He thought about the pilot from last night. His mental pictures of pilots were from movies. There were unshaven actors from World War II films, disgraced motorcyclists from Vietnam cinema—those were all he could summon. Had he ever interviewed one on the phone? He had many plane crashes in his clip file. Yet none were military. The Delta crash one winter—in the Potomac. One in a field, maybe United, he thought in Maryland. An editor had sent him to the airport to find relatives arriving from somewhere to identify the dead. The editor told him to stake out the gate, interview them. He had hurried away, hidden his notebook, given off an air of waiting for a flight to Orlando, and, after watching the grieving arrive and disperse, called his editor to say he’d asked all of them if they’d wanted to talk, but none had. Keep trying, the editor told him. So the next flight of grievers came, and, notebook in hand, he approached a woman in a raincoat. Before he could speak, she shook her head and looked away. He couldn’t try another. He watched the other reporters to see whether any of the relatives talked to them. If they did, he promised himself he too would crowd around the talkative ones and switch on his tape recorder. But no one did, not that he saw. The next day, the other papers had the interviews with grieving loved ones. His editors saw the other stories, and they said, in meetings—Stanley didn’t get one interview. They didn’t berate him. He feared that would happen. What happened was someone else was assigned to do the next-day story on relatives.

But airline pilots—had any survived a crash he’d covered? He couldn’t call one to mind. The pilot was usually dead on impact. Stanley recalled the voices of aviators recovered from the black box, which was always hard to find, a dear prize of a laborious search, more than a few times never found. The words recovered from this throttlehold reminded him of those said in the confessional booth or the psychiatrist’s office—sanctified into a privacy only calamity could sometimes breach. To his sorrow, the transcripts were startling in their brevity. There was little of moment or portent said, just the exigencies of a present like any other. They spoke as if an unremarkable outcome was not just possible—it was likely. He, too often aching, wanted, “I loved Miranda!” Or, “I’ll never see my son again—God help him.” Or, “I have felt lost a lifetime.”

But no. They said, “Palm 90 contact departure control.” Or, “Forward, forward, easy. We only want five hundred.” The best he ever heard was, “Stalling, we’re falling.”

“Larry, we’re going down, Larry….” And what did Larry say? “I know it.”