Miss Wyoming

was crabby and sclerotic. They entered a residential neighborhood. Susan was feeling dizzy and sleepy and said, «I need to sit down,» so they did, on the curb before a Wedgwood-blue French country-style house under the suspicious gaze of an Asian woman on the second floor.

«It's the sun,» said Susan. «It's not like it used to be. Or, I can't take as much as I used to.» She lay back on the Bermuda grass.

Suddenly worried he'd been the only one spilling the beans, John said, «Tell me about the crash. The Seneca crash. I'll bet you never talk about it, do you?»

«Not the full story, no.»

«So tell me.» Susan sat up and John put his arm around her. Staring at the pavement, like Prince William behind his mother's coffin, she told the story. And she might have talked to him all night, but two things happened: the lawn sprinklers spritzed into frantic life, and a Beverly Hills police patrol car soundlessly materialized. Two grim-faced officers got out, hands on weapons on hips. Soaked, Susan started to stand up, but her tired knees buckled. John helped pull her up, saying, «Jesus, we try and take a quick rest and in comes the SWAT team. Who pays your salaries, you goons?I pay your salaries… .»

«There's no SWAT team, Mr. Johnson. Stay calm,» said one of the officers. «Ma'am» — he looked more closely at her — «Mrs. Thraice? Can we help you? Give you a lift? You were great in Dynamite Bay. »Dynamite Bay was a low-budget action picture now in wide video release and not doing too badly. Adam had been proclaiming it as the revival of Susan's acting career.

She took a professional tone. «Hello, boys. Yes, I'd love a ride.» She turned toward John and smiled regretfully. «I'm great for long walks but otherwise I'm not really Outward Bound material. Another day, another pilgrimage.» She entered the rear passenger seat, and the officer shut the door. She rolled down the window. «To Beechwood Canyon, boys.» She looked out at John. «You know — I don't even know my own phone number. Call Adam Norwitz.» Just as the cruiser pulled away, she rolled up a silk scarf, wet from the sprinkler, and handed it to John. «What actually happened after the crash is a much better story. I should have told you that instead. Phone me.» And then she was gone and John stood, clutching the silk to his heart while the sprinkler drenched his feet, as though they were seeds.

Chapter Two

Two days before she turned twenty-five, Susan took a plane from New York, where she'd gone to audition for the part of a wacky neighbor on a sitcom pilot. Not the lead — the wacky neighbor. Next stop: mother roles. The audition hadn't gone well. The producer's Prince Charles spaniel had the runs, which had the hotel management badgering him with phone calls and door knocks while Susan was bravely making the most of stale coffee-tea-or-me jokes written by USC grads weaned on a lifetime of Charles in Charge, plus four years of Gauloises and Fellini ephemera.

In beaten retreat she boarded Flight 802 from New York to Los Angeles, sitting in Coach Class, as Where- Are-They-Now? waves of pity washed over her from the other passengers eagerly attuned to the scent of celebrity failure. Thank heaven for the distracting tarmac rituals — the safety demonstration, the small tingle of anticipation just before acceleration and lift-off. Banks of TV screens dislodged from the ceiling hawking Disney World, the Chevy Lumina and sugary perfumes. A Cheers rerun began.

The seat-belt light went off, and the flight attendants glumly hurled packets of smoked almonds at the passengers. Airlines were so disinterested in food these days, thought Susan, who had once been reigning queen of the old MGM Grand airline flights between coasts, playing poker with Nick Nolte, polishing toenails with Eartha Kitt and trading gossip with Roddy McDowell. Her fellow Flight 802 passengers ripped into their nuts all at once, a planewide locustlike chewing frenzy followed by the salty solvent odor of mashed nuts.Ah, the fall from grace.

