Panorama

THIS HAPPENED on the last day of the last year when we still felt safe, with the American skyline brilliantine, the entire panorama still rendered in its familiar postcard wholeness.

The two years bisected by this particular New Year’s Eve would come and go without fanfare, no shock in the timeline, no Dealey Plaza or Ambassador Hotel, no Miracle Mets or miracles on ice, no archdukes or mad monks, no anarchists or secessionists, no Treaty of Versailles, no surrender, no peace, no Sputnik or man on the moon, no heiresses turned into gun-toting molls, no Giants Win the Pennant! or Nixon Resigns!

The names of the infamous airports of the past became, at a distance, a roll call of crises: Tel Aviv, Kennedy, Sioux City, Hanoi, Tripoli, Athens, Entebbe, all those historical locales that conjured up grainy, United Press International photos of smuggled handguns, heroic pilots negotiating out the cockpit window while hijackers demanded unencumbered passage to Beirut, Havana. In San Juan, the narco dogs barked at every piece of luggage; in Geneva, armored personnel carriers stood sentry between the runways, a response to the vaguely threatening nature of our time.

We could have been anywhere. But for the purposes of this particular holiday and its hurried arrangements and contingencies, we need to choose a benign location. Salt Lake City, the middle of the Great Basin, in the valley sandwiched between the natural fortress of the Wasatch and Oquirrh Mountains. A sprawling city on the bottom of what was once a tremendous prehistoric lake.

Even on a holiday, the town rolled up its sidewalks just after dark. Whatever celebrating was to be done was likely a solitary pursuit. Disgruntled airport workers smoked their last cigarettes of the year alarmingly close to thirty-thousand-gallon tanks of jet-A fuel. The terminal was empty except for employees so close to the margins that these few hours of overtime meant the difference for the next month.

And what are New Year’s resolutions but our simplest prayers? Help me give this shit up, uttered by forty-eight-year-old airline mechanic Arnold Bright as he wandered the tarmac of the Salt Lake City International Airport these silent hours of late evening. A pledge to quit made for the fourth year in a row while digging behind his lip to remove an hour-stale pack of chewing tobacco, just a pinch between his cheek and gum. His wife would refuse to kiss him when he got home, and it was, after all, New Year’s Eve. He swirled tepid coffee in his mouth, trying to extract the grit of tobacco and coarse coffee grounds from his teeth, then spattered the mess onto the concrete.

This burden he carried: at home, everything he did or said was a disappointment. He was worn out, too, from family squabbles, a wife he could not seem to please either emotionally or sexually, a teenaged daughter who now refused to go to church, whose newest set of complaints included not getting a car for Christmas, not having her own cell phone. New Year’s Eve meant another night as last man on the tarmac, a duty his wife would see not as a practical effort to pay the bills but as just another way he had conspired to stay out of the house.

He hoped she could be assuaged with a nine-dollar bottle of champagne, a neck rub, and a pre-midnight arrival home. He was just four hours from union-mandated double time, and besides, every conversation at home reminded him how much they needed the money. But his week already included sixteen hours of overtime, so his decision to cut corners seemed without consequence. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten to do something; instead, he’d actively decided not to roll out the ladder, not to take a closer look at the entire tail rudder assembly. This human gesture—Arnold Bright’s inclination toward home and family on the last night of the year—set in motion a series of events with their own unstoppable momentums.

Arnold busied himself initialing the ground crew’s preflight checklist, making cursory marks with a twenty-nine-cent BIC pen. One of tomorrow afternoon’s early departures, one of the airline’s decades-old workhorses, a 727, was already attached to the Jetway at gate B14. He picked up the basic tool of his job: a clipboard, its metal jaw straining to hold the nearly inch-thick pile of recent airworthiness directives and safety bulletins. There was newfound concern about the older 727s, the potential malfunction of a servo control valve that might cause the sudden deflection of the rudder. A known defect that could result in uncontrolled flight into terrain. The airline took these government-issued documents and translated them into new preflight inspection procedures. But today’s memos, written in the Esperanto of bureaucracy, appeared in commonplace batches of ten or twelve, which made Arnold Bright think none of them was cause for alarm.

He ought to have been more attentive. An understandable oversight, one that would no doubt have been corrected if he could only have seen the next afternoon’s breaking news.

