by Don DeLillo
“Tell me this. What kind of painter is allowed to behave more unspeakably, figurative or abstract?”
She heard the buzzer and walked over to the intercom to listen to the doorman’s announcement. She knew what it was in advance. This would be Martin on the way up, her mother’s lover.
3
He signed a document, then another. There were people on gurneys and there were others, a few, in wheelchairs, and he had trouble writing his name and more trouble fastening the hospital gown behind him. Lianne was there to help. Then she wasn’t anymore and an orderly put him in a wheelchair and pushed him down a corridor and into a series of examining rooms, with urgent cases rolling by.
Doctors in scrubs and paper masks checked his airway and took blood-pressure readings. They were interested in potentially fatal reactions to injury, hemorrhage, dehydration. They looked for diminished blood flow to tissues. They studied the contusions on his body and peered into his eyes and ears. Someone gave him an EKG. Through the open door he saw IV racks go floating past. They tested his hand grip and took X rays. They told him things he could not absorb about a ligament or cartilage, a tear or sprain.
Someone took the glass out of his face. The man talked throughout, using an instrument he called a pickup to extract small fragments of glass that were not deeply embedded. He said that most of the worst cases were in hospitals downtown or at the trauma center on a pier. He said that survivors were not appearing in the numbers expected. He was propelled by events and could not stop talking. Doctors and volunteers were standing idle, he said, because the people they were waiting for were mostly back there, in the ruins. He said he would use a clamp for deeper fragments.
“Where there are suicide bombings. Maybe you don’t want to hear this.”
“I don’t know.”
“In those places where it happens, the survivors, the people nearby who are injured, sometimes, months later, they develop bumps, for lack of a better term, and it turns out this is caused by small fragments, tiny fragments of the suicide bomber’s body. The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outward with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get trapped in the body of anyone who’s in striking range. Do you believe it? A student is sitting in a café. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into the skin. They call this organic shrapnel.”
He tweezered another splinter of glass out of Keith’s face.
“This is something I don’t think you have,” he said.
Justin’s two best friends were a sister and brother who lived in a high-rise ten blocks away. Lianne had trouble remembering their names at first and called them the Siblings and soon the name stuck. Justin said this was their real name anyway and she thought what a funny kid when he wants to be.
She saw Isabel on the street, mother of the Siblings, and they stood at the corner talking.
“That’s what kids do, absolutely, but I have to admit I’m beginning to wonder.”
“They sort of conspire.”
“Yes, and sort of talk in code, and they spend a lot of time at the window in Katie’s room, with the door closed.”
“You know they’re at the window.”
“Because I can hear them talking when I walk by and I know that’s where they’re standing. They’re at the window talking in this sort of code. Maybe Justin tells you things.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Because it’s getting a little strange, frankly, all the time they spend, first, sort of huddled together, and then, I don’t know, like endlessly whispering things in this semi-gibberish, which is what kids do, absolutely, but still.”
Lianne wasn’t sure what this was all about. It was about three kids being kids together.
“Justin’s getting interested in the weather. I think they’re doing clouds in school,” she said, realizing how hollow this sounded.
“They’re not whispering about clouds.”
“Okay.”
“It has something to do with this man.”
“What man?”
“This name. You’ve heard it.”
“This name,” Lianne said.
“Isn’t this the name they sort of mumble back and forth? My kids totally don’t want to discuss the matter. Katie enforces the thing. She basically inspires fear in her brother. I thought maybe you would know something.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Like Justin says nothing about any of this?”
“No. What man?”
“What man? Exactly,” Isabel said.
He was tall, with cropped hair, and she thought he looked like army, like career military, still in shape and beginning to look seasoned, not in combat but in the pale rigors of this life, in separation perhaps, in living alone, being a father from a distance.
He was in bed now and watched her, a few feet away, begin to button her shirt. They slept in the same bed because she could not tell him to use the sofa and because she liked having him here next to her. He didn’t seem to sleep. He lay on his back and talked but mostly listened and this was all right. She didn’t need to know a man’s feelings about everything, not anymore and not this man. She liked the spaces he made. She liked dressing in front of him. She knew the time was coming when he’d press her to the wall before she finished dressing. He’d get out of bed and look at her and she’d stop what she was doing and wait for him to come and press her to the wall.
He lay on a long narrow table within the closed unit. There was a pillow under his knees and a pair of track lights overhead and he tried to listen to the music. Inside the powerful noise of the scanner he fixed his attention on the instruments, separating one set from another, strings, woodwinds, brass. The noise was a violent staccato knocking, a metallic clamor that made him feel he was deep inside the core of a science-fiction city about to come undone.
He wore a device on his wrist to produce a detailed image and the sense of helpless confinement made him think of something the radiologist had said, a Russian whose accent he found reassuring because these are serious people who place weight on every word and maybe that’s why he chose classical music to listen to when she asked him to make a selection. He heard her now in his headset saying that the next sequence of noise would last three minutes and when the music resumed he thought of Nancy Dinnerstein, who ran a sleep clinic in Boston. People paid her to put them to sleep. Or the other Nancy, what’s-her-name, briefly, between incidental sex acts, in Portland that time, Oregon, without a last name. The city had a last name, the woman did not.
