Ken Dornstein - The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky

I

T HE NIGHT MY BROTHER DIED, I slept fine, back in my old bed in my old room in the old house where I grew up. I came downstairs late the next morning. My father and stepmother had left for work, but I was on my first day of Christmas break from college. I had nothing to do, and the entire day to do it. I found the newspaper laid out on the kitchen table. The headline ran in giant letters across the front pagePLANE WITH 259 ABOARD CRASHES, DESTROYS 40 HOMES IN SCOTLAND. I started to read:

LOCKERBIE, ScotlandA Pan Am jumbo jet bound for New York with 259 people, many of them Christmas travelers, crashed last night into this Scottish village, exploding into a huge fireball and setting ablaze dozens of homes and cars. No survivors from the Boeing 747 were found. The cause of the crash was not immediately clear, although speculation centered on either structural failure or sabotage.

There were other stories on the bombing as well: Fire Fell from the Sky Like Liquid. All On Jet, 11 in Town Are Killed. There were also picturesa Scottish police officer peering into the planes crushed cockpit lying in a field; houses and cars on fire; a woman collapsed on the floor of JFK airport (shed just been told that her daughter was on the plane). I skimmed the stories. I also checked the sports page and the police blotter in the suburban Neighbors section. A pizza delivery man had been robbed of $120 at knifepoint not too far from where I lived. News is just news to those not immediately affected, and my brother, David, was not supposed to fly until later in the week.

I finished breakfast and puttered around. At around noon, I turned on the television. Again, the bombing. Now there was news footage from Scotland. I remember the blue lights of the ambulances streaking into town and the hospital doctors looking useless waiting for injured passengers who would never arrive. There would be no injured, the anchorman said, only dead. I remember the houses on fire and that cockpit in the field still looking sort of like a cockpit. David had been dead on the ground since early the night before, but I didnt know it.

I have come to think of the impact of my brothers death in dramatic terms: a curtain dropping on my youth, a terrible storm that left me shipwrecked, the start of a new life. But this language came much later. Events unfolded in a much more everyday way: The phone rang and my father, home early from work, answered it. A sales agent from the airline said she might have some unfortunate news about a David Dornstein. Is this the family of David Dornstein? The agent said she needed to check the final passenger list. She said she needed to cross-reference one thing with another. She said she needed to speak with her supervisor. She said she needed to get people in London or Scotland or New York or somewhere to sign off. She said things were still a little confused. So could you please bear with us? Could you please hold?

My father waited on hold by himself initially, and then he called upstairs to me. I found him at his desk. Pan Am is on the phone, he said. David boarded the plane at Heathrow, the woman from the airline had told him, but for some reason she wasnt ready to say that David had been on the plane when it exploded. My father held the phone away from his ear and let his head slump. I could hear the airlines hold music through an amplifier my father had put on the phone because of a bad ear: Dionne Warwicks Do You Know the Way to San Jose... a Muzak version of When Im Sixty-Four... that trumpet song by Chuck MangioneDo do doooooo, do do-do do-dooooo, da da da da-daaaaaaaaa. The phone call from Pan Am was strange, and the news likely tragic, but the experience of being on hold was familiar. It was as if we had called the airline to book a flight, a winter getaway. Except we hadnt. The airline had called us, and this, we knew, could not be good.

When the woman from Pan Am came back on the phone, my father mainly listened. If he said anything it was on the order of Hmm hmmm or Yes, I understand. Maybe he said nothing. Then he set down the receiver. The message had been delivered.

Neither of us spoke. If we said nothing, if we shut off the lights, if we stood perfectly still, would the news go away? No. My father and I both had heard the final ax blow land, even if the tree had not yet tipped and fallen. We took a last quick look at the world as we had known it, and as the world still seemed to bebut for the fact of that phone calland then it all came crashing down.

What happened next for my father is not for me to tell. He may not even recall the details; weve never spoken about it. But I remember my own reaction, and it still troubles me. I didnt cry or put my head in my hands or collapse like the lady from the picture at JFK. I was still. I understood the loss as my fathers, for the most part, and I thought about how to console him. I looked down from above as the scene in the bedroom played out: those two pitiable souls, my father and I, rats in a maze of grief they had just begun to feel their way around. I felt sorry for them, but sorry like I might feel for the survivors of an earthquake somewhere (there was one in Armenia that same month); sorry like Id initially felt for the victims of Flight 103 when I read about them in the paper that morningwhich is to say, not that sorry at all. It was intolerable for me to have a personal connection to this story, so I simply decided not to.

My father began making callsone to a friend to cancel dinner plans, another to my sister, who said shed be right over. My stepmother walked in from work a few minutes later and collapsed in the doorway after hearing the news. My father helped her to a chair. I didnt know what to do. I walked back upstairs. The book Id been reading was still propped open at the place where Id left off. A glazed chocolate doughnut sat on a white napkin, half eaten. I am embarrassed to say that I finished it. I was hungry. Now what?

Davids old room was next door. I peeked inside. The room was just as he had left it, but now, I knew, it had become a room in a museum. I lay down on Davids bed, thinking maybe I could channel his spirit through his sheets and blankets. The house was quiet for a while.

Time had been suspended, a giant parenthesis had opened up in my life, and I could have stayed there a long time. But then the doorbell rang and the parenthesis closed. Men and women in their hats and coats were arriving at a house of mourning. Well-wishers. They walked through the front door on the verge of tears. They talked in small groups, with hushed voices. Someone asked me where we kept our drinking glasses, almost apologetic for wanting something to drink