seen an uptick in admittances that morning, in advance of the occultation.
Between Bellevue and the New York University Medical Center, two of the largest hospitals in the world, stood perhaps the ugliest building in all of Manhattan. The headquarters of the chief medical examiner of New York was a misshapen rectangle of sickly turquoise. As the fish truck off-loaded bagged corpses, wheeled on stretchers into the autopsy rooms and walk-in refrigerators in the basement, Gossett Bennett, one of the office’s fourteen medical examiners, stepped outside for a quick break. He could not see the moon-sun from the small park behind the hospital — the building itself was in his way — so he instead watched the watchers. All along FDR Drive, which the park overlooked, people stood between parked cars on the never-idle throughway. The East River beyond was dark, a river of tar reflecting the dead sky. Across the river, a gloom overhung all of Queens, broken only by the glow of the sun’s corona reflected in a few of the highest, west-facing windows, like the white-hot flame of some spectacular chemical-plant blaze.
The families of the deceased passengers and crew of Regis Air Flight 753 were encouraged to take a break from paperwork and Red Cross coffee (decaf only for the aggrieved), and walk outside onto the tarmac in the restricted area behind terminal 3. There, with nothing in common but their grief, the hollow-eyed mourners huddled together and faced the eclipse arm in arm — some leaning on others in solidarity, others in need of actual physical support — their faces turned to the dark western sky. They did not know yet that they would be split up soon into four groups and shuttled in school buses to their respective medical examiner’s offices where, one family at a time, they would be invited into a viewing room and shown a postmortem photograph and asked to formally identify their loved one. Only families who demanded to view the actual physical remains would be allowed to do so. They then would be issued hotel room vouchers to the airport Sheraton, where a complimentary dinner buffet would be offered and grief counselors placed at their disposal all night and into the next day.
For now, they stared up at the black disk glowing like a spotlight in reverse, sucking light away from this world and back up to the heavens. This obliterating phenomenon was to them a perfect symbol of their loss at that very moment. To them, the eclipse was the opposite of remarkable. It seemed merely appropriate that the sky and their God would see fit to mark their despair.
Outside the Regis Air maintenance hangar, Nora stood apart from the other investigators, waiting for Eph and Jim to return from the press conference. Her eyes were turned toward the ominous black hole in the sky, but her vision was unfocused. She felt caught up in something she did not understand. As though a strange new foe had arisen. The dead moon eclipsing the living sun. Night occulting day.
A shadow flowed past her then. She detected it as a shimmer from out of the corner of her eye, something like the slithering worm shadows that had undulated over the tarmac just before totality. Something just outside her field of vision, at the very edge of perception. Fleeing the maintenance hangar like a dark spirit. A shadow she
In the split second it took her pupil to move to it, the shadow was gone.
Lorenza Ruiz, the airport baggage-conveyer operator who had been the first to drive out to the dead airplane, found herself haunted by the experience. Standing in the aircraft’s shadow that previous night, Lo couldn’t get it out of her mind. She hadn’t slept at all, tossing and turning, finally rising to pace. A late-night glass of white wine failed to do the trick. It weighed on her like something she could not let go of. When sunrise finally came, she found herself eyeing the clock — in anticipation, she realized, of returning to work. She found she couldn’t wait to get back to JFK. Not out of morbid curiosity. It was the image of that dormant plane, impressed upon her mind like a bright light flashed into her eye. All she knew was that she had to get back to see it again.
Now this eclipse, and for the second time in twenty-four hours, the airport was shut down. This stoppage had been in the planning for months — the FAA had cleared a fifteen-minute window of downtime for airports within the range of the occultation, out of concern for the vision of the pilots, who couldn’t very well wear filtered glasses during takeoff or landing — but still, the math struck her as pretty damning and pretty simple:
Dead Airplane + Solar Eclipse = Not Good.
When the moon snuffed out the sun, like a hand covering up a scream, Lo felt the same electric panic as when she had stood on top of the luggage ramp beneath the belly of the darkened 777. The very same impulse to run, this time coupled with the knowledge that there was absolutely no place to go.
Now she was hearing it again. Same noise she’d been hearing since arriving for her shift, only steadier now, louder. A humming. A droning sound, and the weird thing was, she heard it at the same volume whether she wore her protective headphones or not. Headachelike, in that way. Interior. And yet, like a homing beacon, it strengthened in her mind once she returned to work.
With the fifteen minutes of downtime during the eclipse, she decided to set off on foot in search of the source of the tone, following it. Without any sense of surprise, she now found herself looking at the cordoned-off Regis Air maintenance hangar where the dead 777 was being stored.
The noise sounded like no machine she had ever heard. A churning, almost, a rushing sound, like coursing fluid. Or like the murmur of a dozen voices, a hundred different voices, trying to make sense. Maybe she was picking up radar vibrations in her teeth fillings. There was a group of people out in front, officials gazing up at the blocked sun — but no one else like her, lurking there, bothered by or even cognizant of a hum. So she kept it to herself. And yet, for some weird reason, it felt momentous, being right here, this very moment, hearing the noise and wishing — to salve her curiosity, or was it more than that? — that she could get inside the hangar for another look at the plane. As though seeing the plane would somehow resolve the thrumming in her head.
Then suddenly she felt a charge in the atmosphere, like a breeze changing course, and now — yes — it seemed to her that the source of the noise had moved somewhere off to her right. This sudden change startled her, and she followed it under the negative light of the glowing moon, carrying her headphones and protective glasses in her hand. Dumpsters and storage trailers lay ahead, before a few large box containers, and then some scrub brush and hardy, gray, wind-whipped pine trees, their branches full of snagged trash. Then the hurricane fence, beyond which lay hundreds of acres of scrub wilderness.
Voices. It was more like voices to her now. Trying to rise to one single voice, a word…something.
As Lo neared the trailers, an abrupt rustling in the trees, a
The droning voices were sharper now, grown almost painful. Calling on her. Like a chorus of the damned, the cacophony rising from a whisper to a roar and back again, struggling to articulate one word, sounding like, as best she could make out:
She set down her headphones on the edge of the tarmac, hanging on to her filtered glasses for when the eclipse ended. She veered away from the Dumpsters and their rank garbage smell, instead going toward the large storage trailers. The sound seemed to be emanating not from inside the trailers, but maybe from behind them.
She walked between two six-foot-tall containers and around an old decaying airplane tire, coming upon another row of older, pale green containers. Now she felt it. Not just heard the thrum but
Set on top of the blown trash and uncut, sun-bleached grass was a large, ancient-looking, ornately carved black wooden box. She ventured into the small clearing, wondering why someone would throw such an obviously well-maintained antique all the way back here. Theft — organized and otherwise — was a fact of life at the airport; maybe someone had stashed it here, planning to swing by later to pick it up.
Then she noticed the cats. The outer airport was crawling with wild cats. Some of them were pets who had escaped their transport cages. Many had simply been released onto airport property by locals looking to get rid of
