Don Delillo - Falling Man

She turned on her right side, toward her husband, and opened her eyes.

Thoughts from nowhere, elsewhere, someone else’s.

She opened her eyes and was surprised, even now, to see him there in bed, next to her, a flat surprise by this time, fifteen days after the planes. They’d made love in the night, earlier, she wasn’t sure when, two or three hours ago. It was back there somewhere, a laying open of bodies but also of time, the only interval she’d known in these days and nights that was not forced or distorted, hemmed in by the press of events. It was the tenderest sex she’d known with him. She felt some drool at the corner of her mouth, the part that was mashed into the pillow, and she watched him, faceup, head in distinct profile against the wan light from the streetlamp.

She’d never felt easy with that term. My husband. He wasn’t a husband. The word spouse had seemed comical, applied to him, and husband simply didn’t fit. He was something else somewhere else. But now she uses the term. She believes he is growing into it, a husbandman, even though she knows this is another word completely.

What is already in the air, in the bodies of the young, and what is next to come.

The music included moments of what sounded like forced breathing. She heard it on the stairs one day, an interlude consisting of men breathing in urgent rhythmic pattern, a liturgy of inhale-exhale, and other voices at other times, trance voices, voices in recitation, women in devotional lament, mingled village voices behind hand drums and hand claps.

She watched her husband, face empty of expression, neutral, not very different from his waking aspect.

All right the music is beautiful but why now, what’s the particular point of this, and what’s the name of the thing like a lute that’s played with an eagle’s quill.

She reached a hand to his beating chest.

Time, finally, to go to sleep, following the arc of sun and moon.

She was back from an early-morning run and stood sweating by the kitchen window, drinking water from a one-liter bottle and watching Keith eat breakfast.

“You’re one of those madwomen running in the streets. Run around the reservoir.”

“You think we look crazier than men.”

“Only in the streets.”

“I like the streets. This time of morning, there’s something about the city, down by the river, streets nearly empty, cars blasting by on the Drive.”

“Breathe deeply.”

“I like running alongside the cars on the Drive.”

“Take deep breaths,” he said. “Let the fumes swirl into your lungs.”

“I like the fumes. I like the breeze from the river.”

“Run naked,” he said.

“You do it, I’ll do it.”

“I’ll do it if the kid does it,” he said.

Justin was in his room, a Saturday, putting last touches, last pokes of color onto a portrait he’d been doing, in crayon, of his grandmother. Either that or drawing a picture of a bird, for school, which reminded her of something.

“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.