Don Delillo - Falling Man

They sat waiting for R’s reply, watching him linger in the aura of his defined state.

She went down to the basement with a basket full of laundry. There was a small gray room, damp and stale, with a washer and dryer and a metallic chill that she felt in her teeth.

She heard the dryer in operation and walked in to see Elena leaning on the wall with her arms folded and a cigarette in her hand. Elena did not look up.

For a moment they listened to the load bounce around the drum. Then Lianne put her basket down and raised the lid of the washer. The filter pan held the lint rubble of the other woman’s wash.

She looked at it briefly, then took the pan out of the washer and extended it to Elena. The woman paused, then took it and looked. Without changing position she used a backhand motion to bang the pan twice against the lower part of the wall she was leaning on. She looked at it again, took a drag on her cigarette and handed the pan across to Lianne, who took it and looked and then placed it on top of the dryer. She threw her things in the washer, fistfuls of darks, and put the filter pan back on the agitator or activator or whatever it was called. She poured in detergent, made selections on the control panel, set the dial on the other side of the panel and closed the lid. Then she pulled the control knob to start the wash.

But she didn’t leave the room. She assumed the load in the dryer was nearly done or why would the woman be standing here waiting. She assumed the woman had come down only minutes ago, saw the load was not yet done and decided to wait rather than go up and down and up again. She couldn’t see the time dial clearly from this position and preferred not to make a show of looking. But she had no intention of leaving the room. She stood against the wall adjacent to the wall the woman was leaning on, half slouched. Their straitened lanes of vision possibly crossed somewhere near the middle of the room. She kept her back erect, feeling the impress of the old pocked wall against her shoulder blades.

The washer began to rumble, the dryer tossed and clicked, shirt buttons hitting the drum. There was no question that she would outwait the other woman. The question was what the woman would do with the cigarette if she finished smoking it before the load was done. The question was whether they’d look at each other before the woman left the room. The room was like a monk’s cell with a pair of giant prayer wheels beating out a litany. The question was whether a look would lead to words and then what.

It was a rainy Monday in the world and she walked over to Godzilla Apartments, where the kid was spending an after-school hour with the Siblings, playing video games.

She used to write poetry on days like this when she was in school. There was something about rain and poetry. Later there would be something about rain and sex. The poems were usually about the rain, how it felt to be indoors watching the lonely drops slide down the windowpane.

Her umbrella was useless in the wind. It was the kind of wind-whipped rain that empties the streets of people and makes day and place feel anonymous. This was the weather everywhere, the state of mind, generic Monday, and she walked very close to buildings and ran across streets and felt the wind hit straight down when she reached the redbrick heights of Godzilla.

She had a quick cup of coffee with the mother, Isabel, and then peeled her son off the computer screen and muscled him into his jacket. He wanted to stay, they wanted him to stay. She told them she was a villain too real for video games.

Katie followed them to the door. She wore red jeans rolled up and a pair of suede ankle boots that glowed neon along the welt when she walked. Her brother Robert hung back, a dark-eyed boy who looked too shy to speak, eat, walk a dog.

The telephone rang.

Lianne said to the girl, “You’re not still sky-watching, are you? Searching the skies day and night? No. Or are you?”

The girl looked at Justin and smiled in sly connivance, saying nothing.

“He won’t tell me,” Lianne said. “I ask and ask.”

He said, “No, you don’t.”

“But if I did, you wouldn’t tell me.”

Katie’s eyes went brighter. She was enjoying this, alert to the prospect of a crafty reply. Her mother was talking on the wall-mounted phone in the kitchen.

Lianne said to the girl, “Still waiting for word? Still watching for planes? Day and night at the window? No. I don’t believe it.”

She leaned toward the girl, speaking in a stage whisper.

“Still talking to that person? The man whose name some of us are not supposed to know.”

The brother looked stricken. He stood fifteen feet behind Katie, dead still, looking at the parquet floor between his sister’s boots.

“Is he still out there, somewhere, making you search the skies? The man whose name maybe we all know even if some of us are not supposed to know.”

Justin plucked her jacket away from her elbow, which meant let’s go home now.

“Maybe just maybe. This is what I think. Maybe it’s time for him to disappear. The man whose name we all know.”

She had her hands on Katie’s face, cradling it, caging it, ear to ear. In the kitchen the mother was raising her voice, talking about a credit-card problem.

“Maybe it’s time. Do you think that’s possible? Maybe you’re just not interested anymore. Yes or no? Maybe just maybe it’s time to stop searching the skies, time to stop talking about the man I’m talking about. What do you think? Yes or no?”

The girl looked less happy now. She tried to dart a look left to Justin, like what’s going on here, but Lianne pressed a little tighter and used her right hand to block the view, smiling at the girl mock-playfully.

The brother was trying to will his invisibility. They were confused and a little scared but that’s not why she took her hands from Katie’s face. She was ready to leave, that’s why, and all the way down on the elevator, twenty-seventh floor to lobby, she thought of the mythical figure who’d said the planes were coming back, the man whose name they all knew. But she’d forgotten it.

Rain was lighter now, wind diminished. They walked without a word. She tried to remember the name but could not do it. The kid would not walk beneath the spread umbrella, staying four paces back. It was an easy name, this much she knew, but the easy names were the ones that killed her.

This day, beyond others, she found it hard to leave. She came out of the community center and walked west, thinking about another day, not long in coming, when the storyline sessions would have to end. The group was reaching that time and she didn’t think she could do it again, start over, six or seven people, the ballpoint pens and writing pads, the beauty of it, yes, the way they sing their lives, but also the unwariness they bring to what they know, the strange brave innocence of it, and her own grasping after her father.

She wanted to walk home and when she got there she wanted to find a phone message from Carol Shoup. Call me soonest please. It was only a feeling but she trusted it and knew what the message would mean, that the editor had quit the assignment. She would walk in the door, listen to the four-word message and know that the editor could not handle the book, a text so webbed in obsessive detail that it was impossible to proceed further. She wanted to walk in the door and see the lighted number on the telephone. This is Carol, call me soonest. A six-word message that implied a great deal more. This is what Carol liked to say in her phone messages. Call me soonest. It was something promised, that last urgent word, an indication of auspicious circumstance.

She walked without plan, west on 116th Street past the barbershop and record shop, the fruit markets and bakery. She turned south for five blocks and then glanced to her right and saw the high wall of weathered granite that supported the elevated tracks, where trains carry commuters to and from the city. She thought at once of Rosellen S. but didn’t know why. She walked in that direction and came to a building marked Greater Highway Deliverance Temple. She paused a moment, absorbing the name and noticing the ornate pilasters above the entrance and the stone cross at roof’s edge. There was a sign out front listing the temple’s activities. Sunday school, Sunday morning glory, Friday deliverance service and Bible study. She stood and thought. She thought of the conversation with Dr. Apter concerning the day when Rosellen could not remember where she lived. This was an occasion that haunted Lianne, the breathless moment when things fall away, streets, names, all sense of direction and location, every fixed grid of memory. Now she understood why Rosellen seemed to be a presence in this street. Here was the place, this temple whose name was a hallelujah shout, where she’d found refuge and assistance.