Blink of an Eye

By TAD BARTIMUS

We were sitting down to a quiet supper when we heard the helicopter's jet engines. Too low, we thought, rushing to the window. Is he going to crash?

The chopper wasn't in trouble; somebody else was. For hours in the dark, back and forth across the shoreline rocks, sharp-eyed Coast Guard pilots searched in vain for -- whom?

We'd been comfortable and snug in our kitchen, chopping lettuce for salad, cutting up fruit, listening to a sonata, while just a quarter-mile away a soul was lost. Did he see through our windows? Call out for help? We went to bed haunted by the searchlight and all it represented. Finally drifting into a fitful sleep, we awoke at dawn when the helicopter returned with a fresh crew and a full tank of gas.

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It is the curse of summer, these lost swimmers who go splashing into cool, clear water on a sunny, hot afternoon. One minute a head bobs in the waves; the next the horizon is flat and empty. Where do they go? How does it happen and no one notices? He was young and strong and used to the surf, yet now he's gone. Surely it's not possible. I do not know this child, yet I know every child. And every child's mother and father, sister and brother, uncles and aunts. We all know every child, because we have hearts.

For the next three days helicopters, planes and boats searched for the 15-year-old last seen in black shorts with blue stripes. Experts measured wind, ocean drift and currents, and combed a 12-mile grid. We went about our routines, acutely aware of the red helicopter skimming the white caps right off our porch. Silently, we said prayers and made excuses:

"Perhaps he's got his foot caught in the rocks and he can't wiggle loose; somebody will have to find him. Perhaps he's broken his ankle. Perhaps he's alive but unconscious."

Time passed; hope faltered. The search ended.

On that same day, in the mail, came my friend Pat Milton's new book detailing the FBI's investigation of TWA flight 800, which exploded off of Long Island and fell into the sea three years ago this summer. Pat was at the crash scene shortly after the tragedy which claimed the lives of 230 passengers and crew in circumstances that remain mostly a mystery. For the title of her exhaustive chronicle, she chose: "In the Blink of An Eye."

It is an apt phrase, not only for the loss of an airliner full of precious people but also for the loss of a single young boy in black shorts with blue stripes. One moment they frolic and laugh; the next they're gone. In the blink of an eye. And we cannot explain it, or puzzle our way through it. Pat Milton chose to let the philosopher Aeschylus, writing in the fifth century before Christ, point the way:

"He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."

I have turned off the porch light, but I cannot stop staring into the dark.

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