The noise was unbearable, alternating between the banging-shattering sound and an electronic pulse of varied pitch. He listened to the music and thought of what the radiologist had said, that once it’s over, in her Russian accent, you forget instantly the whole experience so how bad can it be, she said, and he thought this sounded like a description of dying. But that was another matter, wasn’t it, in another kind of noise, and the trapped man does not come sliding out of his tube. He listened to the music. He tried hard to hear the flutes and distinguish them from the clarinets, if there were clarinets, but he was unable to do this and the only countervailing force was Nancy Dinnerstein drunk in Boston and it gave him a dumb and helpless hard-on, thinking of her in his drafty hotel room with a limited view of the river.
He heard the voice in his headset saying that the next sequence of noise would last seven minutes.
She saw the face in the newspaper, the man from Flight 11. Only one of the nineteen seemed to have a face at this point, staring out of the photo, taut, with hard eyes that seemed too knowing to belong to a face on a driver’s license.
She got a call from Carol Shoup, an executive editor with a large publishing house. Carol had occasional jobs for Lianne, who edited books freelance, working usually at home or in the library.
It was Carol who’d sent the postcard from Rome, from the Keats-Sh
elley House, and she was the sort of person who was sure to sing out, on her return, “Did you get my card?”
Always in a voice that hovered between desperate insecurity and incipient resentment.
Instead she said softly, “Is this a bad time?”
After he walked in the door and people began to hear about it, in the days to come, they called her and said, “Is this a bad time?”
Of course they meant, Are you busy, you must be busy, there must be so much going on, should I call back, can I do something, how is he, will he stay for a while and, finally, can we have dinner, the four of us, somewhere quiet?
It was strange, how terse she became, and uninformative, coming to hate the phrase, marked as it was by nothing more than its own replicating DNA, and to distrust the voices, so smoothly funereal.
“Because if it is,” Carol said, “we can talk whenever.”
She didn’t want to believe she was being selfish in her guardianship of the survivor, determined to hold exclusive rights. This is where he wanted to be, outside the tide of voices and faces, God and country, sitting alone in still rooms, with those nearby who mattered.
“Which, by the way,” Carol said, “did you get the card I sent?”
She heard music coming from somewhere in the building, on a lower floor, and took two steps to the door, moving the telephone away from her ear, and then she opened the door and stood there, listening.
Now she stood at the foot of the bed and watched him lying there, late one night, after she’d finished working, and asked him finally and quietly.
“Why did you come here?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“For Justin, yes?”
This was the answer she wanted because it made the most sense.
“So he could see you were alive,” she said.
But it was also only half the answer and she realized she needed to hear something beyond this, a broader motive for his action or intuition or whatever it was.
He thought for a long moment.
“It’s hard to reconstruct. I don’t know how my mind was working. A guy came along in a van, a plumber, I think, and he drove me here. His radio had been stolen and he knew from the sirens that something was going on but he didn’t know what. At some point he had a clear view downtown but all he could see was one tower. He thought one tower was blocking his view of the other tower, or the smoke was. He saw the smoke. He drove east a ways and looked again and there was only one tower. One tower made no sense. Then he turned uptown because that’s where he was going and finally he saw me and picked me up. By this time the second tower was gone. Eight radios in three years, he said. All stolen. An electrician, I think. He had a water bottle he kept pushing in my face.”
“Your apartment, you knew you couldn’t go there.”
“I knew the building was too close to the towers and maybe I knew I couldn’t go there and maybe I wasn’t even thinking about that. Either way, that’s not why I came here. It was more than that.”
She felt better now.
“He wanted to take me to the hospital, the guy in the van, but I told him to bring me here.”
He looked at her.
“I gave him this address,” he said for emphasis, and she felt better still.
It was a simple matter, outpatient surgery, a ligament or cartilage, with Lianne in the reception area waiting to take him back to the apartment. On the table he thought of his buddy Rumsey, briefly, just before or after he lost sensation. The doctor, the anesthetist, injected him with a heavy sedative or other agent, a substance containing a memory suppressant, or maybe there were two shots, but there was Rumsey in his chair by the window, which meant the memory was not suppressed or the substance hadn’t taken effect yet, a dream, a waking image, whatever it was, Rumsey in the smoke, things coming down.
She stepped into the street thinking ordinary thoughts, dinner, dry cleaning, cash machine, that’s it, go home.
There was serious work to do on the book she was editing, for a university press, on ancient alphabets, deadline approaching. There was definitely that.
She wondered what the kid would make of the mango chutney she’d bought, or maybe he’d had it already, had it and hated it, at the Siblings’, because Katie talked about it once, or someone did.
The author was a Bulgarian writing in English.
