Falling Man (15 page)

They were watching TV without the sound.

“My father shot himself so I would never have to face the day when he failed to know who I was.”

“You believe this.”

“Yes.”

“Then I believe it too,” he said.

“The fact that he would one day fail to recognize me.”

“I believe it,” he said.

“That’s absolutely why he did it.”

She was slightly drunk after an extra glass of wine. They were watching a late-night newscast and he thought of hitting the sound button when the commercials ended but then did not and they watched in silence as a correspondent in a desolate landscape, Afghanistan or Pakistan, pointed over his shoulder to mountains in the distance.

“We need to get him a book on birds.”

“Justin,” he said.

“They’re studying birds. Each kid gets to choose a bird and that’s the bird he or she studies. That’s his or her feathered vertebrate. His for boys. Hers for girls.”

There was stock footage on the screen of fighter planes lifting off the deck of a carrier. He waited for her to ask him to hit the sound button.

“He’s talking about a kestrel. What the hell’s a kestrel?” she said.

“It’s a small falcon. We saw them perched on power lines, mile after mile, when we were somewhere out west, back in the other life.”

“The other life,” she said, and laughed, and pushed up off the chair, headed for the bathroom.

“Come out wearing something,” he said, “so I can watch you take it off.”

Florence Givens stood looking at the mattresses, forty or fifty of them, arranged in rows at one end of the ninth floor. People tested the bedding, women mostly, bouncing lightly in seated positions or lying supine, checking for firmness or plushness. It took her a moment to realize that Keith was standing at her side, watching with her.

“Right on time,” she said.

“You’re the one who’s on time. I’ve been here for hours,” he said, “riding the escalators.”

They walked along the aisle and she stopped several times to check labels and prices and to press into the bedding with the heel of her hand.

He said, “Go on, lie down.”

“I don’t think I want to do that.”

“How else will you know if this is the mattress you want? Look around. They’re all doing it.”

“I’ll lie down if you’ll lie down.”

“I don’t need a mattress,” he said. “You need a mattress.”

She wandered along the aisle. He stood and watched and there were ten or eleven women lying on beds, bouncing on beds, and a man and a woman bouncing and rolling, middle-aged and purposeful, trying to determine if one person’s tossing would disturb the other’s sleep.

There were tentative women, bouncing once or twice, feet protruding from the end of the bed, and there were the others, women who’d shed their coats and shoes, falling backwards to the mattress, the Posturepedic or the Beautyrest, and bouncing with abandon, first one side of the bed, then the other, and he thought this was a remarkable thing to come upon, the mattress department at Macy’s, and he looked across the aisle and they were bouncing there as well, another eight or nine women, one man, one child, testing for comfort and sculptural soundness, for back support and foam sensation.

Florence was over there now, seated at the end of a bed, and she smiled at him and fell back. She bounced up, fell back, making a little game of her shyness in the midst of public intimacy. Two men stood not far from Keith and one of them said something to the other. It was a remark about Florence. He didn’t know what the man had said but it didn’t matter. It was clear from their stance and their vantage that Florence was the subject.

Keith stood ten paces away from them.

He said, “Hey fuckhead.”

The idea was that they’d meet here, have a quick lunch nearby and go their separate ways. He had to pick up the kid at school, she had a doctor’s appointment. It was a tryst without whisper or touch, set among strangers falling down.

He said it again, louder this time, and waited for the word to register. It was interesting, how the space between them changed. They were looking at him now. The man who’d made the remark was heavyset, in a shiny down jacket that resembled bubblewrap. People drifted along the aisle, in blurry colors. Both men were looking at him. The space was hot and charged and the one in bubblewrap stood brooding on the matter. Women were bouncing on the beds but Florence had seen and heard and she was seated at the edge of the mattress, watching.

The man was listening to his companion but did not move. Keith was happy to stand and watch and then he wasn’t. He walked over there and punched the man. He walked over, stopped, set himself and threw a short right. He hit the man up near the cheekbone, one blow only, and then he stepped back and waited. He was angry now. The contact set him off and he wanted to keep going. He held his hands apart, palms up, like here I am, let’s go. Because if anyone said a harsh word to Florence, or raised a hand to Florence, or insulted her in any way, Keith was ready to kill him.

The man, who’d lurched against his companion, turned now and charged, head down, arms bowed out, like a guy on a motorcycle, and the bouncing stopped all along the rows of beds.

Keith caught him with another right, to the eye this time, and the man lifted him off the floor, an inch or two, and Keith threw some kidney punches that were mostly lost in bubblewrap. There were men everywhere now, salesmen, security guards jogging down the aisle, a workman who’d been pushing a handcart. It was odd, in the general confusion after they’d been separated, how Keith felt a hand on his arm, just above the elbow, and understood at once that it was Florence.

Every time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching. The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone’s, into some other distance, out beyond the towers.

The skies she retained in memory were dramas of cloud and sea storm, or the electric sheen before summer thunder in the city, always belonging to the energies of sheer weather, of what was out there, air masses, water vapor, westerlies. This was different, a clear sky that carried human terror in those streaking aircraft, first one, then the other, the force of men’s intent. He watched with her. Every helpless desperation set against the sky, human voices crying to God and how awful to imagine this, God’s name on the tongues of killers and victims both, first one plane and then the other, the one that was nearly cartoon human, with flashing eyes and teeth, the second plane, the south tower.

He watched with her one time only. She knew she’d never felt so close to someone, watching the planes cross the sky. Standing by the wall he reached toward the chair and took her hand. She bit her lip and watched. They would all be dead, passengers and crew, and thousands in the towers dead, and she felt it in her body, a deep pause, and thought there he is, unbelievably, in one of those towers, and now his hand on hers, in pale light, as though to console her for his dying.

