Don Delillo - Falling Man

There was religion, then there was God. Lianne wanted to disbelieve. Disbelief was the line of travel that led to clarity of thought and purpose. Or was this simply another form of superstition? She wanted to trust in the forces and processes of the natural world, this only, perceptible reality and scientific endeavor, men and women alone on earth. She knew there was no conflict between science and God. Take one with the other. But she didn’t want to. There were the scholars and philosophers she’d studied in school, books she’d read as thrilling dispatches, personal, making her shake at times, and there was the sacred art she’d always loved. Doubters created this work, and ardent believers, and those who’d doubted and then believed, and she was free to think and doubt and believe simultaneously. But she didn’t want to. God would crowd her, make her weaker. God would be a presence that remained unimaginable. She wanted this only, to snuff out the pulse of the shaky faith she’d held for much of her life.

He began to think into the day, into the minute. It was being here, alone in time, that made this happen, being away from routine stimulus, all the streaming forms of office discourse. Things seemed still, they seemed clearer to the eye, oddly, in ways he didn’t understand. He began to see what he was doing. He noticed things, all the small lost strokes of a day or a minute, how he licked his thumb and used it to lift a bread crumb off the plate and put it idly in his mouth. Only it wasn’t so idle anymore. Nothing seemed familiar, being here, in a family again, and he felt strange to himself, or always had, but it was different now because he was watching.

There were the walks to school with Justin and the walks back home, alone, or somewhere else, just walking, and then he picked up the kid at school and it was back home again. There was a contained elation in these times, a feeling that was nearly hidden, something he knew but only barely, a whisper of self-disclosure.

The kid was trying to speak in monosyllables only, for extended stretches. This was something his class was doing, a serious game designed to teach the children something about the structure of words and the discipline required to frame clear thoughts. Lianne said, half seriously, that it sounded totalitarian.

“It helps me go slow when I think,” Justin said to his father, measuring each word, noting the syllable count.

It was Keith as well who was going slow, easing inward. He used to want to fly out of self-awareness, day and night, a body in raw motion. Now he finds himself drifting into spells of reflection, thinking not in clear units, hard and linked, but only absorbing what comes, drawing things out of time and memory and into some dim space that bears his collected experience. Or he stands and looks. He stands at the window and sees what’s happening in the street. Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into night, if you stand a while and look.

He thought of something out of nowhere, a phrase, organic shrapnel. Felt familiar but meant nothing to him. Then he saw a car double-parked across the street and thought of something else and then something else again.

There were the walks to and from school, the meals he cooked, something he’d rarely done in the past year and a half because it made him feel like the last man alive, breaking eggs for dinner. There was the park, every kind of weather, and there was the woman who lived across the park. But that was another matter, the walk across the park.

“We go home now,” Justin said.

She was awake, middle of the night, eyes closed, mind running, and she felt time pressing in, and threat, a kind of beat in her head.

She read everything they wrote about the attacks.

She thought of her father. She saw him coming down an escalator, in an airport maybe.

Keith stopped shaving for a time, whatever that means. Everything seemed to mean something. Their lives were in transition and she looked for signs. Even when she was barely aware of an incident it came to mind later, with meaning attached, in sleepless episodes that lasted minutes or hours, she wasn’t sure.

They lived on the top floor of a redbrick building, four-storied, and often now, these past days, she walked down the stairs and heard a certain kind of music, wailing music, lutes and tambourines and chanting voices sometimes, coming from the apartment on the second floor, the same CD, she thought, over and over, and it was beginning to make her angry.

She read stories in newspapers until she had to force herself to stop.

But things were ordinary as well. Things were ordinary in all the ways they were always ordinary.

A woman named Elena lived in that apartment. Maybe Elena was Greek, she thought. But the music wasn’t Greek. She was hearing another set of traditions, Middle Eastern, North African, Bedouin songs perhaps or Sufi dances, music located in Islamic tradition, and she thought of knocking on the door and saying something.

She told people she wanted to leave the city. They knew she wasn’t serious and said so and she hated them a little, and her own transparency, and the small panics that made certain moments in the waking day resemble the frantic ramblings of this very time of night, the mind ever running.

She thought of her father. She carried her father’s name. She was Lianne Glenn. Her father had been a traditional lapsed Catholic, devoted to the Latin mass as long as he didn’t have to sit through it. He made no distinction between Catholics and lapsed Catholics. The only thing that mattered was tradition but not in his work, never there, his designs for buildings and other structures, situated in mostly remote landscapes.

She thought she might adopt a posture of fake civility, as a tactic, a means of answering one offense with another. They heard it mainly on the stairs, Keith said, going up and down, and it’s only music anyway, he said, so why not just forget it.

They didn’t own, they rented, like people in the Middle Ages.

She wanted to knock on the door and say something to Elena. Ask her what the point is. Adopt a posture. This is retaliation in itself. Ask her why she’s playing this particular music at this highly sensitive time. Use the language of the concerned fellow tenant.

She read newspaper profiles of the dead.

When she was a girl she wanted to be her mother, her father, certain of her schoolmates, one or two, who seemed to move with particular ease, to say things that didn’t matter except in the way they were said, on an easy breeze, like birdflight. She slept with one of these girls, they touched a little and kissed once and she thought of this as a dream she would wake from in the mind and body of the other girl.

Knock on the door. Mention the noise. Don’t call it music, call it noise.

They’re the ones who think alike, talk alike, eat the same food at the same time. She knew this wasn’t true. Say the same prayers, word for word, in the same prayer stance, day and night, following the arc of sun and moon.

She needed to sleep now. She needed to stop the noise in her head and turn on her right side, toward her husband, and breathe his air and sleep his sleep.

Elena was either an office manager or a restaurant manager, and divorced, and living with a large dog, and who knew what else.

She liked his facial hair, the hair was okay, but she didn’t say anything. She said one thing, uninteresting, and watched him run his thumb over the stubble, marking its presence for himself.

They said, Leave the city? For what? To go where? It was the locally honed cosmocentric idiom of New York, loud and blunt, but she felt it in her heart no less than they did.

Do this. Knock on the door. Adopt a posture. Mention the noise as noise. Knock on the door, mention the noise, use the open pretense of civility and calm, the parody of fellow-tenant courtesy that every tenant sees as such, and gently mention the noise. But mention the noise only as noise. Knock on the door, mention the noise, adopt a posture of suave calm, openly phony, and do not allude to the underlying theme of a certain kind of music as a certain form of political and religious statement, now of all times. Work gradually into the language of aggrieved tenancy. Ask her if she rents or owns.