Falling Man

by Don DeLillo

  Keith stood ten paces away from them.

  He said, “Hey fuckhead.”

  The idea was that they’d meet here, have a quick lunch nearby and go their separate ways. He had to pick up the kid at school, she had a doctor’s appointment. It was a tryst without whisper or touch, set among strangers falling down.

  He said it again, louder this time, and waited for the word to register. It was interesting, how the space between them changed. They were looking at him now. The man who’d made the remark was heavyset, in a shiny down jacket that resembled bubblewrap. People drifted along the aisle, in blurry colors. Both men were looking at him. The space was hot and charged and the one in bubblewrap stood brooding on the matter. Women were bouncing on the beds but Florence had seen and heard and she was seated at the edge of the mattress, watching.

  The man was listening to his companion but did not move. Keith was happy to stand and watch and then he wasn’t. He walked over there and punched the man. He walked over, stopped, set himself and threw a short right. He hit the man up near the cheekbone, one blow only, and then he stepped back and waited. He was angry now. The contact set him off and he wanted to keep going. He held his hands apart, palms up, like here I am, let’s go. Because if anyone said a harsh word to Florence, or raised a hand to Florence, or insulted her in any way, Keith was ready to kill him.

  The man, who’d lurched against his companion, turned now and charged, head down, arms bowed out, like a guy on a motorcycle, and the bouncing stopped all along the rows of beds.

  Keith caught him with another right, to the eye this time, and the man lifted him off the floor, an inch or two, and Keith threw some kidney punches that were mostly lost in bubblewrap. There were men everywhere now, salesmen, security guards jogging down the aisle, a workman who’d been pushing a handcart. It was odd, in the general confusion after they’d been separated, how Keith felt a hand on his arm, just above the elbow, and understood at once that it was Florence.

  Every time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching. The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone’s, into some other distance, out beyond the towers.

  The skies she retained in memory were dramas of cloud and sea storm, or the electric sheen before summer thunder in the city, always belonging to the energies of sheer weather, of what was out there, air masses, water vapor, westerlies. This was different, a clear sky that carried human terror in those streaking aircraft, first one, then the other, the force of men’s intent. He watched with her. Every helpless desperation set against the sky, human voices crying to God and how awful to imagine this, God’s name on the tongues of killers and victims both, first one plane and then the other, the one that was nearly cartoon human, with flashing eyes and teeth, the second plane, the south tower.

  He watched with her one time only. She knew she’d never felt so close to someone, watching the planes cross the sky. Standing by the wall he reached toward the chair and took her hand. She bit her lip and watched. They would all be dead, passengers and crew, and thousands in the towers dead, and she felt it in her body, a deep pause, and thought there he is, unbelievably, in one of those towers, and now his hand on hers, in pale light, as though to console her for his dying.

  He said, “It still looks like an accident, the first one. Even from this distance, way outside the thing, how many days later, I’m standing here thinking it’s an accident.”

  “Because it has to be.”

  “It has to be,” he said.

  “The way the camera sort of shows surprise.”

  “But only the first one.”

  “Only the first,” she said.

  “The second plane, by the time the second plane appears,” he said, “we’re all a little older and wiser.”

  8

  The walks across the park were not rituals of anticipation. The road bent west and he walked past the tennis courts without thinking much about the room where she’d be waiting or the bedroom down the hall. They took erotic pleasure from each other but this is not what sent him back there. It was what they knew together, in the timeless drift of the long spiral down, and he went back again even if these meetings contradicted what he’d lately taken to be the truth of his life, that it was meant to be lived seriously and responsibly, not snatched in clumsy fistfuls.

  Later she would say what someone always says.

  “Do you have to leave?”

  He would stand naked by the bed.

  “I’ll always have to leave.”

  “And I’ll always have to make your leaving mean something else. Make it mean something romantic or sexy. But not empty, not lonely. Do I know how to do this?”

  But she was not a contradiction, was she? She was not someone to be snatched at, not a denial of some truth he may have come upon in these long strange days and still nights, these after-days.

  These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.

  She said, “Do I know how to make one thing out of another, without pretending? Can I stay who I am, or do I have to become all those other people who watch someone walk out the door? We’re not other people, are we?”

  But she would look at him in a way that made him feel he must be someone else, standing there by the bed, ready to say what someone always says.

  They sat in a corner booth glaring at each other. Carol Shoup wore a striped silk overblouse, purple and white, that looked Moorish or Persian.

  She said, “Under the circumstances, what do you expect?”

  “I expect you to call and ask.”

  “But under the circumstances, how could I even bring up the subject?”

  “But you did bring it up,” Lianne said.

  “Only after the fact. I couldn’t ask you to edit such a book. After what happened to Keith, everything, all of it. I don’t see how you’d want to get involved. A book that’s so enormously immersed, going back on it, leading up to it. And a book that’s so demanding, so incredibly tedious.”

