Waters bends over the controls for a long time. A drop of sweat plinks on the dash. His gaze shifts briefly, and Kate sees him looking at the photograph of his wife. “Minneapolis, Fargo is a first-strike location. We’ll have a better chance north. There are two hundred and forty-seven souls onboard.”

The radio crackles. Minneapolis considers.

There is a snap of intense brightness, almost blinding, as if a flashbulb the size of the sun has gone off somewhere in the sky, behind the plane. Kate turns her head away from the windows and shuts her eyes. There is a deep muffled whump, felt more than heard, a kind of existential shudder in the frame of the aircraft. When Kate looks up again, there are blotchy green afterimages drifting in front of her eyeballs.

Kate leans forward and cranes her neck. Something is glowing under the cloud cover, possibly as much as a hundred miles away behind them. The cloud itself is beginning to deform and expand, bulging upward.

As she settles back into her seat, there is another deep, jarring, muffled crunch, another burst of light. The inside of the cockpit momentarily becomes a negative image of itself. This time she feels a flash of heat against the right side of her face, as if someone has switched a sunlamp on and off.

Minneapolis says, “Copy, Delta 236. Contact Winnipeg Center one-two-seven-point-three.” The air traffic controller speaks with an almost casual indifference.

Vorstenbosch sits up. “I’m seeing flashes.”

“Us, too,” Kate says.

“Oh, my God,” Waters says. His voice cracks. “I should’ve tried to call my wife. Why didn’t I try to call my wife? She’s five months pregnant, and she’s all alone.”

“You can’t,” Kate says. “You couldn’t.”

“Why didn’t I call and tell her?” Waters says, as if he hasn’t heard.

“She knows,” Kate tells him. “She already knows.” Whether they are talking about love or the apocalypse, Kate couldn’t say.

Another flash. Another deep, resonant, meaningful thump.

“Call now Winnipeg FIR,” says Minneapolis. “Call now Nav Canada. Delta 236, you are released.”

“Copy, Minneapolis,” Kate says, because Waters has his face in his hands and is making tiny anguished sounds and can’t speak. “Thank you. Take care of yourselves, boys. This is Delta 236. We’re gone.”

Story Notes and Acknowledgments

IN THE INTRODUCTION I TALKED about some of the artists who most influenced me. One I left out was the novelist Bernard Malamud, author of The Fixer and The Assistant, who once suggested that a corpse in a coffin might be the perfect work of art, because “you got form, but you also got content.”