Don Delillo - Falling Man

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.

When he appeared at the door it was not possible, a man come out of an ash storm, all blood and slag, reeking of burnt matter, with pinpoint glints of slivered glass in his face. He looked immense, in the doorway, with a gaze that had no focus in it. He carried a briefcase and stood slowly nodding. She thought he might be in shock but didn’t know what this meant in precise terms, medical terms. He walked past her toward the kitchen and she tried calling her doctor, then 911, then the nearest hospital, but all she heard was the drone of overloaded lines. She turned off the TV set, not sure why, protecting him from the news he’d just walked out of, that’s why, and then went into the kitchen. He was sitting at the table and she poured him a glass of water and told him that Justin was with his grandmother, released early from school and also being protected from the news, at least as it concerned his father.

He said, “Everybody’s giving me water.”

She thought he could not have traveled all this distance or even climbed the stairs if he’d suffered serious injury, grievous blood loss.

Then he said something else. The briefcase sat beside the table like something yanked out of a landfill. He said there was a shirt coming down out of the sky.

She poured water on a dishcloth and wiped dust and ash from his hands, face and head, careful not to disturb the glass fragments. There was more blood than she’d realized at first and then she began to realize something else, that his cuts and abrasions were not severe enough or numerous enough to account for all this blood. It was not his blood. Most of it came from somebody else.

The windows were open so Florence could smoke. They sat where they’d sat last time, one on either side of the coffee table, positioned diagonally.

“I gave myself a year,” he said.

“An actor. I can see you as an actor.”

“Acting student. Never got beyond the student part.”

“Because there’s something about you, in the way you hold a space. I’m not sure what that means.”

“Sounds good.”