Don Delillo - Falling Man

He was back in Las Vegas now and she was in bed, flipping the pages, reading the obits. The force of this obituary did not register at once. A man named David Janiak, 39. The account of his life and death was brief and sketchy, written in haste to make a deadline, she thought. She thought there would be a complete report in the paper of the following day. There was no photograph, not of the man and not of the acts that had made him, for a time, a notorious figure. These acts were noted in a single sentence, pointing out that he was the performance artist known as Falling Man.

She let the paper slip to the floor and turned off the light. She lay in bed, head propped on a couple of pillows. A car alarm began to sound down the street. She reached back for the pillow nearest her and dropped it on top of the newspaper and then lay back, breathing evenly, eyes still open. After a while she closed her eyes. Sleep was out there somewhere over the curve of the earth.

She waited for the car alarm to stop. When it stopped she turned on the light and got out of bed and went to the living room. There was a stack of old newspapers in a wicker basket. She looked for the five-day-old paper, which was the paper of the following day, but could not find it, whole or part, read or unread. She sat in the chair next to the basket waiting for something to happen or stop happening, a noise, a drone, an appliance, before she went to the computer in the next room.

The advanced search took no time. There he was, David Janiak, in pictures and print.

Dangling from the balcony of an apartment building on Central Park West.

Suspended from the roof of a loft building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

Dangling from the flies at Carnegie Hall during a concert, string section scattered.

Dangling over the East River from the Queensboro Bridge.

Sitting in the back seat of a police car.

Standing on the rail of a terrace.

Dangling from the bell tower of a church in the Bronx.

Dead at 39, apparently of natural causes.

He’d been arrested at various times for criminal trespass, reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct. He’d been beaten by a group of men outside a bar in Queens.

She clicked forward to the transcript of a panel discussion at the New School. Falling Man as Heartless Exhibitionist or Brave New Chronicler of the Age of Terror.

She read a few remarks, then stopped reading. She clicked forward to entries in Russian and other Slavic languages. She stared into the keyboard for a time.

Photographed being outfitted with a safety harness, an associate trying to shield him from the camera.

Photographed with bloody face in hotel lobby.

Dangling from parapet of tenement in Chinatown.

All his falls were headfirst, none announced in advance. The performance pieces were not designed to be recorded by a photographer. Those pictures that exist were taken by people who happened to be at the site or by a professional alerted to the event by a passerby.

He studied acting and dramaturgy at the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His training included a three-month residency at the Moscow Art Theatre School.

Dead at 39. No sign of foul play. Suffered from a heart ailment and high blood pressure.

He worked without pulleys, cables or wires. Safety harness only. And no bungee cord to absorb the shock of longer falls. Just an arrangement of straps under the dress shirt and blue suit with one strand emerging from a trouser leg and extending back to a secure structure at the top of the fall.

Most charges dismissed. Fines and warnings issued.

She came across another burst of foreign languages, many words decorated with acute accents, circumflexes and other marks whose names she couldn’t think of.

She looked into the screen waiting for a sound in the street, car brakes, car alarm, that would get her out of the room and back into bed.

His brother, Roman Janiak, a software engineer, assisted with most jumps, becoming visible to onlookers only when it was unavoidable. Plans for a final fall, according to him, did not include a safety harness.

She thought it could be the name of a trump card in a tarot deck, Falling Man, name in gothic type, the figure twisting down in a stormy night sky.

There is some dispute over the issue of the position he assumed during the fall, the position he maintained in his suspended state. Was this position intended to reflect the body posture of a particular man who was photographed falling from the north tower of the World Trade Center, headfirst, arms at his sides, one leg bent, a man set forever in free fall against the looming background of the column panels in the tower?

Free fall is the fall of a body within the atmosphere without a drag-producing device such as a parachute. It is the ideal falling motion of a body that is subject only to the earth’s gravitational field.

She did not read further but knew at once which photograph the account referred to. It hit her hard when she first saw it, the day after, in the newspaper. The man headlong, the towers behind him. The mass of the towers filled the frame of the picture. The man falling, the towers contiguous, she thought, behind him. The enormous soaring lines, the vertical column stripes. The man with blood on his shirt, she thought, or burn marks, and the effect of the columns behind him, the composition, she thought, darker stripes for the nearer tower, the north, lighter for the other, and the mass, the immensity of it, and the man set almost precisely between the rows of darker and lighter stripes. Headlong, free fall, she thought, and this picture burned a hole in her mind and heart, dear God, he was a falling angel and his beauty was horrific.

She clicked forward and there was the picture. She looked away, into the keyboard. It is the ideal falling motion of a body.

The preliminary finding is death from natural causes, pending an autopsy and toxicological report. Suffered from chronic depression due to a spinal condition.

If this photograph was an element in his performances he said nothing about it when questioned by reporters after one of his arrests. He said nothing when asked whether anyone close to him had been lost in the attacks. He had no comments to make to the media on any subject.

Suspended from the railing of a roof garden in Tribeca.

Dangling from a footbridge over the FDR Drive.

MAYOR SAYS FALL MAN MORONIC.

He turned down an invitation to fall from the upper reaches of the Guggenheim Museum at scheduled intervals over a three-week period. He turned down invitations to speak at the Japan Society, the New York Public Library and cultural organizations in Europe.

His falls were said to be painful and highly dangerous due to the rudimentary equipment he used.

His body was discovered by his brother, Roman Janiak, a software engineer. The Saginaw County medical examiner’s office reports this was an apparent coronary event, tests pending.

His training included formal classes six days a week in both Cambridge and Moscow. Graduating actors gave a showcase presentation in New York for casting directors, artistic directors, agents and others. David Janiak, as a Brechtian dwarf, assaulted another actor, seemingly trying to rip the man’s tongue out of his mouth during what was supposed to be a structured improvisation.

She clicked forward. She tried to connect this man to the moment when she’d stood beneath the elevated tracks, nearly three years ago, watching someone prepare to fall from a maintenance platform as the train went past. There were no photographs of that fall. She was the photograph, the photosensitive surface. That nameless body coming down, this was hers to record and absorb.

Early in 2003 he began to reduce the number of performances and tended to appear only in remote parts of the city. Then the performances stopped.