And there was this, the taxis in broad ranks, three or four deep, speeding toward her from the traffic light one block down the avenue as she paused in midcrossing to work out her fate.
In Santa Fe she’d come across a sign on a shop window, for ethnic shampoo. She was traveling in New Mexico with a man she used to see during the separation, a TV executive, flauntingly well-read, teeth lasered lime white, a man who loved her longish face and sort of lazy-lithe body, he said, down to the knobby extremities, and the way he examined her, finger tracing the twists and ridges, which he named after geologic eras, making her laugh, intermittently, for a day and a half, or maybe it was just the altitude at which they were screwing, in the skies of the high desert.
Running toward the far curb now, feeling like a skirt and blouse without a body, how good it felt, hiding behind the plastic shimmer of the dry cleaner’s long sheath, which she held at arm’s length, between her and the taxis, in self-defense. She imagined the eyes of the drivers, intense and slit, heads pressed toward steering wheels, and there was still the question of her need to be equal to the situation, as Martin had said, her mother’s lover.
There was that, and Keith in the shower this morning, standing numbly in the flow, a dim figure far away inside plexiglass.
But what made her think of this, ethnic shampoo, in the middle of Third Avenue, which was a question probably not answerable in a book on ancient alphabets, meticulous decipherments, inscriptions on baked clay, tree bark, stone, bone, sedge. The joke, at her expense, is that the work in question was typed on an old manual machine with textual emendations made by the author in a deeply soulful and unreadable script.
The first cop told him to go to the checkpoint one block east of here and he did this and there were military police and troops in Humvees and a convoy of dump trucks and sanitation sweepers moving south through the parted sawhorse barriers. He showed proof of address with picture ID and the second cop told him to go to the next checkpoint, east of here, and he did this and saw a chain-link barrier stretching down the middle of Broadway, patrolled by troops in gas masks. He told the cop at the checkpoint that he had a cat to feed and if it died his child would be devastated and the man was sympathetic but told him to try the next checkpoint. There were fire-rescue cars and ambulances, there were state police cruisers, flatbed trucks, vehicles with cherry pickers, all moving through the barricades and into the shroud of sand and ash.
He showed the next cop his proof of address and picture ID and told him there were cats he had to feed, three of them, and if they died his children would be devastated and he showed the splint on his left arm. He had to move out of the way when a drove of enormous bulldozers and backhoes moved through the parted barricades, making the sound of hell machines at endless revving pitch. He started over again with the cop and showed his wrist splint and said he needed only fifteen minutes in the apartment to feed the cats and then he’d go back uptown to the hotel, no animals allowed, and reassure the children. The cop said okay but if you’re stopped down there be sure to tell them you went through the Broadway checkpoint, not this one.
He worked his way through the frozen zone, south and west, passing through smaller checkpoints and detouring around others. There was a Guard troop in battle jackets and sidearms and now and then he saw a figure in a dust mask, man or woman, obscure and furtive, the only other civilians. The streets and cars were surfaced in ash and there were garbage bags stacked high at curbstones and against the sides of buildings. He walked slowly, watching for something he could not identify. Everything was gray, it was limp and failed, storefronts behind corrugated steel shutters, a ci
ty somewhere else, under permanent siege, and a stink in the air that infiltrated the skin.
He stood at the National Rent-A-Fence barrier and looked into the haze, seeing the strands of bent filigree that were the last standing things, a skeletal remnant of the tower where he’d worked for ten years. The dead were everywhere, in the air, in the rubble, on rooftops nearby, in the breezes that carried from the river. They were settled in ash and drizzled on windows all along the streets, in his hair and on his clothes.
He realized someone had joined him at the fence, a man in a dust mask who maintained a calculated silence designed to be broken.
“Look at it,” he said finally. “I say to myself I’m standing here. It’s hard to believe, being here and seeing it.”
His words were muffled by the mask.
“I walked to Brooklyn when it happened,” he said. “I don’t live there. I live way uptown on the west side but I work down around here and when it happened everybody was walking across the bridge to Brooklyn and I went with them. I walked across the bridge because they were walking across the bridge.”
It sounded like a speech defect, the words smothered and blurred. He took out his cell phone and entered a number.
“I’m standing here,” he said but had to repeat himself because the person he was talking to could not hear him clearly.
“I’m standing here,” he said.
Keith headed in the direction of his apartment building. He saw three men in hard hats and NYPD windbreakers, with search dogs on short leads. They came walking toward him and one of the men tilted his head in inquiry. Keith told him where he was going, mentioned the cats and the children. The man paused to tell him that the tower at One Liberty Plaza, fifty-plus stories, near where Keith was going, was about to fucking fall down. The other men stood by impatiently and the first man told him that the building was actually and measurably moving. He nodded and waited for them to leave and went south once more and then west again through mostly empty streets. Two Hasidic men stood outside a shop with a broken window. They looked a thousand years old. When he approached his building he saw workers in respirators and protective body suits scouring the sidewalk with a massive vacuum pump.