A plane down on approach to Dallas–Fort Worth.

What Arnold Bright would see on television: ranchland scattered with the detritus of wreckage, briefcases, a lone running shoe, the live network feed from a camera stationed at a discreet-enough distance to insinuate a burning fuselage, its cyclone of smoke visible over the reporter’s right shoulder. In that field, the camera would find its narrative in garbage, air sickness bags and in-flight magazines, luggage thrown clear of the debris field, a teddy bear and some sort of melted personal electronic device, a leather portfolio stamped with the name of a property and casualty insurance company, its corporate logotype intact despite the presence of soot and ash and oozing plastic and blood spatter, the implied presence of human remains.

Those broadcast images would never leave him; the insurance logo would always evoke for him not the image of a blanket or a fireman’s hat or a piece of the rock, but an airplane short of the runway, the end of his career as a burning field.

Months after the accident, once reports had been written about the failure to notice the stain of bright-purple hydraulic fluid visible against the predominantly white and orange paint of the Panorama Airlines’ color scheme, and blame officially assigned, the livelihood of a forty-eight-year-old airline mechanic, a union and family man, would become the final casualty of Flight 503.

RICHARD MACMURRAY—moderately well-known television pundit, part-time gadfly, prized Washington cocktail-party guest, owner of more than a hundred neckties in a palette of screaming oranges and purples, forty-two years old and once divorced, a Capricorn, former criminal defense attorney turned professional advocate—sat in a director’s chair trying to regulate his breathing, hoping his forehead sweat wouldn’t pop through his makeup.

He was a guest, live and in studio, on a cable news show debating the issue of mandatory sentencing. Eight weeks ago, at the beginning of the November sweeps, he’d appeared on the same program supporting the inalienable right of a bakery owner in Madison, Wisconsin, to sell pastries shaped like human genitalia. A cupcake frosted to look like a breast was guaranteed airtime, guaranteed ratings, maybe a two-point spike in the overnight share. Tonight’s topic, legal and esoteric, meant that no one would watch. During the commercial break between segments, he found himself wondering what the lowest possible rating on the Nielsen scale could be. He wasn’t breaking news or making memorable television here, just cashing a check. He hadn’t even told his sister about it, and she recorded nearly all of his appearances.

A foundation for criminal justice reform had hired Richard as their television mouthpiece, given him contractually defined talking points simple enough to memorize: mandatory sentences handcuffed the judiciary, put a disproportionate burden on youth and minority offenders, gave too much discretionary power to the police, to prosecutors. But he’d hit all the high notes in the first segment, closing with, “If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then absolute discretion divvied up between police and prosecutors is a power that will be absolutely abused. We all want safer schools, safer streets. But those good intentions haven’t led, in this case, to good public policy.”

On the adjacent set, Max Peterson, tonight’s anchorman, fiddled with papers; Richard knew from experience the papers were blank, a prop. A former Marine and a Rhodes scholar, Peterson could be counted on to digress eloquently on anything from the Stanley Cup finals to the risks inherent in American naval presence in the Persian Gulf. His appearance as a substitute anchor tended to evoke a similar reaction in most viewers: I thought he’d retired. Among the inside-the-Beltway talent, Peterson was famous for trying to get his guests to crack, interrupting arguments about the serious issues of the day with a discrete flash of a hand-drawn pornographic cartoon, something like Uncle Sam sporting a monstrous erection. No shenanigans tonight, however, which made the attorney in Richard suspect that maybe Peterson had been spoken to by human resources.

Richard stood and smoothed his suit, eavesdropping as the anchor mumbled monosyllabic responses to his in-ear instructions. Forty-five seconds back. The director would probably offer him some comments as well; the previous segment featured Richard talking over the flustered objections of the other guest, Vance Hiddell, a United States attorney from Alabama.

“One last segment, boys,” the director said. Richard realized he didn’t know a face to put with the voice in his ear. “Let’s try to share our little sandbox. We’ll treat it like congressional debate, two minutes and forty-five seconds, divided equally. Then we’ll go back to Max for wrap-up and his final thought.”

Hiddell stood close by, tapped on the wooden armrest of Richard’s chair. He smelled like a barbershop. “Congratulations. We’re the featured guests on the lowest-rated network-television program of the year.”

