Before the Fall

Chapter 2 narrates an experience from Scott’s childhood: a visit to San Francisco on a family vacation. On a tour of Fisherman’s Wharf, they witness fitness guru Jack LaLanne swim from Alcatraz Island to the Wharf with his arms and legs shackled and towing a large boat. The six-year-old Scott is awestruck by LaLanne’s sheer willpower—mind over matter—and when he returns home, he signs up for swim class.

The adult Scott is in the water and, disoriented, he realizes that the plane has crashed. While disconnected images flash through his mind, Scott fights his way to the surface amid the wreckage. He shouts for help and searches for other survivors. His shoulder is injured, making swimming difficult. Nevertheless, he decides to swim for the mainland. To focus his energy, Scott thinks about Jack LaLanne, his childhood hero. Just as he is about to swim away from the wreck, he hears a child’s cry. Remembering his sister, who drowned in Lake Michigan when she was 16, Scott swims back and finds JJ clinging to a seat cushion. Scott calms the boy the best he can and orients himself in the dark. For a panicked moment, Scott fears sharks are in the vicinity. He and JJ float, motionless, until the fear passes.

Trying to keep his mind occupied, Scott imagines that Fate has delivered him—a high school swimming champion—to this moment with a singular purpose: to save this boy. They continue to swim, despite dangerous waves and the threat of hypothermia. After hours of struggling against the cold and the current, JJ spots land. Thirty minutes later, they crawl onto the beach, exhausted. Scott has delivered them safely to shore.

A fisherman finds them on the beach and drives them to the hospital. At first, the intake nurse is skeptical about Scott’s claim that they have been in a plane crash, but she believes him once she looks up to see the television news coverage of the accident. As the emergency room doctors try to take JJ away, he panics, and Scott assures him he will stay by his side. JJ is given a sedative and falls asleep; Scott is wheeled into another room and examined. The doctor repeats the news reports that there are no other survivors.

The doctors allow Scott to share a hospital room with JJ. Someone has called JJ’s aunt and uncle, and Scott falls asleep after hearing this news. When he wakes up, the crash is still being covered on the news, with the added information that Ben Kipling was being investigated for financial misdeeds. Just then, a group of officers from several government offices—the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Treasury Department, and others—arrive to speak with Scott. Led by Gus Franklin of the NTSB and Special Agent O’Brien of the FBI, the agents ask him about the other passengers and why he was on the plane in the first place. Scott says that he met Maggie at a farmers market a few weeks earlier, and is offended when O’Brien asks if the relationship was sexual. The agents want Scott to reconstruct as best he can the details of the crash and what led up to it, but his mind struggles to make sense of the event and the  details are “fuzzy.” As the agents leave, Gus remarks, “You’re a hero now, Mr. Burroughs” (50), noting that even though Scott wasn’t listed on the passenger manifest, it won’t be long before the news media figures out how JJ made it to shore. Because of the prominence of JJ’s father and the complexities of Kipling’s case, the event will be of particular interest. Scott is left alone to speculate about how his life is about to change.

Chapter 5 lists the names and ages of those who died in the plane crash.

Chapter 6 looks back on David Bateman’s life, with an emphasis on his success as the “architect” of the ALC News network. David’s great innovation is to be proactive, to “Make The News” rather than chase it after it happens (54). This vision is particularly attractive to the unnamed “billionaire” who provides the network’s startup funds. One of David’s first hires is Bill Cunningham, an “angry white guy with a withering wit” (55). His attitude is a perfect fit for ALC’s business model; he’s not afraid to project his own political opinion.

David is the only child of an autoworker; out of loyalty to his father, who only had a high school education, he turned down a full-ride scholarship to Harvard to attend the University of Michigan. In college, David became fascinated with politics and was particularly enamored with Ronald Reagan. He quickly realized that his talents lay behind the scenes. After 20 years as a political consultant and “kingmaker,” David came to ALC.

Two days before the plane crash, David wakes up in his Manhattan apartment, alone. Maggie and the kids are on Martha’s Vineyard. He lingers in the doorways of his children’s bedrooms, wishing the household staff had not tidied them up. He talks to Maggie on the phone about her and the children’s plans for the day. David is determined to give his kids the childhood he never had—fun and free of responsibility. His security team escorts him to work—a necessity because of the amount of vitriol his news network attracts. He can’t help but think back to Rachel’s brief kidnapping, reflecting that the family might not be so lucky if something like that happened again. Before he can settle in his office, Bill Cunningham enters with his producer. It turns out Cunningham has illegally tapped the phone of a liberal pundit and used the audio files in a news story. David is irate. ALC’s attorney suggests this could lead to a Congressional investigation, and David believes he’s to blame for giving Cunningham a platform in the first place. He ponders how best to fire his top-rated on-air personality.