Susan sat in her window seat, 58-A, and idly watched the landscape below. To her left was an older couple — he an engineer of some sort, and she a mousy 1950s wife. Mr. Engineer was convinced they were currently flying directly over Jamestown, New York, «the birthplace of Lucille Ball,» and craned over Susan, jabbing at what looked like just another American town that bought Tide, ate Campbell's soup and generated at least one weird, senseless killing per decade. Later, Susan would look at a map of the eastern United States and realize how truly wrong Mr. Engineer had been, but at the time she gawked downward in some misplaced mythical hope of seeing a tiny little dot of flaming red hair.

It was at this point the engine blew — the left engine, clearly visible to Susan from her seat. Like a popcorn kernel — poomp! — the blast was muffled by the fuselage. The recoil shot flight attendants and their drink trolleys into the center bank of seats, while oxygen masks dropped like lizard tongues from the ceiling. The jet began tumbling and the unseat-belted passengers, such as Susan, floated like hummingbirds. She thought to herself,I can float. She thought,I'm an astronaut. Everything was moving too quickly for fear. There was some moaning during the drop, some cursing, but no hysteria and little other noise.

Then the pilot regained control of the plane, and the harnessing of its reins made it feel as if its bulk had walloped onto concrete. The oxygen hoses swooned like cartoon water lilies, and the TV screens resumed playing Cheers.

For the next two minutes normal flight resumed. Susan felt some relief as Mr. Engineer described to Mrs. Engineer exactly why the plane would remain flyable.

Then the descent began again, a descent as long as a song on the radio, a downward free float — smooth and bumpless. Susan felt as though the other passengers must be angry at her for jinxing their flight — for being the low-grade onboard celebrity who brought tabloid bad luck onto an otherwise routine flight. She avoided looking at them. She put on her seat belt. She felt clenched and brittle. She thought,So this is how it ends, in a crash over Lucy's hometown, amid syndicated TV reruns, spilled drinks, and moaning engines. Once the plane hits the ground, I'll no longer be me. I'll go on to being whatever comes next.

She felt a surprising relief that the plastic strand of failed identities she'd been beading together across her life was coming to an end.Maybe I'll blink and open my eyes and I'll find myself hatching from a bird's egg, reincarnated as a cardinal. Maybe I'll meet Jesus. But whatever happens, I'm off the hook! Whatever happens, I'll no longer have to be a failure or a puppet or a has-been celebrity who people can hate or love or blame.

Then, like the yank of a cyclone roller coaster, the plane sheared and bounced and slid into soil. The noise was so loud that it overpowered all other sensations. The visions she saw came at her fast as snapshots — bodies and dirt and luggage strewn toward her as though from a wood chipper — the screams of tortured metal and compressed air. And then silence.

Her seat had come to a stop along with a section of fuselage. The engineer, his wife and their two seats were …gone. Her chair rested alone, bolted to its piece of fuselage, perfectly vertical. She was still for about a minute, a small plume of smoke rising far off to the right. She smelled fuel. Gently she unclasped the seat belt of 58-A and rose to look across a fallow sorghum field. A brief survey of her body showed she was unscratched, yet it appeared to her that all the other passengers were crushed and broiled and broken along a debris path that stretched half a mile across the sorghum field hemmed with tract housing. There was a brief gap between when her plane crashed and when people began streaming from the suburb toward the wreckage. During that moment Susan had the entire plane wreck and the crumpled passengers to herself, like a museum late on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. The bodies around her seemed as though they'd been flocked onto the plane's hull and onto the gashed sorghum field from a spray can. A clump of unheated foil-wrapped dinners covered a stewardess's legs. Luggage had burst like firecrackers and was mixed with dirt and roots and dandelions, while cans of pop and bottles of Courvoisier were sprinkled like dropped marbles. Susan tried to find somebody else alive. There were limb fragments and heads. The sootcovered fuselage contained a cordwood pile of dead passengers.

She felt like a ghost. She tried to find her bodily remains there in the wreckage and was unable to do so. She grew frightened that the relationship between her mind and body had been severed.

Teenage boys on bicycles were the first to arrive, dropping their bikes as they began sleepwalking around