Glamorama

m having a Coke with someone named Ben Affleck while Jamiroquai plays over the sound system in the cavernous club we’re all lost in and Gabé Doppelt just has to introduce me to Bjork and I have to pose with Giorgio Armani and he’s hugging me as if we go a long way back and he’s wearing a navy-blue crew-neck T-shirt, a navy cashmere sweater, navy corduroy jeans and a giant Jaeger-Le Coultre Reverso wristwatch.

The plane ignites and a huge wave of people die by inhaling flames, their mouths and throats and lungs charred black.
For some, a minute of falling while still conscious.
Onto a forest situated just seventy miles outside Paris.
The soft sounds of bodies imploding, torn apart on impact.
A massive section of the fuselage lands and because of an emergency backup system, all the lights in the plane continue flickering as a hail of glowing ash rains down.
A long pause.

but he just goes into shock and doesn’t die until the plane smashes haphazardly into the forest below and the dying comes in waves.
In the business section everyone is soaked with blood, someone’s head is completely encased with intestines that flew out of what’s left of the woman sitting two rows in front of him and people are screaming and crying uncontrollably, wailing with grief.
The dying are lashed with jet fuel as it starts spraying into the cabin.
One row is sprayed with the blood and viscera of the passengers in the row before them, who have been sliced in two.
Another row is decapitated by a huge sheet of flying aluminum, and blood keeps whirling throughout the cabin everywhere, mixing in with the jet fuel.
The fuel unleashes something, forces the passengers to comprehend a simple fact: that they have to let people go—mothers and sons, parents and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives—and that dying is inevitable in what could be a matter of seconds. They realize there is no hope. But understanding this horrible death just stretches the seconds out longer as they try to prepare for it—people still alive being flung around the aircraft falling to earth, screaming and vomiting and crying involuntarily, bodies contorted while they brace themselves, heads bowed down.
“Why me?” someone wonders uselessly.
A leg is caught in a tangle of metal and wires and it waves wildly in the air as the plane continues to drop.
Of the three Camden graduates aboard the 747—Amanda Taylor (’86), Stephanie Meyers (’87) and Susan Goldman (’86)—Amanda is killed first when she’s struck by a beam that crashes through the ceiling of the plane, her son reaching out to her as he’s lifted out of his seat into the air, his arms outstretched as his head mercifully smashes against an overhead bin in the craft, killing him instantly.
Susan Goldman, who has cervical cancer, is partly thankful as she braces herself but changes her mind as she’s sprayed with burning jet fuel.