Falling Man

by Don DeLillo

  “He takes the binoculars over to the Siblings’. Any idea why?”

  “They’re searching the skies.”

  “For what?”

  “Planes. One of them, I think it was the girl.”

  “Katie.”

  “Katie claims she saw the plane that hit Tower One. She says she was home from school, sick, standing at the window when the plane flew by.”

  The building where the Siblings lived was known to some as Godzilla Apartments or simply the Godzilla. It was forty stories or so in an area of town houses and other structures of modest height and it created its own weather systems, with strong currents of air sometimes shearing down the face of the building and knocking old people to the pavement.

  “Home sick. Do I believe that?”

  “I think they’re on the twenty-seventh floor,” he said.

  “Looking west across the park. This much is true.”

  “Did the plane fly down over the park?”

  “Maybe the park, maybe the river,” she said. “And maybe she was home sick and maybe she made it up.”

  “Either way.”

  “Either way, you’re saying, they’re looking for more planes.”

  “Waiting for it to happen again.”

  “That scares me,” she said.

  “This time with a pair of binoculars to help them make the sighting.”

  “That scares the hell out of me. God, there’s something so awful about that. Damn kids with their goddamn twisted powers of imagination.”

  She walked over to the table and picked half a strawberry out of his cereal bowl. Then she sat across from him, thinking and chewing.

  Finally she said, “The only thing I got out of Justin. The towers did not collapse.”

  “I told him they did.”

  “So did I,” she said.

  “They were hit but did not collapse. That’s what he says.”

  “He didn’t see it on TV. I didn’t want him to see it. But I told him they came down. And he seemed to absorb it. But then, I don’t know.”

  “He knows they came down, whatever he says about it.”

  “He has to know, don’t you think? And he knows you were there.”

  “We talked about it,” Keith said. “But only once.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Not much. And neither did I.”

  “They’re searching the skies.”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  She knew there was something she’d wanted to say all along and it finally seeped into wordable awareness.

  “Has he said anything about this man Bill Lawton?”

  “Just once. He wasn’t supposed to tell anyone.”

  “Their mother mentioned this name. I keep forgetting to tell you. First I forget the name. I forget the easy names. Then, when I remember, you’re never around to tell.”

  “The kid slipped. He let the name slip. He told me the planes were a secret. I’m not supposed to tell anyone the three of them are up there on the twenty-seventh floor searching the skies. But mostly, he said, I’m not supposed to mention Bill Lawton. Then he realized what he’d done. He’d let the name slip. And he wanted me to give him double and triple promises. No one’s allowed to know.”

  “Including his mother who gave birth to him in four and a half hours of blood and pain. This is why women go running through the streets.”

  “Amen. But what happened,” he said, “is that the other kid, the little brother.”

  “Robert.”

  “The name originates with Robert. This much I know. The rest I mostly surmise. Robert thought, from television or school or somewhere, that he was hearing a certain name. Maybe he heard the name once, or misheard it, then imposed this version on future occasions. In other words he never adjusted his original sense of what he was hearing.”

  “What was he hearing?”

  “He was hearing Bill Lawton. They were saying bin Laden.”

  Lianne considered this. It seemed to her, at first, that some important meaning might be located in the soundings of the boy’s small error. She looked at Keith, searching for his concurrence, for something she might use to secure her free-floating awe. He chewed his food and shrugged.

  “So, together,” he said, “they developed the myth of Bill Lawton.”

  “Katie’s got to know the real name. She’s way too smart. She probably keeps the other name going precisely because it’s the wrong name.”

  “I guess that’s the idea. That’s the myth.”

  “Bill Lawton.”

  “Searching the skies for Bill Lawton. He told me some things before he clammed up.”

  “One thing I like. I like knowing the answer to the riddle before Isabel knows.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The Siblings’ mother.”

  “What about her blood and pain?”

  She laughed at that. But the thought of them at the window, with the door closed, searching the skies, continued to disturb her.

  “Bill Lawton has a long beard. He wears a long robe,” he said. “He flies jet planes and speaks thirteen languages but not English except to his wives. What else? He has the power to poison what we eat but only certain foods. They’re working on the list.”

  “This is what we get for putting a protective distance between children and news events.”

  “Except we didn’t put a distance, not really,” he said.

  “Between children and mass murderers.”

  “The other thing he does, Bill Lawton, is go everywhere in his bare feet.”

  “They killed your best friend. They’re fucking outright murderers. Two friends, two friends.”

  “I talked to Demetrius a little while ago. I don’t think you met him. Worked in the other tower. They sent him to a burn unit in Baltimore. He has family there.”

  She looked at him.

  “Why are you still here?”

  She said this in a tone of gentlest curiosity.

  “Are you planning to stay? Because I think this is something we need to talk about,” she said. “I’ve forgotten how to talk to you. This is the longest talk we’ve had.”

  “You did it better than anybody. Talk to me. Maybe that was the problem.”

  “I guess I’ve unlearned it. Because I sit here thinking we have so much to say.”

