As the wind began to die down, Hail was able to open his eyes and see where the hell he was walking. Directly in front of him sat five small monoliths. Each tip of each tower was about thirty feet high. Each tower was a different color, the stone having been mined from each of the countries where the incident had taken place.
That’s the way it was commonly referred to. An incident. But it wasn’t an incident to Marshall Hail. It was the rapture. It was a million nuclear explosions. It was the planet being hit by a meteor the size of the moon. It was too big to even put into words and the word incident was an insult to him.
Then it had been referred to by the date, similar to 9/11. But that wasn’t how it got its name. It got its name by way of introduction. It got its name by reference. It got its name by every person who ever brought up the subject, starting with the words THE FIVE.
THE FIVE commercial jets were shot down in FIVE different countries, by FIVE surface-to-air shoulder-held rockets, by FIVE separate terrorist organizations, within FIVE minutes of one another. When newscasters talked about the incident it always began with THE FIVE airplanes that were… etc… etc… etc…
The horror, the outrage, the crimes against humanity, against families, against children, against the civilized world would become something as simple as THE FIVE.
Hail didn’t really care what it was called. There was no pleasant way to refer to the carnage that had taken place on that day just two years ago. The families of those souls who were lost didn’t give a damn what it was called. They just wanted their loved ones back, and no name, no matter how caring or elegant or compassionate, was going to do that. Hail thought that THE FIVE was just about as good as any other name.
On the highest point of this man-made hill was the only reference to his wife and little girls that he would ever see. He had never had the strength to come visit THE FIVE Memorial before. Hell, he barely had the strength to get out of bed. And Hail could argue the fact that time heals old wounds. Hail knew that time did not heal his old wounds. Each year the scars healed but his heart got heavier. He felt that one day it would just fall out and become as inert as stone. The only way to stop that process was to reverse the process, and that’s why Hail was in Washington. That’s why he had built up his business, his arsenal. That’s why he still got out of bed every day. That’s why he hadn’t stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. It sure the hell wasn’t to go on living. He had done enough of that and where had that gotten him?
Hail trudged up the hill. His back hurt, but his heart hurt more. He could already feel the tears beginning to form before he had walked up to look at the first of five stones.
It was made of Colorado Yule Marble, same exact marble used to carve the Lincoln Memorial. The white obelisk sat in a perfectly straight line with the other four. Large slabs of black slate had been laid on the ground, creating a base in which the five pillars had been set. It was a pleasant seventy-five degrees outside, but Hail guessed that any kid who had stepped onto the shale surface in bare feet during a hot summer day had not stayed long.
The monolith he was standing in front of, on the far left of the others, represented the Virgin Atlantic flight 1082. Hail looked at the surface of the gleaming marble, but none of the letters carved into the stone indicated the flight number. Matter of fact, it didn’t have any indication of the flight or country or any other information. Just a list of names. Lots of names. Each name representing someone who had perished on that flight. But Hail knew that it was flight 1082 originating from Orlando, Florida and on its way to Gatwick airport in London. It had been a huge airplane, a Boeing 777 that was flying at full capacity with 660 passengers on board. Embedded in the bright marble were six hundred and sixty names, chiseled in long endless columns. The first name started down low. And when the last name had been etched in high enough where it was difficult to touch or see, then the engravers had started in on another column of names. When there was no more room for more columns, the chisel moved to another side of the pillar. Hail reached out and touched one of the names. Sarah Gartner. He didn’t know her. He didn’t know any of the people on this flight, but in a way, he knew them all. He knew how their relatives felt about their passing. Every name on all five shafts of stone was intertwined at some level, a specific frequency of consciousness that those who had not been affected by the horror would never understand.
Hail worked his big index finger inside the channel that formed the S in Sarah. Some sort of gold material, either gold-leaf or maybe just golden paint, made each of the names stand out against the white marble background. He snaked the tip of his finger from the top of the S to the bottom of the S.
Sarah Gartner.
She was someone’s child, maybe someone’s wife, maybe a mother, maybe a grandmother. But she sure the hell didn’t deserve to end up on this slab with all the other meaningless deaths that this monument represented.
Hail removed his hand and took a few side steps to his right, centering himself in front of the next stone.
He had watched the news when the memorial was being built. Hail knew what airline, what flight, what country and what group of human beings were being memorialized just by the color of the stone. The obelisk he was standing in front of was cut from a beautiful piece of red granite. The reddish feldspars gave the granite its color, but it was broken up with quartz crystals that were semi-clear greyish and purplish in color. This stone represented the Paris to New York flight AirFrance 1082. Its destination had been John F Kennedy International, leaving out of Charles De Gaulle, but it never made it. None of the flights represented by these stones had ever made it. Like the Orlando flight, the Paris aircraft was a huge Boeing 777 with 451 passengers on board. Without counting them, Hail was certain that there were 451 names chiseled into the surface of the red granite in front of him. 451 names that had been colored in golden paint. 451 people who never thought for a single second that this piece of hand-worked stone would represent their final resting place.
Hail looked around and didn’t see any other people around him. He guessed that the helicopter might have scared off some, but he didn’t sense that was the case. He looked to his left, down the hill toward the Vietnam Memorial. There were maybe a hundred visitors at that site. And it made perfect sense when he thought about it. There were roughly 60,000 names inscribed into the walls of that memorial. And only a fraction of that number was on these five columns in front of him. Sixty thousand families lost someone in the Vietnam War. If ten family members loved each of those soldiers then that yielded a potential of 600,000 visitors from just those loved ones; not to mention all the other friends, soldiers, tourists and the general public that wished to pay their respects. In contrast, there were only 1716 names on these stones. Just 2 % of the names compared to the adjacent memorial, but each of those names were just as important as the names on these stones. Every death mattered to someone, except for those terrorists who had caused them.
Next to the pretty red stone was a grey monolith. Simon Bolivar International of Maiquetia to George Bush Intercontinental. Caracas Venezuela to Houston in Texas. United 1045. Boeing 737. 205 dead. Golden names burrowed into grey sparkling granite. This had been a smaller plane so there were fewer names on the stone, but the monolith was the same exact size as all the others. Its smooth warm sides reached skywards, narrowing as it rose until it came to a sharp merciless point that seemed to want to go higher if not clipped by a chisel and a budget.