Don Delillo - Falling Man

“They protect themselves this way, themselves and others. I understand this. But then there’s the other thing and that’s the family. This is the point I want to make, that we need to stay together, keep the family going. Just us, three of us, long-term, under the same roof, not every day of the year or every month but with the idea that we’re permanent. Times like these, the family is necessary. Don’t you think? Be together, stay together? This is how we live through the things that scare us half to death.”

“All right.”

“We need each other. Just people sharing the air, that’s all.”

“All right,” he said.

“But I know what’s happening. You’re going to drift away. I’m prepared for that. You’ll stay away longer, drift off somewhere. I know what you want. It’s not exactly a wish to disappear. It’s the thing that leads to that. Disappearing is the consequence. Or maybe it’s the punishment.”

“You know what I want. I don’t know. You know.”

“You want to kill somebody,” she said.

She didn’t look at him when she said this.

“You’ve wanted this for some time,” she said. “I don’t know how it works or how it feels. But it’s a thing you carry with you.”

Now that she’d said it, she wasn’t sure she believed it. But she was certain he’d never argued the idea in his mind. It was in his skin, maybe just a pulse at the side of the forehead, the faintest cadence in a small blue vein. She knew there was something that had to be satisfied, a matter discharged in full, and she thought this was at the heart of his restlessness.

“Too bad I can’t join the army. Too old,” he said, “or I could kill without penalty and then come home and be a family.”

He was drinking scotch, sipping it, neat, and smiling faintly at what he’d said.

“You can’t go back to the job you had. I understand that.”

“The job. The job wasn’t much different from the job I had before all this happened. But that was before, this is after.”

“I know that most lives make no sense. I mean in this country, what makes sense? I can’t sit here and say let’s go away for a month. I’m not going to reduce myself to saying something like that. Because that’s another world, the one that makes sense. But listen to me. You were stronger than I was. You helped me get here. I don’t know what would have happened.”

“I can’t talk about strength. What strength?”

“That’s what I saw and felt. You were the one in the tower but I was the berserk. Now, damn it, I don’t know.”

After a silence he said, “I don’t know either,” and they laughed.

“I used to watch you sleep. I know how strange that sounds. But it wasn’t strange. Just by being who you were, being alive and back here with us. I watched you. I felt I knew you in a way I’d never known you before. We were a family. That’s what it was. That’s how we did it.”

“Look, trust me.”

“All right.”

“I’m not set on doing anything permanent,” he said. “I go away a while, come back. I’m not about to disappear. Not about to do anything drastic. I’m here now and I’ll be back. You want me back. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Go away, come back. Simple as that.”

“There’s money coming,” she said. “The sale is almost complete.”

“Money coming.”

“Yes,” she said.

He’d helped work out details of the transaction concerning her mother’s apartment. He’d read contracts, made adjustments and e-mailed instructions from a casino on some Indian reservation where a tournament was in progress.

“Money coming,” he said again. “The kid’s education. Now through college, eleven or twelve years, criminal sums of money. But that’s not what you’re saying. You’re saying we can afford a major loss I might suffer in the card rooms. This won’t happen.”

“If you believe it, I believe it.”

“Hasn’t happened and it won’t,” he said.

“What about Paris? Will that happen?”

“It became Atlantic City. A month from now.”

“How does the warden feel about conjugal visits?”

“You don’t want to be there.”

“I don’t. You’re right,” she said. “Because thinking about it is one thing. Seeing it would put me in depression. People sitting around a table going shuffle shuffle. Week after week. I mean catching planes to go play cards. I mean aside from the absurdity, the total psychotic folly, isn’t there something very sad about this?”

“You said it yourself. Most lives make no sense.”

“But isn’t it demoralizing? Doesn’t it wear you down? It must eat away your spirit. I mean I was watching on TV last night. Like a séance in hell. Tick tock tick tock. What happens after months of this? Or years. Who do you become?”

He looked at her and nodded as if he agreed and then kept nodding, taking the gesture to another level, a kind of deep sleep, a narcolepsy, eyes open, mind shut down.

There was one final thing, too self-evident to need saying. She wanted to be safe in the world and he did not.

When she received a summons for jury service some months earlier and reported to the United States District Court with five hundred other potential jurors and learned that the trial for which they’d been assembled concerned a lawyer accused of aiding the cause of terrorism, she filled out the forty-five-page questionnaire with truths, half-truths and heartfelt lies.

For some time before that day she’d been offered books to edit on terrorism and related subjects. Every subject seemed related. She wasn’t sure why she’d been so desperate to work on such books during the weeks and months when she could not sleep and there were songs of desert mystics in the hallway.

The trial was now in progress but she didn’t follow it in the newspaper. She’d been Juror Number 121, excused from serving on the basis of her written responses. She didn’t know whether it was the true answers or the lies that had made this happen.

She knew that the lawyer, an American woman, was associated with a radical Muslim cleric who was serving a life sentence for terrorist activity. She knew that the man was blind. This was common knowledge. He was the Blind Sheik. But she didn’t know the details of the charges made against the lawyer because she wasn’t reading the stories in the newspaper.

She was editing a book on early polar exploration and another on late Renaissance art and she was counting down from one hundred by sevens.

Died by his own hand.

For nineteen years, since he fired the shot that killed him, she’d said these words to herself periodically, in memoriam, beautiful words that had an archaic grain, Middle English, Old Norse. She imagined the words engraved on an old slant tombstone in a neglected churchyard somewhere in New England.

The grandparents hold sacred office. They’re the ones with the deepest memories. But the grandparents are nearly all gone. Justin has only one now, his father’s father, disinclined to travel, a man whose memories have settled into the tight circuit of his days, beyond easy radius of the child. The child is yet to grow into the deep shadow of his own memories. She herself, mother-daughter, is somewhere midway in the series, knowing that one memory at least is inescapably secure, the day that has marked her awareness of who she is and how she lives.

Her father wasn’t buried in a windy churchyard under bare trees. Jack was in a marble vault high on a wall in a mausoleum complex outside Boston with several hundred others, all chambered in tiers, floor to ceiling.

She came across the obituary late one night, looking at a newspaper that was six days old.

They die every day, Keith said once. There’s no news in that.