From his hospital bed, Scott watches ALC News. On the air, Cunningham speculates that the plane crash was not an accident but rather “an act of terrorism” aimed at David Bateman (73). JJ’s aunt Eleanor, who arrived with her husband the night before, wakes up in the chair next to her nephew’s bed. She and her husband have been married for less than three months, and they both seem unprepared for how their life is about to change. Scott is concerned about JJ’s future, especially when he smells alcohol on Doug’s clothes. When they are discharged, Scott leaves his phone number with Doug and Eleanor, telling JJ to call anytime. JJ doesn’t respond; he hasn’t spoken since they washed up on the beach. As Scott turns to go, JJ clings to him.

The narration shifts to explore how Scott ended up boarding the doomed plane in Martha’s Vineyard. He had been a good artist but never a great one. At some point in his pursuit of success, he stopped swimming; later, he turned to alcohol misuse to deal with his feelings of failure—a sense that became particularly acute in his 40s. After a weekend of partying, the 46-year-old Scott woke up in the host’s home and decided to start swimming laps in his pool. The sensation took him back to the experience of watching Jack LaLanne swimming in San Francisco. Scott gave up alcohol and red meat, started swimming three miles a day, and dedicated himself once again to his art. In a rental home on Martha’s Vineyard, Scott painted disaster scenes that garnered the attention of the New York art world. On the verge of success at last, Scott got on the private plane.

To avoid the reporters outside the hospital, Scott, with the help of his friend Magnus, sneaks out the staff entrance dressed in medical scrubs. As they drive away, Scott thinks of JJ’s welfare and wishes that he had gotten Eleanor’s phone number. He feels connected to the boy but fears he would be a poor role model. Magnus tells him that Leslie “Layla” Mueller, the owner of a prestigious gallery, has offered him a guest room for several days. Scott turns down the offer initially but agrees to have dinner with her. A couple arguing in the car next to them triggers a memory: the flight attendant arguing with the pilot, although Scott’s not sure if it’s a genuine memory. He asks Magnus to pull into a gas station. He borrows $20, walks in, exits through the back, and wanders into the surrounding neighborhood, leaving Magnus sitting alone in his car. Still in his hospital scrubs, Scott finds a fast-food restaurant and calls Gus, the NTSB agent, to offer to help with the search.

Descriptions of five of Scott’s paintings, each narrated in the second-person, are interspersed throughout the novel. The first painting depicts a fiery train crash, passenger cars derailed and jackknifed into the engine, a headlight’s glare obscuring much of the scene. Out of the light emerges the image of a woman—a survivor—walking through the wreckage, seemingly searching for something or someone.

Scott and Gus fly to the crash site in an NTSB helicopter. As he sees Martha’s Vineyard in the distance, Scott thinks about his three-legged dog and marvels at how far he and JJ had to swim. He still struggles to answer many of Gus’s questions about the crash. He thinks to himself that maybe he’s lucky not to remember more.

Gus is an engineer who grew up in a working-class Black family in Manhattan. He has long taken refuge in logic and detachment, even though it cost him his brief marriage 16 years earlier. His work at the NTSB and the deaths of both his parents, however, exposed Gus to forces and emotions beyond the capabilities of his “engineer’s brain” to handle. He no longer sees the world as “a machine that operated with dynamic mechanical functionality” (94). Grief, he discovers, cannot be fixed like a faulty mechanism; it can only be “endured.” When he was contacted about the Bateman plane crash several days earlier, Gus engaged both sides of his brain: the logical engineer side that asks all the pertinent questions and the empathetic side that grieves for the victims. The search had begun almost immediately.

After they land on the Coast Guard cutter that is the center of the search operation, Gus tells Scott what he’s learned about the accident. The plane had been “off radar” for six minutes before air traffic control noticed, making the search area difficult to narrow down. The lack of a flight plan and an incomplete passenger list made the operation even more complex. David Bateman’s prominence meant that the president and the FBI were involved, along with Homeland Security; Ben Kipling’s presence on the plane meant that the Treasury Department sent agents as well. Scott wonders why Gus has allowed him, a civilian, to be part of a search mission. After some hedging, Gus replies that he’s rewarding his heroism. Scott asks Gus about a comment one of the federal agents made about baseball when they were still at the hospital. Gus tells Scott that the catcher for the Boston Red Sox broke the record for the longest at-bat in MLB history at exactly the same time the plane was in flight and crashed. Scott considers the two events’ “symbolic connectivity.” Looking out toward the horizon, Scott sees a storm approaching. Gus goes over what he’s learned about the crew members. There don’t appear to be any red flags on the record of the pilot, James Melody, or the co-pilot, Charles Busch, and Scott reflects that he can barely remember interacting with them.

Watching television below deck on the cutter, Scott sees Bill Cunningham promote his latest conspiracy theory, this time having to do with Ben Kipling. Seconds later, Scott realizes that Cunningham is now talking about him, asking why a “nobody painter” was on a private jet with Bateman and Kipling to begin with. While images of Scott’s house on Martha’s Vineyard flash across the screen, Cunningham insinuates that he is an ISIS terrorist. Gus sees the report and suggests Scott find somewhere to stay temporarily “under the radar” (103). Scott remembers Layla Mueller’s offer.