“At least we’ll be done in time to join in the festivities. Any plans?”

“Reservations at the Old Ebbitt. My wife insisted. Even though the crab cake that’s twenty dollars every other day of the year is now part of a two-hundred-fifty-dollar fixed-price romantic adventure,” Hiddell said.

Richard nodded in a way that he hoped suggested agreement. New Year’s was always difficult, had been for years. The imaginary pressure to invent happy occasions with his now ex-wife had given way to an equally imagined fear that people would judge him if he admitted to his usual habit of spending the holidays alone.

Alone. He repeated the word to himself as he reached for his bottled water.

He heard the shuffle on the studio floor that meant they were going live, the count in his ear, five, four, three. The red light on the anchor’s camera went hot, and Max Peterson set up the final segment. On the reference monitor, the split screen suggested that Richard and his opponent had been brought together by the miracle of satellite, when in fact they sat on the same riser, in identical chairs five feet apart.

“Welcome back. We’re talking about possible revisions to federal sentencing guidelines, what the lawyers might call mandatory minimums. Our guests are Washington-based defense attorney Richard MacMurray and longtime federal prosecutor Vance Hiddell, Alabama Republican and candidate for the United States Senate. Mr. Hiddell, how do you respond to the charge some legal scholars have leveled that mandatory minimums undermine the very premise of equal justice for all?”

“Mandatory minimums are the absolute guarantee of equal justice. They serve as a deterrent to crime and add a system of checks and balances against activist federal judges, one that keeps them from handing out unduly lenient sentences.”

“Or,” Richard interrupted, “mandatory sentencing laws undermine the very purpose of the judiciary, which is to allow our learned men and women the chance to display wisdom, compassion, and judgment. We’re building prisons faster than Stalin, and filling them with college kids who made the fatal error of smoking a joint, or housewives who stole a seven-dollar lipstick.”

Hiddell took an unsubtle detour into his stump speech. “It’s almost as if my friend has forgotten where these laws came from. They keep violent offenders off the streets. They keep our wives and mothers safe from recidivists. And the prisons we send career criminals to are nicer than the hotel I stayed in last night. It costs taxpayers nearly twenty-five thousand dollars a year per prisoner in the federal system, and those felons get three square meals and cable TV. What we need to bring back is discipline. The sense that prison is not a vacation but a punishment. Because right now, we’re not reforming or rehabilitating, we’re simply coddling these people. Sending a three-time loser to a work farm for ten years is nothing more than justice.”

Richard took the reference to these people as a typical us-versus-them gambit, designed to rile up the pickup-truck-and-shotgun crowd. Hiddell probably had polling data in his briefcase that showed how those voters were exactly the kind of people who might put him over the top on election day.

Richard did not know he would pull the stunt until he was out of his chair and crossing the stage. The director shouted through his earpiece, an airburst of profanity followed by the begging of all three cameras to stay with the shot. Richard walked the two steps across the riser, stopped next to the candidate. “Thirty-eight years ago, a teenager pled guilty to a pair of nonviolent felonies for some youthful mischief involving fireworks and bad decisions. Since then, he’s graduated from high school and college, earned a master’s degree, and become a licensed pharmacist. And this week,” Richard said, “a district court in California sentenced this fifty-seven-year-old pharmacist to life in prison. His crime? Stealing a Snickers bar.”

Hiddell prattled on, “We don’t need to send career criminals off to camp. We need them to pay their debt to society.”

Richard dug into the pocket of his suit pants and extracted some change. When he extended his hand, Hiddell reflexively stuck out his own. Richard dropped the coins in, one by one. “Twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-seven, and seventy-eight.”

“What’s this shit?” the candidate demanded. The anchor blanched, but all three heard the director answer, “Easy,” into their earpiece.

“One criminal’s debt to society, paid in full.”

They’d end the segment, Richard knew, no matter how much time was left. A slogan popped into his head: More Americans get their news from our network than any other news organization. He knew too that the clip would be picked up on free media and repeated in a seemingly perpetual loop, the candidate sitting there in his chair, dumbfounded and visibly furious, trying to decide whether or not to stand, still holding on to the spare change.

