Don Delillo - Falling Man

“The towers are down. You know this,” she said softly.

“This time coming, he says, they’ll really come down.”

They talked to him. They tried to make gentle sense. She couldn’t locate the menace she felt, listening to him. His repositioning of events frightened her in an unaccountable way. He was making something better than it really was, the towers still standing, but the time reversal, the darkness of the final thrust, how better becomes worse, these were the elements of a failed fairy tale, eerie enough but without coherence. It was the fairy tale children tell, not the one they listen to, devised by adults, and she changed the subject to Utah. Ski trails and true skies.

He looked into his plate. How different is a fish from a bird? One flies, the other swims. Maybe this is what he was thinking. He wouldn’t eat a bird, would he, a goldfinch or a blue jay. Why should he eat a fish swimming wild in the ocean, caught with ten thousand other fish in a giant net on Channel 27?

One flies, the other swims.

This is what she felt in him, these stubborn thoughts, biscuit in his fist.

Keith walked through the park and came out on West 90th Street and it was strange, what he was seeing down by the community garden and coming toward him, a woman in the middle of the street, on horseback, wearing a yellow hard hat and carrying a riding crop, bobbing above the traffic, and it took him a long moment to understand that horse and rider had come out of a stable somewhere nearby and were headed toward the bridle path in the park.

It was something that belonged to another landscape, something inserted, a conjuring that resembled for the briefest second some half-seen image only half believed in the seeing, when the witness wonders what has happened to the meaning of things, to tree, street, stone, wind, simple words lost in the falling ash.

He used to come home late, looking shiny and a little crazy. This was the period, not long before the separation, when he took the simplest question as a form of hostile interrogation. He seemed to walk in the door waiting for her questions, prepared to stare right through her questions, but she had no interest in saying anything at all. She thought she knew by now. She understood by this time that it wasn’t the drinking, or not that alone, and probably not some sport with a woman. He’d hide it better, she told herself. It was who he was, his native face, without the leveling element, the claims of social code.

Those nights, sometimes, he seemed on the verge of saying something, a sentence fragment, that was all, and it would end everything between them, all discourse, every form of stated arrangement, whatever drifts of love still lingered. He carried that glassy look in his eyes and a moist smile across his mouth, a dare to himself, boyish and horrible. But he did not put into words whatever it was that lay there, something so surely and recklessly cruel that it scared her, spoken or not. The look scared her, the body slant. He walked through the apartment, bent slightly to one side, a twisted guilt in his smile, ready to break up a table and burn it so he could take out his dick and piss on the flames.

They sat in a taxi going downtown and began to clutch each other, kissing and groping. She said, in urgent murmurs, It’s a movie, it’s a movie. At traffic lights people crossing the street stopped to watch, two or three, seeming briefly to float above the windows, and sometimes only one. The others just crossed, who didn’t give a damn.

In the Indian restaurant the man at the podium said, We do not seat incomplete tables.

She asked him one night about the friends he’d lost. He spoke about them, Rumsey and Hovanis, and the one who was badly burned, whose name she’d forgotten. She’d met one of them, Rumsey, she thought, briefly, somewhere. He spoke only about their qualities, their personalities, or married or single, or children or not, and this was enough. She didn’t want to hear more.

It was still there, more often than not, music on the stairs.

There was a job offer he’d probably accept, drafting contracts of sale on behalf of Brazilian investors who were engaged in real-estate transactions in New York. He made it sound like a ride on a hang glider, completely wind-assisted.

In the beginning she washed his clothes in a separate load. She had no idea why she did this. It was like he was dead.

She listened to what he said and let him know she was listening, mind and body, because listening is what would save them this time, keep them from falling into distortion and rancor.

The easy names were the ones she forgot. But this one wasn’t easy and it was like the swaggering name of some football player from Alabama and that’s how she remembered it, Demetrius, badly burned in the other tower, the south tower.

When she asked him about the briefcase in the closet, why it was there one day and gone the next, he said he’d actually returned it to the owner because it wasn’t his and he didn’t know why he’d taken it out of the building.

What was ordinary was not more ordinary than usual, or less.

It was the word actually that made her think about what he said concerning the briefcase, although in fact there was nothing to think about, even if this was the word he’d used so often, more or less superfluously, those earlier years, when he was lying to her, or baiting her, or even effecting some minor sleight.

This was the man who would not submit to her need for probing intimacy, overintimacy, the urge to ask, examine, delve, draw things out, trade secrets, tell everything. It was a need that had the body in it, hands, feet, genitals, scummy odors, clotted dirt, even if it was all talk or sleepy murmur. She wanted to absorb everything, childlike, the dust of stray sensation, whatever she could breathe in from other people’s pores. She used to think she was other people. Other people have truer lives.

It’s a movie, she kept saying, his hand in her pants, saying it, a moan in the shape of words, and at traffic lights people watched, a few, and the driver watched, lights or not, eyes gliding across the rearview mirror.

But then she might be wrong about what was ordinary. Maybe nothing was. Maybe there was a deep fold in the grain of things, the way things pass through the mind, the way time swings in the mind, which is the only place it meaningfully exists.

He listened to language tapes labeled South American Portuguese and practiced on the kid. He said, I speak only little Portuguese, saying this in English, with a Latin accent, and Justin tried not to smile.

She read newspaper profiles of the dead, every one that was printed. Not to read them, every one, was an offense, a violation of responsibility and trust. But she also read them because she had to, out of some need she did not try to interpret.

After the first time they made love he was in the bathroom, at first light, and she got up to dress for her morning run but then pressed herself naked to the full-length mirror, face turned, hands raised to roughly head level. She pressed her body to the glass, eyes shut, and stayed for a long moment, nearly collapsed against the cool surface, abandoning herself to it. Then she put on her shorts and top and was lacing her shoes when he came out of the bathroom, clean-shaven, and saw the fogged marks of her face, hands, breasts and thighs stamped on the mirror.

He sat alongside the table, left forearm placed along the near edge, hand dangling from the adjoining edge. He worked on the hand shapes, the bend of the wrist toward the floor, the bend of the wrist toward the ceiling. He used the uninvolved hand to apply pressure to the involved hand.

The wrist was fine, the wrist was normal. He’d thrown away the splint and stopped using the ice. But he sat alongside the table, two or three times a day now, curling the left hand into a gentle fist, forearm flat on the table, thumb raised in certain setups. He did not need the instruction sheet. It was automatic, the wrist extensions, the ulnar deviations, hand raised, forearm flat. He counted the seconds, he counted the repetitions.