Falling Man

by Don DeLillo

  ALSO BY DON DELILLO

  NOVELS

  Americana

  End Zone

  Great Jones Street

  Ratner’s Star

  Players

  Running Dog

  The Names

  White Noise

  Libra

  Mao II

  Underworld

  The Body Artist

  Cosmopolis

  PLAYS

  The Day Room

  Valparaiso

  Love-Lies-Bleeding

  Contents

  PART ONE BILL LAWTON

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  PART TWO ERNST HECHINGER

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  PART THREE DAVID JANIAK

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SCRIBNER

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by Don DeLillo

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  DeLillo, Don

  Falling man: a novel / Don DeLillo.

  p. cm.

  1. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Fiction. 2. Victims of terrorism—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.E4425F36 2007

  813'.54—dc22

  2006052306

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-6207-9

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6207-8

  Falling Man

  PART ONE

  BILL LAWTON

  1

  It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars.

  The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall.

  He wore a suit and carried a briefcase. There was glass in his hair and face, marbled bolls of blood and light. He walked past a Breakfast Special sign and they went running by, city cops and security guards running, hands pressed down on gun butts to keep the weapons steady.

  Things inside were distant and still, where he was supposed to be. It happened everywhere around him, a car half buried in debris, windows smashed and noises coming out, radio voices scratching at the wreckage. He saw people shedding water as they ran, clothes and bodies drenched from sprinkler systems. There were shoes discarded in the street, handbags and laptops, a man seated on the sidewalk coughing up blood. Paper cups went bouncing oddly by.

  The world was this as well, figures in windows a thousand feet up, dropping into free space, and the stink of fuel fire, and the steady rip of sirens in the air. The noise lay everywhere they ran, stratified sound collecting around them, and he walked away from it and into it at the same time.

  There was something else then, outside all this, not belonging to this, aloft. He watched it coming down. A shirt came down out of the high smoke, a shirt lifted and drifting in the scant light and then falling again, down toward the river.

  They ran and then they stopped, some of them, standing there swaying, trying to draw breath out of the burning air, and the fitful cries of disbelief, curses and lost shouts, and the paper massed in the air, contracts, resumés blowing by, intact snatches of business, quick in the wind.

  He kept on walking. There were the runners who’d stopped and others veering into sidestreets. Some were walking backwards, looking into the core of it, all those writhing lives back there, and things kept falling, scorched objects trailing lines of fire.

  He saw two women sobbing in their reverse march, looking past him, both in running shorts, faces in collapse.

  He saw members of the tai chi group from the park nearby, standing with hands extended at roughly chest level, elbows bent, as if all of this, themselves included, might be placed in a state of abeyance.

  Someone came out of a diner and tried to hand him a bottle of water. It was a woman wearing a dust mask and a baseball cap and she withdrew the bottle and twisted off the top and then thrust it toward him again. He put down the briefcase to take it, barely aware that he wasn’t using his left arm, that he’d had to put down the briefcase before he could take the bottle. Three police vans came veering into the street and sped downtown, sirens sounding. He closed his eyes and drank, feeling the water pass into his body taking dust and soot down with it. She was looking at him. She said something he didn’t hear and he handed back the bottle and picked up the briefcase. There was an after-taste of blood in the long draft of water.

  He started walking again. A supermarket cart stood upright and empty. There was a woman behind it, facing him, with police tape wrapped around her head and face, yellow caution tape that marks the limits of a crime scene. Her eyes were thin white ripples in the bright mask and she gripped the handle of the cart and stood there, looking into the smoke.

  In time he heard the sound of the second fall. He crossed Canal Street and began to see things, somehow, differently. Things did not seem charged in the usual ways, the cobbled street, the cast-iron buildings. There was something critically missing from the things around him. They were unfinished, whatever that means. They were unseen, whatever that means, shop windows, loading platforms, paint-sprayed walls. Maybe this is what things look like when there is no one here to see them.

  He heard the sound of the second fall, or felt it in the trembling air, the north tower coming down, a soft awe of voices in the distance. That was him coming down, the north tower.

  The sky was lighter here and he could breathe more easily. There were others behind him, thousands, filling the middle distance, a mass in near formation, people walking out of the smoke. He kept going until he had to stop. It hit him quickly, the knowledge that he couldn’t go any farther.

