, staying with science. The way that plane went down—shredding the clouds, salting the shore, boiling the sea—there was just no case to be made that anyone in that thin-skinned aluminum coffin should still be alive.
Of course, things do happen implausibly on occasion. Catherine had studied family medicine and toxicology, then worked at a walk-in clinic on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for eight years before leaving practice at age thirty-four to start her own business. Catherine knew about probabilities and bell curves and the occasions on which the very limits of the likely were reached and exceeded. She’d seen a woman shipped off to emerg and then surgery for the removal of what turned out to be 343 gallstones. She’d treated a two-year-old who had fallen three storeys into the improbable safety of an open dumpster full of shredded legal documents. She’d lost count of the supra-combinatory overdoses—people amped and kitty-flipping, bananoed and shabued, so past grey zones they were falling through the twilight sub-mantles of death itself—who had yet been brought back to life. If street medicine taught you anything, it was that the human animal did survive on occasions when rational analysis told you it shouldn’t.
Catherine understood that much. But as those calendar leaves peeled away and fluttered out of frame, she also could not shake the feeling that probability could not entirely account for her situation. And she wondered if she felt that all the more intensely, more than the other five survivors, because only Catherine had walked away. She wasn’t unscratched. But she fell from the clouds to earth and was only scratched.
Catherine didn’t like to talk about the details of the crash. Even in therapy, which she’d tried briefly just after the first anniversary, Catherine had spoken carefully, circumspect, omitting parts. Even as difficulties had been mounting and all tides in life seemed to be ebbing hard against her, when she was taking Paxipam to sleep every night, she did sit and squirm in the deep leather chair of the therapist’s office and speak carefully around the topic of what she’d seen, what she remembered, but never recounting the details of what she still dreamed nightly. Scenes as if through a strobe light. The massive noise of the explosion and the roiling of black smoke in the cabin. The drink trolley that smashed out of nowhere and into her legs before there was even a sensation of falling. A sudden awareness of herself pinned to the ceiling of the cabin. Sounds and smells and pains bleeding into one another. And at the very moment of tipping, at the top of that long and earnest fall, some stiffness, some realness seemed to leach out of the structure around her. The plastic tray tables and leather seats, the aisle carpeting and all the members of aluminum and steel that made up the plane’s most essential inner workings, all these seemed to lose form and rigidity, liquefying long before contact with the hard ocean below. As they began to fall, she broke through layers of sensation, cutting the night sky over Ireland, disintegrating as they went, wings detaching as if the plane were moulting, the tail section floating away and the cabin awash with debris and bodies. She was pasted to the ceiling, pinned there above her ticketed seat, and she felt only a terrible separation. It would have been impossible to explain if Catherine had ever tried to discuss it. A separation from herself, like being able to feel herself twice, at once here and gone, one actual and one potential Catherine Bach. One present, one future conditional. The G-forces seeming to push right through her, gravity working its last wish to both split and unify. To black-hole me, that’s what she thought. To pull me out of myself and deposit me in two places on opposite sides of the universe at once. And in the moment that thought struck her, she hallucinated vividly, the air around her seeming to fill instantly with black shapes, thudding and beating their wings. Birds, an instant shroud of them, black wings and beaks and claws that touched the skin of her arms and legs and face, their shuddering bodies close and cold. And Catherine fell in this shroud of black birds towards the sea, understanding the creatures to have burst into existence directly from her chest, spiralling out and away from her, but having emerged directly from her own heart.
A miracle. That was the other thing that people said, cycling back to the idea of her great blessing, the beneficence of heaven. And here the published photographs did not help her, as they tended to support the miracle reading. Even Catherine looked at those images, the most iconic of which were taken on an iPhoneX by a twelve-year-old girl from Indianapolis on holiday in Wicklow County, and realized that otherwise reasonable people would indeed reach for something beyond the natural world to explain how she’d stood up and walked away from that littered, pebbly shoreline, with the heaving mound of the cockpit and a length of double-tiered fuselage still bobbing in the bay behind her.
You walked away! Every day you must wake up so grateful! The implication and attendant obligation were clear—Catherine would need to do something very special with the tanked-up gift card that the Fates had apparently hand-delivered to her. You must have incredible plans. Well, she did. But she’d had plans before too.
The other survivors, significantly, Catherine thought, had each been badly injured, each hospitalized, taking weeks and months to re-enter the world as best they could. She thought of them often, more than work really allowed her the time for, and then more and more, in part because difficulties at work seemed to demand it. She’d avoided knowing the names, but had a single secret artifact from the ill-fated flight, a seat map, six seats marked with yellow highlighter.
12B, 18E, 20F, 63B, 70F.
Her own seat was 2L. But it seemed to her those five others, by being injured, by struggling for survival, those five had also obeyed the bell curve a degree more than she had. They’d paid a crucial courtesy to luck, however unconscious the genuflection, a courtesy she had herself not paid. And it was for that failure on her part that luck seemed recently to have turned against her.
Catherine didn’t like thinking this way. Luck, fate, destiny. These were conceits, offensive to rational thought and logic. The universe, like the human body, was complex and on occasion surprising. But it remained an ordered and structured thing. The Rule of Stephens, she’d lectured her sister, Valerie, as far back as when they were still in high school. That would be Stephen Hawking or Stephen King. There were the laws of physics and then there was everything else. You had to choose which set of rules explained life best.