In a year when everything else would go his party’s way, Vance Hiddell would lose his September primary by twelve percentage points.

Richard walked past camera two, unclipped his IFB, then headed through the narrow corridor behind the control room, where he was surrounded by stagehands offering back slaps, laughs, murmurs of congratulations.

In the reference monitor, Richard saw Max Peterson stack the papers of his fake script one last time and smile at the camera. “We’ll return in a moment.”

AT THE deserted concourse gates of the Salt Lake City International Airport, the waiting areas flickered with the light of soundless televisions blinking out the last of the year’s news. A science correspondent talked about the prevailing winds, the patterns of frigid Pacific currents, the historical increase in temperatures, all to an audience of empty plastic chairs. At each gate, video terminals predicted the on-time departure of tomorrow morning’s earliest flights. Maintenance personnel tended to the business of cleaning; their slapping mops and whirling floor polishers, their muffled whistles of boredom and melancholy, all reverberated off the terminal’s exposed girder-and-crossbeam ceiling. Forty-gallon garbage bags stuffed with stale cinnamon rolls sat abandoned near an unattended customer-service kiosk.

Because the most delicious cigarette is a surreptitious one, the workers inside smoked too; cigarettes dangled from their pursed lips as they completed the last items on a checklist of second-shift chores. Behind the closed pull-down gate of an airport shop, a twentysomething employee they called Heavy Metal Bob stacked and tied together bundles of the previous morning’s newspapers, December 31 headed for the recycling bin. Tomorrow’s travelers would congregate over a stack of them, four different varieties with the same set of headlines: Sri Lankan Ferry Disaster Claims Hundreds; Heat Wave Dominates for Third Straight Day; For California Businesses, Everything Turns Up Roses.

They called him Heavy Metal Bob thanks to his long, straight hair and endless supply of concert T-shirts. Behind his back, coworkers scoffed at his ratty jeans and the navy suede sneakers that on rainy days left his white tube socks stained at the toes and heels. The people he worked with assumed he was high, but he’d gotten and stayed clean, if only to spite the naysayers. He blocked out their sniping comments and the day-to-day sounds of the airport with an old Walkman he’d found near gate A18, and worked with the perpetual slowness of someone barely awake.

Bob spent the end of his New Year’s Eve shift dusting around shelves of souvenirs, stuffed animals, shot glasses and snow globes, bric-a-brac labeled with the city’s name, purple T-shirts emblazoned with the incongruous words Utah Jazz. He’d volunteered to work, to give the family men on the custodial staff the evening off, and in the near solitude of late evening, he did what so many others across the nation were doing at that exact moment, using the year’s waning hours for self-assessment—this personal inventory his only distraction as he counted his way through a rack of paperback bestsellers. His resolutions were meager—put away a few dollars for the future, stop wasting so many on 900 numbers and late fees at the video store, get a few more fresh vegetables into the diet.

Bob dreamed of an airline job, counter agent or baggage thrower, one that might mean someone to talk to at work. All he’d ever wanted was to help people, to be dependable; in the parlance of the cop show he’d watched last night at 2:00 a.m., you could say anything you wanted about Bob Denovo, but he was a stand-up guy, the kind of guy who’d bail you out of the city lockup, no questions asked, the kind of guy who, if there was one sandwich left in all the world, would offer you half. How easy it had become to ignore the guy with the garbage bags and the headphones; most evenings, as he passed the women who worked at the hamburger joint on the A concourse, he received only a nod in return to his greetings. Someday, he hoped, one of them would wave him over and say thank you for carrying out the bags of stale buns and rancid meat. They might talk for a few minutes, but it wouldn’t be anything like working on the ramp.

Maybe he could be the guy with the flashlights, steering the pilots toward the Jetway. He had no idea what the guys with ear protection and fluorescent vests actually did, just a peculiar confidence: whatever it was, he could do it too. Besides, no way you could sit out on the ramp all day, loading and unloading planes, and never find anything to talk about.