He said, “It still looks like an accident, the first one. Even from this distance, way outside the thing, how many days later, I’m standing here thinking it’s an accident.”

“Because it has to be.”

“It has to be,” he said.

“The way the camera sort of shows surprise.”

“But only the first one.”

“Only the first,” she said.

“The second plane, by the time the second plane appears,” he said, “we’re all a little older and wiser.”

8

The walks across the park were not rituals of anticipation. The road bent west and he walked past the tennis courts without thinking much about the room where she’d be waiting or the bedroom down the hall. They took erotic pleasure from each other but this is not what sent him back there. It was what they knew together, in the timeless drift of the long spiral down, and he went back again even if these meetings contradicted what he’d lately taken to be the truth of his life, that it was meant to be lived seriously and responsibly, not snatched in clumsy fistfuls.

Later she would say what someone always says.

“Do you have to leave?”

He would stand naked by the bed.

“I’ll always have to leave.”

“And I’ll always have to make your leaving mean something else. Make it mean something romantic or sexy. But not empty, not lonely. Do I know how to do this?”

But she was not a contradiction, was she? She was not someone to be snatched at, not a denial of some truth he may have come upon in these long strange days and still nights, these after-days.

These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.

She said, “Do I know how to make one thing out of another, without pretending? Can I stay who I am, or do I have to become all those other people who watch someone walk out the door? We’re not other people, are we?”

But she would look at him in a way that made him feel he must be someone else, standing there by the bed, ready to say what someone always says.

They sat in a corner booth glaring at each other. Carol Shoup wore a striped silk overblouse, purple and white, that looked Moorish or Persian.

She said, “Under the circumstances, what do you expect?”

“I expect you to call and ask.”

“But under the circumstances, how could I even bring up the subject?”

“But you did bring it up,” Lianne said.

“Only after the fact. I couldn’t ask you to edit such a book. After what happened to Keith, everything, all of it. I don’t see how you’d want to get involved. A book that’s so enormously immersed, going back on it, leading up to it. And a book that’s so demanding, so incredibly tedious.”

“A book you’re publishing.”

“We have to.”

“After it’s been making the rounds for how many years?”

“We have to. Four or five years,” Carol said. “Because it seems to predict what happened.”

“Seems to predict.”

“Statistical tables, corporate reports, architectural blueprints, terrorist flow charts. What else?”

“A book you’re publishing.”

“It’s badly written, badly organized and I would say deeply and enormously boring. Collected many rejections. Became a legend among agents and editors.”

“A book you’re publishing.”

“Line-editing this beast.”

“Who’s the author?”

“A retired aeronautical engineer. We call him the Unaflyer. He doesn’t live in a remote cabin with his bomb-making chemicals and his college yearbooks but he’s been working obsessively for fifteen or sixteen years.”

There was serious money to be made, by freelance standards, if a book was a major project. In this case it was also a rushed project, timely, newsworthy, even visionary, at least in the publisher’s planned catalog copy—a book detailing a series of interlocking global forces that appeared to converge at an explosive point in time and space that might be said to represent the locus of Boston, New York and Washington on a late-summer morning early in the twenty-first century.

“Line-editing this beast could put you in traction for years to come. It’s all data. It’s all facts, maps and schedules.”

“But it seems to predict.”

The book needed a freelance editor, someone able to work long hours outside the scheduled frenzy of phone calls, e-mails, lunch dates and meetings that an in-house editor encountered—the frenzy that constitutes the job.

“It contains a long sort of treatise on plane hijacking. It contains many documents concerning the vulnerability of certain airports. It names Dulles and Logan. It names many things that actually happened or are happening now. Wall Street, Afghanistan, this thing, that thing. Afghanistan is happening.”

Lianne didn’t care how dense, raveled and intimidating the material might be or how finally unprophetic. This is what she wanted. She didn’t know she wanted this until Carol mentioned the book, derisively, in passing. She thought she’d been invited to lunch to discuss an assignment. It turned out that the meeting was strictly personal. Carol wanted to talk about Keith. The only book Carol mentioned was precisely the one not intended for Lianne and precisely the one that Lianne needed to edit.

“Do you want dessert?”

“No.”

Stand apart. See things clinically, unemotionally. This is what Martin had told her. Measure the elements. Work the elements together. Learn something from the event. Make yourself equal to it.

Carol wanted to talk about Keith, hear about Keith. She wanted the man’s story, their story, back together, moment by moment. The blouse she was wearing belonged to another body type, another skin color, a knockoff of a Persian or Moroccan robe. Lianne noticed this. She had nothing interesting to tell this woman about Keith because nothing interesting had happened that was not too intimate for telling.

“Do you want coffee?”

“I hit a woman in the face the other day.”

“What for?”

“What do you hit people for?”

“Wait. You hit a woman?”

“They make you mad. That’s what for.”

Carol was looking at her.

“Do you want coffee?”

“No.”

“You have your husband back. Your son has a father full-time.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“Show some happiness, some relief, something. Show something.”

“It’s only beginning. Don’t you know that?”

“You have him back.”

“You don’t know anything,” she said.

The waiter stood nearby, waiting for someone to ask for the check.

“All right, look. If something happens,” Carol said. “Like the editor can’t deal with the material. The editor can’t work fast enough. She feels this book is destroying the life she has carefully built over the last twenty-seven years. I’ll call you.”

“Call me,” Lianne said. “Otherwise don’t call me.”

After that day, when she could not remember where she lived, Rosellen S. did not come back to the group.