  He tried to tell himself he was alive but the idea was too obscure to take hold. There were no taxis and little traffic of any kind and then an old panel truck appeared, Electrical Contractor, Long Island City, and it pulled alongside and the driver leaned toward the window on the passenger’s side and examined what he saw, a man scaled in ash, in pulverized matter, and asked him where he wanted to go. It wasn’t until he got in the truck and shut the door that he understood where he’d been going all along.

  2

  It wasn’t just those days and nights in bed. Sex was everywhere at first, in words, phrases, half gestures, the simplest intimation of altered space. She’d put down a book or magazine and a small pause settled around them. This wa
s sex. They’d walk down a street together and see themselves in a dusty window. A flight of stairs was sex, the way she moved close to the wall with him just behind, to touch or not, brush lightly or press tight, feeling him crowd her from below, his hand moving around her thigh, stopping her, the way he eased up and around, the way she gripped his wrist. The tilt she gave her sunglasses when she turned and looked at him or the movie on TV when the woman comes into the empty room and it doesn’t matter whether she picks up the phone or takes off her skirt as long as she’s alone and they are watching. The rented beach house was sex, entering at night after the long stiff drive, her body feeling welded at the joints, and she’d hear the soft heave of surf on the other side of the dunes, the thud and run, and this was the line of separation, the sound out there in the dark that marked an earthly pulse in the blood.

  She sat thinking about this. Her mind drifted in and out of this, the early times, eight years ago, of the eventual extended grimness called their marriage. The day’s mail was in her lap. There were matters to attend to and there were events that crowded out such matters but she was looking past the lamp into the wall, where they seemed to be projected, the man and woman, bodies incomplete but bright and real.

  It was the postcard that snapped her back, on top of the cluster of bills and other mail. She glanced at the message, a standard scrawled greeting, sent by a friend staying in Rome, then looked again at the face of the card. It was a reproduction of the cover of Shelley’s poem in twelve cantos, first edition, called Revolt of Islam. Even in postcard format, it was clear that the cover was beautifully designed, with a large illustrated R that included creatural flourishes, a ram’s head and what may have been a fanciful fish with a tusk and a trunk. Revolt of Islam. The card was from the Keats-Shelley House in Piazza di Spagna and she’d understood in the first taut seconds that the card had been sent a week or two earlier. It was a matter of simple coincidence, or not so simple, that a card might arrive at this particular time bearing the title of that specific book.

  This was all, a lost moment on the Friday of that lifelong week, three days after the planes.

  She said to her mother, “It was not possible, up from the dead, there he was in the doorway. It’s so lucky Justin was here with you. Because it would have been awful for him to see his father like that. Like gray soot head to toe, I don’t know, like smoke, standing there, with blood on his face and clothes.”

  “We did a puzzle, an animal puzzle, horses in a field.”

  Her mother’s apartment was not far from Fifth Avenue, with art on the walls, painstakingly spaced, and small bronze pieces on tables and bookshelves. Today the living room was in a state of happy disarray. Justin’s toys and games were scattered across the floor, subverting the timeless quality of the room, and this was nice, Lianne thought, because it was otherwise hard not to whisper in such a setting.

  “I didn’t know what to do. I mean with the phones out. Finally we walked to the hospital. Walked, step by step, like walking a child.”

  “Why was he there in the first place, in your apartment?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why didn’t he go straight to a hospital? Down there, downtown. Why didn’t he go to a friend’s place?”

  Friend meant girlfriend, an unavoidable thrust, she had to do it, couldn’t help it.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You haven’t discussed this. Where is he now?”

  “He’s all right. Done with doctors for a while.”

  “What have you discussed?”

  “No major problems, physical.”

  “What have you discussed?” she said.

  Her mother, Nina Bartos, had taught at universities in California and New York, retiring two years earlier, the So-and-So Professor of Such-and-Such, as Keith said once. She was pale and thin, her mother, following knee-replacement surgery. She was finally and resolutely old. This is what she wanted, it seemed, to be old and tired, to embrace old age, take up old age, surround herself with it. There were the canes, there were the medications, there were the afternoon naps, the dietary restrictions, the doctors’ appointments.