  “A book you’re publishing.”

  “We have to.”

  “After it’s been making the rounds for how many years?”

  “We have to. Four or five years,” Carol said. “Because it seems to predict what happened.”

  “Seems to predict.”

  “Statistical tables, corporate reports, architectural blueprints, terrorist flow charts. What else?”

  “A book you’re publishing.”

  “It’s badly written, badly organized and I would say deeply and enormously boring. Collected many rejections. Became a legend among agents and editors.”

  “A book you’re publishing.”

  “Line-editing this beast.”

  “Who’s the author?”

  “A retired aeronautical engineer. We call him the Unaflyer. He doesn’t live in a remote cabin with his bomb-making chemicals and his college yearbooks but he’s been working obsessively for fifteen or sixteen years.”

  There was serious money to be made, by freelance standards, if a book was a major project. In this case it was also a rushed project, timely, newsworthy, even visionary, at least in the publisher’s planned catalog copy—a book detailing a series of interlocking global forces that appeared to converge at an explosive point in time and space that might be said to represent the locus of Boston, New York and Washington on a late-summer morning early in the twenty-first century.

  “Line-editing this beast could put you in traction for years to come. It’s all data. It’s all facts, maps and schedules.”

  “But it seems to predict.”

  The book needed a freelance editor, someone able to work long hours outside the scheduled frenzy of phone calls, e-mails, lunch dates and meetings that an in-house editor encountered—the frenzy that constitutes the job.

  “It contains a
long sort of treatise on plane hijacking. It contains many documents concerning the vulnerability of certain airports. It names Dulles and Logan. It names many things that actually happened or are happening now. Wall Street, Afghanistan, this thing, that thing. Afghanistan is happening.”

  Lianne didn’t care how dense, raveled and intimidating the material might be or how finally unprophetic. This is what she wanted. She didn’t know she wanted this until Carol mentioned the book, derisively, in passing. She thought she’d been invited to lunch to discuss an assignment. It turned out that the meeting was strictly personal. Carol wanted to talk about Keith. The only book Carol mentioned was precisely the one not intended for Lianne and precisely the one that Lianne needed to edit.

  “Do you want dessert?”

  “No.”

  Stand apart. See things clinically, unemotionally. This is what Martin had told her. Measure the elements. Work the elements together. Learn something from the event. Make yourself equal to it.

  Carol wanted to talk about Keith, hear about Keith. She wanted the man’s story, their story, back together, moment by moment. The blouse she was wearing belonged to another body type, another skin color, a knockoff of a Persian or Moroccan robe. Lianne noticed this. She had nothing interesting to tell this woman about Keith because nothing interesting had happened that was not too intimate for telling.

  “Do you want coffee?”

  “I hit a woman in the face the other day.”

  “What for?”

  “What do you hit people for?”

  “Wait. You hit a woman?”

  “They make you mad. That’s what for.”

  Carol was looking at her.

  “Do you want coffee?”

  “No.”

  “You have your husband back. Your son has a father full-time.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “Show some happiness, some relief, something. Show something.”

  “It’s only beginning. Don’t you know that?”

  “You have him back.”

  “You don’t know anything,” she said.

  The waiter stood nearby, waiting for someone to ask for the check.

  “All right, look. If something happens,” Carol said. “Like the editor can’t deal with the material. The editor can’t work fast enough. She feels this book is destroying the life she has carefully built over the last twenty-seven years. I’ll call you.”

  “Call me,” Lianne said. “Otherwise don’t call me.”

  After that day, when she could not remember where she lived, Rosellen S. did not come back to the group.

  The members wanted to write about her and Lianne watched them at work, folded over their legal pads. Now and then a head would lift, someone staring into a memory or a word. All the words for what is inevitable seemed to crowd the room and she found herself thinking of the old passport photos on the wall of her mother’s apartment, from Martin’s collection, faces looking out of a sepia distance, lost in time.

  The agent’s circular stamp at the corner of a photo.

  The bearer’s status and port of embarkation.

  Royaume de Bulgarie.

  Embassy of the Hashemite Kingdom.

  Türkiye Cumhuriyeti.

  She’d begun to see the people before her, Omar, Carmen and the others, in the same isolated setting, with the signature of the bearer sometimes written across the photo itself, a woman in a cloche, a younger woman who looked Jewish, Staatsange-hörigkeit, her face and eyes showing deeper meaning than an ocean crossing alone might account for, and the woman’s face that’s almost lost in shadow, the printed word Napoli curled around the border of a circular stamp.

