Before The Fall

A Novel

By Noah Hawley

Everyone has their path. The choices they’ve made. How any two people end up in the same place at the same time is a mystery. You get on an elevator with a dozen strangers. You ride a bus, wait in line for the bathroom. It happens every day. To try to predict the places we’ll go and the people we’ll meet would be pointless.

(Hawley 2016, 1)

There are things in the sea that are impossibly old, astonishingly large, great undersea rivers pulling warm water up from the Gulf of Mexico. The Atlantic Ocean is a nexus of highways, of undersea flyovers and bypasses. And there, like a speck on a dot on a flea, is Scott Burroughs, shoulder screaming as he fights for his life.

(Hawley 2016, 33)

Was it lucky? Is there anything lucky about surviving a tragedy?
(Hawley 2016, 46)

TV newsmen tried so hard to appear objective when the truth was, they were anything but, CNN, ABC, CBS, they sold the news like groceries in a supermarket, something for everyone. But people didn’t want just information. They wanted to know what it meant. They wanted perspective. They needed something to react against. I agree or I don’t agree. And if a viewer didn’t agree more than half of the time, was David’s philosophy they turned the channel.

(Hawley 2016, 56)

Cunningham was David’s gift to the world, the angry white man people invited into their living rooms to call bullshit at the world, to rail against a system that robbed us of everything we felt we deserved – the third-world countries that were taking our jobs. The politicians who were raising our taxes. Bull Cunningham, Mr. Straight Talk, Mr. Divine Righteousness, who sat in our living rooms and shared our pain, who told us what we wanted to hear, which was that the reason we were losing out in life was not that we were losers, but that someone was reaching into our pockets, our companies, our country and taking what was rightfully ours.

(Hawley 2016, 70)

Where the average person appreciates the beauty of surf and waves, Gus, an engineer, sees only practical design. Gravity, plus ocean current, plus wind. Poetry to the common man is a unicorn viewed from the corner of an eye – an unexpected glimpse of the intangible. To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function over form. It’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, a glass half full or half empty.

To an engineer, the glass is simply too big.

(Hawley 2016, 93)

And so now, at fifty-one, Gus Franklin finds himself leaving simple intelligence behind and approaching something that can only be described as wisdom, defined in this case by an ability to understand the factual and practical pieces of an event, but also appreciate its full human import. A plane crash is not simply the sum total of time line + mechanical elements + human elements. It is an incalculable tragedy, one that shows us the ultimate finiteness of human control over the universe, and the humbling power of collective death.

(Hawley 2016, 95)

“Why are you telling me this?” Scott asks.

“You asked.”

“And is that why you brought me out here? Because I asked?” Gus thinks about that, human truth versus strategic truth.

(Hawley 2016, 99)

Two things happen at the same time. By mentioning them together they become connected. Convergence. It’s one of those things that feels meaningful, but isn’t. At least he doesn’t think it is. How could it be? A better in Boston fouling pitches into the stands while a small plane struggles through low coastal fog. How many millions of other activities begin and end at the same time? How many other “facts” converge in just the right way, creating symbolic connectivity?

(Hawley 2016, 100-101)

The things money can’t buy, goes the famous quote, you don’t want anyway. Which is bullshit, because in truth there is nothing money can’t buy. Not really. Love, happiness, peace of mind. It’s all available for a price. The fact is, there’s enough money on earth to make everyone whole, if we could just learn to do what any toddler knows – share. But money, like gravity, is a force that clumps, drawing in more and more of itself, eventually creating the black hole that we know as wealth. This is not simply the fault of humans. Ask any dollar bill and it will tell you it prefers the company of hundreds to the company of ones. Better to be a sawbuck in a billionaire’s account than a dirty single in the torn pocket of an addict.

(Hawley 2016, 118)

Tragedy is drama you can’t bear to relive.
(Hawley 2016, 121)

Someone had told her once that mothers existed to blunt the existential loneliness of being a person. If that was true then her biggest maternal responsibility was simply companionship. You bring a child into this fractious, chaotic world out of the heat of your womb, and then spend the next ten years walking beside them while they figure out how to be a person.

Fathers, on the other hand, were there to toughen children up, to say Walk it off when mothers would hold them if they fell. Mothers were the carrot. Fathers were the stick.

