Don Delillo - Falling Man

“He likes white.”

“He’s thinking very white. Like paper.”

“He uses bright colors for the eyes, the hair, maybe the mouth. Where we see flesh, he sees white.”

“He’s thinking paper, not flesh. The work is a fact in itself. The subject of the portrait is the paper.”

Martin walked in licking foam from the rim of the glass.

“Does he have a white crayon?”

“He doesn’t need a white crayon. He has white paper,” she said.

He stopped to look at the vintage passport photos on the south wall, stained with age, and Nina watched him.

“So beautiful and so dignified,” she said, “those people and those photographs. I’ve just renewed my passport. Ten years come and gone, like a sip of tea. I’ve never cared much about how I look in photographs. Not the way some people do. But this photograph scares me.”

“Where are you going?” Lianne said.

“I don’t have to go anywhere to own a passport.”

Martin came around to her chair and stood behind it, leaning over to speak softly.

“You should go somewhere. An extended trip, when we get back from Connecticut. No one is traveling now. You should think about this.”

“Not a good idea.”

“Far away,” he said.

“Far away.”

“ Cambodia. Before the jungle overtakes what remains. I’ll go with you if you like.”

Her mother smoked a cigarette like a woman in the 1940s, in a gangster film, all nervous urgency, in black and white.

“I look at the face in the passport photo. Who is that woman?”

“I lift my head from the washbasin,” Martin said.

“Who is that man? You think you see yourself in the mirror. But that’s not you. That’s not what you look like. That’s not the literal face, if there is such a thing, ever. That’s the composite face. That’s the face in transition.”

“Don’t tell me this.”

“What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” he said.

“What we see is the living truth. The mirror softens the effect by submerging the actual face. Your face is your life. But your face is also submerged in your life. That’s why you don’t see it. Only other people see it. And the camera of course.”

He smiled into his glass. Nina put out her cigarette, barely smoked, waving away a trail of smeary mist.

“Then there’s the beard,” Lianne said.

“The beard helps bury the face.”

“It’s not much of a beard.”

“But that’s the art of it,” Nina said.

“The art of looking unkempt.”

“Unkempt but deeply sensitive.”

“This is American kidding. Am I right?” he said.

“The beard’s a nice device.”

“He speaks to it,” Nina said. “Every morning, in the mirror.”

“What does he say?”

“He speaks in German. The beard is German.”

“I am flattered, right?” he said. “To be the subject of such kidding.”

“The nose is Austro-Hungarian.”

He leaned toward Nina, still standing behind her, touching the back of his hand to her face. Then he took the empty glass to the kitchen and the two women sat quietly for a moment. Lianne wanted to go home and sleep. Her mother wanted to sleep, she wanted to sleep. She wanted to go home and talk to Keith for a while and then fall into bed, fall asleep. Talk to Keith or not talk at all. But she wanted him to be there when she got home.

Martin spoke from the far end of the room, surprising them.

“They want their place in the world, their own global union, not ours. It’s an old dead war, you say. But it’s everywhere and it’s rational.”

“Fooled me.”

“Don’t be fooled. Don’t think people will die only for God,” he said.

His cell phone buzzed and he altered his stance, turning toward the wall and seeming to speak into his chest. These fragments of conversation, which Lianne had heard before, from a distance, included English, French and German phrases, depending on the caller, and sometimes a small jeweled syllable such as Braque or Johns.

He finished quickly and put the phone away.

“Travel, yes, it’s a thing you ought to consider,” he said. “Get your knee back to normal and we’ll go, quite seriously.”

“Far away.”

“Far away.”

“Ruins,” she said.

“Ruins.”

“We have our own ruins. But I don’t think I want to see them.”

He moved along the wall toward the door.

“But that’s why you built the towers, isn’t it? Weren’t the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It’s a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down.”

Then he opened the door and was gone.

He watched poker on television, pained faces in a casino complex in the desert. He watched without interest. It wasn’t poker, it was television. Justin came in and watched with him and he outlined the game to the kid, in snatches, as the players paused and raised and the strategies unfolded. Then Lianne came in and sat on the floor, watching her son. He was seated at a radical slant, barely in contact with the chair and staring helplessly into the glow, a victim of alien abduction.

She looked at the screen, faces in close-up. The game itself faded into anesthesia, the tedium of a hundred thousand dollars won or lost on the flip of a card. It meant nothing. It was outside her interest or sympathy. But the players were interesting. She watched the players, they drew her in, deadpan, drowsy, slouched, men in misfortune, she thought, making a leap to Kierkegaard, somehow, and recalling the long nights she’d spent with her head in a text. She watched the screen and imagined a northern bleakness, faces misplaced in the desert. Wasn’t there a soul struggle, a sense of continuing dilemma, even in the winner’s little blink of winning?

She said nothing about this to Keith, who would have turned half toward her, gazing into space in mock contemplation, mouth open, eyelids slowly closing and head sinking finally to his chest.

He was thinking of being here, Keith was, and not thinking of it but only feeling it, alive to it. He saw her face reflected in a corner of the screen. He was watching the cardplayers and noting the details of move and countermove but also watching her and feeling this, the sense of being here with them. He had a single-malt scotch in his fist. He heard a car alarm sounding down the street. He reached over and knocked on Justin’s head, knock knock, to alert him to a revelation in the making as the camera located the hole cards of a player who didn’t know he was dead.

“He’s dead,” he told his son, and the kid sat without comment in his makeshift diagonal, half in the chair, half on the floor, semi-mesmerized.

She loved Kierkegaard in his antiqueness, in the glaring drama of the translation she owned, an old anthology of brittle pages with ruled underlinings in red ink, passed down by someone in her mother’s family. This is what she read and re-read into deep night in her dorm room, a drifting mass of papers, clothing, books and tennis gear that she liked to think of as the objective correlative of an overflowing mind. What is an objective correlative? What is cognitive dissonance? She used to know the answers to everything then, it seemed to her now, and she used to love Kierkegaard right down to the spelling of his name. The hard Scandian k’s and lovely doubled a. Her mother sent books all the time, great dense demanding fiction, airtight and relentless, but it defeated her eager need for self-recognition, something closer to mind and heart. She read her Kierkegaard with a feverish expectancy, straight into the Protestant badlands of sickness unto death. Her roommate wrote punk lyrics for an imaginary band called Piss in My Mouth and Lianne envied her creative desperation. Kierkegaard gave her a danger, a sense of spiritual brink. The whole of existence frightens me, he wrote. She saw herself in this sentence. He made her feel that her thrust into the world was not the slender melodrama she sometimes thought it was.