  “We don’t have so much to say. We used to say everything, all the time. We examined everything, all the questions, all the issues.”

  “All right.”

  “It practically killed us.”

  “All right. But is it possible? Here’s my question,” she said. “Is it possible you and I are done with conflict? You know what I mean. The everyday friction. The every-word every-breath schedule we were on before we split. Is it possible this is over? We don’t need this anymore. We can live without it. Am I right?”

  “We’re ready to sink into our little lives,” he said.

  ON MARIENSTRASSE

  They stood in the entranceway watching the cold rain fall, younger man and older, after evening prayer. The wind sent trash skidding along the sidewalk and Hammad cupped his hands to his mouth and exhaled six or seven times, slowly and deliberately, feeling a whisper of warm breath on his palms. A woman on a bike went past, pedaling hard. He crossed his arms on his chest now, hands buried in armpits, and he listened to the older man’s story.

  He was a rifleman in the Shatt al Arab, fifteen years ago, watching them come across the mudflats, thousands of shouting boys. Some carried rifles, many did not, and the weapons nearly overwhelmed the smaller boys, Kalashnikovs, too heavy to be carried very far. He was a soldier in Saddam’s army and they were the martyrs of the Ayatollah, here to fall and die. They seemed to come up out of the wet earth, wave on wave, and he aimed and fired and watched them fall. He was flanked by machine-gun positions and the firing grew so intense he began to think he was breathing white-hot steel.

  Hammad barely knew this man, a baker, here in Hamburg maybe ten years. T
hey prayed in the same mosque, this is what he knew, on the second floor of this shabby building with graffiti smeared on the outer walls and a setting of local strolling whores. Now he knew this as well, the face of combat in the long war.

  The boys kept coming and the machine guns cut them down. After a time the man understood there was no point shooting anymore, not for him. Even if they were the enemy, Iranians, Shiites, heretics, this was not for him, watching them vault the smoking bodies of their brothers, carrying their souls in their hands. The other thing he understood is that this was a military tactic, ten thousand boys enacting the glory of self-sacrifice to divert Iraqi troops and equipment from the real army massing behind front lines.

  Most countries are run by madmen, he said.

  Then he said he was twice regretful, first to see the boys die, sent out to explode land mines and to run under tanks and into walls of gunfire, and then to think they were winning, these children, defeating us in the manner of their dying.

  Hammad listened without comment but was grateful to the man. He was the kind of man who is not old yet by strict count but who carries something heavier than hard years.

  But the shouts of the boys, the high-pitched cry. The man said this is what he heard above the noise of battle. The boys were sounding the cry of history, the story of ancient Shia defeat and the allegiance of the living to those who were dead and defeated. That cry is still close to me, he said. Not like something happening yesterday but something always happening, over a thousand years happening, always in the air.

  Hammad stood nodding. He felt the cold in his bones, the misery of wet winds and northern nights. They stood in silence for a time, waiting for the rain to stop, and he kept thinking that another woman would come by on a bike, someone to look at, hair wet, legs pumping.

  They were all growing beards. One of them even told his father to grow a beard. Men came to the flat on Marienstrasse, some to visit, others to live, men in and out all the time, growing beards.

  Hammad sat crouched, eating and listening. The talk was fire and light, the emotion contagious. They were in this country to pursue technical educations but in these rooms they spoke about the struggle. Everything here was twisted, hypocrite, the West corrupt of mind and body, determined to shiver Islam down to bread crumbs for birds.

  They studied architecture and engineering. They studied urban planning and one of them blamed the Jews for defects in construction. The Jews build walls too thin, aisles too narrow. The Jews built the toilet in this flat too close to the floor so a man’s stream of liquid leaves his body and travels so far it makes a noise and a splash, which people in the next room can sit and listen to. Thanks to the thin Jew walls.

  Hammad wasn’t sure whether this was funny, true or stupid. He listened to everything they said, intently. He was a bulky man, clumsy, and thought all his life that some unnamed energy was sealed in his body, too tight to be released.

  He didn’t know which one of them had told his father to grow a beard. Tell your father to grow a beard. This is not normally recommended.

  The man who led discussions, this was Amir and he was intense, a small thin wiry man who spoke to Hammad in his face. He was very genius, others said, and he told them that a man can stay forever in a room, doing blueprints, eating and sleeping, even praying, even plotting, but at a certain point he has to get out. Even if the room is a place of prayer, he can’t stay there all his life. Islam is the world outside the prayer room as well as the sūrahs in the Koran. Islam is the struggle against the enemy, near enemy and far, Jews first, for all things unjust and hateful, and then the Americans.

  They needed space of their own, in the mosque, in the portable prayer room at the university, here in the apartment on Marienstrasse.

  There were seven pairs of shoes set outside the door of the flat. Hammad went in and they were talking and arguing. One of the men had fought in Bosnia, another avoided contact with dogs and women.