(Hawley 2016, 138)

To be an artist is to live at once in the world and apart from it. Where an engineer sees form and function, an artist sees meaning. A toaster, to the engineer, is an array of mechanical and electrical components that work together to apply heat to bread, creating toast. To the artist, a toaster is everything else. It is a comfort creation machine, one of many mechanical boxes in a dwelling that create the illusion of home. Anthropomorphized, it is a hang-jawed man who never tires of eating. Open his mouth and put in the bread. But poor Mr. Toaster Oven. He’s a man who, no matter how much he eats, is never truly fed.

(Hawley 2016, 189-190)

In the absence of facts, he thinks, we tell ourselves stories.

This is clearly what the news media is doing – CNN, Twitter, Huffington Post – the twenty-four-hour cycle of speculation.

(Hawley 2016, 195)

“You know,” he’d [Jack LaLanne] say, “there are so many slaves in this country. Are you a slave? You’re probably saying, Jack, how can you be a slave in this wonderful free country of America? I don’t mean a slave in the idea that you’re thinking of it. I’m talking about you’re a slave when you can’t do the things you want when you want to do them. Because you are a slave, just like the slaves of old who were captured and put in chains. They were shackled, you know, and not allowed to go anyplace.”

(Hawley 2016, 247)

“Yes. That’s one of the – it feels like, to me, I mean, we’re all gonna die. That’s – biology. All animals – but we’re the only ones that – know. And yet we – somehow we manage to put this profound knowledge into some kind of a box. We know, but at the same time we don’t. And yet in these moments of mass death – a ferry sinks, a plane crashes – we are brought face-to-face with the truth. We too will die one day, and for reasons that have nothing to do with us, our hopes and dreams. One day you get on a bus to go to work and there’s a bomb. Or you go to Walmart looking for savings on Black Friday and get crushed by a mob. So – what started as irony – my life, the disaster – opened a door.”

(Hawley 2016, 253)

James had learned to ignore them mostly. At fifty, he had resigned himself to never knowing the true identity of his biological dad. It was just another of life’s great mysteries. And James was a believer in mystery. Not like his mum, who never met a phantasmagorical ideology she didn’t embrace instantly and completely, but in the manner of Albert Einstein, who once said, “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”

(Hawley 2016, 291)

Here’s something else Einstein said: “The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the feat of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.”

(Hawley 2016, 292)

He was a collector of facts and details. In fact, this was what he was doing now at the restaurant in Westwood, reading the Economist and waiting for his mother. It was a sunny morning in August, eighty-three degrees out, prevailing winds from the southeast at ten miles per hour. James sat drinking a mimosa and reading an article on the birth of a red heifer on a farm on Israel’s West Bank. The cow’s birth had both Jews and fundamentalist Christians in an uproar, as both Old and New Testaments tell us that the new Messiah cannot come until the Third Temple is constructed on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. And as everyone knows, the Third Temple cannot be built until the ground is purified by the ashes of a red heifer.

As the article explained (but which James already knew), Numbers 19:2 instructs us, “Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke.” The animal must not have been used to perform work. In the Jewish tradition, the need for a red heifer was cited as the prime example of a hole, or biblical law for which there was no apparent logic. The requirement was therefore deemed of absolute divine origin.

(Hawley 2016, 292-293)

When James asked her what had happened, she said simply, “Oh, those sillies. They act like they know everything. But as the Tao Te Ching tells us, Knowing others is wisdom. Knowing the self is enlightenment.”

(Hawley 2016, 293)

A sunrise, a winter squall, birds flying in a perfect V. These were things that were. The truth, visceral and sublime, of the universe, was that it existed whether we witnessed it or not. Majesty and beauty, these were qualities we projected upon it. A strom was just weather. A sunrise was simply a celestial pattern. It’s not that he didn’t enjoy them. It’s that he didn’t require anything more from the universe than that it exist, that it behave consistently – that gravity worked the way it always worked, that lift and drag were constants.

As Albert Einstein once said, “What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.”

(Hawley 2016, 298)

It is just one of a million magic acts we have mastered over the centuries, technologies invented – from anatomical stents to war machines – their origins traced back to the diary days of the Neanderthal and the creation of fire. Tools for survival and conquest.

And how ten thousand years later, men in skinny jeans and Oliver People’s eyeglasses can disassemble a black box inside a sterile case and probe it with wiry pentalobes and penlights. How they can replace damaged ports and run diagnostic software, itself created from binary code. Each line simply a version of on or off.