Valerie, three years younger and an aspiring stage actress in her teen years, had always seemed faintly dissatisfied with natural explanations. She was then, in Catherine’s memory, always yearning mystery, even tragedy into the world. Such a redhead, people would say about Valerie, but never about Catherine, who shared the same strawberry ginger hair inherited from their mother, the same fine, fair features and intense green eyes. Catherine remembered the lunches she and her sister had shared in an empty chem lab, half an hour over salads they made together before school. Half an hour before Valerie’s friends came to find her and Catherine herself turned to whatever homework needed her attention, whatever book was on the go. She recalled one occasion, running late, a mid-term afternoon in April or May. She’d rushed in flustered and talking already about the injustice of her English teacher’s marking scheme: so subjective, so lacking in rigour. And there was Valerie wiping away tears, trying to cover up the horoscope that she’d been reading.
Friends can be deceiving. And as Saturn squares with Venus, beware the one friend who…
Valerie distraught. Catherine instantly furious. Saturn said no more about Valerie’s chances in love or friendship than it did about Catherine’s English grades. There was this matter of physical causality, Catherine ranted. And since she was also carrying around a copy of A Brief History of Time that year, in the cause of sisterly, protective love she resorted to it. That really was her up at the chalkboard drawing cones that met at their points, trying to explain how the speed of light quite tightly proscribed what could affect a given moment, just as it limited how a given moment could affect the future. Catherine with chalk in her hand, drawing pictures, trying to explain Hawking’s “hypersurface of the present” just as the lab door burst open and Valerie’s drama club friends poured in.
The one in the lead was lean with broad shoulders and a narrow waist, brown T-shirt, golden, close-cut hair. He had dark brown eyes and an expression of endless amusement. He’d played Paul in the school’s musical production of Misery that year. Catherine had seen it and could not dispute that the young man could lie in a bed, fake broken ankles and still sing like a lark.
He looked at Catherine, the older, weirder sister. Catherine felt that exact assessment in the gaze. The one who freckled more. The one with glasses, always toting books. To this young man, they must have looked like opposites in that moment.
He looked at the chalkboard, laughing a musical laugh.
“Time cones?” he said.
Then he took Valerie by the hand and pulled her towards the door.
“Stephen Hawking or Stephen King,” Catherine called after them, her face red but refusing to feel ashamed of what was right. “The world runs by the rules of one of them. And you have to choose, people!” And nothing in the universe was going to rise against that statement. No fact then known or to be proven in future, woven as all such facts must be in the warp and woof of the universe’s magnificent and rational unfolding. She had been so sure.
Where had that dead certainty gone? At work, invariably, in a slow but undeniable way, Catherine would sense herself in branching moments with nothing like her typical clarity of plan and vision, ranked options with outcome probabilities assigned. And her eyes would drift to one of the warehouse windows, and in the long light of the late afternoon, in the blue shadows of shining buildings, on the flanks of the black and looming north shore hills, she saw something pixelated there, some early-blooming seed crystal of doubt.
And not from lack of data, either. Data Catherine had in spades, in heaving seas. That failing sense of certainty came instead from another, distinctly more troubling source. She shared this with no one, not even Valerie. But from quite early after it happened, she began to have the strange sense of something newly alive in the world, something with opposing polarity. An opposite, she thought, a phantom with no phase or physics. A force, it seemed, at work on the project of balancing luck’s ledger, betting against her. Running up the odds in some unfavourable way, and threatening to win too, it had to be said. On a couple of recent occasions, threatening to win big.
Didn’t she feel very blessed? Was she not now filled with purpose and meaning? Did life not shimmer with possibility in the wake of those moments when possibility itself was so very nearly snuffed out entirely?
They asked their question with wide eyes and open hearts. A good number of them wanted to hug her. They’d read the whole story. They knew the gory truth, the body count. They’d been online and read the black box transcript, heard the recording of the pilot’s strange last words. We are coming apart. We are…and then this, in what was described as a scream from the centre of a cloud of squelch, at exactly 10:30 p.m.: We’re splitting. We’re splitting.
No bang to speak of at impact. No sound at all at the dreaded moment of. Only impact, radical and entire. Those black birds swarmed around her. The black hole opened, and out came fire and water and death to all but those lucky six.
12B, 18E, 20F, 63B, 70F…
And all the way up front to her own suite in first class, 2L—which struck her now as an embarrassment, that just before disaster she’d thought to accept this favour from an over-ingratiating booking agent, an upgrade from economy to radical indulgence. We’re empty up there. You’ll like it. Trust me. That was her accepting the unpaid upgrade, now living with the knowledge that whoever had taken her seat in economy had died in her stead.
Did the other five do the same? Did they have worn seat plans over which they pored in the dead of night? Did they silently reach for answers, wondering at the impossible reasoning of it all? In hotel lobbies. In boardrooms. Driving the freeway. Waiting to board a train. Did they all travel by train now? Had they sworn off flying, delaying meetings, putting everyone out of sorts, driving three hours to Seattle when a meeting with potential investors could not possibly be Skyped or avoided?
Two years later, two years into the downward spiral of what was supposed to be her recovery, her rebirth, Catherine Bach learned that at least one of them did. Sitting on her couch, stroking her old tabby cat Toby. And she thought: things happen for reasons. Effects are caused. And here comes a cause that she could have perhaps squinted her eyes and seen coming earlier, approaching her steadily all that time. A speck, then a shape, then a human form coming in across the waves, the beach and the dunes, through the sifting fronds of Irish beach grass. Only then a sound. Pinprick in the ear, a cascade of synthetic bells.
And now her phone ringing. Her personal cell. A number only a few people close to her knew and it wasn’t any of them calling.
It was 70F.