Dear Mr. M Read Online Free Page A
Author: Herman Koch
so, around midnight, after having put away
Liberation Year,
I turned on the TV for a few minutes. Bouncing from channel to channel, I finally arrived at National Geographic. I was in luck, the program that was starting was one I always enjoy.
Seconds from Disaster,
about aviation catastrophes. You see how the passengers—the unsuspecting passengers—place their luggage in the overhead compartments and fasten their seat belts.
Sometimes it starts earlier than that. During check-in. The passengers put their suitcases on the scales and are handed their boarding passes. They are looking forward to a well-deserved vacation or a reunion with distant relatives. But we, the viewers, know that they can forget all about that vacation and that family reunion. None of that is going to happen.
At the same moment, in another part of the airport, at Gate D14, a Sunny Air Boeing 737 is fueling up and receiving its last-minute inspection. The technicians discover “nothing unusual,” as they will later tell the members of the investigative committee. Most of the parts, broken into tens of thousands of little pieces and spread at great depths over an area of dozens of square miles, have now been recovered with the help of the most modern equipment. In a vacant hangar, investigative committee specialists set about putting the plane back together, using those tens of thousands of pieces of the puzzle. It takes months. When they are finished, the final product still looks more like a jigsaw puzzle than a plane. It will, in any case, never fly again. The only reason for the reassembly is to determine the cause of the disaster. Was it a technical defect, or was it human error? What does the black box tell us? Can we learn anything from the final conversations between the pilot and the air-traffic controllers?
“Left motor has failed…right motor has failed…we are going down to thirty thousand feet…”
Suddenly, the little dot on the radar screen in the control tower ceases to be a dot.
“Hello, Sunny Air 1622…? Do you read me, Flight 1622…??? Hello, Flight 1622?”
This all comes much later. The important thing is the beginning. In the beginning, everything is still in one piece. I usually think even further back in time. I think about the passengers. How they put on their socks and shoes that morning. How they brushed their teeth and then took the taxi or the train to the airport.
“Have we got everything? Do you have the tickets? What about the passports?”
Personally, I’m in favor of a black box that starts registering information much earlier. Not just the last half hour of conversation in the cockpit, but
everything.
The true extent of a disaster has a tendency to be tucked away in the details. In the note to the neighbor lady who has promised to feed the cat:
kitty chow only in the morning, in the evening half a can of cat food or fish, raw heart 1x weekly
. Barely twelve hours later, the hand that wrote those words has disintegrated at an altitude of thirty thousand feet. Or become lost amid the wreckage. That morning, that same hand tore a sheet from the roll of toilet paper, folded it three times and carefully wiped his or her backside. It’s partly about the senselessness of it all, in hindsight. Looking back on it, he or she might as well have skipped that wiping, or at least not done it so carefully.
But let’s stick with the hand. During the final hours of its existence, the hand—at an altitude of thirty thousand feet and moving at a speed of almost six hundred miles an hour—flipped through a magazine. The hand reached out and accepted a can of beer offered it by the stewardess, the fingertips registering that the can was, if not icy cold, at least cool enough. In a moment of inattention the hand stuck one finger in a nostril, but found nothing large or solid enough to worm out. The hand was run through a head of hair. The hand was placed on a denim-covered thigh—at that very moment, in the cockpit,
Liberation Year,
I turned on the TV for a few minutes. Bouncing from channel to channel, I finally arrived at National Geographic. I was in luck, the program that was starting was one I always enjoy.
Seconds from Disaster,
about aviation catastrophes. You see how the passengers—the unsuspecting passengers—place their luggage in the overhead compartments and fasten their seat belts.
Sometimes it starts earlier than that. During check-in. The passengers put their suitcases on the scales and are handed their boarding passes. They are looking forward to a well-deserved vacation or a reunion with distant relatives. But we, the viewers, know that they can forget all about that vacation and that family reunion. None of that is going to happen.
At the same moment, in another part of the airport, at Gate D14, a Sunny Air Boeing 737 is fueling up and receiving its last-minute inspection. The technicians discover “nothing unusual,” as they will later tell the members of the investigative committee. Most of the parts, broken into tens of thousands of little pieces and spread at great depths over an area of dozens of square miles, have now been recovered with the help of the most modern equipment. In a vacant hangar, investigative committee specialists set about putting the plane back together, using those tens of thousands of pieces of the puzzle. It takes months. When they are finished, the final product still looks more like a jigsaw puzzle than a plane. It will, in any case, never fly again. The only reason for the reassembly is to determine the cause of the disaster. Was it a technical defect, or was it human error? What does the black box tell us? Can we learn anything from the final conversations between the pilot and the air-traffic controllers?
“Left motor has failed…right motor has failed…we are going down to thirty thousand feet…”
Suddenly, the little dot on the radar screen in the control tower ceases to be a dot.
“Hello, Sunny Air 1622…? Do you read me, Flight 1622…??? Hello, Flight 1622?”
This all comes much later. The important thing is the beginning. In the beginning, everything is still in one piece. I usually think even further back in time. I think about the passengers. How they put on their socks and shoes that morning. How they brushed their teeth and then took the taxi or the train to the airport.
“Have we got everything? Do you have the tickets? What about the passports?”
Personally, I’m in favor of a black box that starts registering information much earlier. Not just the last half hour of conversation in the cockpit, but
everything.
The true extent of a disaster has a tendency to be tucked away in the details. In the note to the neighbor lady who has promised to feed the cat:
kitty chow only in the morning, in the evening half a can of cat food or fish, raw heart 1x weekly
. Barely twelve hours later, the hand that wrote those words has disintegrated at an altitude of thirty thousand feet. Or become lost amid the wreckage. That morning, that same hand tore a sheet from the roll of toilet paper, folded it three times and carefully wiped his or her backside. It’s partly about the senselessness of it all, in hindsight. Looking back on it, he or she might as well have skipped that wiping, or at least not done it so carefully.
But let’s stick with the hand. During the final hours of its existence, the hand—at an altitude of thirty thousand feet and moving at a speed of almost six hundred miles an hour—flipped through a magazine. The hand reached out and accepted a can of beer offered it by the stewardess, the fingertips registering that the can was, if not icy cold, at least cool enough. In a moment of inattention the hand stuck one finger in a nostril, but found nothing large or solid enough to worm out. The hand was run through a head of hair. The hand was placed on a denim-covered thigh—at that very moment, in the cockpit,
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