Language, Destroyer of Worlds

No regular reader of Cormac McCarthy will be surprised to find that The Passenger begins with a corpse. Or two corpses, really, one of which has gone missing. The one we see, in the italicized, single-page prologue with which the book begins, is of a frozen golden-haired girl found hanging “among the bare gray poles of the winter trees.” Her name is Alicia Western, and she’s dressed in white, with a red sash that makes her easy to spot against the snow, a “bit of color in the scrupulous desolation.” It is Christmas 1972, a forest near the Wisconsin sanitarium where the twenty-year-old has checked herself in—a place she’s been before.

She’s a math prodigy, the daughter of a man who worked on the Manhattan Project, but she’s also been visited since the age of twelve by an apparition she calls the Thalidomide Kid, a restlessly pacing figure three feet tall and with flippers instead of hands, who to her is neither dream nor hallucination but “coherent in every detail.” The Kid often checks up on her, talking and teasing and goading, and knows her every thought and weakness. She understands that he’s not real, yet she also believes in his separate existence, a being “small and frail and brave…[and] ashamed” of his body’s spectacle. But he doesn’t visit her alone. Usually he brings some friends, the ones Alicia calls her “entertainers,” an old man in a “clawhammer” coat, say, or “a matched pair of dwarves.” Her doctors have diagnosed her as a paranoid schizophrenic, some of them think she’s autistic, and according to a personality test she is a “sociopathic deviant.” None of the labels fit.

Then there’s the body we don’t see, the one that should have been found in a private jet forty feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s 1980, and Alicia’s older brother Bobby—a Caltech dropout and onetime race car driver—works as a salvage diver out of New Orleans. He and his partner have been hired to investigate the crash. They cut the plane’s door open and then slowly swim inside, “the faces of the dead inches away,” their hair floating along with their coffee cups up toward the ceiling. Pilot and copilot plus seven passengers in suits, and it doesn’t take Bobby long to realize that there are a few things missing. No pilot’s flight bag, no black box, and the navigation panel has been pulled from the instrument board. Their firm will be paid with an untraceable money order, but later that day Bobby finds two men with badges outside his apartment. Seven passengers, they ask? Are you sure? Because the manifest shows eight, and the agents’ questions confirm his suspicions. The plane’s door latch may have been intact before his partner’s oxyarc torch sliced it open, but somebody else, somebody alive, has been in and out of that sunken jet before them.

We’ll never learn who that passenger was, or what brought the plane down. I’ll admit to some unsatisfied curiosity about that, but it didn’t take long to realize that neither Bobby nor I was going to get any answers. The missing passenger, the eighth man, is a MacGuffin, and he’s not the passenger the title refers to. Bobby is. The two words don’t share an etymology, but a passenger is essentially passive. A passenger gets borne along, not in control of the destination, not driving or steering or deciding. And Bobby’s driving days are done, though he still owns a Maserati and sometimes takes it on the road. They’ve been done ever since he crashed his Lotus in a Formula Two race and went into a coma—ever since he came out of it to find that his sister was dead.

Now he dives. The money is good and so is the adrenaline; as Alicia tells her shrink, Bobby was never afraid of heights or speed, but the depths, oh yes. So he dives and he drinks, a French Quarter life with no shape beyond the moment, until that plane goes down and he begins to wait for what will come. That’s when the surprises begin. The corpses grab you, but there’s much more here to hold you: a troubled family history on the one hand and a complicated, enveloping, exhilarating formal drama on the other.

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