  Pictures snapped anonymously, images rendered by machine. There was something in the premeditation of these photographs, the bureaucratic intent, the straightforward poses that brought her paradoxically into the lives of the subjects. Maybe what she saw was human ordeal set against the rigor of the state. She saw people fleeing, there to here, with darkest hardship pressing the edges of the frame. Thumbprints, emblems with tilted crosses, man with handlebar mustache, girl in braids. She thought she was probably inventing a context. She didn’t know anything about the people in the photographs. She only knew the photographs. This is where she found innocence and vulnerability, in the nature of old passports, in the deep texture of the past itself, people on long journeys, people now dead. Such beauty in faded lives, she thought, in images, words, languages, signatures, stamped advisories.

  Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese.

  Dati e connotati del Titolare.

  Les Pays Etrangers.

  She watches the members write about Rosellen S. A head lifts, then drops, and they sit and write. She knows they are not looking out of a tinted mist, as the passport bearers are, but receding into one. Another head comes up and then another and she tries not to catch the eye of either individual. Soon they would all look up. For the first time since the sessions began, she is afraid to hear what they will say when they read from the ruled sheets.

  He stood near the front of the large room watching them work out. They were in their twenties and thirties, arrayed in ranks on the stair climbers and elliptical trainers. He walked along the near aisle, feeling a bond with these men and women, not sure quite why. They strained against weighted metal sleds and rode stationary bikes. There were rowing machines and spidery isotonic devices. He paused at the entrance to the weight room and saw powerlifters fixed between safety bars, grunting up out of their squats. He saw women at the speed bags nearby, throwing hooks and jabs, and others doing footwork drills, skipping rope, one leg tucked up, arms crossed.

  An escort was with him, young man in white, on the staff of the fitness center. Keith stood at the rear of the great open space, people everywhere in motion, blood pumping. They quick-walked on the treadmills or ran in place, never seeming regimented, never rigidly linked. It was a scene charged with purpose and a kind of elemental sex, rooted sex, women arched and bent, all elbows and knees, neck veins jutting. But there was something else as well. These were the people he knew, if he knew anyone. Here, together, these were the ones he could stand with in the days after. Maybe that’s what he was feeling, a spirit, a kinship of trust.

  He walked down the far aisle, escort trailing, waiting for Keith to ask a question. He was looking the place over. He would need to do serious gymwork once he started his job, days away now. It was no good spending eight hours at the office, ten hours, then going straight home. He would need to burn things off, test his body, direct himself inward, working on his strength, stamina, agility, sanity. He would need an offsetting discipline, a form of controlled behavior, voluntary, that kept him from shambling into the house hating everybody.

  Her mother was asleep again. Lianne wanted to go home but knew she couldn’t. It was only five minutes ago that Martin had walked out the door, abruptly, and she didn’t want Nina to wake up alone. She went to the kitchen and found some fruit and cheese. She stood at the sink washing a pear and heard something in the living room. She turned off the faucet and listened and then went into the room. Her mother was talking to her.

  “I have dreams when I’m not quite asleep, not all the way down, and I’m dreaming.”

  “We need to have some lunch, both of us.”

  “I almost feel I can open my eyes and see what I’m dreaming. Makes no sense, does it? The dream is not so much in my mind as all around me.”

  “It’s the pain medication. You’re taking too much, for no reason.”

  “The physical therapy causes pain.”

  “You’re not doing the physical therapy.”

  “This must mean I’m not taking the medication.”

  “That’s not funny. One of those drugs you take is habit-forming. At least one.”

  “Where’s my grandson?”

  “Exactly where he was last time you asked. But that’s not the question. The question is Martin.”

  “It’s hard to imagine that a day will come an
ytime soon when we stop arguing about this.”

  “He was very intense.”

  “You haven’t seen him when he’s intense. It’s a lingering thing, goes back years, well before we knew each other.”

  “Which is twenty years, yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “But before that, what?”

  “He was involved in the times. All that turmoil. He was active.”

  “Bare walls. The art investor with bare walls.”

  “Nearly bare. Yes, that’s Martin.”

  “Martin Ridnour.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell me once that’s not his real name?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe,” Nina said.

  “If I heard it, then it came from you. Is that his real name?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t think you told me his real name.”

  “Maybe I don’t know his real name.”

  “Twenty years.”

  “Not continuously. Not even for prolonged periods. He’s somewhere, I’m somewhere else.”

  “He has a wife.”

  “She’s somewhere else too.”

  “Twenty years. Traveling with him. Sleeping with him.”

  “Why do I have to know his name? He’s Martin. What will I know about him if I know his name that I don’t know now?”

  “You’ll know his name.”

  “He’s Martin.”

  “You’ll know his name. This is nice to know.”

  Her mother nodded toward the two paintings on the north wall.

  “When we first knew each other I talked to him about Giorgio Morandi. Showed him a book. Beautiful still lifes. Form, color, depth. He was just getting started in the business and barely knew Morandi’s name. Went to Bologna to see the work firsthand. Came back saying no, no, no, no. Minor artist. Empty, self-involved, bourgeois. Basically a Marxist critique, this is what Martin delivered.”