His plans were for an evening of television and a modest splurge, delivered pizza and a Sprite (he wasn’t Mormon but had adopted some of the Latter-Day disciplines, such as skipping caffeine, mostly to avoid strangers who might ask the question of his faith). As he watched the illuminated ball descend over the Times Square throng, he would feel the total absence of human contact in his life, a longing for someone, anyone, to kiss at midnight. What else could he do besides watch television? A cable network offered a marathon of reruns, this science fiction series he was trying to catch up on, where government agents were complicit in the cover-up of an impending alien invasion. This plot made perfect sense to Bob; on the edge of the high desert, he’d seen inexplicable displays of celestial lights, phenomena known by obtuse-sounding titles that combined numbers and initials. The only other thing on TV was going to be the news, and whenever he could help it, Bob paid no attention to the events of the world outside.

At the top of the ten o’clock news, a fat weatherman—the standard-issue avuncular type—offered a scientific explanation for the week’s weather pattern. We were just two days away from perihelion, the time when the earth moved closest to the sun; B-roll video showed coastal North Carolina, buffeted by a week’s worth of unusually strong surf, the result of a convergence of the latest nor’easter and the tidal pull of a full moon. Under the constancy of fifty-knot winds, a handful of million-dollar homes had already toppled into the sea near Wrightsville Beach, but those disembodied images were the nation’s only bit of bad news this New Year’s Eve.

The optimism of the New Year was reflected in the forecast: the jet stream crept farther north across Canada’s prairie provinces, flooding the states below with an abundance of surprising warmth; the weatherman spoke of the prospects for record high temperatures, a dearth of snow. The first day of January would arrive from sea to shining sea under the brightest spotlight of clear winter, American sunlight, no chance of foul weather.

THE HOTEL, an elegant stone high-rise off Temple Square, stood just feet from the spot where the city of Salt Lake began. Tourists gathered in the shadows of the six steeples of the great temple and took photographs of the statue of the angel Moroni as he beckoned the faithful to arms with his blazing golden trumpet.

In the dead hours just before dinner, the lower floors of the hotel bustled with preparations for the evening’s festivities. Uniformed employees vacuumed ballrooms while men in jeans and black T-shirts assembled modular stages; bar backs sliced limes, and $6.74-an-hour kitchen help wrapped frozen scallops in bacon slices. The musicians in cover bands—a schoolteacher, a car salesman, the produce manager of a local market, a hired-gun horn section that had once, in an emergency, played behind Chuck Berry—geared up for their various New Year’s Eve parties, restringing guitars and reviewing their cheat sheets, the charts that would allow them to churn out perfunctory versions of the top hits of yesterday and today.

And on the seventh floor, Mary Beth Blumenthal primped for a night out. She opened her room’s window to release the accumulated steam of her shower and admit the lush breeze of a warm December night, pausing in her preparations to admire the precise layout of the city. In front of a vanity mirror that made her look ten pounds heavier, she vowed to be remarried by this time next year, a preamble to her next New Year’s resolution: provide a strong male role model for her son, Gabriel, who on his next birthday would be seven years old and had never known his biological father.

Mary Beth’s strongest prospect was Mike Renfro, the Texas insurance man who also happened to be her boss. They’d been dating clandestinely for months, but this weekend was the first inkling she’d gotten that their future contained something more, maybe even something permanent. Mike was the only reason she would be in Salt Lake City. She could think of only one other reason people might come to Utah on holiday—skiing—and she hadn’t been much for winter sports except for a few college-era trips down the bunny slopes. A romantic getaway meant the islands, St. Barts maybe, or dinner and a show on Broadway. Mary Beth had a tough time picturing romance in Utah. She had been meaning to ask about this strange destination ever since Mike snuck into her office the Wednesday before Christmas and left her an envelope stuffed with colorful brochures and airline tickets; there had been only two tickets, Mike’s and Mary Beth’s, and she’d been angry that he’d made no accommodations for Gabriel.

It had taken intense bilateral negotiations before Mary Beth agreed to leave her son with Sarah Hensley, one of Mike’s cadre of just-out-of-college assistants. They would stay at Mike’s house, where Gabriel could avail himself of the big-screen television and the heated pool, all under adequate supervision. Still, her worries had dominated the last three days, feelings of guilt about being apart from her son for the first time in his six years, a sense of remorse tempering the joy she felt at relaxing in the hotel-provided terry-cloth robe, the snacks of fourteen-dollar macadamias and honey-roasted cashews from the minibar.