Don Delillo - Falling Man

This was his father seeping through, sitting home in western Pennsylvania, reading the morning paper, taking the walk in the afternoon, a man braided into sweet routine, a widower, eating the evening meal, unconfused, alive in his true skin.

There was a second level to the high-low games. Terry Cheng was the player who divided the chips, half to each winner, high and low. He’d do it in seconds, stacking chips of different colors and varying denominations in two columns or two sets of columns, depending on the size of the pot. He did not want columns so high they might topple. He did not want columns that looked alike. The idea was to arrive at two allotments of equal monetary value but never of evenly distributed colors, or anything close to that. He’d stack six blue chips, four gold, three red and five white and then match this, with steel-trap speed, fingers flying, hands sometimes crossing, with sixteen white, four blue, two gold and thirteen red, building his columns and then folding his arms and looking into secret space, leaving each winner to rake in his chips, in unspoken respect and semi-awe.

No one doubted his skills of hand-eye-mind. No one tried to count along with Terry Cheng and no one ever harbored the thought, even in the brooding depths of the night, that Terry Cheng might be wrong in his high-low determinations, just this once.

Keith talked to him on the telephone, twice, briefly, after the planes. Then they stopped calling each other. There was nothing left, it seemed, to say about the others in the game, lost and injured, and there was no general subject they might comfortably summon. Poker was the one code they shared and that was over now.

Her schoolmates called her Gawk for a time. Then it was Scrawn. This was not necessarily a case of hateful naming, coming mostly from friends and often with her connivance. She liked to pose in parody of a model on a runway, only all elbows, knees and wired teeth. When she began to grow out of her angularity, there were the times her father rolled into town, sunburnt Jack, shooting out his arms when he saw her, a beautifully burgeoning creature he loved in muscle and blood, until he went away again. But she remembered these times, his stance and smile, the half crouch, the set of his jaw. He’d shoot out his arms and she’d fall shyly into the enclosing fold. This was ever Jack, hugging and shaking her, looking so deeply into her eyes it seemed at times he was trying to place her in proper context.

She was darkish, unlike him, with large eyes and wide mouth and with an eagerness that could be startling to others, a readiness to encounter an occasion or idea. Her mother was the template for this.

Her father used to say of her mother, “She’s a sexy woman except for her skinny ass.”

Lianne was thrilled by the chummy vulgarity, the invitation to share the man’s special perspective, his openness of reference and slant rhyme.

It was Jack’s perspective on architecture that had drawn Nina. They met on a small island in the northeast Aegean where Jack had designed a cluster of white stucco dwellings for an artists’ retreat. Set above a cove, the grouping, from offshore, was a piece of pure geometry gone slightly askew-Euclidean rigor in quantum space, Nina would write.

Here on a hard cot, on a second visit, was where Lianne was conceived. Jack told her this when she was twelve years old and would not refer to it again until he called from New Hampshire, ten years later, saying the same things in the same words, the sea breeze, the hard cot, the music floating up from the waterfront, sort of Greek-Oriental. This was some minutes or hours, this phone call, before he gazed into the muzzle blast.

They were watching TV without the sound.

“My father shot himself so I would never have to face the day when he failed to know who I was.”

“You believe this.”

“Yes.”

“Then I believe it too,” he said.

“The fact that he would one day fail to recognize me.”

“I believe it,” he said.

“That’s absolutely why he did it.”

She was slightly drunk after an extra glass of wine. They were watching a late-night newscast and he thought of hitting the sound button when the commercials ended but then did not and they watched in silence as a correspondent in a desolate landscape, Afghanistan or Pakistan, pointed over his shoulder to mountains in the distance.

“We need to get him a book on birds.”

“Justin,” he said.

“They’re studying birds. Each kid gets to choose a bird and that’s the bird he or she studies. That’s his or her feathered vertebrate. His for boys. Hers for girls.”

There was stock footage on the screen of fighter planes lifting off the deck of a carrier. He waited for her to ask him to hit the sound button.

“He’s talking about a kestrel. What the hell’s a kestrel?” she said.

“It’s a small falcon. We saw them perched on power lines, mile after mile, when we were somewhere out west, back in the other life.”

“The other life,” she said, and laughed, and pushed up off the chair, headed for the bathroom.

“Come out wearing something,” he said, “so I can watch you take it off.”

Florence Givens stood looking at the mattresses, forty or fifty of them, arranged in rows at one end of the ninth floor. People tested the bedding, women mostly, bouncing lightly in seated positions or lying supine, checking for firmness or plushness. It took her a moment to realize that Keith was standing at her side, watching with her.

“Right on time,” she said.

“You’re the one who’s on time. I’ve been here for hours,” he said, “riding the escalators.”

They walked along the aisle and she stopped several times to check labels and prices and to press into the bedding with the heel of her hand.

He said, “Go on, lie down.”

“I don’t think I want to do that.”

“How else will you know if this is the mattress you want? Look around. They’re all doing it.”

“I’ll lie down if you’ll lie down.”

“I don’t need a mattress,” he said. “You need a mattress.”

She wandered along the aisle. He stood and watched and there were ten or eleven women lying on beds, bouncing on beds, and a man and a woman bouncing and rolling, middle-aged and purposeful, trying to determine if one person’s tossing would disturb the other’s sleep.

There were tentative women, bouncing once or twice, feet protruding from the end of the bed, and there were the others, women who’d shed their coats and shoes, falling backwards to the mattress, the Posturepedic or the Beautyrest, and bouncing with abandon, first one side of the bed, then the other, and he thought this was a remarkable thing to come upon, the mattress department at Macy’s, and he looked across the aisle and they were bouncing there as well, another eight or nine women, one man, one child, testing for comfort and sculptural soundness, for back support and foam sensation.

Florence was over there now, seated at the end of a bed, and she smiled at him and fell back. She bounced up, fell back, making a little game of her shyness in the midst of public intimacy. Two men stood not far from Keith and one of them said something to the other. It was a remark about Florence. He didn’t know what the man had said but it didn’t matter. It was clear from their stance and their vantage that Florence was the subject.

Keith stood ten paces away from them.

He said, “Hey fuckhead.”

The idea was that they’d meet here, have a quick lunch nearby and go their separate ways. He had to pick up the kid at school, she had a doctor’s appointment. It was a tryst without whisper or touch, set among strangers falling down.

He said it again, louder this time, and waited for the word to register. It was interesting, how the space between them changed. They were looking at him now. The man who’d made the remark was heavyset, in a shiny down jacket that resembled bubblewrap. People drifted along the aisle, in blurry colors. Both men were looking at him. The space was hot and charged and the one in bubblewrap stood brooding on the matter. Women were bouncing on the beds but Florence had seen and heard and she was seated at the edge of the mattress, watching.