  They looked at videos of jihad in other countries and Hammad told them about the boy soldiers running in the mud, the mine jumpers, wearing keys to paradise around their necks. They stared him down, they talked him down. That was a long time ago and those were only boys, they said, not worth the time it would take to be sorry for a single one.

  Late one night he had to step over the prone form of a brother in prayer as he made his way to the toilet to jerk off.

  The world changes first in the mind of the man who wants to change it. The time is coming, our truth, our shame, and each man becomes the other, and the other still another, and then there is no separation.

  Amir spoke in his face. His full name was Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir el-Sayed Atta.

  There was the feeling of lost history. They were too long in isolation. This is what they talked about, being crowded out by other cultures, other futures, the all-enfolding will of capital markets and foreign policies.

  This was Amir, his mind was in the upper skies, making sense of things, drawing things together.

  Hammad knew a woman who was German, Syrian, what else, a little Turkish. She had dark eyes and a floppy body that liked contact. They shuffled across the room toward her cot, clamped tight, with her roommate on the other side of the door studying English. Everything happened in crowded segments of place and time. His dreams seemed compressed, small rooms, nearly bare, quickly dreamt. Sometimes he and the two women played crude word games, inventing nonsense rhymes in four pidgin languages.

  He didn’t know the name of the German security agency in any language. Some of the men who passed through the flat were dangerous to the state. Read the texts, fire the guns. They were probably being watched, phones tapped, signals intercepted. They preferred anyway to talk in person. They knew that all signals traveling in the air are vulnerable to interception. The state has microwave sites. The state has ground stations and floating satellites, Internet exchange points. There is photo reconnaissance that takes a picture of a dung beetle from one hundred kilometers up.

  But we encounter face to face. A man turns up from Kandahar, another from Riyadh. We encounter directly, in the flat or in the mosque. The state has fiber optics but power is helpless against us. The more power, the more helpless. We encounter through eyes, through word and look.

  Hammad and two others went looking for a man on the Reeperbahn. It was late and bitter cold and they saw him finally coming out of a house half a block away. One of the men called his name, then the other. He looked at them and waited and Hammad advanced and hit him three or four times and he went down. The other men advanced and kicked him. Hammad hadn’t known his name until they shouted it out and he wasn’t sure what this was all about, the guy paying an Albanian whore for sex or the guy not growing a beard. He had no beard, Hammad noticed, just before he hit him.

  They ate skewered meat in a Turkish restaurant. He showed her the dimensional specifications he did in class, where he studied mechanical drawing, halfheartedly. He felt more intelligent when he was with her because she encouraged exactly this, asking questions or just being herself, being curious about things including his friends at the mosque. His friends gave him a reason to be mysterious, a circumstance she found interesting. Her roommate listened to cool voices speaking English in her headset. Hammad troubled her for lessons, for words and phrases and we can skip the grammar. There was a rush, a pull that made it hard to see beyond the minute. He flew through the minutes and felt the draw of some huge future landscape opening up, all mountain and sky.

  He spent time at the mirror looking at his beard, knowing he was not supposed to trim it.

  He did a little lusting after the roommate when he saw her ride her bike but tried not to bring this craving into the house. His girlfriend clung to him and they did damage to the cot. She wanted him to know her whole presence, inside and out. They ate falafel wrapped in pita and sometimes he wanted to marry her and have babies but this was only in the minutes after he left her flat, feeling like a footballer running across the field after scoring a
goal, all-world, his arms flung wide.

  The time is coming.

  The men went to Internet cafés and learned about flight schools in the United States. Nobody knocked down their door in the middle of the night and nobody stopped them in the street to turn their pockets inside out and grope their bodies for weapons. But they knew that Islam was under attack.

  Amir looked at him, seeing right down to his base self. Hammad knew what he would say. Eating all the time, pushing food in your face, slow to approach your prayers. There was more. Being with a shameless woman, dragging your body over hers. What is the difference between you and all the others, outside our space?

  When Amir spoke the words, talking in his face, he inflected them with sarcasm.

  Am I talking Chinese? Do I stutter? Are my lips moving but no words come?

  Hammad in a certain way thought this was unfair. But the closer he examined himself, the truer the words. He had to fight against the need to be normal. He had to struggle against himself, first, and then against the injustice that haunted their lives.

  They read the sword verses of the Koran. They were strong-willed, determined to become one mind. Shed everything but the men you are with. Become each other’s running blood.

  Sometimes there were ten pairs of shoes outside the door of the flat, eleven pairs of shoes. This was the house of the followers, that’s what they called it, dar al-ansar, and that’s what they were, followers of the Prophet.

  The beard would look better if he trimmed it. But there were rules now and he was determined to follow them. His life had structure. Things were clearly defined. He was becoming one of them now, learning to look like them and think like them. This was inseparable from jihad. He prayed with them to be with them. They were becoming total brothers.

  The woman’s name was Leyla. Pretty eyes and knowing touch. He told her that he was going away for a time, absolutely to return. Soon she would begin to exist as an unreliable memory, then finally not at all.