When they played the black-box recording on television, Stanley was wretched to hear the tones of the pilots: stunted, unreadable, the opposite of the burning music he imagined.

No doubt this pilot too—the one who ejected—was as disembodied, as untouched by grandeur or longing as all the others he had never interviewed or known.

Yet he hoped. He hoped that there was a place where the real transcript could be found. And there, where he and others of his trade had no windows, there was the dialogue that made living a sacred, felt thing. There would be, somewhere, a marveling—wouldn’t there?

Somewhere, perhaps, but not in the Room. There, last night’s pilot, if found dead, would have become someone whose military records were requested; someone whose commanding officers, if they were retired, would be called; someone who would have had to fit either into the story of a brave pilot, beloved by all, cruelly and ironically unlucky, or the story of the headed-for-trouble pilot whose superiors were too overburdened or negligent to have stopped him. Sometime later, there might be a feature writer who craved writing for magazines and would consider writing a longer, more nuanced story, but who would decide after a few weeks that a fall into a river in the nation’s capital from a great wasp of a warplane was a singularity upon which no writer, no matter how great, could improve. But the caracara reporter, that bird would not rest. He would run to the doors of those who didn’t want to talk at first but might finally. He would database and dial neighbors, flight-school classmates, lost spouses, half-siblings, math teachers, aunts, and, if bitingly lucky, poach the sweetest morsel: parents. He would compose a story that would be too long—Stanley had never seen one less than seventy-five column inches, the height of a tall man. Unless there was something in the pilot’s past—criminal record, too many accidents, a supervisor who wrote him up as unbalanced—editors would cut the story. It would run inside Metro, not even on the front of Metro, and certainly not, as erroneously dreamed by the keenest striver, on the newspaper’s front page. Stanley was often called upon to edit these remnants of moxie; big editors edited big stories, less-so editors edited stories that found neither the usual nor the unusual.