“I just want them to know that it happened for a reason.”
“Look, Tyler, some things just happen.” This close, the stillness of the ghost plane was overwhelming.
“But why did they die instead of us?” the boy asked, with an air of patiently reciting a well-rehearsed argument. His gaze was unblinking.
“Because they were exposed to a certain virus, and we weren’t. You can look for reasons, and god knows a few people here have driven themselves half-crazy trying, but Tyler, that’s all there is.”
“What if we were saved for a different reason?”
“Saved?” Clark was remembering why he didn’t talk to Tyler very often.
“Some people were saved. People like us.”
“What do you mean, ‘people like us’?”
“People who were good,” Tyler said. “People who weren’t weak.”
“Look, it’s not a question of having been bad or … the people in there, in the Air Gradia jet, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Okay,” Tyler said. Clark turned away, and Tyler’s voice resumed almost immediately behind him, softer now, reading aloud: “ ‘She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her.’ ”
Elizabeth and Tyler were living in the First-Class cabin of the Air France jet. He found her sitting in the sunlight on the rolling staircase that led up to the entrance, knitting something. He hadn’t spoken with her in a while. He hadn’t been avoiding her, exactly, but he certainly hadn’t sought her company.
“I’m worried about your son,” he said.
She paused in her knitting. The manic intensity of her first days here had dissipated. “Why?”
“Right now he’s over by the quarantined plane,” Clark said, “reading aloud to the dead from the Book of Revelation.”
“Oh.” She smiled, and resumed her knitting. “He’s a very advanced reader.”
“I think maybe he’s picked up some strange ideas about, well, about what happened.” He still had no words for it, he realized. No one spoke of it directly.
“What kind of strange ideas?”
“He thinks the pandemic happened for a reason,” Clark said.
“It did happen for a reason.”
“Well, right, but I mean a reason besides the fact that almost everyone on earth caught an extremely deadly swine-flu mutation. He seems to think there was some sort of divine judgment involved.”
“He’s right,” she said. She stopped knitting for a moment to count her rows.
He felt a touch of vertigo. “Elizabeth, what reason could there possibly be for something like this? What kind of plan would possibly require …?” He realized that his voice had risen. His fists were clenched.
“Everything happens for a reason,” she said. She didn’t look at him. “It’s not for us to know.”
Later that summer a band of religious wanderers arrived, headed south. The precise nature of their religion was unclear. “A new world requires new gods,” they said. They said, “We are guided by visions.” They said vague things about signals and dreams. The airport hosted them for a few uneasy nights, because this seemed less dangerous than running them off. The wanderers ate their food and in return offered blessings, which mostly involved palms on foreheads and muttered prayers. They sat in a circle in Concourse C and chanted at night, in no language anyone in the airport had ever heard. When they left, Elizabeth and Tyler went with them.
“We just want to live a more spiritual life,” Elizabeth said, “my son and I,” and she apologized for leaving everyone, as though her leaving was some sort of personal abandonment. Tyler looked very small as they left, trailing at the back of the group. I should have done more for her, Clark thought. I should have pulled her back from the edge. But it had taken everything he had to stay back from the edge himself, and what could he have done? When the group disappeared around the curve of the airport road, he was certain he wasn’t alone in his relief.
“That kind of insanity’s contagious,” Dolores had said, echoing his thoughts.
In Year Fifteen people came to the museum to look at the past after their long days of work. A few of the original First-Class lounge armchairs were still here, and it was possible to sit and read the final newspapers, fifteen years old, turning brittle pages in gloves that Clark had sewn inexpertly from a hotel sheet. What happened here was something like prayer. James, the first man who’d walked in, came to the museum almost every day to look at the motorcycle. He’d found it in Severn City in Year Two, and had used it until the automobile gas went stale and the aviation gas ran out. He missed it very much. Emmanuelle, the first child born in the airport, came in often to look at the phones.