Chapter 1, Part 2

The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky
by Ken Dornstein

(Page 2 of 2)

Soon the Eyewitness News team would be in the living room. David's picture, yearbook-pose false, would be beamed throughout the tri-state area, the local angle to the international news story. Mothers mixing noodle casseroles would glimpse my brother's face and think, How handsome (my father would later mistake a picture of JFK, Jr., for David). And then: How awful.

I was overwhelmed by a sense of the wrongness of what was happening, or if not by the wrongness, then by the sheer pace of events. I felt that David would have been disappointed at how quickly we had accepted the news of his death, and how readily we had set in motion the machinery of memorialization. One minute he was alive in our minds, headed home from a long time away; the next minute the phone rang and we were burying him.

I refused to be enlisted into this gathering army of the bereaved. I slipped out the door and into the backyard. I dropped to my knees on the frozen ground, thinking I should pray, but I didn't know any prayers. Then I lay down, looking up. It was cold, but I couldn't be bothered with so small a matter as my own warmth. I had ventured out into the winter night to make some kind of celestial connection with my dead brother and I assumed I would be insulated from such worldly concerns by the sheer drama of the situation.

I don't know how long I was outside. At one point a jet flew overhead, and I watched the blinking lights on the wings and tail move across the sky. I thought of the snug world inside the cabin, the ice clinking in the first-class glasses, the reading lights being dimmed, the endless rearrangements of blankets and pillows at the start of a night flight. And then I wondered what it would look like if the plane suddenly split in two and all of the people inside spilled out. Which is to say: I tried that night, but it would be years before I could even begin to imagine David's fall.

II

I have started this story a hundred times in the years since David died, but never finished. Let me begin again.

Once upon a time, I had a brother. He was older, bigger, wiser, more daring, more passionate, better spoken, and much better looking. He traveled farther away from home than I ever imagined I would. I admired him. I was nineteen when he died, a sophomore in college. Now I am in my midthirties. I have some memories of my brother, but not as many as I'd like to think. And each time I check, I seem to have one fewer. If at first I found it hard to believe that David was dead, now I find it hard to believe that he ever lived. David's life has come to seem like a story I made up, a fairy tale, no more real than words on a page. I sometimes find it dispiriting to think that this is what a life comes to, that this is how it ends. But I can imagine David smiling about it. Words were his life. And now the words he left behind would be more vital than ever.

David was a writer. In the years before he died, he was working on something big and, at least to me, mysterious. He wrote night and day, filling dozens of spiral notebooks with his fevered thoughts and phantasmagorical dreams. For a time, he told people he was trying to write down every thought that had ever occurred to him. When he slept it was on the floor, surrounded by books and papers. He renounced beds. Later, he swore off banks, keeping his money thoroughly liquid-a wad of cash tucked inside the pages of a book called The Irrational Man. This was David: He played out every idea to the end.

One day David left home. He left the country. He said he had to go, but beyond his initial destination he didn't know where, and he didn't know when he would be back. He was twenty-five. He pledged not to return until he had written something substantial or until he had otherwise settled the question of his future as a writer. Before he left, David copied into his notebook a passage from the novelist Thomas Wolfe about the extraordinary troubles Wolfe had with an early novel:

I had been sustained by that delightful illusion of success which we all have when we dream about the books we are going to write instead of actually doing them. Now I was face to face with it, and suddenly I realized that I had committed my life and my integrity so irrevocably to this struggle that I must conquer now or be destroyed.

We know this story: A boy heads off into the wild to kill a bear, and he returns to the village a man. But in this case, the boy did not come back. A newspaper feature called this "A Tragic Twist on a Young Writer's Life." According to the article, David carried a manuscript with him onto Pan Am Flight 103, the draft of a brilliant first novel finally on its way to expectant American publishers. But the novel was presumed lost in the wreckage, loose pages of it spread across Scotland along with seat cushions and insulation and other bits of the disintegrating 747. Coming-of-age stories usually end with some obstacles being overcome and the way ahead finally clear. But this one seemed to have ended, at least in part-at least for David-at the bottom of the North Sea with the rest of the lightest debris from Flight 103.

Was the "Tragic Twist" story true? I didn't know. I remember meeting David's best friend, Billy, a month or so after the bombing and talking to him about what we should do with David's writings. Even if there were no novel to publish, I argued that we could put together an edited collection of some kind. David had filled a giant cardboard box with his notebooks and manuscripts. He labeled it in thick Magic Marker: the dave archives. I told Billy that there must be material in there for several books. I remember thinking we needed to strike fast, while the world still cared about the people on Flight 103, but Billy and I never formed anything like a plan.

David's papers sat unread for a long time. At one point, I decided to catalog them. I ordered the notebooks chronologically and straightened them on a shelf. I sorted loose typescripts into color-coded files. I was careful to read only enough of each thing to fix a label to it: fiction, poetry, plays, letters, etc. I told myself it was too sad to read these pages, too difficult, too soon, too much, but my reasons were much simpler. I feared what David himself had feared: that what was inside those notebooks, what was typewritten on all of those loose sheets, was not good enough to justify all of the big noises he'd made about it. I feared that the grand plan had never been realized and that David had hidden this fact from himself in a mass of paper. I feared page after page of throat-clearing about a book that David would forever be on the verge of writing. Wasn't the "Tragic Twist" story a much better way to leave things?

Copyright © 2006 by Ken Dornstein.

About the Author

Ken Dornstein has been published in the New Yorker and has received two Yaddo artist residencies. He is the Series Editor at PBS's Frontline and lives near Boston with his wife and two children.