Don Delillo - Falling Man

Doctors in scrubs and paper masks checked his airway and took blood-pressure readings. They were interested in potentially fatal reactions to injury, hemorrhage, dehydration. They looked for diminished blood flow to tissues. They studied the contusions on his body and peered into his eyes and ears. Someone gave him an EKG. Through the open door he saw IV racks go floating past. They tested his hand grip and took X rays. They told him things he could not absorb about a ligament or cartilage, a tear or sprain.

Someone took the glass out of his face. The man talked throughout, using an instrument he called a pickup to extract small fragments of glass that were not deeply embedded. He said that most of the worst cases were in hospitals downtown or at the trauma center on a pier. He said that survivors were not appearing in the numbers expected. He was propelled by events and could not stop talking. Doctors and volunteers were standing idle, he said, because the people they were waiting for were mostly back there, in the ruins. He said he would use a clamp for deeper fragments.

“Where there are suicide bombings. Maybe you don’t want to hear this.”

“I don’t know.”

“In those places where it happens, the survivors, the people nearby who are injured, sometimes, months later, they develop bumps, for lack of a better term, and it turns out this is caused by small fragments, tiny fragments of the suicide bomber’s body. The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outward with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get trapped in the body of anyone who’s in striking range. Do you believe it? A student is sitting in a café. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into the skin. They call this organic shrapnel.”

He tweezered another splinter of glass out of Keith’s face.

“This is something I don’t think you have,” he said.

Justin’s two best friends were a sister and brother who lived in a high-rise ten blocks away. Lianne had trouble remembering their names at first and called them the Siblings and soon the name stuck. Justin said this was their real name anyway and she thought what a funny kid when he wants to be.

She saw Isabel on the street, mother of the Siblings, and they stood at the corner talking.

“That’s what kids do, absolutely, but I have to admit I’m beginning to wonder.”

“They sort of conspire.”

“Yes, and sort of talk in code, and they spend a lot of time at the window in Katie’s room, with the door closed.”

“You know they’re at the window.”

“Because I can hear them talking when I walk by and I know that’s where they’re standing. They’re at the window talking in this sort of code. Maybe Justin tells you things.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Because it’s getting a little strange, frankly, all the time they spend, first, sort of huddled together, and then, I don’t know, like endlessly whispering things in this semi-gibberish, which is what kids do, absolutely, but still.”

Lianne wasn’t sure what this was all about. It was about three kids being kids together.

“Justin’s getting interested in the weather. I think they’re doing clouds in school,” she said, realizing how hollow this sounded.

“They’re not whispering about clouds.”

“Okay.”

“It has something to do with this man.”

“What man?”

“This name. You’ve heard it.”

“This name,” Lianne said.

“Isn’t this the name they sort of mumble back and forth? My kids totally don’t want to discuss the matter. Katie enforces the thing. She basically inspires fear in her brother. I thought maybe you would know something.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Like Justin says nothing about any of this?”

“No. What man?”

“What man? Exactly,” Isabel said.

He was tall, with cropped hair, and she thought he looked like army, like career military, still in shape and beginning to look seasoned, not in combat but in the pale rigors of this life, in separation perhaps, in living alone, being a father from a distance.

He was in bed now and watched her, a few feet away, begin to button her shirt. They slept in the same bed because she could not tell him to use the sofa and because she liked having him here next to her. He didn’t seem to sleep. He lay on his back and talked but mostly listened and this was all right. She didn’t need to know a man’s feelings about everything, not anymore and not this man. She liked the spaces he made. She liked dressing in front of him. She knew the time was coming when he’d press her to the wall before she finished dressing. He’d get out of bed and look at her and she’d stop what she was doing and wait for him to come and press her to the wall.

He lay on a long narrow table within the closed unit. There was a pillow under his knees and a pair of track lights overhead and he tried to listen to the music. Inside the powerful noise of the scanner he fixed his attention on the instruments, separating one set from another, strings, woodwinds, brass. The noise was a violent staccato knocking, a metallic clamor that made him feel he was deep inside the core of a science-fiction city about to come undone.

He wore a device on his wrist to produce a detailed image and the sense of helpless confinement made him think of something the radiologist had said, a Russian whose accent he found reassuring because these are serious people who place weight on every word and maybe that’s why he chose classical music to listen to when she asked him to make a selection. He heard her now in his headset saying that the next sequence of noise would last three minutes and when the music resumed he thought of Nancy Dinnerstein, who ran a sleep clinic in Boston. People paid her to put them to sleep. Or the other Nancy, what’s-her-name, briefly, between incidental sex acts, in Portland that time, Oregon, without a last name. The city had a last name, the woman did not.

The noise was unbearable, alternating between the banging-shattering sound and an electronic pulse of varied pitch. He listened to the music and thought of what the radiologist had said, that once it’s over, in her Russian accent, you forget instantly the whole experience so how bad can it be, she said, and he thought this sounded like a description of dying. But that was another matter, wasn’t it, in another kind of noise, and the trapped man does not come sliding out of his tube. He listened to the music. He tried hard to hear the flutes and distinguish them from the clarinets, if there were clarinets, but he was unable to do this and the only countervailing force was Nancy Dinnerstein drunk in Boston and it gave him a dumb and helpless hard-on, thinking of her in his drafty hotel room with a limited view of the river.

He heard the voice in his headset saying that the next sequence of noise would last seven minutes.

She saw the face in the newspaper, the man from Flight 11. Only one of the nineteen seemed to have a face at this point, staring out of the photo, taut, with hard eyes that seemed too knowing to belong to a face on a driver’s license.

She got a call from Carol Shoup, an executive editor with a large publishing house. Carol had occasional jobs for Lianne, who edited books freelance, working usually at home or in the library.

It was Carol who’d sent the postcard from Rome, from the Keats-Shelley House, and she was the sort of person who was sure to sing out, on her return, “Did you get my card?”

Always in a voice that hovered between desperate insecurity and incipient resentment.

Instead she said softly, “Is this a bad time?”