Don Delillo - Falling Man

There was a corresponding elevation of stakes.

Then someone raised the question of food. This was a joke. There was food in casual platters on a counter in the kitchen. How disciplined can we be, Demetrius said, if we are taking time to leave the table and stuff our jaws with chemically treated breads, meats and cheeses. This was a joke they took seriously because leaving the table ought to be allowed only as a matter of severest bladder-racked urgency or the kind of running bad luck that requires a player to stand at the window looking out on the deep abiding tide of night.

So food was out. No food. They dealt the cards, they called or folded. Then they talked about liquor. They knew how stupid this was but they wondered, two or three of them, whether it might be advisable to narrow their intake to darkish liquors, to scotch, bourbon, brandy, the manlier tones and deeper and more intense distillations. No gin, no vodka, no wan liqueurs.

They enjoyed doing this, most of them. They liked creating a structure out of willful trivia. But not Terry Cheng, who played the sweetest game of poker, who played online at times for twenty hours straight. Terry Cheng said they were shallow people leading giddy lives.

Then someone made the point that five-card draw was even more permissive than seven-card stud and they wondered why they hadn’t thought of this sooner, with the player’s capacity to discard and draw as many as three cards, or to stand pat, or to fold if he sees fit, and they agreed to limit themselves to one game only, five-card stud, and the large sums they bet, the bright chips in stacks, the bluffs and counterbluffs, the elaborate curses and baleful stares, the dusky liquor in squat glasses, the cigar smoke collecting in stratiform patterns, the massive silent self-reproaches-these free-flowing energies and gestures were posed against the single counterforce, the fact of self-imposed restriction, all the more unyielding for being ordered from within.

No food. Food was out. No gin or vodka. No beer that was not dark. They issued a mandate against all beer that was not dark and against all dark beer that was not Beck’s Dark. They did this because Keith told them a story he’d heard about a cemetery in Germany, in Cologne, where four good friends, cardplayers in a game that had lasted four or five decades, were buried in the configuration in which they’d been seated, invariably, at the card table, with two of the gravestones facing the other two, each player in his time-honored place.

They loved this story. It was a beautiful story about friendship and the transcendent effects of unremarkable habit. It made them reverent and thoughtful and one of the things they thought was that they had to cite Beck’s Dark as the only dark because the beer was German and so were the cardplayers in the story.

Somebody wanted to ban sports talk. They banned sports talk, television talk, movie titles. Keith thought this was getting stupid. Rules are good, they replied, and the stupider the better. Rumsey the fartmeister, dead now, wanted to revoke all the prohibitions. Cigarettes were not prohibited. There was one cigarette smoker only and he was allowed to smoke all the cigarettes he wanted if he didn’t mind appearing helpless and defective. Most of the others smoked cigars and felt expansive, grand in scale, sipping scotch or bourbon, finding synonyms for banned words such as wet and dry.

You are not serious people, said Terry Cheng. He said, Get serious or die.

The dealer skimmed the cards over the green baize, never failing to announce the name of the game, five-card stud, even though it was the only game they now played. The small dry irony of these announcements faded after a time and the words became a proud ritual, formal and indispensable, each dealer in turn, five-card stud, and they loved doing this, straight-faced, because where else would they encounter the kind of mellow tradition exemplified by the needless utterance of a few archaic words.

They played it safe and regretted it, took risks and lost, fell into states of lunar gloom. But there were always things to ban and rules to make.

Then one night it all fell apart. Somebody got hungry and demanded food. Somebody else pounded the table and said, Food food. This became a chant that filled the room. They rescinded the ban on food and demanded Polish vodka, some of them. They wanted pale spirits chilled in the freezer and served neat in short frosted tumblers. Other prohibitions fell, banned words were reinstated. They bet and raised, ate and drank, and from that point on resumed playing such games as high-low, acey-deucy, Chicago, Omaha, Texas hold ’em, anaconda and a couple of other deviant strains in poker’s line of ancestry. But they missed, each dealer in turn, calling out the name of one game, five-card stud, to the exclusion of all other games, and they tried not to wonder what four other players would think of them, in this wallow of wild-man poker, tombstone to tombstone in Cologne.

At dinner they talked about a trip they might take to Utah during school break, to high valleys and clean winds, to breathable air, skiable slopes, and the kid sat with a biscuit in his fist, looking at the food on his plate.

“What do you think? Utah. Say it. Utah. A big leap forward from a sled in the park.”

He looked at the dinner his father had prepared, wild salmon, gummy brown rice.

“He has nothing to say. He has passed beyond monosyllables,” Keith said. “Remember when he spoke only in monosyllables. That lasted a while.”

“Longer than I expected,” she said.

“He has passed beyond that. He has gone to the next stage of his development.”

“His spiritual development,” she said.

“Total silence.”

“Utter and unbreakable silence.”

“ Utah is the place for silent men. He’ll live in the mountains.”

“He’ll live in a cave with insects and bats.”

The kid slowly raised his head from the plate, looking at his father or into his father’s clavicle, x-raying the slender bones beneath his father’s shirt.

“How do you know the monosyllables were really a school thing? Maybe not,” he said. “Because maybe it was Bill Lawton. Because maybe Bill Lawton talks in monosyllables.”

Lianne sat back, shocked by this, by the name itself, hearing him say it.

“I thought Bill Lawton was a secret,” Keith said. “Between the Siblings and you. And between you and me.”

“You probably already told her. She probably already knows.”

Keith looked at her and she tried to signal him that no, she hadn’t said a thing about Bill Lawton. She gave him a clenched look, eyes narrowed, lips tight, trying to drill the look into his forebrain, like no.

“Nobody told anybody anything,” Keith said. “Eat your fish.”

The kid resumed looking at the plate.

“Because he does talk in monosyllables.”

“All right. What does he say?”

There was no response. She tried to imagine what he was thinking. His father was back home now, living here, sleeping here, more or less as before, and he’s thinking the man can’t be trusted, can he? He sees the man as a figure that looms over the household, the man who went away once and came back and told the woman, who sleeps in the same bed as the man, all about Bill Lawton, so how can he be trusted to be here tomorrow.

If your child thinks you’re guilty of something, right or wrong, then you’re guilty. And it happens he was right.

“He says things that nobody knows but the Siblings and me.”

“Tell us one of these things. In monosyllables,” Keith said with an edge in his voice.

“No thank you.”

“Is that what he says or is that what you say?”

“The whole point,” he said, snapping the words clearly and defiantly, “is that he says things about the planes. We know they’re coming because he says they are. But that’s all I’m allowed to say. He says this time the towers will fall.”