Don Delillo - Falling Man

Rosellen S. saw her father walk in the door after a disappearance lasting four years. He was bearded now, head shaved, one arm missing. She was ten when this happened and she described the event in a run-on convergence, an intimacy of clean physical detail and dreamy reminiscence that had no seeming connection-radio programs, cousins named Luther, two of them, and a dress her mother wore to somebody’s wedding, and they listened to her read in a half whisper, one arm missing, and Benny in the next chair closed his eyes and rocked all through the telling. This was their prayer room, said Omar H. They summoned the force of final authority. No one knew what they knew, here in the last clear minute before it all closed down.

They signed their pages with first name and first letter of last name. This was Lianne’s idea, maybe a little affected, she thought, as if they were characters in European novels. They were characters and authors both, able to tell what they wished, cradle the rest in silence. When Carmen G. read her pieces she liked to embellish them with phrases in Spanish to seize the auditory core of an incident or an emotion. Benny T. hated to write, loved to talk. He brought pastry to the meetings, large jellied bladders that no one else would touch. The noise echoed in the hallway, kids playing piano and drums, others on roller skates, and the voices and accents of the adults, their polyglot English floating through the building.

Members wrote about hard times, happy memories, daughters becoming mothers. Anna wrote about the revelation of writing itself, how she hadn’t known she could write ten words and now look what comes pouring out. This was Anna C., a broad-bodied woman from the neighborhood. Nearly all of them were from the neighborhood, the eldest being Curtis B., eighty-one, a tall taciturn man with a prison history and a voice, in his readings, that had the resonance of entries in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a collection he’d read front to back in the penitentiary library.

There was one subject the members wanted to write about, insistently, all of them but Omar H. It made Omar nervous but he agreed in the end. They wanted to write about the planes.

When he got back uptown the apartment was empty. He sorted through his mail. His name was misspelled on a couple of pieces of mail, this was not unusual, and he snatched a ballpoint pen from the mug near the telephone and made the corrections on the envelopes. He wasn’t sure when he’d started doing this and didn’t know why he did it. There was no reason why. Because it wasn’t him, with the name misspelled, that’s why. He did it and then kept doing it and maybe he understood at some snake-brain level of perception that he had to do it and would keep doing it down the years and into the decades. He did not construct this future in clear terms but it was probably there, humming under the skull. He never corrected the spelling on mail that was out-right third-class indiscriminate throwaway advertising matter. He almost did, the first time, but then did not. Junk mail was created for just this reason, to presort the world’s identities into one, with his or her name misspelled. In most other cases he made the correction, involving one letter in the first syllable of his last name, which was Neudecker, and then slit open the envelope. He never made the correction in the presence of someone else. It was an act he was careful to conceal.

She walked across Washington Square Park behind a student saying hopefully into his cell phone. It was a bright day, chess players at their tables, a fashion shoot in progress under the arch. They said hopefully. They said oh my god, in delight and small awe. She saw a young woman reading on a bench, in the lotus position. Lianne used to read haiku, sitting crosslegged on the floor, in the weeks and months after her father died. She thought of a poem by Bashō, or the first and third lines. She didn’t remember the second line. Even in Kyoto -I long for Kyoto. The second line was missing but she didn’t think she needed it.

Half an hour later she was in Grand Central Station to meet her mother’s train. She hadn’t been here lately and was not accustomed to the sight of police and state troopers in tight clusters or guardsmen with dogs. Other places, she thought, other worlds, dusty terminals, major intersections, this is routine and always will be. This was not a considered reflection so much as a flutter, a downdraft of memory, cities she’d seen, crowds and heat. But the normal order was also in evidence here, tourists taking pictures, commuters in running flurries. She was headed to the information desk to check the gate number when something caught her eyes out near the approach to 42nd Street.

There were people clustered near the entrance, on both sides, others pushing through the doors but seemingly still engaged by something happening outside. She made her way out onto the crowded sidewalk. Traffic was building, a few horns blowing. She edged along a storefront and looked up toward the green steel structure that passes over Pershing Square, the section of elevated roadway that carries traffic around the terminal in both directions.

A man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the viaduct.

She’d heard of him, a performance artist known as Falling Man. He’d appeared several times in the last week, unannounced, in various parts of the city, suspended from one or another structure, always upside down, wearing a suit, a tie and dress shoes. He brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump. He’d been seen dangling from a balcony in a hotel atrium and police had escorted him out of a concert hall and two or three apartment buildings with terraces or accessible rooftops.

Traffic was barely moving now. There were people shouting up at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body’s last fleet breath and what it held. It held the gaze of the world, she thought. There was the awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all. And now, she thought, this little theater piece, disturbing enough to stop traffic and send her back into the terminal.

Her mother was waiting at the gate, on the lower level, leaning on her cane.

She said, “I had to get out of there.”

“I thought you’d stay another week at least. Better there than here.”

“I want to be in my apartment.”

“What about Martin?”

“Martin is still there. We’re still arguing. I want to sit in my armchair and read my Europeans.”

Lianne took the bag and they rode the escalator up to the main concourse, steeped in dusty light slanting through the high lunettes. A dozen people were grouped around a guide near the staircase to the east balcony, gazing at the sky ceiling, the gold-leaf constellations, with a guardsman and his dog standing alongside, and her mother could not help commenting on the man’s uniform, the question of jungle camouflage in midtown Manhattan.

“People are leaving, you’re coming back.”

“Nobody’s leaving,” her mother said. “The ones who leave were never here.”

“I have to admit, I’ve thought of it. Take the kid and go.”

“Don’t make me sick,” her mother said.

Even in New York, she thought. Of course she was wrong about the second line of the haiku. She knew this. Whatever the line was, it was surely crucial to the poem. Even in New York -I long for New York.

She led her mother across the concourse and along a passage that would bring them out three blocks north of the main entrance. There would be moving traffic there and cabs to hail and no sign of the man who was upside down, in stationary fall, ten days after the planes.