Don Delillo - Falling Man

“Whatever,” Terry said. “Exactly.”

Each followed the other’s line of thought along the narrowest track. Around them a wordless din so deeply settled in the air and walls and furniture, in the moving bodies of men and women that it wasn’t easily separable from no sound at all.

“It’s a break from the circuit. They drink aged bourbon and have wives in the other rooms somewhere.”

“ Dallas, you’re saying.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a game getting started in Los Angeles. Same thing, stud and draw. Younger crowd. Like early Christians in hiding. Think about it.”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I could survive a couple of nights in that kind of social arrangement.”

“I think it was Rumsey. The one man,” Terry said, “who smoked cigarettes.”

Keith stared into the waterfall, forty yards away. He realized he didn’t know whether it was real or simulated. The flow was unruffled and the sound of falling water might easily be a digital effect like the waterfall itself.

He said, “Rumsey was cigars.”

“Rumsey was cigars. You’re probably right.”

For all his looseness of manner, the clothing that didn’t fit, the tendency to get lost in the hotel’s deeper reaches and outlying promenades, Terry was set inflexibly in this life. There was no rule of correspondence here. This was not balanced by that. There was no element that might be seen in the light of another element. It was all one thing, whatever the venue, the city, the prize money. Keith saw the point of this. He preferred this to private games with easy banter and wives arranging flowers, a format that appealed to Terry’s vanity, he thought, but could not match the crucial anonymity of these days and weeks, the mingling of countless lives that had no stories attached.

“Did you ever look at that waterfall? Are you able to convince yourself you’re looking at water, real water, and not some special effect?”

“I don’t think about it. It’s not something we’re supposed to think about,” Terry said.

His cigarette had burned down to the filter.

“I worked in midtown. I didn’t experience the impact that others felt, down there, where you were,” he said. “I’m told, someone told me that Rumsey’s mother. What is it now? She took a shoe. She took one of his shoes and she took a razor blade. She went to his apartment and got these things, whatever she could find that might contain genetic material, like traces of hair or skin. There was an armory where she took these things for a DNA match.”

Keith stared into the waterfall.

“She went back a day or two later. Who told me this? She took something else, I don’t know, a toothbrush. Then she went back again. She took something else. Then she went back again. Then they moved the location. That’s when she stopped going.”

Terry Cheng, the old Terry, had never been so talkative. Telling even a brief story was outside the limits of what he took to be a superior self-restraint.

“I used to tell people. People talked about where they were, where they worked. I said midtown. The word sounded naked. It sounded neutral, like it was nowhere. I heard he went out a window, Rumsey.”

Keith looked into the waterfall. This was better than closing his eyes. If he closed his eyes, he’d see something.

“You went back to work in the law office for a while. I remember we talked.”

“It was a different firm and not a law office.”

“Whatever,” Terry said.

“That’s what it was, whatever.”

“But here we are and here we’ll be when the craze dies down.”

“You still play online.”

“I do, yes, but I can’t give this up. Here we’ll be.”

“And the man in the surgical mask.”

“Yes, he’ll be here.”

“And the blinking woman.”

“I haven’t seen the blinking woman,” Terry said.

“One day I’ll speak to her.”

“You’ve seen the dwarf.”

“Once only. Then he was gone.”

“A dwarf named Carlo. Significant loser. He’s the only player whose name I know except for you. I know the name because it belongs to a dwarf. There’s no other reason to know it.”

The massed slots bubbled behind them.

When he heard the news on the radio, School Number One, many children, he knew he had to call her. Terrorists taking hostages, the siege, the explosions, this was Russia, somewhere, hundreds dead, many children.

She spoke quietly.

“They had to know. They made a situation that had to come to this, with children. They absolutely had to know. They went there to die. They made a situation, with children, specifically, and they knew how it would end. They had to know.”

There was silence at either end. After a time she said it was warm, in the eighties, and added that the kid was fine, the kid was all right. There was an edge in her voice, followed by another silence. He tried to listen into this, find the link in her remarks. In the deep pause he began to see himself standing exactly where he was, in a room somewhere, in a hotel somewhere, with a telephone in his hand.

She told him that the findings were unremarkable. There was no sign of impairment. She kept using the word unremarkable. She loved the word. The word expressed enormous relief. There were no lesions, hemorrhages or infarcts. She read the results to him and he stood in his room and listened. There was so much to report that was unremarkable. She loved the word infarct. Then she said she wasn’t sure she believed the findings. Okay for now but what about later? He’d told her many times and told her again that she was devising ways to be afraid. This wasn’t fear, she said, but only skepticism. She was doing well. She had normal morphology, she said, quoting the report. She loved this term but couldn’t quite believe it referred to her. It was a question of skepticism, she said, from the Greek for skeptic. Then she talked about her father. She was slightly drunk, not half smashed but maybe a quarter, which was about as smashed as she ever got. She talked about her father and asked about his. Then she laughed and said, “Listen,” and she began to recite a series of numbers, pausing a beat between each, using a happy sort of singsong.

One hundred, ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine.

He missed the kid. Neither liked talking on the phone. How do you talk to a kid on the phone? He talked to her. They talked sometimes in the middle of the night, her time, or middle of the night, his time. She described her position in bed, curled up, hand between her legs, or body spread wide above the sheets, phone on the pillow, and he heard her murmuring in the double distance, hand to breast, hand to pussy, seeing her so clearly he thought his head might explode.

There was a show of Morandi paintings at a gallery in Chelsea, still lifes, six of them, and a couple of drawings, still lifes, and of course she went. She had mixed feelings about going but went. Because even this, bottles and jars, a vase, a glass, simple shapes in oil on canvas, pencil on paper, brought her back into the midst of it, the thrust of arguments, perceptions, deadly politics, her mother and her mother’s lover.

Nina had insisted on returning the two paintings on her living room wall. They went back to Martin in the early stages of their estrangement, and the old passport photos as well. This was work done half a century earlier, the paintings, and the photographs were much older, most of them, and it was work that both women loved. But she honored her mother’s wishes, arranged the shipment, thought of the dollar value of the paintings, respected her mother’s integrity, thought of the paintings themselves, Berlin-bound, to be bargained over and sold in a cell-phone transaction. The room was tomblike without them.