  “There’s nothing to discuss right now. He needs to stay away from things, including discussions.”

  “Reticent.”

  “You know Keith.”

  “I’ve always admired that about him. He gives the impression there’s something deeper than hiking and skiing, or playing cards. But what?”

  “Rock climbing. Don’t forget.”

  “And you went with him. I did forget.”

  Her mother stirred in the chair, feet propped on the matching stool, late morning, still in her robe, dying for a cigarette.

  “I like his reticence, or whatever it is,” she said. “But be careful.”

  “He’s reticent around you, or was, the few times there was actual communication.”

  “Be careful. He was in grave danger, I know. He had friends in there. I know that too,” her mother said. “But if you let your sympathy and goodwill affect your judgment.”

  There were the conversations with friends and former colleagues about knee replacements, hip replacements, about the atrocities of short-term memory and long-term health insurance. All of this was so alien to Lianne’s sense of her mother that she thought there might be an element of performance. Nina was trying to accommodate the true encroachments of age by making drama of them, giving herself a certain degree of ironic distance.

  “And Justin. Having a father around the house again.”

  “The kid is fine. Who knows how the kid is? He’s fine, he’s back in school,” she said. “They reopened.”

  “But you worry. I know this. You like to nourish your fear.”

  “What’s next? Don’t you ask yourself? Not only next month. Years to come.”

  “Nothing is next. There is no next. This was next. Eight years ago they planted a bomb in one of the towers. Nobody said what’s next. This was next. The time to be afraid is when there’s no reason to be afraid. Too late now.”

  Lianne stood by the window.

  “But when the towers fell.”

  “I know.”

  “When this happened.”

  “I know.”

  “I thought he was dead.”

  “So did I,” Nina said. “So many watching.”

  “Thinking he’s dead, she’s dead.”

  “I know.”

  “Watching those buildings fall.”

  “First one, then the other. I know,” her mother said.

  She had several canes to choose from and sometimes, on the off-hours and the rainy days, she walked up the street to the Metropolitan Museum and looked at pictures. She looked at three or four pictures in an hour and a half of looking. She looked at what was unfailing. She liked the big rooms, the old masters, what was unfailing in its grip on the eye and mind, on memory and identity. Then she came home and read. She read and slept.

  “Of course the child is a blessing but otherwise, you know better than I, marrying the man was a huge mistake, and you willed it, you went looking for it. You wanted to live a certain way, never mind the consequences. You wanted a certain thing and you thought Keith.”

  “What did I want?”

  “You thought Keith would get you there.”

  “What did I want?”

  “To feel dangerously alive. This was a quality you associated with your father. But that wasn’t the case. Your father was at heart a careful man. And your son is a beautiful and sensitive child,” she said. “But otherwise.”

  In truth she loved this room, Lianne did, in its most composed form, without the games and scattered toys. Her mother had been living here for a few years only and Lianne tended to see it as a visitor might, a space that was serenely self-possessed, and so what if it’s a little intimidating. What she loved most were the two still lifes on the north wall, by Giorgio Morandi, a painter her mother had studied and written about. These were groupings of bottles, jugs, biscuit tins, that wa
s all, but there was something in the brushstrokes that held a mystery she could not name, or in the irregular edges of vases and jars, some reconnoiter inward, human and obscure, away from the very light and color of the paintings. Natura morta. The Italian term for still life seemed stronger than it had to be, somewhat ominous, even, but these were matters she hadn’t talked about with her mother. Let the latent meanings turn and bend in the wind, free from authoritative comment.

  “You liked asking questions as a child. Insistently digging. But you were curious about the wrong things.”

  “They were my things, not yours.”

  “Keith wanted a woman who’d regret what she did with him. This is his style, to get a woman to do something she’ll be sorry for. And the thing you did wasn’t just a night or a weekend. He was built for weekends. The thing you did.”

  “This isn’t the time.”

  “You actually married the man.”

  “And then I threw him out. I had strong objections, building up over time. What you object to is very different. He’s not a scholar, not an artist. Doesn’t paint, doesn’t write poetry. If he did, you’d overlook everything else. He’d be the raging artist. He’d be allowed to behave unspeakably. Tell me something.”

  “You have more to lose this time. Self-respect. Think about that.”